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Industry balancing: short and long term

Started by jamespetts, June 17, 2009, 08:18:11 AM

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jamespetts

Given that a release is imminent, I thought that it might be helpful to start a discussion about balancing industry in Pak128.Britain. I have short- and long-term suggestions. In the short-term, before the next release, I suggest that the output of all industries is uniformly decreased: when I last tested the industries, their output was far in excess of what any transport could carry. Perhaps they could be calibrated to similar levels to those in Pak128. In any event, some reduction, I think, is needed before the industries are really playable.

In the longer term, I think that it would be helpful to have a slightly different approach to balancing industries to that adopted in the other paksets to enhance playability and interest. I suggest that, in many cases, there be a greater disparity between the production and consumption of different parts of the same industry chain, requiring a larger number of similar industries to be part of the same chain.

For example, the small shops should not consume all of or even half of a single factory's output: they should consume a quarter or less, so that each factory serves at least four shops, possibly many more. Likewise, farms should not produce anything like the amount that they do, even in Pak128: they should produce a fraction of the amount required by consumers, requiring a large number of farms to be present in an industry chain involving a consumer of farm products.

In both cases, this has two effects: firstly, it is more realistic (there are not, after all, major railway terminals next to Farmer Giles's Field, because Farmer Giles's Field does not have the output of a large steel mill; instead, farm produce is transported in small quantities by road to the nearest town to be taken by railway to its destination, or, latterly, transported by road for its whole trip, in small quantities). Secondly, it makes transport involving industry chains more interesting and challenging: instead of arranging a simple point-to-point service consisting of all a factory's output moving from producer to consumer, a proper distribution network must be put in place. Trains might have to have mixed types of freight and call at multiple industries to be profitable; road transport would have more use (and even lorries of different sizes and weights, which I am reflecting in the lorry timeline on which I am working).

Further into the future, it would be helpful to have different types of industries for different eras: a larger number of smaller industries in the early days when modes of transport can only cope with small quantities, a smaller number of larger industries in the late industrial revolution/early 20th century, when transport capacity is much increased, and, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, a far smaller number of industries some of which have enormous outputs (such as Drax-like power stations) to reflect the trends of the period. If possible just by specifying settings in the configuration files (I have not looked into this yet), farms should have far more fields than they currently do, so that much of the countryside is taken up, as in reality, by agriculture. Some of this will be more useful in Simutrans-Experimental, where obsolete industries close down, but is still worthwhile implementing in Standard in any event.

Shops, too, should evolve over time: from the early types of shop selling one or two individual product, to department stores in the 1910s onwards, to supermarkets in the 1970s onwards selling everything in large quantities, the pattern of industry should slowly change with time. Coal, too, should be sold in small quantities in coal merchants in cities until the 1960s or so to give road transport for coal something useful to do, since transporting coal in bulk to industry is almost always more efficient by train.

I realise that there is limited time for drawing extra industry/shop graphics. Whilst it would certainly be highly desirable to have different graphics for different industries in different eras (and also later type industries, such as electronics plants (piece goods) and gas power stations (require no input goods, produce less electricity than coal types), etc.), but, in the short-term, much of this can be implemented by re-using existing industry or even in some cases city building graphics to represent industries with different levels of output.
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The Hood

Your suggestions are broadly in line with what I was planning, and what the overall plan for pak128.Britain freight transport should play like.  The reason for the huge capacities at present is very simple - it was just a case of bung in a uniform high value for all industries to ensure they got generated when testing the graphics.  These definitely need to change.  If you want James, you could adapt the dat files to more appropriate values (especially if you could link this in to any work you might want to do on train balancing) to ensure a sensible number of train loads per industry per month.  I'd err on the high capacity side for the minute, as industries are spanning longer times than eventually planned, and therefore need to cater for high volume modern goods flows. 

I'd be interested in other people's views though.

VS

There is one pitfall to warn you about - afaict handling of "free" industrial trees (no set number of suppliers) is still suboptimal. In 128 I removed all these constraints and resulting trees sometimes often spiral out of control, adding tens of new factories.

