The International Simutrans Forum

During the play of Stephenson-Siemens game I observed the following things:

1. there are very few industries (final consumers) generated automatically
2. those that exist suffer from staff shortage
3. For one pub generated there's one brewery, and dozens of grain farms.

Could #1 be adjusted by "industry_increase_every" or when creating the game? Would a newly spawned pub (or any final customer) connect to existing factory with spare capacity? What I'd like to see is that there are multiple final consumers in each town, and brewery feeding dozens of pubs. How to achieve that?

I know that #2 can be adjusted by "minimum_staffing_percentage_consumer_industry" and "minimum_staffing_percentage_full_production_producer_industry", but I would prefer them to really be staffed. The question is if this is caused by:
a) a bug in counting of commuters that arrived?
b) wrong setup of commuting trips: commuting_trip_chance_percent, passenger_trips_per_month_hundredths
c) commuters absorbed by city buildings (IND, COM, curiosities, townhalls) and player buildings (stations, depots, signalboxes, headquarters)

Could removing com & ind city buildings from pakset, and increasing "industry_increase_every" help spawning more industries - optimally so many to replace the missing COM with final consumers, and IND with producers?
Would that cause some other problems?

That would be excellent. Given a suitable production of consumer industries, I would be happy to draw more shops that consume textiles:

   
• Milliner's
• Dressmaker

and perhaps paper

   
• 1750-early 1800s, news and print shop

among others.
Is there a way in the .dat file to make industries group together, like on a "High Street" ?

What I have observed so far:
1. Yep, there are too few consumers and these few have a very low consumption especially in early years.

QuoteCould #1 be adjusted by "industry_increase_every" or when creating the game?

Try it out but what I have observed none of these two will help.

QuoteWould a newly spawned pub (or any final customer) connect to existing factory with spare capacity?

No, or at least not pretty often. I was trying to spawn new consumers manually using public services map tools and ended up with new chains and these consumers got most of their goods from newly generated industries so I ended up with even worse overall production/consumption balancing still being bottlenecked by the consumers.

QuoteHow to achieve that?

Build and link these consumers manually using public service. Don't use the "create industry chain" feature!

I suspect to get this automatically done the industry spawn/connection algogithm needs huge adjustements, if not even a complete overhaul.


2. staff shortage is a great idea but not pretty well implemented yet, as city growth does not consider staffing at all. James mentioned there will be a rework of city growth that will fix the problem but until then the only way is to disable that feature or manually demolish city industry buildings and build residental buildings instead, again using public service.

QuoteThe question is if this is caused by:

To my knowledge it is caused by c but maybe b could also be related to it.

QuoteCould removing com & ind city buildings from pakset, and increasing "industry_increase_every" help spawning more industries - optimally so many to replace the missing COM with final consumers, and IND with producers?

No. Industries don't care about that.

QuoteWould that cause some other problems?

As mentioned above, it can fix the staffing problems of existing industries.

Quote from: wlindley on December 15, 2019, 07:47:39 PMIs there a way in the .dat file to make industries group together, like on a "High Street" ?

Afaik, no. But you could make a "high street shops" consumer that is technically a single industry selling multiple different goods but graphically multiple shops. However, I am not quite sure if it is possible to align the rotation to roads. Recently, there was a commit adding "automatic" rotation to industries so this could work but I am not sure how exactly "automatic" behaves.