|
Like you can auto build a refinery complex and just ship out 100% of the fuel and bitumen and basically buy your buildings. I intentionally avoid this because it feels a little too gamey - I like to work up through the construction goods first - but doing that you can outright buy a lot of the initial industries and then slowly become independent at your own pace. If you even want to - technically so long as you’re positive on exports-imports you don’t have to do anything more. You’ll absolutely have false starts - I consider pretty much 100% of my games a false start eventually - but it’s so much fun and a super unique game in the genre. It touches a layer not anything I’ve played does, despite all of its issues.
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 04:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 21:15 |
|
|
Maybe I will pick it up, then. Because I like building and making things look nice.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 05:15
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:Maybe I will pick it up, then. Because I like building and making things look nice. I will absolutely caution you that you won’t get cities skylines level zen garden amazing cities from it, but I’ve made some downright nice looking stuff if I spend the time to really work it out. There’s also some annoying ness with placement on anything but very flat terrain, but you learn the rules of that pretty quick.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 05:23
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:I will absolutely caution you that you won’t get cities skylines level zen garden amazing cities from it, but I’ve made some downright nice looking stuff if I spend the time to really work it out. Modding is getting better and has some more aesthetic options but you're always going to be in the "Soviet Republic" look.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 07:23
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:
Perfect! That means when I finish the signals guide (probably this weekend, Christmas + work has left me very time poor right now for advanced brainwork), you'll realise half the network is technically incorrect and be stuck hating it!
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 10:17
|
|
|
Would you recommend a blank or populated map for someone first starting out? I'm really tempted to give this game a try, but I open it up and immediately get overwhelmed by choice.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 10:35
|
|
|
A blank map (with easy mode options turned on, especially the option for not worrying about heating) is a pretty nice way to start. You can try out whatever kind of industries you want and see how that goes. Bear in mind that you'll probably want to start an entirely new game once you've figured out what you're doing a little better. A very simple early industry is to build oil wells and export the oil via train, since it requires no workers (except for a fire department if you have fires enabled). Another is to build a liquor factory near the border, auto import crops, then export the liquor. You'll need to make a town to service it. You can expand both of these easily by adding a refinery for the oil (fuel and bitumen are both much more valuable), and farms for the vodka (plus possibly a food factory). Distribution centers are your friend. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Dec 21, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 16:10
|
|
|
For what it’s worth, too, I’ve found out that basically old city houses provide citizens enough needs on their own that they don’t escape or die (to the point of making ghost towns - I think a certain % still do sometimes). I booted a game and let it run while I made dinner to see and when I came back a year or two had passed and all the stock cities still had surviving people at roughly the same ratio as I had left them. This was with winter turned on and “standard/fair” response to needs being met. This might be helpful if you like to start with a populated map. I know my next run I won’t be so worried about powering every single city off the bat. Volmarias’ advice is all quality, though. I would not recommend my start here as a “good” one because it ended up costing me tons of cash down the line to sustain it. That said it does sort of track with the order of which you probably want to produce construction goods, vaguely. (Gravel first, asphalt, bricks, cement/concrete, prefabs, steel. Mix boards in there somewhere when able.) Importing things like gravel and concrete gets super expensive because of delivery fees with the amount you need of them and they’re pretty easy to make even if you have to auto import coal or cement (or bitumen for asphalt) for a little while. E: Also, it’s *much* cheaper to send trucks to the border and bring your imported goods to a storage spot instead of mashing auto import, if feasible. In my save, as of ~1977, I think I’ve paid like $5million in delivery fees on maybe $10 million in imports? It can get crazy. In the future I’ll be only importing myself and not using auto import wherever possible. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Dec 21, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 17:55
|
|
|
So, I'm guessing the next 5 year plan is developing a dispersed export industries localized on existing border crossings?
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 18:37
|
|
|
Radiation Cow posted:Would you recommend a blank or populated map for someone first starting out? I'm really tempted to give this game a try, but I open it up and immediately get overwhelmed by choice. I've used the default populated map. The pre-existing population centers are pretty much in stasis until you start building on them and they look nice and give you a reservoir of manpower to draw from that you don't have to pay for if you ever need it. Because they are inert until you utilize them, you can also just build your first settlements in the middle of nowhere to exploit natural resources. On the default map there's a nice coal deposit and iron deposit relatively close to each other that makes a good starting location if you want to bootstrap yourself toward resource independence.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 20:18
|
|
|
I think there's a limit to it. By 1965 the existing old towns seem to deplete significantly, with small villages reduced to 1 or less person per house (which I'm pretty sure is my New Soviet NEETs deciding that it's gonna beat living with mom forever). This is with all of the difficulty options enabled, though, so if you disable escape or being unhappy due to no food etc you may end up remaining fully populated
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 21:22
