Industries closing down

[zook2]

1. I was investigating oddities in my industry chains when I took a look at the industry log (Messages -> Towns) and noticed that from 1894 (the oldest entries) to 1910, no firms closed down. In the five years since it happened almost monthly. I should add that this is a very old game that I started using 11.1x, but I switched to 11.35 years before 1910.

After writing this paragraph I read some more about Experimental features and realized that industries, e.g. coal-related firms, begin closing down years before becoming obsolete. I consider myself a not-inexperienced SimExer, but this is one of the more obscure features of the game and it took me a while to figure out what happened. Maybe you could just change the message text in these cases "XY has closed down (this industry is slowly becoming obsolete)".

2. Would it be possible to implement a search function for the log, or save it to a text file?

3. I consider a connected industry closing down to be much more important than an upgrade or opening of a new one. It can interrupt an entire transport network. Could you make these messages a separate item in the message center, one that can be set to create a popup window while leaving the less important messages to the message ticker?

4. When power plants close down, their substations get removed and that sometimes interrupts the electricity network. Finding the problematic spots can be a nightmare. Could you instead replace the substations with wires?

5. The abovementioned oddities in my industry chains are that I can't for the life of me connect two sheep farms to slaughterhouses, although other, older such connections run fine. Wool is routed with no problems from both farms, but no livestock. Now I saw that sheep farms can close down (one already did), i.e. it seems they become obsolete at some point. Could that be a reason why I can't connect them?

[DrSuperGood]

If the game is old it may be suffering from pak128 Britain errors. Sheep farm in particular since they were meant to update (old sheep farm upgrades into better new sheep farm) but instead they close down due to a mistake in the pak set. This is not the only such error, China shops I believe are also one. These errors are fixed in the development version of the pak set (along with billions of others!) however that is aimed at double heights so unfortunately is not an easy upgrade.