Logistics in strategy games?

[Damned Registrations]

-u

If we're not just talking military logistics, Factorio is the ultimate logistics simulation in a strategy game

I'd throw in various city/economy sims into that category, stuff like Pharoah, Victoria, Patrician and so forth. Also, Dwarf Fortress arguable beats factorio if you want nitty gritty logistics. Can't make pants without some kind of fabric or hide and a craftsman and a place to work and beer and food and... Yeah. Obvious Rimworld is the kiddie pool version of that.

Surprised to not see the Total War games mentioned. Yeah, it's the barebones attrition on armies effect, but that's more than some games do, and I like that hunkering down to forage for supplies is an option, and some factions do it better than others, and terrain effects matter.

Shadow Empires is a deep logistics system as well. Conquering territory isn't enough; you need to build roads or railways, and then you need to build supply depots along them and have fuel to run them, and you need to do those things in proportion to the size of the army you're trying to support and it's needs.

Star Sector is another good one. While the fleet side is fairly abstract, the planetary/economy side is pretty detailed, even including things like smuggling for illegal drugs if you've got a large enough population or a nasty sector like mining, and these logistics get influenced by diplomacy with other factions, pirate and terrorist raids and bases, and actual merchant fleets being destroyed. You can ruin a planet by starving it of a resource. Or make a huge profit by doing that and then trading with it on the black market.

 

[Nutmeg]

Now if only Factorio didn't have modern style "crafting" BS

 

[General Disarray]

All the Wargame games and WARNO have ammo and fuel that you need to resupply.

 

[Azdul]

Order of Battle: World War 2 extends Panzer General formula with logistics - and immediately it feels more realistic than Panzer General.

Unless arbitrary turn limits in Panzer General were supposed to represent sorry state of Wehrmacht logistics throughout the war that can be overcomed only by lightning fast victories in very short campaigns.

 

[Nutmeg]

Damned Registrations and Berekän why the ratings? Is it because you guys like the Minecraft style crafting and think I am stupid for not liking it? Or I am mistaken in its presence or importance to the game?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, first up, crafting wasn't invented by minecraft. And there's not exactly a lot of ways to go about turning materials into finished products. You've basically either got skills involved or not, and involving skills in a game about mass production would be silly. I'm assuming that's what you mean by modern; the fact that you don't need to sit around throwing thousands of sticks and rocks together to make a hatchet reliably like you did in the good old days of everquest.

Second, crafting is, like, the entire point of that game. What would you even be doing without the crafting? Spending credits to put down defenses like it's some shitty RTS?

 

[Nutmeg]

I'm assuming that's what you mean by modern; the fact that you don't need to sit around throwing thousands of sticks and rocks together to make a hatchet reliably like you did in the good old days of everquest.

Sorry, I stopped playing new games around 2008 and I rarely play games made after 2006, so when I say modern I might be referring to things over 15 years old now. Mainly, I mean the kind of crafting I assume was popularized by Minecraft, as prior to Minecraft I didn't notice it appearing in, and IMO severely declining, games I could otherwise enjoy. Let me elaborate with reference to something concrete:

If we watch the first few minutes of this video:



which is I assume typical (please correct me if I'm wrong, I *want* to be wrong), we can see the player controlling a single character as they click on props in the scenery to collect "materials", these materials then appear as occupied slots in a grid based inventory, and are combined using forge structures of some kind to yield second order materials, which are then used to build other structures and combined to make third order products and so on and so forth. Also the video is heavily cut, and in others I can see this phase of the game takes much longer than it appears here. So, this is what I'm referring to. And while the game does evolve away from this type of play as the video goes on to focus more on logistics and automation, the kernel of character based resource collection and crafting as in Minecraft remains.

Second, crafting is, like, the entire point of that game. What would you even be doing without the crafting? Spending credits to put down defenses like it's some shitty RTS?

Well, something like the Settlers or Locomotion and Transport Tycoon, the latter of which is was the basis for Factorio -- the maker of Factorio was an excellent OpenTTD content creator prior to making his own game. In these games, players skip the character control, manual terrain prop harvesting and inventory drag and drop crafting, to instead deal with logistics and automation from the outset.

 

[manifest]

Check out Kohan, Zone of Supply is just the game's healing system though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

which is I assume typical

While YMMV, in my experience the first ~30 minutes or so of the game are very atypical compared to the rest of it. Generally speaking, doing any crafting or gathering or transportation by hand after the first 5 minutes or so in facotrio is sign you have fucked up or are trying to speedrun shit. In particular, gathering resources by hand instead of belts is terribly inefficient. I tend to do a fair bit of that anyways out of laziness, but more experienced players tend to have plans from the start that vastly reduce the amount of fiddling with inventory. Clicking on a forge to carry it's contents elsewhere is the result of bad planning- you should have had a belt or something set up to do that for you, and your factory should be set up in such a way that you have no shortfalls you need to correct by hand. That's like, the entire point of the game. It's technically advantageous to instantly teleport some shit from one box to another 15 feet away using your inventory, but outside of speedruns where you know exactly how much to move and when, you're better off setting up automation instead to massively overkill the problem in the long run.

