LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

You guys don't have tuk tuks? Then why are they THERE?

Just to confirm, there's no way to do A to B to C to D style links, is there? It's all one way or out and back?

The only place I have seen trike-like trucks are in China and the tuk tuks are in Cambodia. I didn't look too closely but those tuk tuks in game are 3 wheelers right?

Now, I challenge our forum to find anyone who saw a car with 2 million kms/miles on the odometer! Who would pay more than $1 for something like that?

Tuk tuks are three wheeled - game and real life - but I usually associate them with India and Thailand. Wikipedia says they are called "auto rickshaws" in India.

Bfgp wrote:

Also, anyone who can finish Australia let alone the rest of the world is a madman/madwoman.

Challenge accepted.

Yay enabling. Will see where this lands tomorrow on the Steam Sale, but I'm likely in.

Oddly enough the one concern I have is with the DLC. I see California... which I will want to get.. but, just like American Truck Simulator, if San Francisco isn't portrayed in all of its glory and if the only way to "win" is to actually help Los Angeles rather than find a way to turn it to rubble, I will just stop playing.

This page from the game hub on Steam shows a pretty dense concentration around SF. Might want to poke around on the hub.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Yay enabling. Will see where this lands tomorrow on the Steam Sale, but I'm likely in.

The game and a couple of the DLCs (New Zealand and The Netherlands) will be 30% off during the sale.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Yay enabling. Will see where this lands tomorrow on the Steam Sale, but I'm likely in.

According to a Dev post I spotted on the Steam Forums the base game and older DLC will see a 30% discount during the Steam sale.
I have no regrets paying full-price for the base game, and the only reason I will probably not pick up any DLC this go around is that Time is a finite resource that I seem to have very little of these days.

Edit: Actually the Germany pack is on sale at the same discount for one more day, and having grown up there I'm really curious if playing this game translates to more geographic awareness since I really only have a surface level familiarity with most of the map. I just don't know how much switching back and forth I would do. Since they are discrete campaigns... Maybe the universe is sending me a sign. Daycare just uploaded a new photo of my little time-sink playing with a truck.

Carlbear95 wrote:

if San Francisco isn't portrayed in all of its glory and if the only way to "win" is to actually help Los Angeles rather than find a way to turn it to rubble, I will just stop playing.

How dare you.

Not really, I don't care.

I believe, though, that you have to start in Hawaii to do the US... Someone correct me if that's wrong. California is listed as "Medium to Hard".

I thought you could do any DLC you wanted.

I noticed that you have to get past the first easy bits before the DLCs are offered to you. At least for The Netherlands and Germany. However, that said, I *think* Hawaii is available to you after the tutorial...?

Edit - Or, it could just be that that's when I bought the DLCs, so... I dunno, I guess.

I'm up over 75 towns completed now, probably close to 100, and I started to realize the reason I like this game. It's pretty much the Anno series shipping and supply chains, and the Anno series are my favorite strategy games of all time.

That said, as soon as I made the comparison I was doomed to see all kinds of flaws. In Anno you could:

1) pickup and drop off at each location you stopped at, it wasn't all just one-way
2) you can also do daisy chains with three, four, five, how every many locations you wanted in a route
3) you can assign multiple vehicles to the same route
4) you can split cargo on a single vehicle so they take two goods per trip instead of twice as many of one good

And those are just the things I feel like this game should do, there are other things you can do like stop a vehicle mid-route with it's cargo intact or drop cargo in the middle of the sea and send another vehicle to pick it up and take it someplace else.

Now the game just feels lacking and there's no going back from that. I still am addicted but I wish they would just borrow some of the quality-of-life mechanics from the Anno series....

I'm at 81 towns colorized now, and yeah, I think there's room for improvement. But of course it's a matter of how many copies get sold.

The game has become much less frantic and much more thoughtful for me. This is going to be a good relaxer.

I was happy to pay full price for such an Aussie game. Aside from wonky UI I've seen only one typo (Straithfield should be Strathfield) and one bug - you can buy the cheapest utes for $1200 (?) and sell for $2500 for infinite money. I only tested the resale gimmick a few times for research purposes, I swear...

Also, this game has the upgrade everything compulsion going on. Got sidetracked on finishing goals because I like to have massive supply chains before I tackle any particular town. I looked up from my monitor and it was 1.30am. Dangerous game. Only going to get more addictive now I unlocked 8 tonne dump trucks.

I'm unspeakably happy that people are playing and enjoying this game.

Bfgp wrote:

I was happy to pay full price for such an Aussie game. Aside from wonky UI I've seen only one typo (Straithfield should be Strathfield) and one bug - you can buy the cheapest utes for $1200 (?) and sell for $2500 for infinite money. I only tested the resale gimmick a few times for research purposes, I swear...

Also, this game has the upgrade everything compulsion going on. Got sidetracked on finishing goals because I like to have massive supply chains before I tackle any particular town. I looked up from my monitor and it was 1.30am. Dangerous game. Only going to get more addictive now I unlocked 8 tonne dump trucks.

