Cargo ( original ) Help / Tutoral

Well, the answer is pretty simple: If you don't connect a city to consume the goods, it will not improve. It only increases one good per month up to the amount of goods requested by the connected cities.

After you connected the goods production with a city, you should also connect a raw material source with the goods factory. It will produce the same amount of stuff consumed by the factory.

Enable the "goods" layer (bottom right on the screen) to see where goods are already traveling on their own. Have enough transport capacity to meet the demand. When transporting goods you only have to make sure they are at their destination within 20 minutes of real time. And note that the demand of the cities is "per year", or the equivalent of 12 minutes real time.

Factories that are not connected with your own line to a city will not improve beyond 25 production, i.e. they will not improve on their own. The same probably applies to raw sources that are directly delivering to factories, thus inhibiting the factory production.

You can click on the city name on the map and should get a window telling you details about that city. An alternative click path would be to click on the lower left icon for all cities, and then on the city name.

The window will tell you how many people, work places, businesses and leisure is there, the percentage of public transport usage, and finally the amount of goods needed.

However, whenever you have connected a factory with a city, clicking on the factory will show you the same info when you click on the details tab. The "potential" goods consumption is the sum of all connected cities. That tab also gives you recommendations how to (slightly) optimize this factory. Basically it will tell you two things: Either you are lacking raw materials and should ship more, or you are lacking consumers. Shipping more will be done automatically as long as you have free space in your cargo transportation (i.e. a train long enough to be able to add some more raw materials each round). Adding more consumers however is slightly more tricky. You can easily connect one more city, but note that each city will consume as much as one factory output alone late in the game. Also too many cities may interfere with each other, destroying productivity in the factory. Don't connect too many cities. I was fine with two or three per factory on my maps.