Posted June 14, 2018
This game initially presents as a cutesy modern TTD, or perhaps a more business-oriented SC2K, but it actually conceals more depth than the TT or SC games ever had, even in its current unfinished state. More depth, though currently less breadth.
I plopped down a few orchards, a water siphon, an oil drill, and a warehouse, and eventually configured them more or less appropriately. I then got supply and distribution to a place I liked. I was gaining reputation with all towns on the map (more slowly for the farther-away ones), but I wasn't turning a profit.
Well, that turned out to be because I took out a pretty unfavorable loan to finance my expansion, and it was impossible to turn a profit in light of my monthly payments. So I had to figure out how to do a loan consolidation, taking out a just-barely-large-enough loan to pay off the previous ones, at a much longer repayment plan, and correspondingly smaller monthly payment (in fact I slashed it by 2/3). Immediately I began turning a modest profit, which I could eventually leverage through further expansion (at a sane pace this time) and eventual loan repayment. I further assume that after I figure out how to correctly deploy truck depots, my vehicle upkeep will go down or else my sales will go up, either one in lesser proportion to the increase in building upkeep of having the depot. There'd be little point in logistic buildings if they didn't do this. Due to my previous bad loan choices, I can't afford to experiment with this without restarting the game.
So, this game makes you think carefully about solvency, and in fact having a grasp of ECON 101 actually helps a lot. Many games are afraid to assume the player has any particular knowledge for fear of alienating potential customers, but that's not a good way of looking at it. Any good game should teach you in steps how to play the game. Becoming good at this game constitutes developing valid economic intuitions that could, conceivably, benefit you outside the game. Not because you're going to learn anything important about the financials of an apple orchard, perhaps, but there are a lot of general principles at play here that are worth knowing.
The game does a good job of simulating local markets. Everything isn't priced at global market value, and indeed "global market value" only exists in the game as an abstraction of deeper game mechanics. The price you actually get at a given farmer's market or hardware store is the global market baseline weighted by actual supply and demand at that store, defined probably in some way relating to the population and prosperity of the town. When a town is experiencing shortfalls you can clean up by supplying them, and this is a remarkably astute business move.
I underestimated how much these price fluctations matter until I tried to calculate the individual profitabilities of my buildings and discovered a discrepancy of about $60K in my favor, which is more than any one of my buildings actually earns. I realized this was because I was using the global market prices in my calculations rather than the actual sale prices I was getting in the local markets, which was anywhere from 10%-25% in my favor. So by supplying to markets that actually needed my products, I was earning the profits of an invisible extra two production buildings that I didn't have to pay for.
The fact that the demo tech tree only goes two layers deep is frustrating but understandable. It's a demo. I am also eager to discover what industry parks and administrative buildings are going to be. The terraforming tools seem quite well-balanced. I was able to make room for more water harvesters at what I suppose is a reasonable price. The fact that this game uses the early SimCity water-exists-anywhere-you-drop-elevation-enough mechanic is perhaps ignorable. The game already runs pretty badly considering how little detail there actually is on the screen at any given time, and implementing something like real fluid mechanics would grind it to a halt.
I would prefer that the game provided more information BEFORE you built certain things, so you would know beforehand whether to bother. I built a fisherman pier (and paid millions for the build permit besides) only to discover afterwards that I couln't locate any fish. The demo map doesn't have any fish tiles, so I was left to guess whether this meant that any water tile might have fish, or else the demo map has no fish (which is actually a huge oversight of the demo map). I abhor guess-and-check game mechanics. I assume the map layers view is intended to fix this, but an actual planning mode would be nice, where you can plop ghost buildings for free (and perhaps even virtually link them to existing buildings) to predict peak returns, tweak their placement, and then deploy the plan if you like it (and can afford it). Most plop-building-make-money games would benefit from a planning mechanic, but I have yet to see one correctly implement it.
There's currently no specific way to see the profitability of individual buildings. You're shown their productivity and their costs, but not their profitability. You can multiply their product by its market price to get a rough idea, but if the game is going to go through any trouble to show you ledger items then it should go through the trouble to show you the important ones... like whether individual buildings are in the black or not. In a vertically-integrated business, it of course doesn't necessarily make sense to ask whether individual buildings are turning profits (we make up for the on-paper loss of the water harvesters by the profits of the farms they supply, and the factories supplied by those farms, etc), but if you're going for horizontal integration it matters a lot. And even for the vertically-integrated business, you need to decide whether to build or buy. My water harvester produces 15 units of water per month at a cost of about $1000 per unit. Meanwhile the global market values water at over $2000 per unit and I couldn't buy it wholesale nearby for less than arond $4500 per unit. So my decision to build water harvesters rather than buy water was justified. Though I am not actually SELLING any water, I am turning a good profit on my water harvesters, because the cheapest possible substitute is vastly more expensive. If the global price of water crashed for some reason, it's important to know the exact point at which it makes more sense to shut down my harvesters and buy water. I was able to derive that $1000 per unit figure with simple enough arithmetic, but this will disadvantage anyone who doesn't know they should do that. It would be very easy to simply show that number, along with a few others that are important. Per-unit cost, and realized per-unit profit (if applicable) are the big two.
