Offline goods, or zombie survival skills, is my current greatest endgame enigma, so I will just state the problem, I had typed up a strategy for San Diego to try but we didn't make it. The problem is that Zombies haul a significant amount, but run into the consumption wall and then their hauling mostly treads water, essentially throwing their carloads away. and if you groom and close an RG after the zombies do most of their work, you have completely thrown their trains away. There needs to be some way to manage zombies actively, despite zombies being... well... not active.
Tbh, the more endgames I play, the more I think that very most offline calls from good callers (not me, but I get to see at least one excellent caller in action almost every round
) only serve the purpose to minimize the damage inactive players do, by giving them a task for the city, where they can feel useful and appreciated. Because else they would try to "help" by hauling everything from wherever they feel like, or even do that out of spite, and by that mess up everything for the active players. So from good callers, offline calls are IMO more a psychological trick to comfort rather inactive players, than the caller actually thinking, that them grinding the offline goods helps the city more than having more choices with a low wait time they can call for the active players.
Also the observations I made in different kind of megacities fit with that logic. Megacities with a low hauling power, that only got into the endgame, because at least 40 other cities had even less, won't have the numbers to beat consumption by a high enough margin to make it worth it, when they also have high wait times at the facilities. Cities with a lot of active hauling power don't have that many offline players to make offline goods actually worth it, but they could use more options with possibly low wait times, because with their players playing many hours in a row and staying up late, the risk of some of them making concentration mistakes (ooooops) and messing up the next planned call increases. So having an offline good does more damage than good to them most of the time. The only megacities where in theory offline goods actually make sense - beyond the psychology behind them - are cities with a lot of rather passive hauling power, but little active hauling power only. But in practice they most likely have poorly organised calling, and way too many rather inactive players didn't get their trains out of town in time, and/or are hauling whatever they feel like anyway.
However, I think there are a few occasions where having offline goods can be a good thing:
- Passengers in Classic and SoE. Pretty obvious, because they won't be an online call before all cargo goods are finished anyway, because not only the wait times will likely never be low enough, but also because you would lose 10 min for getting the passenger trains out of the museum, and then another 10 min for getting the cargo trains back to work. Because of that passengers are only a useful offline good for players who'll be offline for several hours in a row however.
- If facilities for possible offline goods (I agree with @sacroima and @Neilus about the criteria for them) are messed up anyway, you've got only little hope that this will become better over the next hours, and you've got enough possible offline haulers to beat the consumption by some percent nonetheless.
- If you've got several facilities for a possible offline good, but they all are 6 - 8 tracks away from the city and you really manage that the offline players only use one of them, so the active players can finish off the good from a low wait time facility during a mid hour call.
- If you've got a good to 80% or so with online calling, but a lot of players are leaving for sleep or work - in this case them at least beating the consumption and hopefully adding some percent could be a good thing, but I'm not even sure about that.
- Similar scenarion: if the endgame is going to end in some hours and you've got no hope that the facilities of the offline good will be of any use for the online calling.
It's rare that the callers dare to say that players should just park their trains or even better haul in ghosttowns far away enough from any megacity to make prestige and some money for waggons when they are going offline, rather than making offline calls. Strictly by logic* I think it would be the better choice from a city point of view however in most cases. And getting my trains to ghosttowns is also what I usually do, when I go offline for some hours and the endgame isn't to end soonish.
Funny side note: The guy who managed the winning city on our server the last 2 rounds, tried that no offline goods strategy some rounds ago. To much upset from the second corp in town, with the result that he agreed to offline calls from the warehouse only. (I assume some of his love for really huge warehouses stems from that
.) Still the second corp in his city was so upset, that for most of the endgame they didn't show up at all, instead of just being semi-active at their usual level.
* I'm aware of the irony when that comes from a guy who spends a lot of time playing a buggy browser game, and then even writes lengthy forum comments about it.