Supply Chain Manager

See what your supply chain needs, before you buy the vehicles

Supply Chain Manager shows you how much cargo every line in a supply chain has to carry each year, and how many vehicles (or wagons) it takes to carry it. It works on lines that already exist, including lines with no vehicles yet, so you can plan a chain, balance it, and only then spend the money.

Getting started

1. Open the line manager and press the small box button in a line's row, next to the locate button. The Supply Chain Manager panel opens beside it.
2. Press Add connected lines, or open an industry and press Supply chain, to pull in the rest of the chain.
3. Read each line's card: the bar shows how much of its cargo the current vehicles carry, and the blocks under it show the vehicles it has and the ones it still needs. Open a card for the details.

The button in the game's mod button area opens the panel with all your lines.

What it does

• Pick a chain. Add lines with the box button in the line manager or the statistics list, or open an industry and press Supply chain to pull in every line connected to it, upstream and downstream. Add connected lines grows a selection the same way.
• See the flow. For each line you get the cargo per year on each leg (which industry or warehouse it comes from and where it goes), based on what the industries produce and consume, including boosts. The figures can follow production (each line carries what its source makes) or demand (a line that feeds a warehouse, a town or an industry carries only what is wanted further down the chain: added up over everything a warehouse serves, and worked back through industries). Demand is the default. An industry only uses so much of a cargo: no line is shown carrying more than the industry at its end can use, and when a warehouse hands its cargo to several lines the share follows what each line's vehicles carry (equal shares for lines that have none yet).
• See the vehicles. For each line: how many vehicles it needs for that cargo, whether it is covered, how many it is short, and a rough cost to cover it. A line with clearly more vehicles than it needs is flagged, so you can spot the ones to trim. Vehicle options are compared on capacity, speed, price and loading speed, including the faster loading at industry stations and loading bays that match the cargo.
• Trains. Suggests locomotive and wagon combinations that fit the platform, with the fewest trains first, then the fewest cars, and shows how long each train is. For a train that is too small it tells you how many wagons to add rather than buy a whole second train, and when a longer platform would let one train do the job, it says how long. Cargo trams get the same locomotive-and-wagon suggestions, and cargo a line loads at several stops is added up.
• Upgrade hints. If a vehicle on sale would do the same job with clearly fewer vehicles than the one a road, tram, ship or air line uses now, the line's card says so (not for trains yet).
• Rail suggestion. If a road line needs a crowd of vehicles for its length, you are pointed to rail.
• Passenger lines. Sized by how much the line actually carries today, or by the service interval for lines with no vehicles.
• Towns and happiness. When a line delivers to a town, the town is named (click it to open it) and the card warns if deliveries are arriving late. For passenger lines and cargo that spoils, an opened card shows how happy the people are and how good the cargo is, waiting at each stop and on board, and says whether the problem is on board or at a stop. Towns the chain delivers to also appear next to the industries, with what each one asks for, what it receives from everybody and what your lines deliver. A line's figure for a town is what the buildings around its stop ask for, and the card says when the whole town asks for more.
• Switch cargo off. Turn off cargo a line does not really carry, and the numbers follow.
• Overview. The All lines tab lists every line you own, the ones that need attention first. It works on big saves too: lines are calculated in the background and shown 30 at a time, with a button for more (tested with more than 1,700 lines). A search box finds lines by name (type a few characters, or several words that must all be in the name), and the + button on a card adds the line to the selection.
• Settings. A card at the top of the panel (closed until you open it, with your choices shown on its title) holds the Suggestion priority, which ranks the vehicle suggestions by the fewest vehicles (the default), the lowest price, the lowest running costs, the fastest or the lowest pollution, and Cargo figures based on, production or demand (the default). They are saved with your savegame.
• Save chains. Name a selection and keep it with your savegame. Lines in a saved chain get a small chain badge on their colour circle, in the line manager, the statistics list and other windows. Click it to open the chain.
• Controller. On a controller the window takes the focus when it opens, the stick and d-pad move around it, the shoulder buttons switch between All lines and Selected, and the back button (O on a PlayStation controller) closes it. Selected lines are moved with up and down buttons instead of dragging. There is also an entry for it in the radial quick menu.
• Reorder and tidy. Drag lines in the selection to put them in the order you like, or take them out.
• Jump around. Click an industry, warehouse or station name in the panel to open it and move the camera there. A line name opens that line in the line manager.

Good to know

• The numbers are estimates. Trip times are worked out from the route, speed limits, loading times and the vehicle, and each line shows how much to trust them. For lines that already have vehicles, the panel also shows the game's own measured round trip next to its estimate.
• On a 34-line test save, road, rail and water estimates averaged within about 5% of the game's own measured round trip, with individual lines up to about 25% off. Aircraft are only calibrated on a single line, so treat those as a rough guide. Each line shows how far to trust its estimate.
• New passenger lines are sized by service interval only: the mod does not predict how many people will use a brand new line. Passenger train lines are not sized yet.
• A line counts as covered when its vehicles carry at least 95% of the cargo, because the estimates are not more exact than that, so you are not asked for a whole extra vehicle to cover a small shortfall.
• The rail suggestion compares vehicles only. It does not include the cost of track.
• Only your own lines are shown.

Compatibility

• The mod does not change gameplay and can be added to, or removed from, an existing savegame at any time. Removing it only loses your saved chains.
• It replaces two small parts of the game's interface (the locate button, which gains an extra button, and the line colour circle, which gains the chain badge), so another mod that replaces the same widgets may clash with it.
• Languages. English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and Japanese. The mod follows the game's language setting. The translations are first drafts, so if a wording reads oddly, tell me the language and the text and I will fix it.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome. If something looks wrong, please include a screenshot and the line it concerns.