LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

Robear wrote:

Yeah, that's when you take the leftovers from one roadwork and finish another.

Finally I realized how to beat the problem with large depots (like ports, 15 or 30 slots) and wood/plastic/steel. These are used to upgrade depots, but you can end up with a bunch of, say, slots that need wood to expand. That's fine, but if you then need to put a wood storage into the port, you have to upgrade all of the ones before it will take any wood into actual storage.

The answer makes me feel stupid. In this situation, build your wood, plastic and steel storage before anything else.

Sigh. I wish I'd actually connected the dots with this earlier in the game. Instead I ran across it reading the Discord chat. Oh well. :-)

This is a major annoyance.. compounded on top of that is that it upgrades from oldest to newest storage and even if you have the "return" arrow on and the green light on, it stops after completing one storage and you have to re-drag it to do the next. So if I have 4 storage and I want to prioritize the 4th storage to upgrade with wood, I send my truck and if the first 3 also need wood, it goes and completes those first, and after it finishes upgrading each one it stops and I have to go back to it.

This is particularly annoying with ports. Some goods are more important than others, and ports end up with like 15-30 spots and if I want to upgrade one (lets call them fricken Opals in Australia).

No idea. I may end up asking Sacada lol.

Robear wrote:

No idea. I may end up asking Sacada lol.

I did. Apparently not everything with a population is a town. This actually was part of what I was theorizing this morning. Some places with population have a business name like "mailbox" after the population number. Anyone confirm/deny?

Right. According to the folks on the Discord, the definition a town is a site with population and consumption. Without that, it’s a business (museums, zoos, tourist sites, etc).

99% confirm. I'm pretty convinced only "towns" which are the blue icons on the screen (some of them are green because they double up as some sort of industry) consume..

Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this but, a few QOL things.. when I start, first thing I do is go to filters and uncheck "businesses" just to declutter the screen. This hides all the grey icons. This isn't a problem if you're trying to grind money because those businesses will still show a circle even if they are filtered off.

So usually what I do is a) select and turn off the green light on a truck b) select a supply c) drag it off the supply and every business lights up that can use that supply. Particularly in Japan / Germany there are a lot of businesses that need like 1.2 of something, so if you have a 40t truck you can basically hit them all up one at a time. Shutting off the green light on the dash means it only drops exatly what is needed, so you can just keep dragging that truck from location to location. When I get a new truck, I always do this just to load it up with bonuses. When you're done or can't find anywhere else to dump. Turn on the green light, turn the power back on and it just "overdumps" wherever your truck is.

Robear wrote:

Right. According to the folks on the Discord, the definition a town is a site with population and consumption. Without that, it’s a business (museums, zoos, tourist sites, etc).

Also: Another way to tell if a location is a Town for consumption purposes, its name in the info box will be Blue if it's a town, gray if it's a business

Every little color in this game has a meaning.

Playing off and on and re-clearing New Zealand has been perfect. Not locking myself out of a good third of the initial land mass by unknowingly initiating a few road upgrades has made these first few hours much less frustrating.

There’s a lot of discovery of mechanics and their uses in this game. But it can be really chill.

I burned out when I reached Germany and USA. Germany as it opens up is just so very dense. I will come back to Australia most likely or find more islands to do. The restricted nature of less populated and smaller areas is more appealing.

You might want to look into some of the Logistical 2 DLCs. Some are less dense than others. Also, the “Vaccine” free Xmas DLC this year is the full world, but only with resources needed to build refrigerators and vaccine.

I'm not going to lie, the Vaccine DLC is just what I needed when I was getting frustrated with South Korea. BTW - if you don't know, you get the DLC by joining the open beta branch in Logistical: Earth.

And it will release later, I think, for the rest of us.

Finally hit 2000 towns in Logistical: Earth, and closing on 5000 businesses. Wooooot!

Holy cow, Robear. 100 towns seems like a huge milestone - 2,000 is mind blowing.

