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I abandoned this game last year out of frustration, but kept it installed and said I'd go back to it. I fell down a hole for 5 hours today and apparently definitely went back to it. I have no idea what I'm doing and my economy is completely falling apart, but I'm following the eternal wisdom to  . I don't even know what I'm doing wrong to ask for advice on how to do it better, so I'll just offer a few snapshots. The center of industry so far, Eulergrad (a friend gave the name for this one, the rest just caught random names I don't even remember). Home to 2500-odd people, host to a university and various amenities, and also pseudo-host to the start of my construction industry - gravel, asphalt, and concrete production. (The latter two are permanently full while I can't make my gravel production catch up to consumption whatsoever.) Starting to continue road expansion along the coast.  The theoretical beating heart of this fledgling republic's economy, pumpjacks... actually produce far less oil than I expected they would, and it's a serious struggle to make any money whatsoever here, especially to match all the rubles outflow. Nonetheless, producing bitumen and fuel, using the fuel to supplement international purchases and the bitumen for asphalt, and at least in theory I'm exporting fuel for money (in practice I couldn't fill even the smallest tanker in under multiple real-life hours). Oil power provides a large share of the baseload for the republic.  I figured I'd figure out the farming mechanics and work on a food supply, since that's kind of essential for things like "living". That didn't really work out, but the food factory operates nonetheless.  But I needed coal to kickstart other industries, and so my second "town" began. Dysfunctional corner of hell that also hosts one end of my only rail line so far. Just barely started piecing together the construction office and storages here. I'm down 80% of my starting rubles and no longer breaking even like I used to be. I have asphalt and concrete very reliably produced locally, gravel unreliably produced locally, a semi-stable food and fuel supply, and... pretty much everything else has to be imported still. Power hasn't been stable enough to keep exports going, fuel exports are going extremely slowly and unsuccessfully, and in general the economy is kind of just falling apart. Sitting at >90% happiness at least, I guess! That said: I can only really play this game later in the day when my ADHD medication has already mostly worn off, and holy hell this is a time-hole. I don't think I can play this game long term just from the perspective of self-care and keeping this poo poo under control. I'll see if I can manage it another way, but man...
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Jun 18, 2022 05:50
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:46 |
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Anime Store Adventure posted:It looks good! There’s always going to be fights with learning in this game - I still find out ostensibly new information when I approach things slightly differently than I had in my hundreds of previous hours. Don’t be scared by the curve, you’re absolutely through the worst of it if you have functioning industries. At this point, with the industries mentioned, is it worth going with partial local construction and just using rubles for the materials I don't have yet (steel, electronics, etc)? Not sure how much that will actually stretch the remainder of my money, but it sure doesn't seem like there's much way to recover spent rubles easily...
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Jun 18, 2022 14:23
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Two more followup questions, as I started over but mostly have my poo poo together again:
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Jun 20, 2022 01:02
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Volmarias posted:Uh, do you have anything coming OUT of your gravel plant? I do, it's just barely anything because I can't get enough stuff from the stone over to the plant consistently enough. I have conveyors running to a pair of storages just offscreen. e: I hadn't switched over yet on account of the slowness, but I'm not ruling it out at this point as an option... vvvv SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 02:04
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 My economy is thoroughly suffering and I hope I can string things together a few more months off of oil exports, but I'm making progress. A lot of new construction off of local and imported resources with local labor, a little oil infrastructure funded by my nearly untouched USD, and general expansion throughout. My actual production is not totally stable but I'm figuring out quirks of the game's system that are causing the issues (like my constant concrete shortage being caused by gravel processing output not splitting evenly between the conveyor outputs - I'm not getting any feed to my concrete and cement plants 90% of the time even when it's actively producing gravel). Two universities founded to start working on education, planned out domestic lumber industry to get started, and the American bucks gave me a little local oil production to supplement my pair of tankers. I almost bankrupted myself buying more electronics and clothing on a freighter than I thought I had done, but hopefully I can recover from ~900k rubles and turn it around some. Worst case I just coast a while and hope that the domestic food supply is enough to keep people fed... I did run into one weird issue that I'm pretty sure is a bug, though. Since my rubles were running low and my USD supply was untouched, I figured I'd fill a pair of new apartment buildings with the USD resident option - third world immigrants. All well and good, until the buildings finish, the immigrants arrive... and they all have No Education and are incapable of working, putting me at 12% permanent unemployment instantly. I'm running Simple Education settings and there are no buildings that can educate them. The number has actually ever so slightly risen since I built those buildings (less than 5 people, but more than there were originally), so I think that introducing these bugged citizens is going to cause it to propagate. How can I actually deal with this? Universities don't touch them and both other schools are disabled because of Simple education.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:05
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 Sorry for dreaming this horrible layout into existence. euphronius posted:I started cosmonaut with the goal of being self sufficient and … this Is going to take 300 hours isn’t it . More . It'll take some time, but it won't be that bad. Just one step at a time.
