"Le seul jeu industriel qui pourrait vraiment faire cohabiter l'usine et la nature"
Hello team,
I'd like to step back on a topic that keeps coming up as small, scattered
suggestions (tunnel boring machines, underground pipes, caves) but that I
think deserves real attention on its own: tunnels and underground
infrastructure.
Right now, the game's logic almost always pushes toward the same solution:
flatten it. A mountain is in the way of a rail line? Cut it open. A deposit
sits under a forest or a hill? Level everything to reach it. The only
language the player has to interact with the terrain is the excavator. Over
time, every playthrough ends up looking the same: a flat island, striped
with conveyors, with nothing left of the original landscape.
That's a shame, because the game's original promise isn't "destroy
everything" — it's "transform a world." There's a real difference between
the two. A world you transform keeps a memory, a geography, constraints you
learn to work around cleverly. A world you flatten becomes a sandbox with no
identity, where the only variable that matters is how many tiles are
available.
Tunnels change that relationship at a deeper level. It's not just a
convenience (going under a mountain instead of cutting it in half) — it's a
different design principle: coexisting with the terrain instead of erasing
it. A tunnel boring machine that digs slowly, with a real cost in resources
and time, would force a genuine strategic choice: do I flatten the surface,
fast and brutal, or do I preserve the landscape and go underneath, slower
but more elegant? That choice alone would give every playthrough an
aesthetic — almost moral — weight.
It would also open up concrete possibilities:
- underground conveyors and pipelines, freeing the surface for things
other than logistics
- railways that cross the terrain instead of erasing it
- islands where, by late game, you can still recognize the original shape
of the land, with nature reclaiming space elsewhere
I'm not asking for one more gimmick mechanic. I'm aski