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:I think there's a limit to it. By 1965 the existing old towns seem to deplete significantly, with small villages reduced to 1 or less person per house (which I'm pretty sure is my New Soviet NEETs deciding that it's gonna beat living with mom forever). This is with all of the difficulty options enabled, though, so if you disable escape or being unhappy due to no food etc you may end up remaining fully populated Ah okay - I didn't let it run that long and I did notice that a certain part of the population was escaping, but it seemed relatively 'stable' - like the existing old towns would sort of maintain whatever their initial state was. Maybe eventually the replacement rate is too low. (This was with normal difficulty for needs/escapes.) I might spend some time today messing with some sandbox maps and doing some experiments about different designs (whether they be depots and things, factories, or railways.) I had found this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1991851668 and wanted to build these and see them in action. I'm not sure if they're necessary now that there's some built in passing logic allowed? I also want to plan out a few more 'standard' factory layouts - try to make them a little bit more orderly and squared off. Sometimes I think I'm doing great, really making something nice and orderly looking, and then get done and go "oh my god its a mess!" when I zoom out. I'll share them if I get anything good! I also want to toy with a few mod buildings for 'smaller' industries - my guess is that a lot of them really aren't worth it really at all, but I'd love to try a game where I really follow my heart about starting more decentralized. I felt like I had started doing that in this playthrough but then inevitably I immediately centralized. If I could manage to set up a little bit more of a spread with smaller industries... Probably still easier to just truck the products slowly somewhere else, though. I wish I had done some of this work before my current save, because now I'm having to tear up some of my local cargo stations because they don't work. (You can't offload meat to a connected meat storage through a train at a warehouse.) Triple A posted:So, I'm guessing the next 5 year plan is developing a dispersed export industries localized on existing border crossings? Not for me! Tourism is our next focus. Exports are mostly mechanical parts, boats, and trains, which is beaucoup bucks for our little Republic! Veloxyll posted:Perfect! That means when I finish the signals guide (probably this weekend, Christmas + work has left me very time poor right now for advanced brainwork), you'll realise half the network is technically incorrect and be stuck hating it! Hey, this is exactly the type of 'hating it' that's beneficial! I do think this save will probably wrap up within a handful more updates because I'm getting that urge that makes me want to press New Game more and more. My plan right now is to keep the LP going if/when that happens - just sort of split it into a 'take 2'. I'm not super into going past the 90's "end" date unless I'm extremely happy with the progress of the map. (I will never be extremely happy with it.) That basically means unless I really dig into the minutia of what I'm doing or really turn on the flowery prose, I can't see any one game going for a whole huge amount of updates. I might try to up both the minutia and flowery prose if I restart, though, now that I'm finding a bit more of my footing of actually doing an LP.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
Crossposting here just in case anyone found the game through here and not the Management Games thread, I'll add the collection to the OP. I did this when I was going back and adding some new (cosmetic) mods from the workshop, which I plan to use in the future save. quote:I still owe folks a general tips and otherwise guide, but I did at least do this:
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 04:27
|
|
|
A secret santa got the game off my wishlist. Ive put 6 hours into it this evening. I have.no clue wtf is going on and ended up 8 million rubles in debt by march. 10/10 confusing game of the year.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 07:13
|
|
|
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1718149719 drat, this guide has what I feared. I was hoping for ghost chain signals at points. Just means that your line is going to jam a smidge every time there's a crossing. It's not ONLY this game that has that though. Mashinky and TTD have the same problem (Factorio's distance to cross and scale tend to let you have enough space between your double tracks so you can jam a chain signal in). Not unexpected mind you. Just annoying.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 10:03
|
|
|
Veloxyll posted:https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1718149719 See: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1991851668 I think - if I understand - you’re talking about what this guide solves with their slightly expanded designs? I didn’t end up testing these today, but I also think that maybe a behavior change (where signals allow some passing on red if there’s no conflict) might make these moot anyway - but I’m not sure.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 10:10
|
|
|
Yeah. That sort of thing is needed so that chain signals reserve only the blocks they need. Otherwise they'll reserve both sides of the track in the block. I'd have to test to know for sure either way. A bit of spacing to let you squeeze a signal in between tracks basically lets you break up the blocks better.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 10:28
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:Part 8: Living With Our Decisions Kindergartens (or schools etc) in block cores are 'correct', actually, granting that the scale's off - conceptually you want services like that interior to districts. If you go look at any 'Soviet' urban area you'll generally notice School # whatever enclosed by housing blocks surrounded by primary road, specifically in that order. Nevertheless Novy Sejov looks like a hellish place to live, unfortunately; I suspect the demolition of the old town would be resented for decades and with good reason. Your big problems, aesthetically - and they're common ones - are lack of space, lack of sightlines, and lack of greenery. Space is an obvious one - you're building up, and there's a tendency to cram buildings together as tightly as possible because the automatic thought seems to be that High Density Means Tight Spaces. This isn't necessary, though - and can be deeply counterproductive if you end up having to demolish entire housing blocks because you need to squeeze a heating pipe through somewhere next year and can't. Loosen things up a bit and allow for some open areas (away from roads - kids gotta run around somewhere). Sightlines are almost always ignored unless you've stopped to think about what you're doing but they're key to making things look natural. Think about the two U shaped blocks above - each building has an entire facing that's, what, 10 meters away from the next building over? That means if you're in one of those apartments you either have your curtains closed or your neighbours can pretty much stick their heads through your window. Horrifying, you'd have to force people into them at gunpoint. An easy rule of thumb here is that buildings should be arranged such that, if they were to fall over in the direction that a living space faces, they shouldn't hit the next building (though obviously works less well the taller you go). So - fine to compress eg the ends of a longitudinal apartment block (since the only windows that face out the sides will be stairwells or bathrooms or etc) but don't squeeze them together front-to-front. Greenery is not obvious because the mental image is of big grey tower blocks surrounded by construction waste, debris etc. Which, at the time of construction, sure! Given a few years though your towers should be absolutely drowned in greenery - even if the trash doesn't necessarily get cleaned up. Once you've got the urban structure down, go absolutely hog wild with the tree planter tool - it's essentially impossible to have enough of them. e: home from work. the Republic Urban Design Combine presents the plan for a modern urban district of 5,000 residents based on the brick housing apartment block series I-447:   
Pretty rad dad pad fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Dec 22, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 11:31
|
|
|