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jamespetts

VS,

ahh, does the code add more producers to a chain than is commensurate with the number of consumers  (or vice versa)? If so, this is a bug, isn't it? It should be reported as a bug and hopefully fixed. If not, I am not clear on what you mean...
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VS

Exactly what you are saying. Prissi knows about that and... no idea when and how things change. But I am pretty sure this problem is known.

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jamespetts

We shouldn't really balance things to take account of present bugs that are planned to be fixed...
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VS

Sorry, I am driving this more and more off-topic again. Just saying: "don't leave InputSupplier[] empty" was all I really wanted. Of course your point stands anyway.

I am pretty sure both of us would be welcome to fix the bug ;)

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The Hood

So for large factories, InputSupplier[] should be high (lots of suppliers), and for small end-chain shops, InputSupplier[] should be 1 with a small capacity too, so that it takes only from one factory and that factory supplies several end-chains.  Is that right?

VS

I can't remember outright but this might be :
This is a number of new factories built, always. Also an attempt to link other existing suppliers is made. So setting it to 0 allows end consumers to join existing suppliers in most cases (gas stations etc.)

Edit:
http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=en_FactoryDef#input

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Severous

Hello

I cannot contribute to the code stuff I'm afraid.  I play games rather than make them. 

But on the question of balance I hope you can achieve a game that doesn't have industry with so much to transport that the player needs to build multiple parallel routes.  Multiple lines, each full of the best locomotives money can buy, struggling to keep up with demand just doesn't look realistic..and has been done many times in games of this genere.

Id like to face choices like: 1jinty+6 wagons or 10 lorries. Whereas normally the volume is so much that the choice becomes 10 jinty+60 wagons or 100 lorries.

One minor point. Does modern times mean higher goods volumes?  If it does then that doesn't mean more trains. We seem to move less by train than we used too. More diversity than more volume perhaps?

Good luck with the imminent release.
Regards
Sev.

jamespetts

Severous,

you are largely right on what makes a good balance - certainly, having to have multiple parallel rail lines for a single factory would be absurd. Even in reality, however, some larger industries (coal fired power stations in particular) have a very high turnover of goods that need to be supplied by something rather more substantial than one 3F class locomotive and six wagons - five or six 9Fs each with 50 or so wagons might be perfectly realistic.

Indeed, there is a lower proportion of freight using rail than there was many years ago (although coal for power stations is still mainly carried by rail because of the enormous bulk): it has become more economical over the years to make smaller, more widely dispersed deliveries by road rather than by rail. What I envisage in terms of higher volumes are fewer, larger factories each supplying a larger number of consolidated consumers. So, for instance, instead of six factories supplying twenty small shops, there might be three factories supplying six supermarkets: but each factory will supply something to each supermarket, meaning that the volume between any two given points does not increase substantially.
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The Hood

@Severous - that is exactly the philosophy we are aiming at in pak128.Britain - I was looking on TT forums today and reminded myself of the ridiculously huge and unrealistic stations and networks that game throws up!  Definitely want more subtlety and a place for small branch lines.

prissi

The problem with pak128 is, that some factories have ridiculious production rates (i.e. iron ore mines or steel mills), which needs to creates lots of factories. The automatical balancing also fails with crossconnection everything; but this is expected as simutrans cannot guess, what you will connect and what not.

Other than that it worked quite nicely for all sets I had to balance and even for the industrial set (which had production rates even beyond pak128 factories.)

The Hood

@prissi - do you have any particular advice, or sensible values for the different parameters then?  Presumably the pak64 values are properly balanced to work well with the code?

prissi

Avoid comsumers with very large demand. Also having something like 200+-100 for pruduction range and actual demand is 210 will very likely create two factories (with their chains) with a very large overcapacity in the end. If every producer is slightly about the consumer mean production (or at least 1/n of it), chains will not spawn unreasonable amounts of industries. However, with pak128 intended supplier product shortage, chaiging the values just to zero will spawn lots of those suppliers. In such cases you need to manually balance stuff.

VS


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The Hood

Thanks for the explanation prissi.  Just to check then - can the system cope with (say) chain A->B->C, and I want 5 of A feeding 1 of B feeding 10 of C, I should set production of A = 2, production of B = 10, production of C = 1 (or some multiple of these)?

prissi

Exactly. Since SImutrans may start to share industries, you may end up with 11A 2B and 9C or so. It also depends on distance, i.e. if there is nothing in a reasonable distance, the chances for a new factory is higher.

