It would be very helpful to allow the player to task wagons with moving materials (e.g. boards, bricks, weapons) from one facility to another. This would add a dimension to logistics management and improve product management.
Example use cases:
Storing raw materials used in heavy industry near remote mining camps improves efficiency of refined material creation, but lowers efficiency of delivering the refined products to your town. Being able to tell wainwrights to transfer such materials to local storage yards would be helpful.
Remote barracks/guard towers that don’t require constant use take significant time to garrison armed troops, as they have to pick up weapons made in town first. Being able to task wainwrights with stocking a local storehouse with garrison weapons would improve mobilization.
Wainwrights already transfer everything that your mines/work-camps generate to the storage. So you should keep your storage near the “industry” and have enough wainwrights to do the work of transferring everything.
Interesting hot take, but uh… In my experience while they try to transport those goods, they are not frequent enough to prevent workers from making long trips to town storage and wasting tremendous amounts of time.
Further, in those instances where a large number of resources are clustered at a remote location, it would be far more efficient for industry to move to the resources and to transport the finished goods
If industry moves close to the mines, raiders will take pleasure plundering what’s there. Iron, gold, they’ll be too happy to oblige.
Industry needs coal too, so unless you really have all resources next to each other it will be difficult. It’s much easier with a central storage for gold, iron, clay, sand and coal and all industry next to it.
Mines can store up to big amounts before someone is forced to walk back to town to empty it.
You need to put the adequate number of wainwrights to deal with the number of mines, temporary shelters, work camps you have. They move slowly, so having 1 for every 2-3 of those should be ok.
In my city of 300 people, I have 3 buildings (6 wainwrights). But all depends on how far the mines/… are.
Clay mines and brick makers, forests, log splitters, kilns to make charcoal, iron and gold mine, foundries and forges, sawmills, all in one place, along w storage to speed transfer between them. My industrial supply chain is banging!
But this is remote, so all those finished products are far away and my builders have to trek out to grab the materials to build. I want to shuttle from those remote storage locations to storage in my town (specifically bricks, boards, stone, and firewood; building materials from a storage yard) with wagons. This seems a reasonable thing for wagons to do.
I’m honestly confused why this isn’t a good idea. Transporting goods (finished or raw) is under the domain of logistics, which is what the wainwrights are supposed to provide. Limiting their functionality to raw materials is, in a word, limiting.
To be clear, I have excess wainwrights, with one facility reporting over 75% idle time. It’s not about capacity, it’s about what services they provide.
I was just explaining how it all works.
The way I explained it your builders wouldn’t have all these problems.
But yes, I agree that it should be possible to have some kind of transfer between storage units.
For instance, in Surviving Mars, you can tell to each storage which quantity of goods it should have (min & max).
People will always try to store some good in the closest storage (ignoring those limits) and some drones will work to satisfy those constraints, moving goods between storage until nothing else can be moved (all constraints satisfied or no storage can take the resource without breaking its constraint).
I must say that I’d like this to be implemented.
Wainwrights spend a lot of time doing nothing. Instructing them to transfer goods from one storage facility to another isn’t out of the question. Like the barn transferring cattle to another barn, only in real game time using wagons, instead of magically appearing.
I totally agree with you. Logistics is an industrial / commercial field in its own. My sand is somewhere, my coal is elsewher, my glass factory on another side, my preservist close to my arborist…
And all ot them have to work smoothly together.
Also i would like to have bulk planks, wood, stone, bricks moved in stockyard temporarily for new project / ne neighborhood…
It would seem wainwrights aren’t the only ones wasting time. I looked at why my foundry wasn’t producing iron. My coal miners are spending 68% of their time transferring goods and 30% stocking shelters. Only 2% productivity!
Here’s the rub, I have a stockyard directly across the road from the coal mine, accepting only coal. This is frustrating to say the least.
For instance, in Surviving Mars, you can tell to each storage which quantity of goods it should have (min & max).
People will always try to store some good in the closest storage (ignoring those limits) and some drones will work to satisfy those constraints, moving goods between storage until nothing else can be moved (all constraints satisfied or no storage can take the resource without breaking its constraint).
Yes! Exactly! I found myself wishing for those little storage depots as well. It would great to have a small supply of parts, far away from your town hall, that can take care of minor routine repairs and maintenance.
This stems largely from a misunderstanding of how the current system is meant to work. Your wainwrights are not programmed to pick up goods from a stockpile, they are programmed to pick up coal directly at the mine and bring it to a central stockpile. Also, you should have a temporary shelter near your mine. The wainwright will stock that, increasing efficiency of the workers there. I usually build a well and a temp. Shelter.
The system works fairly well if you accept that this is how it is supposed to work, and if you have enough wainwrights it means that basically every industry needs to be centralized.
The comment was not about the wainwrights specifically, but about the coal miners who spend 68% of their time transferring goods from the mine to a stockyard, literally across the road. Which they don’t! They decide to walk half way across the map to another stockyard, and the wainwrights do nothing.
In another district, wainwrights pick up sand at two mines and deliver them to a stockyard 50 meters away from the mines. Therefore, the sand miners are over 70% productive. So why wainwrights ignore the coal mines and don’t ignore the sand mines? In my opinion, there is no logic to how the current system works.
Try building more wainwrights and see if it solves the issue? It might be you’ve got not enough wainwrights and their priority is sand above coal for some reason.
I don’t think that’s the problem, maybe you know better, let me know please.
I have a central wagon shop next to my original, central storage yard and I have three outlying districts: sand and clay district, iron ore, gold ore and clay district, and coal district. Each district has it’s own stockyard and wagon shop along with all the other amenities required. This settlement is about 300 people, so I believe this is sufficient transportation for the village at the moment. Oh and I have another area for forge, blacksmith with another storage area and wagon shop. Of course, I don’t think the wainwrights are doing what I intended no matter what limitations I put on stocking what in the stockyards.
I have stated elsewhere on this forum (under bugs) that I believe there is a bug in the display of work actions for all mines. It doesn’t matter where the mines are located, if there is a wagon master, or if there is storage next to it. That graphic display always shows the miners spending an inordinate amount of time delivering produced product. In truth if you watch the individual miners they rarely spend their time doing it. They spend most of their time mining ore.
There’s a lot of idle time with wainwrights. Many wagons travelling to a destination with empty wagon, reaching their destination and leaving with an empty wagon.
This may be, however, I noticed this because my whole production of tools and weapons crashed, so I believe the stats were accurate. The reason my production was working at all was I started mining coal long before building the industry needing it, so even at 2% productivity, I had coal available at the beginning of production.
it means that basically every industry needs to be centralized.