I, too, have industry-build-up-itis. Stay strong, brother (or sister).

I re-orient routes and build up industries to accommodate towns as well as other industries. So I've usually got about 3 different operations going at once across 15 vehicles (with the occasional oddball, like discovering one town wants a few truckloads of dynamite or lettuce and nothing else). I've got two industries (steel and oil) to level 3, and I'm in a sort of upgrade rush, since one dump truck can carry enough stuff to upgrade 3 or 4 industries to level 1. Still looking at doing the 250 machinery (I think) needed to upgrade my cement plant to level 3. And I should upgrade the cement storage depot to level 3 so I can pop one nearby on a highway and just keep the flow going.

The money just rolls in. Right now I'm at 2 semis and 13 8 tonners. My cement source is waaay out of town, so they made the depot runs as needed, until demand was pretty much dried up (and I've just opened up my north/south highways that needed cement). Currently I'm running around standing up a few smaller supply sources like flowers and milk and sorghum, in preparation for future needs. I'm also finishing a ton of towns, although a few oddballs are in there that I won't have for a while (like Sydney which wants coffee, and another place that needs solar cells).

It's odd. One of my semis makes money, the other I think needs to run shorter routes, because it's losing money. Not hugely but it bugs me. I'd kill for the ability to do 3 or 4 stop shipping routes, but I suspect that those would not be feasible without level 2 industries supplying each location, and that might just be impractical given the current limits on trucks.

I am away for a couple days, but my grind strategy has levelled quite a few industries to 3 stars. Off the top of my head: dynamite, crates, bricks, steel, asphalt, clay, sand, iron, trees, planks... Just sent 50 refrigerators to my worm farm. My efficiency is shit, but my fleet is now mainly 8tonners with a Semi currently idling because I am still wrapping my head around the storage logistics.
I did start paying attention to the operating costs and that has made me delegate the remaining 1 tonners for early industry supply and upgrade duty only.

I've decided to slow down and just work on one region at a time as best I can, so I'm starting with the first one. Since one can now easily see which towns still aren't done by checking the achievement box for that region, I hope it'll be easy to fix most towns. I need to explore a bit though and fix some more roads to find more industries though.

Efficiency? Achievement box?

Sorry, it's the same menu as the contracts, but if you click the achievements tab, and then click the region, it'll color which cities are done and which aren't. It's shockingly great.

Robear wrote:

Efficiency?

When you deliver goods, the city consumes some of them so you have to resupply if you don't deliver goods fast enough. The rate of consumption seems to decrease the more goods that you have delivered (ie. if you hit the 50% threshold where the bar turns yellow, the rate of consumption will decrease, and I believe it will further decrease if you hit threshold where the bar turns green).

The more goods you lose in this manner, the lower your efficiency for that town. There's a percentage above the ALL/GROUP box on the left of the town bar which shows your delivery efficiency.

I believe, also, if you over-deliver your efficiency goes down but that's more an assumption than a proven fact. So, if you were to deliver 8 to a place that requires only 7.2, and the bar looks like it's gone past the end, that will decrease your efficiency.

Honestly, I have no idea what efficiency does. Money earned seems to be based on population, not efficiency.

edit: efficiency affects score. I honestly don't know where score appears in the game.

(aside: For the first time yesterday, I hit a city that consumed goods so fast they were literally all gone by the time the next truck arrived. I had to put three times as many trucks on delivery for each good.)

Thanks guys! So much stuff tucked into a minimalist interface.

Thanks for turning me on to this game. I just picked it up and can't wait to get started. It sounds like the kind of thing I would play in the morning while having my cup of coffee.

Well, once Steam lets the transaction go through.

DonD wrote:

It sounds like the kind of thing I would play in the morning while having my cup of coffee.

It is PERFECT for that.

Robear wrote:

Thanks guys! So much stuff tucked into a minimalist interface.

Every time I play I see something new in the interface.

Last night I noticed that the color of the bar for a city would actually surround the city in the map. It appears to be the worst color of the bars (had a town that needed two things, one was red and one was orange, the city ion the map was surrounded by red).

(I had seen efficiency but had no idea what it was except mostly it was 0.0% except sometimes it would be 100% except on some other occasions when it would be some other percent).

I got an achievement and was given - in addition to the 15 trucks I have in Australia - a one-tonner in each of The Netherlands, Germany, Hawaii and California.

As much as I've been enjoying this game, it's starting to bump up against my frustration threshold. I'm finding too many dead ends, both on roads and cargo. Every time I try to fulfill a city's requirements, there's one item I have no occurrence of, despite extensive exploration. I spent an hour fixing a 500-asphalt road to open up an area, and it yielded nothing of real use.

The latest was purchasing the New Zealand DLC and finding that, to begin using it, I need to fix the road to the harbor in Sydney, which requires 10 boats. I have three sources of boats with <2 boats each, and no capacity to create more. So, trying to supply them, I need fiberglass--not a single source on my entire map.

How are you folks getting past these obstacles. I've killed the last several play sessions just scrounging whatever I can rather than trying to pursue contracts or specific areas. Am I missing something?