Captain of Industry is a colony sim with a rather simple premise: you lead a band of survivors who land on a deserted island, and you're tasked with rebuilding civilization from scratch. The catch here is, you'll have to build the island's industry from nothing into a highly intricate web of different machines that produce the various items needed for the island to function and expand, while also making sure to keep your islanders fed and healthy. In short, imagine Aven Colony with a heavy dose of Factorio.
This show provides examples of:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Mining activity does not create pollution, and neither does dumping trash into the ocean. Since mining is a core mechanic and since dumping is how you expand and reshape your island, having to manage the pollution that would occur in real life would make building Unity in the early game near impossible.
- Late game assembly machines require Computing Power along with regular old electrical power. The way you provide this is by building Data Centers. How a single centralized data center is able to handle computing duties for dozens of different machines located all around an island is anyone's guess, but the alternative would be needlessly complicated.
- Liquids don't require pumps to be transported long distances or up inclines.
- Steam is treated as a liquid, though it cannot be stored in storage tanks. That said, steam in a pipe doesn't lose temperature no matter how long it sits there.
- While this game simulates soil fertility and the game encourages you to cycle crops, as long as you supply enough fertilizer and water, you can engage in intensive farming of a monoculture like corn with no adverse effects. In real life, this would degrade the soil to the point nothing will grow without fertilizers, and the fertilizer runoff would also pollute the water table and the sea around the island.
- Carbon dioxide emissions are counted as air pollution and will therefore increase the probability of illnesses spreading through your settlements. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is harmless to people in real lifenote , unlike the other emission sources (like blast furnace gas, boiler exhaust, sulfur dioxide, burning trash) that are counted as pollution, which absolutely are harmful to people in real life. If it weren't you would no reason to engage in carbon sinking, or really any reason to deal with carbon dioxide beyond your air scrubbers outside of electrode production for your electric furnaces.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You are limited in the number of vehicles you can field at once, even if you have the fuel and people available to operate many more. This is prevent the player from relying too much on trucks for logistics.
- Beef Gate: High-value resource points (such as iron mines) are usually hidden behind a very high level enemy ship on the world map that you won't be able to take on without investing in significant upgrades for your Ship.
- Cool Ship: The Ship your survivors arrive in. With upgrades you can turn it into a powerful battleship capable of taking out all but the strongest threats.
- Easy Logistics: About the only convenience this game gives you is your fleet of trucks that will automatically ferry needed items from A to B. Everything else is your responsibility, though there are a few concessions made to avoid needless complexity.
- Conveyors and sorters consume power, unlike most games of this type.
- All machines consume maintenance packs, which must be produced in maintenance depots. Failing to keep up with maintenance consumption will result in your machines and vehicles breaking down. Thankfully, these are consumed automatically and you don't have to worry about distributing these to your machines.
- Played straight with the logistics within a settlement. Food, electricity, and waste management is all managed internally, so long as you build the appropriate modules on the outside of the settlement.
- Trucks and heavy equipment consume diesel, and you'll need to build fuel stations to keep them fueled. For large mining operations, you'll probably have to allocate a truck specifically for refueling excavators and tree harvesters, and allocate another truck for transporting diesel from your refineries to the fuel station.
- Excavators and tree harvesters cannot deposit material directly into storage units; trucks must do this for them instead.
- Cargo ships take several in-game months to travel between your external resource wells and your island. They also require their own loading docks and need a constant supply of diesel fuel.
- Groundwater is not unlimited; while rain replenishes wells, if you get too greedy you will sap your wells dry.
- Boilers require a constant supply of water, and turbines require a constant supply of steam. Also, unless you want to run out of groundwater, you'll have to learn to balance steam production with cooling towers to conserve water.
- On the other hand, if you spend Unity, you're able to instantly deliver construction material to a new construction site, and any goods you buy from outside villages will also immediately appear at your trading dock.
- Electrical distribution is handled automatically. There is no need to build power poles or connect buildings to the grid. As long as you're able to meet the island's overall power demands you're covered.
- Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: If you mine too close to your machines, you run the risk of causing a mine wall collapse that will destroy your structures.
- Green Aesop: Water and air pollution negatively affects Unity growth, encouraging the player to seek ways to control pollution such as air scrubbers and wastewater treatment plants instead of simply dumping toxic chemicals and waste into the sea and air.
- Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Trucks cannot pass under conveyors that are less than 2 units high, and excavators and tree harvesters cannot pass under them at all. If you plan to allow the latter two vehicles to cross through your conveyors, you'll need to build a bridge and pass the conveyors under it.
- Resources Management Gameplay: Aside from the countless variety of manufactured items you'll need for advancing research and trading with other villages, there are a few resources you absolutely need to manage to keep your new society from failing:
- Food: inarguably the most important resource, as famine will wipe out your island extremely quickly. It's important to make sure your food production keeps up with population growth, and to keep a sizeable reserve for emergencies.
- Diesel: Needed for trucks and heavy equipment. If you run out of fuel and your trucks stop, it could result in your logistics network collapsing (especially for necessary services such as food delivery and garbage collection) with potentially disastrous consequences.
- Population: Machines, ships and vehicles need workers, so to expand your production you will need to increase your population, which necessitates building more settlements, increasing food production, handling more trash and wastewater, etc.
- Unity: A currency that is steadily earned every in-game month, which can be spent to instantly build or deconstruct structures and to purchase goods from neighboring villages, which can save your society if you find yourself running dangerously low on food or fuel. Unity represents the islanders' "contentment" with their current situation, and it can be increased by building nicer housing, better food, or providing services such as healthcare to your settlements. However, certain actions such as building research labs, boosting production on machines, and operating off-shore resources such as oil rigs consume monthly Unity growth, and environmental factors such as pollution and illnesses can even force growth into the negative.
- Stationary Enemy: Enemy ships, which are implied to be pirates, never move from their spots on the map and act more like barriers to progression than active threats.
- Tech Tree: Features an expansive upgrade tree with four tiers of research.
- Trash of the Titans: Settlements produce trash that can only be disposed by either dumping or burning. Since the latter method produces pollution that lowers Unity, your best bet is to either store it or dump it, potentially resulting in giant mountains of trash littering your island.
- Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Captain of Industry is remarkably intricate with its simulation of manufacturing processes, even in comparison to its inspiration Factorio.
- Iron and copper smelting produces slag, and the molten metal must be funneled to a dedicated casting machine to produce plates. Slag must be either crushed to be used in concrete, or dumped into the environment. Higher level furnaces also require the addition of limestone (for iron) or sand (for copper) along with requiring you to crush the ore first, more closely approximating how those metals are smelted in real life. Furthermore, to be made useful copper needs to be further refined with electrolysis.
- While early-game food items like vegetables and potatoes can be distributed to settlements as-is, later (and more space-efficient and Unity-gaining) foodstuffs like meat, wheat, corn, sugarcane and soy require additional processing. For example, wheat will need to be milled into flour and then baked into bread, corn is ground into a liquid mash and is primarily used for the production of ethanol in fermentation tanks (a vital ingredient for medicine), meat requires running farms that require a constant supply of animal feed and then the meat itself will need to be processed with salt. Like many other processes in this game, food production also generates byproducts, some useful (like animal feed), some not (meat trimmings, best used for compost). Also, due to the sheer amount of space farms and greenhouses take up, keeping up with the food demands of a large population will almost definitely require you to produce fertilizer, itself a complicated chemical process.
- Petrochemical processes are exceptionally detailed. Refining crude oil distills three different weights of oils that can be further refined into valuable products like diesel and naphtha, which are further used for other products like fuel gas, rubber, plastics, and more. Learning to balance these products is necessary for keeping your refineries running consistently. And, much like metal refining, oil refining produces a nasty waste product in the form of sour water, which can either be dumped into the sea (dropping Unity due to the extreme amounts of pollution this creates) or processed into water, ammonia and sulfur.
- This is probably the only game of its type that requires you to create hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine, and ammonia for processes like steelmaking, fertilizer production, and petrochemical cracking.
- The process for manufacturing microchips is incredibly complex, requiring nearly a dozen steps along several different machines that also consume rare and difficult to produce material, such as silicon and gold.
- We Buy Anything: Averted. External villages will only accept barters of specific items (along with some Unity), such as wood for coal, or construction material in exchange for potatoes. Buying too many items at once will raise your cost as well.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: Construction Materials are required for all new buildings, and there are four tiers at the moment. They also require significant amounts of manufacturing-intensive resources such as iron, steel, electronics and wood to produce, along with more exotic materials such as glass and electronic circuit boards at the higher tiers, so it's important to build up a stock for when you aren't aggressively expanding.
