Rise of Industry: Beginners’ Guide 2021

General Settings

When you first press the new game button, you’ll be shown a screen with some settings on and a difficulty percentage. The first few pages of settings don’t actually affect the difficulty so it’s up to you for what to set them as but when you get to the difficulty settings, important choices need to be made. For a new player either straight after a download or fresh out of the tutorial, I would recommend going between 30% and 75% difficulty as this usually strikes a fair balance between challenge but fun for a new player.

Number of opponents

The number of other companies you choose really doesn’t make too much of a difference as they don’t tend to do much if there’s only one or two, but with any more they can hinder your progression. If it’s your first game and you just want to learn how to play the I’d honestly recommend just playing without any other companies as they can be quite annoying. Although adding one can make the game quite interesting and give the auction feature an actual purpose, although the AI rarely ever bid in my experience. Having another company can even lead to a defeat however as if they buy all your shares then you’re out, although again this rarely if ever happens.

Overview

After you’ve configured your settings and loaded in, you need to make the decision of where to place your HQ. This headquarters will determine where your company operates out of and which resources you will have available to you in the early game. It’s also worth turning on the resource names and shop names heat maps on when choosing a city.

Things to consider

When you’re looking for the right place to place your HQ there are a number of variables to consider, but I would say that these are the main ones:

• Availability of water
• The types of shops in the city and in neighbouring cities
• The items on sale in the shops
• How central the location is on the map
• The terrain

Availability of water
Although this factor isn’t particularly important as there’s usually a lot of water on the maps and there’s always at least some water source in each area, it’s still a good factor to take into account as if the city centre and any flat ground is on the other side of the city’s area to the only water, then it might not be the right choice because of the distance trucks would have to travel.

Types of shops
By types of shops I mean farmers markets, hardware shops, clothing shops etc. This is not very important however because sometimes neighbouring cities will have speciality shops (not farmers markets or hardware stores) and as long as a nearby city has one then the early-mid game should be fine.

Items on sale
I would argue that this is the second most important factor behind the central location of your city because it determines a lot. For instance, there’s not much point investing in a cow farm when no nearby cities or your own take beef or leather. Also, if the region you’re looking at is fishing orientated, but doesn’t accept fish in the local farmers market, it might not be a good option because in the early game, the truck driving costs can really eat up your income if you’re having to drive long distances to sell your goods.

Centralised location
This is in my opinion, the most important factor in determining the city you pick to place your HQ because I’ve had games where there have been cities with very good resources and shops but it was an island because it was cut off by a large river and there were no bridges, so you’d have to research bridges straight away and build them which would take up valuable time and money. Also, the further away you are from other cities, the higher the truck driving cost so you always want to minimise the time it takes trucks to drive from A to B.

The terrain
Finally, we come on to the terrain. This isn’t a very important factor for most players first play-through, however if you’re in a particularly mountainous or hilly area, it can be hard to fit in any industry and roads become very long and twisted. Also terraforming the area is extortionately expensive, especially for players just launching a new game.

Once you’ve placed your headquarters, it’s time to start your industry with buildings I call *tier 2*(see final section of the guide). The recommended first thing to place is a lumber yard which is in gatherers and this is a good first industry because it pulls in a decent amount of cash at the start and is cheap to set up and get going, also every hardware store takes it so it’s a good one to sell. This lumber can also later be used in many different recipes.

Once you’ve got a stable mill running, it’s time to choose a specialisation for your company. This usually depends on your start location and note that you can change this over the course of the game. By this I mean will your company specialise in agriculture, mining or fishing to start off with. Usually if your location is copper, iron, coal or oil rich then you will be mining, if it’s got a lot of fish then obviously fishing and if it has not much of anything or just a few resources then it’s safe to do agriculture. Although note, most regions will and should do 2 of the listed 3 for maximum profits. The pros and cons of all 3 are stated below:
Agriculture
-pros-

• Easy and cheap to start
• Decent profit
• Stable income
• Infinite resources
• Many different crops for selling in different shops
• Can lead to a lot of different products later
• Can build anywhere

-cons-

• Need to make a water siphon and constantly supply with water
• To make substantial profit, usually requires quite a few farms, orchards, plantations etc

