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That's definitely a thing, and it creates a vicious circle in regards to both assistive and oppositional AI--the computer must in turn be as incompetent as a distracted player in order to produce semiplausible results where player attention isn't, which in turn makes doing the Patton bullshit of jumping into a jeep and leading one (minimum exposed unit here) around give implausibly good results, which in turn encourages the player to leave nothing to their own vestigial AI, which in turn makes fixing up the barely-used player-subordinate AI low priority.
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Jul 13, 2022 23:15
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the bitcoin of weed posted:Honestly the high fantasy total conversion mod Anbennar is a lot more interesting than base game europa 4 at this point since they actually went really crazy with mission trees and wizard goblin bullshit. It makes a decent platform for that sort of thing and for whatever reason mission trees in vanilla are completely loving boring that never really got expanded on at all How's the balance on it, mission trees taken into account? Aimed for "yeah I paint the map, in 1550 as a Euro/Horde power or in 1750 as an African province" types, different enough through the heavy modification that the gameplay decisions are heterogonal, or forgiving but similar? Mandoric has issued a correction as of 08:12 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 08:09
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Frosted Flake posted:Has anyone tried the more contemporary Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic? I've put around 200 tracked hours into this, and probably twice as much into out-of-engine planning and discussing. When it actually clicks and you understand and engage with all the systems, it's extremely engaging; as the name implies the game part is essentially an autarkhy simulator, where the goal is to touch the "normal" city builder pay-cash-for-ploppable play as little as possible and instead build out with solely local labor and as many local materials as possible. (Right now there are some points early on where you can't do so, but the next patch is supposed to cover those last few "need a resource to extract more of that resource" blockers.) This does make it a bit slow and deliberate at points. The catch is that, in the fine tradition of high-quality eurojank, the systems are decently balanced and afford a lot of opportunity for improvement but you've got to figure them out and memorize them yourself. Much of the layout of your towns depends on chains of building going down in a particular order and with particular amounts of free space around them for later expansion; these orders can at least be mirrored but to discover that there's a "mirror building" key you have to pay close attention in the keybinds menu; storages are optional but near-vital and complicate layout further; some buildings push, some pull, and some do neither which is flagged nowhere in the UI; and a number of the services (education, crime, and loyalty in particular) are implemented in a way where they don't gate anything you can see in the UI but the penalties for ignoring them build exponentially and you can brick a start by putting them off a little too long. Some of the services just aren't touched on in the UI at all, orphans are apparently a thing that is tracked but I hadn't noticed the orphanage building tucked away in the ancillary parts of the schools category until my current run. All resource extractors are valid worksites, but some actually require labor and in others any human contribution is overshadowed by machines. The ratio math gets extremely don't-even-try; a logging camp working at full bore supplies, IIRC, 401 chemical plants, for example. And there are of course no general range overlays for anything, just an overlay on initial placement showing connections that will work; you've got to keep in mind, say, that some factories self-heat and will never show a red line to the heat exchanger, while others don't and if they aren't showing a red line on placement will tank their workers' health. The fairly deserved joke in the thread in Games is that they not only made a communism simulator, but for added veracity they made it unplayable without the tutelage of a vanguard party. And you definitely have to be able to, psychologically, deal with having slack in a way that the rest of the genre tries to optimize away. Workers prefer to, well, work, and even if you don't need and can't even store any more steel, you'd better be holding hardbass breakdance competitions in the break room every day so those 500 people don't sit at home resentfully unemployed and drinking. Conversely, you're going to need steel to build a lot of things, so even if you only have the people to put 50 to work building the full-sized steel mill is often better than trucking it in from the border. Commutes need to be short enough to deal with winter snow slowing traffic. Factories almost require added storages for their inputs so a single missed shift due to illness at the daycare doesn't result in a refinery worker staying home to watch the kids, resulting in a fuel shortage, resulting in a bus waiting at the gas station, resulting in the whole coal mine missing a shift, resulting in the district heating plant shutting down, resulting in the entire town freezing to death. So that 200 tracked hours is, to be fair, around 1 in 2019-2020, 5 in 2020-2021, and the remaining 194 in the past year after I put the extra discussing and planning in.  But once I stopped having to fight the game, it's quite rewarding, with the pace meaning there's always something to plan around or watch being done rather than the SCitis of eventually just slopping extra zones on and tweaking later.
