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 It is still fiddly as gently caress, but its pretty nice that you can make a proper roundabout now!
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Jun 14, 2023 02:27
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| # ? May 30, 2024 02:18 |
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DISTRIBUTION OFFICES NEED RESEARCH NOW?! gonna hyperventilate a little bit the other research gates seem reasonable for me, but distribution offices are such a lifesaver for border congestion as well as less finnicky logistics. double nine fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jun 15, 2023 |
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Jun 15, 2023 19:03
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Eh, you still have few free ones and DOs can at least be researched in the small communist HQ. Now panels, that seems more funky (I have no idea, that is in technical university?)
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Jun 15, 2023 19:17
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commando in tophat posted:Eh, you still have few free ones and DOs can at least be researched in the small communist HQ. Now panels, that seems more funky (I have no idea, that is in technical university?) I hope to heck they do some kind of balance pass if they put most of this stuff behind research walls, so that I'm not just screaming at the start of the game.
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Jun 15, 2023 19:26
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By the time I went "boy I really wish I had bigger truck DO" I had the tech researched. Overall my biggest peeve with research right now is the amount of empty techs that start tech tree branches. It just seems pointless. Most of them don't even unlock several new options, they just inexplicably have a tech you need to research first before you can research the first tech that actually gives you something. Kinda baffling game design if I am being honest. They could have just added that time cost to the next tech and at least it wouldn't feel quite so pointless. I wish there were more efficiency gain techs for factories and the like. For those curious: I ran the numbers and by my back-of-napkin calculations, importing plastic garbage and exporting the recycled plastic does actually get you a small profit of about 100 rubels per ton at game start (not accounting for fuel costs, wear and tear on vehicles transporting, workers upkeep etc.). The same can not be said for metal scrap to steel, even when trying scrap to steel to mechanical components. I also made the mistake of finally doing a playthrough with water/sewage for the first time and good drat is it a hassle. How do you get drinking water to your mine buildings up in the mountains? Just truck it up there?
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Jun 15, 2023 22:36
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Yes water trucks are run out of a TO
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Jun 15, 2023 23:10
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I don’t hate the research, I think the gating is at least remotely interesting early on. I would like to see another pass on it, though. It feels like a good start but needs a round of feedback and tweaking.
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Jun 15, 2023 23:45
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ArchangeI posted:I also made the mistake of finally doing a playthrough with water/sewage for the first time and good drat is it a hassle. How do you get drinking water to your mine buildings up in the mountains? Just truck it up there? Probably easiest, yeah.
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Jun 16, 2023 00:45
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Yeah you really do want a small technical services for a water and sewer truck that cover your industrial areas. They use relatively little water but have limited productivity without it. (I think - my mines have been lucky to be in a convenient place to pipe in my last few saves, mines do have a lot of workers.) I’ve also found having water and sewage trucks essential to quick re-piping of cities in Realistic. I’ve had spots where despite my best efforts, I screwed up my system in a way I needed to just delete and reroute the smallest pipe. Even with staging everything to complete the job quickly, it’s still enough time to overflow your city’s sewers before your construction workers patch the break. They’re good to have as a backup.
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Jun 16, 2023 00:49
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Fun fact (unless they changed it) water pumps are just as cheap in the mountains, even though realistically you would need to blast through a ton of rocks, meaning that you can just build a pump station way up high and not quite next to the polluting area, and the water will be Fine.
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Jun 16, 2023 01:13
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I don’t hate the research, I think the gating is at least remotely interesting early on. I would like to see another pass on it, though. It feels like a good start but needs a round of feedback and tweaking. I mean.. it's logical that most things need the technical university because they're.. technical things, but you are a little turbofucked until you build one. Still figuring out the new mechanics but they seem p cool overall.
