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ArchangeI posted:Electricity is a very opaque system and I wish there was some better tools to understand what is actually going on. Do powerplants just create electricity "pressure" with brownouts if the pressure drops too low? I think yes, actually, where volts is pressure, watts is throughput.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:29
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Yeah, on investigation, I shut off my power import and my windmills all sprang to 100% usage (which still wasn't enough to prevent outages). So it's just a weird interaction between power importing and power production that's the problem. Once I have a real baseload plant set up it'll be all good. In the meantime I weep for the complete absence of gravel spots near my new start and the sheer amount of CO traffic this is creating. I wish the devs would change their minds about "only one vehicle can move in a customs office at a time, even if multiple have clear paths".  Traffic isn't too bad right now, but I designed the roads for the COs pretty poorly and it's not helping. and yes, I started by the perfidious NATO, truly selling out
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Mar 18, 2023 16:57
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ArchangeI posted:Electricity is a very opaque system and I wish there was some better tools to understand what is actually going on. Do powerplants just create electricity "pressure" with brownouts if the pressure drops too low? Why does electricity at a substation/switch sometimes seem to fluctuate wildly within seconds while production in all powerplants is stable? That's a decent enough way to think of it. Voltage seems to act as current storage / capacity, while wattage acts as flow. Brownouts will show the voltage slowly decrease, and then when you have enough power it will slowly increase.
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Mar 18, 2023 17:35
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SkyeAuroline posted:Yeah, on investigation, I shut off my power import and my windmills all sprang to 100% usage (which still wasn't enough to prevent outages). So it's just a weird interaction between power importing and power production that's the problem. Once I have a real baseload plant set up it'll be all good. One thing it can be really worth doing at the start is just making a basic little storage area, which you fill from the border. Because especially for building things, it will send a truck to the border to pick up half a foot of electrical cable and a handful of gravel. If you set up a DO to stock up a simple yard full of separate storages for things, the trucks will only make full trips to the border. Gravel in particular can be shipped to a next-to-the-border gravel yard with the big 25t dumper trucks which will cut your number of trips to the border station down significantly. When possible you really want a rail DO which can ship stuff in big quantities to a dedicated distribution yard. But even just with roads you can cut border traffic down by building your own distribution yard for the stuff rather than buying it purely on demand from the border. If you want to be fancy you can make proper storage facilities with a road cargo station to speed up loading/unloading, but even the basic free storage dirt patches can help, even though they transfer agonizingly slowly, it still keeps your bottlenecks away from the border itself. I would say for gravel specifically though you are better off making a small aggregate storage and maybe a loader to fill up construction trucks quickly. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 17:59
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SkyeAuroline posted:Yeah, on investigation, I shut off my power import and my windmills all sprang to 100% usage (which still wasn't enough to prevent outages). So it's just a weird interaction between power importing and power production that's the problem. Once I have a real baseload plant set up it'll be all good. My version of realistic mode is starting in the middle of the map so delivery costs more.
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Mar 18, 2023 18:04
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OwlFancier posted:One thing it can be really worth doing at the start is just making a basic little storage area, which you fill from the border. That's what the pair of warehouses to the right of the fabric factory are, with cargo stations on each one. As well as the gravel storage south of them that runs to the loader, asphalt plant, and cement plant. The gravel is the big problem, and it gets used faster from the loader than I can manage to drop it off thanks to fabric factory trucks + supply trucks for food clogging things up too. Eventually I'll have the rail distro yard off to the left, I'm just not quite there yet. e: Given how much of their time is spent just waiting at the border I'm honestly tempted to swap out the gravel trucks for the 25-ton dump trucks; they're slow as hell but at least they carry twice as much a run... SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 18:12
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The 25 ton trucks are a good idea I think yeah, especially for loading from the border.
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Mar 18, 2023 18:26
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PerniciousKnid posted:My version of realistic mode is starting in the middle of the map so delivery costs more.  How do you actually do that and have any money? I would expect most of your money to be taken up by the cost of fuel and the number of vehicles you need to export at a reasonable rate. Even on maps where I primarily want a start location on the center, I'm still setting up a border town to do tourism or oil or something to finance my republic.
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Mar 18, 2023 20:27
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Volmarias posted:
Well I have fuel off so I guess that helps. Edit: I didn't really export until I got trains. The point is really just to disincentivize waiting too long before building the construction industry.
