Playing more Rise of Industry. Today's themes are warehouse troubles and success. Warehouses are odd structures in the game. They have a one way entrance and a one way exit both coming off the building on two sides at a 90 degree angle. And when you slap one down it automatically starts routing all the production from other nearby buildings in it's radius to itself and dispatching those goods to buildings that need them. Potentially convenient, but used improperly this might just end up doubling the amount of trucks and total distance of travel. Along with building upkeep they can end up doing more harm than good until you get the hang of them.

So I sat down for a bit to deliberately play around with them on a freeplay map. Built myself a production hub around one with a rail terminal linking to another at the end of a city to supply it. Build up as much production as I could around it and played with the roads leading to it. Deliberately overloading the roads, redesigning them. Once I got the one way streets lined up properly it was humming along nicely. I then put in a railway cloverleaf between the two terminals and began linking in more production off splinter lines.

And then the warehouse in town filled up and the trucks leaving it couldn't get to the stores fast enough. And you can't change the roads within settlements. For a time I was debating just turning off the traffic simulation. After a moment of despair I found out that the trucks were carrying a single unit of goods so I went to toggle the manual deliveries and set the trucks to only leave when full. The trucks continued to leave the warehouse with only a single unit of goods.

More despair. Then I found out that the automatic settings on the warehouse were to blame. Either cancelling the automatic exports or going into the options menu to change some of the settings will fix this. Now my trucks only leave full, instantly fixes all the traffic problems since the upgraded semi trucks an hold 3 units of cargo. The semi's are more expensive to dispatch but since you need less of them you end up spending less. I was just about to load one of my other saves after a bit more playing around at optimizations then the game hit me with a new warning. A town was shrinking due to pollution.

I was surprised to learn traffic causes pollution. In the game. Turns out all the truck traffic from the warehouses going to the shops in towns either had or was now due to the change from medium sized cargo flatbeds to semis making a pair of small areas near the warehouse and shop polluted. Turns out smog is easy to fix though. Tougher emissions standards on new vehicles. Pfft nah. Just one relatively cheap building supplied with some water.

So with all fires put out it was time to load up my island map and see if I could put what I learned to turn it all around. And got hit with a 1 million dollar fine from a random event. Oops. Despite the setback I researched various techs to make my operations more efficient. It was still slow going. Boats in the game aren't as cost effective as trains. Tech and rebuilding costs allot of money that I already didn't have much of. But eventually things turned around. The town grew, I paid to build it a new shop asking for higher tier goods. I saved and built a second production hub making orange juice and apple juice, floated it down the river, and made bank. One factory producing two units a month quickly afforded me enough cash to build 7 more. Started the game with a 10 million dollar loan, frequently had to shut off research to avoid bankruptcy hovering around 100K. Now I'm loan free and at 17 million cash on hand ready to expand just about anywhere or any fashion I can imagine.