The Hood


ӔO

#19
I took a stab at balancing the goods.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17111233/pakbr128%20goods%20balancing%20v1.ods

of particular note, are changes in consumption vs. production values. I made the values lossy, where 1t of input will not equal 1t of production, unless there are other unaccounted goods involved in the process, like water. The numbers I put are whole number ratios and not actual production values.

Industry structure is slightly more complex, especially in the later years.

I also played around with the speed bonus and prices a bit. Manufactured and processed goods will pay more than raw goods. Speed bonuses on perishable foods are changed around slightly so they are more reflective of how fast they perish in comparison to each other.
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jamespetts

#20
AEO,

were these values tested for Standard or Experimental?

Edit: Also, there was someone who suggested changing the balance of industry so that there was a greater abundance of smaller shops and producers in comparison to manufacturers; has this been contemplated in this exercise?

Edit 2: I notice that bulk goods are no longer in rounded figures of tonnes, wheras the vehicles carrying them are all set up for specific numbers of tonnes ("12t bulk wagon"); also, the English translation texts specify tonnes as the multiple this sort of good: "12 tonnes of coal", etc. - does it not make more sense to have bulk goods in rounded numbers of tonnes?
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wlindley

AEO, Excellent! 

I especially like the addition of 1 Wood as input to the early Brewery (one wonders if we shouldn't have Glass as a good) and Textile to the furniture factory.

Why does the 1913 paper mill level drop to 1 from 6? Can't we do something with woodchips before 1860, perhaps have them sold by the builders yard?

Isn't it true, the "packaged food" (canned food) category is currently unused?  How about industries like:

  • 1750s: "Grocer" (replaced circa 1950s by "Supermarket") as a shop acceping Packaged / Canned Food (see Wikipedia "Grocer")
  • 1800s Potted Meat factory: inputs Meat, China (obviously the low-grade stuff!), and output Canned Food
  • 1800s Potted Fish factory (reuses same graphic): inputs Fish, China; output Canned Food
  • 1900s Soup Cannery: inputs Meat, Vegetables, Steel; output Canned Food
  • 1950s Bakery (as a factory, not a shop) converting Flour + Fruit -> Packaged Food for sale to Supermarkets (see that whole other discussion)

If we wanted more diversity, we could even add without too much difficulty -- any interest in these? --


  • Bakery, in parallel with the current one, accepting Flour *and* Fruit
  • 1920s: another Hardware factory, but taking plastic + steel -> hardware.
  • 1960s: plasticware factory taking Plastic and converting to... "China" ? Hmm.

Anyone like the idea of having a second type of Quarry (same graphic, and overlapping time periods) that outputs Sand; and a Glassworks (reusing the Pottery graphic for now) accepting sand + (wood / coal) (+ lime, if we make another Quarry with that as a good as well)?

jamespetts

WLindley,

if you draw them, I suspect that there'll be much interest! I can't vouch for Standard (although I suspect that they'll be popular there), but I'd be very interested in having those things in Pak128.Britain-Ex (albeit with "potted" renamed to "tinned").
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wlindley

For your comments, a diff file with new Pastry Bakery, Plastic Hardware Factory, and Plasticware Plant. 


jamespetts

Are these samples; in other words, is it intended to have these go throughout the time periods, or just have one of each as in this .diff file?
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ӔO

#25
@james
I noticed that the payment values were different for standard and experimental, and they new values I came up with are for standard. It might be a bit of trial and error, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work in experimental. The payment values aren't so important, as is their ratio to each other. Some goods are lighter, some are heavier, some pay more, some pay less.

As for the new weight values for bulk goods, an oversight on my part. I was looking mainly at the trucks, which are a bit underpowered compared to how much they carry, at least for now.

taking a closer look, it seems that long goods (plank/steel) are also in tonnes.

