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 Welcome, comrades, to your new Soviet Republic. It is here we will forge the future of socialism, mostly by massive conga lines of workers and by making sure that our trains don't get stuck facing each other on the same track - a common problem in monstrous capitalist nations. We have assigned you to Mormorsk Prefab Flats 8, it's the one between Prefab Flats 3 and Prefab Flats 6. Look for a district with a Lenin statue, but if you find one with heating pipes, you've gone too far. It's Worker's and Resources: Soviet Republic! My first LP ever, but I was encouraged by some folks over in the Management Games Megathread and decided to do something more formal so I don't crap up the thread with what's essentially LP content. I have recently started a new game that I've been documenting fairly in-depth and now is a great time for me to start the initial write-up and let y'all over the border into my yet-to-be-named republic. Table of Contents: Zbir Autonomous Region (Second Save): Part 1: The Best Laid Plains of Marx And Men Part 2: We've Been Here Before Part 3: loving Capitalists Part 4: Back On Track Part 5: So Much Room for Activities Part 6: Keeping Pace Part 7: Zerocool wider Part 8: There's so much happening all the time Part 9: Don't Forget to Take Pictures! Part 10: I Didn't Forget to Take Pictures. Part 11: We're Officially Out Of Gravel Part 12: "Five Years" is a Suggestion Part 13: Accelerating Again --- Unnamed 'Bad' Republic (First Save): Part 1: Welcome to the Republic! Part 1b: Strategy, Survival, and Planning Part 2: We've Been Working on the Railroad. Part 2b: This is When the Game Starts Part 3: It's Not All Hammers and Sickles Part 3b: "A lot of "you" talk for collectivism, don't you think?" Part 4: Bread and Hoses Part 4b: Too Many Words About Logistics Part 5: My Republic for a Train Part 5b: Ugh Part 6: Hub Hubbub Part 7: We uh, Murdered Some Folks Part 8: Living with Our Decisions Part 9: Actually, Not Living With My Decisions Central Committee Approved Viewing and Listening Materials: Chain Signals And You - Very helpful railway guide from Veloxyll My Mod Collection A very nice potential layout for a microdistrict. - Thanks Pretty rad dad pad Youtube: The Soldier's Dance - look at that glorious backdrop of 1960's Moscow. Youtube: They have "Sovietwave" now? Enough to stock a youtube music stream? Alright. Youtube: Alyans - На заре - this is the theme song for the entire LP. Look at that mustache. Youtube: How did planners design Soviet cities? - brief video on microdistricts. - Thanks luxury handset from the Management Games thread. Youtube: The National Anthem - Thanks VostokProgram Youtube: That feeling when you send your first ship full of exports to the border. --- Background The Game: I'll be playing Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic which is an extremely unwieldy named city builder and transport sim. It's simple: Feed and clothe your citizens, make sure they have radios or can go to the movies, then send them over to your mines and factories so they can help produce the goods that will create your republic. What stands out compared to many of these games is that while you can spend money to build like you would in any usual nation/city builder, the goal is to become completely resource independent. You will start creating your own cement and concrete, your own boards, steel, and bricks. Then you'll need vehicles to get them physically to the construction sites. Then you'll need people, excavators, and cranes to get it all assembled. Even with massive efforts, it can take months to build industries like a steel mill. The ultimate goal is to become entirely resource independent. You can even build your own trucks, trains, boats, and planes! This creates an extremely cool level of detail - Trucks don't materialize like Tropico. You have to buy (or build!) those trucks and make point them to the resources they'll need for construction. You need to lay out and design the train lines and large depots to store things. There's no (heavy) abstraction at that layer. This also means that problems that arise are very 'natural' - if there's a traffic jam, its because your designs or orders caused it, not because of any sort of arbitrary number or game weirdness. You can bring your industry to a grinding halt because a crucial road was blocked by a train waiting in a station to fill up with bricks, but your workers can't get to the brick factory because their bus is stuck on the wrong side of the train. Ultimately the game is still in early access and has some really weird jank and odd systems. For those that might buy the game, be aware. You'll want to be comfortable with something like Transport Fever/Open TTD or be willing to futz through learning trains and good transport practices. The LP Style: I will be posting screenshots and writing a light narrative around them. This is something I basically do in my head during city builders anyway, so writing it down will be fun for me! You can find some posts of my style in the Management thread from my old W&R save. I will probably put more effort (generally) into posts for the LP, since I won't feel as bad cluttering up a not-dedicated LP thread. I am also extremely long-winded when allowed - A warning. I absolutely welcome questions about the game in general - whether my save or yours - because I have a pretty high level of comfort with it and, as mentioned, it has a lot of quirks and weirdness. I'll include some interactive bits that I'd love input about below, too. I also want to caution folks about the quality of the screenshots - The game has a certain charm to its presentation, but many might find it ugly in many ways. Not only is it based in the stark brutalism of Soviet architecture, but the game has lots of browns and grays and doesn't have a lot of nice post processing effects. To me, a lot of screenshots look really rough and grainy. That's just sort of how the game looks in stills - I don't think there's anything I can do about it other than smearing filters from a photo editor on them, which I don't totally fancy doing. (I might need to revisit this at some point.) I could consider doing a discord stream or something for folks but I play this game extremely slowly, spend a lot of time on pause and stare silently at things on pause while I think about them - probably unexciting content. I think I will be posting updates in two parts - one post styled like a narrative, or history of what's happening with your more 'flowery' prose. Then I'll do another update (maybe not every single time) to explain more of the 'game' behind the narrative aspects. Thinking about my LP-lite posts that sort of spawned this, I think it was missing more of the nuts and bolts of how the game works that might be of interest to a lot of people who are trying to play this game themselves. I'm sure there's youtube series out there that are helpful, but guides and wikis are awful for the game, so hopefully some of my explanations can help folks understand what I'm doing to make things work 'behind the scenes' so to speak. My background: I play tons of city builders. If there's a city builder that's been out in the past 10-15 years, I've probably played it if not put a ton of time into it. I am not nearly as skilled at aesthetics as some folks who do youtube series and that, but that actually works with the brutalism of W&R. I'm an engineer by day so a lot of my thinking to solve in-game issues is inspired by all those bizarre Design for Lean and Systems Engineering courses and crap like that. I only mention this if people become interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of how I design systems or work through issues in systems, it might provide some context of my approach. I have only a general knowledge of the Soviet Union colored by American high school education, but I've bolstered it a little bit with some brief youtube videos. All in all, not an expert. I'd like to learn more, in small bites at least. Become a hero of the Republic! Here's a few things I thought of that I'd love some reader feedback about! Let me know if you have other ideas for how to make this LP more interactive. I am definitely going to keep in mind decisions I can defer to the thread about, but ultimately I'm going to play the game when I want to, so I won't want to wait around for consensus on smaller decisions that I need to make to progress. Easily Digestible History/Background: Someone in Management games shared a 15 minute youtube explaining Soviet Microdistricts and how they designed their cities and flats. This type of stuff rocks and I'd love to pull together a list of these sorts of short videos, articles, whatever. Would like to keep it to things you can bite out in one sitting (or episodic). Helpful in-game designs: I've played a lot of management games and city builders, but I've only dabbled in train-system games. Mostly Transport Fever, which does not really require the same level of signalling that W&R does. If you see me doing something stupid or spot an area I can improve, please share! I also really like the idea of folks laying out their own microdistricts because mine are always sort of.. Boring, if efficient. If you don't have the game I can share some detail if people are interested. I don't speak any Russian: I would love to be naming cities and industrial areas with a more Soviet flavor but I generally just label stuff based on the random names that pop up on the map. I watched my friend who speaks fluent Russian play and his cities were named way cooler.  Help me out! I even need a name for the republic as a whole.Just general suggestions: Hey, it's a Let's play and its about collectivism. Who would I be not to get consensus about direction and decisions? Guidelines from the Central Committee and General Housekeeping: -Because the game is literally a Soviet Communism Builder, there's inevitably going to be some discussion about Communism in general, the Soviet Union, etc. I welcome some of this, because its interesting and can provide interesting comparison of the game vs. reality, but tread carefully - I don't want to descend into nasty arguments about these sorts of things here. We have D&D and CSPAM for that. I will do my best to keep my own content political editorial free (other than tongue-in-cheek references to our "most glorious and perfect republic,'" etc.) I'd generally hope discussion would end up more about planning and industries, but inevitably some of those discussions of real things are going to be naturally intertwined with controversy. Just be reasonable, please! -The management games thread is the home for general game discussion about W&R, but I don't want to discourage that posting here either. If you see something weird ("why did you design that train switch like that?") and want more general game advice I'm happy to answer, or even help you troubleshoot your own designs. -No idea what the 'lifetime' of this LP will be, so no promises. I suspect I've picked the worst time to start one as a friend got me Cyberpunk for Christmas (which I intended to wait to play) and then I am getting new flight sim hardware at the end of the month. Still, I should be able to keep it up at a reduced pace until I get back into more W&R. I have a very horrible tendency to love restarting maps, but I will break this habit for this LP. Look at us, we're already helping each other! Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2020 02:38
