FIRS Industry Replacement Set - releases

[supermop]

I typically play FIRS with Cargodist myself. I find that that multiple tiers, and initially low delivery rates of a centrallized engineering supply distribution system typically take A LOT longer for the distribution system to recognize and handle compared to other new transport links. I usually get around this with force transfer orders when setting up shipments to a new "supply depot". I know that ideally unload and transfer orders should not be used in Cargodist, but I find that when the service first starts up, you will have A LOT of supplies "to any station" which might not get off at the depot, which has no acceptance of them, leading to a full train making several runs back and forth before the link is established. Another tip would be to have the vehicles that will take the supplies on their final leg of the journey not set to full load, or have a long timetabled loading period, as Cargodist will be unable to establish the link from depot to primary industry if no truck/tram/boat has ever completed a trip between the two.

Another thing to consider: If your centralized machine shop is producing 1000 supplies a month, and you want to deliver 1 crate to each serviced primary industry a month, via a depot and distribution network (as described in above posts), you will likely want to send fewer, larger shipments to each depot. If your depot services 4 nearby industries, one standard car will deliver enough supplies for 10 months of distribution. If the train delivering to the depot has more cars, it will have to return even less frequently. The danger here when playing with Cargodist, is that deliveries that are made only once every 20 months or so would disapear from the link graph inbetween trips, leaving your station at the machine shop with cargo wanting to go to a destination that will be removed by the time the next train heading there should start loading. The hypothetical shop producing 1000 crates a month could theorhetically supply 250 depots each month at 4 crates each, which is completely impractical. If each delivery to a depot is two cars (80 crates) once every 20 months, you could service about 12 depots in any given month, which would be easier on your network, but much more difficult to maintain in the linkgraph. My approach to this has been to not try to acheive perfect distribution and grossly overdeliver. I try to have my machine shops provide to about 10 or so nearby industries, and if they produce 1000 crates a month, I go ahead and deliver 100 to each industry to keep things simple. If I need to serve 100 different industries across the map, I try to do so with several local or regional shops at lower production.

Sorry to make this post more of a "Cargodist strategy" than a "FIRS strategy", but I do feel that the lower volumes present a challenge in Cargodist that is more or less unique to FIRS.

Best,

[Creat]

I would like to see more discussion of strategy as it helps me finalise and complete FIRS. There are some things that will evolve or change in future. How about either more strategy in this thread, or a new FIRS strategy thread?

Well, I'll interpret that as a call for comments, so here we go

There is only one thing that I have a real issue with, which is the "supplies"-system:

The single most important industry in FIRS is the machine shop. Currently in FIRS the only way to increase industry production is using engineering/farm supplies.

I don't know if there are plans to change that, but that is just bad. It's never a good idea to have an effective dependency on a single type of cargo (or in this case cargo group) for almost all industries. Even more so considering how little you can influence where cargo actually goes (even with Cargodist, though that does do a far better job at distributing the supplies). I personally would much prefer a system more based on demand. As long as >50% of the/one produced cargo is transported, increase production to some degree. Supplies (whatever kind the industry needs) could be required to increase the maximum production level that can be reached (or the speed of increase, ...). It's also just weird that industries increase production when supplied with their supplies, even though nothing they produce is transported.

Expanding on that: the effective requirement to deliver supplies once per month (no matter what volume) makes for some pretty strange gaming concepts, like the transfer stations where you transfer cargo to road vehicles just to get smaller delivery portions, or airports/helipads all over the place with the same purpose. What I think is bad about that is quite a few things: First of all, there is effectively no (good) mechanism to control when cargo gets delivered. Additionally you can't tell them how much to load (except 'full' and 'nothing', and both isn't helping). The game is designed around the concept, that more cargo/load is better, making a longer train has quite a few advantages over having many smaller ones with the same over all capacity. Here it's the opposite is true, which leads to recommendations like:

Set vehicles never to expire as the Whirlwind is the best helicopter to use that others are more expensive to run and take more cargo.

Additionally it can cause complications with things like Cargodist (see note at the end of this post).

Why not just increase production of an industry by a margin determined by the amount of supplies delivered in a month or so (obviously the max. increase has to be somehow limited though). If none are delivered production is reduced slightly, or reduction only sets in after an amount of time depending on the amount of supplies delivered last month (not just the last load, or having multiple supply routes to one industry is suddenly a bad thing). It is also conceivable that keeping a certain production level requires a certain amount of supplies per month. It should still be possible to deliver multiple moths at once not to repeat the problems of the small, timed deliveries...