@wlindley
the numbers are a ratio, not the actual settings they would be at.
taking the paper mill as an example, 1860 has 6:5, 1913 has 1:1 and 1944 has 5:3:5, or scaling it, this can be 18:15, 15:15 and 15:9:15, so the 1913 paper mill is more efficient compared to the 1860 version. Then, for the later paper mills, the standards raise, so the chemicals would be something like a bleaching agent.
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jamespetts

AEO - thank you for the information. Are the road vehicles underpowered in Standard or Experimental or both? Experimental  has a different physics model to Standard.
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ӔO

Quote from: jamespetts on December 26, 2010, 03:09:36 PM
AEO - thank you for the information. Are the road vehicles underpowered in Standard or Experimental or both? Experimental  has a different physics model to Standard.

they are underpowered in both, but I think the problem is 3 fold.
One part are the goods being too heavy.
2nd part are the capacity of the vehicles
3rd part are the power values for the trucks.

I looked up the DAF CF65, 75, 85 and XF series, and they can have anywhere from 156kW (lowest for the 65) to 372kW (highest for the 85), but in the game all have fairly low number.

And then for experimental, there is the consideration of balancing game play with reality. In reality the weight limit for trucks in the UK are 44t total on public roads, with special exceptions granted for overweights or private roads. Unfortunately, with only 44t to work with, that would put trucks at a fairly large disadvantage compared to a train in terms of capacity.

I think the capacity for the vehicles are good.
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jamespetts

AEO,

thank you for looking into that. I am not sure where the information as to the power for the vehicles came from; I suspect that it was mainly guessed, as it's quite hard to research. May I ask - where did you find the information? I may well have to go through them all and update them with more accurate figures. As for the goods being heavy; how does that apply to bulk goods that are by their nature measured in tonnes in the first place?
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wlindley

Just a first pass at some numbers in these dat files, but I added:


  • Bakery Pastry 1840 and 1910 accept flour and fruit (reuses Bakery graphic)
  • Petrol station 1955, added packaged food and corrected error that prevented Newspapers from being used
  • Fish and Chips stand, 1945 accepts flour and fish (new graphic)
  • Hamburger stand, 1955 accepts flour and meat (new graphic)
  • Builders yards demand woodchips until 1920
  • Plasticware factory turns plastic to "china" 1956-2000 (reuses grain mill graphic for now)
  • Modern hardware factories 1920-2001 turn plastic + steel to hardware (reuses hardware factory graphic)

Zipfile with diff of .dat's, a few new .png's, and a complete playable BritIndustry.pak

jamespetts

I'm not sure about the hamburger stands: we didn't really have that sort of fast food until the early 1980s - it was the USA that had it from the 1950s onwards. Also, I do wonder whether there should be a different plastic ware factory from the 1970s onwards. I do like the grocer's shops, though.
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wlindley

Ah... A quick google quotes the Telegraph as reporting the first McDonalds in Britain opened in Woolwich in 1974.  Perhaps 1975 would be a good start date for that, then.

jamespetts

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ӔO

#33
@james
for the end game diesel trucks from DAF, I just looked up the maker website.
All modern trucks usually have somewhere around 200hp to 600hp depending on purpose and as far as I can tell, the majority should be in the 300hp to 400hp range.

I plan to look into the other trucks as well, but for the older trucks, it might be a bit hard. Generally, for the more recent cars and trucks, there is a 'tow capacity' rating, indicating how heavy a trailer (usually boat or camping) and the power requirements for hauling a certain amount of payload does not change over time.

one thing to keep in mind with road vehicles, is that they can come in multiple trim and power levels, despite them having the same badge. It's just more personal and customizable compared to trains. ;)
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ӔO

#34
okay, I took another stab at this.

This time all the input and output are the actual values they should be in game, instead of a I/O ratio.
I also reverted the weights of goods where weight is specifically given.

The input/output ratio for steel, petroleum and coal power are more or less based on real values.
the others are more or less a guess, taking into account economic and environmental factors.

10t coal = 20MW/hr
10t hematite = 9t iron/steel
9m^3 petroleum = 12m^3 petrol

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17111233/pakbr128%20goods%20balancing%20v2.ods
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waerth

Quote from: jamespetts on December 26, 2010, 10:12:45 PM
Yes, that seems sensible enough :-)

Hi no fish and chips shops??? Every town in Britain has a chippie right (Only been in London once though) .... they could be supplied Fish, Oil and Potatoes?

