Hi everyone! Progress continues, slowly but surely, during the pandemic. Today, we wanted to talk some more about how the upcoming Campaign Mode will work!
This is a major addition to the game (almost like a second game on top of the first!), so it's definitely taking a bit longer than anticipated, but we're making progress!
Campaign Mode Details
When you start a new campaign, a planet will be randomly generated for you:
These planets are separated into tiles. Each tile has its own biome that determines what kinds of resources are available there.
In addition, there are four types of structures that can be built on a tile: Resource Gatherers, Cities, Industrial Parks, and Logistics Stations.
Resource Gatherers
Resource Gatherers are structures like lumberjack camps, mines, quarries, farms, and pastures that grow or extract raw resources from the land. These can only be built by AI companies, who then offer competitive market prices for export contracts that you as the player can choose to take. But beware! There are AI manufacturers who may scoop up the best contracts if you're too slow, causing prices to go up with demand.
Industrial Parks
Industrial Parks are tiles that contain factories and warehouses. Many of these will be vacant upon starting a new game, just awaiting a lease. These factory spaces have varied sizes and shapes, and their rent will be based on many factors, including square footage, amenities, and local supply/demand.
Logistics Stations
By default, all purchase and sales contracts are carried out by cargo trucks on roads.
But sometimes, you need to be able to haul more goods or haul them to/from somewhere not connected by a road. That's what logistics stations are for. Eventually there will be three types:
- Train Stations - Allowing trucks to load/unload large quantities to transport long distances. Expensive to build the stations/tracks/trains, but very cheap to run afterwards. We hope to have train stations implemented for the initial campaign, but they may be pushed back to the first post-campaign update.
- Cargo Harbor - Allows huge but slow cargo ships to transport goods across bodies of water. These are big and expensive, but require no tracks (just water) and have the biggest cargo capacity in the game. Cargo Harbors and water transport will not be available in the initial campaign update, but will come in a later update.
- Airport - Airports are a very expensive, but completely unrestricted, method of cargo transportation. Airports and air transport will not be available in the initial campaign update, but will come in a later update.
Cities
Cities are the true heart of the campaign mode's simulation. Cities will contain hundreds or thousands of residents who each live individually simulated lives. They live in houses with families, they get jobs and take care of kids and their elderly parents, they move out and get married and have children themselves... and each of these households need products that you can provide.
Everything that can be manufactured in your factories will be categorized and graded by quality and quantity. In the cities, to feed the needs of the population, AI retail companies will open stores and place purchase order requests to fill their shelves. You, or your AI rivals, can take these contracts and deliver an agreed upon amount of product to their store once a day for a tidy profit.
But you have to watch the markets carefully... flood a consumer good category with too much product and the prices will bottom out. Alternately, you can limit your production to make sure demand outpaces supply to drive the price up, but this gives your rivals an opening to undercut you on price. Products sell at different rates too; i.e. furniture doesn't need to be replaced often, but if a population is growing, they'll need more of it, whereas things like clothing and cleaning products are purchased more regularly. In addition, the households that are simulated will have different buying habits based on their economic situation. Lower class households will tend to buy cheaper goods, middle class usually looks for a good value that they can afford, and upper class will often buy the most expensive regardless of quality.
Building efficient factories will help you keep lean margins, which will be important when trying to make up your overhead costs for rent and deliveries and raw materials. Or you could just play hardball negotiating contracts to buy low and sell high. Or just find an untapped niche where untold profits await. Maybe a rival sawmill has a surplus of planks, so it's cheaper to buy them from there instead of cutting your own from raw logs? You'll never know if you don't look!
Every campaign will start out randomly generated and have a reactive, organic economy, so no two games will ever be quite alike.
We hope you're as excited about this update as we are! We've certainly been looking forward to releasing it for a long time. Right now, nearly all of the core mechanics are working, so we're primarily just expanding the amount of content and production trees available to make sure the economy has enough goods to remain diverse, and then we'll need to do some balance testing.
We're hoping for a release in time for the holiday season, but no guarantees just yet.
Also: This is another reminder that the price of the game will increase when this update comes out, to reflect the value of the new content.