LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

The road train, loaded, needs I think a 200t road. You can improve roads, but honestly I'd park it until you are comfortable with upgrading roads and you have a need for that kind of throughput. (I'm just starting to get there myself; still not actually using any road trains.) Mining trucks have a similar issue and the same solution.

That said, upgrading roads also increases truck speeds on those segments, so sometimes the last mile to the factory is good to at least check and see if it needs upgrading.

You *could* do a depot web, but the problem with doing that is that you get paid for putting goods into a storage area. The more of those you have, the more you are spending on transport without a return. And you don't want to kill the income from filling stuff.

I use depots to transfer from road to rail and vice versa; to handle goods in ports (of course); and when I'm rushing a city with a population of more than like 50K. This is not really a game that rewards complicated store-and-forward networks. Just keep the number of non-paid stops for goods at a minimum and you'll be okay for cash.

And finally, for the port.... Keep looking around for one in the region that you can open, maybe even from the outside. I think you may even have a contract for it, check the list.

Yeah, the answer was Japan. I'd opened a ferry, but I thought that was just opening up a roadworks that I didn't have the goods to complete. I didn't realize that the solid gray line was a crossing that a truck with floaties could get across.

And you're off to the new races!

Just opened Italy, so I've got that new country smell going on.

Since yesterday morning, I’m up about 200 towns and $4M. Love getting new countries.

What's interesting is that Italy has a ton of industries you can build without qualifying. So it's kind of a factory center if you want to build it up. I'm anticipating France already.

I also have my German/Swedish/Croat truck fleet running all over Europe and environs. Very nice to be able to do that. Eventually, I want a fleet of 40t trucks with floaties, ocean floaties and a multi-stop gizmo, so I can run them anywhere in the world. But that's waaaay to expensive for now. (Ocean floaties alone are $500k per ton.)

Hope everyone is still enjoying the game.

Dived back in after a few days break. Nearing 3000 towns. Latest small country I opened, I have all the goods for it that I need, but it wants every town completed before it will open the borders to its neighbors. Also, I need to ship in trucks, so I have to be able to afford Ocean Floaties. Which means more businesses fulfilled in Europe. Every challenge is a bit different.

Been building out Italy. Large focus on businesses and making money and buying new factories so I can make a profit shipping stuff.

I started opening an airport to aid my progress in a country. I've got to deliver 595,000 of a good to it, in order to open up a storage slot, so I can ship in stuff that's needed. So far I have been using 5 or 6 Jumbo Jets and I'm about 150K into the project. I just do that in the background, feeding the airport with trains and feeding the train station with my trucks 2 or 3 times an hour as I play.

The recent updates have opened up a bunch of new countries and added in the final production chains and goods (one of them is cyborgs lol). Still a great distraction from stress.

Anyone else still stuck into it?

I'm still going strong. Currently working on the areas adjacent to Germany. Really would like to get the airplane contract completed, but still can't do it.

You'll get there. I'm not that far ahead of you.

Finally opened up the Eastern US!

Okay, so I've been working on Japan, the Koreas, and starting to get a toe hold in western Russia. At this point, should I be trying to get the North Korea <> China border open, or taking stuff from Japan and going elsewhere? If it's into China, I can't for the life of me figure out how to work my way around to the city I need to finish for the North Korea 2 contract.

This is where my bad memory really bites me. I know I found a bunch of new stuff in South Korea and Japan, I just don't remember if any of it was a gating item in one of the other regions. Manually going and looking is going to take a while, so I haven't done that yet.

Hold off on China. Will still be a while.

Typically, if you can't find a way in, you're going to get it later as a contract. In this case, China does not open on those borders, and it requires goods in the initial port that you don't have yet. When in doubt, check your contracts; you should have one from New Zealand that gives you a truck in Germany, for example. You'll have more than enough to work with in the countries you already have, along with Germany and Scandinavia, to carry you for quite a while.

I should also say that countries are sort of grouped in regions that open up pretty easily. So Germany and Denmark, for example, you get into them pretty closely together. Same for Norway and Sweden, Russia and Poland, that sort of thing. So expect Korea/Japan to keep you busy for a long time, first to discover and build out, and then to help send goods elsewhere.

Remember that it *is* a puzzle game, and it's a *hard* puzzle game. If you join the discord, you can search and ask questions if you are frustrated, but I recommend exhausting all the obvious stuff before you take those steps. It's much more rewarding to see the next contract pop up and another area become available.

