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Captain of Industry is an industrial strategy that inherited the best from the iconic Factorio. Its gameplay revolves around resource extraction, increasing production, improving technologies, and building factories. Fights are absent in this game. Though you will have to face pirates’ ships on the map, it’s hardly enough to call it a full-fledged combat system.
When I first tried Captain of Industry, I was overwhelmed a bit by the amount of obscure things for me. For instance, I tried to understand, for quite a long time, why I must repair vehicles and buildings by hand. After all, it was nonsense!
To help you avoid similar silly and funny problems, I have written this little guide. Here are my tips for playing Captain of Industry based on my own experience. If you are an absolute newbie, I think it will definitely make your life easier.
Build Maintenance Depots
It’s such an obvious thing that it’s a bit strange to write about it. Anyway, the Maintenance Depots will repair your vehicles and buildings automatically! You won’t have to click on every car or house and repair it by hand. You will laugh, but that’s what I did for the first half an hour. And you? 😁
Deconstruct abandoned buildings
That’s another thing that escaped my attention for some reason at first. It’s happened because I thought that I must restore this building with the indicated number of resources. So don’t repeat my silly mistakes. Just destroy it and get free resources!
Designate dumping properly
It might be hard for beginners to figure out how to make a dump correctly. I couldn’t get rid of dirt and sand, you know, and I was forced to store them. At some point, I had about 20-30 storage units filled with dirt!
As always, the solution to this problem turned out to be simple. It’s just necessary to build the Mine Control Tower somewhere and to designate a dump within its reach. Then you can specify what types of resources can be dumped there.
Use dumps for building ramps
This tip follows directly from the previous one. The fact is that there are almost always hills on the map that cannot be reached initially. And when a new player tries to build a ramp by digging a ledge with excavators, he is surprised to find out that it isn’t possible!
Fortunately, you can make a ramp using trash instead of digging. Designate an appropriate dump as shown above and enjoy your new territory. Besides, in this way, it’s possible to fill any holes in the landscape that may be left after resource extraction.
Build fuel stations
When you play around for a bit, you will notice that your excavators and tree harvesters are driving to fuel storage tanks to refuel themselves. This significantly slows down your production. The fuel stations allow trucks to deliver fuel to heavy machines and refuel them.
Remember hotkeys
Here are some necessary hotkeys to remember. They allow you to play more comfortably.
- RMB (Right Mouse Button) – move the camera
- MMB (Middle Mouse Button) – rotate the camera
- Shift + W/A/S/D – move the camera faster
- F2 – Message Center (mini-tutorials)
- F1 – recipes (you can also right-click on any resource in most game windows to open its tab in the recipe book).
- L – overlays showing where resource deposits are located.
- O – statistics. Here are all the main graphics that indicate the production capacities, stored resource amounts, health of workers, and others. You can pin any resource from the “products” tab in the sidebar by clicking on the pin icon.
- Tab – world map
- F3 – trade (you need to build a cargo depot for this)
- G – research tree
- Space – continue / pause
- DEL – dismantle a building
These are the main ones. You can find other useful hotkeys in the “Controls” tab in the main menu of the game on your own.
Add resources to the sidebar
This is an easy way to always know how many units of important resources you have. Press “O” to open the stats window, then go to the “Products” tab, and lastly click on the pin icon next to the resource you need to monitor.
Build Cargo Depots
To use cargo depots, you must have cargo ships. They can be found by exploring nodes on the world map or by buying them from settlements.
Cargo Ships travel to your resource nodes (like an oil rig) and deliver resources from there passively. This means you don’t have to send your main ship for resources every time.
You can also build different storage modules for cargo depots that can be connected to common storage buildings. This will allow the cargo ship to quickly unload the cargo and set out on the next voyage.
Optimize your production
It might sound simple, but in games like this, it’s an essential thing. Always strive to optimize your production to produce more and faster. For instance, once you unlock advanced distillation technologies, you shouldn’t have to waste your oil by refining it using basic distillers. Build an advanced production chain. Don’t be afraid of difficult things, because that’s what this game is about, after all!
The secret of success, in my opinion, is to always think about what to do with a surplus of products. You must do something with them because otherwise they will accumulate and delay your production process. So you should think ahead. Find out when technologies for refining specific resources will be available. Decide what to do next: store these resources somewhere or just burn the surplus.
Thus, in the early stages of the game, I stored waste water, as I knew that later it could be purified. This allowed me to reduce water pollution and maintain a positive balance of unity.
Turn off your perfectionism
Some people think that perfectionism is some kind of superpower. But in fact, it’s a real disease. And when you play games like Captain of Industry or Factorio, you can fully “enjoy” that feeling. It’s like the devil on your shoulder always whispering to you, “This isn’t perfect! You can do better!! Destroy everything immediately and start over!!!” Did you ever want to rebuild half of your base that took hours to build due to a few unevenly placed barns? Yeah, that’s it 😁.
Since I personally am a typical perfectionist, I hardly know what to advise you. Try not to dwell on the visual flaws of your base. You also shouldn’t place objects too close to each other. There is plenty of free territory there. It isn’t necessary to economize too much.
In general, don’t limit yourself. Just keep building and everything will be OK. Good luck and thanks for reading 😉.