Honestly not sure, haven’t gotten that far yet.
I watched a tutorial or read some guide – and it said once you’ve upgraded to a level 3 you can upgrade it.
Anyway, enjoying the game – it’s 2.21am here. Not quite quarter-to-three, but close enough. But the UI is complete dog poop and the mouse controls are so flaky!
I wanted to love this game, but a bug in the tutorial wouldn’t check off one of my missions even after doing it over and over again. I guess I’ll start completely over and try again
Oh wow, that’s awesome!
Pod, I actually love the UI, in its own quirky way. It is super finicky though.
The graphics on the screenshot looks very… jarring. It’s like a sticker book, with stickers from different books.
I can’t get on board with the UI. Elements overlap each other, and selecting the right thing is an exercise in frustration. I like the game just fine – It’s relaxing. But the UI is just… geez.
Even though I know the exact set of pixels I should be clicking to perform the action I want, after approaching 10 hours of gameplay the UI is still terrible to use. I often find myself accidentally selecting trucks/towns I don’t want and zooming to parts of the map when I didn’t intend to. It also has terrible performance for what amounts to 15 trucks moving between a bunch of graph nodes.
Still: Fun game!
Does anyone have any strategy-tips? e.g. How many trucks of each type? Is it OK to buy ancient trucks, or save the money and get the more expensive ones?
I know that completing towns is a great way to make cash and it gives bonuses to your trucks, which can turn even an ancient and slow truck into a speedster.
There’s also some kind of leaderboard in this game, which I think is just a count of the number of towns you’ve provided goods for. The only person I have on it is @BrianRubin, and I’m already beating him on that metric, it seems! Complete more towns, Rubin, your trucks will thank you. :)
edit:
Ps to answer this question directly, there both aren’t and are time constraints.
-
Aren’t: You can just leave your trucks sitting around with the game “unpaused”†. Nothing will happen, they won’t cost you any money, no one will care.
-
Are: When you start providing goods to a town in an effort to “complete” it or whatever the game terminology is, it does start a slow timer. The town will “eat” the resources you give it until it’s at 100% in all categories it wants. This presents a bit of a challenge for some towns as you have to muster all the resources and trucks and dispatch them all at once to the town in an effort not to waste too much. The game tracks the wastage as a “score” and it also scales the amount of money you get from a town. (Also, for some of the really huge towns, if you just had one truck slowly delivering goods to them from one side of Australia to the other you’d never complete them). But it’s Star Craft 100apm level frantic or anything.
† I say “unpause”, but the game’s implementation of pausing is terrible. You can’t effectively give orders whilst paused because the screen doesn’t update anything properly, so you have no idea what’s going on.
I’ve played about 10 hours of it now, and yeah that UI…
Other than that, the important thing to realize is that you’re not trying to build up a transport network, so much as putting together the stockpiles and trucks necessary to achieve the next goal. Eg, you don’t need to have a truck tasked with constant feeding of a steel-mill if you don’t have steel needs in the immediate future.
Also, upgrading industries, both production and storage, is massive since it also impacts the efficiency with which it processes the input ingredients, and the output stockpile grows something like 10 -> 60 -> 120 -> 240, so getting that first upgrade is a huge step up.
At this point my truck pool is something like 6 1-tonners, 8 dump-trucks, and 1 articulated truck (in Australia). The Utes & TukTuks just don’t have the required load cap.
I appear to have hit a bug where selling trucks doesn’t actually give you any money! Which is a shame, as I might change the composition of my fleet soon, especially upgrading the 3 cheapest 8T trucks I bought near the start of the game. They’re so slow, compared to the newer ones, even with the P and B boosts.
My current composition is 3x1T, 9x8T, 2x20T, 1x40T. I found that 8T trucks are definitely more useful than 1T ones, and I only really keep those around to help quickly “prime” new places that only input/output 2 goods at a time or whatever. And I think it’s worth getting the cheap but slow ones at the start, as you can complete towns using them which give them speed boosts that last a long time. I’m currently deliberately ‘farming’ boosts form y 40T and 20T trucks to stop them being so slugging.
