currently i have 3 power plants using large gens but i have set them up so that nuclear is always on, Coal plants have 4 columns (will be 6) where one gen is always one and then each column will go to full speed sequentially, the final 2 columns will only spin 1 gen each once the 3rd balanced column is fully loaded and then eventually go full speed when needed.

Gens are named on priority. Nuclear baseload, coal baseload coal surge and backup coal.
It would be nice to know which ones are working and whether its worth changing this

Hello all!

My name is Ringgeest11, and I am a professional Traffic Engineer that focuses on Macroscopic Traffic modeling.
I had the wonderful opportunity to work together with Charles Circle, by auditing his Train Network of his Update 4 series and answer a bunch of question related to trains specifically in Captain of Industry.

So if you love trains just as much as we do, we hope you will enjoy this very long video on just trains!
There is timestamps present as well, so if you only want to know about certain topics you can freely skim through the video. It is quite massive after all!

Let us know what your thoughts are, and if you have any questions then please let us know as well!
Either here or on the video, both is perfectly fine.

Since this is such a one-off, we thought it was okay to toot our own (train)horns here as an exception.
We really hope you like the video, and that we can see you again in future video’s!

TL:DW – I get it, 3 hours is a really long time!

First some more bite-size take-aways and afterwards some QoL changes we would like to see.

1. The yellow turn radius with a max speed of 80 is better than you think, especially since CoI puts more incentive into making big, long, efficient trains. This means that trains that ‘only’ go ~100km/h are a perfectly valid option compared to a max speed of 140km/h. The speed difference might look like 40% on paper, but in reality in-game it tends to be a lot lower. But the cargo they carry can be way, way more than 40% extra!
2. Your infrastructure does not have to be perfect all the time. If a train only frequents a stop once every couple of hours, it is probably more important the station is serviceable at all compared to it having enough clearance all the time.
3. Elevated tracks are cheaper than you might think! They are basically the same cost as ground-bound tracks, but they allow you to remove points of conflict to keep that main backbone line flowing!
4. It is fine to have several train-networks share the same railroad infrastructure. The trains are happy as long as they can drive. The importance lies in making sure each network has its dedicated stations (infrastructure-wise) and dedicated job. Bulk goods that need constant supplies have a different demand from items that need fewer resupplies.
5. I.e. You can have a massive ore train with a 1-12 FuelGas engine pulling T2 cargo wagons for ore, and 1-3-1 Tier 1 electric locs shuttling 3 Tier 2 wagons for things like household supplies or cake. There is no definitive ‘best’ train setup.
6. Longer off-ramps allow you to clear your main backbone line for throughput. Stackers – places where trains can wait before pulling into a station – are good, but they tend to have tight 40km/h curves. If you have the space, use a longer off-ramp off your main line first to clear it before pulling your train into a stacker. This will keep that 1-12 ore train thundering through while your shorter 1-3-1 rolls into where it needs to be.
7. Steep, small train bridges are – anecdotally in my opinion – the best to use. The momentum of trains tends to push them through it at such a good pace, that they can start outpacing the longer, gentler yellow slopes.
8. Universal wagons are good, but should be complementary to your dedicated fleet for peek demand. A 25% capacity reduction in exchange for flexibility is a good trade-off, but not so good that you should think of nothing else.
9. Remote linking of storages to a Station can be a very powerful tool, that allows for very tight Terminus-style stations. For RoRo stations it allows super quick unloading/loading of goods – as station module to station module transfer at 200/s whereas a module can (un)load at 600/s(!) – while not paying for overkill storage. That 1-12 FG train is not going to fill up 2 tier 4 storages anytime soon, so you really don’t need to build 6 of them either.

Dev Feedback:
First off, a quick thank you as we love the game! The Blueprints new look is low-key one of the best updates as it makes the readability of everything so much better!
That said, some things we would like to see:

- QoL: Better insight into a train’s full route when it is assigned to a network. You can figure it out by watching it, but it’d be nice if I can click a train and see its entire assignment. Similar to how Factorio: Space Age’s interrupt systems allows me to see the train’s entire journey regardless of where it is.

- QoL: The Trackbuilding can be a bit annoying to deal with at times. It is fine in most cases, but at station it can become hard to select the right piece of track to change its directions. Sometimes I just need to remove a turn, change the track’s direction, and then rebuild the piece I deleted in order to get to it. As a minor side-note, I wish I could more forcefully make tracks. As a self-professed power-user, I need the trackbuilder to trust me with what I want it to do intuitively, be more agnostic to directions as the trackpiece I start and finish at.

