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OwlFancier posted:Has anyone had a practical use for container shipping? It seems a bit weird tbh when you could as readily just load stuff directly into ships, or use the trains to export given how absurd the production rate needs to be to utilize container packers/harbours properly. It looks cool as hell. (So, not really, no.)
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Sep 13, 2021 03:47
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Maybe there’s some load/unload time savings, on second thought? I can’t imagine this would truly matter, but maybe containers load dramatically faster so you can essentially shift the “load” time for large shipments to when the vehicles aren’t at the station such that when they arrive they can quickly stock up and ship off.
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Sep 13, 2021 03:49
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I think containers do load faster yes but you also have to load the containers so I don't know if it is that much faster really. For the effort I feel like it would be easier to just buy another boat. Also vexingly I don't think you can stack the containers if you are also shipping out cars, and you can't put cars in containers.
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Sep 13, 2021 04:38
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I'm hype for that water&sewage
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Sep 13, 2021 11:32
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grate deceiver posted:I'm hype for that water&sewage soviet repooblic
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Sep 13, 2021 16:28
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LeFishy posted:soviet repooblic Finally, comrade, a way to make use of your posts!
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Sep 13, 2021 17:19
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If the game gives me anything akin to Cities Skylines water physics I'm going to have to quit my job. I played with that junk for days. I would also like more consumer goods, even if it was something fairly generic. Some kind of 'widget factory' where you can dump various resources to produce containers of 'goods' for export or to make people happy would give me reason to ship a lot of things like wood and bricks that, after stocking up a local depot, I never touch again because they don't feel worth the money to export. Inevitably, too, you kind of end up with too much labor in massive cities once you get your major industries established and fed... Although that does get solved pretty well with vehicle production facilities. I'm more or less happy with their roadmap. I worry a little bit about the loyalty system still and I'm also worried that waste + new residential needs will sort of clutter cities. I already feel like my cities are 60/40 services/support/electric/transit to residential buildings by land area. Interested to know what they plan on incorporating from mods, though. Mods and building variations for size would be absolutely killer and its a bummer that's almost a year out - One of my biggest "ugh" moments in the game is when I have a new save and I have to plot out another massive complex for x y or z when I'm only at the scale of a single small town. Being able to start small with steel, cement, food, etc, would really help smooth out the weird 'progression' of your Republic.
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Sep 13, 2021 17:41
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I would also like more consumer goods, even if it was something fairly generic. Some kind of 'widget factory' where you can dump various resources to produce containers of 'goods' for export or to make people happy would give me reason to ship a lot of things like wood and bricks that, Comrade, today the toy quota has been increased from a stick, to a stick and a ball made of brick. Just as corn is a secret to the success of the west, so is their stick ball sport. Let us show them how much more powerful a soviet team of ball can be!
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Sep 13, 2021 18:26
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I've largely given up on ever figuring out how to succeed in this game, but every time I see AAS post I get that itch. It's probably been asked before but do you ever stream or anything?
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Sep 13, 2021 18:53
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Anime Store Adventure posted:If the game gives me anything akin to Cities Skylines water physics I'm going to have to quit my job. I played with that junk for days. I haven't even considered water physics, I had just assumed it would be something much simpler like a building you place that creates a small lake and that's your "reservoir" but it's modeled like a building is. But we will see I guess. Lib and let die posted:I've largely given up on ever figuring out how to succeed in this game, but every time I see AAS post I get that itch. If it helps you to enjoy it please do just post your woes here, it does require you to sort of wrench your brain into the right mindset but once it clicks it goes a lot better from there. Took me a lot of time to get started but I enjoy it now:  
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 13, 2021 19:31
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Lib and let die posted:I've largely given up on ever figuring out how to succeed in this game, but every time I see AAS post I get that itch. I don’t regularly stream, but I did some last year - I was doing an LP of the game last year for a bit but I let it die as I’ve been games hopping with a buddy so I haven’t had my singular laser focus on W&R again. The LP is still there (I think linked in the OP) and who knows, once winter sets in if things calm down I could see myself doing another LP and streaming when I can. I could see the October patch being a good launch point for a new save. Streaming it was really fun though the few times I got a couple folks from here to chat so I’d definitely do it again if I decide to do another “spend 20 hours a week in W&R” period of my life.