Pretty rad dad pad posted:Kindergartens (or schools etc) in block cores are 'correct', actually, granting that the scale's off - conceptually you want services like that interior to districts. If you go look at any 'Soviet' urban area you'll generally notice School # whatever enclosed by housing blocks surrounded by primary road, specifically in that order. Thanks, this is awesome and helpful. To cut myself some slack here - I got lazy when laying out the cities. I had a very nice city in a previous save with green spaces and tree painting, then I rushed here and made the absolute hellscape you see before you. (This is one of the things pressuring me to want to hit refresh on a map, building more sensibly.) I got in this mentality of the Five Year Plan and instead of pausing and carefully, you know, planning, I slapped stuff down to achieve an arbitrary goal. There’s a real nasty tendency to want to make everything accessible by foot, including train stations on the edge of the city and everything, despite buses/electric busses being relatively cheap/easy transport in a city. Of course this meant I crammed everythingin what amounts to 300 square meters without another thought instead of thinking of it as a distinct district and maybe I could just bus some folks around if I really needed to. Sightlines is a new concept for me. Okay - no, I’m familiar with it at least as a layman, but I’ve often ignored it even when I’m taking my time laying out an area. I’ll have to think more about that. Greenspace I get - I just need to avoid being a lazy moron about it. The central committee accepts your design and will put it into practice. ...On our next save. I hate to dump and restart on y’all but I am desiring of a clean slate enough that it’s starting to hamper my ability to think about the current save. I’ve got one more update, then I’ll probably wipe the slate and do a Chapter 2, of sorts. Luckily I can promise all sorts of new features in the new save like: -a truly Republic-wide mindset and not falling into centralizing in 1/4 of the map -Actual planning that’s not just done once ahead of time and then vaguely thought about periodically while slapping stuff down because wooo that’s an LP update (easy trap I made for myself this time.) -better trains -Fences and guard rails (why did I download these mods I’m going to be here decorating forever) -more granular and focused updates (because it’s been 3 days and I’m still staring at this factory complex trying to make it look nice)
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 17:46
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:To cut myself some slack here - I got lazy when laying out the cities. I had a very nice city in a previous save with green spaces and tree painting, then I rushed here and made the absolute hellscape you see before you. (This is one of the things pressuring me to want to hit refresh on a map, building more sensibly.) I got in this mentality of the Five Year Plan and instead of pausing and carefully, you know, planning, I slapped stuff down to achieve an arbitrary goal. To be fair, my cities are blighted urban hellscapes. My villages have quant cabins razed two or three at a time to put in high rise housing. That's the ones that are actually being paid attention to, the towns and villages further out are just left to be on their own. Doing these kinds of planned towns is also a massive financial and logistic undertaking (to say nothing of the futzing with the building boundaries, alignments, etc) and it's probably ok to leave until your republic is healthy enough to build it without issue.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 17:57
|
|
|
Anime Store Adventure posted:I got in this mentality of the Five Year Plan and instead of pausing and carefully, you know, planning, I slapped stuff down to achieve an arbitrary goal. a little too on the nose
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 18:00
|
|
|
Part 9: Actually, Not Living With My Decisions One last thing I wanted to try before we wipe the slate: Tourism. It's new in this patch (which has launched today, officially!) along with several other improvements, and, notably: Planes. Laying out an airport is something that should be done with care because of noise pollution and subsequent traffic. Luckily the citizens of Nowy Sejov hate me already, so let's put it up close and personal to our hellblocks.  That looks like a good spot.  Our last big truck conga for the save! I'll miss you until we see new truck congas.  Taxiways and runways are lighted! Laying out the airport, this time, I was pretty lazy as I already had my sights on the new save, but there seems to be a decent amount of potential? The control tower can clearly handle multiple runways, and it seems like one can build intersecting runways (at least at or close to 90 degree angles, nothing very acute.) I am not totally sure how it handles ground traffic - there doesn't seem to be any sort of manual control or signalling, so it seems like you could get planes into a 'bad state' during taxiing, but I didn't test this. In our new save, I'll take the care to design realistic airports which should preclude any scenarios where planes end up face to face while taxiing, unless we get an incredibly busy airport (I play a lot of flight sim and AirportCEO, I know enough to make it look decent enough for the tools provided here.) Related, it doesn't seem like airports are meant to be incredibly busy. That terminal you see is currently the only one in the game, and it can support only a handful of attached parkings/gates. You could build multiple, but given my one plane was never full, I'm not sure why you'd build more other than trying to make it look busier than it actually is. I'm sure you can get enough tourists to fill planes, but at some point I'm sure the point at which you want more than say, 2-3 terminals, you'd probably end up with another airport or a way to bring tourists in, as you'd be taking up a huge amount of real estate for that airport. This is guessing, though! There's no ground services other than the terminal providing fuel, it doesn't need plowing. (Maybe this would just be annoying, but a fleet of airport plows looks so cool in formation plowing a runway.)  Our republic's purchased Tu-154.  It has a pretty steep climb profile. Planes work not unlike ships - they are given an "outside the borders" waypoint and can be told to pick up tourists or cargo. It looks as though they have the option to be used for commutes, too. I'm not sure this would be high on my list, but planes are fast enough that if we find some remote industry that needs manpower, we can make them a tiny strip and land some AN-2's out there. Maybe a mountain/remote tourist destination? Cargo, also, seems like it wouldn't be preferable. The largest planes (as of ~1978) can only carry 45 tons of cargo. Again, if I can think of a 'novelty' way to work them in, I will, but I don't think they would beat trucks or trains in most cases. I could see perhaps loading them with high value goods like electronics - we don't want those to get damaged on some rough roads or railway, right?  