Continuing our expansion, I made a double-rail line all the way from the glass mill to Las Vegas and then to our dairy.
Protip: Control + click on signals lets you set the interval between them, now you can drag-and-drop to auto-signal long portions of tracks. I usually employ one signal every 5 tiles, not too expensive, not too far apart.
And here we see our boson ships arriving with sand!
This monstrous 4-engine train is one of the few things that can haul a significant ammount of glass around with a reasonable speed. Glass is the heaviest peice goods I think.
And here's the importance of having a maximized, stable line before expanding. Wibbly profits all around from tuning the lines and initial hauls for factories.
My next step was linking the brewery with the supermarket. For our luck we already covered 4/5ths of the way there with our milk line...
Also we needed grain to brew the beer, one of the farms is reasonably close and I could link it either with trains or ships. I opted for ships to ease the train overload on the milk rail.
I like the tractor for hauling grain as again it doesn't have much of a speed bonus, and it can haul comparatively a lot (twice as much as the best simple trucks)
And here they go. The reason I didn't demolish that field on the way is that farms and treefarms have their output linked to how many fields there are around them. They expand slowly once linked though.
One of the dangers of having your supply and output arrive on the same line is a gridlock because the factory is out of supplies, in this case, coal. I had to add a few extra platforms and a platform choose signal to streamline it and reduce the chance of a gridlock, but it still may happen unless I come with another solution another boat line to supply coal would solve this issue, for instance.
Here's how I linked las vegas. The station control building is only aesthetic. I used the station sprawl exploit to cross the road though.
You can see the arriving line has a platform choose signal, while one of the platforms has a end-of-plaftorm choose signal. The reason for doing this is that it excludes that specific platform from the search, so only lines you tell to stop there in their schedule will stop. The glass supply arrives there, while the grain gets hauled on a tiny leg via tractors too. The outgoing track acesses both directions because the glass trains stop here and then go south to deliver stuff to dairy.
Our dairy wasn't in a pretty situation though, becuase we have 3 lines passing trough this crossing:
1: the milk line itself
2: the glass supply which comes from the glass mill, stops at las vegas and then goes to the dairy to deliver the remaining glass.
3: the beer line that goes all the way down to the supermarket! - Beer production rates are insane too, I'm at 11 trains and the brewery is still overflowing.
The solution was to optimize some of the bottlenecks at the crossing. I improved the acess for the milk haulers with that loop near the road, and added a bypass for the beer.
I had to include a waypoint for the beer route because simutrans trains can be a bit dumb and not pick the best route.
And here we can see it running like clockwork. I should do some youtube vids of playing.
Our next challenge is increasing the speed on the milk line again. Because now we are sharing the fast milk line with a slower-moving line for delivering beer, our speedbonus is down and our profits aren't as good as they should be.
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Topic: Let's play Simutrans Pak128 - A song of beer and milk. (Read 10884 times)