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Sep 13, 2021 19:52
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OwlFancier posted:If it helps you to enjoy it please do just post your woes here, it does require you to sort of wrench your brain into the right mindset but once it clicks it goes a lot better from there. Took me a lot of time to get started but I enjoy it now: Also yes - I still really enjoy getting my (soviet) engineer's hat on and helping people futz through problems with big impenetrable walls of text. And that city looks dope as hell, Owl.
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Sep 13, 2021 19:55
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Cheers, it's a testament to the game more than me though, there's something about the way the game works (and renders foliage) that makes stuff really look good I think, I wish there were more decorative options about (and that buildings could occupy not-square footprints) but by and large I just plonk stuff down and then surround it with different flavours of tree, and it looks good. Also there's more incentive to work around geographical features too, which I think helps. Also the infrastructure focus I think is a big thing too, once you have the highways built you don't want to mess with them too much, and if you're retrofitting a train line as I did for that town, it sometimes takes some weird paths because building it just anywhere is actually quite difficult compared to something like skylines.
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Sep 13, 2021 20:01
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I have been really enjoying The Passages map because it gives me tons of challenge working around geography instead of just 'going through' it, but it did make my latest save a false start that was really deep because I'm brutally unhappy with a few decisions I've made but also in a position where I blew through my initial 10mil Rubles and only have industry enough to tread water with exports. I refused to level this tiny river and instead built my construction goods industries around it, which is my favorite example of working with geography recently.  This town turned out OK - was going for a more village/low rise vibe.  But I made some poor planning choices and instead of using available space I made one of the easy to make mistakes of stapling myself in and packing everything together - not the least because I started in 1930 and the trucks suuuuck then. Here's some rail infrastructure that's absolutely abhorrent:    (Alright I actually like my dual road/rail stack/cloverleaf/whatever interchange, but its attached to a bunch of garbage.) Now the town is basically dying - I can't sustain exports unless I pack the factories, which are now way too close to the town, which kills too many workers with pollution. I put that town directly by the cloverleaf thing - which, I do want that infrastructure there because of the map's layout - but I absolutely don't need that scale yet and its been a huge obstacle to expanding meaningfully. The town got stapled in because of some other poor planning and now I'm sort of goosed. Willing to call it a false start and try another go. Really wish I could find other maps as fun as the Passages that aren't quite as gutpunching, but for me it really hits everything where a lot of maps either have weird concentrations of resources (too little, too many, whether in terms of # of deposits or density of concentration or both) or just not super interesting/mostly flat terrain. The Passages is definitely a little bit unrealistically 'noisy' in terms of how near all the geographic features are, but I feel like it hits the compacted scale of the game well (if that makes sense.)
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Sep 13, 2021 20:30
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I'm glad I am not the ony one who has horrible train noodles running through things because I cannot train properly. I don't think you have yet resorted to the train turning circle though so good job there.
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Sep 13, 2021 20:54
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Is there gonna be a roundabout tool? Or a way to have things snap to be parallel with roads and other buildings?
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Sep 13, 2021 20:59
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They already have parallel road building, it was added in an update a while back. Roundabouts are actually fairly easy to build just by using the curve tool, just set it however big you want the roundabout and then drag out half the curve, delete the straight bits, then connect the two ends with the same curve setting. There is no building grid placement though, though you can rotate through 90 degrees by pressing R and buildings do technically only have a fixed number of rotations so you can get them to the same rotation as each other easily enough. Roads are still a little inexact though. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 13, 2021 21:01
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I think somewhere in this thread I gave my best guide for getting things all nicely gridded up with pictures but I don’t think they’ll ever really have snap beyond the parallel tool they have now. Roundabouts are an absolute dick to make (nicely) right now, but I feel like one of their blogs mentioned they were going to add a roundabout tool? I might have dreamt that. Getting things finely adjusted and aligned is a lot of futzing admittedly but it can be done. E: here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3885840&perpage=40&noseen=1&pagenumber=3#post514320646
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Sep 13, 2021 21:11
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Honestly the only thing I find a little irritating about roundabouts is the one way tool makes the arrows ugly, they're really easy to draw though IMO? I have loads of them on my main road network because they're about the easiest junction type to make for double roads and also easy to expand from.
