@azgalaga

This mod can be made as simple or complicated as you like.

Just subscribing to the mod and enabling it in the content manager will turn on the custom distance based matching algorithms instead of the vanilla ones which should greatly improve a lot of your services and supply chains around the city. The mods default settings have been selected to provide a good user experience for most situations.

After that it really depends on your city and play style and what issues you encounter along the way.

The first option I recommend looking at is the match distance algorithm section which can be found in the global settings > Transfer Manager > General.

Path distance is the best algorithm to choose if your computer hardware is capable enough. This option will examine the cities vehicle network to choose the best match for the given offer. This will produce much better matches if your map has islands or peninsulas or complex geographical or network features where the closest match by line of sight is actually a long way away by travel time.

Just turning on this mod should already significantly improve your services compared to the vanilla behaviour but you might find you wish to adjust it further.

In the global settings you can set distance limits for each type of service. These ensure that vehicles don't end up driving all the way across your map unnecessarily. I find starting with 4km for death care, healthcare, garbage and police works quite well but this will depend on your map and play style so experimenting with these can be useful.

Alternatively you can enable Prefer local district services which does a similar thing but uses districts as the boundary instead of distance. Please make sure you set up districts within your city for this option though.

If you want to control just a particular service building you can click on it and then click the button with two blue arrows in the top right corner of the building panel to open the Transfer Manager panel for the particular building you are looking at.

This mod can greatly improve factory behaviour. With the vanilla transfer manager your factories will quite often sit idle waiting for a material to come from outside the city or from way across town. Even though you have a warehouse right next door with the exact material the factory needs to continue production, which is incredibly annoying.
This mod now has a global option Factory First which I highly recommend using and is ON by default. This option performs all factory IN matches early in the matching process. This ensures that your factories get first pick of the material from the closest possible location which results in a lot less supply down time.

To maximise this behaviour I recommend placing a factory in a district with warehouses dotted around it with each material that it needs. Using the transfer manager building panel set the warehouses Outgoing restriction to "Within District Only" and your factories Incoming restriction to "Within District Only". This way the warehouses act as large storage buffers for your factories and you should find that you can increase production rate to 150% without any raw material complaints at all.


There are several options available to provide finer control over your warehouses.
The Warehouse First option will make your production and commercial buildings use warehouses more often which can help smooth out your supply chain as warehouses have larger storage capacity and usually more trucks to deliver the goods than normal buildings.
When you enable Warehouse First it is also a good idea to use the Reserve trucks slider. This option ensures that the warehouses don't use up all their trucks exporting goods from the city so that they are unable to respond to needs within your city. By default 20% is reserved which usually works well for me but you can try different settings for your city and see what you prefer.

If you are finding your highways are clogging up or a cargo station is getting overloaded the Import/Export tab in the global settings has distance multipliers for your outside connections. Adjusting these can make different types of connections more or less attractive for the matching algorithm so you should be able to find a nice balance for your city.

There is also the Outside Connection Panel (Ctrl+6) which you can use If you wish to just alter one particular outside connection that your are having trouble with. This will also show you which outside connections are really busy and which ones are hardly being used. Clicking on any item in the Outside Connection panel will open a settings panel for that connection where you can adjust settings for that specific connection.

Outside connection capacity values can now be directly modified in the Outside Connection setting tab of the building panel. You can also control Importing globally or Import/Export on a connection basis in a similar way. This can be very useful if you have plenty of production in your city but the material is still being imported unnecessarily.

Outside connection capacity settings are now available on the building panel for each outside connection.

Each capacity setting changes a different group of offers that the outside connection normally sends to the Transfer Manager. The best place to see the affect of changing the settings is the "Transfers" tab.

After increasing one of these settings "Cargo capacity" for example you will see that the outside connection now puts out transfer offers for cargo more regularly and with a higher "Amount" field. Or conversely if you decrease it to 0, the outside connection will no longer make any cargo offers at all.

This means you can control how much cargo, tourists etc...the outside connection is willing to offer up to the city on an individual connection basis.

Advanced Options

The following options are more non-core/experimental than the above ones. But they can substantially improve the transfer matching process so feel free to try them out.

By default, the vanilla behaviour for warehouses is to not transfer goods between each other unless the combined priority of the offers is quite high (3+). This is to ensure that goods don't just end up transferring back and forth between the warehouses endlessly.

It works reasonably well but as there isn't a lot of "smarts" involved, it can lead to unnecessary transfers between warehouses or not enough transfers where one warehouse is nearly empty and the other is full but they refuse to transfer between each other.

The Improved inter-warehouse transfer option modifies this behaviour to allow transfers at lower priorities but actually compares the two warehouses current storage levels to determine if the goods can be transferred instead and will only allow the transfer if the requesting warehouse has substantially lower storage levels than the responding warehouse.

In the vanilla game death, garbage and police will only add offers with the amount of 1. This means after the service building has been matched only once the service building will no longer be included in the rest of the matching process for that turn, even if the service building has lots of vehicles available to handle the request. This results in more "sub-optimal" matches to further away service buildings unnecessarily.

This option changes the amount offered to be the number of vehicles remaining (minus a small number of reserve vehicles) so that the service building can still respond to other issues that are close by.

