Station rating / FIRS / "Cargo-Overflow"

[Oakman]

Hallo,

Given is a rather complex railroad-network with FIRS 3.0.12 Extreme Economy (and some other GRFs which shouldn't matter for the question). A machine shop receives metal and petroleum and produces engineering supplies for multiple mines and oil rigs.

The problem is, that the whole system is “instable” due to varying station ratings; as long as the trains which pick up the engineering supplies arrive regularly, everything is fine, the station rating is OK, and I can transport 70+x % of the produced engineering supplies – once there is a gap in the pick-up (which might happen, there are multiple trains with different cycle times) the station rating drops to 20 % and it takes month to recover. As a consequence, In the worst case, my mines and oil-rigs lose their “Gung-ho” production which makes the recovery time even longer.

Using more, but smaller trains would kill my railway network and establishing timetables to synchronize the pick-up trains would be a sh[xxx]-load of work and its still a game so i wouldn't like to do that.

My first idea was to build a transfer-Hub between the machine shop and the mines/oil rigs so there is a constant flow from the machine shop to the transfer-hub. This works quite well, yet the transfer hub tends to “overflow”; this solves the problem with the mines and oil-rigs loosing Gung-ho, there are always enough engineering supplies in the transfer hub, yet once the transfer-hub is “full” the station rating of the station with the machine shop drops again, which is consistent with the TruncateCargo() function described in https://wiki.openttd.org/Game_mechanics#Station_rating

So, what I need is some sort of “cargo-overflow” for the transfer hub; is there any way to realize that?

Thanks a lot!

[andythenorth]

1. Engineering Supplies have particularly horrible feedback loops in Extreme in FIRS v2 or v3. I don't like them. One stuck train can collapse the whole train and logjam an entire network. It's a design flaw.

2. Supplies are designed to favour using frequent deliveries by smaller vehicles. Trucks, planes, helicopters, or ships or trains with 40t-100t capacity.

3. There's a persistent myth (dunno where it originated, can't find the source) that supplies require timetabling. They absolutely don't. I don't use timetables.

4. One remedy is to fix the station ratings to 100%. FIRS 2 has an option to do that. I removed that option in FIRS 3 to simplify the grf, but somebody produced a separate grf to do it.

5. There are various gameplay approaches to maintaining station rating. You should be able to pick up all the machine shop supplies and dump it into the transfer hub without any loss of station rating at the machine shop. You can also piglet to keep the rating up: viewtopic.php?t=56649

Good luck! FIRS 4 will not have this specific supply problem. There will be new problems!

[Oakman]

Thanks a lot!

3.6 k Engineering Supplies waiting at the Transfer Hub - Not great, not terrible

[odisseus]

I never thought of engineering supplies abundance as a problem. If you have too much engineering supplies, just dump them into any nearby industry.

By contrast, vehicles in the ECS economy, having a similar role, are much trickier to deal with. Each industry can accept only a set amount of vehicles, which depends on the history of its products being transported. This means that sooner or later your "sinkhole" industry will stop accepting them entirely...

In my experience, short trains indeed work the best for delivering engineering supplies. Ideally, a train would hold exactly the amount that is needed to boost an industry from normal level to gung-ho (usually 80 or 84 units). If your rail network cannot handle these short trains, build a separated network just for engineering supplies. It doesn't have to have high throughput, since the traffic will be rather low; it may be even single track with occasional passing loops.

As an alternative, you can set up a distributor service. A long train would pick up the engineering supplies at the machine shop, and deliver them to an intermediate station, where short trains would deliver them directly to the industries. This works great if you have a cluster of consumers located far away from the producer.

If you want to avoid the hassle altogether, consider funding ports next to the industries that require engineering supplies. Each port can boost 2-4 industries depending on its base production rate and its own boost level.

[LaChupacabra]

...once there is a gap in the pick-up (which might happen, there are multiple trains with different cycle times) the station rating drops to 20 % and it takes month to recover.

For the transport rating to fall from 70 to 20%, this gap had to last about six months - that's a lot. There is nothing to think about, what to analyze some "cargo overflow", just increase the number of vehicles that take products.

1. Engineering Supplies have particularly horrible feedback loops in Extreme in FIRS v2 or v3. I don't like them. One stuck train can collapse the whole train and logjam an entire network. It's a design flaw.

I see no flaw in it, but a challenge. If it were easy, it wouldn't be interesting.

4. One remedy is to fix the station ratings to 100%. FIRS 2 has an option to do that. I removed that option in FIRS 3 to simplify the grf, but somebody produced a separate grf to do it.

It was a very useful option, especially since ...

5. There are various gameplay approaches to maintaining station rating. You should be able to pick up all the machine shop supplies and dump it into the transfer hub without any loss of station rating at the machine shop. You can also piglet to keep the rating up: viewtopic.php?t=56649

...It doesn't work anymore. From version 1.10 RC, vehicles that load but do not deliver cargo not only don't raise the rating, but even lower it.


There are many methods of effective supply. Sometimes a timetable is a good option. However, this is a laborious method.

I recently built something like this. Also quite laborious, but effective.

Zorkur Buracos Industries, 2057-11-24.png (317.53 KiB) Viewed 1788 times

Zorkur Buracos Industries, 2057-11-24.sav

(1020.2 KiB) Downloaded 60 times

Between the main terminal and intermediate stations from which supplies are picked up, two trains circulate which are responsible for even distribution of supply.
Because too much supply is delivered, the excess takes one extra train without a "full load" order but with timetable. In the event of a crisis, it can be stopped and therefore sufficient products are still available.

[odisseus]

That's just a distributor service of epic proportions.