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Jun 16, 2023 06:24
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It would be nice if they added also small technical university that could research either first 2 columns (since 1st doesn't do anything), or 1st column would lock it into that "faculty" and it could research only from that part of tree
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Jun 16, 2023 09:43
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commando in tophat posted:It would be nice if they added also small technical university that could research either first 2 columns (since 1st doesn't do anything), or 1st column would lock it into that "faculty" and it could research only from that part of tree I think it’s something like this that I want. At least for my play style it takes me quite awhile to realistically need a new university, and you absolutely need the technical one first… except for like distribution offices and maybe 1-2 other party HQ techs. It feels bad to have to quickly force two uni’s, though I suppose if you use some mods for small ones and your first town is big enough this becomes less of an issue.
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Jun 16, 2023 15:33
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Mod in a foreign aid office that is a university in game terms but gives you early technical techs without fully educated slots.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:14
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I wish the game told you why people are dying. My population seems to swing up and down month to month with no easily discernible cause. Was there a logistics bottleneck that caused starvation? Did the hospital temporarily lose power? Did the nearby factory run more this year and put out ever so too much pollution? Who knows! Do we know if medical research is a bonus, or if it just gets you back to the old standard?
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Jun 16, 2023 19:01
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It's bit weird that there is research for resources map, but you can still detect them manually when placing mines/jacks. So that research is just to annoy you. I also tried to build one-lane road roundabout in realistic mode. Vehicles get trapped by one way roads it you have more segments 
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Jun 16, 2023 19:40
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I think they don't want to expressly disable a resource extraction start which is why you can still manually detect where the deposits are. it is a bit weird though yea
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Jun 16, 2023 20:42
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Arven posted:I wish the game told you why people are dying. My population seems to swing up and down month to month with no easily discernible cause. Was there a logistics bottleneck that caused starvation? Did the hospital temporarily lose power? Did the nearby factory run more this year and put out ever so too much pollution? Who knows! This would absolutely be great, I wonder too. A good way to try and sus it out is to look at exactly how certain things play out. Is it deaths or escapes? That half splits a lot. If it’s deaths, check your stores. Even if they have food now, is there a huge backlog of shoppers waiting? (Supply chain issue.) Does the hospital look overfull? (Heating issue, they go to hospital when they’re injured from cold.) Check apartments that used to be full, is their life expectancy poo poo? (Pollution.) I have a current poo poo city I built haphazardly to satisfy the need for a border town on a map that doesn’t have any drat room near the Soviet border, and every winter it bleeds people like crazy because of heating pollution, which sucks everyone’s life expectancy leading to a bunch of “…natural” deaths that the birth and growth rate can’t replace until spring hits and the heating plant isn’t running full bore. It took me awhile to observe the effect because it wasn’t immediately obvious as technically everyone seemed happy and while it made for more hospital visits, it wasn’t like the overwhelming wave like the “no heat rush” causes.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:42
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I wish they would have an option other than a red/green gradient for things like pollution, resource density. I can't see any of those colours guys! Just replace the colours with little numbers as an option, please.
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Jun 16, 2023 21:25
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https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-77 Two new paths!
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Jun 26, 2023 03:26
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when taking loans, which do you prefer? a longer term with higher interest but lower monthly repayments, or a shorter loan with lower interest but higher monthly repayments
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Jun 26, 2023 21:14
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If you're taking the loan short term, you probably don't really need it. Long term loans allow you to invest large amounts of money into money-making industry and support facilities which then gets you out of needing loans in future, though you can still use them to build up faster. In true business fashion you should be up to your eyeballs in debt to fund expansion.
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Jun 26, 2023 21:29
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exactly, you're only worried about the monthly (or even annually if you have buffers) in-and outflow but I got into a dumb argument with someone who was fixated on the interest rate, as in just focused on the added 'cost' of the total loan. I don't see the point of < 3 year loans, usually 4 or 5yr are the 'best'
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Jun 26, 2023 22:16
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OwlFancier posted:In true business fashion you should be up to your eyeballs in debt to fund expansion. To be fair the only way for business or nations to fail at loans with a half amount of development planning are external factors and external factors in games are usually code for "unfair surprises"
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Jun 26, 2023 22:57
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They’re also code for “usually ends up as unfun pains in the rear end for players”.