Note concerning Cargodist (relating to supermops post above): The reason the centralized system takes a long time in the beginning to work correctly is that you (probably) try to transport small amounts of supplies. If your cargo amounts are too small (especially if the distance is long) the link might very well disappear before the vehicle comes back for the next load (like with the train running every 20 months), potentially causing your problems. Please also note that using transfer orders effectively disables cargodist for that part, the same goes for forced unload orders!

[supermop]

Please also note that using transfer orders effectively disables cargodist for that part, the same goes for forced unload orders!

I realize that, and actually I am ok with that. This is off topic for this thread, but I wouldn't mind being able to disable cargodist for one or two specific classes, as opposed to the broad categories in the current demand handling interface.

I actually end up delivering large amounts of supplies to establish links precisely due to the reasons I mentioned in my post. It is simply not effective to set up and maintain links with the ideal sized shipments. So even though there is no way that iron ore mine could use an entire train load of dump trucks/dynamite/whatever are represented each month, its most effective to deliver in that way.

I know that FIRS is not meant to have stockpiles, but this could be usefull for processing the cargos that represent operational overheard rather than raw material. If a farm receives 4 months worth of tractors(!), it should slowly consume them over the next for months. Likewise, it might be interesting if the farmer could refuse to pay for more tractors if he already has more than he could conceivably need (that is, farm will not accept more supplies when stockpile is full).

This being said, I am actually pretty satisfied with the way the FIRS mechanics work right now.

It's also just weird that industries increase production when supplied with their supplies, even though nothing they produce is transported.

I might be alone here, but I like to think these industries are selling locally, like a farmer selling some of his own produce at the local farmers' market (harder to imagine for iron ore mines...). Otherwise it gets a little too troubling to see industries open in the middle of nowhere, far from any material, labour, power, or market.


With regard to vehicle capacities, there are many real transport companies (realism, I know, sorry...) that specialize in just this sort of distribution. The way various industries in FIRS can boost their production due to timely delivery of material and supplies allows a (crude) approximation of just in time supply chains. While some of us may appreciate the logistical challenge, it is by no means mandatory, as you are not penalized for over delivering supplies, nor is it necessary to boost production agressively to have a fun and fruitful game.

I do not find it perverse that FIRS encourages small vehicles for some cargoes. I think it would be best if the available vehicles better accomodated such a model instead. Using a set with smaller, modern vehicles would go a long way towards helping this, as would the ability to specify a load order of x% or "x crates of cargo y". But these are both outside of the scope of the FIRS project.

Finally, I do not find it nearly so strange that transported percentage is irrelevant to production as I do that regional demand plays no role. Whether an ore mine is well supplied, or well served, it is still odd that it would keep producing even if no one wanted to buy any steel...(way outside the scope of FIRS, or even the scope of any game that would be fun to play...)

Didn't mean to nitpick your post Creat, you do raise some good points. Just sharing my thoughts on the issues at hand.


Best,

[Kogut]

I like idea of ignoring amount of transported cargo, it allow to play with early vehicles without massive disappearing of industries.
XXX Supplies acts now very strange, and I have a few ideas how to change it.

There are two problems - (1) Player is happy when all possible cargos goes to machine shop.
(2) Current behaviour of supplies is strange.

(1) [copy from another FIRS thread] maybe make cargo to good conversion way better than cargo to supplies conversion?
Machine shop produce: root(delivered), good production: linear(delivered).[another copy ] Maybe draw some equipment if and only if industry have * supplies delivered. Maybe sth similar for other industries?
What means:
100 litres of fuel oil/aluminium for machine shop: 50 crates of farm and 50 crates of engineering supplies.
400 litres: 100 + 100 crates
1600: 200 + 200 crates
6400: 400 + 400 crates
25600: 800 + 800

(2) Introduce stockpiling, but a bit different
Stockpile is unlimited.
Cargo is always accepted.
Each day suplies processed, with small chance to increase production. Industry uses in month (production/30)+1 supplies. (When month demand is below 30, each day cargo is used with chance of <total use/30>).
Each day, after processing 2% of cargo are lost (after month (30 iterations) it consumes 45%).

In result cargo still should be delivered rather often than in big quantifies, and 1 horse cart of supplies for 900 tonne iron ore mine in 2020 year will be insuficient!

