Cities: Skylines - Industries Review (Enterprofilenamehere)
It's a decent expansion.
It allows you to build extractor buildings for the four different resources in the game:
- forest (logs)🪵
- fertile land (crops)🌾
- ore 🪨
- oil 🛢️
These resources can be exported, imported, or sold to the vanilla zoned industry.
You can then build buildings that process each of those resources into one of two more refined resources:
- logs ➡️ planed timber or paper
- crops ➡️ animal products or flour
- ore ➡️ metal or glass
- oil ➡️ petroleum or plastic
These more refined resources can be exported (but not imported), or used in the unique factories included in the expansion to produce luxury goods 💎. For example, the furniture factory needs paper and planed timber to produce furniture. All luxury goods are treated as one resource once they leave the factory; for example, the furniture factory says it produces furniture while the sneaker factory says it produces sneakers, but they are both just treated as the same luxury resource. Luxury resources can be exported or sold to zoned commercial buildings.
There are also warehouses and storage buildings to store resources. It is a good idea to build them near where the resources they store are produced and near where they are used. For example, you could build a warehouse for storing planed timber near sawmills and near a furniture factory to ensure the sawmills can empty their outputs and the factory is always supplied.
This DLC adds a lot of things to do and really changes how your cities look. The new industry roads (which have two nice bridges) are also nice to have. It also adds some at-least somewhat more realistic scale, with larger farms and whatnot.
Some of the things I don't like are the unrealistically huge amount of truck traffic these buildings produce (which could be a problem before with specialized industry as well). There are existing problems in the game with cargo distribution that are made worse with this expansion, like train networks getting clogged with cargo trains that are only 10% full. Ore and oil resources are also extracted too fast; you go away and work on another part of your city and a little while later your oil specialized area extractors have depleted all the oil underneath them and need to be moved.
In summary: I recommend this expansion if you can get it on sale, as the price is a little steep, but you will probably like it if what I said here appeals to you.
7/10