Freight movement

[jjeffrey]

Lots of freight leaves cities by truck and train but no freight evers enters a city.

I have freight stations or ports in every city and they all are shipping freight out but a query of the road/track shows none entering a city.

Passenger cars, buses, and subway trains appear to travel between cities just fine.

Is there something I need to do to get freight to move into a city?

Thanks for NAM. It ROCKS!

-Jeff

[metasmurf]

Someone else will prolly give you a better technical explanation, but freight cannot enter the city from other cities. However, there's somewhat of a workaround. You can place a freight traffic generator near the border, pointing it in to your city. It can be found at http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1014

Good luck!

/Andreas

[Diggis]

Freight doesn't enter a city.  The economy is slightly screwy in that all it does is manufacture stuff, it never makes use of what it manufactures.

[jjeffrey]

Well, that's too bad.

Thanks guys!

[SC4BOY]

For each freight "leaving" the city.. either at a border or a seaport, you get cap relief for Industry (20?) other than that its simply part of a single city's dynamic  In fact it must leave in order for you go get "credit" .. hehe

[jjeffrey]

SC4BOY:  Well, at least it has some purpose.

Is this something that could be simulated like NAM does or is it beyond what can be done with SC4.

[SC4BOY]

I'm not sure what you're really asking, but truth is SC4 doesn't really know what is going on in other cities while it is running a given city. The other city is just a "lump over there" also called "simnation". The multi-city model was apparently added late in the SC4 game development and was implemented in very crude fashion. For example if a "SimA" gets a job in adjacent "CityB" the city just tosses him "over the border" at a point half way into the tile and assumes that all works out.. in fact you don't even have to have the road or whatever in the CityB go anywhere as long as it is connected. Now what it DOES keep count of is the actual traffic "at the boundary". In that sense it is continuous, but not at any detail level.. all that does is dump traffic over and when you enter the other city it will figure out what to do with it.

If you're asking "can SC4 be made to use or model freight across borders" the answer is almost certainly no.. I don't even think the model does anything but "did it leave" or not and count it.

[jplumbley]

The problem with freight in this game was not that it doesn't "enter" a City, it is actually that it doesn't have a "Demand" to be satisfied.  This would have been something that would not have been all the difficult to implement, but the creators did not.

On a very, very broad scale it would have been simple to add another property to the Building Exemplars that stated how much freight a building would accept.  This would mean that the Traffic Simulator would have to deal with freight traffic more like it does with the commuter traffic by finding "demand" for the freight much like a Sim looks for a "job".  But, to make it easy, it simply just looks for the closest neighbor connection instead.  The other thing that this would have added would be another demand basically.  When the demand was positive you would have more buildings requesting freight than you had providing freight and when negative would be showing you have more creating freight than those requesting it.

I always thought this would have been a better way to implement freight into the game.  It is too bad they never made it possible.  We could have even taken it a step further with having multiple kinds of freight such as, minerals, consumables, retail products, food and produce.  But this would change the landscape of how you would zone Industries and Commercial buildings, possibly making it a little more complicated to play as well trying to provide the right types of commerce and industries for your City to survive.  It would focus the game more towards economy than transit, although transit holds a big key for an economy to survive.

[jjeffrey]

You guys are amazing.

This whole site is amazing.

Thanks for taking the time out to explain it to me.

(Now, if I could just find out what was happening on May 29, 2008, 03:26:06 PM.)

[SC4BOY]

......For example if a "SimA" gets a job in adjacent "CityB" the city just tosses him "over the border" at a point half way into the tile and assumes that all works out.. in fact you don't even have to have the road or whatever in the CityB go anywhere as long as it is connected. Now what it DOES keep count of is the actual traffic "at the boundary". In that sense it is continuous, but not at any detail level.. all that does is dump traffic over and when you enter the other city it will figure out what to do with it....

I didn't mention it, but this is pretty clear that this behaviour is what causes the "eternal commuter" or "commuter loop" or "commute time bug".. Since SimA got pitched over the border without further qualification, it gets "looked at" when you enter that adjacent city (CityB). The simulator looks at SimA and checks for a job for it.. if the best option seems to "throw it over the fence to CityC" then it does that .. this often occurs if the entry connection is near a corner and another exit connection is nearby.. so it sends SimA now to CityC  and washes its hands of it. Now if you enter CityC and find SimA dutifully waiting there at the city connection from CityB it picks it up and checks out the options.. it may send it right back to CityA if the right conditions exist.. .or it may send it to CityD and so on.. needless to say that Sim has a long commute and no job to boot! And of course CityA has no clue that SimA even came from CityA to start with.. it may even send it on more tail-chasing travels..

If your city geometry and connections have the right conditions, there ends up being 10's of thousands of commuters (perhaps even the same "traveler" several times) circling madly around city to city and going nowhere fast.. (how fast depends on what travel mode.. ) This is the "commuter loop" or whatever name you wish...

[j-dub]

Here's my thoughts, because of the neighbor deals, ie: garbage import, and garbage export, that could have been done with the industrial, instead of just having trucks dump to the next city over. In my case, if you build a farm next to train tracks, somehow those farms generate their own freight line and go to the next city over as shown by the query, but that train ain't coming back. I blame EA for rushing this game to the market, because had they done the usual delays like other developers that make those games right, we probably could have had this problem solved. The neighbor deals don't even show the importing vehicles entering the city anyway, at least for me, you would think that could of been implemented to handle freight traffic, because factory import and export could of been done using the neighbor deal way to show incoming trucks and as traffic registered by the query, but even if we could have thought about making a patch using that, they never seemed to show the garbage imported by trucks into the city, or appearing under the route query, they just seem to be an exiting animation, just like when you build a police station, or a fire station, all those cars just drive around by that area.

The only thing that seems to go in and out of cities, is airplanes, you can see those flying from city to city in the region view, my thoughts are, there still has to be a way, but airplanes are only just animation.