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Mar 18, 2023 23:25
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*SLAPS ROOF OF W&R* You can fit so much micro into this badboy
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Mar 19, 2023 19:10
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biglads posted:*SLAPS ROOF OF W&R* Basically summarizes my current experience trying to get railways to build properly from RCOs...
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Mar 19, 2023 19:20
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The initial bit is a pain but generally you want to as soon as possible, get the edge of the rail network to be two tracks behind a crossover and ensure there is only one signal block per track behind that crossover, then the CO should send out trains OK and they will build the tracks. Also as I learned recently, do not build electrified track right off the bat, build concrete and then upgrade to electric, as the track builder will build multiple blocks of concrete and then multiple blocks of electrification until it runs out of material, rather than if you build electrical from the start in which case it will only build one segment at a time and go back to the depot between each.
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Mar 19, 2023 19:28
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OwlFancier posted:I still use pre signals entering the interchange because otherwise trains like to park themselves across the intersection and if the exit block isn't clear they block the entire junction. The way around this is to use regular signals for entry and do away with exit signals altogether, ie the first signal beyond an intersection should be at least one train length away. Once the train has physically passed the last switch it will be as though it exited a normal chain signaled intersection. This way you benefit from the path signaling and the intersection is never deadlocked.
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Mar 19, 2023 20:26
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New report on the research system. Interesting thing in the research icon files suggests "pipeline to the west/east" which may mean export via pipeline? Huge if true. https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-70
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Mar 19, 2023 21:58
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I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of the idea that I need research for distribution offices and steel production considering how vital those end up being for getting your republic off the ground. I do however like the sound of sustainable forestry and fertilizer.
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Mar 19, 2023 23:08
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ArchangeI posted:I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of the idea that I need research for distribution offices and steel production considering how vital those end up being for getting your republic off the ground. Yeah, I'm similarly unconvinced by some of what's getting gated by research soon. Overall looks like a good sign though. Also, speaking of steel and getting off the ground, my new republic is about to start running 100% on loans if I can't get my economy back together. This is gonna be great*. I'm totally not terrified. Finally doing a start that doesn't involve oil exports is, in fact, way more challenging. *may not be great for the people living there
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Mar 19, 2023 23:22
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Distro offices seem annoying but if they’re pretty much the first thing you get it’s fine as a starting tech. I don’t hate the idea of research but it heavily depends on execution. I don’t have a strong feeling that for the length of which I play a save that it’ll ever be interesting to me. Universities should be able to have a sort of passive bonus you can enable if you split your professors away from teaching. Give me small loyalty bonuses for the generic university/party Hq, small health bonuses/reduction in alcohol need or something for medical ones. Tech has a whole host of options, I’d love to put my universities heavily on managing pollution. It would be a lot more abstracted than anything else in the game but at least this keeps you needing to support universities separate from just pure education.
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Mar 19, 2023 23:30
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Distro offices seem annoying but if they’re pretty much the first thing you get it’s fine as a starting tech. The more stuff you have to research, the more it will put a strain on your starting number of college educated workers you get wen importing your first batch of workers. Since they are already needed for a bunch of jobs even in a starter town, it might start to feel really thin.
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Mar 20, 2023 06:28
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Yeah I'm not sure how it's going to work tbh, and it feels weird for your first lovely starter town to immediately put all three universities in it so you can unlock proper buildings and industries to build another town around.
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Mar 20, 2023 08:33
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supersnowman posted:The more stuff you have to research, the more it will put a strain on your starting number of college educated workers you get wen importing your first batch of workers. Since they are already needed for a bunch of jobs even in a starter town, it might start to feel really thin. Not discounting this but it still seems like a weird getting off the ground problem that isn’t super interesting. Since it feels a little arbitrarily gating, idk. It might be one of the few mechanics I turn off, but I’ll have to see it’s execution. I derive a lot of my fun from designing the systems of infrastructure in the game and artificially hamstringing them because of research checkboxes feels weird. I already do stuff like refusing to build “modern” flats until its “year appropriate” because I like to roleplay a bit. I dunno, I’ll have to see once it drops.
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Mar 20, 2023 12:44
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Yeah, the fact that it's being introduced this late means that a lot of the balance just hasn't been done; it's already difficult to get yourself off the ground in Full Realism mode, adding a tech tree to things you simply need to even be able to afford any further development is pretty rough. Tourism, Value Add industries, and power export are practically the only ways to even make enough money at the start, so limiting it to everyone beelining a coal mine and power plant feels kind of rough.