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Aug 26, 2022 15:31
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Also, while we're on citybuilders, Songs of Syx is a recent standout as well. Fantasy rather than historical, and the loading quotes definitely imply that like Vicky the dev is a lolbertarian who set out trying to make something pedagogical from his direction and blundered his way into materialism, central planning, and an LTV trying to make the numbers square away, but it has the same focus on relying on locally-extracted resources as W&R, an additional focus that buildings require constant maintenance so you can never back too far off extraction once you've gotten something up, the meat of your interaction is planning logistics to reliably pull from internal-export warehouses near deposits to supply warehouses near puller workshops that are also near housing, and it lets you get extremely granular with construction: a bakery, say, isn't a building you place, it's a sheltered room with ovens, cooling racks, and coal storage. And pretty uniquely it uses the fantasy cliches to do things like "Sure, you want some orcs, they breed fast and they're great farmers! But they won't be happy living in squared-off urban grinds of stone, they want to live in rounded wood-framed yurts with trees around, or at least rounded stone towers near a park. Dwarves are great miners and can endure tough winters, but they'll straight-up plant an axe in your sheriff if you ask them to live in a roofed building with a curved wall rather than a cozy undermountain 3m×3m." Pryor on Fire posted:Workers & Resources is great, it's sort of Rimworldy in that there are a ton of ways to fail and collapse your city, but if you enjoy that style of game and figuring out all the systems it is pretty fun. Once you get to the point where you have an army of trucks rolling out to pave a runway or all the factories to manufacture your own cars you feel like you really accomplished something. E: Yes, yes, this is it! Your first domestically-produced tower crane, built under license from Czech or DDR plans but where every girder is domestic steel forged from domestic iron and coal, and every gear machined by domestic workers, rolls off the production line and is ready to be hauled to a construction office to start its career of lifting prefab panels into place. There it will do the hard work of 20 men and women who are now freed to pursue more intellectually engaging careers. If your reaction is "why did I spend the past 3 hours and ₽200k on plans for this when I could have just paid 30,000 of my ten million rubles, or even better just paid 50,000 of my ten million rubles to have Uncle Joe/Uncle Nicky instabuild that apartment block", W&R probably won't hit for you unless you're very into the Warsaw Pact urban aesthetic. If, on the other hand, you're relishing the idea that your 7th and beyond cranes cost only labor-time now that you've built up the productive forces, or you're already hearing in your heart an orchestra cue up at the ceremony to cut the ribbon and honor the most dedicated workers on the line, then it's a "wait it's dawn already? poo poo" banger. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 02:50 on Aug 27, 2022 |
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Aug 26, 2022 23:45
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started with a japan run, i think the focus on being an ~open-ended sim~ kinda hurts the game as i didn't gently caress up and thus i'm saddled with a shogun who refuses to participate in government but still has exclusive personal legitimacy so no one else can pass any laws, in 1907 got the confederate new york thing, got the repeated communist revolutions in nova scotia  , got anatolian egypt, italy and prussia both failedand now i have the papal states taking a swing at the nonchristian great power, a sort of last crusade (beating the us after it gets dismembered still counts for westernization.) gonna see Japanese Parma on the map when the war weariness ticks down enough--the spicy cheese for 1.0 is going to war against someone who has no boats and just tanking the war weariness penalty for a week, since loser gives up first demand even if you never fight and ai is on a strict timer. e: when i saddled , i mean it. can't ditch the bakufu without either a civil war, the generic liberalization event, or waiting until lategame for the landowners to go broke. don't get the civil war if the landowners just storm out of government and aren't in charge to be rebelled against, can't liberalize with 10% bills every ten years because the landowners still have all the clout, they themselves don't rebel because ??? they sat at 30% support 90% radicalism for a decade and still no dice. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 09:36 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 09:13