For context, here's three achievements in the game on steam and their completion rates:

Win the game : 18.2%
Construct more machines using robots than manually (Titled "You're doing it right") : 8% - Note this refers to placing buildings on the ground by simply laying down blueprints and having drones fly off and move things from chests. Producing more materials with automation than manually is a foregone conclusion pretty much immediately.

Win the game while manually crafting no more than 111 items : 3%

That last one is not terribly hard to do and I suspect it'd be a lot higher if there was any sort of incentive to getting achievements in the game. It's honestly hardly even a handicap past the first 10 minutes or so. Not manually crafting objects is technically leaving some amount of production on the table, but your character's crafting speed is outstipped by having like, 4 assemblers. By the time you're 30 minutes in you should already have dozens if you know what you're doing. By the midgame, I'm using radar to lay down blueprints of solar farms because I can't be assed to walk over to where I want my solar panels to go and create the layout in person.


Here's a video of someone not just getting that last achievement, but all the achievements, including the various speedrunning ones that require reaching trains and rockets within certain timeframes. Which obviously implies that not manually crafting things doesn't hold you back that much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jPbPfh8wYs

If your gripe with the game is needing to manually lay down factories and belts from inventory, there are some popular mods that give you some primitive logistics bots to start with so you can just lay down blueprints and watch them do that shit for you. I personally like having to unlock that feature, as the change in gameplay makes it feel more rewarding to climb the tech tree, but to each their own.

If your gripe with the game is having to navigate grids full of dozens of objects to pick the correct ones to assign as outputs or construct as buildings, well, that is indeed the core gameplay and there's no getting around that.

 

[Jaedar]

If we watch the first few minutes of this video:

You do everything by hand in the first few minutes, after an hour you only deal with the extraction, moving, refining and consumption of material by hand placing all the roads, buildings, miners, etc.
After say a dozen hours (although obviously this depends) you'll make a single 'perfect' design for each thing that needs to get done, and then copy paste it until satisfied. And if you don't feel like belts you can also get robots to "teleport" material for you.

You can't really compare it to minecraft or other standard survival crafting games, where at the start you are mining wood with an iron pickaxe and 10 hours later mining obsidian with a diamond pickaxe.

 

[Nutmeg]

If your gripe with the game is needing to manually lay down factories and belts from inventory, there are some popular mods that give you some primitive logistics bots to start with so you can just lay down blueprints and watch them do that shit for you. I personally like having to unlock that feature, as the change in gameplay makes it feel more rewarding to climb the tech tree, but to each their own.

If your gripe with the game is having to navigate grids full of dozens of objects to pick the correct ones to assign as outputs or construct as buildings, well, that is indeed the core gameplay and there's no getting around that.

In brief, I think the game would be better if it did away with the character altogether and instead controlled like any number of other builder games e.g. the Settlers or Transport Tycoon.

 

[Jaedar]

If your gripe with the game is needing to manually lay down factories and belts from inventory, there are some popular mods that give you some primitive logistics bots to start with so you can just lay down blueprints and watch them do that shit for you. I personally like having to unlock that feature, as the change in gameplay makes it feel more rewarding to climb the tech tree, but to each their own.

If your gripe with the game is having to navigate grids full of dozens of objects to pick the correct ones to assign as outputs or construct as buildings, well, that is indeed the core gameplay and there's no getting around that.

In brief, I think the game would be better if it did away with the character altogether and instead controlled like any number of other builder games e.g. the Settlers or Transport Tycoon.

The character provides a smoother learning curve, and adds some depth to managing the xenos and mining expansions.

If you still feel it's a bad choice after you finished the demo I'd like to hear the reasoning.

 

[Silva]

Logistics is boring.

The best games include it in some abstract form that makes you deal with it without even knowing it.

CHange my mind.

 

[Harthwain]

The best games include it in some abstract form that makes you deal with it without even knowing it.

You mean: most games don't really have logistics to begin with. Logistics is about transporting supplies/goods, not requiring some resources to buy certain troops. Abstract that too much and you won't really have logistics in your game. Because just having a resource doesn't mean it can be put to use, because of your supply problems.

Anno games had logistics of sorts, by allowing you to transport goods between islands (apparently Anno 1800 has the best logistics & supply chain mechanics).

The Settlers, too, had some missions where you had to establish supply chains between different islands in order to win (and the whole game was really all about creating working supply chains, so it does fit into a strategy game centred around logistics).

