Should InfraSpace have Storage units for Cars/Trucks

Hi, I would think that Storage units for Cars would be nice for the game, like Amazon’s Satisfaction Warehouses. Send cars in advance to stockpile and have the travel time be slower for when the resources are needed at a factory. I think this would be important for making Radiation Cores because of the distance between Iridium and Uranium, and the fact that they are both on mountains, it is very hard to set up the Reinforced Iridium and Enriched Uranium close enough to make Radiation Cores. The factories never seem to have everything they need when they need it. Could you please add this to the game?

The new distribution centers in the final release are supposed to cover exactly this use-case, according to my understanding. Personally I’m not in favor of this feature but I’ll see about that when I actually get to play around with it :grin:

A lot of people are asking for a warehouse feature. I guess most of those never worked in a modern production chain (e.g. a factory) :joy: Any kind of stock or inventory is rightfully considered waste, so if you can get away with it that’s always better. If you translate that to the game, then trying to solve the problem by making the flow of goods along the value chain more smooth is the first thing you should try before crying for warehouses.

On the other hand lessons from real life have limited application in the game. The reason for not wanting inventory is that it ties down your capital which you would rather invest into upgrading your business. But in the game there is no capital. Every good is basically produced for free. In that sense the game is actually too easy; it even let’s you get away with warehouses :wink:

Speaking of real life, we can see what a little cold form the far east did to our supply chains. Wall Street might not like warehouses, but they are exceptionally useful in maintaining a steady, consistent, supply of quality product to the consumer and an expected price point…which in the long run, helps to maintain life long customers for said product.

If, due to no warehousing, your product is unavailable, or you have to scramble to use untested manufactures and/or components to catch up to production levels, which results in an inferior product, and/or more expensive product, your consumer will be forced to seek out a new supplier who is better able to serve their needs, and may never switch back to your product.

Warehousing needs to be used efficiently and intelligently, and to heck with what Wall Street thinks.

I disagree. I have perfect traffic flow right now; barely any traffic lights; trains & trucks flow very smoothly and efficiently. However, my factories producing Yellow Science aren’t requesting enough deliveries of supplies at once. I have hundreds of chemicals stored in buildings across the map, and the Yellow Science factories are flickering on and off because the chemicals can’t be delivered fast enough. Unless buildings will start taking travel time into account when requesting deliveries & their sizes, warehouses for local storage will be an incredible solution to this distance problem.

I guess you mean green science, since those need chemicals and yellow doesn’t?

The problem with green science and chemicals is that the so called stack size of chemicals is only 10. That means neither the Incoming storage not the outgoing storage of any factory can exceed that. And for the incoming storage, all chemicals already traveling count towards this limit. In your situation you can probably observe the amount of stored chemicals plus the amount of chemicals being delivered (explore this number by hovering over chemicals in the incoming storage of green science) always adds up to 10 except right after a new science pack was started. What kills your production is the long delivery time, because the long haul chemicals are blocking the incoming storage without being in the factory.

Would warehouses solve this problem? Yes, if built very close to the green science factory, but it also depends on how they are implemented, stack size wise. Does this invalidate my point? No, and here’s why. In the previous version of InfraSpace almost all stack sizes were 40 and it was much harder to run into this problem. In the new version many stack sizes were drastically reduced and I’m sure that this is on purpose. It gives Items a bit of an expiration date. You can’t deliver stuff all across the map because the goods is just not fresh anymore then. But that may only be the lore rationale I just made up. From a gameplay point of view, the new change makes sense because it forces you to build certain consumers and producers close together. So like I said, instead of using warehouses there are other ways to solve your problem. Build the chemical factories really close to the green science and use districts to manage deliveries.

But why would the developers want to force you to do that? My guess is that the game was simply too easy, especially when playing on medium or low traffic difficulty. It was possible to just build huge clusters of the same factories in one place and connect them with each other and gg. With the current stack sizes you are going to hit limits in a lot of places. I find confirmation in this guess in the stack size of ores, which are all 50 (some maybe even higher). Since the mines sometimes just have to be far away, they must have a high stack size. Everything else, I’ll just say it again, can be optimized :joy: I guess Industries around mines could be too, but take this freebie from the developers.

I need to add a final caveat about stock sizes. There are some cases in the current balancing of the game where the stack size is less than twice the required by a recipe, which will always lead to a lack of goods temporarily and cannot be optimized away. Green science used in yellow science factories and chemicals in uranium enrichment plants for example. But just to make this clear: this oversight by the developers would not be fixed by warehouses. The stack size or the recipe needs to change. Or even better: Incoming goods are removed at the start of production, not the end.


I already said lessons from real life have limited applicant in this game but I want to make a connection here anyway. How would this be solved without the warehouses despised by capitalists? You basically said it already: by considering the transportation time. Although in a real production chain it’s more complicated than that. I’m talking from my experience in the automotive industry here but it probably applies to other Hightech industries as well. What you basically want is a pull system where goods are pulled through the production chain from end to start. Of course it’s not about physically pulling with ropes, it’s about metaphorically pulling with orders.

The point of this system is to only produce what is really needed by the customer, which is exactly what you want to do so you can avoid building stock — and thus as little warehouse capacity as possible… To my knowledge (I may be wrong here) this system was invented by Toyota, not the Wall Street.

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