LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

How do you fix roads? I dragged gravel to either and both ends of a broken road and it didn't repair. Do I just need to deliver a lot? Is there a meter somewhere for how much gravel is required?

D-Man777 wrote:

How are you folks getting past these obstacles.

Ignore what you can't do.

I'm up over 100 solved cities now and I'm clearing low-hanging fruit and building infrastructure, but if I don't have resources I just move on. I also don't have a source of fiberglass. But as soon as you get it it'll just be trivial to get the boats you need to open Sydney.

It really sucks that a paid DLC is locked behind an unlock condition. That makes no sense... what's the "road to the harbor in Sydney"? I don't recognize that road that needs boats.... Canada Bay -> Gladesville?

As soon as I find fiberglass I will report back and you can make a bee-line to it.

Carlbear95 wrote:

How do you fix roads? I dragged gravel to either and both ends of a broken road and it didn't repair. Do I just need to deliver a lot? Is there a meter somewhere for how much gravel is required?

Select a city at one end of a broken road, and the requirement (type and quantity) will show in the bottom left corner of the city info window. With a truck selected, drag that icon to the map and any viable sources will highlight. Drop your truck there and it will start hauling that resource to the end of the broken road.

Carlbear95 wrote:

How do you fix roads? I dragged gravel to either and both ends of a broken road and it didn't repair. Do I just need to deliver a lot? Is there a meter somewhere for how much gravel is required?

On the city at the bottom, there is an indicator of the type of resource required to fix the roads connected to the city. Each resource has a number just like other resources that shows you how much is needed to fix the road. Roads tend to require a lot, 50, 80, 200, 500....

Wilton (for example) requires 80 asphalt to finish the road.

IMAGE(https://preview.ibb.co/fRQtL5/Roads.png)

My son made me start a new game together last night. So I now have double the number of achievements and towns to solve.

D-Man777 wrote:

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?

Just wait and keep upgrading towns and going to new ones. I suspect there's a reason road trains exist; I anticipate developing by the area, but also that I won't be able to finish Sydney without exploring a great deal in all directions, and shipping stuff extremely long distances. So just bypass the places where you don't have sources yet and keep pushing outwards.

The game does do this, gently. There's one town near Sydney that wants honey. I had to open a number of roads and get to another major city region before I found a town that supplies it - and that needs a supply of hives, which I don't have yet.

So clearly, some of the town finishes are meant to be done much later in the game. Don't despair. Just, when you open up a new group of towns, go back and check to see whether they offer any of the oddball resources. Eventually you'll find them and be able to move on.

I agree, the New Zealand gate is odd, given that the game *gave* me trucks for four other places yesterday (and opened them up even earlier). I'll probably start Hawaii today, just for grins. But I still have a ton of stuff to do around Sydney and Canberra, and I'm pushing north up the coast too.

This is a good game not to get too focused on one area to move into, since it does not work that way. You'll get there when you get there. In a sense, it's a "journey" game, rather than a "destination" game. And as I noted before, if you are (actual) OCD, or just completionist, it's a constant, low-level positive feedback to your need to set the universe to its ideal state.

Well picked this up at the Steam sale and I have you all to thank for that! Now if I can tear myself away from Factorio....

Huzzah!

My family thanks you Veloxi - I hope I mean that sarcastically but it likely is not.

It's funny, I look forward to this by the end of the day. I'll think about which contracts to work on. Then I put in an hour or so, and I'm good. If I have time, I'll go on, but otherwise, it's just a nice break in the day.

Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

Well picked this up at the Steam sale and I have you all to thank for that! Now if I can tear myself away from Factorio....

I'm not sure I understand. Stop playing Factorio? What do those words even mean in that order? It's some kind of gibberish babbling.

One of the early missions in South Sydney (first area after the tutorial island), says to find the Waghanma (sp?) truck store. I've looked everywhere and I can't find it. Would love to get something that can haul more than 0.5 each leg. Do I have to unlock it by finding more cities or am I just blind?

Carlbear95 wrote:

One of the early missions in South Sydney (first area after the tutorial island), says to find the Waghanma (sp?) truck store. I've looked everywhere and I can't find it. Would love to get something that can haul more than 0.5 each leg. Do I have to unlock it by finding more cities or am I just blind?

