In my most recent game I focused heavily on Ore and Forestry industry specializations,figuring that later in the game I'd hook them up to a Cargo train terminal and be able to export masses of goods and make money doing so. It turns out that my specialized industry should've been hooked up to my generic industry which ,in in turn needs to be linked to my commercial. Would there be a ration of exactly how much specialized industry vs generic and commercial I need to have to keep the process running smoothly,as at the moment I'm having to import a surprising amount of goods for my generic industry and commercial districts,and the resulting traffic influx is chocking my roads severely,even with daily 2 and 3 train shipments of material?
Industry question
- Thread starter Michaelp
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
You cannot make money from exporting specialized industry.
I know of no such ratio. I haven't seen a mod for that yet.
But there are 4 specializations, so I assume you need 25% of each type to supply all of generic industry. Not sure on the generic industry to commerce for goods. I do know they all need to be fairly close to each other or they will import what they need. Maybe 1km?
Try not to use goods as a general term as generic industry actually makes a good called goods. Maybe use the term product? But yes, specialized industry is imported to generic industry so it can make goods (purple) and commerce will import goods (purple) if too far away from generic industry. Ore and oil also run out, and when it does, they will both import and export their raw materials (products).
Try not to build commerce in this game unless you need it. As it will cause a demand for generic industry. and you will get caught in a vicious circle and soon flood your city with freight traffic. Build offices instead, then only build commerce where you want it.
I have to say I have not had distance be a factor in if industries supply to each other. But I do give all my industry areas easy access to the highway and if possible connect them to the rail network/sea lines.
So here is a quick breakdown of how it works and some quirks I have noticed. Specialized industry sends their goods to generic industry. Generic industry sends their goods to commercial. If your industry sells their goods inside your city you get bonus income.
They will export in the following circumstance: When they reach a threshold of production and there is no customer in your city that needs their goods.
They will import in the following circumstance: When they need a good for a certain period of time and no industry within your city has hit their release threshold.
Think about the above for a second. You need to ask: How often do the release threshold and need threshold fail to sync up?
The answer is: All the damn time.
So how do you know if you are producing goods in the right amounts? Looking at the various buildings and seeing them lit up is misleading. I don't know how long they stay lit up after importing or exporting something but its really long. So you can see a lot of buildings lit up when the raw number of imports/exports is really small. Also, don't assume if one type is heavily represented on the pie chart you have too much of it. Look at the raw numbers of goods imported/exported and compare to the pie chart. I'll give some examples. For perspective its easy to break 1000 in imports and/or exports and I rarely can get much below 50.
So if you have a well developed city and your import pie is pure purple, you see some commercial lit up in purple should you make more generic industry? Maybe. If your imports are over 1000, definitely. If your imports are around 50, no. Remember you will always have some release/need desync and will never completely eliminate this.
Your industry is lit up in a variety of colors of imports. Your pie is mostly black. Do you need more oil industry? Maybe, are your imports high or low? In this case you might actually need a bit of a couple of the specialized industry type. If the pie is 75% black and 25% orange you need mostly oil and a bit of agriculture. Remember you will always have some release/need descync and will never completely eliminate this.
So in the end all you can do is look at the raw numbers and if one of them gets high look at the pie chart and determine what you need. Remember when you need jobs, office doesn't affect the goods balance if you don't want to deal with it at that time.
So here is a quick breakdown of how it works and some quirks I have noticed. Specialized industry sends their goods to generic industry. Generic industry sends their goods to commercial. If your industry sells their goods inside your city you get bonus income.
They will export in the following circumstance: When they reach a threshold of production and there is no customer in your city that needs their goods.
They will import in the following circumstance: When they need a good for a certain period of time and no industry within your city has hit their release threshold.
Think about the above for a second. You need to ask: How often do the release threshold and need threshold fail to sync up?
The answer is: All the damn time.
So how do you know if you are producing goods in the right amounts? Looking at the various buildings and seeing them lit up is misleading. I don't know how long they stay lit up after importing or exporting something but its really long. So you can see a lot of buildings lit up when the raw number of imports/exports is really small. Also, don't assume if one type is heavily represented on the pie chart you have too much of it. Look at the raw numbers of goods imported/exported and compare to the pie chart. I'll give some examples. For perspective its easy to break 1000 in imports and/or exports and I rarely can get much below 50.