But sometimes, yeah, Sacada can be an obscure bastard. In a few cases, you'll need to really read a contract carefully for hints, and in others, you really need to understand the rules. (For example, you can fly stuff into an *airport* without accessing it by the ground, but for *airfields*, you have to access it from the ground and complete one resource before you can fly stuff in. And then with both you can only build storage for the resources required, which adds another twist.

Also, build your industries up to level 3. That makes production more efficient - more end products for each unit of input, and that means you can afford to fill those businesses/mailboxes that need like 1000 goods and make a *ton* of money in a few minutes work. That will be very helpful in Japan, Korea, pretty much everywhere.

I need to get back into it. I sort of left off knowing what I need to do.. but doing that requires a lot of intermediate steps. So like "I need goods A, B, C" to unlock the next puzzle. Goods A, B I know where to get, but I need trains to get them there. In order to get trains there I need to complete the town to build a train station there, which needs goods D and E. However good E needs a boat to get it from Australia, and then a train to get it to that town. Fighting the UI and getting all that to work is sometimes more than I want to deal with even though I know exactly what has to happen.

You should be getting comfortable with the UI after a while... Are you grouping trucks where you need to? The drag mechanic should take care of a lot of finding sources and destinations, and that's the biggest part of the mechanics. Note that the only time you need to do things simultaneously is when you do a town; everything else you can start and then go off and do something else and come back to it, if you don't want to wait.

Note also, that particular set of things creates a task that has you getting in-depth familiar with trains. That will be repeated with other mechanics, as the game adds them (ships and planes, at least, as well as crossing quarantines and the like). You'll find that once you get through that, you'll view trains just like trucks, as a tool with particular uses and limits. The game is a bit subtle that way.

I do as much as I can to make the UI as practical as possible, and yes I do all of those things you mention. And yes I know only getting towns done is "timed", but when I see what I want to do, i just want to do it. Its what I mentioned a while ago... there is so much going on on the global map, that when my ship is just idling because I'm focused on two little trucks in Hungary, it annoys me

One UI thing that I'm curious about.. is there anyway to remove the airfields (Grey square with a blue circle inside)? It seems like under every airfield there is a town, but its really hard to click that town unless you zoom in really close.

You should be able to remove the airfields by clicking on second icon from the left in the upper left. That gives you access to the map filters. Then deselect airfield and airport in the list, and they should not show up. You will still need to zoom in for cases where small circles are under other icons; that can't be avoided at the moment but Sacada is aware that's a big complaint.

I now tend to work with larger groups of trucks in particular countries. I can group trucks, then hit "Ctrl-1" to set them to the "1" key as a hotkey selector. You can do that with 1-4 on the keyboard. That helps in switching back and forth and reduces selections. You can also group trucks together by clicking on the paint palette icon above the truck list, which not only lets you change truck colors but move them up and down in the list. I keep my trucks sorted by nationality, for example, so they are easy to select. That cuts down UI frustration as well.

Yeah I've tried every filter and I can't seem to get them to disappear. It could be because all of those airfields are also train stations and/or towns so unless I uncheck everything, they still show up. Sounds like its something he's thinking about though.

Yes, they usually have a train station. None of them should be towns, but there's one airport per country and that tends to be really big.

I would suggest that you just use the zoom in when you need to to separate the towns from the airfields. The philosophy is that each zoom layer focuses on a different set of information, and if you're trying to identify individual towns but they are overlapping, you need to zoom in until they separate. Zoom is not just the same info presented at different granularities; it add info as you zoom in, and abstracts it as you zoom out, so you find different stuff at the highest zoom than you do at the lowest. Not sure how else to put that, but if you look, you'll find that there are levels you naturally gravitate to for particular tasks. It's easy to find ports, for example, at the highest level, because you'll often be setting up long-range transport at that level; but if you tried to do the same task at 3/4 zoomed in, you'd be frustrated trying to find the ports and scrolling like mad across the map to get to the other side of the world.

I just kind of figured out through use what works for me. But there are a lot of fiddly details in this game, and many of them turn out to be fiddly for a reason that can make your life easier.

Has there been a change or bug introduced in the last few weeks where there's pink arrows pointing to every town in the country you're focused on? It's been doing it for me ever since I got back into it last week, and I don't know if it's something I toggled on or what. It's not super noticeable when I'm zoomed in, but as soon as I zoom out, the country just gets covered in pink arrows. It's really weird.

