Earlier today I made a mistake – I’d paused the game to do some track editing shortly after loading the previous day’s save game. I placed some tracks without cantenary which broke the route of some electric locomotives I was using to deliver goods.

After un-pausing the game, my industry chain completely collapsed to 0 production within a matter of minutes. It’s taken a few hours so far just to get it back to 50% of what it was. This imbalance is just ludicrous. It makes me not want to refine my rail network, which makes me not want to use trains for cargo. And using trains for cargo is the primary reason I bought the game.

This is further compounded by the “death spiral”. I had lots of freight carriages per train on that route, and they were set to “Full load (any)”. So as soon as the production rate starts to drop, the trains start taking longer to fill and thus there are bigger gaps in delivery. This leads to two side effects:

1. The factory will often realise it can walk its output down a road faster than the now delayed trains = trains fill even slower. Recursive death spiral. (This doesn’t always happen, but when it does it’s very painful to recover from as it also exacerbates the second side-effect…)
2. If train deliveries are too infrequent, the city will assume it’s not being served by the production chain and remove it’s pull request, so production drops even further. Recursive death spiral.

Editing and refining rail networks should be fun, the current mechanics have turned it in to a very tedious and painful experience. There are numerous other issues I could mention, such as blocker issues if you use multiple supply and delivery lines within the same chain (the AI basically breaks and the chain collapses rapidly), but suffice to say a simple “fix” would be to transpose the rates at which production scales up and scales down.