LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

It’s important to know where the unfixable roads are, because some of them will be changed by opening a city with a contract. You’ll see a bunch in an area, usually a border region or across a river or something, and that will remind you that a contract exists to change their requirements.

Find the contract, finish it, and the reqs will change to simpler goods.

UMOarsman - Correct, you need to ship the needed goods in somehow to “prime the pump” for building a factory.

Bought my first boat and immediately used it to violate quarantine. Capitalism, Ho!

I think I'm missing a mechanic or something. I've gone about as far as I can in NZ, and I think Australia is my next target. Over there, I've opened up all the roads I can fix, and gone as far out as I'm able. I have the port almost complete, and am only missing limestone and undiscovered opals.

Googling suggests that the next thing I need to do is the Australian Rail contract, which will get me a train which I can use to open up the area with opals. I think I might also need to do the Brush Fires 2 contract to get to there? The problem is that I can't figure out how to open up the roads I need to do either of those. I have access to the goods elsewhere, but I can't figure out how to get them to Australia. I can't build the industries there because of the 2/8 rule, and I can't see how to ship them in without finishing that port. Any idea what I'm not seeing?

That you can finish the port from outside, by ship using goods from NZ?

As always, when stuck, examine your contracts. If you have not completed a port yet, there will be one there for a port in NZ (which I think gets you a ship, too). If you have not done that yet, get to it!

Yeah, unlocking roads and finding paths in Australia was pretty challenging, if only because its so different and bigger from what you had to do in NZ and Martinique.

Every region is different in various ways from the others. That's part of the challenge.

Robear wrote:

That you can finish the port from outside, by ship using goods from NZ?

As always, when stuck, examine your contracts. If you have not completed a port yet, there will be one there for a port in NZ (which I think gets you a ship, too). If you have not done that yet, get to it!

That's what I'm trying to do, and doing that got every need filled except for limestone and opals. The only limestone I have access to (I think) is in Australia, but I can't get it to the port because I can't fix the road betwen the mine and the port.

I'll need to take another pass around Australia and try to see if I missed a roadworks that I can actually fix with resources in the country.

Edit - sorry, missed the point.

You can't get to the Oz port because of the road? Are you missing mats, or do you not know how to select the route to upgrade it?

The port in NZ can be opened just with stuff on the same island. If you have not done that, then any other port will be useless, because you need to ship stuff to them from outside.

Robear wrote:

That you can finish the port from outside, by ship using goods from NZ?

As always, when stuck, examine your contracts. If you have not completed a port yet, there will be one there for a port in NZ (which I think gets you a ship, too). If you have not done that yet, get to it!

Another tip if you haven't done it, filter your contracts (that's the 2nd thing I do after filtering out Businesses from the map). There's one mostly for road works and another for overall progress (ie. Complete Christchurch for South Korea). Everything else is unnecessary.

Also, i've started taking advantage of the push pins. Pin the cities that unlock things, pin "easy" to complete towns so you can come back to them later. Pin your storage (if you have it). If you find yourself looking for a resource that you swore you had, pin it. Use different color pins for different things.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Also, i've started taking advantage of the push pins.

The what now?

Anytime you look at a city, in the upper left of the city display, is a push pin. Select it to pop it up on the map. Click it to change colors.

Yeah, they are hotkeyed to the 'o' and 'p' keys. One pins and cycles through the colors, the other unpins. If you are feeling particularly aggressive, holding shift and clicking on the pin (or pressing the hotkey) will add various color stripes to the pins to give even more variety.

Figured it out. There was a single red circle that I could get to, buried in a mess of other red circles that I couldn't get to yet. Once I went to that circle, I was able to work my way around to the city that'll unlock trains.

This is a perfect example of why I wish there was a way to only show red circles that you can actually reach. I was probably stalled for a good hour or so because you can't do that. I'm all for complex puzzles, but that's just the UI making you do a pixel hunt.

I've used pins a few times, but is there an easy way to go and select your pinned stuff? I can see the pins on the map, but when I try and click on them I usually wind up getting one of the other locations that's clustered around the pinned one.

Re: Pins, no not really unfotunately. I think its really just to get your eyes to the right place. Once you start getting out of Oz, you're going to get to places with multiple ports, and you'll want to build multiple storage. You may want to bounce from country to country so remembering what town needed in Germany to be completed for the next "gate" or roadworks without having to go through all your contracts (even after filtering) is very helpful especially if you've spent some time moving boats/trains around working in Australia because Germany hurts your head :).

The different map modes are designed to declutter the background and let you see the red circles. If there are many together, just zoom in. You will find that when there are impassable roads, they have only one red circle beyond them for each length of road they are connected to. Looking for those dashed lines will quickly let you see where the boundary is, and that will let you find the red circles that are on your side of it.