I've been ignoring that one because I can't find it either.

Truck stores are pink. Woollahra is near Paddington near Sydney. They sell 8T Dump Trucks.

IMAGE(https://image.ibb.co/n5uyL5/Truck_Stores.jpg)

I don't recognize a store named Waghanma. I've only found three stores so far. The most I can carry is 40T.

I think you aren't going to find it until a truck runs through it.

I have about 7 hrs into it now and opened up quite a bit of the area around Sydney to the south and west. I made the mistake of buying the 20t and 40t trucks, which I can't really use effectively (because they require a certain type of road and can't get to most of the cities I'm working with). My advice is to stick with dump trucks until you really need to haul more than 20t of something for a long distance. You cap out at about a dozen trucks, so you have to pick and choose which ones you want. For me, tuk tuks are history, and I only kept 1 ute, for towns that only want a tiny amount of something (fertilizer seems to be a popular item that only requires 1 or 2t to fulfill).

For the most part, I'm ignoring the quest system and just working to feed and upgrade my industries. There are a few resources that are absolutely key to making progress, and those cities become a priority to get upgraded as quickly as possible.

All in all, an enjoyable zen-like game that I'm eager to get back to. I just wish everything ran a bit quicker, and that the x2 speed wasn't locked behind a city I can't complete yet (and won't be able to for a while).

I have almost all of the gravel roads upgraded, a majority of the asphalt that's within a reasonable distance of my main supplier, and I'm now just getting my cement industry going.

Oh, I also have no idea how to trade in a truck to complete that mission.

Robear wrote:

if you are (actual) OCD, or just completionist

I you are actually OCD I would avoid this game. Technically every industry could be made level 3... That won't help you finish all the towns, but it's certainly something to do... I can't even imagine how long that would take.

Frahg wrote:
Robear wrote:

if you are (actual) OCD, or just completionist

I your are actually OCD I would avoid this game. Technically every industry could be made level 3... That won't help you finish all the towns, but it's certainly something to do... I can't even imagine how long that would take.

Actually, given that you will need to (for later towns) build industries in the area, and you can only build industries that are level 3, it kind of does help complete towns

Plus, I believe you need to level 3 all industries in an area to complete the achievement for that area. Could be wrong about that, though.

I am OCD, Frahg, although manageably so. OCD does not mean completionist, necessarily. It does mean that there's a ton of satisfaction in the dominos falling one after another to complete a task. Everything in its place and all that. Since there's so much of that in the game, it's oddly exciting and soothing at the same time.

You can find the small green pennant on the map even before you get a truck to the area. Those pennants mark truck stores.

Robear wrote:

I am OCD, Frahg, although manageably so. OCD does not mean completionist, necessarily. It does mean that there's a ton of satisfaction in the dominos falling one after another to complete a task. Everything in its place and all that. Since there's so much of that in the game, it's oddly exciting and soothing at the same time.

It's interesting you find it soothing. That makes a lot of sense. If you like processes and the chain of events I could definitely see how you would like delivering wheat to a farm to make cattle to make beef... those chains would definitely satisfy that.

I definitely was thinking more in a completionist fashion, that you would look at a region and think I need to complete everything here so I can move on. And you wouldn't feel comfortable skipping parts and coming back later. You have a lot of flexibility to control the order that you tackle things, but some things you simply have to let the game decide when it's available to conquer.

In any case, I meant no offense. I apologize if there was any. I put my foot in my mouth far too often.

No problem. You seem to get it, and I didn't before I was diagnosed, myself. There's a stereotype out there that everyone knows, and the reality is similar, but definitely not the same. I'd shorthand it as "if you have to do things, do them right" and "there is a right way and I know it". It's that second thing that drives the first, and the stronger the compulsion, the weirder "right" can be. It can be idly counting things when you encounter them (especially identical things, like fence posts or highway mile markers), or it could be just "knowing" that you need to do 16 different things exactly right to get your hands clean after they touch certain things. The latter is debilitating, of course.

So processes can be soothing, especially when there's an "attaboy" for completing them. Predictability is good (ie, not having to make a choice all the time, since that involves weighing all those alternatives you see that others discount). And details are good, because you notice details and it's cool to have something that *rewards* that level of detail, which most people just kind of ignore.