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Jun 23, 2022 03:37
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OwlFancier posted:I would suggest, unless you are likely to put huge volumes of traffic through that intersection, you can get away with just having a Y junction that crosses both lanes. Traffic will find its way quite comfortably across the extra lane. For better or worse, it's already mostly built (one section of bridge + the far lane left to go), and it elicited horrified reactions from all of my friends who asked me to stream the game when they saw it, so I'm calling it a victory. This is the only overbuilt intersection I have. Even the other "on-ramp" is just an at-grade four-way crossing.
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Jun 23, 2022 03:43
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Game's on sale for 35% today on Steam if anyone reading is on the fence.
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Jun 23, 2022 21:26
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Pharnakes posted:Is there a way to mirror flip buildings? I'm often finding myself really wishing inputs or outputs were the other way around to fit in nicely with conveyor belts. T, I believe. It only ever comes up in loading screen tips and hotkey assignment.
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Jun 25, 2022 18:53
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There definitely is a way to turn off autobuy, considering the last ~10 buildings I needed it on (mostly grocery stores, which definitely default to autobuy) all came with it turned off, but I'm not sure what that option is without actively looking at the game.
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Jun 27, 2022 13:16
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How long do people's trains end up being usually? Planning out rail infrastructure (while debating whether or not I'm only sticking with this save because of sunk costs...), and with no trains running yet I have no idea how much I need to work with.
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Jun 28, 2022 15:37
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Anime Store Adventure posted:The short depot allows a maximum length of 150m and I use that as my measuring stick for signals and things. I’ve never found a reason for a longer train that wasn’t better met by just running multiple trains. Noted. Roughly what I used for laying out infrastructure just now. For 3 1/2 hours. Only to stop playing very soon after. Because a) I hosed up a lot of structure, b) gently caress I hate the water mechanics with a passion already. Going to restart next time, I definitely have it figured out now. Assuming there is a next time, this game definitely has bad effects on me brain- and time-wise.
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Jun 29, 2022 05:42
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Water and sewer feel like maybe the worst mechanic. I enable it because I have to do All The Things but my initial excitement for it is gone and when anyone asks going forward I'll recommend disabling it until you also need All The Things. Water isn't even that bad, it's sewage that's a pain in the rear end thanks largely to the slope mechanic. Terrible design.
