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General: Production is demand-driven. If the sawmill doesn’t have any customers for its goods, nobody will produce anything. You always have to set up the complete chain at once.
(There may be some production even if you’re just supplying raw materials, because of the automatic transport. However, if the sawmill started out with a production of 0, it’s likely that there’s no city in the vicinity to create demand, so it won’t do anything on its own.)
For the whole process, it works imho best to think it backwards: The city needs goods – how to get them there? And from there on down to the raw materials.
I actively try to avoid thinking about frequency. I do stuff and hope it works; if not, I change it or do something else. “Shorter time is kind of better, except when it’s not” works, so far – on easy. 😀 The whole thing is very vague, I fear that the meagre scraps of information given by the developers only obfuscate things further, and the game does a spectacular job at not providing meaningful feedback.
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Update on the supply chain above:
It’s not the iron itself that’s buggy, it’s the station or lines. The game can’t seem to cope with TWO kinds of cargo waiting for the SAME line and direction. Just imagine: TWO! Not one! The sheer complexity!
Anyway, what happened: Somehow, the transfer station switched from “eating” all the iron to “eating” all the coal. I suspect that my trucks cleared the station from all coal waiting there, maybe even managed to get it all to the factory before the next train arrived. When it did, it was the iron train. From then on, the iron waited in the station, as it should, and was duly transported uphill by the trucks. Instead, all the coal disappeared, as the iron had before.
A few years later, it went back to coal.
tralala: I grouped train station and truck stop, yes – I don’t know whether it’s necessary, never tried it without grouping.
However, I don’t think that it’s really necessary. Even grouped stations count as separate stations, in a certain way:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=314065865
This is the train part of the station. (I get this only when clicking directly on the station graphic, not by clicking the symbol.) Nothing is waiting here, as the train with the goods has just departed, and the coal is waiting for the trucks. Also, you can see that the iron the train just delivered is moving from the train station along the road to the truck station.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=314065525
This is the truck part, a few days later, also selected by clicking on the station itself, not the symbol. Note that it still retains its own name (“Church Stretton Annex”), although the whole station goes by “Ch. St. West”. The coal is waiting here, and you can also see the iron disappearing: It *is* moved over from the train station, which it would only do if there’s “demand” at the truck station, the little symbols are getting fewer as they arrive, but they never show up at the station as waiting.
Anyway: I think douglas is right here, that grouping mostly is for alleviating player’s OCD. 😉
Also, seeing the state in which TF currently is, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some bugs preventing such a supply chain from working under certain conditions, or just giving the appearance that it doesn’t work, or whatever.
Yep – path signals are sufficient for what TF does. That trains don’t take alternate routes if their usual one is blocked, has nothing to do with the signals, but is an effect of TF’s line mechanics. (A line is assigned to a track, and trains will only use that assigned track, nothing else, ever.)
Anyway, path signals are quite enough even in games like OTTD; you can get the same results with them. They’re basically the traditional pre-signal/signal setup, rolled into one.
While I use Steam (although a bit reluctantly), I find it quite offensive to suggest that someone who doesn’t want to is only looking to pirate the game. There are good reasons to reject Steam and comparable services, without piracy coming into play.
I do it as Morat described. Even if I added a vehicle to a line later, and it hasn’t yet reached its replacement age yet, I sell it nonetheless with the whole bunch. Maybe not as efficient money-wise, but more than made up by not having to click-send to depot – sell each vehicle manually.
For the red/black divide, you need two signals:
One on the black line, shortly before it merges with the other ones, in southward direction.
One on the red line, shortly before it merges with the other ones, in northward direction.
Both set to one-way.
That way, a train coming from the station won’t enter the black line (because the one-way signal prohibits that), and will take the red line. And vice versa, with a train coming from the north.
Unfortunately, you can’t decide which platform on a station is assigned to a line. You can fiddle around until you get what you want, but that’s hit-and-miss and will change every time you alter your line.
Combined supply chains work, but are sometimes displayed incorrectly.
