|
OwlFancier posted: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. The small building attached to one of the clothing factory's two warehouses is a fabric factory, it's set up to be basically perfectly ratioed and the warehouse has a large enough buffer to deal with the road-feed issue. That was one of the first buildings I put up, and it's been mostly fine (a few brief interruptions but never more than half a day every week or so). I appreciate all the suggestions & thoughts. I do have the steel mill blueprinted, it's just far enough away that I need at least part of the commuter city done to supply it with people. Working on domestic coal that will help supply it, and yeah, importing iron until I have an iron mine and processing up once the mill is running. We'll see if I survive that long! I am also building a small oil field, which should help (just exporting the raw oil for now, not able to run a refinery feasibly).
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 00:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 04:04 |
|
|
Raw oil doesn't sell super well unfortunately, and is a little difficult to transport as well. If you at all can I would definitely say a refinery is worth building because refined oil products are worth quite a lot more than the oil itself (and extremely useful because all your vehicles use fuel, and bitumen is dense enough you can export it quite easily with trucks, so you are essentially "selling" some of that fuel at purchase price (because you don't have to buy it)) It is a big steel outlay though unfortunately. That said you might also consider a gas power plant which for some reason runs off raw oil. If you have enough power connections you can sell the spare power. Less useful though if you're already running a coal plant. That said if you can get an oil train going, the wells themselves are not too pricey and I think oil and oil products are actually something the yanks will pay OK money for. And of course they don't need workers which is nice so once they're set up they do just produce money even if it isn't a huge amount. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 23, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 00:34
|
|
|
Can’t you just make a long dirt road from the Russian border to your city. They should drive all the way even on a empty tank (I think )
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 00:46
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Can’t you just make a long dirt road from the Russian border to your city. They should drive all the way even on a empty tank (I think ) I probably could, though the obstacle of needing a bridge remains present. Got rivers in the way. But honestly could probably replace the highway I already mapped out with just a dirt road.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 03:38
|
|
|
A gravel road would not be much harder to lay and much faster to traverse.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 10:26
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted: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. you can always quick-build a powerline from a nato border station near the corner, make it run to a USSR border station, and set the nato station to import power & set the USSR station to export power. It's not the best in the short term but if you make it run in the background you can slowly exchange your dollars for rubles by doing that. it's still better to import from/export to USSR bc of the better exchange rate + they have more stuff you want anyway. edit: depending on the map you might be able to import/export your goods via boat, and that gives you options to switch trading partners as needed. double nine fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Mar 23, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 13:18
|
|
|
double nine posted:you can always quick-build a powerline from a nato border station near the corner, make it run to a USSR border station, and set the nato station to import power & set the USSR station to export power. On that note, are buried cables my only option for crossing rivers without blocking boats, if I don't have convenient hills or similar to provide elevation? Haven't tested it, but boats being able to fully traverse the river would be nice. Minimap as of around when I took those screenshots, including the slightly winding route of the highway (to leave space for oil and mining fields):  The southern Soviet post doesn't have any rail connection but does have power and one road, the southwest one has a 1 rail office, northwest one has the standard 3 rail. So I'm a little limited on building eventual rail out there, but a quick built power line might not be the worst idea. Just have to make sure the river crossing is non blocking.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 16:30
|
|
|
I actually don't think boats give a poo poo about low bridges, they seem happy to clip although I build high for thematic reasons. You do probably need buried cables for electric though yeah, if only because they can't span very far above ground.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 17:36
|
|
|