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 The world at the end of (the war at the end of) an era. Mistakes: Many. - Early dev whether or not the Shogun approves gets Japan off on an extremely strong midgame footing, but the Shogun never forcefully disapproves, just lets you work yourself into a soft failstate where they'll stomp out of government, preventing you from either passing reforms that further disempower them or pissing off the growing industrialist and samurai interests enough to kick off a historical Meiji Restoration. Around 40 years midgame were spent just cycling RGO/factory dev and waiting for the politics timer. - I never really managed to deal with the peasant economy or severe research constraints as a whole due to this; SoL is passable just due to PM changes keeping everyone fed but eh. - Around another 20 years was spent focused on bullying what was left of the US. Bullying for territory is extremely suboptimal even if it's good territory; you get one state unless you can bait them into actual war and still get your five-year truce timer and huge bad boy points (I think my BEST foreign relation, barring an incongruous protectorate in Parma I took on a lark as my wargoal in a Cut Down To Size play from the Two Sicilies and then they collapsed, is -1500.) - Because of the research constraints only allowing for one military path, and how fatal being behind in land tech is if you can't swarm, my navy's loving dire and my economy did tank hard when I attracted convoy raiding while waiting these out. - I didn't think to start spam-coring after going multiculturalism/separation of church and state, so this also meant regular rebellions to clean up after the main war. Successes: - Every other major except the Qing was buried by near-continuous civil conflict, so while I'm nominally the fourth GP--in a dead heat with the UK for 3rd--if I wanted to map paint I have a clear path through just continuing to shred Russia and Qing. - Cut Down to Size seems to just not work if you don't share a land border; everyone but Russia, I didn't even seriously mobilize, just was able to wait them out and WPed. - If you don't have major unprofitable sectors to subsidize, and starting from enforced autarkhy encourages this, forcing through Council Republic rapidly gets you to a 100% legitimacy 100% voteshare national unity government dominated by the unions. Systems  s:- Autocrats who leave government rather than kicking off a civil war, but still have autocratic legitimacy. - I don't mind the war system per se, but: -- Lots of the fate of all Kamchatka resting on 2000 dudes from two 400k armies meeting in some forest for the scheduled battle that month. But the AI definitely doesn't care about whatever limited supply system there is, and will flood their 400k in to pingpong a more reasonably sized force to death. -- Fronts get extremely weird around impassable/seas. Holding Okhotsk but not Kamchatka or Transbaikal, you cannot march east as it's considered part of the Transbaikal front; conversely, if fighting in Hokkaido the front gets split sometimes into west and east of Asahikawa, and woe unto you if your general gets reassigned to the east and needs to do a full redeploy to hold a thrust coming toward/through Sapporo. - And you will be fighting in Hokkaido if you're Japan, as you can't actually colonize it until after your reform process kicks in and the Euros will snag it and Sakhalin first. But you get a reclaim state claim on Sakhalin? But not northern Hokkaido? - Apparently can't garrison unruly islands against separatism; you get booted out and have to land again. - If you're naughty, everyone will want to cut you down to size. Even people on the other side of the world with no navy. - Conceding a Cut Down to Size war definitely isn't just returning all conquests within the prior 10 years like the tooltip says. Might be conquests from targets who you've conquered from in the prior 10 years, or past 10 years plus uncored, but I'd been keeping my plate spinning and lost literally everything when I tried it. - AI doesn't dev unusual resources well at all; if you want there to be oil or opium or even rubber in the world you basically have to conquer somewhere that has it and dev it up yourself. Opium kind of stands out because unless you start extremely early you have to be able to take either the British or the Qing. For my next run, I'm going to manually disassemble the US and then try and take one state up.
