You've basically just described Factorio, which is all about logistics.
I strongly encourage you to give it a try, not only because of this, but because it is one of the greatest games ever made -- especially when played with mods, which make it 100 times better than the vanilla game (which by itself is fantastic).
You have sooo many options on what to do and how to do it in Factorio, it puts most other games to shame just by that alone.
I could go on about how great Factorio is.. for hours.. but I won't because there are plenty of other Factorio threads on HN that do just that.. so don't take my word for it, but read some of those threads instead.. or just do yourself a favor and play it already! If you're interested in logistics I don't see how you couldn't love Factorio.
Factorio presents a significantly more complex problem at a vastly increased scale.
Players who get way into Factorio see that as the beginning of the game, some 40hrs after starting in my case. If the idea of playing essentially a 40hr tutorial doesn't make you want to run away then Factorio might be for you.
I prefer Dwarf Fortress if I want to make large swaths of time disappear, personally... though I haven't played that in many years come to think of it. I guess as I approach 40 and my awareness of my own mortality increases I care less for making time disappear.
[0] I think pushing robotics much earlier in the tech tree may have made it more enjoyable for me, and there are mods for that, but I never paly a modded game until I've experienced it as it was intended and by that point I didn't want to pay more of that damned exercise in complexity-fetishism.
The outcome is too momentum-based. Once a player builds a solid early game lead, there is pretty much no way to stop them. There aren't really any offense tactics besides monopolizing resources, which pretty much has to happen early on. The various "black market" sabotages are pretty weak and expensive. None of them will stop a late game player with momentum. It feels like your starting position and the decisions you make in the first 1-2 minutes of the game pre-determine the outcome 30 minutes later--which is boring.
The stock trading system (which is ultimately the only way to win) is simplistic and just not a satisfying way to end the game. You're sitting there trading, making tons of money, doing everything right, then suddenly Game Over--someone had more money and decided to buy you out, which you can't defend against, even if you pre-buy all your own stock. You get a warning a few seconds before it happens (the red percentage number next to your opponent) but there's literally nothing you can do to stop them.
That should give you a feel for what the vanilla game is like, and what you like and don't like about it, so you'll be in much better shape to make your own decisions as to which mods look interesting or useful to you.
Then I'd experiment with mods to find out which one you like or not. Some of the most popular mods are probably not too bad to start with (as long as they're not full game overhaul mods or ones that add a ton of content, as those will almost certainly be completely overwhelming for a newbie.. they can be overwhelming even for advanced players).
Also, I'd start with just a single mod or two, and learn how to use those before adding more. It's easy to go mod-crazy, but that's useless unless you actually know how to use them. So learn a mod or two at a time, and then get a couple more.
There are usually videos on at least the most useful and popular mods out there, so those should be of great help in learning how to use them... but nothing beats trying them yourself.
For me personally, the top three absolutely essential mods are Fill4Me, Squeak Through, and Todo List. Don't expect to be blown away by these mods.. they're very small and very simple utility mods.
These days I actually play with hundreds of mods, so the three above won't even give you a small taste of what's possible.. they just cure a couple of annoyances, and add a tiny bit of useful functionality that I personally can't live without. But sooo muuch more is possible!
I did try Bob's and Angel's, but I found the formulas so nonsensical that it broke the "immersion" for me.
I think I'd be more interested in a mod that added something that fits the game world and just... extended it a little. E.g.: adding aluminium and titanium, not 50 new raw materials that inter-convert into each other in absurd ways -- loops even in some mods!
E.g.: One thing that feels "not fleshed out enough" in the vanilla game to me is the infrastructure related to nuclear power. The centrifuges have no use other than nuclear enrichment and related processes. The heat pipes can only be meaningfully used with nuclear reactors. Etc... Similarly, you never need to use circuit networks, the back-pressure from the belts alone is sufficient to achieve the desired throughput.
It does tweak nuclear a little, giving you a way to use reprocessing side projects for fusion power near the later part of the tech tree.
In terms of circuits, the one area in which I always use them is to control oil refining so I didn't end up capping on heavy/light oil but also didn't turn it all into petrol and leave myself without the resources to make lubricant or rocket fuel.
Space Exploration pretty much forces you to use circuits too in controllijy what goes to your space stations/other planets but it's a long mod with most of the content basically starting after a full vanilla playthrough
On the other hand, I think things like keybindings and mods that fix problems are probably ok (personally).
Factorio: Bob's mods, Angel's mods
Minecraft: Literally every tech mod, most magic
Skyrim: Requiem
Fallout 4: Horizon
Then go watch videos and do it again, but much faster.
Then if you’re still playing, you obviously have time to kill so go play Industrial Revolution 2, space exploration, and bobs mods on their own for a whole new experience.
Just so people know what they'll be getting in to with these mods: they add a ton of content and make the game much, much longer... which is great, if that's what you want.
But maybe you prefer more combat, or less combat.. or something that's focused on giving you some particular technology or technologies, or a dozen other ways to approach the game.
Also, many of my own favorite mods don't actually add much if any content at all, but are utility mods, which make certain parts of the game more manageable or more flexible... like train management mods.
QoL mods:
- Long Reach: Highly recommended if playing on >1080p res display
- Squeak through: Once you start laying pipes for fluids this becomes an essential mod for moving about your base
- Even Distribution: Evenly distributes items when you click drag to fill multiple entites with items, eg furnaces with fuel
- EvoGUI: Simple display overview for keeping track of biter evolution and basic environment info.