I'm doing an extremely early start realistic campaign (1917) and man, I'm really annoyed at how water quality works even more than I usually am. It should really just be "untreated" and "treated", none of this percentage BS where anything lower than 99 and your people death spiral. Building water infrastructure with horse and buggies is harder than building a steel mill. Also, untreated ground water is also usually safe IRL unless they're fracking in your area or something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I actually don't think boats give a poo poo about low bridges, they seem happy to clip although I build high for thematic reasons. I once did an experiment once on an infinite money instant build map and the boat refused to leave towards the abroad waypoint unless I there is absolutely some height detection logic in the ship pathfinding algorythm . That said, the cheap boats you can buy at the start (400-600k rubles) don't have that much height, like 10 meters above sea level iirc? the big bastards get canyon-sized in their height requirements, and at that point you're better off building tunnels for your cars/trains imo. but those also cost millions. I don't think I ever tried to see if powerlines are an issue unfortunately. double nine fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Mar 23, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 17:57
|
|
|
I've used boats quite extensively and never had an issue with powerlines, but low bridges will absolutely block boats. I suspect there is also some detection logic concerning width so the different bridges have different gaps between their pillars, which may or may not matter. I don't think you can tunnel under the sea though? Every time I've tried I got "Tunnel is above terrain" error. might have to do with underwater terrain which you have no way of seeing, unfortunately.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 19:44
|
|
|
Bridges do block boats but I think the only way to know if a boat can pass is to build the bridge and try it. :/ This is a good case for saving your game, autobuilding the bridge, seeing if it works, then reloading. (Assuming you’re going for realistic mode or adjacent.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 19:52
|
|
|
I thought there was a view when building the bridge or a pathfinding view after it's construction ghost is placed. It's a static calculation of is-passable based on height if I remember it right, so certain models may clip especially if modded.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 20:23
|
|
|
I wonder if some of the big tankers just have odd clipping then, cos I am sure I saw them clipping through my bridges.Arven posted:I'm doing an extremely early start realistic campaign (1917) and man, I'm really annoyed at how water quality works even more than I usually am. It should really just be "untreated" and "treated", none of this percentage BS where anything lower than 99 and your people death spiral. Building water infrastructure with horse and buggies is harder than building a steel mill. I would download some water treatment mods, I think there are some specific for early starts that use coal filters and possibly even just village wells which I assume just produce drinking water but don't connect to anything? https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2794406213 https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2424939483 OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Mar 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 00:12
|
|
|
I hadn't looked on their listed roadmap on the website, which teases a lot more features than they've yet covered in the reports! https://www.sovietrepublic.net/roadmap Fertilizer! Sounds pretty neat. This would make waste actually a neater mechanic. Mod incorporations! Also neat, though not important for those of us with too many mods. ~*ONE LANE ROADS!*~ Just so everyone knows I definitely wasn't considering restarting my save for almost no reason and checking when they planned the next patch to know if I should wait or not.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 01:11
|
|
|
The demolition thing combined with research unlocks really does seem like an odd combination, as it heavily discourages setting things up until you've unlocked what you want by making redevelopment harder. I wonder if using workers rather than explosives might allow more material recovery.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 10:43
|
|
|
On one hand, my economy is even more in freefall than before, and despite finishing the coal mine/processing staffing city I have zero people going to the train station to work. Running on a lot of debt to keep afloat at the moment. On the other hand, I now have two small villages in my current outlying areas!  Stroprany, my gravel mine that finally exists and will cut the 200k a year (!) I was spending on gravel to "cost of fuel".  Elnicz, my "I need a fire station for the farms and oil plant, that needs staff, it's too far for a bus so I need houses, which need services, which need more houses..." little town. Both have a little unemployment from overbuilding housing, but they're stable and functional as far as I can tell. So that's a nice little addition while I continue to unfuck things. Gravel town in particular is going to help stabilize the situation. I did get the power line quick-built to the Soviet border so I have a ruble source, however slow it may be. Burning through coal fast and really wish those mines would start working already... e: THE COAL MINE LIVES!  e2: It Keeps Getting Worse. Several million in debt in both currencies. Attempting to stabilize where I can but boy I think this run is doomed unless I take a hail-mary loan for an oil refinery or something. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Mar 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 17:03
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:Bridges do block boats but I think the only way to know if a boat can pass is to build the bridge and try it. :/ You can use the measurement tool to check bridge height, just make it taller than your boats.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 18:28
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:You can use the measurement tool to check bridge height, just make it taller than your boats. Woah wait, the measurement tool can measure height of bridges?!