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Sep 13, 2021 21:12
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OwlFancier posted:Honestly the only thing I find a little irritating about roundabouts is the one way tool makes the arrows ugly, they're really easy to draw though IMO? I have loads of them on my main road network because they're about the easiest junction type to make. Trying to get them evenly around those roundabout islands from the workshop is hellish, but I also require them to be almost perfect and then have the nodes in the right spots for connections.
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Sep 13, 2021 21:13
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Building them specifically around a filler would be harder I guess, but the curve tool approach makes it really easy to move the nodes around.
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Sep 13, 2021 21:17
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OwlFancier posted:Building them specifically around a filler would be harder I guess, but the curve tool approach makes it really easy to move the nodes around. I think its really just the filler aspect that makes it painful. You can't build it second (I think?) and its really hard to get the road perfectly curved around the island's radius. Where without the island a slight deformation/bad angle isn't that noticeable, its pretty apparent when you have a perfect guide that borders the road. Also big ugh - I made that post earlier about "Maybe I'd do another LP sort of thing and a big long save with the new patch" and now its tantalizing me again and I'd love to set it up but quote:"We also made one important improvement for existing stuff. Until now we read a lot of complaints regarding restrictions for vehicles moving inside certain buildings. We updated the safety protocols and blueprints of certain facilities to allow movement of more than one vehicle inside. These facilities include hospitals, farms, and parking lots. Unfortunately, it is not possible to replace old structures automatically, so this change will not impact existing vanilla buildings, but You may rebuild Your facilities if you have enough room for that. All new buildings will have this feature after release." This is in the new patch and I can't justify starting a new save until I have exactly that feature (so I don't have to rebuild stuff) and I've got to bet the beta is only a few weeks away. 
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Sep 14, 2021 02:32
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In setting up a new save I went hunting for more maps that I might have missed and found this one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2512383145 It might be my next favorite and definitely a good candidate that's got a lot of the charms of the Passages without being nearly as difficult. It's got a very basic dirt road system connecting all the borders and existing towns with a little bit of gravel near the two 'main' old towns, but it's mostly just a ring around the map with a single path through the middle for access to some old towns. There's only really 3 main 'old' towns and about 3 'old' villages as well, but all are compact and feel like something I could actually use in the early game instead of immediately ignoring (because they lack accessibility for stores/services/transit/etc.) Resources are limited, but dense in the pockets where they exist. They all seem to make you play with some height challenges that have plenty of options for how to approach them. There's a number of pockets of each, so you aren't going across the map for that only good coal deposit. All of the existing structures - towns and border crossings - are all lovingly crafted but don't require mods and aren't overdone. There's a minor train network set up to a warehouse in the 'main' city, which would be nice for an early year (1930-1960) start where your trucks suck rear end but not enough to feel like cheating. There's even a really neat 'old flooded quarry' looking spot that looks like, with a little terraforming, could be functional. The terrain is pretty good, though it does lack major mountains and water/shipping access seems more of a novelty than a focus, but thats OK. (I tend to prefer big waterways.) There's some stretches of terrain in the center of the map that I'm not a massive fan of - they're mostly uneven hills with some exposed stone bits - Maybe they'll be a fun challenge to work around, but they seem more annoying than neat. I wish it had one or two more styled 'regions' but its got some really fun difficult canyons and ridges while still maintaining a lot of open space. It absolutely seems like a map that would work really well with the usual progression of flowing out from one or two Soviet border stops, since the harder terrain kind of spirals out from the center-left of the map which is where your main cities and most of the 'tame' land is. All in all, really nicely handcrafted, nothing super offensive, and a good balance of terrain and resources challenges without being extreme. I might play around with it.
