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How do I avoid flooding the dock with oil?

Started by MagnusA, June 12, 2015, 06:56:31 AM

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MagnusA

... or more generally, how do I avoid flooding an intermediate transfer station from being oversupplied?

Hi!

I am a long-time, but occasional, Simutrans-player usually playing pak64 with the default 256x256 map starting 1930. I like it small.  Currently Simutrans 120.0.1.

My style of play is trying not delivering more goods to the consumer end than it can sell to end customer (or rather slightly more because of discrete sizes of deliveries - size of vehicle, number of convoys). The rest of the transport chain is balanced to that.

But when e.g. an off-shore Oil Rig is involved this strategy nevertheless creates oversupply problems. In a current game I have OilRig -> (ship) -> dock -> (trucks) -> Oil Refinery -> (trucks) -> Gas Station. The land transports is quite easy to balance the relative small consumption of the gas station and the refinery has customized its production to the low demand but that huge ship keeps delivering oil to the dock indefinitely, way more than the gas station needs! The dock gets flooded with oil (an environmental catasrophe...)

Is there any way to "back pressure" the ship without manually sending it to the depot every now and then? The refinery and gas station almost never gets oversupplied so no "stop orders" from there. The available storage space at the transit station (the dock) does not work as "stop order".

/Magnus

Combuijs

There is a setting

no_routing_over_overcrowded = 0

If you set that on 1 then all goods, passengers and mail that have an overcrowded stop in their route won't be created. That should stop overflowing your dock. Note that this then also works for passengers and mail, so it might influence other traffic as well. There is no way to separate this in such a way that it works for goods only.
Bob Marley: No woman, no cry

Programmer: No user, no bugs



MagnusA

#2
Quote from: Combuijs on June 12, 2015, 08:33:36 AM
no_routing_over_overcrowded = 0

If you set that on 1 then all goods, passengers and mail that have an overcrowded stop in their route won't be created.

Thanks! I will try that next game. (New-game-only parameter?)

After I posted my question I found another solution/work-around. To decrease the number of round-trips each month for my huge oil tanker I used "Month wait time" in the line schedule to add some slack time.

The trick was to define some minimun load (1%) at the dock and have the ship waiting there before returning empty to the oil rig. I tried to set some waiting time at the oil rig but as soon as the ship was fully loaded it departured...

Combuijs

I don't think it is a new game parameter, but I am not sure.

Good trick that, although it is tiresome if you have to watch every place where this happens. As you play a small map, there won't be a lot of such places.
Bob Marley: No woman, no cry

Programmer: No user, no bugs



gauthier

#4
What about removing one or two of your tankers from the line ? It would have the same effect as setting a slack time before returning.

MagnusA

Quote from: gauthier on June 12, 2015, 01:00:42 PM
What about removing one or two of your tankers from the line ? I would have the same effect as setting a slack time before returning.
I have only one tanker there so impossible to remove anything.

I have not thought about this slack time trick before but I think one can see it like determining the minimum number of convoys to properly (and otherwise effectively) supply a line. If even one full-time convoy of the smallest available size is too much capacity one has to slow down that one a bit. :-)

Vladki

You should try playing with JIT2.
Available in nightlies

DrSuperGood

Download nightly and use JIT2 economy system. You will not receive more goods than are needed. This is because orders are placed by consumers as they use the goods so that you get a constant flow towards the consumer. If there is a backlog forming it would be because of insufficient transport capacity since the rate of goods flowing is proportional to what is required.

This was one of the reasons I helped implement JIT2.

Ters

How is it with turning on JIT2 for an existing game, or are most users best off starting a new game with JIT2?

DrSuperGood

QuoteHow is it with turning on JIT2 for an existing game, or are most users best off starting a new game with JIT2?
Requires 2 save/reload cycles.
1: Turn on JIT2 and having maximum in-transit set to 100 odd to reduce conversion error.
2. Set maximum in-transit to 0.

Industries might take a while to correct.