Go play a dumbed-down mobile game if you want to play “baby’s first capitalism”. Why can’t I just click on the factory, choose a supplier, and have the raw materials deposited at my factory?īut Shamus! That’s not how things work in THE REAL WORLD! This game is trying to teach you about supply systems. My problem is that we have so many layers of complexity that exist for no reason. Complicated games need to have complicated tutorials. My gripe here isn’t that the game is too hard or that the tutorial is bad. I wouldn't mind all this complexity if there was some depth to go along with it. So then I use the keyboard shortcut designed to solve problems like this, which is Alt-F4. The tutorial is broken and my game is soft-locked. (A “real world” where my factory workers can’t move furniture next door.) So I demolish the old building and discover I don’t have enough money to build a new one. Of course, in the REAL WORLD you can’t get your money back if you demolish an already-completed building, and this game is all about the REAL WORLD. So I need to tear down my warehouse and build it father away. So I try to hire a truck to move the stuff next door, but the tutorial won’t let me create a route that short. I check, and discover that putting the two buildings next door to each other doesn’t work. Sometime later in the tutorial process, I realize that I don’t have any furniture available to sell. Thinking I’m being clever, I build the warehouse right next to the factory so I won’t need trucks to transport the furniture around. Now the tutorial tells me to build a warehouse to hold the output. I can’t see any way to sell or even throw away the Wood Planks, so I need to build another entire warehouse and do the whole supply chain again, but with the right part this time. So now my warehouse is full of wood I can’t use. Looking at my holdings now, I see I bought “Wood Planks” when the tutorial told me to buy “Treated Wood Panels”. Then I assign the factory a single blueprint. I have to build a warehouse, then buy some raw materials, then hire a truck to bring the materials to the warehouse. I’m about fifteen minutes into the tutorial, which has me creating a single product. I can’t remember which games I’ve played or how they all worked, but here is a rough approximation of my experience: I think my problem with these games is that they too often feature complexity without the depth to back it up. And if my Factorio problem is any indication, I have a weird obsession with logistics. On paper, it seems like this stuff should be right up my alley. These games are popular – Capitalism in particular has a reputation as a legendary title from the 90s – but they’ve never clicked for me. I’ve never gotten very far with any of them, but I keep trying anyway. I’m not sure where the genre borders are, and I don’t know where you draw the line between “Production Business” type games and “Transport and Logistics” type games. Then some various $noun Tycoon games in the aughts and teens. The first was when I played the original Capitalism (1995) sometime in the late 90s. I’ve had a few run-ins with this genre over the years. I'll probably add a few more 7 wagon C17's before I move on to bigger trains. I also have an O Class with 4 wagons 4 a an extremely short route <200m. I just started a new game and I'm in year 3, just finally paid off my loan I had maxed out and I have 3 C17 Class with 7 wagons each. Now I realize this was a mistake and I should have kept adding wagons and spaced out my production areas a bit so I didn't have so many intersections. My first game I kept building C17 class with 4 wagons, I had like 20. There is a trade-off though and hopefully with the ratio of train length - distance - unload speed it will work out. There is a penalty for longer trains unloading into short stations but also longer trains just unload slower. Short distance, or routes with a ton of intersections and signals where the trains will wait you want higher acceleration. Long haul where the train will not be stopping for a great distance, you want the longest trains you can and acceleration doesn't matter as much as top speed. Take a look at the locomotive's power, top speed, acceleration, weight, etc. What you should keep in mind when choosing train lengths are things like route distance, number of intersections and potential stoppage points.
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