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Jun 26, 2023 23:24
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I quite like how W&R handles it, it's quite easy to borrow so much that you end up paying a lot of money each month to service debts, and expanding your capacity also expands your debt ceiling, so there's a big incentive to take out loans to pay off other loans too. So I usually spend the first couple of decades in the negative and trying to meet repayments while also frantically expanding as much as I can, which I think is a good way to do loans ingame. You can, of course, try to avoid taking them, but you have so much you need to build that you will struggle. The absolute volume of interest is a concern, but in a sort of "gently caress I'm paying a lot of interest and it's eating my actual profits" sense. You can end up taking so much debt that your profits only really pay the interest and then you need another loan to pay off the first loan. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 23:28
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Pro tip: you can refinance pretty freely. When you're using, say, a 5 year loan at 4%, and 1 year has passed, take out a 4 year loan for the same amount and 3.6% giving lower monthly payments, or another 5 year loan for that amount for lower monthly payments. Win win!
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Jun 27, 2023 03:23
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Gaming interest rates in my Soviet city builder game.
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Jun 27, 2023 14:35
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Lol if you're not buying the rope the capitalists will sell you to hang them with
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Jun 27, 2023 16:17
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Is garbage out yet on experimental? I want to play with garbage
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Jun 27, 2023 16:18
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the experimental is garbage. and demolitions. and the research update. and the ugly af yellow highlight is gone and replaced with something nicer
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Jun 27, 2023 17:43
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double nine posted:the experimental is garbage. That took me a moment
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Jun 27, 2023 18:54
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Same, I was ready to throw down
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Jun 27, 2023 19:27
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 nah there's a lot of qol in the beta version that have been missing for far too long
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Jun 27, 2023 19:48
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I usually take short loans, and refinance whenever necessary. But you really, really need to use the loans to become cashflow-positive. That money should go into export industries, not paying running costs.
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Jun 27, 2023 23:54
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W&R Soviet Republic: Soviet Garbage
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Jun 28, 2023 07:16
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It's finally time to share my progress on a new map! This is the one I'll play forever, I swear. I was going strong on my last save, but with the new patch and evolving ideas of my own, I always end up wanting to start over. I digress! I'm starting on one of the hardest, but 'prettiest' maps I've found. This hits all my criteria of interesting features and resources and not being too flat, whatever. It doesn't have a thousand border crossings that I feel the need to connect out of some sense of roleplay, and even has some fun details like a complete and thoughtfully designed border fence against both borders, but with a big heavy one against the NATO side. It reminds me a LOT of "The Passage" which is one of my most favorite other maps, but I think for me Chyrja edges it out because the features feel a little bit more natural while still retaining interest. There are a lot of old cities and destroying houses with demo and waste is a pain in the rear end, so keep that in mind. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2878454786  It certainly isn't easy, though, especially on a 1935 start. It's a case where the NATO border might be a lot easier, save getting your vehicles. There are only two border stations for each side - and only a medium and small. You start with a train track built from each medium part way into the map, and in retrospect I might have started building at the end of that and getting to trains more quickly. Either way, from a realistic start, your 4 options to start near a border are: Small NATO: No flat land, no train corridor, NATO vehicles. Why?! Medium NATO: Near flat land, train access, a decent sized old city and easy expansion, but NATO vehicles. Small Soviet: Near decent land and open land, close to iron so it would be easier to get steel running more quickly. No trains to the border. Medium Soviet: A beautiful coastal cliff road! (Which means limited flat land for a looong while), but train and soviet vehicle access much easier. In retrospect I might have gone somewhere