Issue with oil supply and railways

[Gregorovitch]

As i get better at the game, I've got a couple of somewhat related problems that are beginning to annoy me as they are causing a lot of delays, distractions and reloads.

First is the oil supply. The wells seem to drain so fast there is always a problem with getting more oil. What makes it worse is that the effort needed to get more, almost always involving railway transport, takes so long to sort out that by the time I've sorted out more oil the last lot has run out. I am almost always exasperatingly short of oil and it seems to take far too long to hook up new supplies all the time (or the oil wells run out too fast depending on the way you look at it).

A second related problem is the "No Path" message on trains. After the first two train lines or so (and oil lines are always after the first few for me) virtually every line gets the "No Path" message. It takes anything up to an hour or two to figure out what's wrong because there is no indication where the problem is. It's like a compiler telling you there is an array out of bounds exception crash but not telling you the file and line number it occurred on. I know about the obvious one of forgetting to add the straight bits to the curves, but there are always others that are incredibly difficult to debug, for me anyways.

Almost every time I have to try to solve this oil shortage problem my base falls to pieces or gets invaded because of the exasperating length 0of time it takes to fix it.

What is the secret of dealing with this, especially the "No Path" problem.

[DaveMcW]

Forget barrels and trains, use underground pipes.

[Gandalf]

Oil supply: Most of the time oil works fine for me. You can use speed modules to get a little more oil out of the drained sources, maybe that'll help. Other then that, if oil always turns into an issue for you, maybe you should just change your map creation settings next time you start a new game.

Trains: If you're gonna do a multi-train setup you have to do it properly from the start. Usually it's much easier to have trains only go in one direction on any track, so use two tracks for going back and forth. There's a let's player called Bentham on youtube (youtube.com/user/MangledPork) who does large train networks, maybe you can find some inspiration there.

[Koub]

The question is also : do you use some of your oil to make solid fuel for a hundreds of steam engines and for hundreds of steel furnaces ? Or does all your oil production go into petroleum gas via advanced oil refining and heavy/light oil cracking, all that powered by hardcore solar panel farms ?

[Gregorovitch]

It all goes into gas really, don't make any solid fuel. I use coal for trains. I do 20 steam engines to start then solar all the way.

I tried doing the remote oil again with pipes and it's about 10 times easier and 10 times faster. i did not realise you could pipe oil that distance, i thought it was made so you had to use trains and barrels to get remote oil.

I still wish they would print why a train has no path on the screen though.

[Xuhybrid]

No path is one of two things. Missing track, or incorrect rail signals.

[Gregorovitch]

No path is one of two things. Missing track, or incorrect rail signals.

I kind of got that - the question is which is it and where is it? It would help some if it told you "Signal error" or "Track error" or "Signal and track error(s)" etc. It would help even more if when the train was ordered to commence the route it first advanced to the point of the first signal error or track fault, stopped, and then said "Signal error" or "track error" instead of obstinately sitting there saying "Path error - naah nah nah naaaah nah!". Or if it's easier just highlight the good part of the route in green and the bad in red or something in map mode.

[Gandalf]

I took the liberty of opening a suggestion thread based on your description. Feel free to add more to it.

[ssilk]

I never make solid oil. You need really rich oil-fields to waste oil for burning.

[SHiRKiT]

Solid fuel seems fine on depleted oil fields. They produce more energy than they consume =]