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Part 1: Welcome to the Republic! A meeting of the central committee is called. They have already been through several hours of discussion of various topics and everyone wants to go home. One of the final pieces of business is what to do with a tract of land between two Soviet republics and a western country. Neither bordering Soviet Republic lays claim to the land in its entirety, and it is not particularly valuable. While it has deep water access to both the West and East, it is not particularly resource rich. Both neighboring Republics are at odds about who should occupy the strategically important land passage from NATO to the USSR, with factions waffling between claiming it in order to secure potential resources in the name of defense against the West, and others thinking it will cause more issues and scrutiny from the central committee than any good it would do. One man looks up to the map on the easel.  'Oh my god who CARES,' he thinks, thought nearly spilling out to his lips from pure frustration. After reaching for a cigarette that isn't there, his frustration boils over. "Didn't we promise a committee of absolute goons their own republic at some point? Can't we just give it to them and end all this debate?" The room is silent. ...  It is decided. -- Welcome to the Sejov Autonomous Region! While not the name our committee of rudely named 'goons' has chosen, it's what we have to work with right now. Sejov is the defacto 'capital' of our new Republic, resting along a crucial river - once the border of nations, now both shores are under Soviet control. While it may no longer serve as a border, it is still a critical crossing between the West and the East.  Sejov, pre-1960. The region contains two other larger cities and several small villages. These have been generally rural, agrarian towns until Soviet control, largely unchanged physically - though Soviet officials did move most of the population of the region elsewhere. Now many buildings stand empty and the villages are near ghost towns.  Gliwilystok, pre-1960.  Miergeni, pre-1960.  The village of Klibruysk, pre-1960.  The village of Brelov, pre-1960.  The two villages of Dolny and Gorny Bratwice, pre-1960. The new local government was implored to start rapid development in the region. Currently the citizens either imported goods, or lived on what the sparse region could provide locally. They did not produce a single board or brick beyond local artisans. The new government was granted a sizable stipend of Rubles and, notably, even western Dollars from the central committee for their development. So where to begin...? After long discussions about the level of resistance and displeasure it would cause, it was decided that the most important first step was to centralize the region's population in order to better provide more modern and equitable services to everyone. Steel mills and cement plants were not industries to be manned by dozens living in cottages, but by hundreds living in modern apartments. The people of the region did not even know the modern conveniences of central heating and electricity in any meaningful capacity! In the early months of 1960, the population of the villages was forced to move into the three cities of Sejov, Gliwilystok, and Miergeni. They numbered only several dozen among all of the villages, but it was met with resistance. The villages were leveled in the months following the moves. As well, citizens were moved from cottages on the outskirts of the major cities into the main flats. This helped consolidate the population while foreign workers and resources were moved in to build central heating plants and power lines to the cities. It was an expensive effort, but by Summer 1960, the region's population was moved to the cities and both central steam heating and electricity were fed to every home. Some central blocks had been demolished to make room for new shops and services. While still supplied with goods from other Republics, they provided a quality of living higher than those in the region had previously experienced.  Sejov, Summer 1960. New heating plant, shops, schools.  Gliwilystok, Summer 1960. New heating plant, shops, schools.  Miergeni, Summer 1960. New heating.. You get it.  The first high voltage power lines connecting the region, Summer 1960. This would sustain the population through the harsh winter that would hit within months. The first and foremost concern of the committee, of course, was the safety and prosperity of the people it represented. A close second, though, was the development of industry with which they had been tasked. Which brings us to  The First Five Year PlanFive Year Plans are a crucial staple of any well planned Republic. It's a good arbitrary amount of time that allows us to both plan extremely achievable goals that still sound lofty, and/or goals that are completely untenable because, hey, 5 years is a long time, right? We can totally do that in the next five years. But whatever, the takeaway is this: We have a Five Year Plan. The first one, in fact. The committee wishes to become resource independent and have a truly self-sustaining Republic. This should be the hope of any semi-autonomous state! But the means to produce things like heavy machinery and infrastructure... Heavy and consumer industry... All of that needs those base components. Wood. Concrete. Asphalt. Steel. Our first Five Year Plan is to produce steel. Related to that, we plan that we will also produce the aforementioned asphalt, concrete, boards, and other items too, but those are all secondary to the larger goal of a working, productive steel mill. Many moving pieces need to come together for this to happen. We will first want to produce gravel from a quarry. This will be the base for our buildings, industries, and roads. It is also prohibitively expensive, relative to the cost of the actual good, to import in the amounts required for rapid development. Gravel is also a crucial component in cement, concrete, asphalt, and prefabricated concrete panels. All of these are things we need in droves to modernize. Once we have gravel, we can start to move onto producing coal. Coal makes up the other half of our cement equation, which means we will be independently producing concrete and prefabricated panels as well. Once those industries are established and running, we will not be nearly as dependent on foreign imports. And further, while it will cost us greatly in imported steel, we can move to both electricity and heating independence. The two staples of modernity for our citizens and they'll already be produced internally. A rousing goal!  Sejov Quarry, on a late summer evening, 1960. Across the river from Sejov is a range of hills, many of which have exposed rock perfect for quarry. The Republic has, naturally, imported a fleet of construction vehicles and earth movers, and while the electrification of the cities was underway, also undertook development of the quarry on the nearby hill. The other construction industries would be built within the same 'complex' as the quarry. Quickly, the stone processing plants sprang up and fed a cement factory, concrete and asphalt plants, and a prefabricated panels factory. Depots began to dot the shore of the river opposite the city, stocked with dozens of imported vehicles buzzing around the new area. Busses carried new workers from Sejov to worksites all over the hill.  Sejov Quarry and nearby factories, evening, Spring 1963. It did take a significant amount of manhours and imported goods to get the area operational. Workers were unskilled, vehicles and mechanisms were new and different. Imported resources were expensive and sometimes sparse, but that wouldn't stop the wheels of progress. The 'construction' industries area was completed in 1962 while work had already begun on the next focus area: A coal mine. Geotechnical surveys indicated a viable mine site for coal just to the east of the current quarry facility. It would take a significant conveyor system to bring it down from the mountain for processing, and even more to bring it all the way to the quarry facility for use, but it would provide several benefits to the region. Coal was necessary for brick production, which meant the local government could stop imports of bricks - another low cost item that was needed in large amounts and relatively expensive to import given the unit cost of bricks. It also meant that, with the help of foreign engineers and steel, they could work to build a power plant. So far, the region was powered by imported electricity. It was no small feat to complete the coal production complex - was completed only by late 1963. The feat was not to be ignored - the republic now produced its own power and even exported it back to its neighbors, beginning to recoup some of its previous expenditures in importing electricity. Mines are work intensive and difficult to both build and staff, so such progress is to be acknowledged... But the Five Year Plan was looked at fairly tongue-in-cheek whenever real completion was mentioned. Sure, surveys had been completed and the steel mill complex had been laid out, but depots were not even built near to the steel mill until the coal factory complex was completed. How would the people achieve the goal?  The Sejov-area coal mine, Autumn 1963.  The Sejov-area coal product complex and power plant, Autumn 1963.  New construction offices between Sejov and Gliwilystok, Autumn 1963. Luckily, the local committee had planned ahead. Perhaps they could have split some of the workforce to begin laying the groundwork for the steel complex sooner, but exporting electricity extended their increasingly thin account of Rubles greatly, buying them crucial time and money to import the resources necessary to complete the steel plant. But with the power plant complete, the entire fleet of construction vehicles moved to new depots near to the steel mill and began work in earnest. By the spring of early 1964, the roads in the region had been paved and prepared for the rush of trucks to the facility. The race was on. Two years to produce steel in the autonomous region.  A truck carrying asphalt for the steel plant's groundwork navigates melting snow on the roads, late February 1964.  An excavator lays gravel on the long road to the iron mine tucked in the distant mountains, Spring 1964. Now with a singular focus, the region's workforce descended on the steel mill. Halfway between Sejov and Gliwilystok, workers from both cities could aid in the construction. The fleet of trucks was constant, and by early autumn 1964, the steel mill was completed. At least, the mill itself. Technically the complex and the mines feeding it were far from complete ... What was the Five Year Plan again? "Produce steel?" Oh poo poo, we can do that. Send some trucks to the border, order up some iron, bring some coal from the brick factory...  The steel plant produces its first steel, Autumn 1964. Maybe in the spirit of the goal, we didn't fully, autonomously produce steel, but by the letter of the law, the region produced its own steel pre-1965. By any metric, I call that Five Year plan a success. But that's only one step toward our perfect socialist society. What's next? What does the region need next to move toward true utopia?  Using locally produced steel, the newly built rail construction depot begins laying track for planned railways, spring 1965. --- Not all my updates will be this long, but not only did I figure the first one would have some extra content because of the 'before and after' with the cities, I wanted to shortcut a lot of the more boring parts of the first 5 years. I paused the game at the start and laid out the first two factory complexes in their entirety, bought the bare minimum, and then let the AI build the rest. This is kind of cool and calming to watch in an ant-farm sort of way, but maybe not the best to share as an LP. Now that I have steel, though, I intend to have multiple projects moving at once, so content should focus more on the interesting bits of that instead of skipping years while I wait for trucks to show up with resources. Please share any and all feedback, I'm still kind of feeling out what 'voice' I want for the more narrative sections. I'll also follow this up with a more technical, game mechanic focused update.
