While the likes of Industry Giant used to rule the production line game roost back in the day, more recent entries in the series have a lot more competition to face up against these days. Ambitious breakout hits like Satisfactory, simple yet satisfying experiences like Shapez 2, and obscenely addictive games like Factorio are now the go to destinations for folks that love building and resource management. Now seeing a resurgence, three years after launching in early access, Captain of Industry is the latest challenger to see a huge spike in popularity. After dropping a massive update last week, it’s now setting new player count records on Steam.
For most games launching in early access, the typical goal is to take anywhere from six to 18 months to perfect the experience with the help of player feedback, constantly delivering new updates and content to keep players invested. Most of the time, you want to hit the promised land of 1.0 as quickly as possible. Captain of Industry is taking a more steady approach – it first hit Steam Early Access in May 2022, already packed with plenty of content. Instead of medium-sized updates every couple of months, the building game delivers the majority of its new innovations in massive annual drops, and the latest arrived just a few days ago.
Update 3 for Captain of Industry adds two massive new gameplay features to the manufacturing sandbox. The first is trains – these allow you to move cargo and resources longer distances across the map versus the more local networks of conveyor belts. You can have loads of trains running at once, and it’s rather hypnotizing watching your fleet snake their way through your empire.
You can upgrade each train’s size and capacity independently by adding individual carriages and wagons, ensuring you have just the right train for the job you need it to perform.
A rail network is impressive, but it’s nothing compared to space flight. Yep, Update 3 takes Captain of Industry into orbit with the addition of rockets and space stations. After constructing a rocket (and all the infrastructure needed to launch one) gather up the required resources to build a space station and send it skyward. Space stations will now let you set up orbital supply chains. But what can you extract from the cosmos? Well, if you build space probes, you can use them to scout and capture asteroids, bringing them back to your island base where you can then mine them for valuable resources.
Alongside several new facilities and production lines, which can be used to obtain materials like uranium ore and create synthetic diamonds, you’ve also got more options in the city building side of Captain of Industry. For those who prefer to work at the comfort of a desk, offices have been added, which are an end-game structure that can provide huge boosts to your operations. There are now also more luxurious housing options and shops that can be built to reward hard-working citizens.
On top of all the new content, developer MaFi Games has redesigned and enlarged all of Captain of Industry’s maps (largely due to the addition of those limitless rail networks). It’s also completely overhauled its UI to make things clearer and more easy to navigate, and delivered loads of quality of life improvements and balancing changes. It’s a monster of a patch, and one that’s having a dramatic effect on the game’s Steam player count. Since Update 3 arrived, daily player counts have soared, and over the weekend it achieved a new peak concurrent player record of over 11,000 – not bad for an early access game that’s got plenty of popular competition.
Update 3 for Captain of Industry is live right now. Currently sitting on a lifetime user score of 94% on Steam, it comes highly recommended, so if you want to give it a go, head to its Steam page here.
For more, check out our lists of the best management games and best city building games.
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