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Jun 29, 2022 14:08
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OwlFancier posted:Those towers do have issues with construction if they are only connected by paths, I don't know if there is a flag in the building file or something the modder needs to set to control how they are built, but there are some vanilla buildings as well that just don't like being connected only by paths, not really sure why. For buildings that take deliveries it makes sense but I think I've had it with other types of building too. Speaking of buildings taking deliveries: how exactly is the vanilla pub supposed to receive alcohol? It's available for distribution offices to go to but it has no vehicle loading/unloading and no factory connections, just the internal storage. Are they stuck on autobuy only to stay supplied? (I've been using modded ones instead that fill the gap, just an unusual oversight.) Started over with a more difficult setup and without immediately going for oil processing money-printing... this is much more difficult but hopefully I'll make it work out. Biggest issue so far is just keeping everything staffed that's not in walking distance, as usual.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:44
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OwlFancier posted:Can it not accept deliveries? I guess I can't say I have paid close attention but I thought it just accepted trucks like anything else. I've had mine set up to feed from the same warehouses as my other pubs, without a shortage of alcohol to feed them with & set to dispatch a truck at 60% or so, and the vanilla pubs are consistently out of alcohol entirely while the workshop ones don't drop below ~50% reserve. It's possible they're accepting deliveries and just burning through those deliveries way faster despite having lower capacities and being situated further away from population centers... but it's still weird behavior.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:57
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OwlFancier posted:Do the workshop ones have larger warehouses? I'm not able to boot the game up right now, and the wiki unsurprisingly has zero documentation on the pub at all. Am I correct in remembering it's either 7.5t or 10t in the pub? If so, the larger one does have a 20t storage... which still raises the question of why my distribution trucks apparently can't manage to do a round trip of about 600 meters in the time it takes to go from 60% of (whatever the vanilla pub capacity is) to zero, or why the "train themed bar" here similarly never ran out of stock on a 3.5t storage despite the two being located a couple blocks from each other. I mean, the problem itself is "solved" for me - I just use the workshop ones and they stay stocked. (They do have slightly different space requirements, and the dots extending way beyond the building edges is seriously loving up placement in my current save in a way it didn't with the same buildings on my last save... but that's a problem I can work around at least.) Just trying to understand the weird behavior since this game is so poorly documented across the board.
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Jun 30, 2022 17:19
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That may be the best solution, yeah. Both in my current game and the one where I was noticing these issues, I standardized all my vehicles as much as I could per class - I don't remember which open and covered trucks I was using for the issue game (70s - it might have been the RTTN variants?), but right now it's all T148 variants everywhere they can be used (except dump trucks at my quarry, which are the obnoxiously slow 25t ones) on account of the speed/cargo/engine power balance. (And the lovely buses because the Mars 305 doesn't exist yet in 1960.) Smaller bed trucks dedicated to supplying this stuff might be the way to go. I'll follow up once this new republic is at least a little bit stable. Unfortunately, with most of the oil and all of the iron on the map very distant from me, stability may be a ways off still.
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Jun 30, 2022 17:27
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euphronius posted:I just play on nearly flat maps I thought I was doing that this time. I even did an initial setup that would have been way more successful, but loving with the water system both ate a lot of starting money and had me so displeased I just stopped. Started again and moved to a different part so I could set up an agricultural republic on nice, flat ground near a border post. The red contour lines were hidden underneath trees. So goddamn many red contour lines. Editing instead of double posting: I'm making it happen. 
SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 17:58
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 Tonight's discoveries: Rail construction vehicles are horrible at their jobs and should never be trusted. Building a rail network is an exercise in pain, and expanding an operational one even more so. Windmills remain complete and utter wastes of resources. Economic stability without the specific crutch of oil is a nightmare and I'll be revising my starting approach in the future to go back to that. Never trust a workshop map. Next time: averting electrical catastrophe and figuring out how to turn a profit since my multiple endeavors to do so have failed so far.
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Jul 2, 2022 04:56
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OwlFancier posted:Generally to make profit you need to process resources, raw extraction doesn't get you very much cash, but processing facilities, especially multiple steps, will generally add a lot of value. Yep, limping along on a clothing industry in the foreground (along with a lot of loans), and I just got steel set up, though I still have to import the iron thanks to the map layout. I'll switch over to producing fabric instead of importing eventually, it's still a 100% profit margin off just imports. Just doesn't make up for the mountain of costs I have going. Steel mill will hopefully alleviate those for construction, and then it's just... figuring out everything else to turn around the costs from here.
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Jul 2, 2022 05:23
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OwlFancier posted:https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-54 Looks promising. Hopefully rail construction in general gets improved at the same time. Republic status: my economy is in shambles at all times, but I managed to gently caress with refinancing the loans to make my per month payments lower (not quite enough to be tolerable). Also finally have passenger rail, revealing the inexplicable design choice that trains can't have line spacing, so I can't make them run on time.
