LOGistICAL - Sublime Logistical Strategy Puzzling

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Since I've been trying to spread the word about this amazing game, I figured I'd create a thread about it. Welcome to the amazingness that is...LOGistICAL.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/57...

It's...not the easiest game to explain, but I'll try.

The base game includes Australia. All of it. But you begin in a small section of it surrounded by a bunch of towns. All of these towns are essentially small puzzles that need to be completed in order for you to gain money to buy more trucks to move more things to solve more towns.

Each town has its own requirement, such as fish or lettuce or nails or whatever. You use trucks to bring those items from other towns that produce those things. The industries in these towns can also be upgraded to store more materials and gather resources faster. So you have puzzles within puzzles.

Some towns can't be accessed until you fix their roads, which can be done by hauling gravel or, eventually, asphalt.

All of these things need to be hauled by trucks, of which there are several different types with different states of wear and tear that affect their performance.

The beauty of all this, besides the relaxing and engaging gameplay, is that there's no timer or anything. This can all be done at your own pace, in any order you want. While there are contracts to complete that give you focus and bonuses, these can also be completely ignored if you wish.

It's not the easiest game to explain, maybe these tutorials will do a better job.

That said, this game is wonderful. It's a great game to just pull back, relax with a podcast, and solve a few towns. The game autosaves to the cloud every ten seconds, and you can have multiple saves, so if you want to have a save for Australia and a save for The Netherlands DLC (multiple states and countries are coming as DLC), you can do that too.

It's seriously so, so great, so I've been trying to tell folks about it. The base game is $10, and totally worth it, as you get a couple of thousand towns right off the bat. Also, if you're an achievement hunter, the game currently has about 5,000 achievements, one for every town and road completed. It's crazy.

So yeah, love this game and wanna scream about it from the mountaintop. Thanks for the opportunity.

Friends, some folks on another forum asked me to make a video, so I just whipped one up. Enjoy!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/150668434

So it's basically Rebel Galaxy.

Running Man wrote:

So it's basically Rebel Galaxy.

.......sure......

Just messing with you.

What a strange game. I mean that in a good way.

Seems neat. Will pick this up tonight, I am always looking for games that require half attention and do not have stress or timers that I can play while watching tv.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Seems neat. Will pick this up tonight, I am always looking for games that require half attention and do not have stress or timers that I can play while watching tv.

This should be perfect then! Yay!

Running Man wrote:

Just messing with you.

I know man.

garion333 wrote:

What a strange game. I mean that in a good way.

Yay!

Anyone figured out how to complete the "quest" for delivering a Ute to Kurnell to get a dump truck from Woollahra? I can't seem to press the correct button combination to make it work.

IIRC, don't you just drop off one truck and the other appears?

I moved both of my utes to the town and nothing is appearing. I actually ended up selling one thinking that would work. It did not.

Yeah, I just moved one of mine there after clearing its previous orders and it happened + the achievement.

I kind of like this and play it when I want to chill, but the controls make me a little crazy.

Yeah Rybowl, sounds like you hit a bug. You might wanna report it to the dev on Steam, he's very active.

Tboon, yeah, the overlapping stuff sometimes annoys me, but I can deal with it.

Some tips, cross-posted from Tycoon Game thread:

Robear wrote:

For example, am I just trucking stuff one time, or setting up repeated routes? Why, when a truck is standing somewhere where there is a red exclamation point, does clicking on the red exclamation point do nothing? How do I select a different location - sometimes it shows me the one I want, sometimes it just stays on the current one? I keep having to cancel resource runs after the truck gets empty and sits at it's source waiting for some kind of output...

By default, the route will repeat, as long as the destination has storage capacity for that cargo. "Repeat" is indicated, and can be toggled, by the hooked arrow on the right edge of the truck interface (speedometer).

The red exclamation mark its just an indicator. The background of the speedometer for the selected truck will tell you what the issue is.

The ellipsis (...) button on the speedometer pops out to:

SKIP, which tells the truck to go with the load it has, and not wait for it to fill (in case the source location is dry of that cargo). EDIT: Forgot to mention that this turns off repeat, so the truck will stop once it delivers its partial load. Just click it back on to continue the repeat of the delivery.

CANCEL LOAD, which stops that cargo haul, potentially at a financial cost.

SELL TRUCK, self explanatory.

Yes, the interface is clumsy. I still struggle some with selecting cities vs the trucks parked in them.

Explore as much as you can to reveal other resources, fix roads when able (select city at end of broken road, and the needed resource will be indicated at the bottom-left of the city window). Start with the gravel ones first.

Hope this helps some. I'm finding myself spending way too much time with it. Great to play while doing other things.

If you happen to have any of the DLC, you can set up a long haul in one territory, and go work on another while it's being delivered. Just be sure to make sure you have all resources stocked for higher-tier cargoes.

Thanks, I didn't see this thread at first. I'll plug away at it some more.

Okay, this makes more sense now. Thanks for the advice. Hockosi, it's pretty relaxing and fun. Go for it. The object is to "complete" towns, and fix roads, and upgrade supply sources and stuff like that. Shipping things around and finding where to get resources you don't have is the puzzle part.

Yyooosshhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

So glad more people are playing it!

Ooh Australia map, wonder if the devs are Aussies?

Sounds like a more structured tycoon style game solving supply chains that expand ever outwards. Definitely keeping my eye on it!

D-Man777, if you click the name bar, you reliably get the city/farm/whatever. (Good to see you around, have not crossed a post of yours in a long time!)

Yes, I can see how this game is addictive. So what I have learned to do - early days now - is mechanically simple.