What with manufacturing supplies?
There should be consumed when other cargo is delivered, and lost in the same way.

[Kogut]

And I thinh that word "produced" in raw industry window means "possible production, industry waits for good transport".

[Bob_Mackenzie]

I might be alone here, but I like to think these industries are selling locally, like a farmer selling some of his own produce at the local farmers' market (harder to imagine for iron ore mines...). Otherwise it gets a little too troubling to see industries open in the middle of nowhere, far from any material, labour, power, or market.

I sort of agree with that.

What would be interesting IMO is industries that are over X tiles from a town REQUIRE passengers to produce efficiently. Something like production will not exceed 10t per passenger delivered per month. After all you can produce without workers. If it could be tweaked so that you didn't get paid for oversupplying passengers (workers) that would make the planning interesting IMO and find a game niche for all those DMU/EMU trains (though I suspect most would do it by busses)

Cheers

Bob

[Kogut]

I suggested it already bud due to Openttd limitations (max 3 accepted cargos for industry) it is impossible.

[andythenorth]

Thanks for the feedback. All feedback is welcomed Sorry, long reply follows. I've tried to avoid nitpicks

There are two problems - (1) Player is happy when all possible cargos goes to machine shop.

So....
(A) I'm going to add another source of engineering supplies soon.

(B) I don't mind the dominance of engineering supplies in FIRS. I would be happy if town cargos like goods were more useful than they are currently. But there will always be a need to increase primary production....which means engineering supplies are always going to be among the most important cargos.

(C) I do think other cargos should be more useful. Except for the minor gameplay points of making money, eye candy, and creating routes cargos like goods are pointless. Goods does not (as many players believe) affect town growth in OpenTTD or original TTD (I also believed this wrongly until recently). An improvement would be allowing newgrf control of town growth cargos, which has been requested.

(D) Hydrocarbon fuels are way under-represented in the game economy compared to real life. I don't know if this is really a problem, but I do know that transporting oil is really boring for some reason. Also moving coal to the power station is pointless when there is something like a steel mill that will produce cargo from coal. I keep thinking about these points but I haven't thought of a good solution yet

(2) Introduce stockpiling, but a bit different...

Your proposal for that isn't bad and could work....some thoughts:
(A) it couldn't be implemented quite as described, the production callbacks don't run daily. But the effect you describe could be achieved.

(B) I'm happy with the current behaviour right now and don't want to recode it (yet again). The current behaviour is identical to how the game handles food and water for town growth in Tropic. I know some players find it strange that only 1t is needed, and delivering more has no effect, but I don't mind it.
Your suggestion is interesting though.

I might be alone here, but I like to think these industries are selling locally, like a farmer selling some of his own produce at the local farmers' market (harder to imagine for iron ore mines...). Otherwise it gets a little too troubling to see industries open in the middle of nowhere, far from any material, labour, power, or market.

This is also how I think about it. Railroad Tycoon 3 had the concept of 'invisible shippers' who would keep cargo moving to industries. I imagine the management of OpenTTD industries finding supplies and/or customers somewhere nearby.

The same applies to FIRS secondary industries: the cement plant should in reality need all three inputs to produce any output at all. But that's annoying gameplay, so I imagine management find small amounts of the other cargos somewhere (credits to OzTrans for this concept in CanSet).

I do not find it perverse that FIRS encourages small vehicles for some cargoes. Using a set with smaller, modern vehicles would go a long way towards helping this.

Pikka's GeneralAV8ion provides some perfect planes for this.

One day I'll provide some road vehicles with low capacities, maybe not 1t (that would be too easy), but maybe 2t or 3t . Partial load orders were discussed briefly, but no devs have really had a strong opinion for or against so far. Timetabling ought to be the solution, but I haven't really tried it.

One idea is to use refits to specify the capacity of a vehicle (I do this with HEQS trams). A pickup truck with 1t/3t capacity options might be useful.

FISH will also contain boats/hovercraft with very low capacities for this purpose.

It's my explicit intention to make it hard to use trains for this kind of logistics OpenTTD is not purely a train game.



@Creat: you gave detailed feedback, but I didn't understand all of it, would you mind expanding?

It's never a good idea to have an effective dependency on a single type of cargo (or in this case cargo group) for almost all industries.

What is the problem with this / evidence for the problem?

Even more so considering how little you can influence where cargo actually goes (even with Cargodist, though that does do a far better job at distributing the supplies).

