Industrialization Game

Core idea

The game is kind of like Cookie Clicker, except the number you are trying to make go up is GDP. You start with a very primitive economy—1917 Russia is a useful baseline—with some shitty factories but basically no industrialization. The ideal end point is something like 1980 Japan. That is the rough technological breadth of the game.

You are forced to keep growing rapidly, year on year, in order to industrialize. The basic rhythm is constant bottleneck removal: you remove one bottleneck, and now there is a new bottleneck. Coal is a nightmare; then you roll out a new level of power-generation technology, such as combined-cycle gas turbines, which solves that problem and exposes the next one.

The economy is abstracted. You are not managing individual factories or moving things around on a map. Instead, you choose from menus of investment options—for example, how to invest in power generation now—and deal with the consequences at the scale of the whole economy.

Time and planning

Everything is oriented around five-year plans. Each plan is a period in which you decide how to invest, which bottlenecks to attack, and what kind of economy you are trying to build next.

There is a detailed tech tree covering the transition from the primitive starting economy to a modern industrial one.

What the economy models

Important parts of the economy include:

• power generation and delivery;
• transportation by road, train, and plane;
• steel;
• machine tools;
• consumer goods;
• labor dynamics;
• R&D spending;
• external markets, including exports;
• subsidies;
• natural resources, including coal, gas, iron, and non-ferrous metals.

The export market evolves over time. As your labor costs rise and other countries catch up, they begin to dominate the lower-value parts of the market. You are forced to move higher in the value chain rather than relying forever on the industries that drove your early growth.

Different economies

Each game is somewhat randomized. A country may have a lot of coal, gas deposits, iron, non-ferrous metals, or some other combination of resources. You have to adapt the shape of the economy and its industrialization path to what is available instead of following the same build every time.

Out of scope

The game is not about politics or war. You are not responsible for the military, hospitals, or education. You can choose to put more money into R&D, but you do not manage the education system behind it.

You also do not manage individual factories or a geographic map. The player’s job is national-scale economic planning: making GDP go up, choosing investments, keeping growth moving, and dealing with the next bottleneck.