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Dec 6, 2020 05:27
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Part 1b: Strategy, Survival, Planning Let me put a warning on this first post that I am writing from a perspective of knowing the general resources and workings of the game in these 'behind the scenes' posts. If you're reading and don't know the game, please ask me to explain, I'd be happy to - I just don't want to include in my posts long explanations of some of the base mechanics or production chains for those that are already playing; these updates will just be the meat and potatoes. Also, this will be a long one to catch everyone up on a lot of background and my approach. I hope not all of my technical explanations are this long, but I sort of have a backlog of detail to catch up on if I want to cover all of it. Also a small procedural note: I found out that the lazy way I was doing screenshots during the initial documentation was saving them as crappy JPGs. I started saving as PNG, but I don't want to go back and try to recreate a bunch of the pictures I already have. From here on out they should look slightly better, but I still think the game looks pretty rough in stills. I'll have to get some gifs or short vids now and then. Strategy It's always a great feeling to have a new blank canvas to strategize and plan around. Inevitably this crumbles over time and you start to shove factories and distribution centers in the gaps between other factories and distribution centers, but let's not talk about that until it actually happens. (This will be sooner than you think.) Firstly, I am playing on this map, which I thoroughly enjoy. It is very open but not entirely flat other than certain areas. Resources are challenging and sparse without being disastrously low like a few "hard" maps I've seen. Conversely, they're also not hyper abundant. My brief LP-lite posts in Management games showed me making a 32 well oil field all in one region. I even had more resource left to exploit in that field. While it looked cool, I won't have such opportunities here. There will be a lot more pipelines and smaller fields. I might actually need more than one of each type of mine (and in fact, this already happened!) My approach to the game is maybe unusual: it often goes against how folks recommend to start that I've heard from discussions about the game. Part of this is because despite playing with most of the difficulty tuned up (I do leave "needs" on balanced instead of harsh) I like to start with extra money. This is just part of my playstyle for this game - I want things to look good and be able to plan adequately, and I hate to have to make a "need money need exports fast fast fast" area and then clean that up later. I will already almost assuredly clean up the areas I've placed even though they were heavily planned out, but it gets even worse when you need something up fast so you can survive. The usual approach I hear is to rush a refinery and staff it up, then immediately start selling the fuel and bitumen quickly to bolster your rubles until you get self sufficient. That's fine, but I think it creates a tendency to rely on exports and hit that really boring "Auto-complete construction" button instead of watching your trucks bring all the resources to the site that you so painstakingly produced yourself. I prefer to start with a large lump sum and work through the construction goods chain according to complexity and need. What's nice about this approach is that it forces you to set up some early infrastructure to move things around. It's a slow bleed of money continually until I get to steel and mechanical components made, but loans aren't extremely punishing and usually by the time I've burned through my initial lump sum, I only need to take a few million to sustain until I can start to export those pricey mechanical components. What this looks like is what you see for industry so far: I initially buy the gravel chain - just quarries and a processing plant. I'll buy a cement and asphalt plants as well, but purchase the bitumen and coal for the moment. It's cheaper to buy those ingredients than it is to autobuild roads or buildings that require those resources! With those three things set up, I'll set up a very small depot and auto purchase some steel, bricks, and boards. In my previous save, I actually purchased these from the border and shipped them to the first depot. This saves you a delivery fee, which is not insignificant! This time, though, I didn't want to bother - plus, I wouldn't need to build a city to staff my initial industries. (More on that later.) Coal comes next, and with it, electricity and bricks. Up to this point I was importing electricity - I wasn't using a lot, but its a constant drip of money, and it adds up. Luckily, this approach meant that I had already started working out a high voltage grid for the three main cities on the map. In previous games, I bought my power plant almost first. This is kind of a trap in my opinion - it lets you not build out a nice, logical grid from the border because you can just take the shortest path from your coal plant, and both coal and power are extremely cheap relative to mashing autocomplete on that massive building. (Observant players might note that I was still importing steel, which is one of the largest expenses with the power plant. While true, the labor and other resources are still extremely significant costs!) After coal I fleshed out some more of the construction chain: The cement factory takes coal, cement is necessary for concrete prefabs and concrete. At this point, I'm already narrowing down the amount of imports I need for construction: We are importing bitumen for asphalt, steel, mechanical and electrical parts, and boards. Boards I would set up later - You use relatively few of them compared to steel, concrete, and asphalt. I will eat the cost here just for convenience sake. Everything else is already home produced and I can reverse my slow bleed of money by running my power plant at nearly full capacity, exporting a bunch of electricity. The profits I make from this absolutely don't pay for the steel I still need to import to make my own, but it does more or less cover the imported consumer goods I'm buying right now so it's a good lifeline. Now it becomes The Steel Mill game, which is probably Baby's First Real Logistical Challenge taking this strategy. Everything I've mentioned so far takes resources you'll have fairly close together (You can often find gravel all over on a map, especially near coal if the map has it in mountainous areas.) None of those buildings employ more than the coal mine itself, which while it has 220 slots, you don't need nearly that many people to provide coal for your power plant, bricks, and cement factory. (At least, in my case, where I have a skeleton crew on bricks and cement/prefabs. They don't make sense to export yet because of their low value and not having a good train or boat infrastructure, and a skeleton crew keeps them stocked without running out.) The Steel Mill employs 500 people. A steel mill needs two mines, capable of 220 workers each. It will often consume an entire coal mine's worth of coal passing through multiple coal processing plants when fully staffed. Basically every construction uses steel, and some use a lot, so it wants to get sent everywhere. Further, its the ingredient for mechanical components, and god knows that factory eats a lot of them and also has a high staffing requirement. Steel is a Real Problem and can become the first test of your fledgling infrastructure. You'll quickly get checked on all sorts of questions: Do I have power going to all my places? Are my buses and trains getting enough workers there and to the mines supporting the mill? Am I getting both the ingredients and the products to where they need to be on time and in enough volume? As of writing, my steel mill has just started operating, albeit at a reduced capacity, and I'm buying some amount of ore in the processing plants such that I save a little money on straight up importing steel. I have the mines built, but not yet staffed - next steps, and all. After the steel mill (and mechanical parts), things open up quite a bit. Consumer goods and vehicles aside, the only construction good we aren't producing is Electrical components - a much more arduous chain to work out. For this playthrough, I'll probably focus on building my main depot in parallel with some other industries, because getting that massive main depot up is crucial to how I approach map-wide logistics, but that's an explanation for when we get to the depot. And who knows, I may stray away from that. Survival This is my first time (at least, since very early on playing on the default map) that I am playing on a map with existing settlements. I like this map for it in particular, because its not overly spread out with a lot of small villages but still gives a little 'push' to want to build around the three main cities. Neat! I also don't have to worry about building my own haphazard towns at the start, which inevitably have to get retouched because I plan them in a hurry and without thought to much expansion, as they only serve a specific industry to get me through to the 'mid-game.' Now I have those awkward cities already made. Double neat! These people, though, are going to immediately run off if I don't give them some services. You'll note from the narrative post that I cleaned up a few small villages (gently caress 'em, I'm not building a whole thing for 10 people way out in the sticks) and consolidated people in the city centers. This was actually a little unnecessary as I found out, despite all my hours in this game, that the old city housing doesn't count temperature. (Weirdly, though, they still do seem to draw usage from the heating plant, they just don't have a temperature gauge.) I'm not sure they even need electricity. Either way, for narrative/roleplays sake, I'm glad I linked them to the grid and gave them central heating. I would need the heating anyway for the small universities, schools, and shops I tucked in the cities. For now, all of these things to keep people happy are living on purchased goods. Early in the game, its reasonably cheap to just buy consumer goods as citizens won't use a lot of them. I don't buy them electronics, though, and they don't need them to not run away if their other needs are satisfied. I really should experiment with how little I can give them and keep them happy. Do they really need clothes