Our nation's first hotels. Tourism is basically Paid Citizens with a little extra, it seems to work well. I did not heavily try to optimize their time in this save - I wanted to know how they worked so I don't do anything stupid setting up tourism in my next big save, but I didn't care nor want to figure out the finer details of perfecting it yet. Something to do next time! Tourists have a 16hr "commute" - at least when arriving by plane, though I assume this is standard. In that 16 hours, they need to be made to find an open hotel room, or they will 'end their trip prematurely' - despawn. Obviously this makes planes extremely preferable - 16 hours is plenty of time, but if they need to go from a train from the border, to perhaps a tram, then a bus, then walk - you can see how this might get eaten up. Once at the hotel, tourists have all the needs your citizens do, though now they're more like 'wants.' The hotel provides food, meat, and liquor, which I think is plenty for them to survive (tourists can and will die, I believe affecting your rating. Hilarious if it didn't, though.) They do also sometimes want to visit the hospital, presumably after all that meat and liquor at the hotel. Their other needs are the same, though. They will want to seek out sport, they will shop at your stores, they even ask for church service, if possible. They'll listen to the radio and presumably watch TV. The other part of this is attractions - These are new 'destinations' of various types like Zoos, beaches, amusements, art galleries. Your citizens can use these, too! I'm not exactly sure what need it fulfills for them - they get an "attraction" stat that perhaps just increases happiness? As always, these are free for citizens. From what I can see, the attraction rating is related to the environment around the attraction. I don't know all the knobs here, but for example: A beach or sight tower on the river? Crappy, 1-2 star rating. A beach or sight tower near the port, looking out over the huge bay/lake? 4 stars. Mountain hotels seem to prefer higher altitudes, though I couldn't improve it much, so perhaps things like monuments and that improve it as well? Again, I left some of this slightly unexplored so I have new things to discover elsewhere. You can also reduce the price to improve the rating. Tourists pay for everything in your republic. They pay to use transit, they pay to stay in the hotel, they pay for attractions and goods. And tourists pay a lot of money. I ran with tourists in only those two hotels (roughly 200 tourists at a time), a rating sub 2.5 stars, and tourism was fit to outpace my yearly exports. Granted, I am not exporting tons of stuff, but I was still bringing in several million a year (presuming I didn't eat absolutely oodles of steel that could otherwise be used for mechanical parts.) After a few months my tourists were close to a million rubles spent, and that was starting from the first plane bringing only 10 of those guys into the country. They aren't exceptionally expense to maintain, it seems, as they have the same requirements as citizens, more or less - Just the workers for the hotels. Maybe a downside is that if you don't give them enough to do early on you can tank your rating and they'll stop showing up? Honestly, I could see them becoming the new "meta" for early cash, replacing the petrostate. Maybe that's naive and maybe I only made oodles because of where I was in the game already, but it would be very funny to support communism on the back of an amusement park. -- Savegame Post Mortem: So I mentioned in some posts that this would be my last update on this savegame and for some of the reasons why. I'll share again here. Not that I feel the need to justify it, but some of them might help others who get "stuck" on this game and are afraid to restart. -I planned for awhile, but then kind of stopped thinking ahead more than one move. This is a killer, and related to some of the other reasons mentioned below. I started off strong, but then sort of let the winds guide me on a few things, and it fell into plopping stuff instead of planning stuff. -I got too focused on progressing the LP. First time doing this and I kept thinking about the next update - I should have done the opposite: Played the game the way I do, update on what I'm doing instead of letting it drive. I'm definitely feeling more comfortable with finding my style/voice/whatever, so this shouldn't be an issue going forward. I look back now and I was playing a ton at full speed and flying through the years. Even if we go all the way to the 90's, at that pace that's like 12 updates. I want to do it slower. -I like the self imposed 'time-element' challenge. Part of what I take from the game is making things happen efficiently, and as I drew close to 1980, I realized I was going to be behind older save games both in aesthetic appearances (dramatically) and functional supply chains (oil ones). This game quickly started to fall into my own personal "lose" state. I don't see that as a negative in a "I hate this video game" way- that's how I play - but maybe a little weird for an LP thread. Notably, if you aren't affected by this - I can absolutely fix 100% of what's in my game, given enough time, and perfect it. The little in game clock just might read 2050, though. Don't be discouraged if its 1990 and you know The Wall is falling. -Stuff's ugly. Sort of related to planning and the LP update focus, I got more worried about my arbitrary goals than doing things 'right.' Re: Five Year Plans: Anime Store Adventure posted:I got in this mentality of the Five Year Plan and instead of pausing and carefully, you know, planning, I slapped stuff down to achieve an arbitrary goal. GunnerJ posted:a little too on the nose -- So I'm going to start over! I still really enjoy doing the LP. I swore I wouldn't do exactly this, but hey, its how I frequently play city builders and unfortunately you're along for my weird-brained ride. I'm going to use the same map. I like it a lot - the resources are scarce enough that it makes you really put some thought into getting to them, but it's not overly punishing like a few 'hardmode' maps. (For anyone playing themselves: It is a lot more sparse than vanilla, so if you're very new this map might be very difficult.) It's updated for the new patch, so I don't have to cheat in bauxite. It has some old cities/villages without having a ton of them, so I don't feel overwhelmed starting out, and this time I'm going to sustain the old cities and villages longer - perhaps even small parts of them indefinitely as an 'old town.' It's got a lot of flat-ish terrain and places where I can easily level an area for a development without being "gamey superflat" and not having nice mountains and stuff. (I'd like them even bigger, but I'll make due.) Other maps might catch up and update, but for now, I'm happy to stick with this. A lot of the workshop maps really suck. I downloaded way more cosmetic mods. I am going to hate myself but I know its what I want to do, I just have to be patient. I've got fences, posters, road markings, road barriers, the lot. Just playing to plop is boring, eventually. I'm going to think more regionally. I started this way, then immediately centralized everything around my railhub and that quarter of the map. This time I'm going to plan, actively and from day 0, to try and use as much of the map as possible. I'm sure there will still absolutely be a much heavier focus in that same region (it's where the 3 starter old cities are) but I don't want to feel limited because I'm too lazy to build into new areas. I'm going to pause, plan, and plan some more. I mentioned I started out this way with this save, and it was great, but then I got hasty. I just need to keep this in mind and act on it. I'm gonna make stuff look actually nice. I might not be able to design something quite as nice as Pretty rad dad pad's microdistrict, but I know if I have patience I can get close, or at least get something I like that looks a lot better than the cities and industries of my first LP save. I'm going to be better at trains. Not only is Veloxyll working on a guide, I dug a little bit through the steam guides and experimented on a sandbox map myself to learn better the logic of things. This will go a long way toward keeping the rail system tidy, which also helps the cosmetic appearance of things linked by rail. -- So stay tuned. I am already deep into "paused on March 19th, 1960 and drawing things on the map" phase, so I'll do an initial update Soon(tm). I'll even share some of my harebrained planning 'documents' that I'm making to help aid me remember "here's what you planned, rear end in a top hat."