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:Woah wait, the measurement tool can measure height of bridges?! Yeah you click or hover the pillars, I can't remember exactly. I was shooting for 40m on my big bridge because I think that's taller than any ship.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 18:55
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:Woah wait, the measurement tool can measure height of bridges?!  Water is zero, ergo min/max difference would be height of bridge deck above lowest point. Also very helpful for building level bridges. E: oh yeah and apparently it gives stats about bridges too, that's neat. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 18:56
|
|
|
Can someone point me to any resources that, in a very general sense, talk about the basics of actually setting up a basic functioning city? I'm not looking to get in a challenging simulation with Realistic mode but there are so many systems that interact with each other that I have a hard time just getting the absolute basic supply lines running that even just a year or two in I'm finding myself with a haphazard patchwork of fixes because I can't seem to get my distribution office supplying the basic citizen needs and it feels like there are some very basic ideas that I'm just fundamentally blind to. Yes I'm using footpaths everywhere!
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 18:58
|
|
|
Turgid Flagella posted:Can someone point me to any resources that, in a very general sense, talk about the basics of actually setting up a basic functioning city? I'm not looking to get in a challenging simulation with Realistic mode but there are so many systems that interact with each other that I have a hard time just getting the absolute basic supply lines running that even just a year or two in I'm finding myself with a haphazard patchwork of fixes because I can't seem to get my distribution office supplying the basic citizen needs and it feels like there are some very basic ideas that I'm just fundamentally blind to. hmuda on youtube does some series which sets up a city from scratch in realistic mode. link Though if you would like to just post your city and list the issues you're having I am sure everyone would be happy to stick their oar in. A lot of it honestly is about sustainable growth, you have limited funds so you want to start small and try to not exceed your capacity to supply yourself. The border posts have a pretty strict limit on how fast they can service trucks, so you really want a little tiny town which can service a construction industry as soon as possible, then use that to bootstrap yourself into building a money maker industry and a bigger town to support it, as well as the necessary infrastructure that a bigger town will need like domestic water and sewage handling, and ideally a rail-fed storage facility and distribution office to move the majority of your road cargo handling away from the border station. It's very easy to end up building too big and then hit a problem because some need you were reliant on supplying via imports is now huge and you don't have enough trucks or time at the border station to transport all the goods. Broadly though, citizens need to be supplied with food, clothes, meat, and electronics, and a number of service buildings to stay happy including sport, culture and health. They also benefit from propaganda in the form of communist symbols and later radio and tv broadcasts. They also need to be educated to be able to work, and they need daycare and school for their children if they are to be able to go to work rather than looking after them. Education comes in two tiers and universities are big and expensive, education also requires already educated workers in order to staff the education facilities, which you will need to buy a number of in order to bootstrap your education sector. If a citizen wants to utilize any of these services they need to be able to walk to the building or be transported there by a passenger transport, but that is complicated and I recommend not doing it until you're already stable and comfortable with the game. Build stuff within walking distance. They also need power, water, sewage, and heat in the winter. Power, water, sewage and heat are all supplied by different kinds of substation which connect buildings in their vicinity to the supply of those things (or the drain of it, in the case of sewage) via essentially a broadcast mechanism, this prevents you needing to wire every single building personally, just slap a substation down nearby and plug it in, they handle last mile distribution. These substations need to be connected to the producers of those resources via wires or pipes. Power can be bought from the power connector at the border by setting it to import mode and plugging your wires into it. Water and sewage can be transported by trucks using the "technical services" building and once pointed at a source/deposit building (this can be the border or a domestic water/sewage handing facility) these will attempt to supply or empty any water or sewage facilities they can reach, including both substations and buildings themselves, so you don't strictly need substations at all but buildings have very small water/septic tanks of their own so this is an incredibly inefficient way to do it. Ideally you want to connect water/sewage with pipes and supply your own clean water and have your own sewage outlet, which will eliminate the need for trucks for 99% of your city unless you have distant staffed buildings that you don't want to build a pipeline to. Water has pressure, and pressure is produced by running downhill or by pumps. Ideally store your water in a water tower on a hill and connect your city below it. Sewage must flow downhill or on a flat plane and cannot be pressurized, so try to build your city above sea/river level so it can run steadily down into the sewage outlet. Heat is generated by heating plants and can only be transmitted a short distance from the plant. Heat pipes have a max length and while you can use pumping stations to extend them further, you lose heat by doing this, so don't do it more than once as a general rule. Heating plants cause a lot of pollution so there is a tension between having them close enough to supply lots of heat but not kill everyone with black lung. Generally I would say feel free to use one set of pumps to keep the plant a decent distance away while still covering your city, and build more than one plant on different sides of the city if you need more capacity. Heat is a bastard because the plants basically prevent expansion in that direction and create this awkward zone where you can expand the city into dictated by being not too far that you run out of heat and not too close that you die from the plant. Also if the plants go unstaffed for whatever reason everyone freezes to death distressingly fast. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Mar 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 19:07