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Jul 5, 2022 13:18
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The main issue is just how rail construction handles signals. Near impossible to get a two-way rail line built on an active service line, since you have to remove all the signals in between for the construction trains to path properly, which fucks up any regular trains going along connected routes. I'm not sure what the best way to program construction trains to deal with signals is that wouldn't gently caress up regular trains in the process, but there has to be a better way, and it's sufficiently bad currently that I've just suspended any rail expansion until I'm financially stable enough to buy the rails outright and not have to deal with it. (So much cheaper if I could use the materials I already have stockpiled... but that requires the rail construction trains to path correctly, too.)
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Jul 5, 2022 15:50
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I wish I could draw up an example but I'm at work at the moment. What I mean is, for example: let's say you built a T junction with one end left empty to prepare for future expansion, and you want to build that out now. Right hand "drive", two lanes. The construction train will be happy to go up to the right hand lane and start to build it... and promptly get stuck, because it can't reverse past any signals to get back to the construction office unless you remove every signal in between the construction area and the office, because even one signal existing will prevent it from reversing. It'll never build the left lane at all, because you'd have to either remove all of the signals or reverse all of their directions to let it through, the latter putting you in the same position of it getting stuck anyway. If you aren't building a dedicated rail construction office every time you need to expand your network (a huge waste of resources), then that's going to shut down continually expanding parts of your rail line entirely, in a way that especially fledgling networks can't handle at all. It's not like building a highway where you can just cross over with a mud road, or signal a stretch where the one way roads turn into two-way at an intersection and let trucks travel normally until they reach the construction site; a sanely designed two-lane rail network should effectively never produce opportunities to let a train go the wrong way down a rail (intentionally or otherwise), and jury rigging crossovers fucks up the game's node-based treatment of rails even after you strip them back out, takes up a lot of space, and wastes resources you won't get back, all so a construction train can reach its 20 meter long arm 2 meters to the left of where it's sitting at to build the other direction. I normally fall strongly into "train good, car bad" but man this game pushes hard towards lovely truck based logistics for any sort of cosmonaut infrastructure that's not single-lane rails. Buying the rails outright eliminates the problem at a significant cost, but if you don't want to quick buy... you're kind of hosed, unless you want to shut down your whole railroad for a while. Hope you're not running anything critical on it if so. (Owl replied while I was already typing but I think the issues still speak for themselves - it's not an issue of trains getting around the construction zones, it's an issue of the construction trains themselves not being able to navigate back from job sites.)
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Jul 5, 2022 16:26
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Yeah, that's why I turned water back off. Interesting idea to manage but the mechanics for sewage, specifically are such a pain.
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Jul 6, 2022 23:33
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Demon_Corsair posted:My plan of building Steel before coal and iron and just buying raw materials is not going well. Even with two distribution centers focused on shipping coal I can't keep the steel mill running for more then a fraction of a second. I have two coal mines and two ore processing plants, and it's still nowhere near enough. Part of the problem is probably staffing though, any staffing method that includes a transfer is a nightmare and that was unavoidable given the location of coal deposits in my map (and my lack of desire to give miners black lung). Train connections instead of truck distribution, plus aggregate storages for a buffer, will help.
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Jul 7, 2022 16:15
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Pharnakes posted:Anyone got any standout recommendations for community maps? Or ideally a curated pack? Confluence has been a consistent favorite for myself and for friends playing the game. My most recent run has been on a much less well made map and I'm feeling the pain, all right. Likely to start over on Confluence again after the next big patch. Hopefully I can figure out a road to profitability other than "oil" this time... abandoned my current save but never even started really breaking even there.
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Jul 23, 2022 18:25
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Agreed (e: re: Minenfeld). If anything is keeping me from continuing to play the game, it's worker distribution, between the very poor functionality of vehicle transfers, the complete absence of scheduling transit (how am I supposed to make the trains run on time if they can't run on any time?), and the lack of clarity on who's going where and why. Plus other weird fun experiences like "I set this house to provide 40 workers to a building with 60 slots, 25 of them are reporting unemployed" where there's logic to it but a shitload of manual work to make the logic work correctly. That one's especially fun since the original building used as a source had more people than jobs at that one location, which is how I found out that the game has no mechanics for overflow if you assign to a full building; anyone who can't get a job at that one location just stays unemployed instead of returning to the default job search pattern. Good luck manually setting balance percentages to keep everything afloat without filling anywhere too high or leaving anywhere too barren!