Oh man, sorry to hear that. You should post on the Steam forums, the dev is very responsive.
Thanks for the extra info Pod.
I did! :P (I linked to the thread I posted in)
Note: The game has a TERRIBLE NAME when it comes to googling for it. I’m surprised developers are still picking a single common English word as names of a product in 2017.
Oh sorry, I missed the link. Any luck?
And yeah, Googling it is a challenge.
It’s got such a great combination of long-term planning, short-term opportunity chasing, exploration, and grinding.
Not that grinding is a good thing in a game, but in this, at least, it’s automated grinding, which turns grinding into a sense of achievement. Repairing a road in New South Wales may require you to deliver 200 concrete from very far away, so you buy a couple double trucks and upgrade your concrete factory to level 3 and make sure it’s sufficiently stocked with raw materials and then you set your huge slow beasts on the job and while you’re off trying to get aluminum production up and running in Boggawilla or Woggabilla or whatever the hell it’s called you suddenly get alerted that this road is finally open. Ding!
I love that after a couple (well, probably ten) hours of obsessively upgrading the storage facilities in Paramatta, Merrylands, and Grenville, and figuring out how to stock them with goods (like, there was two hours of “DROP EVERYTHING, WE ARE MAKING ENGINES AND THINGS WITH ENGINES IN THEM!”), I was doing something else, getting bread production working, and I had a free dump truck sitting around in Sydney. “Hm,” I thought, “I wonder if any of those towns I couldn’t solve are solvable now.” And I went from 95 to 110 cities solved in ten minutes.
There are so many interesting problems! Like, I can paint my trucks any color I want just as soon as I upgrade the paint factory to level 3. How the hell can I find enough demand for paint that I can get the level 2 factory upgradable? Still haven’t figured that out. Simply filling my home improvement center up with paint isn’t enough.
And then I zoom out and realize how much Australia remains. Dear God. Alice Springs is SO FAR AWAY.
This game has the addictiveness of early-game Factorio without the overwhelming complexity of late-game Factorio, and that is what I need in my life right now.
I am so happy to hear you’re enjoying it. :) How many hours do you have in it so far?
Paint is a required input to Magazines (along with Paper), so that can get some more, closer to home, usage as well.
The only sadness so far is that If I want to do a route A-B, where A produces something B wants, and B produces something A wants, I can’t use a truck to just ping-pong between the two always full without annoying micro.
Oh I did this the other day. But I don’t have Aluminium yet so my Engine factory is stuck at producing 15 :'( Thankfully I have 2X gamespeed from doing Canberra.
Where do I get Aluminium from?
ps: Don’t buy those road-train Trucks unless you’re moving stuff from one side of Aus to the other. I just splashed 750,000 on one thinking I could use it the same places I could use the 40T truck, but nope, it can only go on those trans-australia highways, so it can’t any closer to the Sydney area than the place I bought it! I would sell it, but I’m still afflicted by that bug…
Other than uglyness and bugs, this is my major complaint so far. (And cities requiring goods they themselves produce??) I know it’s a “puzzle” rather than a “transport tycoon” style game, but I’d quite like to be able to set up routes for my trucks.
The truck-selling bug is at least off-set by the lack of penalty for Cancel Load. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to do that now that most of my storage facilities are full. The game tells you it is supposed to be a $8010 penalty, but I’ve never seen it deducted.
Although, it would be less often if it wasn’t for the weirdness that sometimes I can drop off multiple loads from a single truck and other times it seems like I can only drop off the remaining load at a storage facility? I’m still not sure if there is any rhyme or reason in that.
And yes, whither Aluminum in Australia is one of our times great unanswered questions.
(I don’t know) it’s probably on the west coast past a quarantine marker or something… I just tasked a pair of dump trucks to always keep the engine factory in Steel and Fuel.
Right now I’m just working my way down the “needs one of” challenges, so I’m getting together the materials for robots…