and a cinema? I left your church intact, you jerks, and I even put a tennis court next to it. You should be fine. In any case, I met their needs and they're all wildly happy about it and immediately filled up the town with kids, who then had kids, and are now escaping in droves as I don't have more housing. While it's a fun challenge idea to try and prevent escapes entirely, my playstyle doesn't dictate expansion in a way that would come anywhere close to sustaining that growth, so overpopulation escapes are part of the game now. Maybe this is why everyone has no trust in the government? (This metric, I think, is completely useless right now mechanically.) Like I mentioned as part of my words on strategy, my early focus is entirely in construction goods, so I've really only modified the initial 'old' cities to be survivable more or less as is. I may add a few flats here or there to supplement the initial workforce at the steel mill, but eventually everyone will be moved into planned districts and the old cities, uh, cleaned up. (Maybe! I could see leaving them... Eh. We'll cross that bridge later.) Notably, though, if I do leave them I'll have to improve their shops. Small shops seem really difficult to keep stocked because of the size of their internal warehouses. I've dabbled with the idea of having multiple shops, each for one good, but that starts to bother the space-usage gremlins in my head and instead opt for attaching a small warehouse (mod content) to each shop so they have more of a stock buffer. Regardless, not a question for now. They'll be fine for awhile. The first settlement I make is absolutely going to be to staff that drat steel mill. So many workers. Planning This is, I think, the most important part of this game. Where other city builders I find you can pretty easily tear up and rebuild, this game comes with some debt if you really decide you don't want that factory complex there. You're going to be moving resources, workers, lines for both goods and workers, maybe laying new rail track just to shift around some of your industry. Compare to Tropico, where if I want to move a factory, I can just destroy it and build a new one somewhere and the logistics surrounding it will just happen. This sucks, and if there's one thing I cannot tolerate in the least its creating technical debt. I am likely to make poor immediate choices in order to avoid the potential of future technical debt. Needless to say, I spend a ton of time staring at the map so I can plan out finer details of where industries will roughly go, where the associated populations to work them will roughly live, and generally where the trunks of the train network will rest. Let's take a look at the map again, but annotated this time.  This is the mental division I worked off of before I even initially unpaused the game.
There's a whole lot of unused map and you'll notice I haven't even begun to tackle several industries or looked at other cities. That'll come - this plan is enough to keep me working for quite awhile. Once those circles are fully realized I'll start thinking about branching beyond that area. I tend to like distributing things as much as possible, so you can expect I'll probably have smaller towns/cities outside the main black circled area to serve other remote industries before I end up centralizing in the main city. I'll need to see where bauxite and oil are rich, too. I should also mention that while on that small map, all of those look very tightly packed, they aren't so much. There's a lot of space around the edges of those circles, but as mentioned, those can quickly fill up. You never know when you'll need a new train line, high voltage lines, technical services, or the like. Those take up a lot of space and will fit nicely in those spots. I do want to go into some detail about the existing factory complexes, but I'll save that for when one of these technical posts gets a bit thin. This was a particularly long one to give all the background and cover the full five years I've played. They're slow, so it makes sense to lump it all together, but things will speed up relative to the total game time now. Until next time! Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Dec 6, 2020 |
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Dec 6, 2020 05:30
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Congratulations on completion of the first five year plan! I'm sure Moscow would be pleased, if they even knew where we were. Naturally we should start the thread with our glorious anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49iLCK4p0w4
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Dec 6, 2020 07:35
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VostokProgram posted:Congratulations on completion of the first five year plan! I'm sure Moscow would be pleased, if they even knew where we were. Holy loving poo poo. Hell yeah.
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Dec 6, 2020 07:41
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Just chiming in to say that I'm here for this
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Dec 6, 2020 09:17
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The People of the Goon Soviet Socialist Republic are happy for your leadership, committee 
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Dec 6, 2020 09:45
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Motherland is proud of your accomplishments camarade. On another's note you made me realize in the management thread that I bought the game last winter but played it only for a couple hours before getting enraged at the communist Ui. Well now I have been in quarantine and putted almost 40 hours into the game in 3 days. When it click it click HARD! It's so good, thank you for that. I'm on my third restart already but I still like the challenge and learning the in and out of the different systems. I'm getting pretty good with the trains and construction but for some reason I can't wrap my head around moving workers to their jobs. Especially with buses, so if you have any pointers on that that would be great! You probably already do that but I found that when I'm constructing long stretch of road, I like to put a dirt road of the same length with a couple entrance parallel to the main road. So it brake the work onto smaller pieces and use all the different vehicles more evenly. I had a real moment of "oh poo poo that game is amazing" when I found that little trick. So yeah, keep going! I greatly enjoyed the first part of your odyssey.
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Dec 6, 2020 10:01
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Chill management games thread represent. Congratulations for doing this, will be following along. +1 would bookmark again.
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Dec 6, 2020 10:10
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Ugh, I'm gonna have to buy this if it goes on sale during the holidays.... Maybe even if it doesn't. drat you! 
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Dec 6, 2020 10:19
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Hey, this looks interesting! I've heard about this game for a while and I look forward to seeing what you do with it. I'm not an expert on the Soviet economy in the middle or later periods, but from my time in grad school, I know of a few academic sources which might be useful. I could bring up summaries or examples if there is any interest.
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Dec 6, 2020 16:45
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Count me as someone else excited for this LP! If anyone who is a smart scientist can discuss some details of how the USSR in this period (60s on) approached industrializing agrarian republics, I'd also be super interested.
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Dec 6, 2020 18:30
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DrHub posted:Motherland is proud of your accomplishments camarade. It really does kind of hit like that. If you can tolerate some weird aspects and get used to its presentation, it hits hard. I bought it around it's initial early access launch and put some time into it, but I got really frustrated with placement and the fact that it didn't seem to like if you placed roads before buildings. Then I kind of figured out the order of leveling land, placing buildings, then roads, etc. Little things like that are really annoying initially. Then there's just the general confusion about some mechanics. Nothing explains that heat pumps lose temperature with each pump station and also distance. Sure, that makes logical sense, but in a video game you sort of expect to be told how it works, because it might not follow reality that closely! Then there's having to learn tricks like shunting people from a bus to a train station to get them to use both the bus and train and things like that. Galaga Galaxian posted:Ugh, I'm gonna have to buy this if it goes on sale during the holidays.... Maybe even if it doesn't. Obviously I recommend it! At the same time, pay attention to your own tolerance for a lot of the weird parts of this. I have a buddy who by all accounts should absolutely love the game, but its just too annoying some features/decisions for him to click. (Mostly, in his case, the placement of things - he's a big aesthetics city builder guy.) Thanks for everybody checking in, glad you're all excited as I am! I'm going to try to do update 2 today which will catch the thread up to where I'm actually playing in the save (summer 1965, but I've placed a lot more things to get started building than visible at the end of Update 1.) Going to need to start coming up with some town names, too. Apparently the starter towns are Polish-named, which I guess makes more sense than Russia for a nation bordering the West. Hilariously, the game notes in a loading screen that the sun is correct (rising in the east,) but in my map, the sun rises over the western countries border at the top of the map, which I consider north for simplicitys sake. Dunno if thats because its a custom map but its all goofy. There was also this helpful tip on a load screen. Stay safe everyone! 
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Dec 6, 2020 20:20
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I'm definitely interested to read this. I like the idea of city builders, but I'm bad enough that I tend to bounce off before long. But if someone skilled is doing the hard work, it's all much better!