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:Yeah you click or hover the pillars, I can't remember exactly. I was shooting for 40m on my big bridge because I think that's taller than any ship. OwlFancier posted:
This loving game. I learn new poo poo all the time. To think it was like, probably only a year ago I learned about mirroring buildings, if that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 19:38
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:On one hand, my economy is even more in freefall than before, and despite finishing the coal mine/processing staffing city I have zero people going to the train station to work. Running on a lot of debt to keep afloat at the moment.  I do not understand how you managed to get ANYTHING done by only importing gravel, the very first facilities I build outside of minimal starting infrastructure is a gravel facility. As you saw, the costs to not do so are ruinous, and you are dramatically limiting your construction speed by how fast it takes your trucks get to the border, queue, load, and return, even if that one is just to an intermediate aggregate you would actually use for construction. Do Never rely on importing raw resources (with the exception of things like Coal, if you don't have a mine yet, because those take forever and the heating use is relatively small at first); you will ultimately bottleneck yourself to border throughput, which you need for resources you can't easily supply yourself yet like food, steel, mechanical parts, or meat. Once you're large enough to consider importing raw materials for industries you can't fully supply locally, do it by sea. quote:A town to satisfy a fire station Helicopters don't actually need people, so just setting up a fire station with a helipad and large helicopter is probably sufficient. quote:e2: It Keeps Getting Worse. Several million in debt in both currencies. Attempting to stabilize where I can but boy I think this run is doomed unless I take a hail-mary loan for an oil refinery or something. SA Forums > Games > W&R Soviet Republic: It Keeps Getting Worse. I think this run is doomed. Anime Store Adventure posted:This loving game. I learn new poo poo all the time. They should be telling you the height above the seabed too, not just the waterline <  >E: for advice on what you need to start, I would recommend turning off all of the difficulty options just to see what you cannot get away with (food, education, etc). Once you have those mechanics down, start adding some other things. Many people do not enjoy the water / sewage mechanics and turn them off; that's ok! Ultimately, your starter town with everything turned off should only need
Later, you must at some point build Universities so that you don't have to keep importing educated workers. If you allow your people to complain, you'll need to have
I would recommend turning off loyalty, crime, water / sewage, winter, complex traffic, and setting citizen expectations to low to start. Loyalty especially, what an absolute pain in the rear end that is until you can get the propaganda ball rolling. Put fire on normal (and NEVER frequent, it's just not fun) and build fire stations if you want, just remember that they're limited in range and require people. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Mar 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 21:26
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:
I don't understand how I managed it either, but Lyubinsk (despite being a highly regarded map in the parts of the community I've interacted with) is a pretty badly laid out map for several reasons. One of those is that there's only two or three places to get gravel that aren't "the mountainous edge of the map, halfway up the slope" because of how the exposed rock faces are created; that one patch that supports 4 excavators is the only one on this diagonal half of the map, and it's close to a quarter of the map's width away from the distribution office. I legitimately couldn't get this up and running sooner except by completely ignoring the coal mine city (which I really should have done, but I got too drat greedy). And those four excavators of quarried stone are all I can manage. In every past run I've made gravel the first thing I've done - it just wasn't feasible here. quote:Do Never rely on importing raw resources (with the exception of things like Coal, if you don't have a mine yet, because those take forever and the heating use is relatively small at first); you will ultimately bottleneck yourself to border throughput, which you need for resources you can't easily supply yourself yet like food, steel, mechanical parts, or meat. I have the benefit of train supply for basically everything now except meat, clothes, and electronics at the moment, but the bottleneck is definitely present. I'm considering spinning up a second (and maybe third if funding allows) clothing factory and grafting it onto the coal mine town somehow, just to keep things supplied and get that connected to railways as well. But yes, I'd very much like to never rely on importing raw resources, and in theory the map has a ton of them to take advantage of; the problem has been building the infrastructure. quote:Once you're large enough to consider importing raw materials for industries you can't fully supply locally, do it by sea. Another place where the map sucks: there is nowhere along the river coast that you can set up a dock without having to do major excavations, because the river is too narrow and has too many islands for the hitbox of any dock except the smallest passenger one, and the edges of the river on both sides are sheer cliffs for the entire run. It's major terraforming work to set up a harbor, and I plan on excavating it on the opposite coast once I get that far (so I don't have to worry about potential bridge collisions from having my highway bridge too low, which I still haven't been able to confirm on account of having no dock to see the ship measurements with).