 

[adddeed]

Conquest Frontier Wars has a supply mechanics. If you dont resupply your fleets when out in space, they become pretty much useless.

 

[Silva]

You mean: most games don't really have logistics to begin with. Logistics is about transporting supplies/goods,

Transporting food is boring. I want to kill shit, not play Uber-simulator.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You mean: most games don't really have logistics to begin with. Logistics is about transporting supplies/goods,

Transporting food is boring. I want to kill shit, not play Uber-simulator.

I mean, the transportation might be boring, but it enables strategies like cutting off supply lines to kill more powerful enemies with a smaller, more agile force. Makes the game more interesting than just mashing numbers against each other until biggest number wins. Same reason diplomacy and research and economy mechanics are interesting.

 

[Nutmeg]

Transportation of supplies can be abstracted so players don't actually have to give orders to a simulated supply unit, and oft. when it is abstracted it's easier for the computer to cut off a human player's supply e.g. in Order of Battle, where the AI will most definitely cut off any units you charge deep into their territory.

That said I find logistics entertaining in and of itself hence why games like TTD are enjoyable. My issue with TTD however is that there's no challenge really -- it's strictly a sandbox.

 

[Storyfag]

Any game featuring gathering of resources.

 

[Storyfag]

Harthwain, explain. How is harassing enemy peons functionally different from hitting an ammo/fuel depot? Before long, the enemy front line will start loosing effectiveness and cohesion.

 

[Harthwain]

Harthwain, explain. How is harassing enemy peons functionally different from hitting an ammo/fuel depot? Before long, the enemy front line will start loosing effectiveness and cohesion.

There are no logistics involved. If you build a sawmill, you can chop wood and it will teleport to your global storage. Now contrast that with a game where items have to physically arrive from point A to point B.

 

[Axioms]

Harthwain, explain. How is harassing enemy peons functionally different from hitting an ammo/fuel depot? Before long, the enemy front line will start loosing effectiveness and cohesion.

There are no logistics involved. If you build a sawmill, you can chop wood and it will teleport to your global storage. Now contrast that with a game where items have to physically arrive from point A to point B.

So many people only experience the behind the scenes of economics in abstracted videogames so they don't even understand what the games are missing. Even worse is that even city builders rarely have real logistics. First they often lack combat and second due to technical constraints you are often only building 1 real settlement.

Harrassing supply chains or dealing with regional instability is almost never represented in games. Even in something like EU4 or especially Imperator logistics isn't really real. "Trade goods" in EU4 are fake news and for Imperator even if you lose your trade routes that just impacts minor stacking modifiers.

I think The Imperium: Greek Wars might be the only game, aside from Shadow Empires, that even takes logistics remotely seriously.

 

[Storyfag]

Harthwain, explain. How is harassing enemy peons functionally different from hitting an ammo/fuel depot? Before long, the enemy front line will start loosing effectiveness and cohesion.

There are no logistics involved. If you build a sawmill, you can chop wood and it will teleport to your global storage. Now contrast that with a game where items have to physically arrive from point A to point B.

But more often than not, the wood still needs to be physically transported from the forest to the sawmill by the peons. Yes, it gets abstracted after that. But en route? Logistics. Gold from the gold mine? The same.

 

[Harthwain]

But more often than not, the wood still needs to be physically transported from the forest to the sawmill by the peons. Yes, it gets abstracted after that. But en route? Logistics. Gold from the gold mine? The same.

There is a world of difference between the same and almost the same. Carrying a bag of gold from the mine to the town hall that is five feet away is not really logistics. Imperivm is a better fit here, because you had to establish the actual supply lines there.

 

[what am i doing]

Harthwain, explain. How is harassing enemy peons functionally different from hitting an ammo/fuel depot? Before long, the enemy front line will start loosing effectiveness and cohesion.

There are no logistics involved. If you build a sawmill, you can chop wood and it will teleport to your global storage. Now contrast that with a game where items have to physically arrive from point A to point B.

But more often than not, the wood still needs to be physically transported from the forest to the sawmill by the peons. Yes, it gets abstracted after that. But en route? Logistics. Gold from the gold mine? The same.

If you then had to physically transport the resource back to your base at least, I'd agree (even if you could then spend it on units without taking it to the buildings making them, at least there would be logistics in one direction) but if you just have a villager walk to a building right next to where they're working... I don't really think there's any logistics there. You don't need to do any sort of planning on what route will be taken, and there isn't really a supply chain that can be cut - the closest thing to it would be killing the villager while they're moving the resource, but that's actually just killing the worker.

You could make an argument that deciding to put the sawmill near the forest instead of far away is logistics gameplay, but in that case, it's really, really bad logistics gameplay and it would reflect better on the game to just say it doesn't have logistics gameplay.