Those dashed lines can be really hard to see though.. some are like 1-dash long. Unfortunately a lot of road/exploring is just trial and error. I do recall what Chaz was saying... it looked impossible to get to the Port via truck because everything seemed to be blocked by a material that wasn't in Oz.. but there was like 1 out of the 20 paths that you could actually get through.

Right. I can think of maybe 2 spots so far that had that issue for me, so it’s not terribly common, but it is there. You can ask on the Discord or here for pointers if you get stuck. But definitely use the different map modes, that helps a lot.

I don’t think Sacada is going to put in a tool that effectively finds the way through a maze of twisty little passages for you. He is definitely inclined to look at that as part of the challenge, from pervious posts.

Finished my first airport today. Took a few hours, since it's about 10 categories of around 6k goods each. This introduced the problem of scale. I had to build up supply chains, and then ensure that all of those goods actually made money, which meant building up a couple of new factories in the region. It also required new attachments to the rail network, both storage and factory towns, because I wanted to move a good volume of stuff with each cycle, and not provide undue wear to my trucks in the process. Another aspect of the game is coming into focus - how to plan for large scale movement and coordination of goods with the limited vehicle selection on hand?

Meanwhile I've still got tons of small circles and a good amount of one-good large circles to do with various resources. In the process, I opened up Luxembourg, and another set of river crossings in the Balkans. Everytime the game starts to look like it's going to be all the same to the finish, it reveals a new way to put the pieces together and becomes fresh again. Genius work, for a puzzle game.

I keep getting thrown off trying to figure out when I've hit the end of what I can do in a region right now, and need to move on to another. I've got a bunch of contracts that have been sitting around for a while that I can't do until I can get my shipping network built up to other regions.

I have one for multi-nav gizmos that needs me to finish all towns and businesses in Martinique. I filtered the map down to towns and businesses, and just had one big town left, so I filled that, but the contract didn't complete. Now I'm not sure if I'm not seeing something, or if the port and capital (?) count as businesses. If they do, then it's gonna take way longer before I can do that because I'm still unable to ship some of those goods.

I've also got some contracts to complete towns on the little islands off the east coast of Australia, but I can't figure out how to actually get there. Trucks won't go, but I don't see a roadworks or locked roadworks.

Yeah that part is definitely not clear... One of the key things in this game is don't try to do everything. What countries do you currently have unlocked beyond Martinique, NZ and Australia?

Carlbear95 wrote:

Yeah that part is definitely not clear... One of the key things in this game is don't try to do everything. What countries do you currently have unlocked beyond Martinique, NZ and Australia?

I explored around in Korea, and suspect that's my next stop. I think I have a truck in Germany too, but haven't gotten over there yet. I'm sure I just need to actually start working in Korea or look around at the other regions I opened up. But the completionist in me wants to clear out all the stuff I'm able to now, before I move on. Which is wrongthink, but it's how my brain works.

Chaz wrote:
Carlbear95 wrote:

Yeah that part is definitely not clear... One of the key things in this game is don't try to do everything. What countries do you currently have unlocked beyond Martinique, NZ and Australia?

I explored around in Korea, and suspect that's my next stop. I think I have a truck in Germany too, but haven't gotten over there yet. I'm sure I just need to actually start working in Korea or look around at the other regions I opened up. But the completionist in me wants to clear out all the stuff I'm able to now, before I move on. Which is wrongthink, but it's how my brain works.

Korea and Germany (maybe in that order) really are the spots you should focus on for now. Probably spend more time in Korea and get stuff going there but eventually you'll want to flip to Germany. You are going to have a LOT of stuff you can't get to. I would just move on.

This really isn't a spoiler but I'll leave it here spoilered if you want to see, just so you have a hint on what may be to come:

Spoiler:

Rubber, and its associated products are still a LONG ways away from you, and I'm sure you are seeing that its a common blocker. I am quite a bit ahead of you and still haven't gotten to it but I have a good idea where it is.. just need to figure out how to get there

Okay, I'll say it right out. You *cannot* complete a region, even NZ, until far, far into the game. And you don't need to until then, and even then, that's just one type of win. I'm few hundred hours in and I've got most of the NZ cities and about a half of the small circles done. I have not even discovered all the goods I need to finish NZ. This is not a linear game where you finish one area and go on to the next. It is gloriously, baroquely complex, at least in the midgame, with lots of moving parts and situations you don't foresee popping up to stump you. It's the best puzzle game I've ever played, and it's a monster game of puzzle games.