Once there are only a few service vehicles remaining at the building the offers will revert to a single one at a time so the service building can still respond to a high priority request each matching cycle.

The game adds dummy traffic to the city to make it feel more alive. If you are finding that your city is already busy enough then disabling this traffic can help.

Balanced match mode matches incoming and outgoing offers in priority order. So if there is an incoming offer with priority 7 and an outgoing offer with priority 6, the incoming offer will be matched against the closest outgoing offer first and then the outgoing offer would be matched afterwards.

The question then becomes which offer to match first when the priority is equal:

The vanilla match algorithm just chooses the incoming offer first so selecting this option in the settings will most closely match vanilla behaviour.

If there was say 10 incoming offers and 100 outgoing offers, this option will match the incoming offers first as you are more likely to get better matches as each incoming offer has more outgoing offers to choose from.

By matching the passive offer first we ensure that the closest vehicle is chosen to that offer to come and handle the match. This reduces traffic within the city.

Note: Most services have custom match algorithms so will not be affected by this choice, it will affect goods delivery however.

- These options will modify the vehicles so when they have finished a task and are looking for assignments the vehicles will check close by buildings for issues that they can resolve.
eg. The fire truck will see close by fires and put those out as well.

I have defaulted most of these to OFF now (except fire) as the Custom Transfer Manager tends to do just as good a job matching vehicles with close by issues anyway these days, but feel free to experiment with them and see it it improves the behaviour of the vehicles that are driving around in the city already.

Thank you so much for this! I know it was probably very annoying to do (I apologize heavily for that) but this is a guide that very much helps people like me who struggle to process information. Thank you again!

"outside connections" panel, how to read it?
Theres 2 things that are misleading, I think, first the number of vehicules makes no sence, there cannot be 500 boats on the map or stacking, yet the cumulated numbers of my routes indicate that, if the game stack up so far away in the future, then maybe show active number with inactive in different color (or parenthesis), one highway shows 2-7 vehicules while I disabled all imports/exports, thats cannot be correct, maybe when we click that it should focus on the vehicules.
Then theres the entries in that list, I have 3 outside highway, in the list 6 "roads", I have 2 ship lines, each 1 arbor and 1 cargo hub, theres 4 "ship" entries, this look like right, OK, but, how to I distinguish one from another? they all link to rockwood with a internal ID number, and I have no idea which one does what or go where (that would help to determine distance, import/export directions)

@arukAdo

Unfortunately the game tends to name all the outside connections the same thing so I have added the building ID on the end so you can distinguish them.

Clicking on an outside connection should zoom in on that particular connection (you may need a camera mod to move to the edge of the map). You should then see a green single/double arrow object which is the actual outside connection object. Roads usually have an IN and an OUT pair so 6 connections for 3 highways sounds right.

The numbers after the connection name are straight from the building vehicle arrays so I think they should be correct.

Another question, could this be used alongside the Optimized Outside Connections mod?

@azgalaga

Sure, I am running that as well myself.

I dont see arrows at the edge of the map (using 81 titles), but I can click some stuff there, seems (hard to be sure with the fog) theres a road with trucks that keep spawning and instantly diseaper (surely because of the policy), theres also a passenger station with ppl boarding on and off.
I still have no idea how I can match the "building ID" to anything, im sorry thats probly trivial but I dont get it.
The numbers of ships seems to variate, but at the lowest ive got is 300+ ships according to the panel, thats definitly not "correct".
Ive got the option to remove dummy.

what does 'value' mean in the building panel?

@arukAdo,

I use Clouds & Fog Toggler to turn off the edge fog.

"trucks that keep spawning and instantly disappear" - I get those as well, it is part of the vanilla behaviour for outside connections. I have been meaning to investigate them at some stage.

The ID is just to help distinguish the outside connections because of the lack of a user friendly name for each outside connection. Paradox didn't intend for users to mess with them when they made the game :-S

The counts includes the ship/plane/train plus all vehicles on it as that is how the building arrays work. I could change it to ignore the vehicles inside the cargo vehicle if that would help.

@Future

The "Value" field shows different information based on the type of material. So for example:

Sick - it is the number of sick people in the building.
Dead - shows the number of dead people in the building
Garbage - shows the amount of garbage piling up in the building.
Police - Shows the amount of crime / number of criminals
Warehouses - shows the amount of that material stored / total storage capacity for that material

etc...

Because it changes depending on the context I have just labelled it the very generic "Value".

I mean it literally says 'value' as the header of one of the columns in the status section and in the the vehicle section of the building GUI (I know what most of the other values mean).
For example, crime has a value of 377/1 in a warehouses status section of the building GUI

@Future,

Yes that will be the level of <crime>/<criminals> for that particular building.

When crime gets high enough you will see a police car come to the building.

ah. Thanks!

Originally posted by Sleepy:

@Future,

Yes that will be the level of <crime>/<criminals> for that particular building.

When crime gets high enough you will see a police car come to the building.

New question: Sometimes there is a vehicle named 'vehicle:<3-5 digit number>' under the vehicle column in the status panel and when I click on it nothing happens. What is that vehicle?

It does that when there is no name assigned to the vehicle. The number is the vehicle id.

If you click and nothing happens then it means the vehicle position is not set. This will be because it hasn't been fully created yet or it has been released/despawned.