Hello fellow outer space entrepeneurs,
I’m relatively new (40 hours) to the game, so maybe this is indeed intended behaviour, but I would wager it’s not. So, consider this example I experience in a new game to illustrate:
I have two distinct areas dedicated to do different things. One is mass producing electronics, one is producing steel. Both have iron mines, both have iron consumers. The iron mines are connected via one-way roads with the consumers. This means that iron from the electronics area cannot reach the steel mills, and also that iron from the steel area cannot reach the electronics factories. This is to prevent cross traffic clogging up roads.
The logic I would expect to apply is that iron mines would only try to supply those facilities they can reach. However: in this setup both the steel mills and the electronics factories eventually complain about the lack of iron while there is plenty of iron in storage in the mines and roads are empty. If I then go and delete either of the areas the issue resolves and iron is again supplied as expected to the respective consumers. Using districts to “hardwire” where goes what doesn’t alleviate this issue, and even if it does it shouldn’t be necessary. Using collection and distribution centers seems to work, but it’s really “clunky” to having to use those to ship a resource literally next door.
I suspect that every consumer orders from a random supplier that has the required goods in storage (or the other way around). However this order seems to be issued whether or not the supplier can even reach the consumer. If the supplier cannot reach the consumer, no goods are dispatched, but also no new order is issued for some time, or maybe repeated orders are issued to the same supplier until the supplier has no storage left. Something like that seems to be happening.
Maybe I got this entirely backwards, maybe this is even inteded. But in my opinion this should be “fixed” since this is either an implementation not working or a very unintuitive gameplay mechanic bound to confuse the hell out of people.
Thank you for reading.
Addition Info: I’m not entirely sure how this works as I cannot replicate it myself reliably. Possibly this only applies if the facilities in question used to be able to reach each other, but now cannot anymore?
