straightforward title of Industries.

No beating around the bush, you want more industry? You got it.

Providing what could be considered the antithesis of the Skylines Green Cities pack, Industries

fully commits to virtually exploiting natural resources in the realms of drilling for oil,

mining materials, logging forests, and farming crops and livestock.

And this time around I was provided an early review key by the publisher, which is how

this video is up before the pack’s official release.

As always though my opinions are my own and nobody’s even looking at this video before

it goes live so I can say whatever I please.

And right now, what I please to say is that Industries is a welcome addition while also

feeling like a retread of previous expansions.

That is to say: taking more direct control of your city’s industrial sector provides

some much-desired complexity and finessing of logistics, but if you’ve played the Parklife

expansion from early 2018 then you’ve already got a good understanding of how it works.

Now, instead of four different kinds of parks you’ve got four different kinds of industries:

Oil, Forest, Ore, and Farming.

These are the same specialized industries that were already in the game of course, except

here they’ve been “parkified” I guess you could say.

So instead of only dropping a specialization on top of existing industrial zones, you can

paint a dedicated district and place individual buildings inside to take advantage of nearby resources.

As with Parklife, these new districts can overlap the traditional ones and won’t activate

until you place a main gate, or in this case a main office building for that particular industry.

And as greater resource quantities flow through said industry it’ll level up through five

levels, unlocking new buildings each time the same way parks did.

And finally, there are also a few policies that can be applied to each industry to further

nail down how they function.

So yeah, if you enjoyed the hands-on nature of Parklife and wanted more of that kinda

thing, you’re gonna dig what Industries has to offer.

Me being a fan of that pack, and nitty-gritty detail work in city sims in general, I found

myself very much on board once I realized Industries was built on such a similar foundation.

It works and it’s fun so it seems they went with a “don’t fix what ain’t broke” approach.

That being said, due to the nature of industrial production and resource management, there’s

an extra layer of depth than there was in Parklife and that’s where things get interesting.

Each industry relies on natural resources and each map comes with a limited amount of them.

Some cities are packed with oil and ore, while others may be filled with fertile flatlands and forests.

There’s always an element of importing resources from unseen outside connections, but for the

most part your industries are going to be limited by the land itself.

This is in stark contrast to Parklife where you could place parks darn near anywhere and

get great results if you only spent enough money on attractions and ad campaigns.

But with industries, especially those focused on extracting oil and ore, once the resources

run dry you’re left with an unsustainable business.

At least, unsustainable at its current rate of growth without making notable changes,

all of which come at the expense of funding, time, traffic, and the environment.

Let’s explore the possibilities by looking at individual industries, starting with bubblin’ crude.

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.

The backbone of the oil industry is extraction, with each pump, well, and rig rapidly draining

any underground oil in a set radius around it.

Once that oil’s gone, it’s gone, and the extractor will have to be decommissioned or moved.

Sometimes even offshore if that’s what it takes to feed the fossil fuel beast.

Mining works very much like oil here as well, except you’re ripping into the earth seeking

precious ore instead.

Multiple types of extractors once again come into play, each with different sizes and capabilities,

but all of which rely on local resources to function.

Once you’ve got raw ore or crude oil out of the ground, it’ll then be packed up and

shipped off to a nearby storage facility.

These are one of a multitude of unique new building types that come with each industry,

many revolving around storage and/or refinement.

So with oil for instance, you’ve got specialized storage facilities that are geared towards

petroleum products and nothing else.

But you also gain access to generic storage yards and warehouses that can accept deliveries

from any industry, including the old zoned ones, with a menu letting you choose how and

what to store at each location.

This ties in nicely with the refining of raw materials and production of products, which

in the case of oil are things like petroleum and plastic, and with mining it’s stuff

like metal and fiberglass.

Again, there are dozens of new buildings to help make this supply chain work, it isn’t

limited to zoned industry vaguely working in the background.

