Games with complex-required-supporting-real-e2e logistics?
I've long enjoyed Foxhole and X4 and was wondering what other games has similar logistical systems. Both give the same satisfying feeling when you look at the big picture of how the games are a complex interplay between the immediate gameplay, and what is being simulated "behind the scenes" to enable it.
The descriptor in the title is a bit of a mouthful, so let's break down what I mean.
Complex
To exclude typical resource game mechanics, where you "just" mine resources which gives you resource points that you can spend directly.
Required & Supporting
In Foxhole the main objective is to push the front and win the war. And players can focus on that and never have to really think about how they get their weapons and ammo. But at the same time the logistics is the entire reason they even can fight.
In X4 you can fly about and do stuff and acquire ships while relying on the AI empires economies. But there has to be some alive economy for the game to not go to a standstill.
In short, logistics systems that are required by the game, but not necessarily by the individual player.
This excludes games where the logistics system is the game, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, etc.
Real end-2-end
To specify that there should as little cheating as possible. Though obviously there is always some cheating in games. Both in X4 and Foxhole, every resource is tracked right from harvest, to refinement, to the end product. And all steps require real moving of goods by AI (X4) or players (Foxhole) between factories, other intermediaries, and end users.
So what other similar games are there? I was thinking of EVE Online, but I think only the player orgs in null-sec have real economies in that game, and you could still play it if they all suddenly stopped.
Regarding eve online, aside from the very basics, everything else is player crafted - someone has to mine the minerals, someone uses them to build a ship, etc. This is less relevant to the average player, and the availability in high sec means the logistics are only really interesting in the nullsec zones, as you've mentioned.
However, if everyone stopped playing, you'd quickly (well, relatively) run out of all the things and have to do it yourself
Thanks for the correction. I haven't really played EVE Online and thought that at the base of it it is like most space-sims where high-sec marketplaces always can sell wares, with maybe only the price fluctuating.
Only the lowest tier items are freely available. Most items have to be purchased in one of the major market hubs. Each station has a market, but the community has made a few de-facto stations as the designated primary player market hubs. Players produce the items either from farming them from enemies or from manufacturing. The major manufacturing is done in nullsec space by the various empires, then there's an entire system of freighters and logistics to get it from there to the market hubs safely. Which isn't always successful - and some of stuff seen destroyed in freighter kill notifications is PAINFUL - like, weeks of IRL salary worth of game time cards painful (EVE has pretty good knowable conversion rates between IRL and in game currency because you can buy game time with either money or in-game currency, and you can buy it as a tradeable item, so you can spend real money to get an item that you can sell to other players for in-game currency).
Yup, it has been years since I did play EVE Online but the farther you got from the central trade hubs the more flying around you had to do in order to get all the different things for your ship. It was often a very real choice between spending a long time flying around to the spots with high availability and good prices, paying a premium locally (if available) or settling on lesser parts. This didn't even apply to nullsec but also lowsec and even highsec areas that were just not near trade hubs.
I also knew various people who made good in game money knowing exactly where to trade outside of the trade hubs to benefit from this dynamic.
The best example of that I've seen is Ingress.
At the normal scale, it's tug of war, blue vs. green. There is no clear end-point, simply the fun of building and destruction
But during some live ops, when things get bounded in time and with distinct goals, global scale communities form, strategize, plan and execute operations with real humans in real places doing wild, incredible things. People have flown into remote places in Alaska to complete an op, coordinated false flags across an entire country to 'sneak a play' around the North Pole, sent mountain climbing units out with sat phones to execute key plays at the exact right time. In less extraordinary moments, small 'military style's units form, are tasked and operated from eyes in the sky towards the master plan. Resource planning and acquisition is months in the making. Folks have even recruited pilots and stewards into the game to increase the frequency of item transfers between far locations.
The logistics are completely emergent from the win state, timeline and gamerules, but their complexity exceeds anything else I can think of.