- Vehicle Snap: Makes it easier to align to a given cardinal direction
- Blueprint Extensions mod (Continued): Get the Continued flavor for version >1.0 compatibility. This mod gives some basic tools such as mirroring or rotating blueprints, very useful.
- Bottleneck: shows a simple colored dot over some entities to show if it's input starved, output limited (overfull), or running normally. Makes it easy to see at a glance what is backing up in sections of your base.
- FNEI: Want to know how to make something, or what use a certain item has? this simple mod shows how anything inthe game is made, or everything it can be used in. Also has great mod support, even full conversion mods.
Conversion/Gameplay Changing mods:
- Bobs And Angels modsets: Think you've figured out factorio? Want more factorio? More logistics? More recipes and items to make More things? Step into Bobs w/ Angels modset to ratchet up the complexity by an order of magnitude or two (in a good way). Want an extra challenge? Get the Sandblock mod, which is Bobs + Angels but starting on a tiny island, and you have to harvest resources to build your factory - including the land you build it on - from the sea.
- Krastorio: I actually haven't gotten around to this, but it's another full conversion mod that is highly recommended by many members of the community. Definitely on my to-play list
- Rampant Arsenal + Pitch Black: Want more of a RTS-esque combat challenge? Biters too boring/easy now that you've come to grips with Factorio's core mechanics? Deathworld too easy? Give this ago. It greatly expands the arsenal available to you should you choose to build them, but also greatly ramps up biter aggression, difficulty, and variety, especially at night.
There are many many more mods to choose from, and the modding community is very vibrant, and well supported from the devs themselves, with an excellent mod portal and mod loading system integrated into the game. It's by far the best mod community and integration in a game I've ever seen, and people are still churning out all manner of new and interesting stuff, as well as improving upon the classics listed above. There are also many I've not specified (eg FARL, LTN, etc) that many would consider essential, but this is already a long list.
EDIT: Also just realized this is a 9 day old thread. Came back from the holidays to my desktop and this tab was still open, apologies for the necro.
There is also Foundation, by a smallish canadian studio (iirc), that kinda is a mix between settlers and sim city :-)
There's also an open source clone of Settlers II called Widelands.
(Just noticed Factorio is mentioned below; Mindustry is similar, but also Open Source cross platform Java)
The Wargame series from Eugen (the most recent one being Wargames: Red Dragon)
Logistics is a huge part of it, your armies can run out of ammo, or be stranded without fuel - there are dedicated units used for resupply.
Supply dumps, supply columns, and their protection, is a big part of the game as well.
You can trust your AT squad to understand that other infrantry needs to be shot at with a gun and that tanks should be engaged with Javelins. This makes the game way more strategic and fun to play than something like Starcraft where you need to babysit moronic units and manually trigger their abilities. In Wargame you can focus more on positioning, information collection and movement instead of having to focus on clickathons to win. By the time shots are fired, the winner is probably already decided.
Some mods fix the most glaring problems, but they require investing in all dlc and make almost impossible to find an online match
there's additional operational cost in the form of energy used if you have far off resources being harvested. and the transport shuttle has to go get the goods, which increases cycle time a little. i have less than a dozen games in but i definitely didn't feel like I was managing the logistics; that moving stuff around was an issue or concern. there's a lot of different resources but they all roll up pretty automatically wherever they are without thinking about it. that was my (limited) experience.
To really do this kind of gameplay well, you'd need to have the ability to task military units to guard supply train units, and for them to have the kind of intelligence / user interface that doesn't just have them defenselessly wandering around an opponents base.
It's been interesting to read the https://acoup.blog/ take on the importance of supply chains and logistics in warfare, and how to organise a properly defended supply chain. I agree that it's an area that could be addressed interestingly, but it'd be a game made out of the bits that other games deliberately abstracted away because they were hard to do well, so I think it'd be a real challenge. Even fiction tends to abstract away from the details of these things because it's so hard to make interesting.
This is the aspect that I wish was implemented in my favourite games such as Stellaris since disrupting the logistics of the enemy and protecting your own requires a much more thoughtful setup by players
* Where to site supply dumps for front-line forces
* how to protect them
* how to get supplies to where they are needed safely from your home world / base to these supply dumps and then to the front lines.
* how to keep forces supplied if you break-through enemy lines
* How to disupt the enemies logistics
Without things like the above the games usually devolve into "Bigger army / fleet wins, with a bit of rock/paper/scissor based on unit composition"
It's also fairly often on good sales
In most RTSes, once you collect resources they essentially go into a magic resource counter in the cloud. You can collect wood on one side of the map, and instantly create a building with that on the other side of the map.
I would be really interested in playing an RTS that focused much less heavily on variety of combat, and much more heavily on variety of logistics.
Imagine a game where you had to shuttle food to your army to keep it fed, or physically bring stone to a construction site to build a castle, and you had to physically stockpile resources in vulnerable depots that would become targets of enemy raids.
You'd have to do a lot of design work to make the ergonomics of setting up the logistics infrastructure not incredibly tedious, but I think it could be done.
The closest RTS I have seen to this is probably the Warrior Kings series which was definitely ahead of its time in many ways.