Mining
-pros-

• Greater profits typically than agriculture
• Leads to more expensive goods in the tech tree
• The main resources needed for the car prototype

-cons-

• More expensive to start
• Air pollution created so normally an air cleansing plant is required which requires water to run
• Finite resources
• Can only build on resources

Fishing
-pros-

• Very easy and cheap to setup
• Decent profit
• Stable income

-cons-

• Finite resource
• Usually quite far from city centres
• Can only build on resources
• Doesn’t typically go anywhere on the research tree

Once you’ve got your mill and tier 2* industry ready and stable, it’s time to expand. When you decide to expand your industry and make better, more profitable goods, you upgrade to what I see as tier 3*. In tier 3* you will be looking at expanding into one of the many new branches depending on what you chose to do for your tier 2* industry.

For agriculture, you’re going to want to expand into food, drinks or paper depending on what type of agriculture you pursued. For mining you’ll probably want to go into electronics, home goods or furniture. For fishing you will need to go into food. This is the main downfall of fishing as it doesn’t lead into anything other than food.

Once you’ve found a new tier 3* industry you would like to expand into, I would recommend choosing a product to invest into and produce. Choosing a product to produce here is very similar to choosing a tier 2* industry. You need to check what products are in demand and on sale in your local shops or in near cities and choose one of those but also make sure you have all the materials to make it inside your zone.

After this step is complete, you can go down one of three paths to make more money, expand into another tier 2* industry and develop that, build up and reinforce the industry you chose by both expanding your tier 2 and 3* factories and gatherers, or progress onto tier 4* with your chosen industry.

A good piece of advice is to constantly be adding new forms of industry to your area and to try and vary the goods you produce as only making one item will make the demand for them go down and this also drives the prices down. Also try and do different goods to any competing companies unless it’s an extremely high profit commodity.

If you enabled other companies in the settings before the game, you will be in constant competition with them throughout your play-through and they will compete in auctions, compete in industry and worst of all, buy your stocks.

In this game you can buy shares in the other companies in an attempt to take them over or eliminate them from the game and therefore take out the competition. You can also be eliminated however by having all your stocks bought out by other companies so you need to buy other companies ones before they buy yours, but watch out because shares are very expensive and only go up as the game progresses and depending on how much land the company owns.

Other than this however, rival companies play a very insignificant role in this game and feel more like a nuisance than a challenge or an opponent which is a shame. This is because they rarely bid in auctions and never really buy shares.

As soon as you’ve developed your tier 3* industry, you should be thinking about which prototype to construct in tier 4* as this grants a victory. The three different prototypes you can make to win are the first computer, car prototype and premade meals. Usually if you chose mining at tier 2* then you’ll be doing either the car or computer and if you chose agriculture you’ll go premade meals. If you chose fishing then you should’ve expanded into one of these other or both other industries during the early-mid game.

Along with this you should also be trying to buy other companies stocks and expand your already existing tier 2 and 3* industries to maximise profit and production. And while you’re at it, you could have some fun and maybe reorganise your tier 1* structures and make some cool transport routes and even perhaps finish the tech tree.

In Rise of Industry, there are a few defeat conditions, but only one victory condition.

Victory condition

To win in Rise of Industry, you need to construct and sell a prototype item in a showroom. You can get a showroom from fully upgrading a city. Once you sell your prototype you get a final score.

Defeat conditions

There are quite a few ways to lose in Rise of Industry which include:

• Going bankrupt
• Having all your stock bought
• Having a rival company build and sell their prototype before you do

Throughout this guide I have referred to a tier system I made to help organise my play-through. You don’t need to use it but I recommend it as it really does help. These are the tiers:

Tier 1
Tier 1 structures are those that don’t produce anything so these include the HQ, roads, tunnels, bridges, warehouses and the various stations.

Tier 2
Tier one is everything from when you place your HQ until you start combining goods to make better ones. Examples of tier one structures are farms, gatherers, air cleansing plants and anything else that doesn’t require any crafting recipes other than water or water + wheat.

Tier 3
Tier 2 structures are any buildings that combine previously made items to make a better one that sells for more. Examples of these are factories.

Tier 4
Tier 3 structures are any buildings that combine prototype goods so this includes the prototype factories only.