It's less played now than it was ten or so years ago, but it still has a pretty diehard core user group that keep things interesting.
Up the RES.
Haven't played in a while. I stopped when they deleted the quantum capsule feature, I loved those and had lots of them with little farms for B8 and rare keys.
No motivation to continue after that.
Plus, it's really hard when you've nothing to do but microfield a small village, wait for decay, and do it again.
My recommendations would be:
The Knuckle Cracker games are more RTS than 4X, but logistics is a central component of their gameplay. I can't praise these games enough. Here's a very old Tildes comment I wrote about Creeper World 3:
If Distant Worlds is known for anything, it's the game's complexity and grand scale. I wouldn't even say Distant Worlds is a 4X game, I'd graduate it to "empire management simulator". Logistics is just one of the many things the player will need to manage, alongside research, ship design, diplomacy, intelligence, politics, and military.
What makes Distant Worlds special is that each aspect of empire management can be automated for the player. You can even "play" the game with everything automated, and just stare at the screen for a few hours. Or you can do everything manually, or pick and choose what parts of the game you want to focus on. Of course, just because something is automated, doesn't mean you can't also meddle in it. You can, for example, automate colonization, and your empire will expand without your input, but you could still manually designate a planet for colonization. That would queue a colony ship to be built, and it would automatically be ordered to colonize that planet, etc.
Distant Worlds also has a sequel, but I haven't played it yet.
I don't actually recommend Aurora 4X, I'm just mentioning it in case you're that very extremely specific kind of person who might like this sort of game (and if you are, welcome!).
Aurora 4X is a ridiculously detailed and complex game. It is heavily focused on logistics, research, and design. To explain the game's complexity, let's use designing a ship as an example:
You want to create a fast Scout Missile Corvette, capable of entering new star systems, scanning them with its sensors, and making sure everything is clear for Geological Research Vessels to come in and do their thing.
Okay, this ship is a scout, so it needs to be pretty small. We'll say a hull size of about 10,000 tons. It should be pretty fast, but also have a decent amount of range. So, we'll give it a big, but fuel-efficient engine.
What engine technology should we use? We've researched all the way to Inertial Confinement Fusion engines, but our fuel efficiency with that technology isn't great yet. We've maxed our research into engine size for Magneto-Plasma engines, so we could get excellent fuel efficiency with that design, but power (and thus speed) would be less than if we used the ICF mentioned before, or even just a Magnetic Confinement Drive.
Okay, screw it, we'll just go for the largest Magneto-Plasma engine possible, to maximize our fuel-efficiency (and thus range), at the cost of some speed. The purpose of these ships are to enter unknown and potentially hostile systems, so they need to be expendable anyways. We can afford to lose a few of them just because they couldn't outrun [REDACTED].
But should this ship also be stealthy? Before we finalize our engine design, we need to decide how easy our ship should be to spot with thermal sensors. For Magneto-Plasma engines, we've researched thermal drive signature reduction down to 80% of normal. Because we are putting a massive engine on the back of this ship, our thermal drive signature will still be pretty bright. 80% is a decent reduction though, and we can sacrifice a tiny amount of range and speed if it means avoiding [REDACTED] sensors.
Okay, we've finalized our engine design, but speaking of sensors, this ship is supposed to scan systems and identify potential threats. It's going to need long range, accurate, and sensitive sensors to detect everything in the system. We will at least need very large and powerful electro-magnetic and thermal sensors. A large active tracking sensor for finding ships far away would be good. We might also want to include a small active tracking sensor optimized for combat and fire control. Okay, now let's design each of these sensors...
I think you get the idea.
Except, no, you don't, because this is a Missile Corvette and that means it needs missiles to fire at things.
So we have to design the missile launcher...
And that launcher needs missiles...
And those missiles need engines...
And then something, either on the ship or the missiles themselves, needs to tell the missiles where to go and what to hit...
So those missiles need sensors...
And the ship needs a fire control system...
And once we have finished designing each of these components, then we need to research each of them, just like we would any other technology...
