American Truck Simulator (Part 2)

Alright – we started a trucking business in Part 1 and got the driving and delivery mechanics down. It’s time to focus on the management simulator half of the game.

Yep - you're not just driving around in this game.

But First… Skills

Oh right, I was about to forget them. I mentioned in passing in Part 1 that when you level up thanks to EXP received from a delivery, you gain one Skill Point to spend on your Skills. Most of these skills yield extra rewards in EXP and money. There are six categories:

• 
  ADR/Hazardous materials: Explosives, gases, flammable liquids, etc., all the way to corrosive substances. Obviously, this means you need to be careful.
  
• Long Distance: At first, the longest delivery you can do is 250 miles long. As you add points to this one, the maximum length of deliveries will increase all the way up to 2500 miles. For the record, a delivery this long will take a few days in-game… and three hours in real-time. Yes, really.
• High-Value Cargo: Self-explanatory. You get more money because the cargo you’re carrying is valuable.
• Fragile Cargo: The goal here is to carry this safe and sound, meaning you must drive while avoiding all possible accidents and mistakes. In short: Good luck.
• Just-in-Time Delivery: This one has to be done in a tighter time requirement. Again, extras if you succeed.
• Eco-Driving: Reduces your fuel consumption at each level. Basically a dump stat to be filled once everything else is maxed.

Expanding the First Garage

As an aside, may I mention that I find it funny
that your profile "avatar" and those of your
employees are the faces of real people?

Okay, so we’ve got the driving mechanics down. What’s next? This is where the management part of the game comes in; it’s vital to take it into account. Growing your garage into a steady business is a tough thing, but you have options. First is the bank, which will gladly loan you some money so you can get started quickly, but you’ll then have to repay them an amount every day with some interests. Loans can be as low as 10,000$ or as high as 400,000$. It’s the only way to have any significant amount of cash early on, seeing as your first deliveries won’t yield much in the way of money (in part since you’re low-level and the more rewarding missions are unlocked by spending skill points) and trucks usually cost over 100,000$.

I'll say, the garage looks pretty nice once
it's been fully upgraded.

As long as you repay those loand in time, it's
all good, right?

By the way, those loans? If you go into a negative amount of money, the bank will gladly give you some credit, as long as you can pay them quickly. This can usually be done in one short mission, depending how much money you need to repay. I feel like the bank is very lenient, to the point where it would be very difficult to actually lose at the game. The bank may threaten to impound your properties if you owe them 100,000$ or more, but you have to screw up in a spectacular fashion to get there.

I might as well slip in a couple of truck-driving
pictures, or this part will be nothing but
boring menus.

Buying online is so much simpler.

Early on, you have to do everything on your own, since you’re not a respected name. If you want to buy a truck, you can’t do it online, you have to go there and then drive back to your garage with the new vehicle (your old one, if any, will be brought back to your business). This is until you’ve purchased three trucks; then, buying a truck online becomes an option.

But before you can buy more than one truck, you must upgrade your garage as the starting one has room for only one truck and one employee: Yourself. Each garage has two upgrades, and both are understandably expensive, but they’re worth it as each upgrade opens two more slots for trucks and employees…

From One-Man Operation To Small Business To Empire

Is it going to be easy, to add employees to the mix? Yes and no. The base idea is simple; but it gets complicated fast.

None of them start out all that great.
They'll get better under your supervision.

Thankfully, you don't have to travel to an
agency after you've found it in order to
hire new people.

To get employees, first you need to find recruiting agencies around the map, hence why exploring is necessary. You get more options for people to hire the more agencies you’ve found. Agencies charge a 1500$ base fee for each driver you hire through their services, too – nothing’s cheap. It gets better: These guys don’t do quick jobs. They’ll only work on freight market missions, so they need their own truck, each and every single one of them.

A fully-upgraded garage will have room for yourself and four employees – take into account the cost of upgrading the garage, then hiring the employees and providing a truck per person. It gets expensive quick. And if an employee isn’t given a truck, boy will they let you know; in-universe, they do this job to be paid, so they can’t lie around and do nothing.

While you own only one garage, this menu is
a bit empty. It'll take some time before it
fills up.

Each employee has a rating (up to 5.0), a wage they request per mission (a base amount + an extra amount per mile driven), and a number of levels in their driving skills, which are the same as yours. Under your employment, on top of bringing cash to the business through contracts, they’ll level up in a manner similar to yours, and you can select what you want them to upgrade – everything equal, or one skill at a time. More money will be made with the Long Distance skill. Also, it is entirely possible that some of these employees will actually cost you money early on, but they’ll get better over time as they grab contracts that bring out more money.

After which you can repay your loans thanks to the money you make, but also the money your employees bring back over time. Once this garage is on a roll, you can get some money and buy another garage – and then lather, rinse, repeat. I imagine that, in order to beat the game, you have to own all of the garages and, if not have them all working at full capacity, have hired every single employee available. I’ve been told that it’s impossible to fill all of the garages, apparently there are too many garages and not enough employees in the game’s code.

So Many DLCs

I guess another thing to do in order to finish the game is to visit 100% of the map. As I was writing this, I was in the process of discovering the handful of towns I hadn’t visited yet. And, of course, I have yet to purchase the DLC States I’m missing. The base American Truck Simulator already has quite a bit of content, but it’s worth buying the DLCs in order to increase the size of the map.