So if you have a well developed city and your import pie is pure purple, you see some commercial lit up in purple should you make more generic industry? Maybe. If your imports are over 1000, definitely. If your imports are around 50, no. Remember you will always have some release/need desync and will never completely eliminate this.
Your industry is lit up in a variety of colors of imports. Your pie is mostly black. Do you need more oil industry? Maybe, are your imports high or low? In this case you might actually need a bit of a couple of the specialized industry type. If the pie is 75% black and 25% orange you need mostly oil and a bit of agriculture. Remember you will always have some release/need descync and will never completely eliminate this.
So in the end all you can do is look at the raw numbers and if one of them gets high look at the pie chart and determine what you need. Remember when you need jobs, office doesn't affect the goods balance if you don't want to deal with it at that time.
As a side note: Getting your industry/commercial balance right won't help with your traffic problem. It doesn't matter if the trucks are coming from your own buildings or from outside the city they will still be traveling through. You need to step up your traffic game and specific advice on that subject would probably require pictures from you. However I can deduce based on the most common problem, you have a bottleneck. Make more access points to the highway in your industry area so all the elevated traffic that industry generates will spread out more instead of all trying to use the same access point.
Same here, in where distance has never been a problem regarding deliveries of product between the different industries.
Promethian,
I would like to use your information as a guide to help me with my import vs building more industry needs in my city.
The problem I have is that I do not use any mods, so my oil and ore natural resources have been depleted (I do not have any oil and ore "raw producers." I only have oil and ore "processors.")
This means that my oil and ore processors receive the raw product they need via importing. Thus, my "raw number of goods imported" (as you have referred to it as) which is seen on the Info Views/Outside Connections/Import tab, is always going to be a "high" number (meaning it will always be higher than 50 and no where near it). So I can not use this number to help me as you suggest.
So what I do instead, is that I look at my Export tab, and I look at my pie chart on this tab. I look to make sure that every color (all 5 colors representing Oil, Ore, Forestry, Farming and Generic) is represented on the pie chart. I don't necessarily look to see how large the pie slice is, but just that at least a small sliver of each color is represented. By doing this, I know that I have at least produced enough product from each industry, for all internal-city needs, and a small excess is exported.
So if I know that each industry is exporting, then this is evidence that they are at least producing enough for all internal-city needs by my various industries.
Does this make sense ? Do you think this is a good way of managing this specific game mechanic ? Or do you suggest another method ?
I've been trying to get it under control,but i've built my city in such a way that I don't think I can address the bottleneck,without demolishing half my city and rebuilding which I'd rather not do at this point,as managing the traffic is something I've always struggled with.
Of course it will matter, if you are generating lots of freight it will increase traffic. If you reduce traffic is will take vehicles off the road. Not sure why you don't think that is true.
Here's a video I thought the game had issues with with exporting, When I only have it out of balance. Notice the heavy traffic:
Here is the same exact city where I reduce industry to semi-even it out. Notice the tremendous difference!
This is also untrue. You can see in my city that I have a single 2-lane, 2-way road in and out of my city. All traffic flows fine without making extra on/off ramps. If your district becomes too large, then you may run into trouble and overload the entrance as you can't balance 100%, as you already mentioned.
Also, on the subject of balancing districts, there is a limit to how far deliveries will take place before the game will export your product and import what the destination wants. Imports don't seem to time out and will keep trudging through which will cause traffic to rise from being on the road so long. but you can reduce it to almost nothing.
He's a video of my Snowfall map when it first came out. I lost my old video, it isn't on YouTube anymore, so I made a new one. It seems the game is a little more optimized on these last few updates for freight as it only timed out when snowing, where before it got worse when snowing and timed out all of the time until I rezoned the rear of the map.
Remember, this game only has a 16k traffic limit. So it has to despawn traffic, or more so, not spawn it at all when balanced. Otherwise, our 100k city would collapse and we'd never make it past 9-tiles, let alone filling 9-tiles.
Oh gracious !
I didn't even know this !
Sure enough, I went to content manager for the game and their was a CO mod as you indicated.
There is also an unlimited-soil mod for landscaping.
Is there an official listing of all the changes they made in this last update. Can someone please reference a quick link that lists everything.
Thank you.
I strongly suggest using the no resource depletion built in mod that was recently added (as mentioned by metacritical).
That said you have pretty much nailed it. That method will ensure you are hitting all your internal needs. I suggest putting freight train stations near your specialized zones so the trucks don't have far to get to get their product out of your city. Cargo harbors/hubs are even better.