else, but those four corners are *quite* separate from each other, so it takes a long time to crawl out to say, mitigate not having trains from the small soviet border. (A better builder than I might be able to do a better job in building in a distributed fashion so you aren't slowly crawling from one corner, but thats not for me.) In any case, astute viewers can probably see my fjord-like sprawl on the bottom center there, coming from the Soviet Medium border. My early game was a bit of an aborted start. I built a really thrown together spot immediately next to the border to help me expand, and while it worked, it wasn't really planned and was always meant to be temporary. Instead of my perpetual restart, I swept it up after I got my more proper settlement running, save edited to replenish my money and reset the start date, and treated it like a New Game+. I've kept to realistic other than that quick 'restart' cheat, but I wasn't exporting anything and would quickly have spiraled with no lucrative exports set up or room to do them. You can get a glimpse of where it was in the field here, and also see the beautiful coastal road that's the absolute bane of importing via truck. That spot will become a great area for train infrastructure that doesn't need workforce like depots and distro offices, since this is one of only two foreign train connections. (You can see the border in the bottom right.)  So I decided to crawl to the next fjord of sorts which had enough flat land combined with just enough room I could terraform 'believably' without feeling like it was going to ruin the natural splendor. I did have to take a little bit of liberty in filling a bit of the ocean, but on a rough mental "only raise as much as you lower" sort of 'fill' scale, it passed the test. I had to clear a small settlement since it was mostly where I planned to build my initial coal industries. Here's the before:  And the after:  And so you can see just how vertical this map is, this is after pretty extensive terraforming of some spots to get some flat land. I only just finished leveling the top of that little coastal cliff for a better construction office area.  But my first "Real" town, since we moved everyone over and gave them several classes informing them that their last town was just a heating-plant-pollution based hallucination. It doesn't have a name yet, I've only just got started in the phase of prettying it up and naming it and the nearby industries on the map appropriately so everythings nice and clean. Still, I'm happy with the layout. It feels tight and 'cramped' but cramped just enough that it still feels vaguely real. The only thing I'm really not happy with is the bridge that kind of 'wobbles' over the train tracks there, but I'd rather have that than at grade crossings. At grade crossings! Can you imagine?! (I probably should have started at grade and seen if it was *really* necessary to bridge it, but I love over-engineering.) It's set up for personal car use, too, as well as all the other amenities. I need to see what the workforce looks like once it isn't the construction hub for the entire budding Republic to see if it can support more than the industries I have so far. I think actually it'll be pretty understaffed, sadly, but I can probably terrace up the hill near the 3 residences at the top center of the picture and squeeze out at least a few more flats. I may also do a fun thing and go back and replace some of these low rises later in the game as a sort of 'modernization.' I hate to have all that distro and depot space right near the town, but there's such limited space I don't have better places right now. I could eventually convert that space too.  Here's a slightly closer focus on the town with surrounding industry as a whole. The CO's here are temporary, they were the last vestiges of my "initial" start and are the next thing I'm working to replace so I can reuse that space. I'll also have some nice embankments against the water there, but they aren't built yet.  This was the first industry area I got set up. It's strictly coal, but I did tuck some other things there including water, sewer, the prison, and the incinerator. The prison and incinerator are going to move once I can support them elsewhere, but I needed them early. Love the water tower on the hill, love that I found a decent spot to use a cableway up to the mine. Arguably it is not really that much better than just having the busses go up there, but hey, why not. It looks neat. The power plant doesn't look exactly 1930's but hey, just squint. It also maybe isn't super obvious, but this is really stapled in and despite its relative simplicity took a lot of effort to lay out well. Still, coal can get out of here via truck or train and conveyors to both heating and power directly. The train connection also cuts over to the brick and cement factories such that I can run a very small shuttle train between the two. (I could technically accomplish it with conveyors, but it wouldn't look 'realistic' and be sort of all over.)  