After 1500, it really picks up.

bleh I was so close to getting concrete.. its a fast consuming town I had all of the goods nearby, and i started filling.. but the consumption was so fast my steel mill ran out of iron ore... a half hour of prepping goods, shipping them in from god know where and it all goes kaput with a something I thought I had more than enough of. Guess I'll have to move everything even closer with some storage.

See if you can find a closer blue town to finish to do a new depot. And make sure every truck has their loading/unloading bonuses going. I'm pretty sure that's the first one where that really matters, at least for me...

Also, try leveling up the supplying industries and the depots, maybe to 3500 instead of 1194. Overkill works, and you can ship stuff around afterwards with no waste. I still have one depot full of stuff I have not used from that mission. I'll drain it off eventually.

yeah there's plenty of them. I thought I had everything close enough already, but I'll pull it out of the port and move it closer. Upgrading port storage is such a pain because it upgrades in order built instead of the specific one you want.

There was one town just south of the factory that I used, and I think I used the port as well, although I may have used a second town nearby. I forget the details. But I had trucks whipping back and forth (40t) and it still was kind of close. I was rebalancing a lot near the end trying to keep everything green. If you can load 2x or 3x needed, you might be okay.

Upgrading port storage with, say, steel, can be incredibly lucrative, if you steel plant is anywhere nearby in the region. Lik $4K a truckload lucrative. That's like nearly $50k per upgrade, and if you have all 30 needing steel, that's a boatload of port cash.

Soooo many ways to make money in this game. Road upgrades are great too. Just remember - the further the trip, the less money it makes as fuel costs pile up. Eventually in larger areas it makes sense to duplicate some industries on different sides of a country.

No doubt. I needed plastic to be shipped out of NZ... problem was I had 2 other storage that needed plastic to upgrade... 2500 a pop... so made plenty of money.. but I kinda wish I didn't have to wait for 250 loads of plastic at 20t a pop to finish.

I made the decision to use 40t trucks in Oz, and that turned out well. For what it's worth. I ran 4 or five of them for this one.

I have 6 of them and I messed it up.. if it wasn't for the steel I think I would have managed it. When I saw the ! I knew I was toast.

I have Newcastle leveled up and a rail depot right next to it for ore. I can make steel all day long.

Obvious question... You are overloading the town inputs, right?

I am, but is there an easy way to "really" overload them? I can let all 6 trucks dump in there.. which usually takes it to like 1.2 or 1.3x. I then try to run one more load on top of that to try to get it past 1.5.. but unless I'm missing something, every run after its green requires manual intervention for each extra run. I'd love to get it to keep going until it gets to 3.0

Nah, you’re doing it right. Just keep track of which ones get drawn down faster and if you miss, do them later in the sequence next time.

I don't understand the point of rail. Can you give me an example town that's going to benefit from a rail connection? I don't mind small spoilers

Some resources are *only* on rail in certain areas. Rail is also far less expensive than trucks, meaning you can transport farther and still make money. And when you get to airports, or some of the regional capitals with like 300,000 citizens, rail is definitely a good way to move goods in bulk to fill their needs. If you set up a depot somewhere, try to put it on a rail line so you can move 500t or 1000t in one go with just a few trains. And that helps with ports, too. Rail can feed 10K ships faster than trucks, which top out at 200t.

In real life, in the US, a gallon of fuel can move 492 tons of cargo one mile, on a CSX freight train. (The measure is Revenue Tons per Mile per Gallon diesel fuel.) Trucks are about 4x less efficient.

The main reason is to add more storage along your rail networks. I'm not sure where you are on in the game, but there are situations where the ONLY access between two important locations is via rail. I've spoilered what these are for me based on where I am in the game, below:

Spoiler:

North Korea to Germany
Port of St. Petersburg to Germany

I believe a "standard" railroad station has 6 spots for storage. So if goods only flow in one direction, you can at most send 6 goods across, or if you want equal transport, you can only send 3 commodities from Country A >B and 3 different goods back from B>A.

So what happens if you need to send more? If there are 10 goods that are available in Country A that country B needs and vice versa, you need 20 slots on each side. So in those cases, you add additional stations along the rail route and just add "single storage" to them for whatever good you need.