Understanding ETS2 freight system vs ATS

[Seriphyn]

Hello all,

I flip between ETS2 + ProMods (w/ extra goods add-on) and ATS regularly. One thing I notice, is that ATS's freight system seems to be more coherent than ETS2. For example, you're moving supermarket bulk items to another supermarket of the same company (Walmart/Wallbert) or to a smaller convenience store, or car parts from a supplier to a garage, or ore from a mine to a freight airport.

ETS2 seems a bit more random, for the most part. Now, I'm not sure if it's a product of vanilla or the ProMods add-on, but I was wondering if someone who is familiar with road freight system IRL might have some illumination here? Are European freight depots more 'hubs', rather than actual industries? To use UK terminology, is it that LGVs move regional freight to the city hubs, and the HGVs move them intercity?

Just trying to make more sense of it, purely for RP purposes. One time I had to move 'Waste' from Wales to Latvia (represented by an Ikea trailer with a forklift...), and trying to make sense as to why you'd move something from Britain to the Baltic. Honestly, I don't even know much about European freight. Why am I moving a construction vehicle from Scandinavia to Central Europe? Couldn't the construction site order more locally? Wouldn't it be cheaper for delivery that way?

[jdenm8]

It's an artefact of how the freight system was set up when ETS2 was originally released.

With ATS, SCS set up a more cohesive freight model with more specialised companies and fewer companies that do the same thing. These improvements carried over to ETS2, but the improvements only apply to the companies added in DLC Scandinavia and DLC France.

New companies in ProMods usually follow closer to the freight model used when ETS2 was originally released.