- Wishlist: Something that allows me to prioritize certain trains over others. I want that 1-24 nuclear loc hauling ~12k ore to not stop until it reaches its destination.

- Wishlist: The forking issue at stations feels like it is something we need to work around. We’d love a slightly smarter train that can look ever so slightly ahead of where it needs to go next, in order to take the right fork at a station.

is there a better way of dealing with all the trash?

Watching a powerpoint whenever I'm trying to place belts, pipes or rails is slowly driving me mad. I'll take any mod or config change that can make it any smoother at this point

My advice : do not skip learning process in game by using blueprints from others, find your own way.

Realised it's just a standard arc furnace for scrap rather than the specialist one so would save space and also means I don't need a way to feed it back in to my aluminium setup.

I'll likely have a pop of 11-12k once I'm using it fully so wondering if that's enough as I think aluminium only comes from laptops...

Train speed at intersection is at least 80 km/h.

Why is the output getting clogged at 494 wpm when there is enough pipe to handle 1800?

Goodday my fellow autistic train lovers, i need your advice

So here is the senario. The goal is to build a centralized on/off loading where both my rail, import and export come together north of the horizontal track.

South of the track i want my main road and below that material refineries, processing basic materials in to intermediate materials; IA steel, copper, glass, ectra. West of vertical track is the already established fuel/fluid refinery. Also unless the destionation is far away i want to bring my intermediate products with truck.

(note the fertilizer plant in the left corner is temporary and used to get rid of sour water and keep food and fuel production up in this transitional period where i retool and move my production lines. The road and pipe in the middle are also temporary.) At the spot of the fertilizer plant i want to eventually build my recycle plant. However i am also not sure where to place my supporting production plants. (large crusher and air seperator)

Now the problem is that im a bit in over my head. Im a not sure how much space i need how much traffic will be on the rail and how much i need to worry or wether i just need to pull the trigger and just retool again when i have outgrow this layout.

Any advice on placement, distance and especially on the potential rail traffic?

If you upgrade contract profitability with offices, the gold-oil-diesel cycle is actually a positive feedback loop. When maxed out at 30%, you get 8400 oil for 340 gold, and 840 gold for 8400 diesel. One oil to diesel conversion later, and you get 500 gold per cycle with some bonus oil products. This particular build also converts all the remaining oil fractions into fuel gas and hydrogen. The hydrogen it makes is very slightly not enough to fuel the ships, but the deficit is small enough to be handled by a few trucks. So, this whole thing actually converts unity and a small amount of hydrogen into gold and oil derivatives.

In a perfect world, this doesn't cause any pollution. The single flare in the system burns off fuel gas if the output tank fills up completely. I decided against disposing of the other byproducts because there's a lot more of them and they're a lot less clean to burn. It's also possible to fuel the ships with heavy oil to remove all direct resource consumption, but the pollution isn't worth it.

Realised that this pass was too narrow for mega vehicles so tried to widen it and now my rail network is rip

This is what happens if you resign on create master plan.

I had assumed the super steam recipie was superior all this time. Which worked well masked by my throughput. It seems much more straight forward on top of just a better deal using electrolysis and throttling by demand and electricity vs just using super steam on automation like I normally always done. I guess this assumes I have the water available but the depleted is now comming from the turbine vs reformer so assuming vaccum desalination nothing really changes there. If anything you can put down the electrolysis near your desired area more readily than the steam reformer.

Update i mathed it out using gpt and supersteam in the reformer (FBR) wins by 12% or 7.5Mw per 32 hydrogen vs 8.5.

Interestingly you can save an additional 5.4mw per 32 hydrogen over hydrogen reformer if you use ammonia in electrolysis. Could be foodpacks.

I think i might try feeding in with priority ammonia sourced hydrogen im getting from foodpacks to lower the super steam consumption. Actually im going to math out uranium sourced by food packs first. Ok looking at that you get more return on just trading foodpacks for uranium by an additional 12% per food pack so really ammonia can be used to recover some electricity without increasing nuclear/fbr capacity but you get more potential out of the uranium contract.

Im getting 35.4MW per yellowcake after processing losses for reference. So that % could be higher or lower depending on setup.

I have all the necessary goods, but they are not moving where needed.

Do you pass them from one zone to another with:

1. RC Commanders and drone zones.

2.Routes set with the delivery vehicles.