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 21:51
|
|
|
The Soccer field big is taken care of. People will queue for a job that’s about to become available. You don’t need the extra workers anymore afaik.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2023 23:38
|
|
|
I've decided to undertake cleaning up my mods, because I've got enough that I'm getting to a point it detracts from my experience to see poo poo I'll never use taking up pages and pages. On the bright side, my effort to clean things up means it'll also be much easier to share things with everyone here and not feel bad that its just a dump of "clicked the checkmark on the new workshop thing." I really do want to curate kind of a "Best Of" of the available mods, though I will say that I have some biases in my mod selections that might exclude otherwise quality mods that I just personally wouldn't use. My first cut is going to be maps. This was a pretty easy one to do, but it bears giving a lot of context and makes for a super long post to help people pick one, since a map isn't a "subscribe and maybe I'll place it" but instead a dedicated choice for a savegame. Maps are very subjective as to what you really want. I'm extremely picky, and while I was cleaning out the maps I was subscribed to, I ditched a lot of maps that I could definitely see someone else liking. At some point, maybe, I could go back and try to put those into categories, but probably not. Instead I want to share my collection of favorite maps for my style of approach to the game. I have certainly not played on all of these maps and some may have weird things that don't immediately present themselves. That said, these all fit a 'vibe' that I think suits the game perfectly. I won't promise that this list is totally comprehensive, but it has to be close. I've scoured the workshop and given the criteria I'll lay out in excruciating detail below, I think these are the only maps that qualify for me and I think they're mostly the ones that I can see myself building on from end to end, even though I fastidiously restart saves before I ever fill out an entire map. ASA's Map Collection: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2951397624 There are a few tiny extra mods in there - they are not required for most of the maps but I included them so that anyone hitting "sub all" won't have issues on those maps. Criteria for selection, in order of weight: 1. Interesting Landforms at a correct scale. Workers and Resources is not true to scale, despite it being one of the better games at not abstracting things at this 'layer.' Let's assume that it's about at the same scale as your granddad's H0 scale trainset. When your granddad made that poo poo in the garage, did he try to lay out a 1:1 satellite scan of Kaliningrad? No, he didn't - he shrank everything down such that grades and distances got compressed a lot. He didn't try to put every single building in the city because things in the real world are so massive that it's not even remotely plausible. Maps with a "real" scale suck so much rear end. They're super flat and generally have boring, gentle grades. You may as well play flat maps, imo, and save yourself having to flatten weird gentle grades constantly. If a city in the real world somehow was an autarky within 20km squared, we'd all be living in copies of it. All of these maps - first and foremost - try to push you into having interesting areas. There are a few that are more open and flat, but still have enough features to them that I can at least see breaking the map up meaningfully. Mostly what I value in maps is seeing how I can do interesting things with the terrain. Steep, dividing mountainous areas. Rivers. Clear divisions between more 'rough' terrain and then flatter areas where you can lay out cities or fields and the like. There's a few I included that are much more flat and open that might not totally abide by this, but generally this is my highest qualifier. Once you know the rules of the game it gets really boring to not have to fight terrain at all, and a lot of otherwise nice maps just let you grid poo poo out the way you want to. If that's what you like, more power to you - I want to have to consider a lot of chokepoints from landforms. It helps because within one map you can vibe with "This is my mountain, miner town" or "this is my beach, tourist town" instead of just being all the same. 2. Not totally overbuilt at the start. I get why some people like this and I want to like it myself, but I can't. It's a very fun idea to try and modernize a heavily populated republic. Some maps even provide complete or partially complete industries to try and tease you into a start kind of based on "How things were" before you took over. Nothing wrong with this - just not how I play, and it's too hard to compensate for. If I tried to dedicate myself to that playstyle I'd end up spending 10 hours accommodating each city before I even got to figuring out how I would transition to my own poo poo. Worse - my first move would inevitably be to consolidate the population to my built up areas and try to slowly delete the small outlying residences, etc. I actually do like this, but to a limit. If I can preserve a little bit of an "old town" I will. I love building in a way that sort of encompasses and encroaches an existing old town. Unfortunately, a lot of the heavily built maps suck you way too heavily into this imo. If you like this style there's several I bounced from my collection based on this alone. I just want to design the systems and not have to start with 'tech debt' - I make enough of that for myself. A few of these maps are uninhabited, too, which I sometimes prefer. 