I believe those arrows indicate the ends of broken roads that you can fix, and they can be toggled on and off with the A button at the top of the screen somewhere. It’s an aid in case you can’t find all the little roads that need fixing. Let me know if that is not it.

Yeah, it was a "B" button on the top bar, but that fixed it. No idea how that got toggled. Also seems weird that there were so many arrows, because I didn't have anywhere near that many broken roads. But I also have no idea what most of those buttons up top do.

Ah. Then that was the Upgrade Roads button. You click it, then click all the roads you want to upgrade, then click it again, and you'll find the upgrade requirements on the those roads. (Apparently the button was changed from A to B recently.) Sorry for any confusion.

I guess I need to get myself into the habit of always upgrading all my storage slots as soon as I'm able to, because if I don't, and I need wood or steel shipped in, I'll wind up having to ship tons and tons in to do upgrades before I can actually store any of it. It's a really, really annoying piece of functionality. I guess I could always sell stores that I don't actually need, but once I have them, it seems better to have more options than fewer, just to get around "no, really, I'd rather you put this steel in storage instead of upgrading wool storage. Why on earth would I need more wool over here?

I find that many of those storage slots will need to be changed over time, at least the way I play. So I only upgrade as far as I really need. You will keep getting more trucks and slots as you play, so eventually 100 tons of wood is just 10 seconds or less.

My understanding is that the upgrading is just another aspect of the puzzle. If you like to optimize, put wood, steel and plastic depots in first. But that does eat up slots... It can be a grindy game at times. I’m still doing businesses in Italy, and it’s definitely making me stretch to get it done.

Just crossed the 2000 businesses and 500 towns mark. I hit a bit of a stumbling block where I couldn't figure out where to go next, but turned out the answer was that there was a railroad fix I could do, which got me all the way across Russia, so I could start bringing stuff into Germany by rail. I still don't know if Russia's building industry rules are more relaxed, or if it's lumped in with Korea/Japan/AU/NZ for unlocking, but I seem to be able to build just about anything I want in there. That let me ship stuff into Germany/Sweden/Finland that'd been blocking me, which let me open up the port in German, the Netherlands, and Croatia. That should keep me busy for a while.

This game continues to suck me in for way too long at a time. I think it's the bubble wrap nature of being able to pick up a load of stuff and just clear circles off the map.

That block in Russia really is annoying as its really hard to see. I'm not sure if I lucked into it or zoomed way in then I finally saw it.

Steam says I'm at 106 hours played. After that long, I still think the UI is needlessly obtuse and intentionally obscures some vital info, but I think I've maybe reached a stalemate with it.

Yep. Congrats to all of you! Rest assured, there are many puzzling frustrations and joys ahead.

Chaz, Russia is the most "loose" of the countries as far as building stuff goes, which is a huge relief and there's a ton of stuff there to work with. One good thing it gives you your first chance to do is to make money. Airfields (regional) and airports (national, 1 per country) have rail and air connections, so you can set up a supply chain, then use trains to send 10K or 50K goods to them, which naturally results in tons of cash (as long as you're setting up relatively close). You can do something similar with ships (or trucks or trains) with ports. Add to that the tiny businesses that need 5K goods and you can basically scoop up cash whenever you need it. Take heart! (Transporting one good by air to an airport recently made me $30M, so there is an undeniable scale to air transport.) Oh, and the Jumbos can only land at airports, not airfields, so you need the regular and small planes in your fleet, too.

If you want to *open* an airport, you can fly goods into it. Once you complete one good, you can build a depot for it (and since there is a rail connection to the airport even before it's done, you can then ship out the goods). An airfield, on the other hand, has to have one good opened up by rail (or rarely, by truck if there is a connection) and that depot built before you can fly in other goods. Once you get 3 depots built in either, it will connect to the road network.

I have opened up The Vatican, San Marino and Sicily, and I took a break from working towards Sardinia (3000 businesses in Italy) to get my foothold in the Eastern US. I've gotten an airport and two airfields partly opened, and just got a road network started. Also building industries to fill in the Balkans and Germany and Scandinavia and expand in Africa and the Persian Gulf...

It's wonderfully addictive.

BTW, the Discord group is awesome and you can get special name colors by posting your score page in the brags/milestones thread. There's a Help section to get hints from other players, too, that can greatly reduce stress if you are so inclined.

Well, the game rolls on. I've made inroads into Africa, the Arabian Gulf, Canada, South America, and the Eastern US.

How are you all doing? Still playing?