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PaperclipPerfector
1mo ago
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Captain of Industry: a short review
Synopsis: a 3d factory automation / colony management game, from a very small indie team. Grapics are neat but not great. No enemies to struggle against, but resource management is a lot tighter and the fully modifiable 3d terrain is a constraint on official maps. If you aren't good like I'm on my 1st playthrough, it'll take forever to get anything done.
Instead of one death spirals, there's several. None are that nasty or irrecoverable. There's a world map which you can't colonize, but where you can do some rudimentary combat, solely based on the tech installed on your sole combat ship, and not that rudimentary trade.
I feel this is underdeveloped, as a factory builder game where you can build a fleet and use it to explore the map, steal resources, and if you're cheeky enough cause someone's angry battleships to come and flatten your island seems like a natural development. The warfare in this game so far is just a very simple mechanic tied to how much tech and resources you've invested into your starting ship.
The game is in alpha. Devs are going to add trains in december, and it does seem good gaming rigs can handle fairly extensive factories, about 20x-30x the size of what you can see in the (Five) screenshot down here.
For screenshots, see links down under the line. For gameplay vids, this guy isn't too annoying and not bad, if overly wordy.
A somewhat more detailed description:
You start with a broken down cargo ship and 20 pickup trucks and couple hundred people on an island with a particularly fortuitously geology: there is coal, iron ore, copper, usually also gold and sometimes uranium. Time runs really fast: 1 game seconds is one day, so, there's no night-cycle. Fastest speedrun I've seen was 200 years. You can, luckily, pause the game.
So, at the start, you have potatoes. Unless you start farming them pretty fast, game is over in about a year. Food is an important resource in this game. Sustains the population, but if it's monotonous, people won't be as motivated. Motivation aka 'unity' is a resource in the game, used to sustain the non-critical trade contracts and allow instant construction. Something like 4 years unity production allows you to instantly teleport resources to build say, a 10th of the end-game factory needed. If you don't need unity, the materials are delivered by vehicles, which takes time. Some buildings like oil derricks or pumps can't be built this way, so you need to grade a road to them. No bridges so far apart from landfilling enough. Relatively easy in shallow bays, takes enormous mountains of material in deeper water. Material that has to come from somewhere.
The population, which runs the factory has to have a roof to sleep under. There has to be access to drinking water, to prevent disease. Waste has to be collected and disposed of ecologically. Later, as it gets bigger, disease becomes a problem. Now you have to get drugs, and of course more food, so fertilizers and more water. Maybe you'll have to desalinate water, as aquifers have a limited capacity, and collecting it requires vast amounts of space.
In short, there's a pretty simple colony game involved. If you fail it - run out of food, catastrophically mess up with disease and enter a doom loop, it's over ,as even with computing, server farms and automation, there's still some need for a workforce. It's pretty forgiving. You can prioritize buildings and even fucking up and losing 25% population to a combination of infectious disease, pollution-related issues etc isn't a game over. If you don't provide consumer goods, you don't have enough unity. Ditto for varied food. Funnily enough, one of the hardest items in the game to make is cake, requiring 5 component types. CPUs are harder though.
The automation part is similar to Factorio, but belts are only one sided. You can, however, stack them 4 high, with a 5th level able to cross over such a stack. There are no inserters, buildings have input ports.
Seems simple, but there are no underground belts yet, and crossing belts isn't that convenient, so you can easily end up with an unholy mess. Pipes are a lot more forgiving, but only for some chemicals. There's auto-design where game finds a path between two endpoints, which can lead to absolutely abysmal pipe spaghetti. Vehicles are indispensable, as they're, apart from world-map contracts the only way of extracting resources other than water and oil. You can use them for logistics, but there is a vehicle limit that is not so generous, and they use diesel fuel. You're probably going to find out what I found out, which is, never use them for logistics unless it's really early game or you're in a crisis.
Sadly, there is no circuit logic yet, but there are filters and customizable belt splitters and assembly modules can have several recipes. I'm not confident it's going to be added into the base game. If there'll be good mod support, not a problem. Multi-item belts are possible, however, one must carefully meter the inputs and outputs so they don't get clogged. And there's no way to meter item insertion onto a belt other than using a slower belt.
The recipes are a bit more shallow, somewhat reminiscent of Angel's & Bobs, but not in extense, but the game has a much broader scope, so there's a lot more of them. E.g. the tier I building construction material takes brick/concrete, iron and wood. Tier 2 construction material needs tier 1 and electronic parts. Tier 3 requires tier 2 and glass and steel. Tier 4 requires tier 3 and microelectronics. There's no tier 4 but end-game, you need to build servers to run automated factories which double to quadruples production while reducing manpower needs. Overall I'd say it's pretty much like Factorio in complexity, except it's a little differently spread out.
The big difference to Factorio is, you can dig. Indeed, you have to dig. Every resource but oil and wood requires physically removing ore from the ground and creating a hole. Sometimes, because devs weren't original enough to make the factory only a means to an end, people dig just for the hell of it, there's a youtube vid with someone making an open-pit mine going half a mile down if we go by car scale. In a normal game, people usually use waste and slag and rock to make the island more conveniently shaped. See e.g. evolution of the landscape and factory in screenshots. One. Two. Three. Five.
The geological part isn't too great, water table is sadly only placeholder, there's a several of types of terrain, which if dug up and put back in behaves just as new. So bedrock and mined out rocks chucked out of a truck, same thing. Also same volume. The dirt, rock and ore only differs in the angle of repose, which is the angle at which a pile can be piled without it slumping. Rock is best - if you want to construct ramps, which you'll need, best make them out of rock if the space is tight. No landslides, sadly.
The official maps are constrained. They're up to what seems like several square kilometers in size. You have to build on a flat area, and most maps are anything but flat and roomy. Unless you have a trade contracts, lots of space is needed for growing trees which are used for construction. There's no money, sadly, and no trade system apart from contracts, but if you play well, it's possible to import all resources and pay for them with laptops, CPUs, car parts or washing machines..
The kinda bad part: In what can only be described as a techie's lack of imagination, the game goal is once again, build an orbital capable rocket.
Overall, I like the game quite a lot. If Factorio had this kind of presentation and terrain modification, I'd like Factorio more, but as it doesn't, and I've played a lot of Factorio, this was a nice change. Modding is possible, at least changing recipes and adding new buildings is fairly straightforward as I recall.
I'll probably add something more to this later as it's late.
Good description of the game. I've played it and would recommend it as well for anyone that likes the factory genre of games.
It is a bit all over the place in terms of focus. The city sim and exploration parts almost felt like separate games entirely. Or they just act as resource sinks for the main factory part of the game.
I think the best part of the game is the landscaping. I loved designing the mines into the ground with retaining walls to get a steeper slope. Flattening mountains to fill in the ocean was oddly satisfying, I usually would reserve some dirt for a later of top soil to make it all look nice and not so inconsistent.
I tended to play the game on the easiest settings, and also found a mod that increased the truck limit. So I removed most of the "challenge" of the game, but I found it more enjoyable that way.
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