3. Heavy water features. I don't like maps where my harbors are on a tight, tiny river. This maybe goes slightly with my desire for interesting landforms, but I'm super bored by seemingly landlocked Republics. Mountains only block off so much. I think heavy use of water really helps you want to use ports and things and try to think about your republic more than a road and train grid. I love building ports and I love waterfronts, lots of water is a must for me. 4. Not completely hosed off resources. This gets weirdly subjective - I don't like a lot of maps for their abundance of resources, but a lot of maps also get way too bullshit punishing about their lack of resources. Trying to find the right sweet spot is really something I'm not sure I can even qualify myself. I've tried to avoid reccommending maps that have one or the other and at least have some level of challenge about accessing resources - at least as much as the game can with terraforming. 5. Looks good! To be fair is kind of is part of all the qualities in their own right, but some maps kind of meet all those requirements and just look bad. I can make individual reccs within the pack if anyone wants more help picking something or is looking for something, but this post is long enough. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Mar 25, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:04
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:4. Not completely hosed off resources. I can't speak for you, but for me the balance isn't so much about the amount of resources as it is how they're localized. There should be decently "dense" deposits of each resource in a few places, some more challenging to get to than others maybe based on if it's a "late game" resource like uranium or something baseline like steel and coal. There should also be some consideration to how tough it is to work with the game to get the resource out; burying all of your coal deposits under mountains sounds fun, until you have to struggle with the map to actually place a mine.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:13
|
|
|
Log082 posted:I can't speak for you, but for me the balance isn't so much about the amount of resources as it is how they're localized. There should be decently "dense" deposits of each resource in a few places, some more challenging to get to than others maybe based on if it's a "late game" resource like uranium or something baseline like steel and coal. There should also be some consideration to how tough it is to work with the game to get the resource out; burying all of your coal deposits under mountains sounds fun, until you have to struggle with the map to actually place a mine. I agree with this. Unfortunately map authors are all over the board with how they view it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:24
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:I agree with this. Unfortunately map authors are all over the board with how they view it. The ones I hate the most are the people who make a huge area of very low resource density. Thanks, now there's no actual challenge but I need to build three mines instead of one to get any reasonable output. Very fun and not at all pointless.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:32
|
|
|
Yeah I absolutely look for maps that have resource pockets in awkward places, the game is infrastructure based so having to build infrastructure over long distances and difficult terrain to get to resources is the appeal.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
Log082 posted:The ones I hate the most are the people who make a huge area of very low resource density. Thanks, now there's no actual challenge but I need to build three mines instead of one to get any reasonable output. Very fun and not at all pointless. Kaugsaare I like because it has a fairly concentrated spot for coal and iron under the mountain, but you do have to sort of terraform to build close, but not totally move the mountain. It does a really good job of making you have a cool mine area that scratches the “mine should be by mountain” thing and, with that being the only area for those resources and having them overlap near a mountain pretty close to the edge of the map, provides a challenge in getting enough people to that area. It gets even harder if you also want to stick your other coal dependent industry and steel mill there.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 00:43