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Jul 25, 2022 21:08
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There's "inefficiencies" and there's "my republic is collapsing because I can't get enough workers to mine coal to run the power grid despite almost twice the number of workers I need to keep all shifts going being assigned to its dedicated rail line with frequent trains".
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Jul 25, 2022 21:59
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euphronius posted:Tons of COs seems to lag my game the last city I made . Disable automatic assigning to jobs and it'll stop the lag. However COs determine pathfinding to new jobs, they do it way too frequently, which causes the lag.
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Aug 2, 2022 02:16
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OwlFancier posted:https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-57 I gave up and started a new save in light of lack of updates. Got 6 or so hours in. 12 hours later, we get an update confirmed for the next week or two. Y'all are welcome. (Thankfully this looks like it can be retrofitted into existing saves.)
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Aug 22, 2022 20:32
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OwlFancier posted:Argh I want the update so bad, jonesing for some central planning. Looks quite interesting. I'm playing on a Seattle map currently, having a rather... rough time with it (did a very poor job planning ahead). Oil economy sure isn't what it used to be, and train planning is hell. Think this is the most recent I have of the bulk of the republic. Still out of date, though. 
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Aug 27, 2022 17:57
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OwlFancier posted:I approve of your resisting the grid. finding it hard to do that personally. Thanks. There are parts that are semi-gridded, but for the most part I follow terrain contour lines. Good for planning roads, terrible for retrofitting rail connections. Going to have to do an entire new plant for asphalt, concrete, and prefabs eventually, a distribution office of 12 T138 dumpers for gravel is not doing the job and I don't think an aggregate station will fit well.
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Aug 27, 2022 18:12
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Volmarias posted:I'm curious what the meta will end up being with early game revenue generation. I tried setting up a nuclear fuel complex, but it requires a LOT of people. I'm guessing that Tourism is where it's at until you can afford to build up? I'm wondering the same - it's already a serious struggle to get a functional economy going for me, and that's without the new update factored in. Not looking forward to what's to come.
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Aug 27, 2022 20:03
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New update is live on the beta branch. Patch notes here.
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Sep 12, 2022 03:47
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Yeah, I'm hoping that last change makes construction trains not completely unusable for multi lane construction even if it takes manual oversight.
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Sep 12, 2022 13:12
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Report for the community just dropped here.quote:But with additional use of customs houses an issue with customs houses throughput surfaced, which you would not encounter early game, as you would never send dozens of vehicles there and people are asking for non-blocking customs now. So apparently, only one truck being able to move in or out of the multi-lane customs house, even if all four trucks occupying the bays are loaded, is intentional and not going to be changed any time soon.
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Sep 18, 2022 23:56
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OwlFancier posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Maeb2DuzBk8 And the update is out. link
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Nov 30, 2022 16:47
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Anime Store Adventure posted:(whole lotta pictures) Looks beautiful, man. You should be proud. I picked the game back up as well, and I'm still working through my initial town of pseudo-realistic (no water or heating, running everything else):  Unintentionally made the farm fields just barely within walking distance of houses, rip to the division of labor. But despite the spaghetti layouts this is coming along ok. Very slow paced and most of my construction labor is still foreign workers, but we're making progress bit by bit. Once the construction field on the right is done, I'll have domestic gravel, concrete, asphalt (with imported bitumen for now), and prefab panels (with imported coal). It's a start at least; the nearest coal and oil is quite a ways away on the map, so this is the best I can do for now. Now if only I could get any workers at all at my bus stops so construction could pick up the pace...
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Dec 23, 2022 15:26
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Thanks! I don't really need it, but I got used to building it this way. It'd be more useful if the gravel processing plant had a conveyor input like it needs to.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:24
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:46 |
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Merry Christmas - has anyone ever used the Christmas lights in this game? A friend of mine has Christmas lights draped over Lenin in their save right now. That's the only time I've ever seen them used. 
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Dec 25, 2022 23:53
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