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 22:12
|
|
|
quote:I'm not sure this would be high on my list, but planes are fast enough that if we find some remote industry that needs manpower, we can make them a tiny strip and land some AN-2's out there I suspect it would be cheaper to just expand the housing nearby, unless it's a blighted hellscape industrial area you have Very Far Away. quote:Tourists pay for everything in your republic. They pay to use transit, they pay to stay in the hotel, they pay for attractions and goods. And tourists pay a lot of money. I ran with tourists in only those two hotels (roughly 200 tourists at a time), a rating sub 2.5 stars, and tourism was fit to outpace my yearly exports. Granted, I am not exporting tons of stuff, but I was still bringing in several million a year (presuming I didn't eat absolutely oodles of steel that could otherwise be used for mechanical parts.) After a few months my tourists were close to a million rubles spent, and that was starting from the first plane bringing only 10 of those guys into the country. They aren't exceptionally expense to maintain, it seems, as they have the same requirements as citizens, more or less - Just the workers for the hotels. Maybe a downside is that if you don't give them enough to do early on you can tank your rating and they'll stop showing up? Honestly, I could see them becoming the new "meta" for early cash, replacing the petrostate. Maybe that's naive and maybe I only made oodles because of where I was in the game already, but it would be very funny to support communism on the back of an amusement park.  I'm going to have to try that, actually. It would be a phenomenal way to roll with the existing cities; plop down some amusements, put a bus into town, then let these decadent capitalist pigs and/or noble soviet holiday goers contribute to my initial costs. I assumed that tourists would just be gravy money and flavor, not a serious form of income by themselves!
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 22:36
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:I suspect it would be cheaper to just expand the housing nearby, unless it's a blighted hellscape industrial area you have Very Far Away. I'm sure - but flying in people in AN-2's sounds a lot cooler. And yes, like I said. Maybe I was just advanced enough in the game that they wanted to spend tons of money but it sure seemed like a cash cow. No idea if its as good in 1960. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Dec 22, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2020 22:37
|
|
|
After spending another 6 hours I made concrete and boards and tried to export them. Im on Very Easy.
Deadmeat5150 fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Dec 23, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 00:00
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:After spending another 6 hours I made concrete and boards and trued to export them. Im on Very Easy Ay! Progress! I hope you're having fun doing it. If anything gets you hung up definitely post here or Management games, I'd be glad to help you out as would plenty of people I'm sure. And while being that new, the steam guides are probably good help as is the ingame tips/help. A lot of the guides and in-game help are very basic and you can quickly find yourself going, "Now I figured that out, but how do I....?" but by then you'll know the basic nuts and bolts, hopefully.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 00:07
|
|
|
The construction industry is harder than most of the others imo. For one thing the way the gravel processing plant accepts input is weird. And it's tricky to lay out all the conveyors and factory connections you need to get to prefab panels and bricks.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 01:50
|
|
|
VostokProgram posted:The construction industry is harder than most of the others imo. For one thing the way the gravel processing plant accepts input is weird. And it's tricky to lay out all the conveyors and factory connections you need to get to prefab panels and bricks. This is absolutely true. Especially if you're of the mindset that "This all goes together, I'll build it together." This took me a long time to escape what's a pretty big trap for making way too complex of designs. One cement plant will pretty readily serve a whole host of concrete plants and a prefab plant and you can pretty easily move the cement by truck to those places. Sure, if you export a bunch of prefabs, or use an absolute ton of concrete and prefabs in a short period, they might outpace your cement truck deliveries, but in my experience unless you're both delivering crazy far away and really heavily leaning on the prefab/concrete production, any lack of supply is a fairly temporary blip. You can aid this by giving destinations a cement storage which will help smooth any big supply drains, usually. Gravel is a slightly different story because you needs tons of it for everything all the time, and while its abundant, its one of the more 'annoying' very low level commodities to produce (because trucks have to be involved, and it needs to go everywhere in bulk.) There's a host of ways you can handle this - Trains are the best, as usual, but trucks will even work. My main construction depot in my last save for Nowy Bratwice, the hub, and the steel mill were all fed gravel by a fleet of trucks at a distribution office. Granted, the gravel source wasn't far away, but I rarely had issues supplying a concrete plant, asphalt plant, and general gravel needs at that depot that way. But ultimately if you do decide to keep it all together and try to link it via conveyors, maybe taking the cement by truck will avoid really nasty crossing dry bulk and aggregate conveyors everywhere. You also don't have to try to tuck everything super close together - there really isn't a limit on how far you can make a conveyor run - but the tradeoff is that conveyors are expensive in steel and mechanical parts, which are essentially the most expensive construction items if you consider how much you use of them. You'll notice in my last save, my coal and construction areas were pretty separate - I just conveyor'ed coal down a long road between them. Also, check out my mod pack (in the op) and even if you want to stay vanilla to learn things, I highly recommend grabbing the "roadside conveyors" mod. Vanilla offers you exactly one conveyor engine which does not pass traffic and has an awful layout. My conveyor systems were trash before that mod. It just adds some new towers to help you connect things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 02:22
|
|
|
My method is to situate your gravel plant as close to the quarry (you may only need one in fact!) as possible, make a road as directly as possible between them, then buy enough vehicles to make a continuous chain of rock trucks to the plant. The new super large truck is excellent for this, since the biggest constraint is the time the trucks take to enter and exit the plant. Connect the plant to a large storage. Connect the storage to a truck loader, mark it as the pickup place for the local construction yard, then add whatever else (cement plant, etc). Conga line those trucks to localized small storages wherever they're needed. With how expensive and time / labor intensive making a new train line is, along with the cost of the train loading and unloading stations are, it's almost certainly cheaper to replicate this setup for any place far enough that a truck conga line won't serve you.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 02:57