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Sep 14, 2021 04:46
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https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-35 This is a huge report! Mirrored buildings, transferring stops without needing two buildings, move-in restrictions. Super excited for all of those features and a public test "next" week? (Does that mean in the next 5 days or 'next' week? Either way!) I've been really jonesing to get another long save off of the ground and I *think* I'm going to try and do another LP of it, but I'm not totally sure. I flopped on my last two LP starts some time through each, though I still had fun doing it and enough people seemed to enjoy following it.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:40
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The mirroring would be very nice to have. Never really played with transferring too much but might try it once the update hits.
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Sep 28, 2021 07:47
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The mirroring is, honestly, going to be something of a godsend. There are so many spaghetti designs that can be fixed now in this way.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:13
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Mirroring would be nice if they can really do it for a lot of buildings, though I've had so many builds now that I've sort of got mental pictures for 'clean' designs for most things that work around weirdness unless I try to connect those designs together, in which case  I already use a mod for mirrored aggregate - that's probably the biggest one I always want turned around. I'm a little underwhelmed by the patch unless they sneak something else in. As Owl said in the MGMT games thread, the UI is probably objectively better but right now I just feel a little lost and its not 'nicer' for me since I just have to relearn muscle memory for stuff. I thought the 'more vehicles in buildings' was a more universal fix but border crossings and other buildings still have the same issues, they just fixed the vanilla hospital and maybe a few others iirc? Loyalty/secret police is kind of silly, I suppose I don't hate it but I don't feel like it adds too much - hoping the December patch with expanded stuff maybe tackles it a bit more. Still probably going to start a new save soon either way, just wish I was more wow'ed by it since the last half dozen patches have ruled each time.
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Sep 28, 2021 16:10
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Have you noticed any changes with the train AI? Supposedly it is somehow "better" but I am not sure specifically how.
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Sep 28, 2021 16:17
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OwlFancier posted:Have you noticed any changes with the train AI? Supposedly it is somehow "better" but I am not sure specifically how. I don’t know if it’s the AI so much as they fixed some behavior around signals not loving up? - maybe preventing weird cases where a train can block itself because it hit a red signal for a track it owns “ahead” of it or some poo poo like that. I loaded up my most “advanced” save but the trains in that were already pretty dutifully running on the old system so it would be hard for me to tell. I’d be interested to know what changed because if I can make my designs a little less robust (which would essentially mean more compact) then I’d be happy.
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Sep 28, 2021 17:38
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I still don't really feel comfortable enough with trains to do anything interesting with them and I doubt I ever will, but I still sometimes just end up with them loving up so if it stops that happening so often that would be nice.
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Sep 28, 2021 17:43
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Someone in my LP thread helped me understand intersections a lot better and that combined with a general theory of “if you’re on these tracks you should keep moving at speed at all times” seems to work for me. I don’t know if I can offer any advice other than “bash your head against it until it makes sense” sadly. Then again that’s also my advice with the game as a whole
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Sep 28, 2021 17:56
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I can't really do trains in any game that has them, like I can make simple routes that run, but my junctions tend to be inefficient at handling higher traffic volumes and I tend to make dead ends where you just keep going until you hit a U turn section rather than trying to add reversing crossovers at every possible stop. Mostly I think my brain is just not good enough to hold all of the logic in my head at once, especially with chain signals, I technically know how they work, I just cannot build complex trees with them because I can't hold more than a couple pieces of information in my head at once and no matter how much I use it it never builds into like, a comprehensive understanding of what I am doing, it's just "does it work, if not change the signal type until it works better" without any real understanding. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 18:02