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Mar 20, 2023 14:41
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And like, my current save is somewhere in the 1950’s, but that’s because I kept resetting the date until I felt it appropriate to sort of move to a new decade. It started from 1930. In reality this save would be well past the fall of the wall if I started from 1960. I’ve got to assume that they’d want research to wrap up well before you hit their unofficial “end” in the 90’s, which means for very long saves, research ends up being a weird road bump. That’s why I really prefer it be some kind of bonus improvement or malus reduction that’s useful even after you’ve checked your boxes. e: another game that perfectly encapsulates this problem is Airport CEO. They have a research tree that gates everything but the smallest, simplest airport at the start. To get that running is still expensive, so you end up in this weird thing where kind of the correct move ends up being getting a tiny airport running to support researching all of the tech, which makes you much more efficient and let’s you build to your desires. They do have my proposed solution, though, and once the tree is complete you can put researchers on “make passengers visit shops more by 5% per researcher.” Ultimately though that research tree is kind of silly, still. There’s not really meaningful interaction with the rest of the game and it just becomes something you have to go click “research this” while you’re waiting for things to catch up. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 14:47
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The free buildings they added plus workers at the border crossings has made realistic start not nearly as overwhelming as before it was supported I think the foreign workers was new
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Mar 20, 2023 15:01
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah I'm not sure how it's going to work tbh, and it feels weird for your first lovely starter town to immediately put all three universities in it so you can unlock proper buildings and industries to build another town around. Breathless messenger: "Comrade Stalin, they've done it! The science boys have cracked the 'Stalin doesn't have to personally order every truck delivery' technology!" Stalin's emaciated foot sticking out from under a pile of paperwork: *twitch*
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Mar 20, 2023 17:50
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Not discounting this but it still seems like a weird getting off the ground problem that isn’t super interesting. Since it feels a little arbitrarily gating, idk. It might be one of the few mechanics I turn off, but I’ll have to see it’s execution. I derive a lot of my fun from designing the systems of infrastructure in the game and artificially hamstringing them because of research checkboxes feels weird. I already do stuff like refusing to build “modern” flats until its “year appropriate” because I like to roleplay a bit. I agree that it seems like another frontloaded thing. I do think the idea of having research staff at universities to basically "power" buffs to your republic would be better. Having more staff in the academia pool could let you set a number of republic-wide buffs to industries and civic functions. Or hell even move the civic functions into an "administration" building like the current town hall and having a well staffed civic administration makes you less likely to have fires, makes your water infrastructure work better, maybe makes your paths provide better walking speed bonuses. Lots of things you could model that way i think. I still would really like for research to allow you to design your own vehicles, like maybe you pick an existing chassis but you can increase the speed, power, carry capacity etc. Or adjust fuel sources or materials for better performance, building all-aluminium electric cars for example. And you would have to build them rather than buying them which gives you another reason to use the building production lines. Having your own little design bureau could be fun and also i want to convert a steam train to run nuclear fuel rods in the firebox. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 18:07
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Yeah I've been pretty upset I can't design my own packaging and clothing types for my citizens.
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Mar 20, 2023 18:13
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I really like the incremental research based and dependent on people thrown at it approach from Songs of Syx. However the writing on the wall has been building unlock for a while now. It's been their response anytime someone questions the balance of being able to build an oil refinery year 1 and printing enough money to do whatever. It's also a nicer ramp for new players and God knows there's tons of players and journalists who think a city builder is beat once you build one of everything which takes about 30 minutes in this game if not holding yourself accountable to actually, you know, having fun. Although I'm not sure how much that counts for this sort of Early Access. Bottom line I imagine veterans are just going to turn it off and build in their own build order.