This puzzled me most. In the default game, the cargo goes exactly where you want it to. If you want to deliver somewhere, you just setup a route to that location. What am I missing?

I haven't tested FIRS with Cargodist at all. I would like to, I think Cargodist could be really fun, but I don't have time to play test games with both the default game and a large complex patch

Expanding on that: the effective requirement to deliver supplies once per month (no matter what volume) makes for some pretty strange gaming concepts, like the transfer stations where you transfer cargo to road vehicles just to get smaller delivery portions

Opinions will differ, but I don't find it strange to make better use of a concept that was present in original TTD (transfers)

The game is designed around the concept, that more cargo/load is better, making a longer train has quite a few advantages over having many smaller ones with the same over all capacity

This puzzled me too. What is the evidence for this? Would you mind expanding a little more?

Thanks for the feedback, it's helpful.

[Bob_Mackenzie]

I suggested it already bud due to Openttd limitations (max 3 accepted cargos for industry) it is impossible.

Its not impossible you just have to remove one of the other cargos.....

[Bob_Mackenzie]

Hydrocarbon fuels are way under-represented in the game economy compared to real life. I don't know if this is really a problem, but I do know that transporting oil is really boring for some reason. Also moving coal to the power station is pointless when there is something like a steel mill that will produce cargo from coal. I keep thinking about these points but I haven't thought of a good solution yet

Once you can use cargo to influence town growth, you can make sure power stations are created within X of a town and have coal delivered influence the growth of the town.

Alternatively no electric trains if at least one power station isn't supplied with coal However I suspect that's impossible to code in a grf

Perhaps you can make the payments higher for delivering to powerstations though that doesn't make it any more interesting.

Or get rid of the power station and introduce a more interesting industry instead. (ooo I don't know - theme park: takes passengers, goods and food - with a low cap on numbers but with a premium delivery price?)

Just some random thoughts which no doubt you've already had

[Bob_Mackenzie]

One day I'll provide some road vehicles with low capacities, maybe not 1t (that would be too easy), but maybe 2t or 3t

The VW Caddy in the LVRS already has a 2 crate capacity. IMO is unrealistically fast tho'

[Bob_Mackenzie]

It's my explicit intention to make it hard to use trains for this kind of logistics OpenTTD is not purely a train game.

Have towns over a certain size start producing VIP's (or have an industry "palace") VIP's won't get on to any transport with a capacity greater than 6. All sorts of scope for taxi's, yatchs, private jets and powerboats

Yes I know there is no space in the system for this

[Lakie]

You do realise you can reply to multiple posts in a single post, or edit a previous post with additional content.
There is no need for 4 posts all within 25~ minutes.

~ Lakie

[Bob_Mackenzie]

You do realise you can reply to multiple posts in a single post, or edit a previous post with additional content.
There is no need for 4 posts all within 25~ minutes.

~ Lakie

I do but I like to keep different topics in their own posts

[NekoMaster]

You do realise you can reply to multiple posts in a single post, or edit a previous post with additional content.
There is no need for 4 posts all within 25~ minutes.

~ Lakie

I do but I like to keep different topics in their own posts

You know you can easily point out the topics being addressed by making sure you have the name of the owner qouted post so that people anmd the owner know who your addressing.

Besides, if you constantly do this, the admins will start getting upset because more posts then needed take up space visually and physically on the servers

[Coxx]

Thanks for the feedback. All feedback is welcomed
...
(B) I don't mind the dominance of engineering supplies in FIRS. I would be happy if town cargos like goods were more useful than they are currently. But there will always be a need to increase primary production....which means engineering supplies are always going to be among the most important cargos.
...
The current behaviour is identical to how the game handles food and water for town growth in Tropic.

I realy like the idea. It requieres some micro management but you get rewarded. But right now I feel Engineering supplies are far too important, you just can´t do without. It´s all about the machine shop with that dumpers and dozers (I wonder why ). And it´s quite a lot of fiddeling around with various transfers, while some important feats (i.e. partially loading and leaving on arrival, more specific loading options in general and some small standard vehicles) are currently lacking. Calculation of profit with transfer orders is annoying. Timetabling is pretty complex, the effects of production changes are almost unpredictable. Playing with the Cargo-Destination patch is more comfortable here but this is not everyones cup of tea.
In general I think it should also work fine without patches, special vehiclesets, micromanagement, timetabling and so on.