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I was definitely there for awhile but I stopped thinking about the system as a 'route' (Ie: "How do I get this train over here") beyond what I termed yards, stops, and transit lines. (These terms probably mean real things that could be close to what I call them, but just a disclaimer that this was my mental naming.) -- Yards are what you see here: Basically one or several 'end' stations for an industry. They have one way in/out, and often collapse all tracks to one switch (like you can see there where the fence narrows around the tracks, center right) and usually have a train buffer (multiple inbound tracks, bottom right) that can hold trains so they clear off of transit lines if they're approaching the yard but another train is using the main switch. These are relatively high traffic, but it doesn't take long for a train to enter and clear the switch, so the delay is minor. If a bunch of trains depart at once, I want them one after another anyway - even if I gave them extra lines they're going to have to space out once they hit the transit lines. Arguably whats pictured is a pretty bad yard, to me, because if you notice there's another T-intersection near the top right of the image that splits off to the rail construction office and north to the small yard for the town's passenger and cargo station. If I designed this again, I'd try to merge all of those into a bigger yard (which, granted, might ask for more than one single switch like I have) but would ultimately minimize the amount of intersections with transit lines. Once trains hit a transit line, they should be cooking and uninterrupted as much as possible. Transit lines are pretty much what they sound like - the long core lines of your rail network. I plan these for huge sections of the map ahead of time, usually with the major highways nearby. (I have several thoughts on how best to mesh highway/rail, but thats for another long post.) Usually they're just 2 lines - though its fairly easy to double them up and get two rails in each direction if its a busy section. This is really only effective if the trains have pretty different speeds (avoid this) or if 'express' lines jump over/under interchanges into yards. For example, I had planned an 'express' line that was uninterrupted and passed right by the main train intersection if a train wasn't going to one of those two pictured yards. Even thats probably overkill. I stick to the small rail depot where I know the max train length is 150m and signal each section (by eye) to be roughly 150-200m, airing on the side of over than under, obviously. Intersections, whether to other directions of transit lines or to yards, are kept minimal and spread apart because they're all spots where stuff can stop. I'd rather connect a bunch of yards together and make a 4-way interchange on a transit line than have 2 3-way intersections next to each other. If you want express lines, its easier to bypass a single 4 way, and if there's any clogging - while it might be worse at that single intersection - its easier to diagnose and understand. Stops suck and I try not to use them much. Stops, in my head, are basically single purpose yards that often want to more or less just be a quick "on and off" of a transit line - think like your usual train station on a long passenger line and not a terminus station. The most common one I run into is diesel stations. They're bad because trains don't have good logic for diesel stations: Say they leave a station and need fuel for the trip - It seems like they will pick the closest (by rail distance) diesel station to refuel and then continue the route. Well, that station isn't always on their route - so there's plenty of times that they want to go to a fuel station, do a flip, and now are on the wrong track to get back moving. You can solve this with switches but it takes a shitload of loving usable space. You can also split off a "T" intersection, which is what I do, and you can see one in the bottom left of that image. You can include a fuel station at a yard, but then you introduce a whole host of loving problems - What do trains do that leave that same yard and need to refuel - can they get to that station? If not, you're going to create traffic at another fuel station somewhere down the line with all the same problems. If they can, you have to make sure they can get back out using the same tracks as the yard exit, running into the same space issues as having it just as a single 'stop' explained above. You're also now introducing more traffic into a yard for fuel alone, and those trains might not want to then enter the yard, so you have to route them an exit from the yard when its probably set up such that everything terminates in the yard. If you set up a yard so that not everything terminates in it (and then let trains easily use that fuel), trains will randomly use the yard as a bypass/express even if its longer because often they can see a green signaled path if they just loop through the yard. Bad! Passenger stops are fine but I don't use them much. Usually your trains are one way (City -> Industrial Compound) so you can just throw a loop around the end of the stop and get them back on the right track pretty easily and join it to the transit lines with a small T/Y intersection. TLDR, maybe it helps to think about the system in more discreet stages and not as 'lines' despite the game thinking in lines. Lines are simply a Yard/Stop>Transit>Yard/Stop>Transit>Repeat. If you follow the model that once you're on transit you should be able to get to any yard or stop, and any yard or stop should be able to get onto transit in either/any direction, it made my networks a lot less lovely. (Except for loving fuel unless you build it nowhere in a field and get power out to it gently caress gently caress fuuuck) Also all of that you probably knew, since I read your post again and you said "chain signals" and yes, it took me a long time. I thought I understood them but this post from Veloxyll helped me a bunch because I just started by copying what he showed me and then watching it in action until I understood it. Once I watched his example of a T-intersection work enough times I figured out how to make that concept work for a whole host of other interchanges or needs. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3950400&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=4#post511076216 This picture from the OpenTTD thread also helped me understand yards and buffering immensely despite never having played the game. 
