LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

Had to take a break as I was getting frustrated with Australia and focusing (too much?) on New Zealand. I opened up the Port but didn't know if that opened anything else up for me. For some reason I'm having a much harder time groking the systems in this version than LOGistiCAL 1 (pretty much skipped v2).

Tauranga Port is useful for South Island and (mostly) for Australia. Keep plugging. You'll want to get going in South Island soon.

Robear wrote:

Tauranga Port is useful for South Island and (mostly) for Australia. Keep plugging. You'll want to get going in South Island soon.

Oh I'm there and making progress. Just got a little frustrated in Australia and getting the port open there. I'll come back.

I used the train for some of that, if that helps. And I got stuck finding the actual road into the port once I opened it, but the answer was pretty simple. It's probably the most annoying task in the first hundred towns, but once you open it up, the whole game sort of ...shifts. You'll see. All of a sudden you have a lot of stuff to do again.

I've been making my opening moves into Germany.

It's actually pretty neat to do a wipe & reset in a new territory. Discovering new landscapes, building infrastructure back up from the basics. I find myself bee-lining my way to the nearest port so I can slowly build my infrastructure through import trade.

I find myself conflicted on the incoming Zen Mode update. Dev said it should only be a couple weeks away. And you can push your current save into it.

It turns off the countdown timer for unique town pops (blue on map) that consume goods while you're delivering to complete the town. Manageable from 1-3 products, but then I look at the advanced ones that have like 10+ resource requirements and just laugh.

At the same time, I've found myself strategically stockpiling specific goods in neighboring towns to beat the timer once the starting gun goes off with your first delivery. And pulling it off feels pretty satisfying.

Wonder if there will be a way to dive in and out of Zen Mode (i.e. carry your save back to Normal Mode) if some challenges carry too much friction. I'd love to be able to pick & choose my battles.

The 48 contiguous states in the USA were just added to Logistical Earth. Sacada says it's one big, long puzzle across the country.

Port of Tokyo is done! Now I can really get my shipping game on!

Every time I fear I'm about get bogged down, I notice something big that opens up more opportunities can be achieved. That's the magic of Sacada's system, that self-renewing, evolving challenge, where the puzzle never seems to end.

Robear wrote:

The 48 contiguous states in the USA were just added to Logistical Earth. Sacada says it's one big, long puzzle across the country. :-)

I wish you could do a custom start in whatever country you wanted to.

I'd love to explore US, but it feels like it'll take forever to get there!

Actually, if you complete a small town in NZ (on the South Island), you get a truck around southern Oregon. So you could get there pretty quickly. I think it's four input but small quantities. Not hard at all to open it up.

Nice!

Thanks for the lead.

There's a contract for it that pops up the first time you load the updated game, so just check your list.

I hit 200 towns today.

Robear wrote:

I hit 200 towns today. :-)

Congrats! Keep posting your exploits here - it's encouraging me to jump in a bit here and there.

BTW, today I realized that when you drag resources, the large circles are towns and businesses, and the small ones are museums/mailboxes/etc. Makes it easier to look for the easy one-resource towns when you first get an industry going.

Also, blue ones are industries that use that resource.

Robear wrote:

BTW, today I realized that when you drag resources, the large circles are towns and businesses, and the small ones are museums/mailboxes/etc. Makes it easier to look for the easy one-resource towns when you first get an industry going.

Also, blue ones are industries that use that resource.

AHA! That's been bugging me since day one. Thank you, sir!

I had been sort of *using* the difference, but not really *aware* of it until yesterday. Which is silly, as I've played the game since release lol. There's a ton of subtlety in the interface that pops out when the game is running fast and you're trying not to waste time.

I'm in 8 countries now, to one degree or another.

Quite an engrossing two days. I'm up to 286 towns complete, and nearly a thousand businesses/mailboxes/museums.

The game continues to evolve. I've had to search the map to find changes and make sure I missed nothing, but not finding a solution to something means either I did miss it, or there's a chain of events that opens things up, or I need to create a new solution (new to me). This creates a real up and down emotional effect as I discover areas I want to exploit, and fill them out significantly, only to get stopped by something that is not yet available or on the other side of a border or just can't access yet. That means it's time to go back, do some other area for a while, and then approach the problem later.

I have not even had to upgrade a road yet (although I've had a few places where I might do that). There are a lot of different puzzle types in the game - opening roads, creating and leveling up supply chains (including ones that don't exist before you get there), opening up ports for shipping, crossing or bypassing borders (in the loose sense; sometimes a quarantine is just a signal that you need to solve things by doing something other than shipping across a border). And there is an art to using supply depots; there is a reason major ports can hold like 30 of them, but small completed cities with 4 or fewer can also be critical.

Then there's the sort of fan-out of missions that occurs when you get a new resource. That can take your entire local transport force to exploit, but it also can jack up your cash reserves. And there's a metagame as well, at least in the timing of adding new vehicles, because if you go too long without them, how will they get their speed-ups earned? Usually you can't get them too early. And if you trash a small vehicle that's got bonuses, well, it might turn out that was what you needed. (Park is your friend, to an extent.)

At one point this week, I was thinking it was too hard for me, but then I shifted to another area and tore it up. I've had to ask one question on the Discord, but that opened a door to me in a way I had not entirely thought through, thanks to someone willing to help. (Learn to use the spoiler highlight for sensitive questions.) I'm hoping by next weekend I'll be at 500 towns done and making inroads into new areas.

But the best thing is that when I'm playing, I'm not worried about COVID or politics or anything else. That's a huge gift. And it's cool seeing all the different *places* that flash by while I'm finishing tasks.

