Rise of Industry is an incredibly involved tycoon game that allows players to control every aspect of their production line: raw resources to components to end products, and shipping those products across the map by truck, boat, and train—even by Zeppelin. From growing vegetables to sucking oil out of the rivers, micromanaging a Monsanto, General Electric-esque empire has never been so easy and so free of controversy.
The central crux of Rise of Industry is logistics—the logistics of how close the water siphon is to the crops, how far the trucks need to travel from the depot to get to the next city, or how fast the carpentry factory is supplied with wood to make furniture. All these things are a delicate ecosystem; traveling to far or too short a distance can put a kink in a supply chain. Helpful pop-ups will let you know if a factory’s storage is full, which happened to me often. I tended make short supply chains to keep the cost of repairing my trucks low, but I ended up siphoning more water than I could use because my plants were so close to my crops and factories. Majority of the time I just disabled my water supply until my crops used up their reserve.
Supplying every market with basic, raw materials can quickly turn a small town into a sprawling metropolis. As the population grows, so will the demand for not only raw materials like apples and fish, but also for more complex items like fabrics and glassware. Clicking on the town names reveals what buildings are there—deli, hardware store, farmer’s market, etc.—and clicking on each building icon will reveal what items are currently in demand for that location. By building farms and factories that matched my town’s current needs, I was able to start turning profits almost immediately.
It’s quite surprising how quickly a town can grow, regardless of the difficulty mode. I’ve never been good at industry tycoon-type games; my theme parks filled with angry children who left stink bombs in the bathrooms, and my prisoners were always one riot away from a full-fledged jailbreak. But Rise of Industry made me feel like I could be a successful business woman—if I didn’t try to expand my empire too quickly, that is. Luckily, the tech trees in Career Mode keep overeager ambitions in-check by requiring the player to gain a significant amount of points before they can unlock an extra perk or a new building. Demands for more refined and complex items will pop up along with new buildings in your town long before there’s a chance to fulfill them.
My town grow so quickly that there was a hardware store, a deli, and several other stores demanding items that I wouldn’t be able to make until I unlocked two more tiers in one or more skill trees. The more complex the product, the more farms, gatherers, and factories are needed. Manufacturing mattresses requires a plantation, a textile factory, and steel—but Rise of Industry makes it more complicated than that. To make the fabric for the mattress, players will need two separate plantations, one to grow cotton and one to grow berries. The cotton can immediately ship to one textile factory, but the berries need to go to a second textile factory so they can be used to make the dye—which then gets shipped to the first textile factory and combined with the cotton to make the fabric.
From there, there needs to be two gatherers, one for coal and one for iron, which gets shipped to a separate factory to make steel. The steel and fabric then get shipped to a third textile factory to make the mattresses. In free play, all these different buildings are unlocked, so if there’s enough cash sitting around in your bank account, you can get started on making these mattresses not too long after your town starts growing—but it will take much, much longer in career mode, because of the slow processes of unlocking each building one by one, tier by tier.
Since Rise of Industry only recently released to early access, there will be plenty of changes along the way and more buildings added to the game. However, given that a major point of this game is to be as efficient as possible, it seems logical that there would be an option to grow multiple types of crops on one farm or produce multiple types of products in one factory, but there isn’t. The process of making something like a mattress is complicated by the fact there must be a separate building for each component. Would it change the game mechanics to drastically if there was an option to produce both cotton and berries on the same plantation? The game is currently set up to allow players to place an initial three fields per farm, with the ability to unlock an additional two, but not the ability to have one farm produce more than one product.
I suppose, logistically speaking, this is supposed to be mitigated by the warehouses—these glorious buildings not only deliver items, but they also pick up items to bring back to the warehouse within a given radius. With each new item I produced, the number of supply routes started to get out of control. I created a scheduling nightmare, one that would get me fired in the real world for sure. But the warehouses helped me consolidate my pickups and deliveries, not to mention they have huge storage capacities. Instead of sending all my cotton and berries directly to the factory, I either dumped it off at the warehouse or had a trucker come pick it up. Building up a huge reserve in the warehouse also allowed me to deliver items to other cities without gaps in delivery.
Even after putting over 20 hours into Rise of Industry, there is still a lot more for me to explore. I haven’t even started to make beer and brandy yet, and that’s what I really want to do: get out of the farming business and move into the industry of helping take out their worst aggressions on their drywall. Rise of Industry will let you decide what demographic to cater to. If the demand exists, you’ll rank in the cash.
For more information on Rise of Industry, check out the website. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher.
