Cargo Distributions

[doug_howell99]

Hey All.

So I know there's a load of cargo distribution topics. But does anyone know how an industry 'decides' where to send it's cargo.

I have an Industry producing Food (and lots of it). I send some to a small village via trucks, and the rest via train to a larger city.

However the industry decides to send so much more to the village as opposed to the city. It is closer (although I've set my 'effect of distance' to 0%) , but i'd rather the majority went on the longer (and more profitable) route.

Any ideas how this can be done. Or am I fighting a loosing cause my wanting to 'dictate' where my stuff goes

Thanks

[Taschi]

If you want to dictate where your stuff goes, why not just use manual distribution.

[LaChupacabra]

Also I think manual distribution would be the best solution.
Alternatively if the village is very close and the city is not very far, try to reverse the distance effect setting.

In general, cargodist operation is much simpler than it may seem and rather far from ideal. This what you write about, while logical, it doesn't work that way. The destination of the cargo is not determined by the industry and the destination is not the city or other enterprise, but the station. Cargodist distributes loads between available stations accepting given loads, but only those to which there is already a connection. If you have connection with only one station, it will just send everything to it. If you have more than one station, the distance and the quality of transport (speed of vehicles, percentage of transported cargo) decide where more will go. Also the volume of production is important, and in the case of cities, the level of cargo acceptance - the more buildings, especially large ones, within the station's range, the greater the acceptance.
If you have a similar amount of buildings within the range of both stations, I suppose in your case, since you set the distance influence to 0%, the cargodist divided equally between both stations, but the trucks simply cannot keep up with receiving loads and it accumulates at the station more and more which makes it seem as if more is going to this village.
To check what the actual split is, open the station window and choose to sort by amount or station, but by planned and not by waiting. If that's not the case, it's best if you add save in the attachments.

Cargo distribution.png (7.68 KiB) Viewed 1216 times

[Eddi]

the most important point here is that cargodist doesn't have any concept of the "size" of the destination, as there is no reliable way to determine this. so what you want ("city" gets more than "village") cannot be achieved.

[Taschi]

In general, cargodist operation is much simpler than it may seem and rather far from ideal. This what you write about, while logical, it doesn't work that way.

Well, OpenTTD is a business simulation game, and here's a fun fact: Capitalism doesn't really work that way either, no matter how logical it is. No factory is going to deliver its output to the nearest consumer if there are consumers on the other side of the world that can pay more. I bought a boring machine last year, and went for a Chinese one rather than a German one, because it turns out that, while the German manufacturer is 300 kilometers away from me at best and China is on the other side of the world, somehow the Chinese one was still cheaper and even came with a variety of bits I'd have to pay extra for with Bosch.

People like to complain that the game they're currently playing is inaccurate, but the reality is that if a game like OpenTTD was truly accurate, it would be unplayable except for a select few people who have such an incredibly deep understanding of the subject matter that they could probably just run a train company in real life.

A tycoon-style game always has to thread the needle between being shallow and boring on one side, and being so realistic (which includes being time-consuming and arbitrary, because real economics are time-consuming and arbitrary) that nobody would want to play them. And to be honest, I think cargodist strikes a fair balance between the two.

[odisseus]

Some industry sets, most notably ECS, implement industry stockpiles. If you keep delivering raw materials to an industry, but don't take away its products, the industry will eventually stop both producing cargo and accepting raw materials. This sounds similar to what you want, however, you must manage the cargo distribution manually (Cargodist with its inherent lag would probably be counter-productive).

[doug_howell99]

If you want to dictate where your stuff goes, why not just use manual distribution.

Because sometimes, no matter how long you've been playing the game, you forget that these things exist

Thanks for reminding me that said feature exists.