It's just mildly annoying in the early game, specially because the map doesn't show you anything about infrastructure when you're trying to build railways, and you have to keep doing the math on how much you'll need every time you try to queue a bunch of buildings.
But I'd say late game they are simply broken.
Once states start running out of manpower lack of infrastructures create death spirals, and they tend to happen everywhere as factories run out of workers, start increasing wages, pulling people from railroads, which decreases infrastructures, makes everything unprofitable and every business collapses, if you don't notice it's happening it's often too late to fix the issue.
The alternative is subsidies, but then you usually end up paying for a bunch of unproductive railways you could turn into profitable ones, because you have 100 states to manage and you can't guess which ones really are unproductive unless you start looking one by one every few years.
And then there are the incentives, if they don't look unproductive AI tends to build them sometimes, making the problem even worse.
Ports also suffer from this, it seems late game their only purpose is being sold to canal companies so they can lose their productivity bonus.
Are there plans to address this? The mechanic works in theory, but it's a mess in practice, maybe transportation could increase infrastructure? Maybe if the trade center bought it to create more infrastrcuture and use it as needed? Not sure what could be done, but it's a pain to try to make them profitable by building a bunch of resource buildings with rail transportation PM only to watch the eternal icons of of "missing input goods" in every state until the end of the game, and still facing problems because of this.
Oh, also, while it's not the same, energy plants have a similar vibe, they are really annoying to build, construction filters/info is very lacking, and the private sector doesn't seem to be able to handle either very well.
But I'd say late game they are simply broken.
Once states start running out of manpower lack of infrastructures create death spirals, and they tend to happen everywhere as factories run out of workers, start increasing wages, pulling people from railroads, which decreases infrastructures, makes everything unprofitable and every business collapses, if you don't notice it's happening it's often too late to fix the issue.
The alternative is subsidies, but then you usually end up paying for a bunch of unproductive railways you could turn into profitable ones, because you have 100 states to manage and you can't guess which ones really are unproductive unless you start looking one by one every few years.
And then there are the incentives, if they don't look unproductive AI tends to build them sometimes, making the problem even worse.
Ports also suffer from this, it seems late game their only purpose is being sold to canal companies so they can lose their productivity bonus.
Are there plans to address this? The mechanic works in theory, but it's a mess in practice, maybe transportation could increase infrastructure? Maybe if the trade center bought it to create more infrastrcuture and use it as needed? Not sure what could be done, but it's a pain to try to make them profitable by building a bunch of resource buildings with rail transportation PM only to watch the eternal icons of of "missing input goods" in every state until the end of the game, and still facing problems because of this.
Oh, also, while it's not the same, energy plants have a similar vibe, they are really annoying to build, construction filters/info is very lacking, and the private sector doesn't seem to be able to handle either very well.
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