I would suggest that the delivery of supplies is only needed to raise production above a certain level (higher than 100units/month or 1/4 of max prod?) so you might happily play even when there is no machine shop on the map.

(2) Introduce stockpiling, but a bit different...

Your proposal for that isn't bad and could work....some thoughts:
(A) it couldn't be implemented quite as described, the production callbacks don't run daily. But the effect you describe could be achieved. ...
I'm going to add another source of engineering supplies soon.

I also think it should be a bit less time sensitive, wether using the supplies up slower (than it should definitly have some sort of stockpiling), or using longer intervals (maybe 3 months?). More and different sources of supplies i.e. the Farm depot and the Lumber treatment plant, they draw from different sources other than the heavy industry. Others might be the cement plant (cement) or a chemical plant (paint, explosives, rubber boots & gloves) or other kinds of depots using various resources (fuel, goods, wood). It depends what might be regarded as "engineering supplies".

(C) I do think other cargos should be more useful. Except for the minor gameplay points of making money, eye candy, and creating routes cargos like goods are pointless. Goods does not (as many players believe) affect town growth in OpenTTD or original TTD (I also believed this wrongly until recently). An improvement would be allowing newgrf control of town growth cargos, which has been requested.

(D) Hydrocarbon fuels are way under-represented in the game economy compared to real life. I don't know if this is really a problem, but I do know that transporting oil is really boring for some reason. Also moving coal to the power station is pointless when there is something like a steel mill that will produce cargo from coal. I keep thinking about these points but I haven't thought of a good solution yet

The power station (Pikkas Pineapple set also have small power generators in the towns using fuel oil) currently is a bit pointless. But this would be different if a concept of providing electricity that have a boosting effect on production similar to the supplies could be implied. This had been discussed already long time ago in the FIRS development section, I have lost track what had happend to that idea. It depends if and how industries can effect other industries nearby, which is far beyond my knowledge.

Goods would be more usefull if they could be sent back into the production chain. Considering all the things produced in FIRS under the label "goods", a lot of combinations might be thought of.
Goods (+MNSP, chemicals) => other goods, goods (+fuel, wood, chemicals) => supplies, goods (+MNSP) => mail (sort of retail-market?).

I might be alone here, but I like to think these industries are selling locally, like a farmer selling some of his own produce at the local farmers' market (harder to imagine for iron ore mines...). Otherwise it gets a little too troubling to see industries open in the middle of nowhere, far from any material, labour, power, or market.

This is also how I think about it. Railroad Tycoon 3 had the concept of 'invisible shippers' who would keep cargo moving to industries. I imagine the management of OpenTTD industries finding supplies and/or customers somewhere nearby.

In ECS there is also some very small production even if there are no resources delivered. I think this is a good idea and yet another opotunity to use small vehicles.

[Kogut]

(C) I do think other cargos should be more useful. Except for the minor gameplay points of making money, eye candy, and creating routes cargos like goods are pointless. Goods does not (as many players believe) affect town growth in OpenTTD or original TTD (I also believed this wrongly until recently).

Ekhm
So why in NoAi:

enum AICargo::TownEffect

The effects a cargo can have on a town.

Enumerator:
TE_NONE This cargo has no effect on a town.
TE_PASSENGERS This cargo supplies passengers to a town.
TE_MAIL This cargo supplies mail to a town.
TE_GOODS This cargo supplies goods to a town
TE_WATER This cargo supplies water to a town.
TE_FOOD This cargo supplies food to a town.

[frosch]

"Town effect" is a multi-purpose property, which is currently very TTDP/OTTD specific.
See also http://wiki.ttdpatch.net/tiki-index.php ... owth_18_19_

OTTD:
Neither passengers, nor mail, nor goods affect towngrowth. Water and food affect it, but independent of the amount delivered.
Furthermore it gives hints for subsidies.
However, I guess this behavior is likely to change somewhen (if someone comes up with a decent town growth callback and/or subsidy algorithm).
In any case AIs have a fair chance that cargos with town effects are supposed to be transported to towns rather than industries.

TTDP:
The town growth is configurable via patch settings, which can also consider the 5 types of town effect cargos.

[Kogut]

But why there are multiple types (goods_effect for example)? For future features?
And water is accepted by industry.

[andythenorth]

In respect of town effect cargos, it would be hoped in future to have newgrf control over town effect cargos, for both delivery and pickup. This has been discussed a little elsewhere as a possible future feature.