After playing around for a bit, and having finished my first big design, I have run into a traffic problem, which I’ll try to dissect a bit and hopefully give some insight for others who might be struggling too, while maybe getting some tips from you myself in the process.
Let me also preface this, by saying I play on hard transport difficulty with round trips enabled.
1. Trucks changing lanes at the last possible second
Trucks always seem to stick to their lane until they get to the segment they need to be in. What this means however, is you will have a lot of parallel moving traffic get momentarily stopped by someone not being at their correct lane.
When looking at intersections with anything larger than a one lane (either one-way or two) road, at least one lane ends by default, and leaves with the lane going away.
What this means is any traffic entering the ending lane has to merge into the middle one, to not be forced to turn off at the next junction. This, however doesn’t happen immidiately, only before the very next leaving junction, basically all at once.
2. Buildings accepting traffic very slowly
Building entrances are basically gravel roads, which is probably intentional. Avoid putting many on a single fast road.
Interestingly cars don’t actually seem to slow down traffic at all when cutting through 4 lanes of other traffic to get inside, only when waiting to do so, so always try to have at least two lanes of traffic in one direction on side roads.
3. Traffic surges
When the game is paused cars don’t get dispatched to buildings because time isn’t moving (duh). As a result, unpausing after building a massive complex (or anything above 10 buildings really) starts a massive wave of trucks going towards the destination, committing serious serious sins mentioned above, and clogging up your network, all the while buildings keep requesting the next delivery as soon as the previous one arrived, creating an everlasting gridlock. When this happens, check the “cars ignore traffic” until it clears, after that, most designs should work. Well as long as you have a highway relatively close and don’t trigger a massive amount of demand ever again. (Like your habitats regaining their oxygen supply and upgrading all at once for example.)
I make sections that are only accessible by train and that are surrounded by two circles of the fastest one-way road.
Each section is roughly 3-5 screen heights long and little over one wide on the farthest zoom level (without mods)
Linking exclusively by train sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure how traffic would handle itself with it being “surgey” as I described in my post. Would love to try it though.
Could you post a picture in a reply?
(You can press Win + Print Scr and it gets saved by default to %userprofile%\Pictures\Screenshots which you can paste in the window that pops up when pressing Win + R)
I’m not sure I understand how you linked up the train station and how roads connect to the outer circle.
PS: when you move train stations around sometimes resources get stuck in the existing stations. You can upload your save to my free service that cleans them
Thanks, the design does work, and it looks cool. However I feel it still has the same problem at the startup of production complexes. Trucks simply cannot choose their lane properly when coming out of a train station. Also a big contributor is all trucks filling up the nearest factories until full, and only then proceeding to the ones farther away as seen here:
Not that it really matters because after filled traffic isn’t that much of a problem even on hard, because building consume so few resources each.
It’s definitely a lot better at handling leaving traffic though, because anything getting stuck is doing so in the lanes going the opposite way to the one-way-road going the opposite way, so coming and going traffic never meet. (Not even when leaving buildings because for some reason that doesn’t obstruct anything.)
It looks like you don’t have enough trains going around. Plus I try to separate each train line by their own tracks.
The layout with the configuration you have in the first picture is probably auto generated and not optimal. You can click the intersection and then drag the crossings
Yeah, I wasn’t really sure on how to use these bigger stations, but I’ll get it right eventually, and also yes, I did add more trains, because on their own these weren’t enough.
The default layout doesn’t seem bad, but I’m not sure what would be appropriate in this game. Cars can instantly stop and do any turns without slowing down, but cannot handle changing lanes properly.
If I allow them to go straight through it causes issues down the line, if I don’t the problem is very apparent right at the first turn because they decide they all actually want to be on the other side of the road and just go without a second thought.
Seriously, it’s like I’m watching indonesian drivers with godlike brakes just going wherever they please, holding up traffic seriously, but not causing any accidents.
Thing is, like I said, apart from the first 5 or so minutes of this huge surge of 40+ trucks going to every building, it all works no matter what. I literally couldn’t find a design that would not work apart from sticking 20 buildings on a single 2 lane 2 way road that does not.
If you have some extra tips I’d be happy to see them, but honestly I’m just considering taking a break until something happens.