W

jamespetts

AEO,

taking a look at this, I notice that version 1 has coal with a much reduced price per unit but also a reduced weight; you have reverted the weight, but not reverted the price in version 2 - is this intentional? Also, is there a reason that coal has its price reduced so greatly in comparison with the other goods? May I ask - how did you calculate the relative prices?

Wearth,

a fish and chip shop is an interesting idea - do you care to draw one?
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ӔO

@james
the price differences are to give some variety and were not changed because the weights didn't change drastically. The prices are not based on anything in particular.
If anything, I would assume, the fossil fuels would have been very cheap, but with high volume, otherwise they wouldn't be a popular choice for energy.

I just think the prices and speed bonuses are something that could be tried out, to give a difference between other paksets, but I don't mind if they are not.
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moblet

Industry balancing is all new, and still Greek, to me, so I'll confine myself to the opening post here.
James, I really like the sound of everything you've suggested. A few thoughts/questions from a newbie perspective:
1) Road vehicles having to load/unload at loading docks that consume a tile might prove to be a cumbersome arrangement in cities in particular, and isn't as realistic for trucks as it is for trains. One thought I have is whether it's possible to specify destinations by clicking on the business, and the truck briefly stops on the road outside the business to load/unload.
2) Is there an algorithm relating consumption of every good to population? The concentration of retailing into larger centres (from the corner shop to the mall) could possibly be handled as an algorithm too.
3) Warehousing plays a crucial role in modern supply chains, and if both primary production and retail are more dispersed, warehousing will become crucial in Simutrans, e.g. to deliver from one factory to 5 towns it will probably be most efficient to rail in bulk to warehouses outside each town and do truck deliveries from there. For dept stores and supermarkets warehouses will also do in Simutrans what they do in the real world - transform incoming "single type" loads into outgoing "single destination" loads. All of this will also help make the Simutrans world be - and look - more realistic.
4) It's not necessary for production and consumption capacity to be in constant balance, as in the real world they never stay that way for long if they ever are. Does/can Simutrans work on a basis of adding production capacity once consumption capacity exceeds it? I.e. Game might start with one coal mine and four local coal merchants consuming only 40% of production, new merchants open as population increases, as soon as enough merchants open to consume >100% of the mine's output a new mine opens. Is that how it works?
5) The backloading opportunities for raw materials that emerge as a Simutrans game matures are insane, and make for much higher loading factors than one would see in the real world. Another of the things that serves to artificiallly augment profits in mature play. Part of this is the way that raw material supply is contracted on the map, which doesn't seem to be discouraged by how far away the customer is (is that adjustable?) but one deviation from reality that strikes me is that in the real world, raw materials are not equally available anywhere on a map, they are concentrated according to local geology/geography/climate. In Simutrans they can drill anywhere and find oil, a great feature for pakDubai but a bit odd in pakBritain. If raw material supply was more highly concentrated that would do a lot to reduce the unrealistic levels of backloading, not to mention being more realistic generally. I would consider it perfectly reasonable for oil, iron, and coal to each only be available in one region of the map, and for most other primary products to be found only in certain areas. Of course in reality some raw materials are only available by international trade and therefore only available at certain ports.
6) Just as there's been an increase in scale in manufacturing and retailing, so has there been in raw material supply. The definition of what constitutes an economic deposit of mineral, or commercial grade, has changed over time. For example, 20 years ago the Chinese steel industry was using local iron ore, which is 35% iron. Now it uses ore imported from Australia and Brazil etc, 60% iron, which makes the steel mills much more productive. So one could have local village coal mines in 1750 hand-mining outcrops, but which can't compete with larger, more distant but more efficient mines as transport improves. Not essential, so maybe a low priority thing, but plausible. As for farming, I don't know about Britain, but in Australia and the US agriculture has tended towards fewer, larger farms over time. This may not be all that significant for gameplay, though, so can probably be ignored.

ӔO

I just realized I made a mistake with the iron ore to steel ratio.

it should be at most 10t of iron ore to 7t of steel and that is one of the most ideal numbers you can get from hematite.