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Sep 28, 2021 19:27
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They added a measurement tool in the beta patch and its everything I've ever wanted.
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Oct 11, 2021 03:23
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I started working on that norwegian themed region everyone was going nuts over a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of the loyalty etc patch coming out and, well, anyone who says you can't make this pile of crap look cool is lying. also you all have to look at my virtual holiday snaps now, it's just like being friends with a tiresome middle-aged communist irl            ...which is not to say it's not a shitload of work. I started in 1917 and have been vaguely/as far as possible working through architectural eras so I'm now (1940) putting up a bunch of wedding-cake Stalinist stuff, building up a trolleybus network, slowly starting to clear out the pre-war in-town industrial buildings and basically transforming a bunch of isolated little towns into a kind of urban region type thing. It may be a janky game in some ways but once it clicks I don't think there's anything quite as satisfying out there, especially if you really put the effort into trying to assemble a country in a fairly organic way rather than just doing the simcity thing of just plopping down a bunch of square blocks of Urban directly from space. I'm not going to say it's 100% self-built because there are definitely some things that just aren't reasonable to do, but I think I'm at about 95% including the entirety of that Goddamn airport which required half the land to be dredged up from the bottom of the sea and then took three Goddamn years to put up with 1930s construction equipment and is still not even finished excited for the 1960s demolitions and plattenbau-based urban renewal 
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Oct 11, 2021 08:50
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Lmao I've never seen an airport with loving doric columns. Looks extremely weird but I suppose if it was built in the 30's it would be appropriate, you (or I at least) never think of airports as anything other than fundamentally modern buildings. Glad you're having fun with it, and yeah I agree that there is something that really is good once it clicks, definitely going to have to give it another spin once they add in proper cosmonaut mode though I hope they also add in something to let you build a zillion little road parts all at once rather than needing half a dozen trucks to deliver half a tonne of various materials per section.
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Oct 11, 2021 13:36
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I've just grabbed this game after being obsessed with screenshots and videos of it since release. I've played through some of the "tutorials" and subsequently gone on to youtube to watch some proper "getting started" type videos. And I come out having a few questions. It looks like the simplest way to get started is to build a coal mining facility and power plant with the small residential district needed to support it. From this you get power (and heat I guess) and hopefully some surplus coal to export. This is fine, building this with cash money is also fine for a beginner like me. The biggest question is is there a way to stop things from magically being built in total isolation from any borders. I don't mind building the absolute minimum to get started but I'm guessing there is a way I can set up a supply network to buy goods at the borders, bring them to my own construction office and then build from there? Once I've got my basic coal town set up I guess it's just a case of picking the next thing I want to do and building that up. Like seeing what's nearby on the map, or ramping up my own construction materials production that sort of thing? Looks like the current "endgame" is vehicle production but once I've managed to get that far I'll be diving into the workshop I'm sure. Basically I'm asking if I have the right of it from my couple of hours spent really focusing in on starting the game rather than half watching 300 episode long lets play series of it. Basically this is how I would start if I was feeling fancy: 1) Magic build a road connected to the border post, add a vehicle depot and a construction office to this road. 2) Set up whatever storage might be needed to build things, get trucks to buy those things (presumably I can set minimum stock levels or something) 3) Use my construction office to start building coal facilities and infrastructure 4) Same for some housing 5) Import a little coal to get the power plant kick started (again trying to use trucks rather than magic) 6) Profit??? (With an export line for my surplus coal) LeFishy fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 14:48
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I would probably actually suggest that currently you may be better off setting up a solar plant or some wind turbines to start with as the solar plant can be built right next to the workers barracks so you can staff it extremely easily, and wind doesn't need any workers. They output variable amounts of electricity but solar is quite predictable (as in it will work during the day and give you lots of power) so you can export surplus quite reliably, and it will also cut down the amount of fuel you have to burn via other methods when it is in operation. Especially with the underground cables you can set up a wind farm that feeds into the main power system fairly easily and it will on aggregate produce enough output to run a small starter town, you can also put the turbines directly near things that need power and they will just feed power to them without needing wires, a