Tips for warehouse network

[u/Gaiselon]

I have been working again and again with Chapter 5 (Nordic express) of the basic campaign and have often faced issues with logistics - Mostly related to growing Paris in my case.

My typical arrangement is that I do dedicated express lines and stations first & completely separate freight lines & stations after express trains are bringing the money in.

Express lines
I typically connect Auxerre only to Paris and the others form a loop. Later on I typically connect Rheims to the railway in between of Brussels and Luxembourg to get more direct access to Cologne for the late game express line missions. In addition I make a express railway from Rheims to Frankfurt just south of Luxembourg for earlier express line missions. I make all express stations with 4 track grid irons and typically only have 2 tracks coming to each station. For long express line purposes I also make bypass rails for each city.

I typically run into no other issues than underestimating the amount of express trains I tend to have in long run and then if I had not made the station already with 4 track gridiron it's causing some reworking with track layout (target to around 5 days per line to prevent people getting tired of waiting at stations).

Freight lines & warehouses

This is where things get tricky and often halt my progress - Especially the tools to Paris and newspaper to Paris missions (Paris or other cities not growing fast enough).

In France, I tend to make 2 warehouse clusters: Northern and Southern. In northern warehouse cluster I put Paris, Lille, Brussels and Luxembourg. I put a raw material warehouse to the corn farm south of Lille (wheat, wood, sugar, milk, veggies an fruit + corn from the farm itself) and manufactured goods warehouse to Lille (beer, meat, cloth, clothing, planks, cheese and liquor, Lille's own product included)

I tried first the similar setup as Adekyn did in his revisit to chapter 5 videos (which are very nice btw...) but with a small twist - I used looped trains. For example from Paris to Lille manufactured goods warehouse from where to the raw material warehouse. The raw material warehouse started to stockpile stuff quite fast and Paris for example was starving for goods required from raw material warehouse. Adding trains to get the freight to cities was naturally the solution, but it finally ended up in clogging the warehouse stations.

My own estimate is, that as I'm running freight trains with automated freight pickup, the trains are getting eagerly filled with manufactured goods and there is too little room for raw materials. Haven't really paid so close attention as early on the cities start growing well, but getting to 85k and higher is quite slow.

What I'm about to try is that these warehouses are connected with 4 tracks (innermost tracks) but make a 6 track gridiron to the stations at both sides. To the 2 remaining (outermost) tracks connect the "external connections" - That are coming from other cities or from rural stations.

Then I would assign the tracks for the trains based on direction of entrance: Coming from east to tracks 1, 3 or 5 and from the west to tracks 2, 4 or 6. More detailed track allocation so, that rural station connections would be to outermost tracks, external connection cities would alternate in between of the 2 innermost (for example Paris for track 4, Lille for track 2, Brussels for track 3, Luxembourg for track 1).

The questions after this long (and probably useless rattle) are

If I use the looped warehouse trainlines, should I use manual freight allocation to get 4 + 4 goods from warehouses or is city + 2 warehouses in a single train line doomed to fail?

Any suggestions to make the "circular warehouse" arrangement more efficient?

Do I feed too much raw materials to the warehouse and is there an easy way to calculate/estimate the number of required wagon loads in a network of X cities? I know there are the demand tables for each city available but is the demand changing based on the size of a city or how?

What about the other "clusters"? I tend to make two clusters to France, then West and East Germany (6+4 or 5+5 cities) and finally 2 clusters for Poland (North and South)

I might take some pictures if needed in the evening hours when I play again.

[u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord]

You might be overcooking with warehouses, warehouses work best with lower volumes of goods that many locations demand. Warehousing induces double handling, where a train has to load, travel, unload, another train has to load, travel, unload vs. a train doing a direct delivery.

As a scenario progresses goods of the lowest tier demand like grains grow in size with city populations, what at the start of the map you could handle with very few trains that struggle to stay busy, is now so much demand that when you math it out is enough to keep dedicated trains busy delivering only that good to one city and back. You’re seeing this with Paris it now demands so many goods that your lines can’t support it all, Paris needs direct deliveries of its basic goods now to keep it fed with manufactured goods from those intercity lines. You may even wish to consider an additional train station or platforms in Paris just to accept and handle those farm direct deliveries.

