Foxhole: Wartime Logistics Is Fun - Sat, Nov 4, 2023
War. War never changes. Good thing I'm not fighting.
Imagine a WW1 + WW2 inspired game, where 2 teams are fighting to the death for every city, every river, every F*%king rock. Day and night, without stop.
A game where one match (war) can last months. Where every trench is dug by players, and every single piece of gear is handcrafted by players. This, is Foxhole.
It will take too much time to talk about the game as a whole, and not here to do that. I am here to talk about the logistics of the game.
About the logistics.
As I wrote above all gear needs to be crafted by the player. At the start of the war, all safe houses and town halls (main spawn points) are stockpiled with various guns, ammo and shirts (shirts or Soldier Supplies are items needed in order to spawn. 1 shirt = 1 player spawn).
After that, your faction needs to start producing guns, ammo, shirts, shells, artillery, trucks, radios, binoculars, tanks, ships, etc, in order to push the enemy out, and win the war. This is a MMO game.
Most factories are in the backlines, usually far-away from the fight, until the enemy is about to destroy you.
The gameplay-loop is simple, but also fun. You start by going to a “Scrap Field”, a place where once every 40 minutes scrap metals are spawning, waiting for you to pick them up. With that scrap, you go to the Refinery building and you start “cooking” Basic Materials, Explosive Materials or Diesel. Those are the main items needed to win a war.
- Basic Materials can be used to build bunkers, vehicles, most rifles and most ammo.
- Explosive Materials are used to make grenades, basic shells and … well… other explosives.
- Diesel is used as basic vehicle fuel, or as fuel for fire pits (needed when it’s snowing outside)
Once you have the BMats (Basic Materials), you go a Factory building, craft your items like rifles, ammo or shirts, and then you drive them to a front, in a truck or freighter ship. That’s. It.
Difference between frontline and backline gameplay:
A player might never actually shot an enemy during the course of an entire war. Most of the time you are stuck in the backlines, in friendly territory, surrounded by friendly buildings and defences. And protected by the front.
This, combined with the fact that players tend to groups themselves into “Logimen” (backline player that only does logistics) and “Frontliner” (…player that fights.. I guess.. idk), can create some unfortunate situations, like having a high-ranking logiman trying to give order on the frontline, even though they not have fired a single bullet that war. (…wait, is this a game, or a simulation?)
This can go the other way as well. Frontliners will b*tch and moan about “missing logi”, even when they don’t realize that the entire server is full, so logi cannot enter. Sometimes frontliners will hamorage resources faster than they can be resuplied, which can cause a front to colapse. (again, is this a simulation?)
But where’s the fun in all this?
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of PvPing in video games. Which is why I enjoy Foxhole.
I enjoy war games, and being able to help a front just by doing mindless grinds and craftings sounds surprisingly appealing to me! I can joing, craft rifles for 4 hours while also being at work, and just leave the items in a Sea Port stockpile ready for other logimen to take them and deliver them to a front.
I can grind scrap and BMats while watching random shows on [INSERT STREAMING PLATFORM HERE].
It’s a game that it’s not demanding when it doesn’t need to be. You can sweat on a frontline, fighting unwinnable battles just to secure a bridge. Or you can casually craft 150mm artillery shells, and let the frontliner use them.
This is why I love Foxhole, and why I spent over 2000 hours in it.