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Dec 6, 2020 21:20
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Part 2: The steel mill complex is nearly completed as of Summer 1965. The supporting mines and ore processing plants are all open, but mostly unstaffed. All the steel produced in the valley has been with imported iron ore and even some imported coal ore. This comes at great expense because of the amount needed! Still, it is cheaper than importing steel, and we need that steel to lay rail. What the Republic needs now, crucially, is labor. Unfortunately, the workforce has been spread thin with several projects throughout the valley. While Gliwilystok's workers can now move to working the steel mill instead of building the steel mill, they do not make up enough numbers on their own to support both the mines and the mill. Sejov is distant - but not too distant - to help staff the complex. There is no passenger rail access yet - in fact, the planned rail connections thus far are all trunk lines and cargo stations. Still, a long bus ride could still bring men there. Unfortunately Sejov doesn't have a surplus of labor now either, they're manning the existing complexes near Sejov and are now swarming the new rail construction office. It needs to be said again, the Republic needs that rail system. The singular focus on the steel mill has essentially stopped any planned residential construction. When children come of age, they are moving to other Republics for lack of living space, despite slight improvements to the aging city centers. Small, community based universities have been established, though they are in high demand and often do not have space for all the citizens - not wholly fair to the people. As well, the roads have been paved, and any upgrade in infrastructure makes future plans that much easier. Housing, though, has not expanded.  Miergeni, Fall 1964.  Sejov, Fall 1964.  Gliwilystok, Fall 1964. Miergeni, of course, doesn't have the stress of supporting other industries as of yet, but is too distant to support the steel mill via road connection. It was not a focus of the previous Five Year Plan, but the area surrounding that city did see growth in industry. Though not the heavy industry of the modern steel complex, the people of Miergeni were tasked with an agrofarm and would shortly begin work on a food factory as well. While not massive, and potentially not even providing enough food to support the fledgling Republic completely on its own throughout the year, it would do well to supplement food imports. North of the city, a patch of forest housed the Republic's lumber mill. While most buildings would be made of concrete and steel, there was still always some need for wood.  Miergeni Agrofarm during sewing, Spring 1965.  Miergeni Lumber Mill, Spring 1965. During a lull as the steel mill was finished, Sejov was given another university to help serve more students. Education is one of the most important things a citizen can get! Unfortunately, this would require even more staff. Clearly, the next step was to start building new towns and cities. The plan in the short term was two fold: Expand existing old cities just slightly as necessary - Make sure the labor force can support the industries around it. There may be opportunities in making multiple rail construction offices - one for each city - so that will require some supplemental manpower. Then, in order to best serve the mill, a new city will be made near to the complex. It will not be massive - only as large as it needs to be - as it won't be a model for the major metro and new capitol of the region. That will require some fancy architects and planners from Moscow.  An excavator lays the groundwork for the Sejov Medical College, Spring 1965.  The Sejov Medical College under construction, Late Spring 1965.  The new, yet-to-be-named Steel-complex town, surveyed and laid out for construction, Late Spring 1965.  Rail construction vehicles pass on a turnaround while working on the coal complex rail spur, Summer 1965. The railway along the river near Sejov was coming along well - though it would soon need to cross the river to get to the steel mill. This would be crucial to linking up with the Southern border - The main passage to the other Soviet Republics. Exports could begin to flow with that link completed, and imports could be made without paying other nations to deliver the goods. But where will all those imports go...? What's that? Oh! It's time for another 5 Year Plan! This plan is two-fold: The Republic has been woefully neglectful in serving equitable, modern housing for its citizens. How easy it is to become complacent. The committee demands that the Republic make strides to modernizing their cities and making sure that the existing industries are well staffed. While we expect that some new industry to be added to the region (particularly a mechanical components factory), the main focus of construction should be residential. But that project risks stressing the Republic's still light infrastructure. Most everything still travels from small depots near Sejov by truck. No passenger stations are yet planned on the railways, and none of the cargo stations are yet connected. Even when linked up, our Republic is missing one crucial piece, even more important than new apartments. The Republic Needs A Hub. A depot. A port. We need a big space for trains to arrive, drop off goods, and shift those goods to supply trains going throughout the network. We need an organized system for export - making sure we are not letting factories sit idle when other Republics could be using our excess goods. We need storage. It may not be flashy, or produce anything on its own, but it is absolutely critical toward organized, rapid expansion. We must not let our lines stretch and become tangled. This hub is our answer to the chaos that can become supply chains. it will be looked upon by many micro-republics of the future as an example of efficiency and perfection. Our surveyors and planners have identified a perfect spot. On the shores of the bay to the west, we will have access to the Soviet nations via deep water for easy export. It is near to the trunk railway between Sejov and the steel mill, so it will be near to existing resources for construction, and then subsequently be an easy location to move resources to once completed. Long-term planning also puts it near to the intended metropolitan area, which will be useful in its construction. It is nearly flat, and while it has a small oil source that will need to be respected, it will not create any large complications in blocking other critical infrastructure.  Chosen Hub Location, Pre-Development, Summer 1965. This will be the main thrust of our next five years.
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Dec 6, 2020 21:26
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Part 2b: This is When the Game Starts Going to be pretty much entirely a wall of text that's more about the 'metagame' as I view it, here. I still want to go through my factory complexes in detail for folks interested in the minutia of design, but that'll come. I've mentioned before that, to me, an operational steel mill is when things really open up. Even with having had the game paused for literal hours planning my initial industries, I still go back and wince at some organizational woes that weren't visible when I laid everything out. This is always going to happen to some extent - you won't spot something until its finished and you see it in action or again with new eyes, but a significant part of it, too, is that there's always that push to get your first steps moving as you are sort of on a clock spending money with imports. Like I mentioned (I think here, maybe just in management games, though) I start with "easy" starting money, and I still blow through 10 million rubles taking extra care to only import what I need. Steel is really expensive. But now I have my steel mill up, and while its not quite running perfectly, I can feel good about linking up my planned train lines. Once I hit the border I can start exporting steel or mechanical components readily and recoup enough money to pay back any loans I've taken. This is effectively when the republic is independent in that Exports > Imports by value. Obviously, the goal is still total resource independence and then building our proverbial 'cathedral' of a massive city and whatever other fun stuff we want to do. There's a lot of ways I could go from here. On a few playthroughs I used to start to worry about oil, fuel, and then work through the chemicals chain. I would still like to, at the very least, get a refinery up now, but the map's resources don't really make that viable right now unless I really want to make it a focus. I may still try, but it's not a priority. I've also got enough running that I could honestly start working on a big city, but its labor won't see a whole host of use right now and it will just increase my spend on consumer good imports. Note that I'm still not importing electronics, so the big 'urban' work sinks like the TV and Radio station are useless right now. My first move now is always going to be a hub. What's killed my saves in the past is essentially being unable (or more appropriately, unwilling) to untangle my spaghetti supply lines. Those spaghetti noodles start right around here. I'm going to need to start moving construction goods closer to projects for construction times to remain reasonable. Soon I'm going to have consumer goods, which need to have a very organized system for adequate distribution. I've found that just slapping a bunch on trucks from your farm doesn't end up cutting it, especially once winter hits and your roads can't be reliably plowed all over. Setting up my hub right now means that I'm solving a bunch of issues right now that can be really annoying later. If I want to export things I'm over producing - even if they're not super expensive? Much easier when I store all of that resource in one spot with rail and port access. If I keep missing that I'm running out of something? Now I know where to look and I don't have to find out by noticing that a bunch of construction hasn't been moving for six months. If I need to get consumer goods to a new spot (or even construction goods to a new, mini-depot), I only ever have to add it to a supply line leaving the hub - I don't need to figure out where there's stock and try to steal it with trucks or things like that. It does, in some ways, create more train traffic because I have to *get* everything there, but it will be almost entirely focused in an area where I can plan to handle high throughput and keep my trunk lines moving. Also once we get private cars for citizens and more dense cities with more busses, our roads are going to get busy. A rail-accessed hub clears up a whole lot of distribution office trucks. Doing all this ahead of when I truly need it means that I don't have to try and cram stuff in weird spots later and will help prevent train traffic jams as I would have to add more weird spurs and sidings. It also gives me opportunities to use what little logic we have for loading/unloading and distribution offices to actually distribute things. Considering there's no rules about "load exactly this much" and the like (just %'s) theres some transfers I can do with multiple buildings/platforms/trains at a hub that are helpful and don't require full trains making pointless laps around the trunk lines making sure a bunch of stops are topped off. (This still often happens, but I might try to solve it this time.) I should say here again that I haven't played any major train-centric games, only Transport Fever which I never made a good hub in. I learned a lot of what I know about designing and using the hub in my last few W&R saves, so if any of you are big TTD or other railgame fans, you might see areas where I can easily improve the hub if I'm missing ways to exploit the logic somewhere. -- Happy to get these two updates out, because now the thread is absolutely live with my progress in the save. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Dec 6, 2020 |
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Dec 6, 2020 22:10
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This is cool to watch. What does a loss look like in this, by the way?
