Rise of Industry 2 makes economic simulation more approachable

Complexes are making it easier to keep track of your operations

SomaSim / Kasedo Games

United States, the 1980s: Industry is booming and you’re a young entrepreneur looking to make a fortune through the power of unbridled capitalism – that’s the simple, yet completely satisfying setup for Rise of Industry 2, the next business tycoon title from SomaSim and Kasedo Games.

As always with strategy games, one of the greatest challenges for the developers is how to make their title both deep and complex enough to be engaging for veteran players as well as approachable for newcomers at the same time – and they showed me their solution to this conundrum in Rise of Industry 2 during a preview at Gamescom 2024.

Playing games like these, it’s always easy to lose the overview of the big picture. You build mines here, smelters there, a factory for car parts near this town, and the one for steel beams on the other side of that river – and when it comes to logistically connecting them, the nightmare really begins. Instead of spreading yourself out widely, Rise of Industry 2 encourages you to build stuff close to each other – very close. This is where Complexes come into play.

A Complex essentially combines several building types together, allowing you to concentrate an entire production chain into the same vicinity. For example, you can place an iron mine, smelter, steel furnace, warehouse, loading bays, and the necessary power plant to keep everything going into a single Complex, allowing you to churn out carbon steel with only coal having to be delivered from somewhere else – all other steps in production can be handled in the same area, cutting away a lot of logistics you’d need to tackle otherwise.

Complexes also help you with space management. Buying property is expensive, so being the most efficient you can be with the land you already own is simply smart.

Complexes are tight areas in which you can concentrate entire production chains. / SomaSim / Kasedo Games

“It’s a lot more approachable than the original Rise of Industry,” the developers tell me. They emphasize that a lot of work went into the tutorials, which they say were “confusing” in the first game, as well as the early campaign missions, which double as onboarding scenarios.

All this doesn’t mean that logistics fiends won’t get a taste of the management they so love in Rise of Industry 2: You still need to make sure that resources are transported to and from your Complexes on time and in the right quantities to fulfill your contracts or be exported, so setting delivery schedules up will still be part of your job.

“A lot of the complexity is in setting up the [logistics] chains,” the developers explain, “but once they’re set up, they continue to do their thing on their own.” It’s the same for a Complex – unless you want to expand it later on, they’re very hands-off once you’ve done the initial setup.

Scenarios in Rise of Industry 2 vary a lot: Sometimes you build a business from scratch, but in other cases you may be asked to turn a failing company around and rescue it. Adapting to such different tasks is easier with Rise of Industry 2’s customization system. Before starting a map, you can choose from a variety of focuses for your business, preparing it as best as you can for the challenge ahead by grabbing some bonuses to specific areas. Another important choice is made right at the start of a game when you need to select your initial investor. They will provide some funding capital for you, but this always comes with strings attached. For example, an investor may ask you to produce certain goods or resources – hence it’s advisable to check out your starting situation before you commit to anyone’s conditions.

Maps in Rise of Industry 2 can get pretty huge and will come with resource locations, cities, and infrastructure like harbors and airports already existing. The game is less about shaping an area to fit your needs and much more about adapting to the circumstances as you find them.

That’s not to say you can’t change things to be more advantageous for you: Investing in nearby cities, for example, helps them grow and in turn, provide more living space for your employees.

Another approachability measure is the fact that new scenarios and maps unlock once you’ve completed the first couple of goals from the current campaign – the game doesn’t overstay its welcome and forces you to play until you’re deep into the endgame, where the management is more likely to overwhelm (or bore) a genre newcomer.

Oh, tasty dinosaur juice. / SomaSim / Kasedo Games

Everyone knows networking is an important part of business and Rise of Industry 2 simulates that aspect as well: CEOs of other companies might hit you up for a chat and request a favor – and agreeing to help may pay off with a juicy discount the next time you need to order resources from that company. In general, dealing with other companies will improve your relationship with them as well.

One of the beauties of this genre is to just load up a sandbox map, see what starting resources you have available to you, and then go with the flow from there: You might build a toy empire that rivals Lego based on some oil wells or become part of the military-industrial complex by making jet engines after getting your start with some humble iron mines – or you can do both.

There are tons of different resources and goods in the game to work with and the simulation can get quite detailed – oil wells, for example, don’t just give you dinosaur juice, but produce natural gas as a byproduct, allowing you to open a gas power plant on the side. Using uranium to open your own nuclear power plant sounds great at first – and definitely solves your electricity issues – but you need a plan on how to deal with the radioactive waste this generates.

Rise of Industry 2 will take part in the October 2024 Steam Next Fest with a free demo, so you’ll have a chance to test the game yourself soon. Its full release is planned for 2025 on PC.