Its worth noting that you actually need very little specialized industry to fill your internal needs. I make my initial specialized areas large enough to be worth the road and fire station maintenance (and they need fire stations! specialized industry burns with alarming frequency) and they produce more than I need for ages. I recently started a game on Prussian Peaks. I'm only at 35k pop and have almost 2k exports, all specialized (very proud of my 11 imports tho, kek).
Also proud of making that mountaintop residential community so here is a daytime non-filtered.
Also proud of making that mountaintop residential community so here is a daytime non-filtered.
Nice.
Ok Promethian. Thank you for all your help and advice.
I will absolutely play my future games with the unlimited oil and ore resource built-in CO mod.
Thank you Fox for the direct links to the listing of changes made with the last patch.
The list is quite long. Good to see that CO continues to put time and energy into this neat game.
I will absolutely play my future games with the unlimited oil and ore resource built-in CO mod.
Thank you Fox for the direct links to the listing of changes made with the last patch.
The list is quite long. Good to see that CO continues to put time and energy into this neat game.
What I find annoying, in as much it acted differently to how I expected, I have a small area for goodsmanufacturing, ore, forestry, agriculture and oil. Each of those are small areas and I have managed to connect them internally to each other by train and goods yard as well as externally by train. My imports are around 450 and exports, not really planned for to this extent, at 2500 (ish). My City is only at 26000 or so and so ship cargos are not available as yet.
Traffic is overall fine at around 86% and yet, having two external road connections, I see that both my agriculture and perhaps another industry are favouring using the external road connection on the opposite end of the map rather than use the one closest and available. Even if the agriculture section uses the highway ramp to go onto the highway next to it for its external connection then the traffic returning seems to come back from the opposite side of the map.
I'll need to work on that and whilst I have just built a university and some high density housing and offices, to supply my orange "industrial needs" I could rebalance how much is being exported by reducing that manufacturing, maybe.
Traffic is overall fine at around 86% and yet, having two external road connections, I see that both my agriculture and perhaps another industry are favouring using the external road connection on the opposite end of the map rather than use the one closest and available. Even if the agriculture section uses the highway ramp to go onto the highway next to it for its external connection then the traffic returning seems to come back from the opposite side of the map.
I'll need to work on that and whilst I have just built a university and some high density housing and offices, to supply my orange "industrial needs" I could rebalance how much is being exported by reducing that manufacturing, maybe.
Remember, cims take the quickest route and not the shortest route. It's often quicker to get on the highway asap and take the longer route as highways have no intersections to deal with and have the fastest speed in the game.
I find importing doesn't seem to time out. It seems to favor one outside connection over the others. I can unlock all 4 connections and the beginning outside connection always stays the busiest. Maybe it's just the way I build my cities, but it does always favor the starting point.
Thanks, sometimes tho I get the opinion that the vehicles returning to the Ore mines seem to come from the furthest highway entrance than the closest, which isn't the quickest. But if that is where they are coming from and then route through the city then I'll have to deal with that.
As my City has expanded, around 41000 or so I forgot to increase the goods capacity in the industry sector, to compensate for the increased commercial that I had built, so I increased basic industry a little. That helped with reducing the imports to....
I guess that with the ore industry it is impossible to reduce the imports to zero....?
Exports.....
Did you turn on the resources never deplete mod? It was added to the base game. The thing with specialized industry is they have two types of buildings. Raw materials extractors and refineries. What I think is happening is the ore in the ground is getting depleted. So your extractors are being replaced by refineries and the refineries are importing raw materials.
Unfortunately without turning on the no depletion mod ore and oil always eventually run out and all the specialized industry of those types becomes refineries that must import. If you don't have to worry about running out you can get imports very low.
Showing off my current city with tiny import numbers:
You can see I'm exporting every industry type in the picture I posted earlier in the thread of the same city. So its very possible to get low imports with every industry type.
Promethian,
Unfortunately if you already depleted the oil and ore in the workable-square areas in your city, turning the in-game mod on for this, does not bring the ore and oil back onto the map for you to work.
I tried to do this on my current city, and was hoping for the resources to re-appear in the areas it occupied previously, but it did not. So once depleted, always depleted. A player would need to restart their game, as a new game.
Another thing I noticed (for those who find it important) is that turning on this mod will not allow you to work on completing your achievements.