Not so much for factories, but it would be awesome if residences, for each need, kept track of how long the average delivery has taken (rolling average over the last X game ticks, maybe?) and ordered accordingly.
For example, a house has 12/12 survival food and is eating 1.2 per minute with zero food in transit. If the average delivery time over the last X game ticks is 3 minutes, it would make sense to order two food right now from any available producer, instead of waiting until the food runs down to 11.
The reason I suggest this is that, as a noob, I did have some rather long paths from producer to residence at first and I was never able to sustain high enough levels of some resources to upgrade, or in the worst cases even to keep people from moving out/downgrading. Got out a stopwatch and eventually realized that (average transit time X consumption) was so large that most or all of the residences’ resources were in transit.
I’m sure all the vets out there are nodding and smiling at my noobness, but if the members of the residence were just a wee bit smarter about ordering they’d be a lot easier to keep happy.
The problem with this system is that average time can vary a lot. If the average is 3 minutes but some of them only take half a minute then if they order from such a food source, it will just go to waste. I’m afraid your wish won’t be fulfilled by the devs.
And to be honest I think it shouldn’t. There is a solution to your problem by changing your city. Your change is making the game easier but for what benefit? Most of the mods you can find in the steam workshop are the same: simply make the game easier to play. No need to use your brain to solve the problems the game throws at you. Just click to win. Maybe this is in vogue with video games these days? Kind of reminds me of this video What if Quake was done today
To a degree this is what the collection and distribution centres are there for. According to a reddit post max habitats only need 6 items that can’t be delivered by pipes and aren’t radius dependent, so you only need 6 distribution centres able to cover your whole city in their radius and you can have your industry running at full speed delivering to the outskirts of your city where the goods will wait close by until needed.
So I did change my city, and have solved the problem to my satisfaction.
Despite what I said, my suggestion was not just about making the game easier - I like difficulty and jumped in at Hard/Hard. But to me this particular problem adds an artificial degree of difficulty because your residents are rather unrealistically dense; it doesn’t take a lot of functional brain power to say “hmm if we eat food at a certain rate and it takes a while for it to get here, maybe we should order ahead of time so we don’t starve”.
As to wasted resources, make the limit a soft cap instead of hard, or only order when you have room for 1 or 2 extra. In the long haul I bet you a nickel that order times are fairly consistent.
At any rate, I’m happy with the game as it is and will work around whatever mechanics I run into whether they are “realistic” or not. The game has lots of more interesting problems to solve and I am enjoying solving them.
For small cities, perhaps. For larger cities there are two problems:
A single distribution center cannot push enough items. My half-finished city of 180 residences needs 540 Good Meals per minute, or 9 per second. A single distribution center cannot push this many goods; you’ll run into issues almost immediately with intersections and traffic snarls.
So you try to use multiple distribution centers, but then
2. overlapping areas from different distribution centers are problematic; it doesn’t matter whether or not a target is pathable before it can be ‘claimed’ by a center, and they won’t share, and they don’t care about districts.
So the solution here is to spread your city out, but then it isn’t one big city, it is several small ones. Which is fine if that’s what you want.
I would use distribution centers to supply residences in a heartbeat if they obeyed district limitations, OR if they didn’t ‘claim’ targets they couldn’t path to. But either of those things might open up a new set of problems, so I’m not really expecting anything here. Distribution centers are fantastic for industry, but not supplying residences. At least not in any way I’ve figured out yet; I’m sure someone out there has built a road network with overlapping distribution centers that does not functionally care who delivers where and works equally well regardless of what happens during game load. But that person is not me.
That person is probably also not playing on hard/hard. kudos for that. Did you try return trips, too? That’s for the really self-loathing city planners.
I did. I normally jump into a game at the hardest level, not so much for the pure masochism of it but I figure I’m eventually going to be playing on the hardest level anyway, may as well get used to it from the get-go so I learn “good” habits while I’m starting out.
Where return trips really started making me sweat were inside cities – I had these lovely one-way arteries all planned out and then I noticed that people wanted to make return trips to parks, entertainment, and schools. Whoops.
p.s. I did get a laugh out of the Quake video. Didn’t Doom actually chastise people for playing on the easier difficulty levels? Been a long time, but ISTR something like that.