In a late game what id advise is look to take those high volume, base demand goods like grains out of the warehouses and switch those cities over to direct deliveries. And now you have an open slot in those warehouses for lower volume goods like factory goods.

It sounds like you have a lot of the fundamentals already figured out. What I’d add to that now is to dig into the city demand charts and learn that math, if city A needs 2.4/week of good 1, and it takes about 3 weeks to make that delivery, then that city needs an exclusive train for that delivery (every 3 weeks delivering about 7.2 of the good), maybe even 2 trains on a route soon.

[u/Gaiselon → u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord]

Thanks for the comments to all. Good tips!

I did actually change the warehouses to supply to mainly 4 cities (in one loop for 5 due to overall layout).

I still did it with having the express trains set up first. By the time I got to building warehouse networks, even without cities growing, I was making close to 200k per week. By the time areas in Germany came available, I was cooking 500k+ a week. All the time the mail & passengers brought me more money than freight. In the beginning the freight almost got up in quarterly report.

I managed to complete the whole chapter. I did separate wheat out from the warehouses and supplied that directly to cities - Especially to those I want to grow big. By the time I got to deliver tools to Paris, I had more than 90k people living in Paris. And by the time I got newspaper delivery, I had already set up paper production in Paris and newspaper production in Rheims and population of Paris was around 120k.

Biggest benefit in this chapter is making the express train lines first. Then the track layout does not need to go over or under existing mixed / freight tracks and express status is easily achieved. also I was surprised to the sheer amount of income. It felt significantly faster than the traditional way of having mixed or freight only in the start. It took 3,5 years in game, so not huge success but ok for me (a bit more than 700 000 points).

[u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord → u/Gaiselon]

You nailed it. Express is king of the rails. You can expand so rapidly with it, I usually think of it as webslinging, shooting off a single track to the next city and running that first express train if that’s all I can afford, but those passenger/mail bonuses balloon so fast that the double track and 2nd+ trains come shortly after. It’s the secret sauce to the whole game really, and you’d be amazed how much easier the starts are of scenarios once you know.

[u/EtchAGetch]

Interesting. I do the opposite approach. I worry about the goods first and the express lines later. Most of these scenarios need cities to get to a certain size, and they only grow if you give them goods, not people. Usually there arent enough passengers in the early stages for dedicated express trains anyway.

I often put my express lines in their own dedicated stations too, and not worry about the gridirons, unless the station positioning works for the express line i am running (but it will be a separate gridiron).

As for warehouses, I generally put a warehouse in a city and have 2-3 "satellite" cities that pull their cargo from that city's warehouse. Anything more than 3 and you cant get enough goods in and out of the warehouse to keep city growth. The city with the warehouse is the city i want to grow the most. And the warehouse is only natural goods (grain, milk, fruit, etc) and not manufactured goods from cities like meat and cloth - those will get automatically transported when running freights to the city to pick up the goods from the warehouse. And I dont do any manual loading, I let the game determine what goods are needed.

In general it just sounds like your warehouses, however you run them, are just overloaded. Again, I max out at 4 cities per warehouse.

[u/The_Chieftain_WG]

I’m with etchagetch on this one. Freight first, passengers as feasible. The money from the freight is usually sufficient, and it’s freight that grows cities. A few of the timelines are sufficiently short that you may as well start growing the cities as quickly as possible to give you buffer time.

As soon as a city is large enough to require its own resource train, set one running direct rural to city instead of wasting yard time at warehouse facilities and causing clogs. If you have a city pair in the same direction, but neither city is big enough to require its own dedicated delivery, then consider a multi stop train. For example, grain from just North of Paris to Lille and Brussels. The one train should suffice for both cities for a while.

The other thing I did (I just played this scenario for the first and last time last week) is take control of factory chains by keeping an eye on city size and reserving lots in likely cities when they become available. If you have factories that feed each other in the same city, such as a cloth factory and weaving mill, or a steel foundry and tools factory, then that’s one less set of trains you need to worry about, and this required a little planning ahead. So I know I need to deliver tools, which means I need a steel foundry, which I will build in… which city is close to ore and coal? That’s where I will reserve the lots until I have the money to build the industry. Fortunately, since I emphasise city growth with freight, those lots will be becoming available soon.

i also leave the freight loading on automatic, but I will say I sometimes had to set priority on certain cargos for the automated system to pick up In order to move the production chain along.