2 Fe2O3 -> 4 Fe + 3 O2
1000g : 700g : 300g
159.69g/mol : 55.85g/mol : 32.00g/mol
6.26mol : 12.52mol : 9.39mol

Of course, there will be impurities that are not Fe2O3 mixed into the iron ore as well, so it would be closer to what moblet has given. Anywhere from 40 to 60% of steel produced for every ton of iron ore.
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jamespetts

Quote from: moblet on January 24, 2011, 03:39:16 PM
1) Road vehicles having to load/unload at loading docks that consume a tile might prove to be a cumbersome arrangement in cities in particular, and isn't as realistic for trucks as it is for trains. One thought I have is whether it's possible to specify destinations by clicking on the business, and the truck briefly stops on the road outside the business to load/unload.

There is no reason in principle why a pakset cannot define a "loading bay" on a road as if it were a 'bus stop. This would require no change to the code, and would also work in Standard.

Quote2) Is there an algorithm relating consumption of every good to population? The concentration of retailing into larger centres (from the corner shop to the mall) could possibly be handled as an algorithm too.

The current system is quite simple, and not changed in Experimental from Standard. Pure consumers (that is, "industries" that consume but do not produce; things such as shops and diaries) in towns are assumed to represent that town's demand for goods. The demand factors built into those "industry" types, when combined, constitute the demand of they city in which they reside. The city's growth figures are based in part on the ratio of goods supplied and goods demanded in a particular city.

Quote3) Warehousing plays a crucial role in modern supply chains, and if both primary production and retail are more dispersed, warehousing will become crucial in Simutrans, e.g. to deliver from one factory to 5 towns it will probably be most efficient to rail in bulk to warehouses outside each town and do truck deliveries from there. For dept stores and supermarkets warehouses will also do in Simutrans what they do in the real world - transform incoming "single type" loads into outgoing "single destination" loads. All of this will also help make the Simutrans world be - and look - more realistic.

This is possible (in both Standard and Experimental) without any change in either the code or the paksets: interchange stations can be set up with large storage capacities (using warehouse graphic station extension buildings: there are some in Pak128.Britain), which are, in effect, warehouses and enable this sort of distribution.

Quote4) It's not necessary for production and consumption capacity to be in constant balance, as in the real world they never stay that way for long if they ever are. Does/can Simutrans work on a basis of adding production capacity once consumption capacity exceeds it? I.e. Game might start with one coal mine and four local coal merchants consuming only 40% of production, new merchants open as population increases, as soon as enough merchants open to consume >100% of the mine's output a new mine opens. Is that how it works?

Not quite. Industries are built by the game in "chains". A chain is a series of vertically connected producers and consumers forming a complete set. When the method for increasing the industry density is called, the program first evaluates whether there is a consumer that is not fully supplied (as in, has some inputs at 0%), and, if so, builds the appropriate producer. Beyond that, however, it will simply build an industry at random (based on the weighting factors specified in their .dat files), and then, either link to existing suppliers/consumers, or, more likely, build a series of new suppliers/consumers. The industry density is increased in Standard when the population grows by a certain fixed amount. In Experimental, there is an industry density algorithm which takes the population divided by one divided by the chance factor of all industries at the beginning of the game, then creates new industries whenever the current density is less than that initial "target" density. This is checked once every game month. New power stations are created whenever the demand for electricity exceeds the supply.

I do need, and am planning, to change this, however, as users have reported problems with Experimental's feature of closing obsolete industries in which industries close such that a supply chain is left with a great undersupply of certain products in a certain part (if the supply chain is affected such that there are no supplies at all, then the game will first try to link existing industries, or, if it cannot, close the affected factories, which might produce something of a cascade of closures along the chain). I am planning to write an industry re-linker that will make sure that no part of an industry chain is supplied by less than a certain percentage of its demand, although exactly how this will work I have not yet decided.

Quote5) The backloading opportunities for raw materials that emerge as a Simutrans game matures are insane, and make for much higher loading factors than one would see in the real world. Another of the things that serves to artificiallly augment profits in mature play. Part of this is the way that raw material supply is contracted on the map, which doesn't seem to be discouraged by how far away the customer is (is that adjustable?) but one deviation from reality that strikes me is that in the real world, raw materials are not equally available anywhere on a map, they are concentrated according to local geology/geography/climate. In Simutrans they can drill anywhere and find oil, a great feature for pakDubai but a bit odd in pakBritain. If raw material supply was more highly concentrated that would do a lot to reduce the unrealistic levels of backloading, not to mention being more realistic generally. I would consider it perfectly reasonable for oil, iron, and coal to each only be available in one region of the map, and for most other primary products to be found only in certain areas. Of course in reality some raw materials are only available by international trade and therefore only available at certain ports.