Custom paintjobs do look cool.

I personally don’t care much for customization in this one – I know I can buy a custom paint job for my truck, but… eh, money’s still tight and I have loans to repay, customization will wait till my garage is profitable. Still for those who want them, there are DLCs for bonus custom paint jobs and options for wheel tunings. The exterior’s not enough? You can also purchase packs of decorations for the interior of the cabin, if you love to use the first-person view.

If you think it's tough to drive 100% of the map
on three States, imagine when you have ten.

Some other DLC packs unlock new brands of trucks that you can then purchase in the game. Last but not least, three packs broaden the number of thing you can carry to their destination; one lets you carry forest machinery, one is all about heavy cargo, and the last involves very special objects to carry around (portable houses, submarines, etc.).

If you want to buy all of these DLCs, it’ll be expensive. But, to be fair, some are free. Arizona is one of those, so you can unlock a full State as soon as you start playing. And it’s not like all of them are mandatory – I’ll gladly skip the cosmetic ones. The option’s out there if you love to customize your stuff, though, and more options never hurt. It does annoy me a bit that several achievements cannot be obtained unless you have the required DLCs.

Wanna Visit Canada?

I actually bought this game in May 2020, but no, it wasn’t originally because of the pandemic. It was already bad at the time, but I wasn’t longing for open spaces yet. Nah, the game was actually advertised to me as very mod-friendly, with a very large community of modders adding their own stuff to the base content. Looking around the menu, I did find an option for mods, a place that stores them and lets you enable/disable them at will. I am not a big user of mods; I tend to be satisfied with the stuff I’m given, but I understand the appeal. I know there are very large modding communities for many big games out there.

Although, when it comes to American Truck Simulator, there’s a lot of possibilities. The most obvious one: Modders building the map for the rest of North America. All of the missing States (except Hawaii, obviously), then Canada and Mexico. I haven’t tried them, so I can’t really speak on the quality of those mods. Let’s just say that if you like this game, there’s an entire world of unofficial, fan-made content to discover.

Not sure I want to travel across the entire
continent to see my home town.

Thinking about it… I live in Quebec. Even if I did download the Canada mod, it would take me hours and hours to be able to get there and visit my corner of the world – I would have to drive all the way across the continent. Before I can even begin, I would first need a profitable business, seeing as unless the mod includes missions to deliver cargo all the way over to there, then I wouldn’t be making money for my own company. I also don’t know how accurate the depiction of Quebec would be, or whether it would be worth the trip. I imagine it would be stripped down, like all other places in the game, but how much? Would it contain the famous landmarks? Would it feature my home town? Would it have enough content to make me want to explore around? And what about the rest of Canada, the other states of the U.S., or Mexico? Still, I love that not only all those mods exist, but SCS Software encourages their creation and provides tools to help their implementation.

Speaking of - I was about to forget, but there's also a multiplayer mode in which you can join a server and be one of many truck drivers making deliveries. So if you see other trucks behaving erratically in that mode, chances are they're controlled by other human players out there.

Final Thoughts

American Truck Simulator sated my desire to go out onto the roads and see new places. It’s a bit disappointing that we almost exclusively see highways and roads, but that’s normal for the type of game that it is. And, of course, it won’t ever replace the real deal. Besides, the focus is on delivering cargo; it’s possible to drive freely, but first you need a steady stream of revenue. It’s really more of an “American Trucking Business Simulator”; not that I’m complaining, as both halves are pretty great.

Dammit! A roadblock!
At least that's not where I had to go.

Driving: The map is immense from the get-go and can grow larger with all the DLC States released by the studio (not to mention the modding community’s contributions). Although the towns and cities are stripped down to their bare minimum due to the 1:20 conversion and the world feels barren in places, you can still see some of the most interesting sights. It also means that longer deliveries are a serious time commitment, seeing as they can take upwards of three hours in real time to complete. The physics are great, and there’s a couple elements to make things feel somewhat realistic – your driver needs to fill the tank and sleep, but never has to eat or stop for bathroom breaks. It does also mean having to deal with road signs, speed limits, roadblocks, and the occasional idiot driver. 

I will never not find it funny that the game uses
what I assume to be the photos of real people
for the drivers you can hire.

Management: A lot of details are taken into account, as I’ve covered through this part. Managing your business as a single employee, then expanding the garage, the employee workforce, the squad of trucks, and eventually growing into a large business by buying garages all over the land. That’s pretty cool. I assume it could take a few hundred hours of playtime to become the biggest trucking business of them all. I think it’s neat to hire employees and conduct their own growth; it’s a bit annoying that we must buy 3 trucks and drive them home, before we can just buy them online; or buy 3 garages before you can buy them online. Annoying, but understandable since you start as a small name. Don’t you love when the annoying parts in a game are 100% justified by the gameplay?

If driving around, fulfilling contracts, visiting States virtually and/or growing a business sounds like something you’d like, for extended periods of time, then this game is for you. If you don’t like games that require some time commitment, it might not be for you; fair enough. All I know is, it scratched one itch I’ve had for a few months.

Another itch I’ve had was about going to places to have activities… like, say, amusement parks. Definitely not recommended at the moment, but thankfully video games can simulate that too. See you next week.