After that, we can assign a specific shipyard (or shipyards) to retool for that specific ship type...
Then finally, once all of that is done, we can order the construction of X amount of our Tedium-class Scout Missile Corvette.
Okay, I think now you're getting the idea.
If you're still interested in checking out the game, I think any of these playlists on YouTube would be a decent introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlw1Ryz0f8s
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTLH5xzGKAolcaXLAhGlcvkaCqcuzgR1C
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfTxfvIdAKluIib5W70k45qmdF-Ym7pEf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhUGGEnJcU
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR5ZBfGW6e1mmQBsRhAxHmZM1a7GQ9Rcl
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz-vcrP1cq-GpxO4fsna-pUNwbKZOwoCv
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tVuiV_b65o7YfSpjl1S4ai
And the link to the game's forums where you'll spend most of your time (and download the game):
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php
I'm looking for something to satisfy similar itch too. I'm not sure would this matches, but I played Fallout 4 with Sim Settlement twice. The first version, then SimSettlement 2.
SimSettlement adds an automated city building to every player owned settlements in the game (except Home Base). Unlike Transfer Settlement where it just ctrl-c ctrl-v cities, SimSettlement has level 0, 1, 2, 3 blueprints for each town (although you'll need a map pack - the built-in pack do not contains some city and only have two levels).
A blueprint is consist of static placed props (like light poles) and also premade plots, which is new content. Plots work similar to zoning in city building games - you (or the city plan) put them down, assign (or autoassign) someone to the plot and they will start building the plot. There are several plot types - residential (home of the assigned NPC, although there are "interior" plot for multiple people home), commercial plot, utility plot (generate power, water, etc.), farming, scavenging (generate resources), industry and advanced industry (with tech tree).
A city grow by having its resource needs fulfilled - like a city builder, which means you need to go out and find resources to donate to city. SimSettlement 2 include a logistics center which create caravan to the next nearest city automatically. In the original game, caravan physically walk from city to city but it might not 100% work. SS2 virtualize the caravan traffic so that cities with leftover can spare food and water with every other cities. (The caravan still do physically walk and you can meet them en route)
As for the actual gameplay, I turn down the resource requirements a bit so that I don't need to farm resources myself (the city's industries automatically generate enough resource to upgrade on its own). Early gameplay would be to try to capture the towns that should generate enough resources to steamroll the lategame, but it depends on the city plan. Sanctuary should generate water, Abernathy Farms and Greygarden generate food. Unfortunately, most community city plan are self-sufficient (I believe it was contest requirements?) so even a town in the middle of a ruin do generate its own food and water by hand-powered water pumps and street-level farming.
SimSettlement 2 add voiced quests that are as good as the original game. In part 2 they added your own HQ, but last I played it is very resource intensive and probably needs real grinding and moving stuff around.
From what I asked around most people recommended me the Anno series, which I object to UPlay so I don't have any plan to play that soon.
Oh wow that's a quite expansive mod. Saw the trailers that looks actual professional. I'm surprised I haven't heard of it, even though I haven't really touched Fallout 4 since release.
I've played Anno 1800 and it does have interesting economics mechanics. But from what I remember it is required of the player to engage with it to progress by amount, like most SP strategy games.
I think Workers & Resources: SR does fit the description. It has production chains similar to pure Logistic games, but the resources and products are needed to build the city state and feed the people. And it's pretty complex.
Ah yes, this.
Caveat of this game is that worker movement is virtualized, similar to OpenTTD. I came in trying to build two way transportation network then it didn't work out as expected. Turns out the citizen do not go home and instead of Cargodist you'd need to force unload (like OpenTTD) to operate a transfer station.
My favorite transportation game is still Transport Fever 2 where it has cargodist (every goods has clear destination where it wanted to go, and transfer station works as expected) and pretty well optimized - with hundreds of vehicle the game doesn't lag at all but the simulation slows down that 3x speed feels like 1x in empty maps.