Steel Artery: Train City Builder

Great concept, but very rough, un-polished. Resourse distribution along the rail lines make this really hard to fully enjoy. Volumn controls dont quite work. Transitioning between tier 1 and 2 is sloppy to the point of impossible. I look forward to what this game will be, with a bit of effort; but for now i cant recommend it.

[h1]This game is a bizarre allegory for real life (not in a good way)[/h1] I really wanted to like this game, and for the 1st few hours it seemed to be ok, It did feel like the tutorial was rushing me a bit towards an arbitrary goal, and since the rest of the tech tree was locked behind that goal presumably, and I could see I was starting to run low on starting resources I played along. I notice I'm starting to run low on plates and I need the "pressing" research to build the workshop that produces these, I have a warehouse full of iron ingots so I figure I'm good, So I rush the quest, only to find out (because there's no way to see beforehand) that actually the pressing workshop needs gears, and I don't really have any, so no I need to unlock the assembly workshop, and I need to mine copper. but I can't build either of these because... I don't have plates so we already hit the 1st soft lock, where resource producer don't follow the bootstrapping rule. but I'm like hey man I've played hard games, I beat frostpunk and ixion I can figure this out, so I remember you can 100% refund the materials on buildings, so eventually I deconstruct enough buildings and structural blocks to get these to build, but by that point some of my other problems are starting to hit critical mass, I was surviving off fish, so I try to switch to gathering vegetables, but once again I have to cannibalize more stuff, but not having great options I start cannibalizing things like toilets and showers, and at that point getting 40% satisfaction in a need was considered normal so my citizen needs satisfaction is falling rapidly and no one want to work, though oddly happiness is in the 90%+ weird... so I spend far too much time freezing several other buildings, trying to get someone, anyone to just decide of their own free will to go work as a constructor, and they finally build the gatherers house, but again... no one is filling the vacancies because everyone is starving, and everyone is starving BECAUSE NO ONE IS FILLING THE VACANCIES TO GO GATHER FOOD, so at this point I've lost 1/2 my max population on the train. On top of that I was also running low on coal, I had the recipe to turn logs into charcoal in the industrial furnace, but also people aren't coming to work, and the few that are don't have enough wood because no one is coming to work at the woodcutter house, There does appear to be something of a priority system in the tech tree but it's at the very end, but I'd argue you need this much earlier, and I wasn't producing any more research because I had to freeze that building and lay everyone off so they'd go be constructors and gatherers. I think possibly if you had the tech tree unlocked from the beginning that might help, since the game lacks a work priority system because everything is profit and self-interest driven. Assuming that last run of the tech tree is the ability to customize the daily salary of buildings that could help prioritize but it shouldn't be locked so far back down the tech tree. From reading the Steam forums the developer has a clear VISION for this game and doesn't seem all that willing to listen to fairly reasonable feedback I've seen other players give them. That's partly why I compare this train simulation to the real world, when you make the motive for everything profit and self-interest you get something that rather resembles the real world and that tends to be a somewhat dysfunctional mess, it is an interesting concept but I think it needs a lot more balance, and probably some rethinking of the early game, I would urge the developer to go play though Frostpunk again, sure sometimes you have to make hard choices and you lose something but it always feels deserved and fair, and that's not the case here, it just feels like I need to save scum in order to win. I'm well past 2 hours so I'll be keeping an eye on patch notes.