great addition to industrial parks for this reason, as they will happily take up part of the consumption load of the plant when possible. You can use a coal plant as well if you want but I think renewables are a good thing to get early on as they just reduce your need to import coal which cuts into your expenses. There is not currently anything to stop you doing everything with cash, but the magic auto-buy supply feature with buildings costs more money the further from the border you are, so it is certainly cheaper to truck stuff in from the border or just to build near the border, the auto-buy function essentially abstracts a sort of "transport cost" for everything you do. Also building stuff with cash is extremely expensive early on, because you are paying for the labour time which is the biggest expense, so even if you just buy the materials for the construction depot and have your workers do the building, you will save a good chunk of cash.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:01
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OwlFancier posted:Also building stuff with cash is extremely expensive early on, because you are paying for the labour time which is the biggest expense, so even if you just buy the materials for the construction depot and have your workers do the building, you will save a good chunk of cash. This makes me so happy because it means my immersion is also the best way to do things hooray! The coal thing was that I would be running under the assumption that I'm building a coal mine too but honestly I wasn't even aware renewables were an option so that makes me happy too.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:07
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They were added in one of the more recent patches, running glorious soviet coal power is perfectly fine, it's just that things like coal and heating can be very stressful early on because if for whatever reason the workers do not arrive to the plant, then the entire country freezes to death in the winter or the economy collapses because there is no power. You have to be absolutely sure they are getting enough workers and at regular intervals. Usually I would suggest running a dedicated minibus route directly to each plant from a bus station with access to a lot of workers (you can deliver workers directly to any building or to another bus station at which point they will get out and look for work near that station). Also you might want to add a car park near the power/heating plant and put a couple others in the city and put some cars in them just as an absolute emergency backup. Normally the easiest way to ensure a place is staffed is to just build the thing in walking distance from a residential building, but the problem with that is that heavy industry is very polluting and will make your workers sick if it is within walking distance, so you need to build them a distance away. You could also consider putting a small barracks near the plant as again, an insurance measure, but you will need to deal with those workers just having the worst life choking on coal fumes. Depends how glory to the motherland you want to be about it The renewables/baseload simulation is quite similar to how it works in real life except that you can turn on/off coal plants instantly. But otherwise renewables are generally best used as a consumption reducer with baseload stations of various types being there to pick up their slack. Solar power though is easy enough to build and run that I think you should definitely make a beeline for it as it can basically mean you just don't have to run the coal plant half the time, very handy. If you're running with winter either way though you do absolutely need to keep the heating plant ready to go at any time because your proletariat are a bit stupid and will happily freeze to death rather than walking a few hundred extra meters to turn the heating plant on, and soviet technology has not invented the space heater so there is no way to convert electricity to not-freezing alas. I will say you don't need to start with a coal mine, it's a decent early industry but I might actually suggest that bauxite is a bit more profitable, you can do the early refining steps easily and it produces decent value ore. Also uranium mining for the same reason. Coal is useful but the problem is it's very cheap, so you need a rail line or a shipping terminal to actually get it out of the country in a worthwhile volume. I think it's less of a money maker and more of a logistical challenge. Coal is easy to come by but for later industry is needed in large volumes, so you need to develop heavy infrastructure to move it around as the game progresses. You can make money off it of course but it can have a hefty setup cost if you aren't right near the border with a train line set up. Aluminium and uranium are probably doable by truck if you process them a bit, and you can sell them to pay for coal to run your power/heating. And the big thing about heating plants is they don't run during the summer (usually) so what you can do is plop down a coal storage yard next to them, and fill it up over the course of the summer to be burned as needed during the winter, which you can definitely do with a couple of trucks. Combine this with some renewables and you can greatly limit the amount of early logistics you need to worry about. And that's kinda the name of the game really, building efficient and resiliant logistics networks. That's where things like adding big stockpiles of materials to handle demand or supply spikes come in. It's not just "I need X resource" it's a matter of "how do I get X resource to Y location in an effective manner with the tools I have available" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 15:14
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