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Dec 7, 2020 00:48
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Gort posted:This is cool to watch. What does a loss look like in this, by the way?  The real answer is I don't know. I assume there's no hard "stop" but probably you just can't take any more loans to import enough to do anything? It seems like it would be pretty hard to get into a truly unrecoverable state given enough time, but there's plenty of "Yeah, nevermind, I'll start over." states. e: Arguably the only hard losses I've run into are when everyone dies because you screwed up your central heating, but when that happened a few saves ago, I just spent a few million rubles to ship in new people come spring. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 01:26
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Anime Store Adventure posted:e: Arguably the only hard losses I've run into are when everyone dies because you screwed up your central heating, but when that happened a few saves ago, I just spent a few million rubles to ship in new people come spring. A true Soviet solution to the problem. The Chairman approves. This is a great RP of a game I'd never heard of, but I love city builders so I'll be here until the end(s).
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Dec 7, 2020 03:12
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TheNakedJimbo posted:A true Soviet solution to the problem. The Chairman approves. It's still in early access and not feature complete, and the politics / loyalty system isn't yet implemented (among with others). At a certain point, if you cannot get the people bread, the people will get you instead.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:15
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Volmarias posted:It's still in early access and not feature complete, and the politics / loyalty system isn't yet implemented (among with others). At a certain point, if you cannot get the people bread, the people will get you instead. Did you read this somewhere or just speculating? Just curious, I haven’t heard anything about loyalty other than observing it means nothing right now and that my people 100% have no trust in me despite meeting every other need 100% unless I blast propaganda in their face 24/7. I also haven’t generally followed devblogs or things for the game. I like the surprise I guess.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:18
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Part 3: It's Not All Hammers and Sickles "We have produced steel in our Republic, comrades. The first five year plan is complete." "Very good, but I have seen that neither of the supporting mines are currently being staffed?" "No, comrade chairman, we are currently importing ore to the processing plants in order to produce our steel. To man the mines, we will need to complete the town near the steel mill, as the current cities cannot begin to supply enough labor. We knew this would be an issue." "Did it ever occur to you that it might cost more to import the amount of ore we would need than it would just to import the steel to finish the town? Did you ever stop to think it might even be cheaper to bring in foreign resources and workers to finish the town than ship in hundreds of tons of ore? Do you realize how many millions of rubles we're in debt now? Did you even look at the monthly cost of imports or did you just approve new loans when you started to run the coffers dry?"  As a planning committee, it pays to keep close watch on ones finances while your republic is still reliant on foreign imports to survive. Sometimes it can become so tantalizing to produce your own heavy industrial products, like steel, that one forgets exactly what they cost to produce. In the excitement to produce local steel, the committee chose to import, directly to the processing plants, coal and iron ore. While this was, at first, a means by which to show great progress toward our Five Year Plan, it quickly became required for the steel needed to continue to develop the area. Not to mention that the railroad was going to become more and more crucial as the infrastructure of the valley became stressed - packed with more and more trucks.  Trucks and construction vehicles clog the streets of Sejov, late Summer 1965.  An expanded construction depot between Sejov and Gliwilystok, near to the steel mill, Autumn 1965. The small construction depot that had serviced the steel mill complex was rapidly expanded, bringing at least some relief to the road traffic - though it still needed to be fed resources from the original industries near Sejov. Imperfect, but progress. It would not only aid in getting the steel mill's town up and running, but was extremely close to the location selected for the rail hub and port, making it a very effective tool for the next five year plan. Steel, though, was still scarce - imports of coal and iron were still necessary, and no matter whether imported as ore or as the refined product - they were costly. Imports were done in small batches, but there was a lot of steel required to develop the new town. While the committee was highly aware of the manpower problems upon completion of the steel mill, it did not fully comprehend just how difficult it would be to solve. Initial plans suggested that the town could be partially completed by the Autumn of 1965 using labor from Gliwilystok. With new workers moved in locally, the expectation was that they could staff the central heating plant and work toward finishing the town throughout the winter. Though difficult, it was not implausible. But steel was being spread thin. By the first snows of winter, almost none of the buildings in town had been completed and those that had were municipal - the town was still unlivable. Many of the plots sat with waiting resources, brought in slowly by along unplowed roads. Progress on the railroad also ground to a halt.  Snow falls over quiet building plots in the new town, Winter 1965-66.  The supports for the railroad truss stand partially constructed, Winter 1965-66. But not everything goes according to plan.  A fire starts in an open resource storage at the new depot, Winter 1965-66.  Weakened by fire, the storage collapses, Winter 1965-66. Pictured just past the power lines is a fire station, though completely unstaffed and unprepared to deal with the fire, as workers are not yet being provided by the new settlement. Progress cannot stop, though, despite the lost resources and setbacks. Unfortunately, it was decided that some further investment of rubles into foreign manpower and steel was necessary. The amount of steel being produced locally combined with labor issues meant that the city might take even another year to even begin to complete. More loans were required. Still, once the town began to be occupied by our Republic's citizens, it began to solve the numerous problems with the new steel mill.  Multiple shifts, even through the night, worked to restock the rebuilt depot, Winter 1965-66.  As the snow melts, the first flats start to go up in the new city, Spring 1966.  The first bus of workers travels to the iron mine, late Spring 1966. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 22:35
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I've been meaning to buy this game, but I held off until I could see someone who knew what they were doing play it first. Great job so far!
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Dec 7, 2020 23:28
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Did you read this somewhere or just speculating? https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-4 It's unclear how this is going to work, so getting Ceaușescu'd may not happen, but I have to assume it's not going to go well.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:53
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That blog also answered my question about the Soviet SST being available. Hell yes.
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Dec 8, 2020 00:41
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Part 3b: "A lot of "you" talk for collectivism, don't you think?" Mostly text, mostly 'meta' again. I thought I aught to share a labelled map - I realized some of my descriptions that are entirely 'relative' to other locations probably don't scan so well when you all don't have a reference.  I've cleaned up the names a bit - but there's a fairly strict length of those (I think because they get put in the auto-generated names for buildings). You'll see a lot of 4 letter acronyms representing a town and then just a label for whatever industrial complex its part of. I'd like to name these more thematically, but I never know how I would even approach that. All of the names that I haven't mentioned are border crossings - the playable area is the middle 6x6 grid + about 1/6 of the edge grid. You can see where the power lines and rail lines end around the edges for an idea. Sejov, Gliwilystok (with its weird accented L I've never seen before), and Miergeni were all stock map names. I adopted the name for the main depots near to the hub/steel mill from the destroyed villages here, Bratwice. I am probably going to settle on calling the Steel Mill town New Bratwice for now. (Maybe I'll look up the word 'new' in Polish for flavor.) A slight note I have to bring up: I cannot stand that that small strip of land south of Nemyman doesn't belong to me. The map is always square, there's nothing to be done about that, but my god is it frustrating I can't build right to the coast. I'll avoid building anything super close to that border just so it doesn't look weird. You can also get a very tiny spoiler of what my hub/port is starting to look like. None of that has even approached being built yet, but the plans still show up on the map. I've been paused just after the snow melts in 1967 designing the finer points of it - obviously nothing I'm ready to share yet. (Update 4 will cover the period between Spring 66 and Spring 67, for those keeping track at home.) My challenge to myself for this save lends itself well to doing a Let's Play - when I play any sorts of these games, I tend to get very tunnel visioned around the current 'hot' project. I mean, how many times did I say "we need manpower/labor" in my last two posts? (Hey, this works well when you have a Five Year Plan) but this game obviously allows you to have a lot of moving parts operate on their own if you get them started and keep them 'fed' with what they need. I really want to avoid that this time, because time marches forever onward. I am going to try and be very careful about making sure all my depots and places are working toward something. It makes the game a lot slower - there's a lot more pausing to lay out designs and even playing on slow speed as I run around to check everything's moving, but the progress per in-game day will be much greater. In previous saves I always ended up with periods where I was off doing something while things just stacked up or ran idle somewhere - It ended up basically screwing one of my saves pretty bad because I automated delivering cars to my citizens in a poorly designed city and, quite literally, grid-locking it with personal cars. (Let's see if we can do it again!) Ultimately though, if I want to make the narrative a little more believable, it doesn't make sense that we'd leave a whole half of the map unattended while I fastidiously design a factory complex with the game unpaused. I know ultimately it doesn't matter - it's just an LP and I can run it however - but it's a way I want to play and this gives me a good excuse to be more thorough. Ultimately a city builder is "won" when you've built the city you want, and further, this one does have a "soft" end in the 1990's - All the vehicle models unlock again and nothing new shows up. No idea how long this LP will last (especially if I'm playing more slowly) but I do keep that date in mind because I'd like to be in some kind of a deep 'end game' state by then, just doing things for fun or trying to push thresholds of the game. Already you can see that I covered 5 years in one update and now I'm down to about 1 year per update. I think that pace will more or less continue to slow if I stick to my idea.Another thing I read (thanks for linking me to their blog, Volmarias. I really should be checking it out) is that the new beta has global events.  