So you’ve got dedicated refineries and factories for every industry now, taking raw materials

and creating more specialized products out of them, with all of them needing to be stored,

used up, sold, and shipped on their merry way.

This relies not only on thoughtful placement of factories and warehouses, but also on efficient

roadworks for endless trucks to get in and out of there at all hours of the day.

To this effect there are new industrial roads that can be placed which are cheaper to build

while still allowing for swift traffic speeds.

And there are now toll booths and toll roads, which by default slow down the flow of traffic

but provide a nice boost to city coffers.

Tolls can also be upgraded through a policy that allows for faster electronic payments,

in addition to some other industry-focused policies like workers’ unions and automation,

all of which come with their own trade-offs.

So yeah, you end up with a pretty involved balancing act of supply chain management that

I find darned satisfying to manipulate.

It’s quite stressful, in an oddly pleasing way, to try and maintain the strained yet

symbiotic relationship between refinement, transport,

production, available workers, and profit margins.

Not to mention the ongoing impact on the environment, from losing miles of valuable land to extraction

machinery, to making half the population sick from the metric tons of pollution being generated.

Hey look, oil industry pollution is down 40%! Can’t you tell?

Onto forestry and farming, which work a little differently from the other two.

These still rely on natural resources, in this case trees and fertile land, but considering

the renewable nature of things that grow they don’t deplete in the same ways as oil and ore.

The forest industry relies on laying down plots of trees

and farming is all about crops and livestock.

They still need to be in areas deemed suitable according to the resource map so you’re

somewhat limited in terms of placement, but at least they can be a bit more sustained

with freshly-planted crops and future generations of animals.

With forestry the main refineries come in the form of saw and pellet mills, which take

the logs of nearby tree plots and turn them into planed timber for building or pulp for paper.

And with farming you have fields holding bounties of fruit, vegetables, and grains, as well

as pastures for livestock like cows, pigs, and sheep.

Each harvest is then turned into new resources like flour and animal products, which can

then be shipped off to new unique production facilities like bakeries and beverage factories.

As a bit of logistical lubrication there are also a couple new airports focused on feight.

The cargo airport and the cargo hub make use of ample aircraft carrying products instead

of passengers, with the hub combining both air and rail into a single ploppable structure.

Speaking of airmail, there’s now a set of postal service buildings to provide mail delivery too.

This works a lot like the road maintenance building introduced in the Snowfall pack,

so it’s not entirely necessary but adding it to your city results in greater citizen satisfaction.

Placing POs sends delivery vans throughout the city spreading stamped happiness everywhere

they go, and sorting facilities act as a middle-man between local and outside postal connections.

And lastly there are some minor free additions that launched alongside this pack.

In addition to the tolls roads shown earlier, the latest patch also introduces custom name

lists to help keep track of every person or building you’ve named, as well as the ability

to mark individual zoned buildings as “historic.”

So even if its level changes the aesthetic will remain the same, something I’ve enjoyed

in city-builders since SimCity 3000 and I’m glad to see it in Skylines.

And that’s the gist of the Industries pack!

As usual it’s sold for $15, or $18 for the Plus version with a new radio station.

Much like Parklife before it, Industries is an expansion that isn’t necessary for every

player so whether or not it’s worth the asking price is debatable.

But it absolutely makes sense for players like me that love getting their business management

hands dirtier than the base game provides.

Though it kinda feels like a conflict of interest owning, operating, and profiting from every

major industrial business in my city while also being the mayor of said city, but eh.

I just like role-playing as a greedy capitalist overlord sometimes, mowing down forests to

grind up rocks and drilling up pristine beaches to fill thousands of barrels of dinosaur juice.

Until we get a proper sequel to the game, packs like this one consistently keep me coming

back to Cities Skylines, and in that sense I’d say Industries does its job nicely.

And if you enjoyed the coverage of this pack for Skylines

why not check out some of my others, I've covered all of them so far!

And I do all sorts of other things here every week on LGR.

And as always thank you very much for watching!