Likewise, anyone who is controllably OCD will be comfortable in a detail-oriented, process-oriented career, because they can have really deep insights into very complicated things, while also being quite thorough in their tasks. Used properly, a person with these skills can be an ideal problem-solver, jack-of-all-trades, analyst... All sorts of "backstage" roles that support leaders and teams in critical ways. If you hire an OCD sysadmin, he'll spend his time automating everything he's allowed to, since it's the best way to be sure things are being done right. And honestly, if it's automated, he doesn't have to worry about little things going wrong all the time, which would otherwise be a source of anxiety that others would not have. You can see that would be a *great* person for the role.

Imagine seeing *everything* as connected, like the game, but in far more complicated ways, and you'll have an idea of how some of us see the world. It's cool, but it means you live inside your head more than other people do, constantly adjusting your understanding of "how things work" at levels that would annoy many people. And it can be exhausting maintaing that understanding, whether it's accurate or not. But... There it is. Definitely an advantage in a tech career.

And that ends this derail, hope it's enlightening.

Ok, picked the game up this morning. Already have 6 hours into it. Addictive is an understatement. So, two questions I can't figure out:

1) How do you transport material from a town... to that town? I'm in Marulan, which makes Concrete. I need concrete in Marulan to build the road over to Goulburn. End result is I'm sitting with a huge surplus of concrete in the town, and no way to tell the road to use it.

2) I finally unlocked a big city, Liverpool. It has tons, tons of industries listed. It was showing as a source of many products for other towns. Yet when I unlocked it I can't figure out how to use those industries. Are they all simply storage, and not actually producers of anything?

2) Liverpool doesn't have any Industries it has storage. Like you said, storage is a way to hold goods to be picked up and re-delivered--they don't actually make those things. It helps because you'll find that the bigger trucks can't go on the back roads to get to all the industries, so you have to deliver goods from your industries to Liverpool and use that as a staging area to deliver further away.

1) From the dev:

sacada [developer] Jun 21 @ 4:13am
There is no local transport yet. The townspeople just love to see the trucks rolling in. I heard some players send the cargo to another location and then as soon as they leave town, they stop them and drag send them back to the supply town.

I just use a storage depot, if one is nearby. If not, yeah, interrupt and drag back.

Question: When I'm setting up a supply chain and I have raw material from point A to point B where it's used to produce another product, the truck will repeat until point B is full, then it stops. When point B needs raw material again, the truck won't resume delivery. Is there a way to set the truck to continue when point B has capacity again? Finding it hard to set up multi-tier supply chains with some autonomy so I can work on other things. This can also mean you have to babysit when there is risk of partially complete cities consuming resources before they're complete.

Changing topics, I have two wishlist items for the game.
1. A search function to find cities. You can select the source and destination names in the truck table, but that only helps if you have an existing route to a city you're trying to find.

2. The ability to pin and move city info boxes, al a Banished. This would be really nice for multi-tier chains.

Still loving the game though. Exploring The Netherlands and Hawaii some this morning. California really has me stymied though. Can't seem to find anything I can complete. Bouncing around territories helps with the waiting some. Sure wish I could complete that 2x mission sometime soon.

This might be helpful. From the dev here
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/qlrPyOg.jpg)

No way that I've found, D-Man. Sorry. I agree, search function would be great.

Did you find that your Aussie vehicle limit is global, or is the limit for each area? if it's global, that's a bit more sequential than I'd like.

I finished Canberra, the 2x mission. Remember that you can upgrade mines. I only had a 34.1% efficiency because I started it before I really understood what I needed for it. Spoiler below, if you read it, don't complain.

Spoiler:

Those buggers in Canberra just tear through the gold, so make sure you can absolutely flood it with gold before starting, if you want the efficiency bonus. And you do - I made $367,000AD off of it even with my sucky performance. Oh... And your B-double truck won't *quite* be able to get into Canberra, so either build a local storage area or just zerg it.

Robear wrote:

Did you find that your Aussie vehicle limit is global, or is the limit for each area? if it's global, that's a bit more sequential than I'd like.

If you click the up arrow on the vehicle list your list will expand to show all vehicles in all areas. If you already had 15 listed you should now have more than 15.

That indicates to me that the limits are regional.

Ah, good. I'll try Hawaii then.