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:My method is to situate your gravel plant as close to the quarry (you may only need one in fact!) as possible, make a road as directly as possible between them, then buy enough vehicles to make a continuous chain of rock trucks to the plant. The new super large truck is excellent for this, since the biggest constraint is the time the trucks take to enter and exit the plant. Connect the plant to a large storage. Connect the storage to a truck loader, mark it as the pickup place for the local construction yard, then add whatever else (cement plant, etc). Conga line those trucks to localized small storages wherever they're needed. I’ll second that this is absolutely the way and my quarry in that first save was overbuilt - and was even a downsize from previous quarries. I could foresee a time and situation when distant construction depots aren’t adequately fed by truck congas, but I doubt you’d have to worry about that until you’re going absolutely hog wild building things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 03:41
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:My method is to situate your gravel plant as close to the quarry (you may only need one in fact!) as possible, make a road as directly as possible between them, then buy enough vehicles to make a continuous chain of rock trucks to the plant. The new super large truck is excellent for this, since the biggest constraint is the time the trucks take to enter and exit the plant. Connect the plant to a large storage. Connect the storage to a truck loader, mark it as the pickup place for the local construction yard, then add whatever else (cement plant, etc). Conga line those trucks to localized small storages wherever they're needed. Also helpful for me was remembering to order the trucks to not depart until fully unloaded. Since gravel plants only store 10t of stone but the big trucks carry 25t (or the other good trucks carry 12t), if you have two trucks pull in at once under the default behavior, one truck will decide that since the plant is already maxed out from the other truck he'll just go back to the quarry...even though he's already fully loaded.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 03:58
|
|
|
Pornographic Memory posted:Also helpful for me was remembering to order the trucks to not depart until fully unloaded. Since gravel plants only store 10t of stone but the big trucks carry 25t (or the other good trucks carry 12t), if you have two trucks pull in at once under the default behavior, one truck will decide that since the plant is already maxed out from the other truck he'll just go back to the quarry...even though he's already fully loaded. Oh yeah, you absolutely want to tick the "wait until loaded / unloaded" boxes for conga lines. The only caveat is if you'd potentially block the input or output required. For example, having an oil tanker supply an asphalt plant with "wait until unloaded" would block dumpers from being loaded (thus allowing the tanker to move on) as well as the bus from arriving if you had it going directly to the building.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 04:22
|
|
|
You DON’T want to check that for loading at the quarry, mind you. They’ll always load to full without it checked, but when the excavator goes to refuel they’ll wait in the parking spot and block the lane as other trucks queue behind it and don’t let the excavator by. I always do give an extra stretch of road for trucks to queue up at the gravel processing, though, and make sure they unload fully. The new large dump trucks really help push it to a more full duty cycle with the 25t capacity. E: and I know it’s extra resources to build but for cement and asphalt factories it feels like a bad move to load them via truck directly - give them an oil tank or other connected storage as needed. Trucks will happy take their 0.3 tons of asphalt all the way to that distant road that needs 190tons and then happily truck all the way back and hope the plant is full this time. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Dec 23, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 04:41
|
|
|
Ive learned two one-way roads make for a decent highway. That I have no idea at all how to use a construction yard. And that I also have no idea how to make money. Like at all. I tried selling cars. It didnt work. That was with importing the bare minimum. Im going to try and set up a working factory complex and learn how to make a profit before I turn on such things as power or day/night cycle.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 05:07
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:Ive learned two one-way roads make for a decent highway. That I have no idea at all how to use a construction yard. And that I also have no idea how to make money. Like at all. I tried selling cars. It didnt work. That was with importing the bare minimum. Im going to try and set up a working factory complex and learn how to make a profit before I turn on such things as power or day/night cycle. Divided highways can be very useful! I think importantly I'd like to caution you about what they cost, but I'll get into that in detail below. Using construction yards is going to be crucial to really grasp the game. There are a few crucial vehicles, and others which are just very helpful. For a tier list:
So, once you've got your vehicles, you need to give the office sources. For workers, you want to point it at a bus stop, generally. This will automatically send the busses from your construction offices there to gather up people and automatically deliver them to valid worksites. Gravel needs to come from a building with gravel (preferably a truck aggregate loading,) asphalt from the asphalt plant, concrete from the concrete plant. Boards, prefabs, steel, and bricks all come from open storages. Warehouses can store mechanical and electrical components. Once these are selected, vehicles will automatically gather materials from those selected buildings. Crucially, though, they don't have any way to decide to import them if they're missing - that's on you. So say you point it to an empty open storage where steel would be, if you had any. Now any construction will just silently slow to stopped because the construction offices assigned to the job will say, "Well, there's no steel, I need steel. I'll go home and wait for steel." You can import steel to that storage (either by using the auto-purchase resources button or manually via grabbing it at the border) or you can make your own steel and deliver it to the storage. Once it has steel, and the construction office needs steel for a project, it'll send a truck to go grab some. The takeaway from this: If you think a construction office should be building something and it isn't, click on the building site and see what still needs to be delivered, then see if the construction office is pointing to a stocked source of it. Sometimes the trucks might be enroute, if its far away, so it may pay to check out your roads and see if they're in the process of heading there. Construction has several phases, but once fed with the appropriate vehicles, manpower, and resources, they'll finish construction automatically. (A side note too, which hopefully you found: Construction offices have a built in hardcoded range of 3k, but that starts at 1k. If a building project is outside of 3k, you'll have to manually assign it to the construction office through its interface - but this only works out to about 3.5k, at which point it cannot be reached and you'll need a new office close by.) Onto the bigger thing, making money. You're right not to turn on too much and get overwhelmed at first (though day/night, I think, is just purely visual, so that ones safe!) but I think you aught to approach the problem a little differently. Worry first about what you're losing money on. Use the economy and trade panel to identify what you're importing that's so expensive. There's a lot of variables here, so let me cover some common "poo poo, that's a lot of money" costs:
The way a lot of people make early money is exporting oil or fuel/bitumen, but even that strikes me as not really addressing the issue - Costs. You should be worried about moving toward sustaining on your own materials ASAP, and even if you focus on "making money," the money you make should feed that self-sustaining beast first. It's likely why you aren't making money on cars - assuming you meant "didn't make money" and not "didn't know how to make cars." (They're also not the easiest or most obvious thing to export correctly if you don't have a good handle on how exporting works.) Imagine one car early game: It requires significant steel, relatively significant mechanical components, and electrical components, fabric, and plastic in small amounts, and labor. The price of that car is based on the material value and some added labor value, plus (I assume) some markup. From what you're saying, I'm going to assume you aren't producing any of the materials involved on your own, perhaps even partially, and are automatically importing them. Your contribution that adds any value whatsoever to the final product is basically only twofold: The labor you put into the car, and some arbitrary, game-decided markup on the car. You have no control over this markup and I don't know if its universal or what - It doesn't matter much, because it's not massive. Doing the labor, a car might take, say, 100 workdays to produce. For reference, you buy 100 work days from a foreign source, that's 1000rubles, so we'll assume that as your labor cost for this example. Let's say this car takes 4000rubles worth of materials to produce. So assuming a R1000 labor cost and a R4000material cost, it costs you R5000 to make each car. Let's assume the game will let you export the new car for R8000. Great! That's a profit of R3000. Right? Not really. There's three things that kill that example. Firstly, I'm guessing the material cost is higher than my example and the markup less, so the margins are slimmer - but lets run with my example numbers further. I'm guessing the biggest one in your case is the delivery cost. You're asking for materials delivered for a large premium direct to the factory. It needs only small amounts of the most expensive bits, but you need to deliver steel and mechanical components in significant numbers. I don't have accurate numbers, but let's say this is only R1000. Now your margin is only R2000. Still OK, right? Eh, no. Remember that we aren't a company here, we aren't paying wages - We're building socialism. When you purchase foreign labor, you buy 100 workdays for R1000. That means that someone shows up for a workday and you give them R10 and they go home. That isn't what happens with your own laborers, though, because we aren't Ford or GM. You don't pay them for a days work and send them off to fend for themselves - you support their life, their children, their transport, their power, the food on their table, the heat in their homes, the cinema they visit. Your labor costs aren't just R1000 per car. If you are importing food for your people, now that becomes part of that labor cost per car, as does the premium on having food delivered. If you bought a fleet of buses that deliver those people to your factory, the price of those buses can be more or less figured into the unit cost of that car. Your people live in buildings that you made - did you assemble them yourself, or did you use foreign resources and labor? If you imported things, now imagine spreading that out per the unit cost of a car. I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. You're 'paying' for everything, and this isn't Tropico where I can go back and charge rent and for meals when my people work at my car factory. The easy way to fix this equation is to make your labor and materials 'free.' All of a sudden if you're producing steel and mechanical components, maybe now the unit material cost of a car is only R2000, even figuring in a delivery fee for what you aren't producing. Now you've got a full R6000 margin to absorb that extra overhead from labor and the other things you're importing. Maybe this makes the cars worth producing and exporting overall! But maybe, further, you need to reduce that labor cost. Start producing and distributing your own food - now that's 'free' in this equation. Maybe you build some buses first - now the buses to shuttle people around are 'free.' Now of course, this ends up taking more labor, which means you need more food, and more busses, and more power... And hopefully now you can see where the complexity comes from, and why I recommend getting as many pieces as independent as possible ASAP. I know it feels like a timer, watching your money go down - but 5 million Rubles is better spent zeroing your costs than expanding your costs to hopefully export a surplus. (This isn't totally true - you can do the math and figure out whats more profitable and it might be exporting certain things. Hint: It's fuel/bitumen/oil, maybe even tourism. But that's capitalist thought, comrade.) Also I'm sure someone will take issue with me calling those things 'free' - I get that they're not, but for the purposes of the game it's much easier to explain them as free than break into managerial accounting. E: Shoot. I said I would talk about highways under costs and then got distracted by socialism. So don't fall into the trap of overbuilding early. I still do this because I try to avoid future "but I might need to do this later" and its always very silly. Specifically for things like highways - It can cost a LOT of money to pave a highway if you either autobuy it or are still importing even just bitumen. Even fully sustained on your own, it can take a ton of time and vehicles to pave a road. Paved roads rock, but if you're using the early game T138's, you're spending oodles and oodles of time, money, and manpower better spent in developing your republic nice and early in exchange for 10km/h over just having gravel roads which are fairly quick and cheap to lay down. (A T138 can go 70km/h, gravel roads are limited to 60km/h.) It's much easier and cheaper to pave all your roads if you've got a fully self-sustained vehicle factory dumping out a new dump truck every few days to carry more asphalt, instead of waiting a year to build the factory because you wanted to pave the road. Some roads never need to be paved. Some can stay mud forever. Like I said, I'm super guilty of paving everything, but if you're conscious of it you can save a LOT of work here. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Dec 23, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 08:03
|
|
|
I never even thought about how much importing steel is costing me! Or how I can just important from the border and send it to a warehouse. When Im off work today Ill be playing around with it much more.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 17:16
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:I never even thought about how much importing steel is costing me! Or how I can just important from the border and send it to a warehouse. When Im off work today Ill be playing around with it much more. That’s absolutely what’s destroying any money you’re making, then! Yeah you can use either a truck line or distribution offices to send trucks to pick up steel and run it back to your nation. The steel will still be expensive as hell (it has a high unit cost) but you’ll at the very least save delivery costs. (Again, for those playing with fuel on you do have a fuel cost associated with it.) I would recommend using your imported steel to move toward your own steel mill and mines to feed it, but you can definitely try feeding it into other factories - I don’t know your republic’s specific economics so that might be enough to make your car factory push you into the green!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 17:23
|
|
|
Ive been restarting every time I want to test things out. So Im my fourth? Republic now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 17:26
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:I never even thought about how much importing steel is costing me! Or how I can just important from the border and send it to a warehouse. When Im off work today Ill be playing around with it much more. Look at your import / exports for the year, and gaze upon the "steel" figure that costs as much as everything else together. It's your "maybe if I have a year without building, I can return to budgetary stability" row.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 08:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 21:15 |
|
|