hmm, for now, i really can't recommend anyone buying this game, even if it doesn't cost much, i don't need a long write up, i just need to lay out its issues, i'll write everything here for you to read and judge if this can serve as your reference. ==================== the biggest flaw of this game right now is the overly unrestrained total free will and weird unregulated movement logic of the ai, if an ai is supposed to travel from point a to point b for work every day, the normal logic is that it holds a fixed work station so it will follow this route repeatedly until it gets dismissed, but this game does not work like that, the ai will not stay at point a permanently, and once it leaves point a or point b, it will wander off to nowhere, its path changes completely every single day, its movement logic makes it dash randomly between point a b c d e f g with no order at all, you can never tell what it intends to do. ==================== the core idea and concept of this game are really interesting, you build an entire city aboard a train that travels between two continents and keep its production systems functional, this premise could have been fantastic, but the game's core design is deeply flawed. ==================== first major issue, you cannot control or assign your residents to jobs, all work assignments and choices are made by the residents themselves, everything is messy and totally unorganized, they choose to work only when they feel like it and ignore labor whenever they wish, on top of this, the ai logic has fatal flaws that leave countless work sites empty with no staff, the game opens by telling you to recruit workers to fill these empty posts and keep the train running, but as i mentioned, the ai has critical broken logic, the ai driven residents have dozens of needs and burn through supplies extremely quickly, even when you have enough available labor to fill every vacant work position, they still refuse to work, there is nothing you can do to fix this, they operate on total free will, they often just sit on the ground doing absolutely nothing, which shuts down many facilities on the train and halts all building construction, they only start to move right before they get automatically dismissed, and you have zero understanding of how their movement and work logic was programmed, you won't notice this problem in the very early game, once you build five to ten or more facilities, you will realize they do almost no work at all, paired with shift rotations and fixed working hours, the whole train is packed with idle aimless people, and this state of affairs is absolutely dreadful. ==================== second major issue, you have to keep your residents satisfied and fulfill their basic physical needs or they will stage work stoppages, but right at the start of a new playthrough, unless you manually edit the custom starting template to grant yourself more advantageous opening conditions, you can barely pull this off using the default template, residents require sanitation, food and sleep, so you need supporting facilities, toilets, shower rooms, rest quarters and mess halls, to keep these amenities running, you have to rush to construct research labs and unlock water collection huts and fishing huts as fast as possible, otherwise you will lack enough resources to sustain your residents, they will grow unhappy, refuse to work and even starve or die from thirst, but how can they produce these vital resources if they refuse to perform labor, this creates an unsolvable vicious cycle, if you mindlessly recruit more residents to board the train just to try to fill work quotas, this destructive cycle on your train will grow far worse, this is the heart of the problem, so i suggest editing a custom template to adjust your starting conditions, the entire game's economic production loop and ai logic function in reverse right now, you would expect things to follow straightforward logic like one plus one equals two, but the game acts as though one plus one equals five. ==================== to sum up based on these two core problems, you cannot build up a functional fast paced industrial production chain no matter how hard you try, no matter how many residents you hire, you hold no authority over them, they follow unregulated free will, their work and movement logic is entirely beyond your control and completely incomprehensible, the current state of the game is a train filled with dozens of empty unused work stations alongside huge groups of residents sitting idle wasting resources for no reason, and i simply cannot wrap my head around how the developers constructed this game's underlying ai logic and calculation systems.

Even though it says 1.0 the game is still in early access. There are a lot of bugs and key systems like logistics and storage often break with your peons getting stuck loading or unloading something. Once you get a large train you spend a lot of your time fixing broken buildings and stuck peons. It has a solid premise but needs a few more years of development.

Don't listen to the Negative Nellies, the game is fun and challenging and offers a few fresh or at least rare takes on the city/colony management genre. The citizens are totally autonomous and you cannot control them directly. Unlike most management games you are actually a manager, not a god that can instantly tell everyone what to do. Rather, it simulates something close to an actual market economy - people work for wages and pay for services. You build the supply chains and decide on production priorities. The game does not forgive poor planning and while there is a learning curve, it is not too steep as the tutorial teaches you the most important and then you mess around with it until you figure it out. The critics in these negative reviews if you ask me are mostly wounded perfectionists that are miffed they can't do a perfect run at once, or simply whiny people that want every game to just be a new iteration of their favorite. I swear gamers are impossible to please; we constantly complain that "x is just a copy of y", but when something pops up that actually does think outside the box they immediately hate on the dev for making a game that they don't immediately master based on previous experience. All that being said, there is still plenty of fixing needed. The Dev (yes, one single guy) messed up his release big time and he knows it, there is even a nonskippable popup in the start menu where he apologizes and links to an essay about his "failed launch". I don't think I've ever seen a dev throw ash over his head and crawl on the floor like this before. His main mistakes I think were insufficient playtest before launch and releasing it without the "Early Access" tag. There is a lot of in-game details that make little sense (e.g smelter can make iron ingots ONLY in batches of 100 and ONLY if they have 200 iron ore stored; if you have 198 iron ore you have to wait until you have more). There is ample in-game early opportunity to soft-lock yourself out of being able to continue and you are forced to restart. Honestly, not as bad as it sounds, not like it's the only game where early game mistakes come back to destroy you later. The main valid criticism I see is that the starting area is way too long; you basically have to slog through 1/3 of the tech tree to have the basics set up to move. However, the Dev is working continously on it and you can see there is a lot of stuff going on that is not finished yet.