I intentionally didn't read the details about what these are - I did see some words about trade prices but I have no idea if there's other ones. Hopefully these throw fun wrenches into the mix to report on. Even that resource depot fire - Playing totally on my own, I'd probably just reload from a couple minutes beforehand and roll my eyes. It's obviously not a showstopper - just an annoyance when dealing with other game stuff that I don't want to think about - but with an LP it actually kind of adds a little extra to just play-through. I like that! I'm normally very much a "play your own game and if its annoying just skip it," but sometimes that 'annoying' is really the challenge of the game. It was super embarrassing that I'm normally extremely paranoid about placing fire departments all over - so I had put one there - but it was just barely not ready to be staffed by citizens yet. Comrades! I am really looking for names for stuff. I have no idea how a Soviet Republic would have named stuff, and further (despite being ethnically half-Polish!) speak no Polish to even fake names for cities and settlements. I can absolutely just google names and things myself, but I'd love some input. I'm definitely okay with tongue-in-cheek funny, but I don't particularly want to stray too far into goofy. No Goatsezino. (Well, maybe. That is kind of good.) I need both names for factory complexes and towns, but I'm fine with just naming industries related to nearby towns. I think the character limit is 24? Ultimately it is kind of only for flavor - but because stuff *has* to have a map name, it can also help. For awhile I had "Baradjoz" or something autogenerated near the steel mill and, because I wasn't referencing it, it was sometimes confusing me where it said some bus stop was when it was near the steel mill. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 03:43
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I take it the rail lines default/ have a build option for double tracks? I would have suggested going single with passing places (the tiniest yards of all) but if they're naturally double, that's workable too
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Dec 8, 2020 09:45
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Veloxyll posted:I take it the rail lines default/ have a build option for double tracks? I would have suggested going single with passing places (the tiniest yards of all) but if they're naturally double, that's workable too They don't naturally double, but the game has a very good system for following existing tracks so double is easy to make, and it's almost always worth the time and effort to do so since double tracked is so much faster.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:22
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Depends on when you do it. You can always go back later to double track, but having spaced out sidings is a lot cheaper to begin with if the line is sparsely used.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:32
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Sejov, Gliwilystok (with its weird accented L I've never seen before), and Miergeni were all stock map names.  The "ł" is used in Polish to denote the "w" sound. While "w" denotes the "v" sound. So Gliwiłystok is pronounced gli-viw-i-stok. And the Polish word for New is "Nowy". I'm really enjoying this LP, and excited to dip my toe into the game as well. Thanks for your hard work, Anime! Radiation Cow fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 14:33
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I double up lines because while you aren’t wrong that it ends up a lot cheaper to do sidings to start, I must reiterate how much I hate “debt” like that. I’d rather just start with two tracks rather than go back later. One of my many “spend a whole lot extra right now that you don’t need because it might be gently inconvenient in the future” things. But stay tuned for when I show off the rail hub/port if you really want to raise some questions about super inefficient and stupid rail designs! I kind of know I’m making some mistakes (or perhaps more appropriately, glaring inefficiencies) there and that there’s better ways to build a yard like I’m making, but I end up defaulting to “What is easy for me to think about and signal up given my current experience/knowledge.” It’ll ostensibly work, but.. Radiation Cow posted:
Cool thanks, this is helpful/fun to learn. I will stop mentally pronouncing it Glee-Willy-Stock.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:27
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As far as naming things, you should definitely have a vladimir lenin something. The game starts post-destalinization so there wouldn't be anything named for stalin. I also like doing single track with sidings for most rail lines since it's more realistic for a low traffic line.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:21
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Don't forget naming local buildings after hometown heroes, especially if they were Great Patriotic War veterans with breast glitter to show for it.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:30
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I did some reading and now I demand you name the power plant city Elektrogorsk
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Dec 8, 2020 21:56
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Part 4: Bread and Hoses It is perhaps because of greater notice following the storage fire that cost significant construction time of Nowy Bratwice, but there appears to be a rash of fires throughout the Republic. This pictured fire was nearly devastating, as it could have spread to the construction vehicles at the office. Luckily, our brave firefighters arrived in time.  A construction office catches fire near Miergeni, Summer 1966. Luckily, a more robust check of the Republic's fire department coverage should help prevent future tragedies. Other improvements were undertaken during the steel mill's opening and the construction of Nowy Bratwice.  The Miergeni food factory opens, Winter 1965-66.  A long, more direct road is prepared for paving to a Northwestern border crossing and prospective oil field, Autumn 1965. Most of these improvements were in and around the city of Miergeni, as the workers there were relatively idle compared to those of the other towns who were focused almost entirely on the steel mill. Once steel was being produced (truly autonomously), each city underwent a brief upgrade of their stores - adding small warehouses to avoid all-too-common stock outs of staple foods. There was also an effort to bring some modern apartments to each city, though old city homes still made up the lion's share of homes.  Two blocks of old homes are razed in Sejov, Spring 1966. Citizens were moved into new modern housing, just barely visible top right.  Several apartment blocks have expanded Gliwilystok's population, Summer 1966.  A new shopping center with attached cold storage and a warehouse is opened in Sejov, Late Summer 1966. The autumn and winter of 1966 were fairly quiet in terms of notable development excepting the opening of the new Mechanical Components factory as part of Nowy Bratwice's steel mill complex. While an extremely important step toward independence and providing the Republic with important components for industry, the achievement felt relatively trivial compared to the opening of the new city and the opening of the complex as a whole. Crucially, though, the Republic is not currently in high demand of the produced components. The rise up to the steel mill's coal mine was already well paved and, luckily the mine itself sat in a small pass that opened to the southern border at Somhasca. A new road was laid, giving an easy route for trucks (at least, in the summer) to export mechanical goods to the USSR at large. Considering the great expense incurred to raise Nowy Bratwice, these exports would prevent the Republic from sinking further into debt.  The road to Somhasca is laid from the coal mine, Autumn 1966.  A convoy of trucks exporting mechanical parts arrives at the border crossing, Spring 1967. This brief lull in major projects has allowed the Republic to claw back on some of its economic debts and, importantly, the main rail lines between the cities are nearly completed. While there is still much work to be done to unite the region by rail, planners and surveyors have already begun to level and lay out the rail depot and port to satisfy the next Five Year Plan.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:14
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VostokProgram posted:I did some reading and now I demand you name the power plant city Elektrogorsk I am definitely planning on some names like this if I can bastardize them enough to not outright copy real cities (not for any reason other than I like to try and keep it sort of original). I actually looked up Magnitogorsk because I assumed it was a similar thing - named by the Soviets because they did some weird heavy industry related to big magnets or something like that. Turns out it's been named that way since the 1700's. I guess maybe those sorts of names aren't particularly Soviet when I think about it, plenty of places are named after "Here's the thing that happens here" but the Russian ones always struck me. Maybe because despite being based in a language I don't speak almost a single word of, it is immediately apparent that, "Oh, this town has to do with electricity or magnetism." I'll keep this in mind for when we tackle a nuclear powerplant.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:20
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I double up lines because while you aren’t wrong that it ends up a lot cheaper to do sidings to start, I must reiterate how much I hate “debt” like that. I’d rather just start with two tracks rather than go back later. One of my many “spend a whole lot extra right now that you don’t need because it might be gently inconvenient in the future” things. Yeah, given the rarity of steel, I figured it might have been financially worth it to single line with sidings. Especially if you could install the points to continue the whole shemozzle and have the curve signalled for eventual doubling. quote:But stay tuned for when I show off the rail hub/port if you really want to raise some questions about super inefficient and stupid rail designs! I kind of know I’m making some mistakes (or perhaps more appropriately, glaring inefficiencies) there and that there’s better ways to build a yard like I’m making, but I end up defaulting to “What is easy for me to think about and signal up given my current experience/knowledge.” It’ll ostensibly work, but.. No doubt! Does it use chain signals and blocks like TTD that you've seen or? (others with experience may also comment)
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Dec 8, 2020 22:36
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Yeah w&r works on a chain signals + regular signals system. But I believe they recently added some path-signaly behavior to chains so that they're a little bit smarter (will allow two trains through the same block if their paths don't interfere). Generally for single + siding I use 4 signals for each siding: a regular to exit the single track part into the siding from one direction, and a chain to re-enter the single part. Reversed for the other track. I like building realistic looking train lines so I often have single track spurs going off to specific warehouses and such.