I plopped down a few orchards, a water siphon, an oil drill, and a warehouse, and eventually configured them more or less appropriately. I then got supply and distribution to a place I liked. I was gaining reputation with all towns on the map (more slowly for the farther-away ones), but I wasn't turning a profit.
Well, that turned out to be because I took out a pretty unfavorable loan to finance my expansion, and it was impossible to turn a profit in light of my monthly payments. So I had to figure out how to do a loan consolidation, taking out a just-barely-large-enough loan to pay off the previous ones, at a much longer repayment plan, and correspondingly smaller monthly payment (in fact I slashed it by 2/3). Immediately I began turning a modest profit, which I could eventually leverage through further expansion (at a sane pace this time) and eventual loan repayment. I further assume that after I figure out how to correctly deploy truck depots, my vehicle upkeep will go down or else my sales will go up, either one in lesser proportion to the increase in building upkeep of having the depot. There'd be little point in logistic buildings if they didn't do this. Due to my previous bad loan choices, I can't afford to experiment with this without restarting the game.
So, this game makes you think carefully about solvency, and in fact having a grasp of ECON 101 actually helps a lot. Many games are afraid to assume the player has any particular knowledge for fear of alienating potential customers, but that's not a good way of looking at it. Any good game should teach you in steps how to play the game. Becoming good at this game constitutes developing valid economic intuitions that could, conceivably, benefit you outside the game. Not because you're going to learn anything important about the financials of an apple orchard, perhaps, but there are a lot of general principles at play here that are worth knowing.
The game does a good job of simulating local markets. Everything isn't priced at global market value, and indeed "global market value" only exists in the game as an abstraction of deeper game mechanics. The price you actually get at a given farmer's market or hardware store is the global market baseline weighted by actual supply and demand at that store, defined probably in some way relating to the population and prosperity of the town. When a town is experiencing shortfalls you can clean up by supplying them, and this is a remarkably astute business move.
I underestimated how much these price fluctations matter until I tried to calculate the individual profitabilities of my buildings and discovered a discrepancy of about $60K in my favor, which is more than any one of my buildings actually earns. I realized this was because I was using the global market prices in my calculations rather than the actual sale prices I was getting in the local markets, which was anywhere from 10%-25% in my favor. So by supplying to markets that actually needed my products, I was earning the profits of an invisible extra two production buildings that I didn't have to pay for.
The fact that the demo tech tree only goes two layers deep is frustrating but understandable. It's a demo. I am also eager to discover what industry parks and administrative buildings are going to be. The terraforming tools seem quite well-balanced. I was able to make room for more water harvesters at what I suppose is a reasonable price. The fact that this game uses the early SimCity water-exists-anywhere-you-drop-elevation-enough mechanic is perhaps ignorable. The game already runs pretty badly considering how little detail there actually is on the screen at any given time, and implementing something like real fluid mechanics would grind it to a halt.
I would prefer that the game provided more information BEFORE you built certain things, so you would know beforehand whether to bother. I built a fisherman pier (and paid millions for the build permit besides) only to discover afterwards that I couln't locate any fish. The demo map doesn't have any fish tiles, so I was left to guess whether this meant that any water tile might have fish, or else the demo map has no fish (which is actually a huge oversight of the demo map). I abhor guess-and-check game mechanics. I assume the map layers view is intended to fix this, but an actual planning mode would be nice, where you can plop ghost buildings for free (and perhaps even virtually link them to existing buildings) to predict peak returns, tweak their placement, and then deploy the plan if you like it (and can afford it). Most plop-building-make-money games would benefit from a planning mechanic, but I have yet to see one correctly implement it.
There's currently no specific way to see the profitability of individual buildings. You're shown their productivity and their costs, but not their profitability. You can multiply their product by its market price to get a rough idea, but if the game is going to go through any trouble to show you ledger items then it should go through the trouble to show you the important ones... like whether individual buildings are in the black or not. In a vertically-integrated business, it of course doesn't necessarily make sense to ask whether individual buildings are turning profits (we make up for the on-paper loss of the water harvesters by the profits of the farms they supply, and the factories supplied by those farms, etc), but if you're going for horizontal integration it matters a lot. And even for the vertically-integrated business, you need to decide whether to build or buy. My water harvester produces 15 units of water per month at a cost of about $1000 per unit. Meanwhile the global market values water at over $2000 per unit and I couldn't buy it wholesale nearby for less than arond $4500 per unit. So my decision to build water harvesters rather than buy water was justified. Though I am not actually SELLING any water, I am turning a good profit on my water harvesters, because the cheapest possible substitute is vastly more expensive. If the global price of water crashed for some reason, it's important to know the exact point at which it makes more sense to shut down my harvesters and buy water. I was able to derive that $1000 per unit figure with simple enough arithmetic, but this will disadvantage anyone who doesn't know they should do that. It would be very easy to simply show that number, along with a few others that are important. Per-unit cost, and realized per-unit profit (if applicable) are the big two.