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Yeah I absolutely look for maps that have resource pockets in awkward places, the game is infrastructure based so having to build infrastructure over long distances and difficult terrain to get to resources is the appeal. As long as the challenge is logistics and not just an hour of fiddling with terraforming tools.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 02:02
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:
I must have played Lyubinsk half a dozen times by now (the first time I started in the same area you did, but I now consider this to be a bit of a trap area) and there are a handful of areas where you can put a small dock/harbour in with some minor (rather than major) flattening of terrain along the river's edge. It is a lot of trial and error though trying to find those areas. F2 is, as always, your friend. There are also some modded harbours that don't require nearly the amount of space because the ship comes in sideways rather than lengthwise.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 02:43
|
|
|
Next organizing step: Vehicles. Vehicle Collection: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2951946821 This collection needs some very explicit qualifiers - It lacks an absolute ton of what would be otherwise 'quality' mods. The TL;DR is that it has the bare minimum amount of vehicles to start from about 1933 (35 if you want to be really safe, I think you may have a few gaps until 34/35.) It also contains a good set of unique ships, a whole bunch of soviet airliners and helicopters, and then a smattering of Polish vehicles with a particular focus on some high quality rail stock. 1. (Almost) Nothing Extra I am not a huge fan of extraneous vehicle mods. Generally I end up picking only a single model of road vehicles or train engines/cars based purely on carrying capacity and top speed (and slightly engine power), price or fuel use be damned. There's some spots where I do mix various models, but generally I just get the best vehicle for the job, especially since the game added colored skins for tons of vanilla vehicles. I don't get a lot of joy out of varied road vehicles, even though it can be neat to see a variety of traffic. Really I just get overwhelmed by having too many choices and blueprints. Vehicle mods vary *wildly* in quality, moreso than building mods. A lot of folks import models from other games that just clash horribly. Sounds vary, balance is all over the place. I hate this, I don't need to fight through this wall of confusion for a few different models. 2. Playable from 1933. I did want to do an early start, though, so most of this pack patches vehicle unavailability from 1933-1960. There is absolutely some mods in this group I'm not a fan of. I really don't like that certain vehicle names aren't transliterated to Latin characters. I don't know how the game localizes, so fair to the author if this is just how it comes across. It's minor, but just makes organizing and finding vehicle types a little weirder if you're using some of the search tools. There's also, again, a wide variation of quality. One vehicle modder in particular is highly prolific and makes a ton of mods that are vaguely balanced, but look like the shittiest plastic-army-men type of vehicles. He's unavoidable if you want to have something to buy in every vehicle role from the 30's. 3. Mostly Balanced. This is not 100% of the vehicles available in that early start era, certainly. In my cleanup I got rid of a bunch, especially some western ones that - while nice - were wildly unbalanced if you subscribe to the idea earlier vehicles shouldn't carry as much and be shittier/slower. In many cases you may only have a single option for a road vehicle until you get a lot later into the years. There's still some weirdness: I really love the look of the Tatra 111's, but these feel really out of place for 'game' balance. They're very fast and powerful early-on. (The mod author alleges these are accurate real world performance values. I believe him, but it doesn't sit well from a pure 'video game' standpoint.) There's also some early western excavators that feel very ahead of their time. 4. Polish! When I was doing my LP actively, I was thinking that I'd keep everything Polish themed. The few road and rail vehicle mods I added outside of the 1930-1960 window were in service of this. I was not super thorough in this. I'm sure there's tons of other good mods from 1960-present from other countries for roads and trains, but I'm just not super interested in grabbing them. Beyond road vehicles: Trains: Locomotives and rolling stock are mostly a patch from the 30's to 1960, with the addition of everything in the "Polish State Railways" pack that is really well done. It would clash very slightly with vanilla assets in that they're higher detail, but they have pretty much enough to use exclusively content from the pack and it all looks very nice. There's a few small additions in terms of different sized vanilla metro sets and a few extra trams. Helicopters, Planes: I tried to grab almost every Soviet, civilian use plane or helicopter available on the workshop. Where with road and rail, they kind of blur into just a vaguely moving shape, I really do