Captain of Industry is great

[Retardo]

Okay, its been out for a month and I'm seriously disappointed that the proud autists of Kodex are not drooling all over it.


Its a game of production chains and logistics, but instead of direct controlling single wanker you also have a settlement that provides you with workforce, akin to Banished.



Judging by the vids, it has a good amount of content and is overall highly polished. Another thing I've noticed so far, is that each of the goods has several recipes it can be crafted with, and that they went with "gritty" aesthetic.

 

[Catacombs]

This looks fun. Though, I'm waiting for it to get out of early access.

 

[ELEXmakesMeHard]

Looks like a game specifically designed for German Americans. I might give it a try though, danke!

 

[anvi]

Anyone play this? I am having fun so far.

 

[anvi]

I love this, the update was just what it needed. If you like stuff like SimCity you would probably love this.

 

[anvi]

Captain of Industry

"here's a game about intercontinental transports, but you have to grow food yourself.

It is a weird game but really great. It is similar to Factorio but without the combat, and far more things to build, far better looking and far more comfortable to play. You don't have to mess around with the minutia of rotating conveyer belts and shit. In this game you just say I want to connect here and here and it makes the belts for you. You can control the shape and the path.

You have a little town that is mostly pre-built and that just acts as the worker population. The focus of the game is mining this huge pretty map. It all works on a kind of pixel level, so you completely reshape the map and see mountains crumble as diggers chip away at them. And you chop through hills, and you flatten out land for you to build on. It is very satisfying. And at the same time you build and manage this huge factory. Similar to Factorio but with far more components and buildings. And it's not a pain in the ass, the factory only needs to grow slowly as you are ready to grow it.

I really like it. With Factorio I didn't really get any satisfaction from looking at what I had built. It was all just flat and 2d and the focus was micromanaging tiny components and the rest was prebuilt. This game is much better because I felt like I had more involvement in building things, and then the camera is 3D and you can control it at any angle and view your awesome huge factory and the reshaping of the landscape. It feels good. It also seems like a programming marvel because everything just works. Like in the original SimCity games if something went wrong and your population was plummeting or something, you would make a change and it would take a while for it to have an impact. In this game everything is done in real time. So if you are running out of coal or something, you just assign another digger and some trucks and they instantly rush across the map to start work. So there is kind of no stress, there are things that go wrong but you can just fix it. The game doesn't punish you.

At first the game was really harsh because you would run out of something and the whole factory would grind to a halt. There are savegames so you could go back or whatever but it wasn't nice having people reach these dead ends. Maybe they wanted it to be a Rogue-like builder or something. But they have since done an update which fixes all of that. Now if you run out of something, everything just slows down and you have a chance to fix it. There is still some tension because if you run out of something key, the whole factory can stop working and then the thing you need, is no longer being produced. But since the last update there always seems to be a way to fix it and get things moving again. The tl-dr- is that the game is really interesting and involving, but it's also pretty relaxing too. Also this is one of the fastest loading games I've ever seen.

 

[anvi]

On top of all that there are some kind of side things that are only basic for now. For example this whole thing takes place on an island so you have a coastline with a dock and a ship. And there is a map with nodes that you can send the ship to visit while you do the factory stuff. At first reaching a node just gives a few resources, but later you find oil rigs and coal mines and stuff so it serves as another resource income to pad out what you are mining. And your ship can get into battles while exploring these nodes. For now it's just a little 2D ship battle which is just 2 ships blasting each other with guns and the highest dps wins. And you can upgrade your ships guns and armor and stuff as you explore these nodes.

It is a nice little side distraction to the factory thing. But it could very easily become a really fun side game like FTL or something. The factory aspect is so big, so many buildings and things to build, you never feel like the game needs more content. So having these little side aspects as ways to grow the game further is a nice bonus. It probably makes the game sound strange in a description but it makes sense when you play it.

 

[anvi]

Maybe you can still fail. Late game all my people became ill and I lost the population and everything shut down. It was looking pretty screwed. Maybe once the illness goes things would start up again. But I decided to start again because I learned so much in the first play through, I wanted to redo it but better and hopefully build up more resources to survive the late game. My redo is much stronger, although I screwed up again on my second attempt. Very early game, you can do things slightly wrong and everything grinds to a halt.

The tutorial misguides you a little bit. I think it is better to build 2 coal makers instead of one, and you need to mine some dirt before you start on Copper. And get mining coal asap. Also the factory kind of keeps dying at first because nothing works without coal and you can have a coal supply right next to a blast furnace or whatever and it wont work until a truck comes to transfer the coal. And your trucks are all so busy at first, things can grind to a halt easily. The tutorial does nothing to help you with all this. But once you research conveyor belts it changes everything drastically. You can have it so that everything is being fed coal without trucks having to do anything. Do the same with their other resources and you end up with lots of free trucks.

p.s. Also press the "Keep Empty" box on the Shipyard to make your trucks use resources from there.
Also if you need resources in something and trucks aren't going there, you can set it to Priority 1 for a while.

 

[anvi]

This game is really good! It is way better than Cities Skylines or other building games I've played. There's a lot more depth and content.

What I thought was late game was barely even mid game. You build a factory and improve it in the early stages, then at some point the workers start getting illnesses and the pollution gets out of hand and the worker numbers start dropping. Turns out you can just wait it out, there are periods of flu and stuff and which passes, and later you can build a hospital to keep workers healthy.

As the workers numbers drop, stuff shuts down, but you can just pause non essential buildings and it gives huge boosts of workers to go elsewhere. So I unloaded the ship which was 35 people, and I paused the vehicle plant which was about 20 ish. Also in Factorio you are encouraged to build multiple Research plants and then fill then. Doing that in this game is more costly because it needs all that power and all those workers for each one. So I sold a few and now just have 2, save the workers for other stuff.

At some point you research Incinerators and exhaust filters and stuff and the pollution stops. Anything that outputs liquid waste you can send to get filtered. And anything that has outputs of different oils you can convert the oils to power all the burners instead of coal.

So the factory goes through periods of illness and worker droughts but you get past it and now my resources are through the roof. But during all of this your factory grows bit by bit. It is far more complex than Factorio, you break components down into far more parts and then use them in far more areas. Most things just have an input and output but later on you get to take all the materials that were being dumped and use them or convert them.

Image host lowers the quality, it looks nicer in real life.

 

[Kabas]

Looks better than mine.

Just wanted to try the game a bit and already wasted 5 hours of my life only to realise that half of my production has grinded to a halt due to my poor planning. Will need to restart.