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Mar 20, 2023 18:15
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Sure you can turn it off but it seems like a sad way to implement a system when it could be as you say, something like syx which I think would fit the game well and also fill what I think is an important need for city workers. As it stands there is not actually much reason to really push city density because the only productive application for workers in dense cities is tourism, there's no administrative element. You are always shipping people out of cities and it's pretty easy to get enough people to staff an industry. More sinks of resources later in the game would be helpful. You could do stuff like have an "admin capacity" which is consumed to maintain things like DOs or for each ton of exports or something, so you need to build administrative centers and keep them staffed and that has to expand with your industrial capacity. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 18:26
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euphronius posted:The free buildings they added plus workers at the border crossings has made realistic start not nearly as overwhelming as before it was supported Yeah, the actual realism mode was a pretty nice addition, but man oh man is actually starting a republic from scratch on Hardest difficulties a rough one already, and that's with using tourism to "cheat" or oil as a constant supply of money that can be used to buy the goods you can't make yourself yet (cheaply enough anyway). And, with price changes due to export volumes, you can't just beeline something far along the value-per-ton chain.
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Mar 20, 2023 23:31
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I have never tried out the tourism aspect of the game to be honest. What is the strategy there - just set up some basic attractions and a hotel and bus line from the border for a steady trickle of money? As soon as my brain heals enough to accept more damage I will try out an early start with a tourist village to at least have something happening while I spend 5+ years building out a road network.
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Mar 21, 2023 10:16
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Broadly, you're building a city anyway for your people, might as well get some tourists in to pay to use your services. There are specific things that make them happy, each building with a tourism rating gains benefits from where it's located, you can look it up specifically on the wiki but it's fairly intutiive, things based around having a nice view work best when located around lots of trees, high up, near water. Culture stuff seems to benefit from being near other culture stuff I think? Everything actually benefits from trees and low pollution. Just build a nice city that works well and has lots of tourist applicable services and then slap hotels in it and ship in the tourists. The happier they are the more people will want to visit, so consider cutting prices a little to boost the attraction value of your services which will allow you to boost yourself into big tourist numbers. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 10:22
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I've run into an issue with my republic that I only caught at the last moment, is going to be a complete pain in the rear end, and is honestly funny in retrospect that I didn't see it coming earlier. As mentioned, I built on the NATO border, because the Lyubinsk map only has a few customs offices and the bottom right NATO one is the only one that's well situated. All well and good. I saved rubles for necessary quick-builds, vehicles, and for importing starting citizens, bought resources with dollars, all is well and good. I've scaled up a fair bit, I'm at 10k people now, and I'm under a million rubles left (and in debt dollar wise, but I'm working on that still... it's not pretty but I'll get there eventually). While looking at options for commuter rail for my next expansion, it finally hit me. I can't buy any more vehicles if I run out of rubles, because NATO in 1965 has like, 5 vehicles available for sale, not covering any of several niches I need. And trains and poo poo are not cheap whatsoever. I can use dollars for the commuter rail, but I'm hosed if I need, say, dump trucks or anything like that. Thank god I have a handful of spare vehicles, but I can't equip my new construction complex without burning a lot of money in the process. Time to build a highway across the map and pray for the best! I don't have much I can export in bulk by road, especially over that distance, but I'll have to figure it out one way or another. (My economy is currently just barely surviving on clothes and food exports, with a few industries starting up that cut costs but don't really turn a profit; if I could keep my power station consistently staffed it would help me earn back some dollars, but I'm not that fortunate so far.)
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Mar 22, 2023 19:24
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the yankee pigdogs also don't pay well for a lot of your stuff, you generally get better prices from the warsaw pact than you do from them, especially for vehicles but it applies to a bunch of stuff I think.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:27
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OwlFancier posted:the yankee pigdogs also don't pay well for a lot of your stuff, you generally get better prices from the warsaw pact than you do from them, especially for vehicles but it applies to a bunch of stuff I think. I'll keep that in mind when I can afford to extend the railway to one of the other border posts and/or get a harbor built (I have to excavate space for the latter, and the only suitable land also happens to be an oil field, so... cool). For now I'm surviving, but not very well.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:31
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Oh yeah you can't do much about it but you've done pretty remarkably just to survive with the reduced numbers of dollars you start with and garbage western prices.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:55