First, the game has you look at a location that needs things. These things spin above the location, and are also grouped into a few bars in the location display. Bring the quantity of these things to that location and once the bars are all green, it will "colorize" and become an upgradable location. That is, it now has the ability to supply more stuff, given the right inputs, and that supply (and storage of produced goods) can be upgraded with boxes.

So once you have chosen a location to supply (probably because it produces something you want, or in the case of gravel is an endpoint of a broken road), you need to find the good to send to it. To do this, look at nearby locations. When you find one that has your good displayed (on the map or after clicking, but *not* rotating around it), then you make sure the right truck is selected in the upper left menu, and click and hold on the good. Locations that need that good are highlighted with little circles. Drag it to the one you looked at before and the truck will start moving to that route. Note that as the output is taken away, the input drops. This means that eventually the initial stock will be run through and you will need to supply the input to *that* location in order to keep the supply coming. That cascade of demand and supply is what makes the game tick.

When a truck can't continue the route for some reason, you'll get a red exclamation point, or it will simply stop and stand there. Select it on the map or in the truck menu, upper left. That will give a status menu in the middle of the speedometer. ...Yeah, I know, but there it is. That terrifying red symbol just means "Hey, I'm stuck here, do something about it". Usually that's turning off the repeat route function, or putting the truck on a new route. Routes are set to repeat by default.

So there's no real time pressure. Don't feel that way. Get to things when you can. It's the *order* in which you do things that matters. For example, don't try to supply tomatoes to a place that needs 10 units of them if your farm produces 3, has 2.5 in stock and needs fertilizer but has zero. You need to feed that farm fertilizer first, and if a *lot* of places want tomatoes (and they usually do), you also want to bring it stuff to colorize it and then upgrade it when you get the chance. So the puzzling is in the bootstrapping of industries in each region.

As to vehicles, I buy new ones when I can. I finally got to the point where I was running a "ute" (the Aussie word for pickup, I think) fleet, and my remaining two tuk-tuks (Asian 3-wheeled quarter ton motorcycle engine trucks) were basically useless, so I sold them. I'm looking forward to bigger and faster vehicles soon. I try to keep them busy at all times.

I hope those more experienced will correct any mistakes I've made, but this is the stuff that would have let me skip the first hour of confusion and dive right in. Thanks for pointing this game out to me, guys, it's bizarrely fun.

Whoever made this game is a madman.

It's fun but intimidating. Thanks to Robear for the gift. Don't give up in the tutorial, or right after. It starts to make sense, but then you realize you're in a smallll smallll corner of the world. Then you panic.

Hockosi wrote:

Whoever made this game is a madman.

It's fun but intimidating. Thanks to Robear for the gift. Don't give up in the tutorial, or right after. It starts to make sense, but then you realize you're in a smallll smallll corner of the world. Then you panic.

This is why I take it in little slices. I wanna fix that town, but it needs a. A is in town b which road is blocked. So first, gravel/asphalt, then get a.

Otherwise all you see is this map with all these icons and aahhhhh!

This sort of seems like the kind of game that I could play while watching a toddler and working on other things... key question: Can you play in a window and how pause, alt-tab friendly is it?

It plays in a window. You don't need to pause. Trucks just keep truckin.

You can play in a window and it is alt-tab friendly. But no pause as far as I can tell. But it really does not need it. There's no time pressure at all. And most of the time is setting things up and waiting for them to finish. Your stuff will just wait until you give them some more orders. If you have to go do something in real life, that is cool.

Yay! Thanks for the info. Happy Father's Day to me!
Edit. LOL had to pause the first tutorial video. Off to a great start. Luckily she is totally worth it, the little imp.

There actually is a pause button up in the right corner, but I never use it.

@Robear:

Very nice synopsis, and accurate, as I understand the game.

I'll add a couple of things. When selecting the good to supply to a city, one also has the option of choosing the "group" or "all" fields. By selecting the background of a group of goods, it will highlight gray, and ALL of the group's goods' locations will highlight once you drag to the map. A city only needs the total at the right for that group. This can be handy if you have several goods options, but no one source is sufficient to meet that requirement.

Also, and this is the only reason I see need for the pause button, until all of a city's requirements are met, the city will deplete any goods you've delivered. The color indicates the rate at which they deplete, green being the slowest. This also means, before trying to 'solve' a city with multiple requirements, one should make sure there are sources to complete them all, lest a completed good get wasted after discovering all requirements can't be met.

Another important mechanic is upgrading industries. Once a particular industry in a city has produced a certain amount, it will indicate a good/quantity to upgrade that industry. Upgrading increases capacities of both inputs and outputs, and, seemingly, efficiency (goods input decreases vs output). Once an industry is upgraded to level three, it becomes available for the player to establish that industry in other cities. Though, I've only just reached that point and haven't actually done it yet.

I'd be very glad to see this discussion continue and hear any additional advice.

Like Veloxi, I'm excited to hear others are enjoying LOGistICAL.

I'll be eyeing this one of the steam sale. Everyone who plays it seems to like it once they get past the UI wonkiness.

7 hours since yesterday. This is eating my brain.

A few tips. If you fill a truck with say 8 units of something, then only a few are required at the destination, you can wait until they are delivered and then fiddle the mouse around near the truck on the map, after making sure it's selected. It will "pop out" a bit from the background, and all the white towns nearby will too. Drag that truck icon and you'll see all the other nearby places that need that good. Send it to one of those to draw down the rest of the goods in the truck.

If you have a truck full of goods needed to run a factory, but the factory input is full, the truck will power off (small button to the lower right of the speedometer) and throw a message that the input is full. Just wait until it's used, then power on the truck and the factory will draw more of the input from the truck. Sure, your truck has just been sitting there, but considering it can cost a thousand per unit of goods to empty the truck and send it off somewhere, using the truck as a temporary warehouse is not bad.

Does anyone know how to build industry and storehouses?

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