Supply chain management suggestions
Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2026 5:31 am
As a player focused on industrial operations, achieving a monopoly on all commodities is one of my primary goals. However, supply chain management can be incredibly frustrating. In the early game, with only a few factories, there aren't many supply and demand relationships to monitor, and it's manageable even at 4x speed. But as the empire grows and the number of factories increases, you have to manage a corresponding number of supply chains, which becomes overwhelming.
Currently, my optimization strategy is to use warehouses as central hubs. I route all identical products into a single warehouse, which then distributes them to all companies requiring that product. Theoretically, this should allow me to shift my focus from monitoring the supply-demand balance of each individual factory to just monitoring the balance of this single warehouse.
However, I've encountered a couple of bugs:
1、Many factories supplying the warehouse start with 100% efficiency in their manufacturing departments, but over time, their maximum efficiency drops to 50%. This isn't due to a lack of demand; on the contrary, the product is in short supply. Yet, even in a state of shortage, the factories' manufacturing departments cap out at 50% efficiency. This forces me to build more factories. Additionally, I've noticed that even when every department in a factory is at level 9, there are still training fees. This might be a clue to the issue.
2、One of the warehouse layouts I use consists of 4 input departments, 1 storage department, and 4 output departments. When a product is in short supply, if I open the warehouse UI, the storage department is full, but only 2 of the 4 output departments are receiving goods from storage. The other output departments get nothing, even though the storage department is properly connected to them. This failure of the output departments to receive goods is causing the supply shortage.
I hope to design a new supply chain management scheme to resolve most of these issues. My idea is to create an Item Management Panel that lists all produced items, allowing me to see at a glance whether the supply and demand for each item is balanced. Furthermore, it would be great if the system could automatically connect factories to retail stores based on supply and demand quantities. For example, one factory could be automatically linked to a few retail stores, and then other factories would be automatically connected to other stores in the same manner. This is just a personal idea of mine.
Fundamentally, the reason we care about supply-demand balance is to check if factory capacity is sufficient, which then prompts me to build new factories. The secondary issue is the connection between factories and retail stores. When a max-level factory's capacity is consistently above 90%, it indicates that the factory can't handle the orders, so I build a new factory and transfer some of the original factory's orders to the new one. It would be even better if the game could alert me when the production capacity for a certain item is insufficient. That way, I wouldn't really need to manually monitor the supply-demand balance at all.
Currently, my optimization strategy is to use warehouses as central hubs. I route all identical products into a single warehouse, which then distributes them to all companies requiring that product. Theoretically, this should allow me to shift my focus from monitoring the supply-demand balance of each individual factory to just monitoring the balance of this single warehouse.
However, I've encountered a couple of bugs:
1、Many factories supplying the warehouse start with 100% efficiency in their manufacturing departments, but over time, their maximum efficiency drops to 50%. This isn't due to a lack of demand; on the contrary, the product is in short supply. Yet, even in a state of shortage, the factories' manufacturing departments cap out at 50% efficiency. This forces me to build more factories. Additionally, I've noticed that even when every department in a factory is at level 9, there are still training fees. This might be a clue to the issue.
2、One of the warehouse layouts I use consists of 4 input departments, 1 storage department, and 4 output departments. When a product is in short supply, if I open the warehouse UI, the storage department is full, but only 2 of the 4 output departments are receiving goods from storage. The other output departments get nothing, even though the storage department is properly connected to them. This failure of the output departments to receive goods is causing the supply shortage.
I hope to design a new supply chain management scheme to resolve most of these issues. My idea is to create an Item Management Panel that lists all produced items, allowing me to see at a glance whether the supply and demand for each item is balanced. Furthermore, it would be great if the system could automatically connect factories to retail stores based on supply and demand quantities. For example, one factory could be automatically linked to a few retail stores, and then other factories would be automatically connected to other stores in the same manner. This is just a personal idea of mine.
Fundamentally, the reason we care about supply-demand balance is to check if factory capacity is sufficient, which then prompts me to build new factories. The secondary issue is the connection between factories and retail stores. When a max-level factory's capacity is consistently above 90%, it indicates that the factory can't handle the orders, so I build a new factory and transfer some of the original factory's orders to the new one. It would be even better if the game could alert me when the production capacity for a certain item is insufficient. That way, I wouldn't really need to manually monitor the supply-demand balance at all.