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I'm not able to boot the game up and look everything over right now, but I do happen to have a batch of screenshots from last night, for what it's worth. Main border city. I started out with a clothing industry supplied by trucks, with a lovely rail spur grafted in later (also served by trucks), which has kept my economy mostly afloat on the back of a wave of Levis and sneakers. Initial construction sites over to the right, including the border import warehouses; the warehouses are getting slowly deprecated for reasons visible later, but the construction offices are still like 90% of my CO capacity right now. That goddamn Palast der Republik nearly destroyed me to build and staff, and I'm still running it at less than 20% capacity because it eats all my workers. I had a massive unemployment spike it was compensating for, but it turns out the spike was for reasons unrelated to actual lack of jobs, so it ended up worse than useless when it ate 500+ of my workers. Food factory in the bottom right is my other economic driver right now, much lower profit but it's also keeping me from having to buy food (just crops...).  Agricultural complex is self explanatory. I'm finishing up the rails to link it with the food factory. It doesn't produce nearly enough to keep the factories running, so I still import tons of crops, but it's helped cut costs quite a bit. I might be able to add more fields using the same farm with how low vehicle utilization is, but I'll need a third DO to support them.  Next expansion hub - these are the construction offices I can't currently staff. Actual rail delivery of materials, and everything available on site except workers. I made the warehouse for components way too large for symmetry and quite literally paid for it when it got stocked (thanks, "percentages are per location and not per good"), but at least I'm set on components for the rest of eternity? Further west from here is where the harbor is likely to be excavated and installed, unless I do oil on this coast after all. The coastline is all hosed up so it's gonna be a lot of work.   The next two images are boring because they're mostly empty land (I had the previews turned off). First one is the site for my planned gravel mine, along with a small town (no more than 500 inhabitants) to keep processing running. Also visible are the site for the highway I mentioned to start (and cross the river), and support roads for some misc infrastructure. The second is the road grid laid out for my eventual coal mine and steel mill staffing city. This may end up being my technical capital. I've deprioritized all the actual buildings besides transport infrastructure for now (besides one DO I missed), they're just laying out the roads until the economy stabilizes. Also visible is my currently intermittently operational coal power plant and my brick factory. Brick factory draws from the coal reserve for now due to finding out after building that unloading stations don't work right with DOs if they're hooked to conveyors. Eventually I'll find a better location for it. It's not stable. It's not even close to stable. But I'm happy with it so far. Hopefully I can keep limping along until I reach profit.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:28
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There are also a bunch of mods that add new western vehicles. Alternatively, you have option 3: rush vehicle production research and build vehicles with imported resources. The steel cost is going to eat you alive but it was always going to do so. Getting up steel production ASAP is the one lesson I took away from half a dozen failed republics. Even producing steel with trucked-in, border bought Iron can be worth it.
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Mar 22, 2023 23:43
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I'm not sure if you're already doing it but a fabric factory next to the food factory to utilize the rail fed crops, then trucked to the clothes factory (or with a clothes factory connected to it, a single fabric factory can supply two clothing factories) should significantly improve your profit margins if you're buying in fabric to make clothes at the moment. Fabric factories consume crops too quickly to be road-fed so you do need a rail connection to make them practical and some sort of storage facility for the crops, they hold barely a day's worth of crops internally. You will basically always end up buying in crops I think unless you specifically only want to use them for domestic food production. A single food factory can supply I would guess probably 30k citizens or something crazy, they have a huge throughput volume and you would need a massive farm area to keep even one supplied, and if you want to use them to make textiles that's even more usage. However as you note, anything you produce takes the edge off. And it's very important to stop price spirals as well if you try to run everything off imports, you'll run a real risk of inflating the price quite badly if you don't try to supplement your imports. And yeah loading/unloading stations do need to be directly connected to storages or the DOs won't know how much you have in the storage. It's unfortunate but also kinda unavoidable I guess unless you could manually register them to a specific storage, as conveyors can link any number of things together and split and merge all over. I still think that's a remarkable achievement to manage with dollar funding. E: yeah if you can produce steel yourself that's super worth it, you need so much of the bloody stuff and it gets horribly expensive, but conversely is a great seller. If you can't produce it you end up having to slow your expansion right down or pick things specifically that dont use steel to build.
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Mar 22, 2023 23:50
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The only drawback to putting textile mills next to clothing mills is that they're all rather pollute-y, so spreading them out if you can will probably save you some level of headache.
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Mar 23, 2023 00:11
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It is true that clothing factories are sufficiently non-pollutey and low cargo volume that you can run them quite happily within walking distance of the town using just trucks, and putting a 2clothes1textile cluster does kind of push that into risky territory. However if you instead want to make a dedicated textile works (which needs its own rail line) you may as well make it fully integrated with clothing factories as well. And it's probably going to be out of town anyway and will already have rail access.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 00:20
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