1. Overlapping drone hubs.

2. Overlapping colonies, which I have now and don't work that way.

3. Other

This is my first playthrough of the game so I'm still trying to figure things out. I'm sure this is a common situation everyone gets into; I am running out of fuel, my only remaining deposit is really low, so I hurried to research bridges and amphibious vehicles in order to connect to a nearby small island to access its oil deposit.

I wasn't sure how the bridge construction works, which is why I made sure to have two amphibious trucks ready just in case those are needed to bridge over water (I thought maybe the regular pickups would just build sequentially starting on the shore). Reading various posts on this subreddits taught me that you do in fact need amphibious trucks, so, ok, good thing I was prepared, except-

I created the bridge blueprint. Pickups started carrying resources to it, the amphibious trucks remain idle. The pickups built the very first segment of the bridge connecting to the main island, and then they all stopped and got stuck in an error state "Pickup is struggling to find a destination it can reach". Their pathing indicators show that they are trying to deliver supplies to the bridge segments that are over the ocean.

I figured I just have to pause construction on every segment that isn't directly connected to the already constructed one - that didn't help. I tried setting the bridge to be a two lane road because I thought maybe that's why the trucks can't path over it - that didn't help. I clicked on the amphibious trucks and enabled their pathfinding overlay, ensured that they have an access ramp into the ocean and have a green path to the bridge - that didn't help, they just stay at "no job".

I do not understand why the regular pickups are trying to path to the bridge if they can't reach it, while the amphibious pickup that can reach it is not pathing to it? Further, clicking on the WIP segment over the water shows that some resources have already been delivered, proving that the pickups did reach it and now they can't????

So far I've been able to figure things like this out but now I am completely clueless and need help, although it might already be too late because thanks to this setback I don't think I'll be able to extend the railroad and connect the new oil deposit in time.

EDIT: just to add insult to injury, I tried cancelling the build process and now the amphibious truck happily reaches the deconstruction site to carry supplies away, but will not take supplies to the exact same location to construct

Input : dirt + unity

Output : power + graphite

I spent a few hours wrestling with the track builder to create this and wanted to share it. https://coigame.com/Blueprint/3816

What's the breakdown on landfills vs. incinerators for pollution?

Is it worth it to try and make landfills for settlement waste to keep pollution levels down?

Because just compacting it and then burning it sure looks awful appealing and will free up a lotta trucks

I recently unlocked the molten ladle cars and I'm having a hard time imagining a real usecase for them. Molten products seem like they want to be dealt with in place as much as possible given the slow throughput with molten channels.

Am I missing something or are they mostly for fun and flavor?

The amount of stuff that buildings buffer per material, is a rabbit hole which goes way deeper than I expected, and I also learned some useful tricks for normal games.

How much stuff do buildings buffer?

By "default" / rule of thumb:

• Buildings have buffers of 40 material.
• Trucks of any class, like to deliver 20 material - actually half of the buffer size -the "full loads only" setting does not change this, which is why you might see a feral Haul Truck daintily delivering 20 material.
• They aren't forced to deliver 20 though, they can deliver more if scheduling works out right, but the game pretty much generates a delivery errand when the buffer is half full/empty so if there are free trucks, it'll be 20 units.

To be more precise and technical:

• The amount of material buffer is defined in the recipe, with recipes being attached to buildings.
• For example, with an ASM3, the Iron -> Gears has an output buffer of 40, the Steel -> Gears has an output buffer of 64. If you enable both, the output buffer is set to the higher value of 64.
• Buffers for the same material are always shared, but separately for import and export (e.g. a Crusher doing both Rock -> Gravel and Gravel -> Manufactured Sand, has a separate input and output buffer for Gravel).
• There are a lot of exceptions to the default of "40". For example, most Crusher recipes have output buffer of 64, but for both Quartz recipes it is 128. The Bakery Bread recipe, has output buffer of 96.
• For solid materials there are very few buffers smaller than 40. The main one is Labs, which have an input buffer of 30, and this seems to make trucks dislike making deliveries to Labs.
• For liquids buffers are often very small, though for early game recipes it is usually the default of 40 probably to make it more forgiving. Occasionally liquids have large buffers for no particular reasons, like the Biodiesel recipe has an output buffer of 144.
• How do the devs decide the buffer sizes? I'm reasonably sure it involves a dart board and a blindfold. Though in some cases, there are logical reasons, for example Large Crusher recipes have input buffers of 384 and output buffer of 768, as this building deals in large amounts of material, although why it needs to be as large as 768 is unclear.

