I Played Industry Giant 4.0 - The Economic Series for Extreme Fans of Spreadsheets Is Back

When I received the offer to play an early version of Industry Giant 4.0, I gladly agreed, but I had a lot of concerns. Reviving a rather niche and difficult economic strategy from years ago is a big challenge, and what worked in the past may not always work today. Tastes are changing, the way we play is changing, and finally, competition is also growing. So it may turn out that even a skillfully refreshed series will not meet the requirements of a modern gamer.

Industry Giant 4.0 is a game for Excel fans. If tracking numbers in tables brings you joy, and a profit colored in green in the last row gives you huge satisfaction, you will feel at home here. Or at work. Because after all, this is not a game that we run to admire beautiful views or create realistic cities. This is the game we play to maximize profits, minimize costs and optimize production. The rest is just background.

The residents of this sleepy town do not yet know that soon they will experience a real industrial revolution.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

Currently, the game is at a very early stage of development and there are still many elements waiting to be refined. For example, not all building models have textures yet, and there are also empty windows waiting for descriptions. The foundations of gameplay and the economic principles of the world are, however, developed to an advanced degree, which allowed me to check how Industry Giant 4.0 is shaping up.

Lecture on advanced microeconomics

The beginning is modest. We have some money for investment (quite a lot on the easiest difficulty level!), and on the map there are only sleepy towns or abandoned freight ports. Our task is to create a vigorously operating and generating astronomical profits enterprise, primarily supplying products to the local market, but with the possibility of exporting and importing some of the goods.

Even the first map is big enough to ensure freedom of building, but it's far from the biggest in the industry.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

Theoretically, we have full freedom of gameplay, although at the very beginning we don't have much choice - the demand in towns is only for basic products so we should focus on them.

When residents can buy the products they need in our stores, such as vegetables, clothes or tools, they return home satisfied, and the city begins to gradually develop. The more residents, the greater the needs. There is an increasing demand for simple products, and there also starts to appear the demand for more complex ones, such as shoes.

A factory operating at 100%? This is often a bad idea.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

What distinguishes Industry Giant 4.0 from many other economic games is the necessity to plan and monitor productive capacities. We can produce a whole mountain of planks, but should we really do that? Demand is limited, production has its costs, and storage costs can literally sink us. On the other hand, the more we produce, the lower the unit price is, meaning each subsequent plank (or any other product) we manufacture is slightly cheaper. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the needs and adjust the production to the current state of the economy.

The first year in which I made a serious profit gave me a huge satisfaction.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

Such an approach is a nice change from the popular rule "there's no such thing as too much production", present in many other games. Here assembly line production of cheap goods and selling them at a fixed price abroad will not provide us with quick wealth, but rather lead to bankruptcy. This also accurately reflects the realities of the modern global economy, in which large corporations can easily produce gigantic quantities of goods. However, they are not faced with the question "can we?", but "should we?", and the answer to the latter question is much more complex, even if we limit ourselves only to economic issues, leaving ethics or ideology aside.

Introduction to logistics

Transportation and production cycles are important elements of the game mechanics that we must have organized if we want to make any profits. The game features a division into quarters and production cycles, of which there can be several in each quarter. There are also goods whose production takes much more time. We must take all of this into account when planning production chains.

We can schedule deliveries only in specific quarters, which facilitates managing the seasonal branches of our company.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

By purchasing trucks or trains and creating transport lines, we can specify which goods and between which points we want to transport. We can create quite complex routes, and at individual stops load or unload only some of the products. In practice, however, especially at the beginning, this is not that useful. It will soon turn out that there will be so many goods transported that most trucks will carry only one product, because a single load will be just a fraction of the needs of factories working at full capacity.

We organize transport by determining how many units of a specific good we want to transport in a given quarter. We can easily calculate everything by looking at the factories data, as well as the needs of individual cities.

There is nothing better in the morning like a grain elevator.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

Unfortunately, the transportation is not very intuitive. We can have 10 trucks waiting in the parking lot, a pile of products in the factory and a transport planned to the next point, and still nothing is happening. Why? I do not know. Ultimately, the goods will most likely be transported, but somewhat sluggishly, reluctantly, and in a wild panic, when after long weeks of inactivity from the beginning of the quarter, the game suddenly decides that this is the moment to meet the needs of the entire quarter in a week.

