All you had to do...

[philbill]

Was take Industry Giant 2 and make it 3D. Nothing in that game was broken it was fun addictive and challenging. What were you thinking?

[MrSkinny]

Genuinely, can you list the key differences? In both games:

* You build an industry, set the production limit
* You feed the demand of towns
* You set up roads and railroads to deliver
* You create warehouses to handle intermediate steps

I'm baffled why people think it's a) so different and b) a Transport Fever knockoff.

If it truly was just a 3D replica of IG2, the same number of people would be yelling, "Rip off! They're charging full price for the same game!"

And it's nothing like TF2. While I love that game, there is a massively different decision space. In TF2, you don't build industries. The industry chain is much simpler. Economy is irrelevant - you start a little slow, but before mid-game, money no longer matters. Vehicles "instant" into and out of existence. There's no import/export mechanism. Etc.

[moron_with_a_gun]

The game has built in restrictions. For example, the zoning system, which prevents open construction. It also has limited demand from the start. In the previous title you could specialize in say electronics, than find other products that use the same resources. In other words, the workflow has been inverted from, find raw resources and see how many products you can make to, find demand, fill demand. Changing the workflow wouldn't be so bad, but the restrictions remove replayability by only allowing the same formula for every map. Overall, it does feel like an inferior version of Transport Fever, because you have to manually choke down production to match megar demand, while also using the same industries of your previous playthrough because demand doesn't change.

[Don VS Dodo]

Thank you to the three of you for your feedback, and thank you MrSkinny for your fair comparison of IG 4.0 to IG2 and TF2.

@moron_with_a_gun: you certainly pin pointed one existing difference to IG2 which is absolutely right to mention. When we launched into EA, cities all requested the same starting goods and all expanded their demand the same way.
This is not how we intend the system to work, but was a shortcut we had to take for EA because we felt like we needed to focus on other areas in the limited time we had.
I can assure you that we are working on custom demand settings per city, as well as establishing more ways to start your company and your playthrough.
However, this is a very balancing and QA intensive task, and we want to prevent that we throw completely unbalanced changes at you.
So we simply ask you for a bit of patience on this topic as well, and please keep in mind that it is an EA release, so there are things that are not final quality and not as they were ultimately designed.
We will continue to work on the areas that are not finished and will keep collecting your feedback to see what we need to change to make you happy and make sure you can enjoy IG4.0.

[moron_with_a_gun]

I think you guys are trying to be a little too precise. It's better to have some demand for every base product and allow growth into more complicated products as demand is met. Not a system of this city wants these 4 things, that city want 2 same, two different. It also sucks that there's no overlap of production. Why not have a livestock farm that produces a lot of meat and some leather?
So in a system of dynamic demand, I start filling food demand, with the overlapping production, leather can go into clothing production. (Shoes) town growth starts to occur, food goes to tier 2 new demand is created, additional food products. Base products for non fulfilled industries stay the same. Town growth can be accelerated by "leveling" up multiple categories, with diminishing returns and penalty of growth for lacking a number of tiered products as city levels up. Level 1 city, 1 industry category, lvl 2 3, etc
Now the player is no longer restricted to single strategies, or static resources on the map. I could flesh the concept out more if I said that in a confusing way, just my suggestion, I'm not insulted by anyone who disagrees.

[MrSkinny]

It also sucks that there's no overlap of production. Why not have a livestock farm that produces a lot of meat and some leather?

The OP's original complaint was IG4 was not like IG2. In IG2, you could only select one product per industry placed, so that would be changing the formula, not leaving it alone.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by your comment above as in IG4, each Industry can have three production lines. So a single Livestock Farm can be making both meat and leather and in different quantities.

[moron_with_a_gun]

You're right, production can be split up, and I should have played again before posting but there is still an issue that lies in this system, I just didn't recall it correctly.

So the game does have some clever tools to help diversify production, into both production lines as mentioned, but also to split the production into seasonal work. This would be a great way to produce some several items, but unfortunately overall industry production is too weak to take advantage of these tools. Take for example the chemical factory, it can convert oil into rubber and gasoline simultaneously (two separate production lines). Unfortunately, a single production line does not produce enough supply for the demands, and as a matter of fact, it doesn't take take long before I need two chemical factories running at 150% all three production lines on Gasoline just to try to keep up with the town's demand. As far as the game is designed, it feels disjointed. On one hand, they limit the locations and number of industries that can be placed, give tools to split production, and limit capacity, all making it seem that a few goods should go a long ways, but on the other side, towns are requesting several production lines worth of products, making the industries feel very under powered. It feels like they originally designed the game to have a lot of small pools of demand but for EA reduced the number of demanded products, early playtesters were able to over produce due to lack of diversity of products and complained that one factory produces too much for the few products demanded. I would rather have overpowered industries that the default position is say 10-20% and allow the player to crank it up as demand increases.

[MrSkinny]

I agree that demand generation from towns right now seems indelicately built to say the least. I posted elsewhere that there's also no parameters around the different maps, so Neighbors is a tiny map with two towns but has the same initial and increasing demand as the larger maps. They also all have the same overall objective target (e.g. X value and Y yearly profit). The game right now is very much more a fixed sandbox with different maps rather than carefully designed scenarios.

But that seems like exactly the sort of thing Early Access is made to experiment with. Or maybe they should open it up to players, provide a bunch of sliders when starting a new map that lets you set things like Demand Rate, Production Efficiency, etc.

[moron_with_a_gun]

I think it would also be useful for the developers to express their vision of the game. Because like i previously said, depending on if they intended industries to be versatile and powerful, you balance outputs and demand, but if you want industries to have limited ability, you would remove limits on how many and where to build.

They also need to make flatter maps, unfortunately these hilly maps go from pretty to ugly real quick once you start building