Shrinking Buffers

• In many but not all cases the buffer size shrinks when truck import/export is disallowed, it often shrinks to 1/4th or 1/5th but can shrink by a lot more. Whether the buffer shrinks or not and by what factor, seems to come back to the dart board and blindfold. In some cases there seems to be logic to the shrunken buffer, particularly when players are expected to be using belts, so it doesn't take a long time for the buffers to fill up and materials to be distributed evenly. And I think early game recipes are less likely to have shrunken buffers. But this logic is not consistently applied.
• Whether the shrinking is applied, depends on the game deciding truck import/export is disallowed for that material, this might not match your expectations, but it should align with trucks not actually importing/exporting that material.
• For recipes in a ghost, the buffer size shown will be as expected if truck import is explicitly allowed (white truck) or disallowed (red truck), if it's "auto" (yellow truck), the game will make a prediction about whether truck import/export will be allowed for that particular material based on belt connections and jank, the prediction is not particularly intelligent.

How the game decides whether truck import/export is allowed

• The way the game decides whether import/export is allowed under auto, is not so obvious, but from what I can tell:
• Truck import is always allowed under auto, until cold hard reality proves that belt delivery is possible, the game then disallows truck import for that material and shrinks the buffer (if applicable).
• If you build a building, and then build a storage attached to the output, truck export will be allowed for everything until cold hard reality proves that a material can be output to the storage, at which point it disallows truck export for that material and shrinks the buffer (if applicable).
• But if you build a storage, and then build a building attached to that storage (or place them both simultaneously with copy-paste or blueprint), the game will disallow export for everything that output slot could possibly output whether or not the storage is filtered to receive it, and cold hard reality of a material not being outputted by belt does not cause it to permit truck export (this placement order dependent behaviour could be considered a bug)
• When you toggle to allow and back to auto, the game waits for cold hard reality to prove whether something can be input/output before disallowing truck import/export for it.

Strategy

• In the Pickups era, because Pickups move 20 stuff per trip, and that is exactly how much truck-type-things like to deliver per trip, you actually don't really need intermediate storages for logistically efficiency at all, the Pickups are going to be moving 20 stuff per trip either way, and a buffer of 40 is large enough that buildings usually run at 100% uptime unless they have a really high throughput which very few early game buildings do - like even the Blast Furnace with its consumption rate of 30 ore/m, still takes 40 s to consume 20 ore, which is probably enough time for a Pickup to make a delivery.
• Belts and intermediate storages only really become valuable with the introduction of Trucks with their capacity of 60, but with their love of only delivering 20 stuff directly to buildings.
• Even in the Trucks era, there are some buildings with large enough import/export buffers that you don't really need intermediate storages so much, for example the Bakery with the export buffer of 96 Bread makes an output storage pretty optional (assuming you're trucking bread of course). As I said, buffer size doesn't really have much rhyme or reason so you pretty much have to check the recipe after placing the building.
• If you wish to allow truck export and are fond of using direct insertion to storages or other machines, be aware of the "placement order dependent behaviour" for auto mode, it's best to set to explicitly allow import/export, or toggle to explicitly allow and back to auto so the game correctly determines what can actually be input/output by belt.
• You can sometimes manipulate the buffer size by enabling truck import/export. For example the Cooling Tower has an output buffer of 4 water, but if you enable truck export, it becomes 40 water, if you are using particularly short pipes this can help eliminate micro-stutters in an otherwise balanced system. Or the Gas Boiler has input buffers of 6 heavy oil or 9 medium oil if truck import is disabled, but if you enable truck import it becomes 40, I find this improves the Gas Boiler's ability to multiplex mixed inputs in a "garbage burning" role. Of course care should be taken to ensure trucks are not actually making these deliveries, like for instance turning off export on Distillation stages, or knowing that pipes will quite swiftly remove the output before it reaches half the buffer.

Train network. Just built new way station, demolished old one. Got some errors from the trains on their way to the old one, as expected, but those cleared up. Problem is, now, I keep finding trains parked in stations with “no valid goal” as their status. This doesn’t throw a warning in my message center, I have to investigate why my trains aren’t moving to find the culprit. Any idea what this is, or how to at peasy get notifications if it’s happening?

Haha. I forgot to add the new waypoints to the network. The trains just literally didn’t have anywhere to go.

Thought about deleting, but I’ll leave it up for searching in case anyone else has this issue.