In my current game, I have a fairly complex supply chain (err, “complex” for TF standards) to a steel mill, with trains and trucks in several stages:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=313962788
The blue line is a train serving coal to the transfer station (Church Stetton West, at the lake).
The light green line is a train serving iron to the transfer station, and transporting goods back to the iron mine, where they are picked up by trucks and served to the city (Church Stetton, bottom right).
The dark green line (bit hard to see) is a truck line from the transfer station up the hill to the steel mill (Oundle East station, top centre/left). The trucks clearly pick up coal from the transfer station and deliver goods back down.
Everything works – trains deliver coal and iron, trucks haul them up the hill, pick up goods and drop them at the transfer station, from where the iron train, on its way back, transports them to the iron mine, where trucks pick them up and take them to their final destination. The lines make money (mostly…), iron, coal, and goods are produced, and transported. After setting up, it takes a few years until the game realises what’s going on, but then, it’s fine.
There’s one bug in there, though:
The iron supply chain is not displayed correctly. Iron waits at the mine, my train gets loaded with iron, and delivers it to the transfer station, where I get payed for it. At that point, however, the iron disappears.There is another iron mine somewhere left of the steel mill (not on screen), which automatically delivers iron to the steel mill.
Now, either the steel mill gets all its iron from the automatic delivery, then why is “my” iron mine producing? And why do I get paid for delivering it to a station in the middle of nowhere?
Or my iron eventually gets to the steel mill and is processed, then why don’t I see it delivered there, as I clearly do with the coal that is transported over the exact same two stages?
That’s not an issue with combined lines, though:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=313963164
This is a pure truck chain, no trains involved.
Iron is taken from the mine (upper left) to the coal mine (lower left/centre), while coal and iron are supposed to be delivered to the steel mill (right edge of the screen). While again, the chain as a whole works and every industry involved is producing, the iron disappears somehow at the transfer station (the coal mine). It never appears as waiting there (as it should), and the trucks never deliver it to the steel mill, which produces nonetheless, and I get payed for delivering iron to the transfer station.
The steel mill is automatically served by another iron mine off screen, but the same two questions remain.
Bulldoze the bus station.In the building menu, go to Roads -> Stations.
You’ll see the usual – bus stop, bus station, tram station.In the top row of that menu, you can switch from passenger (the icon with the little people) to cargo (the house thingy). If you choose the cargo type, you can build cargo stations.
Take a look in the video here:
http://www.train-fever.com/forums/topic/howto-setup-a-cargo-line/#post-6957
around 00:39.
Seasons would be nice.
Night time? One day is a few seconds on normal speed – the effect would be more or less a constantly blinking map.
That’s the spirit. 😀
The clamour for dynamic platform assignment has three main reasons, I think:
– Expectations from how it works in other games. As Train Fever doesn’t seem to believe in explaining, like, anything, people naturally expect things to work like they’re used to. If they don’t, it’s up to the game to tell them. You know, with a manual and stuff.
– Convenience. Realism is all fine, but lots of things in a game are not exactly realistic. Where to draw that line, is basically an arbitrary design decision. (Or, in this case, it’s imho more of a side effect of their game mechanics.) The one-platform-per-line rule is more realistic only in some aspects. So naturally, if that seemingly arbitrary decision leads to more frustrating gameplay, people want it to change.
– It doesn’t always work as intended. I could live with that restriction. There are lots of arbitrary restrictions and abstractions in a sim game. But the game insists on assigning one platform to multiple lines leaving others unused, changes platform assignment every time I change a line, has no recognisable pattern as to which changes to a line lead to a reassignment, and so on. So letting trains simply choose their platform when they arrive, presents itself as a solution to all these issues – one that has been proven to work elsewhere.
Zu den Listen: In der Fahrzeugliste kannst du oben auf die Spaltentitel klicken (Name, Linie, Ertrag, Alter, oder so – ich spiele auf Englisch), und dann sortiert es die Fahrzeugliste nach dieser Kategorie. Nützlich v.a., um nach Alter zu sortieren.
– Upgrading with catenary: Currently, if you upgrade the tracks in a station, it loses all of its passengers. That’s stupid.
