(First-time player)
I’ve outgrown centralized production at my starter area, currently working on starting aluminum development.
I don’t really want to get into spreadsheets to track everything, so I prefer a system I can reason about easily.
My tentative expansion plan:
Build a distribution hub station for basic parts. This will deal with buffering, overflow, keeping dimensional storage full, and sinking excess. Huge area required, with 2 stations (input and output) per basic parts type. Plan for expansion. A few local inputs, but mostly dedicated to consolidating parts from elsewhere. May eventually want multiple hubs? Or might build this more centrally on the map and just go big.
Resource node factories will have smelters and constructors or refineries, and send any “single origin” product back to the hub. They might be multipurpose (eg plastic, rubber, packaged fuel) or optimized for a single purpose (just plastic) depending on current needs.
Every other factory will be dedicated to higher order work like assembly and manufacturing. They’ll each have two train stations, one inbound, one outbound.
Outbound complex products will be dispatched in delivery runs to factories that need them, they don’t use the hubs.
My confusion lies in whether to split delivery by car, or split by train.
At first, I thought it would be easier to plan around single-resource trains, where each stop unloads one car. Add a customer, add a car. Felt like the most “real world” approach. But in the game, it has the weird implications that a) loading needs a carefully balanced splitter system to distribute across cars for fairness to all the customers, yet they don’t necessarily have equal needs, and b) all other stations need to pad dead platforms proportional to other customers. This latter point feels unmanageable as the network grows.
So then I considered a train per customer, one car per requirement. But then loading is weird. If you share a loading platform at the source, another train could starve you by hogging more than it needs. So you end up with the same unscalable platform-per-customer issue to solve that.
With that, I flipped back to thinking single resource trains, one customer per car, but with a fixed max N of train length (add a new “customer group” train if I need more customers, go multihub if balance gets hard), blueprint an unload merger plus smart splitter for destinations so that all the various dependencies for a given station appear on the dedicated platform(s) for that customer, and I sushi belt sort them to their factory inputs; key bit for ease of use is that it’s overbuilt for all N platforms, set up so that any platform can become the “correct” one for a customer by just toggling it to “unload”. I’ll add the customer number (platform number) in the station name for quick reference. (I have no idea what N should be, maybe 5-6?)
So I have a tentative plan, but holy crap does it feel overcomplicated!
So before I commit to this madness, I wanted to ask here… am I missing something fundamental? It’s hard to imagine that this is the setup the designers were leaning into.
(In software terms, what I want is a decoupled interface. It’s bad enough that there’s a producer-to-consumer dependency here, but it’s exacerbated because there is coupling between consumers - they need to basically know all the other consumers in order to ensure their platforms are correctly padded! I’m just trying to set up a system where a new consumer can be added without any other changes to the setup, but this seems nearly impossible, at least without an even more overkill fully point to point “one train = one customer = one dependency, overbuild a all-platform merge/split sushi belt to unload”)
