Still don't understand Freight charges

[jondonnis]

I have a failing factory making steel and plastic. Neither sells. Now the coal for making the steel has run out, instead of opening another coal mine I'm scrapping the factory. Trying to move all the steel and plastic over to a medium warehouse that is literally across the street. I've lowered the price of the steel & plastic to 1 cent in the factory and made it internal sale only. As the factory is over the road, why is the freight cost in the warehouse so high? Surely we'd use our own trucks to move it just those few yards.

[counting]

The price you set is irrelevant to freight cost, but only related to what type of products they are. A television won't be lighter when you label it 1 cent. It's freight, not insurance.

There is also a minimum freight cost to every product, sort of like "packaging" and "loading/offloading" expenses. Whether you paid for a freight company or not (currently the game doesn't tell you that and assume an abstract expense), even just carrying goods across the street, labors involved still need to eat, get paid, and machines need to refuel or recharge. Goods don't magically float to destination. It's especially expensive when it's semi-product or raw material, since it's quantity is so huge. Imagine moving 10 tons of steel bins even just 100 yards with inventory check, how much will you charge (or estimate expenses) if you are a manager tasked to do the job.

[sofrade]

Do you know of any way to estimate the freight cost per product from a city X to a city Y?

I would very much appreciate your help.

[David]

As shown in the attached screenshot, you can see the freight costs before purchasing the products and choose the product with a reasonable freight cost.

After purchasing the product, you can see the detailed breakdown of the freight costs, as shown on the second screenshot. The costs in the breakdown are calculated based on the distances.

[sofrade]

As shown in the attached screenshot, you can see the freight costs before purchasing the products and choose the product with a reasonable freight cost.

After purchasing the product, you can see the detailed breakdown of the freight costs, as shown on the second screenshot. The costs in the breakdown are calculated based on the distances.

Thank you David for your feedback. I am aware of this, but I was hoping to get the detailed formula about how to calculate freight costs. Your example assumes that there is an already existing producer / manufacturer of this product.

In my case, I am the producer / manufacturer and retailer. I want to pick an industry with 0 competition, and be able to estimate the import costs (from my production site to my points of sales). In other words, before spending money on a factory or a farm, I need to be able to do my calculations, then decide whether I should produce locally in every city or produce in a city and distribute to the rest.

Could you please help me on this?

Thank you

[David]

As shown in the attached screenshot, you can see the freight costs before purchasing the products and choose the product with a reasonable freight cost.

After purchasing the product, you can see the detailed breakdown of the freight costs, as shown on the second screenshot. The costs in the breakdown are calculated based on the distances.

Thank you David for your feedback. I am aware of this, but I was hoping to get the detailed formula about how to calculate freight costs. Your example assumes that there is an already existing producer / manufacturer of this product.

In my case, I am the producer / manufacturer and retailer. I want to pick an industry with 0 competition, and be able to estimate the import costs (from my production site to my points of sales). In other words, before spending money on a factory or a farm, I need to be able to do my calculations, then decide whether I should produce locally in every city or produce in a city and distribute to the rest.

Could you please help me on this?

Thank you

I've asked the dev team and here are the details they provided:

Freight costs for shipping products between cities are calculated from the following components:
1) freight cost between the buyer firm and the nearest seaport (the distance on the city map)
2) freight cost for shipping from one city to another (the distance on the global map)
3) freight cost between the supplier firm and the nearest seaport (the distance on the city map)

freight cost = standard product price after applying inflation * freight index / 100 * distance

You can see CapLab web page on Modding about standard product price:
https://www.capitalismlab.com/mod/advan ... -products/

The exact formula involves programming code in C++ and it is hard to share here as normal users will not understand it, which is the case for most strategy and simulation games. The above explanation is the probably the best that we can explain to a user.

I would advise you to conduct some tests of your own: start a test game, arrange goods to be bought between two places, and assess the freight costs. You should have a decent understanding of what might result in lower or higher freight charges once you've done this a number of times.

[sofrade]

Thank you David for your feedback. I appreciate your help.

I have one question left about distance. I actually ran your formula against an Excel file that I previously made for my imports, and I realized that the way I calculate distance is probably wrong; or the formula is not accurate.


Columns:
Distance: 2D distance calculated using the data in Cities.DBF (via this online calculator)
The columns StdPrice, Freight Index were taken from Product_Types.DBF
The City-To-City Cost is the price displayed in the game's UI
The CapLab formula represents the column I used to run your formula, which seems to unrealistic compared to the game's numbers...

Also...

the formula as you said is:

freight cost = standard product price after applying inflation * freight index / 100 * distance

For Milk, the freight cost is $0.19 (City-To-City Cargo Ship)
=> Distance = Freight Cost / [ StdPrice * (Freight Index / 100) ] => Distance = $0.19 / [ 1 * ( 60 / 100) ] = 0.19 / 0.606 = 0.313 ?

On the other hand, when I calculate the distance between PAris and Seoul based on the data in Cities.DBF (I used the columns GLOBE_LOCX and GLOBE_LOCY of each city), the distance seems to be 167

I think I'm missing something HUGE here... Thank you again

EDIT:

I updated the values because I apparently used old DBT files. Now, I use the ones from MOD-kit.zip, but still, there seems to be something "mysterious"... Actually I came to the conclusion that there is a factor "missing" in the formula I guess. Because of all the calculations I made, when I compare what the formula gives with what the UI displays, there is a ~520 multiplier (represented by the last column in my screenshot).

In other words, the formula is : freight cost = standard product price after applying inflation * freight index / 100 * distance / 520

I don't know where it comes from and what it means or represents but I'd like to have this clarified^^ Thank you