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The AI, industry chains and gridlock

Started by falconne, November 13, 2011, 01:37:57 AM

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falconne

I'm new to the game and my observations may be premature, but in my playing so far, the AI doesn't seem to be coping very well with the deep industry chains in the game. I'm playing pak128 on 256x256 maps with all default settings and 6 AIs (3 passenger and 3 goods AIs). I've started 3 games and I haven't played them very far as I'm just experimenting with different things, but in all of them the goods AIs start off by building a few lines to supply a couple of secondary industries, but take no action to deliver the products to 3rd and 4th layer industries. This means that within 2 years most of their lines stagnate when the secondary industries get saturated and the trucks and trains get stuck at stations. The road vehicle building AIs are worse because they seem to build 40+ trucks per line at the beginning, all of which will then get stuck when their industries saturate, creating permanent gridlock on the public roads. That means even the passenger AIs' buses get stuck.

Even when an AI builds a line from a secondary to tertiary industry, the throughput of that is not high enough to match the rate of input.

I tend to concentrate on just one industry chain, leaving the rest to the AIs, so I'm not monopolizing, but I will start a new game with more than the default 4 industry chains and see if that helps. Are there any other settings I could choose to encourager the AI to create networks that span the whole industry chain?

prissi

The AI tries to build one industry chain and then sometimes its money is exhausted (especially with pak128 expensive good stations and rail.) Otherwise it will continue to built a a line up the chain. Only if it fails to built a road and rail connection, it will give up with this chain completely.

The rate the AI transports is matched to the consumption of an industry; It only matches production when a source does not produce enough. This is very easy to calculate for the computer. It is has to built less, when it would result in more than 255 cars per line or more than 24 wagons on trains.

Running more than one passenger or more than two goods AI is not recommended. Usually after some time with too many AIs one dies and the stravating chain kills the other AIs.

falconne

Ah ok makes sense. I just checked my current game and yeah they are all well into the negatives.

They would have run out of money because each built about 50 vehicles to service their primary to secondary industry line, which probably got saturated even before the vehicle cost was recovered. Maybe a routine should be added to the AI that checks if a given line has zero or negative operational profit (for several months) and it can't figure out why, then it reassigns some of those vehicles to a new route? If it needs money, it should sell some of the vehicles. This should cause it to start working on the rest of the chain.

I'll start a new game with just 1 passenger AI and 2 goods AIs and more industry chains and see how it goes.