Part 1: The Best Laid Plains of Marx And Men We're going into a new save with the experience of having played the map once, which is extremely good info to have. We didn't use much of the map last save - really only about a quarter of it tucked down on the southwest quadrant - but at least in this region we know where resources are and in what amounts. One thing that's annoying about the game is that while you can probably swag it, there really isn't a good metric of how much ore you'll get from a mine that's not on a high percentage source and really only by opening the mine and throwing workers at it can you begin to understand if it's going to be enough to feed what you're doing. Generally, the only time that this really becomes an issue is coal for a well-manned steel mill. Regardless - we have a feeling for the distance between resource pockets and the old cities on the map, where areas will get very crowded because of narrow flat terrain, etc. Sure, this doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot until we start laying our own asphalt and steel, but its helpful information. While the intent to branch further out this time (and much earlier) - We're still going to start in this southwestern corner of the Republic. We will import our initial resources with rubles, and we're near to the Soviet border at both Somhasca and Hantsazino. The old cities are here, and even the villages (which we won't immediately raze this time) are mostly in the south half of the map. The exception is Klibruysk, which is close to the northern border. Let's look at the map again, before we've started laying down any major plans. Note that the 'towns' labelled on the outermost squares are actually border crossings, not towns of our republic.  Astute observers will find some weird angular roads already marring the landscape. The committee promised planning, and comrades, you'll get planning. We'll come back to that, though. Let's first visit our old cities and villages, again.  Gliwilystok, pre-1960.  Miergeni, pre-1960  Sejov, pre-1960  Brelov village, pre-1960  Klibruysk village, pre-1960  Dueling Bratwices, pre-1960. This is the Republic we're working with. Each town is at about half of its population capacity and, unlike other Republics, we will not be razing the villages and cities at the first opportunity. In fact, we've heard that tourists like to tour the old churches and appreciate the quaintness of religion. (There's a mod for a cathedral tour attraction. Neat!) Some effort will be made to preserve at least sections of the old cities, but more as an attraction than anything else. But that's for much later - first they'll need to have shops, electricity, heat, clinics - the works. We've been granted our tract of land from Moscow - sandwiched right in between the NATO and Soviet borders. We've been told to bring socialist utopia, yada yada. You know the drill. Who's in?  Alright. First things first - this Republic needs a name. Your benevolent central committee chairman is terrible at naming things, unsure of what level of gravitas to apply, as well as having to find something that fits in the theme of the region (Polish, but vaguely - I'll accept 'vaguely eastern European') and maybe references our perfect message boards, or something funny. A trifecta that's beyond any one man to truly comprehend and manage. The committee is encouraging you to submit suggestions. This will help us along instead of constantly referring to the region as "The Republic." Okay, onto new business. Let's talk planning. As mentioned, you may have noticed some laid roads on the provided map. What's going on there?  New roads outside of Gliwilystok, pre-1960  New roads between Bratwice and Sejov, pre-1960 So what's happening with these odd roads that don't seem to lead anywhere logical - stopping at the bank of rivers, curling near cities without really connecting them? Planning. We've sent the Republic's best planners and surveyors out with trucks and bulldozers to lay mud roads along what will become the main thoroughfares of our Republic. Other, less successful Republics hadn't taken this step - instead only laying out vaguely where major transit corridors might reside and then changing as they see fit. While our central committee does realize the need to be flexible, it is extremely useful to have an idea of where we might connect up the entire Republic. Our planners have provided the following map:  These are the planned major transit corridors for the Republic. The goal was to connect the borders, any population center, and provide reasonable access to every larger region of the Republic. There are - quite apparently - some areas which could logically be connected that are not included. For example - Traveling between Brelov and Klibruysk on these corridors is not direct. Those aren't oversights, but instead seen as 'secondary' - While a likely expansion, they are not seen as a high priority in our current state. It must also be said that these surveyed, dirt roads are not necessarily intended to be the final highways of the Republic - in many cases, the actual roads may follow along nearby terrain features or otherwise deviate somewhat. These dirt roads serve as readily visible guidelines of the surveying effort and remind our planners of the design of our infrastructure. One of our early goals (though not the first) will be to lay out and begin to pave the highways of the Republic. While we certainly believe rail transit is extremely valuable: the investment is high, and we believe other Republics have suffered by not mimicking the autobahns of Germany to jump-start their development. Rail transit, we believe, will likely follow along side these corridors as well, but planning for the rail network is not yet in progress. Still, given that the central planning committee is allotting extra land usage to these corridors, it would stand to reason they would also contain trunk rail lines. Our first focus, though, is to make sure that the entire Republic is accessible for development. Our planners have provided the following map:  This is a map that shows where planners suggest building a construction depot near the existing settlements of the region. The center of each crosshair is where the depot would be located, and the radius looks at, roughly, what we can expect the depot to cover. These first five circles represent depots within range of a settlement that could provide labor - though in the case of Brelov and Klibruysk, the populations are sparse enough that some expansion will be necessary. These depots will offer the full gamut of resources for construction, including asphalt and concrete plants. Notably, these depots are too far apart to be built solely by other depots - some amount of daisy chaining construction offices (or importing foreign labor and goods, in a pinch) will be required. As such, we may even leave some of those intermediate construction offices when convenient, though we do not expect to provide them with full resources - they will go to one of the main depots to source those. In the interest of being thorough, an additional map was provided to examine what the full construction depot layout for the Republic might look like. This was only thought of relative to full coverage for major construction depots - it doesn't consider other conflicting industries or cities that might logically be built in these areas. It is useful for us to keep in mind, but only as guidance - it isn't expected that other depots will be built exactly at those spots.  Let's talk goals. All of this is fine and dandy - but we need to set out to accomplish something. It's important that we don't let meeting accomplishments distract us from quality decision making, but we would be foolish as a committee to neglect setting out a plan. Without a plan, we're just following passing whims. We're better than that.
 Five Year Plan (April 1, 1960-April 1, 1965) for the Republic. There's quite a few things to do:Holy moly, that's way more than some other Republic's Five Year Plans, and now there's measurements? Good luck, everybody. Let's start breaking ground. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Dec 24, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 08:39
|
|