Instead, the game starts out with some deceptively simple situations. It *looks* like a game where you just keep on trucking, hitting the milestones and opening others, doing the same damn thing over and over. But it's not. Different areas have slightly different rules that affect how you play them. The challenges start to involve longer and longer resource chains. Not far in, you can find yourself up against truck type limits, which has ramifications you need to solve before you can really get working in other large areas. Different types of transport come into play. The sheer *scale* of completions rises over time, turning parts of the game into essentially idle game elements (but not completely). And it turns out there are a *ton* of different puzzles that can be put together from the simple parts to keep the game fresh as you go along.

Completionism is my instinct, too. But in this game, it takes different forms. For example, when you first get into a country/region, you need to identify the roads and solve the roadblocks. Then, you need to work up the factories in the region, and determine what goods you need to get past whatever contracts have popped up. Then it's distributing goods so you can build necessary factories, but they need supply chains too. And in these processes, you'll open up more areas... And the cycle repeats, but with more puzzles.

So the game will slowly point you in the right direction for your next expansion, because you'll run out of contracts and explore all the roads you can open and such. Eventually, you'll go elsewhere and you'll find what you need to go on. But in between, you can choose your path and do what you like. It's basically impossible to run out of money (you can always repair roads or upgrade businesses for cash, if you complete all the circles somehow). So just chill, work on the type of problem that appeals to you that day, set your own goals for the weekend, and have a good time. Let progress come to you.

I'm over 200 hours in, I think, with over 5000 businesses and almost 2300 cities completed. And I'm still picking off one good cities in places like Germany! There are goods I have that have not left their home countries. I've got ships and planes and trucks, each working different distribution applications, and I'm building a sort of experimental distribution system in Europe. Factories and storage areas on rail, ports and rail for international stuff, except in... Well, you get the idea. I'm just at the start of a part of the game that should see me *organize* my efforts so I can dump about 600K each of 10 or so goods into Washington to start opening part of the USA... Which will only make my problems larger.

Great fun. Like no other game I've played.

Is there really no way to tell trucks to not dump resources into upgrading single stores instead of actually storing the thing? I built a steel storage as my third one in a town, and I'm trying to stockpile ~700 of it. except apparently now that there's three storage units in that town that can upgrade, I have to deliver 1500 units of steel before I can start stockpiling again? That's incredibly silly.

I know there was a discussion about this earlier, and I think the answer was "make sure you build storage for materials used to upgrade first", but that's really just a workaround for a clumsy bit of code. Unless there's something I'm missing.

Yes. So put your upgrade mats - steel, wood, plastic, etc - in a different storage town by themselves. Or, if you can't, put them in your port at the top of the list (buy them first). But the separate towns method is usually better in the long run.

It's not a clumsy piece of code, really. The opposite way would require you to fill up to over 3500 steel before you could do a 500t upgrade, so really it's pretty equivalent in either situation. And, hey, puzzle game; it's up to you to manage the *logistics* of the situation to make your life easier.

(Also, after a while, 500t of steel is nothing lol).

I mean, the non clumsy way to do it would be to maintain separate tallies for each bucket that a particular good can go into at a location, and let the player decide where to put things. It already understands separate buckets because I have to restart my truck whenever it fills up one of them.

I'm willing to deal with puzzle game mechanics, but this is just obtuse. I'm sure later, 500t is nothing, but where I'm at now, it's a not insignificant chunk of time to deal with.

So set the repeat, and then go do something else in another country for a bit, till it's done. Not being dismissive here, just noting that you don't have to be sequential all the time.

You could always ask Sacada why he did it that way, on the Discord, I guess.

Finally got Belarus and Lithuania roads open. Ukraine next!

I got kind of stuck in Korea, needing goods that I don't have there, and unable to open the port without some of those too, so I bounced over to the US. I've got big chunks of the west and southwest open, and making slow progress (though kind of amazed I haven't found any steel yet).

But I think I once again either bought something way earlier than I can actually use it, or don't understand how to use it. I bought a road train, but this thing can't seem to get anywhere. I know it's rated for 80t, but I'm assuming the weight of the truck itself + 80t puts it over the 100t weight limit for a lot of roads. Does it say anywhere what the fully loaded vehicle actually weighs? If that's the thing, then I'm limited to 500t roads. Since most of my raw material producers are off the highway, I'm guessing I need to complete towns that are rated for 500t (wish these were easier to find), then build storage in those, and then do that again near where I need the goods? Use the road train to haul large quantities between the depots, and smaller trucks to do last mile? I've been trying to do that, but every time I try, I get blocked because there's a roadworks I can't finish yet. Do I have the idea right, but it's not something you're actually able to do until much later?

FWIW I've done a lot of Korea and haven't even started with the US yet other than tooling the truck around the Bay Area for fun so I can tell you that nothing I've done yet has been dependent on the US.

For Korea...

Spoiler:

Have you opened up Japan yet?