I played for like an hour until giving up I don't recommend it, it was really fun initially but afterwards it's just kind of terrible resource management and (for me at least) realising you didn't progress how the game wanted you to and that you have to basically restart and manage your train perfectly to make any more real progress, and while doing all that you still have to manage really annoying resources. Like, dirty water. It is incredibly easy to get way too much really fast, and you need to have free space in your warehouse for more dirty water, and if you didn't choose to research much if at all at the start like I did, you only have one solution to it which is to run your engine by constantly moving about, which you can't really do because you need to stop eventually. Also, in the tutorial your first city is the main objective, and it's the end of the tutorial. So for me, in my tutorial-less run it was a big milestone. But there's nothing to do there at all, except pick up like a quest or two and then continue on. The next biggest thing is to maybe recruit more people, but like every third tile has more than you'll ever need. There's no trade at all and no way to interact with the city, or even see it in the background as far as I could tell. The closest thing to trade is reputation, and you can get like a handful of maybe useful things at exponentially more expensive prices. By the time I got to the city, my train was well built and planned out and functional, and I had neglected research, thinking I could do it later and trade for resources at the city. I couldn't because my great milestone had literally nothing in it but like 300 food and a quest that I thought would be interesting (mail delivery) but it's literally just 'go to this city in the far east.' I would have to go backwards to the starting beach, mine ore, deconstruct my train to make a research station, smeltery, and forge, all to continue building up my train, including reconstruct what I deconstructed. So I just gave up. I lost like all my motivation seeing that theres nothing in cities, and that the entire game is just this boring resource management stuff. I wanted to explore and interact with nations and play a mix between a city with kind of diplomatic power, and some kind of war train, and visit wild, cool new places and do train stuff like maybe help evacuate a city, or take someone politically important somewhere, but it was just kind of. Sit in a tile for 30 minutes until you feel comfortable moving one tile over, and then play duplo bricks for another half hour until you're ready to repeat and eventually set course for halfway across the map.

I can see what Steel Artery is trying to be but I don't think it's ready for release yet. I like the idea of a complex, unforgiving city builder on a train. I've always liked stories about massive mobile - often dystopian - cities. I cannot recommend Steel Artery, as a management sim the UI needs an overhaul. The graphics are great, you can see that in the screenshots but the interface and tutorial... not so much. I sat for a bit thinking if I should write this review for the developer and try and point out what could be improved or just write it for potential players and leave it saying the UI is bad. I want to go to bed so I've chosen the easy way out. The tutorial also needs an overhaul. There are too many game mechanics introduced too quickly through too much text. I soft locked myself in the tutorial twice by not understanding what I shouldn't do. Maybe I'll try again in the future but not now. Lastly the music and sound fx - in so far as I heard - are minimal tending to missing. I want to hear the sounds of life on the train.

Очень много микроменеджмента. Совершенно не интересно строить здания ,потом сносить их ,чтобы расчистить место и высвободить детали под новые постройки, затем снова сносить , снова строить и тп. Миллион зданий к постройке на ограниченном клочке местности - не рабочая идея. Это просто не весело.