I waffled about whether or not I wanted to try and fit this all here, but this is the adjacent, though distinct industrial area. Some of the factories and train stations here are on pause until I can get concrete and asphalt plants up again so I'm only importing cement and bitumen (and soon, only bitumen.) Obviously the train construction is very temporary - we'll pave that over for parking lots - but this area is supplied with coal (far left/bottom) and then produces bricks and cement. Gravel too, though once this industry is up to speed, the cement factory will fully utilize the gravel such that I'll aim to make my gravel supply for construction elsewhere. You can kind of see how I've been working the build - where the dirt roads connect on the right is where I'm slowly trying to crawl out and pave. I use the dirt roads to bridge between whats permanent and what ends up being cleared. As with above, the picture doesn't do it justice, but this was a pain because its *very* pinned by mountains despite this being an area I took probably the most liberty with my bulldozers.  And that's all I've gotten done! It's taken a super long time. I've been loving the 4x calendar time mod - I know it'll gently caress up crops, but everything else about it is exactly the pace I like to play at. This whole town and industry will be done in about 5 years, but make everything after it move a *little* faster. It means once I get into the 1940's and 50's, I can really start to build out the rest of the map and start thinking about really getting to 'end game autarky' in a timescale that's more like, before or around the wall falling, instead of 2100. I know absolutely there are ways for me to play the game a lot more efficiently in terms of an early start, but I'd just prefer calendar time slow down and build at my own pace. And this map has plenty of solid goals for infrastructure megaprojects! I have two very specific ones in mind. One that I'll probably try to get going 'sooner' is a coastal elevated highway that dramatically reduces the time for vehicles to make it to the border from the population centers. Combined with the picture from near the border, take a look at this:  This whole stretch, with the border on the right and my town on the left, can basically be easily straightened with a series of bridges somewhat closely following the coast but skipping over a few of the bays. Skipping the bay on the right straight to the border might save over 500m, I haven't measured. I think I could turn what ends up being a 4km trip into almost half that. This highway, too, could have the same effect if stretched to the left of the picture and across the bay in front of the town and beyond to where the lion's share of flat land (and thus, bigger cities) is. I'm really looking forward to designing the highway here. That doesn't compare to the grandest project here, though! Inspired by the passage, this map just begs for a big canal. Technically not needed - you can reach enough of each nation to send ships from either the north or south shore - but that's not a massive, satisfying infrastructure project. Here's the center of the map (and - eesh, yes - most of the already flat land) with elevation turned on:  This is the narrowest area between the two oceans, as well as the lowest elevation. The south is sort of a naturally protected harbor and the north even has a few areas that could be easily 'protected' (for roleplay purposes) for the entrance to a canal. Still, it's going to be a big project. I see two possible paths.  It depends a little on where the 'capital' city goes. Purple is a little more circuitous, requiring at least two fairly dramatic turns, if not 3, to get nicely to the north side (it has to blend with the end of the blue option there.) Blue is solid, but requires clearing a lot more elevation changes in the southern (closer in picture) end, and divides the area for the capital city a lot more. That said, the rock cut for the canal will be relatively so much lower than the city at most points I probably won't have trouble running metro and that right overtop the canal without limiting ship heights, realistically. I haven't decided yet which I like, but I love having these plans for megaprojects! They feel like nice endgame 'wonders' to reach for - even if both the highway and canal are basically just requiring a whole bunch of concrete. e: Also gently caress, I'm a terrible game photographer and/or the game really needs to have a little motion. I'm super happy with how pieces of this came out, but I can never figure out how to show the elegance of how things are fit in somewhere without either giving a high angle and saying "it fits!" or sharing about 5 pictures from low angles. I aught to just make a quick video of flyover shots. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 06:13
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Excited for the soviet corinth canal.
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Jun 30, 2023 07:44
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I am, once again, maddened with jealousy over how gorgeous your cities are.
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Jun 30, 2023 15:56
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| # ? May 30, 2024 02:18 |
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It's funny that the beta patch has added vehicle maintenence requirements to my digging crews, which are modeled as a combined bulldozer/excavator. Excited to ship my pile of men in the back of an open truck to the vehicle service station once they reach too high a wear and tear level.
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Jul 5, 2023 14:09
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