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Thursday 28 March 2013

How freight works - Understanding industry

Hello there mayors!
I have learnt a lot in the past week. I thought I'd share with you in how freight works. How to make sure freight gets shipped correctly and why freight shipments are important.

Freight is produced by industrial zones. This freight is then shipped to commercial zones and also shipped outside of your city. Freight shipments to commercial zones is not a must, but however, does provide more profit to your industry.

Industry also, is not a must, but is capable of providing a nice income.

Freight shipments make your industry money, no freight shipments = no industrial income. Commercial zones sell the freight you produce.

So better industry = more freight  = more commercial zones wanted = more profit. Simple.


Freight icon graphic by JordanMRichards

So how do you get better industry? Well, industry is based off a few things, I will explain them and how you can improve on them.

Tech level
- Build more schools | libraries and try to increase the amount of sims that enroll.

  • School
  - Max-Tech level: 1 

    • High-School
 - Max-Tech level: 1 


  • Community College
 - Max-Tech level: 2 

  • University
 - Max-Tech level: 3 

How many available places to ship freight
-  You could build an airport and place the cargo terminal extension
- You could build a trade port and place the freight shipping warehouse and ship freight via rail (freight rail terminal) or by ocean (cargo ship dock)
- You can also build a trade depot, but it will only be shipped by road.
- You could zone more commercial
- There are also specialization buildings that freight can be shipped to.

How freight is shipped
- All depends on traffic.
I try to separate my residential traffic from my freight shipments|worker traffic.
Hint: they will always take the shortest route, if that route is highly congested, they will take the next least-congested shortest route.

Density - Workers' Happiness
- Density of industrial zones are based off the workers' happiness. 
To make the industrial workers happy, they want enough places to ship their freight, as explained above.

Here's what your industry workers care about generally in the day:
- They want to get to work on time
- They want to produce and ship the freight they have made to a location
- They want to finish shipping all their freight before the end of the day
- They want to arrive home at least for a few seconds before the next day starts.
 If you accomplish all of these things, your density will shoot up & you won't find many industry building being abandoned.
If your industry is high tech though, they will want skilled workers, if they don't get enough skilled workers, they density can fall and if you leave them moaning for too long, the industry building will get abandoned.

To make it easier to understand, I spent a while making this algorithm illustration. (Click for larger|easier viewing)


Success
- Potential upgrade in the density of the industrial building
- Potential increase to sims' happiness.
- Potential increase in hourly industry profits.

Ok
- Potential decrease of sims' happiness
- Potential decrease of  hourly industry profits
- Things may stay as they were from the day before

Bad
- Definite decrease of sims' happiness
- Potential abandonment of building
- Definite mid|minor decrease in hourly industry profits.




Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, you should visit our forums.

~JMR

13 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Ok, I'm really interested by what you've found, but I'm actually curious now how this might apply to real life commercial freight shipping. It's not often that sims makes me think of the real world...at all.

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  3. Great explanation on how freight industry works. This is also applicable to real life freight services.

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  4. With these sims simulation, players can know how shipping works.

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  7. Thanks for your guide, this useful for shipping.

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