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Topic: Oil Rig workers strategy question (Read 17334 times) previous topic - next topic

Oil Rig workers strategy question

First let me congratulate the developers and the loyal community for this great game!
I play it since 6 years now and again and it's a lot of fun all the time, also I work as a freight forwarder and let me say that this is a decent simulation, to me it's as realistic as a game can get while still being fun  ;D

now my question, which is more about a strategy issue than a technical question:

I've got two oil rigs near one of my seaport, I built a p****enger only game and I'm having trouble bringing the workers there in a efficient manner, here's a screenshot for clarification (simscr01.bmp).



The seaport they're next to is a hub for p****enger that is connected by ferry to another hub seaport.
let's call the seaport the rigs are next to (Hillock Branch Dock) seaport A and the other one (unseen in the screenshot) seaport B.
P****enger level is high enough to allow the biggest ferry available in the 30's, which is an 800 p****enger boat, to get fully loaded on all trips.

The first schedule I tried was to make the big ship stop at the seaport A -> oil rigs -> Seaport B and duplicated backwards: seaport B -> the two oil rigs -> Seaport A.

I found myself having hundreds of workers waiting in Seaport A crowding it in growing numbers as they were brought in. Moreover both the Oil rig stop became crowded as the ship were coming back from Seaport B fully loaded and were never able to took the returning workers.

I tried to reschedule without duplicating backwards: Seaport A -> Oil rigs -> Seaport B -> Seaport A -> Oil rigs... but the situation in seaport A nor the Oil Rigs didn't changed.

I tried to add a smaller ferry (100 p****enger) and use a direct schedule for the big ferry (Seaport A -> Seaport B) and a dedicated line for the Oil Rig workers only but it caused money loss, at that point I applied the Seaport A->Oil rigs->Seaport B->Oil rig->Seaport A schedule to the small ferry and the direct one to the big boat but I was in the same situation as before, the number of workers in Seaport A just kept growing and the Oil rigs were crowded and never served backwards

I can live without the p****enger for the Oil rigs but it's disturbing for me not to provide service to those poor workers!  :P

Any Idea?

here's the savegame http://www.filedropper.com/dada7ok too (dada7_ok), it's still messy and it needs a lot of refinement but It's a work in progress  8)
I believe it's pak64, just installed it on ubuntu without checking anything.

Re: Oil Rig workers strategy question

Reply #1 –
Welcome to the forum!

The best Simutrans solution is to create a line: Seaport A - oilrigs - Seaport B. So you go straight from Seaport B back to Seaport A. This is probably not true to life, but it works best. On the whole line you will need a constant capacity, so you might use a second ship if one of the ports overflows.
Bob Marley: No woman, no cry

Programmer: No user, no bugs


Re: Oil Rig workers strategy question

Reply #2 –
Combujis' solution is good enough, however if you have more number of p****engers directly going between A & B then ****ign the following lines...
If there are more p****engers at B:
Line : A -> B -> oil rigs -> B -> A.
If there are more p****engers at A:
Line : B -> A -> oil rigs -> A -> B.
 
 

Re: Oil Rig workers strategy question

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Combuijs – on
Welcome to the forum!

The best Simutrans solution is to create a line: Seaport A - oilrigs - Seaport B. So you go straight from Seaport B back to Seaport A. This is probably not true to life, but it works best. On the whole line you will need a constant capacity, so you might use a second ship if one of the ports overflows.

Hi Combuijs, my message was too long and not at all that clear, I already tried this solution but it didn't worked, with this schedule both port A and the Oil rig became crowded with workers as the only p****enger that were loaded were those that went from port to port and the poor workers were left in the seaport or loaded in very small number. You're right about capacity  of the lines, see under.

Quote from: TheUniqueTiger – on
Combujis' solution is good enough, however if you have more number of p****engers directly going between A & B then ****ign the following lines...
If there are more p****engers at B:
Line : A -> B -> oil rigs -> B -> A.
If there are more p****engers at A:
Line : B -> A -> oil rigs -> A -> B.

Hi The Unique tiger, same as above, this solution does not appear to solve the problem, doing this way it seems to me I'm leaving a lot of p****enger in the Oil rigs.
I should add that workers for the oil rig live only in city connected to Port A, not in city connected to port B, also port B is very distant from port A so I can't afford empty trips from the Oil Rig to port B.

After a few trial and error I realized few things that were causing the flaw, maybe it will help other players in similar situation

It appears that p****enger wait at station for a direct connection to their destination, they try to avoid unnecessary trip.
I mean workers in seaport A destined to the oil rig does not load on the ship if it's schedule is Port A -> Port B -> Oil Rig and there's another connection that goes directly from Port A -> Oil Rig -> Port B, same happens to the oil rig workers, if they're there waiting to go to port A and a ship comes that goes Port A - Oil Rig - Port B - Oil Rig they wait for the return trip and don't load on the first trip, in my case it happened that on all the return trip from port B the ship were fully loaded so there was no spare space for them to return home; as for above "rule" they didn't loaded on the ship when it went from Port A -> Oil rig -> port B -> Oil Rig -> Port A at their destination, they waited for the return trip and couldn't load because the ships were full, so they crowded the Oil Rigs pointlessy waiting for a ship that always came back full.

The solution was to create two separate lines as such and adding more ships so that they were never fully loaded but worked with some capacity left on all trips.
1) Port A -> Oil Rig -> Port B -> Port A
2) Port A -> Port B -> Oil Rig -> Port A

In some case the schedule 1 ship went from Oil Rig to Port B empty causing money loss but once the crowded situation was solved it didn't happened this much.