like having a lot of models of airliners and helicopters. I skipped western stuff because I wouldn't personally use it - though I may grab the 737 for very late game "Berlin Wall's Gone" sort of poo poo. There are other quality mods for western aircraft, and there's even a bunch of decent modern Chinese planes. I didn't include these because I wanted to stick to Soviet stuff, but there's more out there if you want it. It isn't hard to go through the entire workshop of these categories, there's not a ton available. I didn't include any exclusively military hardware. There's some good ones that I liked as a "I'll produce these for export" but I dunno, it didn't fit the game so I dropped them considering I basically never built them and it cluttered up my mod list. This is also true for road vehicles. It's a neat idea to produce weird soviet military equipment as an export good, but it doesn't give me enough joy to let them clutter the busy vehicle list. Ships: Again, mostly just trying to fill in the pre-1960 blanks, but luckily there is a single modder that does a lot of very similar in quality ships in large packs. Some are a little worse looking than others, imo, but they're all roughly balanced between price/speed/capacity. This is another category that's easy to exhaust in the workshop if you want to look for something I didn't include. A few of these ships support the modded "fishing industry" where you go to a dummy 'factory' you place in the ocean that produces livestock from sunlight (so, fish) and need to be hauled to a dockside processing plant. I'll include those buildings in a later collection, but they can also be found from the mod page of the fishing ships. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Mar 25, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 08:32
|
|
|
Alright, I did it. I didn't feel the need to go into near the detail about any of the other packs, but there is some level of notes in the individual collections about any things you might want to be conscious of. Notably I shaved down a bunch of decor crap, especially stuff like ploppable sidewalks and lamps and things. (This was fun to do and I'll miss the look, but after I did it for my last save there I don't have the urge to ever do it again. Also it lagged a lot when it got super dense with buildings. I think they were all casting shadows on each other too much.) ASA's Master Mod Collection, now organized! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2952396400 What's nice is that now it'll be pretty easy to keep this updated. And I can do things like make a separate collection for "small"/village buildings if I want to go down that rabbit hole again and sub/unsub to it if I'm going to use it in a save instead of having to constantly scroll by a ton of crap I won't use. Also sorry, there's no all-in-one click but if clicking through the collections and hitting Sub All on each is too much, I can go back and make an all-in-one, just let me know. E: Also for anyone lurking that might be like "There's not a lot in these categories.." - If you're looking for something that I don't have, check Robs074's collection. He really has the best and most consistent stuff. The way I organized it made it suck to try and filter all of his mods into my personal categories considering he has both a *ton* of mods and already has them in collections, and I always want them all. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Mar 26, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 23:05
|
|
|
Going for a record here posting too much in a row, but starting my new save and have a weird set up I'm trying to suss out with my coal industry. Does anyone know if an aggregate storage will push into another aggregate storage if full? My setup will be Ore Processing>Conveyor Engine>Storage1>Storage2. I know that without an engine, a factory will still push into a storage, but in this case when storage1 fills up, will it start to push into storage2? I have a weird space where I'm building a massive coal facility and this would be desirable behavior. (It's hard to explain why without showing off the design.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2023 03:13
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:Going for a record here posting too much in a row, but starting my new save and have a weird set up I'm trying to suss out with my coal industry. I don't think so but I'm not 100% sure. Like, 97% sure that it only works 1 storage deep without another engine to act as a pump.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2023 03:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 04:04 |
|
|
I tend to overbuild storages sometimes and I can confirm that storages will not feed another storage without a pump/conveyor engine/forklift hub in between. It was very frustrating figuring that out when I was new to the game. As for new weird edge cases I discovered last night: Did you know that the lengths of ships matter? And that docks have a maximum length of ship they can serve? Because I didn't! Until last night!
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2023 03:21
|
|