There is a feature whereby industries can only be built in certain "climates", which are defined in Simutrans as height ranges. There has been talk of making climates depend on latitude as well as altitude, but this has never been implemented. This is as far as this goes in Simutrans at present, aside from the ability to specify the minimum distance between factories in simuconf.tab. There would probably be some benefit to the ability to restrict where factories are built by region, but that would first require answering the conceptual question of what counts as a region in Simutrans and how that would be coded and made clear to the player. It s, however, possible to make industries appear only at the water's edge. This means that it is possible to make certain goods available only from international ports by making an international port a sort of industry that "produces" certain raw materials. (By the same token, it is possible to make an international airport of sorts by making a "tourist attraction" with the appropriate graphic and a very, very high passenger/mail level. Neither of these techniques have yet been implemented in any pakset, although they have been mooted for Pak128.Britain).

Interestingly, I've rarely seen any significant backloading (assuming that by backloading you mean loading a different cargo on the return trip) in Simutrans games.

Quote6) Just as there's been an increase in scale in manufacturing and retailing, so has there been in raw material supply. The definition of what constitutes an economic deposit of mineral, or commercial grade, has changed over time. For example, 20 years ago the Chinese steel industry was using local iron ore, which is 35% iron. Now it uses ore imported from Australia and Brazil etc, 60% iron, which makes the steel mills much more productive. So one could have local village coal mines in 1750 hand-mining outcrops, but which can't compete with larger, more distant but more efficient mines as transport improves. Not essential, so maybe a low priority thing, but plausible. As for farming, I don't know about Britain, but in Australia and the US agriculture has tended towards fewer, larger farms over time. This may not be all that significant for gameplay, though, so can probably be ignored.

This is already done in Pak128.Britain-Ex with the system of industries closing down when they become obsolete, and being replaced by industries which have a larger capacity and a lower "chance" (meaning that few will appear - note the description of the industry density system described above).

Quote from: AEO on January 24, 2011, 04:25:11 PM
I just realized I made a mistake with the iron ore to steel ratio.

it should be at most 10t of iron ore to 7t of steel and that is one of the most ideal numbers you can get from hematite.

2 Fe2O3 -> 4 Fe + 3 O2
1000g : 700g : 300g
159.69g/mol : 55.85g/mol : 32.00g/mol
6.26mol : 12.52mol : 9.39mol

Of course, there will be impurities that are not Fe2O3 mixed into the iron ore as well, so it would be closer to what moblet has given. Anywhere from 40 to 60% of steel produced for every ton of iron ore.

Can you post a modified version of your spreadsheet with this amendment?
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jamespetts

Quote from: AEO on January 23, 2011, 04:40:29 AM
okay, I took another stab at this.

This time all the input and output are the actual values they should be in game, instead of a I/O ratio.
I also reverted the weights of goods where weight is specifically given.

The input/output ratio for steel, petroleum and coal power are more or less based on real values.
the others are more or less a guess, taking into account economic and environmental factors.

10t coal = 20MW/hr
10t hematite = 9t iron/steel
9m^3 petroleum = 12m^3 petrol

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17111233/pakbr128%20goods%20balancing%20v2.ods

I have implemented a slightly modified version of this in the version of the sources in my Github repository (leaving out the changes to prices and to power stations for the time being, the output for power stations having been carefully calibrated in the past, and the prices being left to be calibrated as part of a different project in the future). Initial testing seems mostly good, although I think that there could still be more shops to every factory: the range was between one and four, with the average being about two (and this was with revised settings that reduced the consumption of shops). I think that four would be a good average; do you think that you could look into this (or comment on what you were hoping to acheive in this respect)?

I have only had chance to test it so far by creating maps and looking at what industry is set up - I have not had the chance to try transporting things and seeing whether the balance is right in that respect.

Incidentally, there might be some merit in looking back over this old thread for some analysis of industry balancing issues.
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