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Dec 8, 2020 23:16
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Veloxyll posted:Yeah, given the rarity of steel, I figured it might have been financially worth it to single line with sidings. Especially if you could install the points to continue the whole shemozzle and have the curve signalled for eventual doubling. You're absolutely right - This save was actually one of the first of my "I know what I'm doing" saves where I actually fumbled pretty hard on steel and had to take a lot of loans getting Nowy Bratwice (the steel mill town, now named) working to get the mines running well. It really didn't help that I let everything continue to build railways and siphon steel off in various directions. One of those problems that seems so dumb and obvious once you notice it, but not when it matters. But hey, its just a few loans. In other games/saves, I generally had enough steel that was being produced 'for free' that it just made sense to double up, lay the track, signal it, and forget about it. This time it hurt me and I should have used that approach. It uses chain signals and blocks, I think. They call them 'signals' and 'presignals' - trains reserve a section of track. Pre signals look downstream and check valid paths. Part 4b: Too Many Words About Logistics I cannot stress enough that experienced train/logistics gamers are likely going to wince at my implementations. They're wildly large and overengineered because I want to try and future proof as much as possible, which is silly to do, but also because I'm not super comfortable with how to signal efficiently into and out of yards. Like, I fundamentally understand how to signal up an entrance to a station so that a train can choose an available platform from a transit line (that's easy!) but I end up making a whole ton of extra space to let any potential extra trains queuing up clear a lot of the main switches - Unfortunately the way this game handles some of the logistics, there's not really a way to have a big (single) train station and get the resources sorted and to their right place. You kind of limit lines to a station with a maximum of two platforms or direct to a storage/warehouse, which has one platform. Also sorry, this is going to take a minute to get back around to signalling my yard, but I think I aught to explain it now in case someone smarter than me has a better approach. If I build the whole hub, I'm going with this method and it's going to suck to switch it in a major way. Fundamentally my thinking for my hub is there are inbound/supply trains (coming from an industry with a good to stock it in the hub) and outbound/local trains (taking a good to a required destination). Generally, you only really need outbound/local trains for consumer goods. I figure I would mostly send outbound construction trains on demand if a distant construction depot gets low, or I'll set and forget one if an area is particularly hungry for resources. The inbound/supply train can sit on a dedicated platform until it's fully exhausted with supply. Outbound trains will use a connected, dedicated outbound platform to come in and grab as needed. A distribution office has logic that can say "Only take from supply if over %," so I use this to catch when a certain stock is being overproduced and can be exported. This way does mean twice as many trains - but I think its the only way to get the "logic" I want of always maintaining stock in the hub, and it makes it easy to export the 'overages.' I could be missing an easy, more elegant solution, though. Let me give a specific example to work through the logic: We're over producing food for the first 4 cities I have. It all happens at one spot, where a train picks up all the food. This train takes it to the depot to a dedicated Food Warehouse where it is the only train allowed to occupy the warehouse's track. It will stay here until the train is 100% emptied into the warehouse. Two things draw off of the warehouse. Trucks at the port are set up to only take supply over a certain %, let's say 80% full. If the warehouse is full, its going to take that food off to be exported until the warehouse drops to 80%. Obviously if the warehouse is anything less than 100%, the supply train will have gone back to the industry where it will fill up again and return. (It does not wait at the industry - if it can't fill, it'll take what it has. This means if something is really running low and not being produced that train is just making constant laps, but generally I can catch if this starts happening.) Outbound/local trains can also come in and go to an attached cargo station and demand food. These trains are often just on a loop among several local warehouses near cities - they don't wait anywhere. At the depot they try to fill up 100%, but won't wait if they can't, and they'll try to unload 100% of what they're allowed at each station. (Local supply is managed by restricting goods in the warehouse.) This does mean that these trains effectively run constantly, trying to top off any station on their route, then come back and fill up again. They are single good-carrying trains. They tend to run very heavy with a pretty full stock of goods and just top everything off. (This might be the fundamental issue with my system - I really like to buffer.) I'd like to make dedicated local trains that can stock multiple goods and just dump all at once, but this gets really bothersome because there's not good logic surrounding how to drop off goods, or when to leave a station. Say I make a train that supplies towns with Food and Liquor, with multiple towns on the line. I tell it to load up 75% food and 25% liquor at the hub. I have no way to give a train any logic like a distribution center - I can't tell it to stock a specific warehouse based on supply, so it cannot travel to local warehouses on demand. Fine - all that means is that it effectively has to hit each town in a line, top off the two goods, and then do the circuit again. It's still running basically constant circles, but at least its only one engine now. (I can't tell it to wait to unload at a station, because otherwise it could create supply issues for the next station in the line while it waits for stock to empty.) The problem is now, what do I tell it to do when it gets back to the depot? I can't effectively tell it to top off in the same ratio again - although I should revalidate this behavior. It could just be that the loading allows a pretty sizable range for what it considers 75/25, but I didn't expect to see over 80% food in the train. In my last game, it seemed like whenever I told it to load 75/25 again, it would load that ratio again based on available space. This ended up meaning that liquor slowly got edged out of ever being in the train, because if the train was 50% full, it would load the remaining 50% of space based on a 75/25 ratio. I can unload the train entirely, then load the train entirely again to get the correct ratio everytime, but I have to wait for it to unload. This can take awhile (remember, we have another supply train likely unloading into the same warehouse as well), and while I don't *think* it would ever take long enough to let local warehouses run out, I'm not positive it would. As well, this potentially kicks off exporting a bunch of goods that I don't necessarily want to export as it can kick it over the 80% threshold while unloading, then not be able to fill while loading. I suppose this might be okay, because anything it's offloading at that point is technically an overproduced amount that local stations can't take? I just haven't totally thought through the logic here. I'm worried there's edge cases I'm not understanding where doing this means I won't have the food and liquor I need going back out through the system because too much gets caught exported while the local trains are loading up. Maybe what I really need to do is just diagram out some different states of what could happen instead of designing around fears that I have the information to actually figure out. I'm worried that a few cycles will eventually put the trains into a state where the system gets drained of resources because of that extra export. I tend to design such that the local warehouses will always be 100% stuffed, but maybe if I drop that assumption its okay to just unload the entire train and load it back up again with the correct ratio of goods. I just don't want a state where the last stop in a line suddenly isn't getting enough food because the train couldn't load enough a few times in a row because it was exported by the time it tried to leave the hub and then the first two stops got low and took whatever food was left. In any case, this ends up driving a lot of the design of the hub because now I need a warehouse for every good I intend to store and export overproduction of, as I'm going to have an inbound train that sits at the warehouse and blocks its sole platform while it unloads. These warehouses are connected to a cargo station where (the outbound/local) trains can load up. Just because of factory connection tetris, this ends up being one cargo station to two warehouses. (I could maybe get fancy with forklifts which let me connect things more distantly, but they're exceptionally slow and I've had a lot of trouble with logic between them and cargo stations.) I end up making absolutely massive L/R lines out of each platform instead of thinking more along the lines of separating entrance/exit rails to the yard. (So effectively my yard, from the stations, goes from LR/LR/LR/LR to LR/LR to LR, not something maybe potentially more efficient like LR/LR/LR/LR to LLLLRR to LR.) I hope any of that made sense. This is probably something that is much easier to try and describe with pictures - I was going to try to wait and do a big cargo hub reveal but maybe it pays to share now to explain in case anyone who's good at these things has better ideas. Edit: Merging in some of the content from the next few random explanatory posts up to the new update in case anyone reads this after the fact and skips the thread in between. Anime Store Adventure posted:I'm so sorry.  Innocent_Bystander posted:My only experience with trains if Factorio, but the chain signal terminology seems familiar enough, as does the buffer structure there. I'm assuming trains can just casually reverse in place at stations in this game? How efficiently will you be using the space in between the rail lines? Will it all be filled up with stops? Could you get space efficiency by moving stuff further out so you can fit stuff in between? What are the transport options/bottlenecks like within the railyard? Trucks? Anime Store Adventure posted:Trains flip when they stop, if they need to. The space that's going unused here is unfortunately kind of just going to be dead. So here's a quick color coded diagram: Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 23:49
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I'm so sorry. e: Okay, fine, you're right. I can sense it from your collective steely gazes, I can do better.  This is going to take a second. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 01:17
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