It is worth constantly monitoring logistics and adjusting it to current needs.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

The way the transport works causes a feeling of enormous lag of the system and helplessness of the player. On one hand, the game encourages optimizing production and creating sophisticated distribution systems that deliver goods in perfect harmony and without unnecessary surpluses ("lean management" and "just in time"). On the other hand, the sluggishness of the entire system forces the creation of storage buffers and shifting the production of semi-finished products even a whole quarter back, so that the logistics department has time to transport the items accumulating in the warehouses to the next factory or store. It's a pity, because I have a feeling that it can be done much more clearly, much more efficiently, and above all - in a way that gives much more satisfaction when the whole system is properly organized.

Civil engineering class

In the version available to us, we could play on two maps. The smaller one has one city, the larger one offers two towns, although initially these are just small clusters of buildings. They develop over time, as a result of our actions and meeting the increasingly complex needs of residents.

Meeting the growing needs of residents will be a significant challenge.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

The entire area is divided into smaller parts, with each of the smaller regions having its own characteristics – some will have fertile soil, others will have dense forests, and somewhere else we will find valuable underground deposits. The necessary resources are quite scattered across the map, which forces us to thoughtfully build factories and shops, as well as organize transportation. Should tools be produced closer to the sawmill or closer to the city where they will be sold? As a rule, it is better to process goods as much as possible on site, however, sometimes it may turn out that planning out a railway line and moving the factory closer to the city can have a positive impact on the entire logistics.

Yes, I made a mountain for my mine. I can afford that.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

The maps are quite mountainous, full of larger and smaller elevations, which, unfortunately, is a big problem for now. This is most visible in the case of industrial objects, which take up a lot of space. Factories or mines require a perfectly flat surface, so the game levels the terrain in the place where we want to place them. Then the game cuts out several dozens of meters from a mountain or creates a several-meter embankment with a vertical slope. This game element definitely needs some refinement.

UX/UI tutoring

Most information is displayed in windows that we can freely move around, and we can have many of them open on the screen. This is great news when we want to monitor the status of several objects while keeping an eye on the transport of goods on a given line. You can arrange everything according to your own preferences and move freely around the map.

Unfortunately, the windows are quite large and strangely designed, so that even 2 or 3 of them can take up practically the entire screen, not showing too much information. As a result, it is difficult to fully utilize the potential of freely moving windows and seeing information we are interested in while playing.

I'm a windows aficionado.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

However, a much more serious problem is the interface's lack of user-friendliness. While the financial overview is very transparent, route planning is pure torture. When organizing a dozen transport routes, I felt terrible frustration with how much I had to click on things and the tediousness of the entire process. This only worsens the impressions of logistics described in the segment above.

I hope that in the further stages of the game development, the developers will not only polish the current state, improving the font size or readability of information, but also slightly redesign the interface so that it does not interfere with the gameplay, but rather improves it.

Contemporary economics exam

At an early stage, Industry Giant 4.0 shows considerable potential, but there is no doubt that it will be a game aimed at the biggest enthusiasts of production optimization and business management. Especially those who fondly remember the previous installments of the series.

The graphics may not be ultra realistic, but they do look nice.Industry Giant 4.0, Don VS Dodo, 2024

I spent a few days with the game and I'm actually still full of concerns about the final result. In this small niche, we currently have several games that Industry Giant 4.0 will have to compete with. Even Rise of Industry, a game not without flaws, is tempting with greater accessibility and charming graphics, drawing heavily from the first installments of the series. In a sense, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is also a competitor, in which we build a centrally planned economy, but with incredibly advanced production chains on a large scale, not available here.

Are the developers of Industry Giant 4.0 correctly reading the demand for this genre and will create a game that will allow them to monopolize the niche? This task seems much more difficult than the challenges posed to the player, but as the history of capitalism teaches us, sometimes it's worth taking a risk. However, this may be the last chance for the series, so the stakes are very high.