Remember; small circles don't have pops eating resources; large ones do. You can turn off the auto-dump on a 40t truck and finish a half-dozen or more museums or mailboxes with what it can carry. And I won't describe it outright here, but supply depots or even just vehicles can be used in interesting ways when you're looking at a large requirement. That alone can revive your game, once you've gotten through the ones and twos in an area and are scratching your head about how to do the larger towns and cities. There's always some new creative approach, once your back seems to be against a wall. Every area has a solution.

So much fun.

Finally, on the third try, I was able to finish a crucial Australian city. At a certain point, you start to want a particular type of good pretty badly, and tracing the chain back you discover that you need a half-dozen different resources, most of which have precursors. Then you have to have enough fast trucks (and fast load is really important for doing big cities), and there's another gameplay element that turns out to be important.

But this new resource has let me go crazy up in the NK/SK/JP sector, and also to break the stalemate in Russian Siberia. That's very nice because Russia is huge, and also connected to a ton of different countries. So I'm hopeful it will be productive.

I'm also doing a ton of development in SK and Japan, and some in Australia and NZ. I'm at the point where I need to strategically park trucks to deal with the various truck limits, and I'm thinking of buying a second 800t ship to speed filling storage areas. A rough week or two leading up to this breakthrough, but the background of filling in museums and mailboxes gives time to think things through, and as a last resource, searching the Logistical Earth Discord has been very helpful for hints (people are good about blacking out details, so you can spoil yourself as much or as little as you like.)

Hope you all are still enjoying it! I'm over 1000 businesses fulfilled, now, and over 300 towns/cities. Have fun puzzling! And remember, everything has a solution...

I've gotten all the way into Russia, but with limited capabilities, so that's going to take filling out. It'll be interesting to see how it connects to Europe. Meanwhile, after the breakthrough I spoke of above, Japan is a sort of cash machine, where I can level up many different industries and gain cities for big bucks. As unbelievable as it seems, I can see eventually finishing Japan. It's a powerhouse for this part of the game.

Anyone else still playing?

I got swayed away by the siren call of Crusader Kings 3, but...

I'll be back.

I promised myself not to buy this until I finished my professional certificate on Coursera (which Google was incentivizing with a gift card reward for hitting a specific deadline). I finished over a month ago but Google flaked on me so far. Last support call blames a 'technical glitch' and vaguely escalated to Google engineers.

At this rate I will need to start my next set of courses before I'll get to play the full version.

Stupid professional development.

Don’t know if it was mentioned but Zen mode was added to the beta branch last week.

It turns off product consumption while you’re complaining towns, etc (blue icons).

I thought I would beeline to this feature upon release but now I’m having second thoughts. The mechanic of supply decay while filling out a location’s demands adds a fun layer of strategic depth, sometimes demanding that you stockpile goods in neighboring locations via supply crates and such.

I understand that toggling Zen mode creates a new save so it could be worth experimenting with to see how it plays out in practice.

I'll have to try zen mode!

I'm saving Zen mode for when I'm done with the game. Each region has its own challenges - really! they are very different in many ways beyond the basic mechanics - and I honestly don't want to spoil the game. Supply decay is integral to how you play the game; without it, many of the set piece elements that challenge you over time are removed. Which is the point, but still, I view it as a second play-through thing...

Finally completed an Australian challenge that had road upgrades as the obvious solution, and it occurred to me that if something seems impossible to do, just play elsewhere and upgrade industries and storage and vehicles, and then come back to it. That solves almost every throughput problem.

I did identify one thing that vexed me. Sometimes I have to send things from one storage location to another. Obviously, each of them can take or send the goods. So it's easy to just drag and drop and find one truck is taking away while another is supplying. But if you watch, when you drag a good from a storage to another storage, when the line "clicks" into place, it'll show the goods moving in one direction. If you then drag it off, and back on, it'll go the other direction! Frustration gone. Another subtle interface element of the type that Sacada seems to delight in.

The joy of this game is that over time, any frustration gets wiped out by figuring a way to solve problems, because as nasty as being stuck can be, when you figure out what to do it invariably gives you an approach to handle other areas. Identifying *and using* mechanics in the game is the secret to progression, really. Sometimes really simple things can elude you for a while, and then when you get them, bam, half of your outstanding puzzles can be solved easily. So puzzle-y good.

I'm up to about 365 towns and I dunno, 1500 or so museums/mailboxes. Looking forward to 500 towns.

All the additional content coming for Logistical Earth are free, and true to his word, today Sacada released BeNeLux into the game. A few weeks ago, the USA was put in, and there's more to come, a lot more.

Zen mode was also added, finally.

Oh, I missed that!

Finally cracked Eastern Russia. Another step in game progression. Australia and SK are exemplars for their regions, and each one takes something of a different approach to build-up than does New Zealand (for variety, I'm sure). Russia is definitely different from them. And each one uses techniques you have to develop for the previous ones, so part of the complexity comes from having to combine various systems to move forward.

But once you break one of the "codes" for how to handle an area or a region, it's a great feeling, and you also get a nice burst of paying work to reward you.

I've done about 65 towns today, rushing towards 500. Just going back and doing one resource towns (and some twos) that I've neglected in my various geographic pushes. I'm getting a bit cramped in the ports, but I'll figure something out, I'm sure. Very relaxing to just focus on this instead of the world.

I wish you would live stream your play. Or write THE authoritative guide. So much LOGistiCAL knowledge should be leveraged.