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Oct 27, 2022 20:25
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Lostconfused posted:I don't think Japan has a problem with a peasant economy? At least for the first 30 years or something that I've managed. Other end of the problem. I basically hit the modern RL issue where there's a decisive enough educated, engaged urban pop to support worldbeater industry--I'm reasonably sure I was the first to electrify!, and I hadn't really slowed down since then other than the entire world being too hosed to really reach endgame tech--but even in Edo half the pop is subsistence farmers and another third is unskilled labor. Ironically it's probably through my own success at early industrialization into large-scale goods production and keeping prices low, the peasantry is more than happy to upgrade to laborers for cheap and therefore I'm deep into production-increasing PMs but barely touching labor-reducing ones, and because the goods are cheap and the landowners and capitalists are completely defanged even laborers have comfortable lifestyles. It just doesn't help my terrible literacy rate or get rid of the journal entry about getting off the farm.
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Oct 27, 2022 21:55
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Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:how did you get to the end? you just play at speed 5 and never pause? maybe that's what im doing wrong. I got far ahead of my quota at work and poopsocked for a couple days. But also, yeah, pause basically only came out when the government, tech, or truce timers ended and it was time to make complex inputs; the baseline industrial stability from autarkhy otherwise allowed me to just mash "add" in the buildings tab when something started being too profitable.
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Oct 28, 2022 15:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:why are people saying there's autarky in Vic 3? I thought that was a Vic 2 thing? Not as a named game system, but I lack a better term for "full-stack internal RGOs and intermediate good production tuned to exactly what my modernized industry needs, while still maintaining the Isolationism trade policy". Once you're there buildings don't really take enough thought to justify pauses, just slam on the new PM and mash whatever added resources are demanded, or mash whatever's profitable and its inputs until it middles out somewhere in the low silver/high bronze to increase your SoL and engaged population. Prices don't need to be watched otherwise because there are no surprise export routes to take advantage of, and no way to rush them down with imports. And if you've been doing it long enough to self-sufficiently industrialize (and self-sufficiently build armies big enough to bite off some oil and rubber), even after exiting Isolation external trade tends to be a drop in the bucket.
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Oct 28, 2022 16:20
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Mans posted:Those are god awful borders all across the world. I'm especially proud of the 105th meridian being Candian, American, Canadian again, American again, Japanese, Mexican, American for a third time, Confederate, and finally Mexican again. A few years earlier and there would also have been 2x whatever the Montreal Commune is called interleaving with the first Canada. Still having trouble getting immediate US divestment into New England off the ground, there's just too much that isn't produced locally to not go into either goods death spiral or no bureaucracy no tax death spiral. Maybe hopping in a bloc would do it. But in the meantime I starting a game as Qing, and with the sure future of the entire world loathing me for annexing the Heavenly Kingdom anyway, I've taken a simple approach to dealing with Europeans: Agreeing in principle to the idea of a treaty port when they bring it up.  
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Oct 31, 2022 03:55
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Lostconfused posted:I guess the lesson here is that you really do need the triple entente. It doesn't tick under 0 if you've never occupied at least one province in each goal/at least one province in the capital state. You can see this by hovering the support number, which doesn't have an underline like pretty much every hoverable in the game, but it also lies and says they have to be simultaneously and continuously occupied to tick down at all (and for some goals it's not very clear what the goal is) when it's actually... I'd need to experiment more but either a question of flagging them all at least once or a check that only occurs when support is at 0, it's definitely kept dropping from below 0 after I've been kicked off a poorly-supported landing that made it go under to begin with. It's probably my biggest frustration with both the front system and the war system as a whole; if you have a long border with someone that isn't broken up at all (becomes really obvious with the Russian/Manchurian line that's a single front from Tomsk east to the Pacific, but I'd imagine US/Mexico and Prussia/Austria have it as well) your generals will happily decide that even though you're in the war to take Vladivostok they'd rather dick around in south Tomsk/your goal is to solidify Tomsk that starts split and they'd rather march all the way up and then down Kamchatka. And once you crack war support you're basically guaranteed less than a year's wait to enforcing all demands, but if you don't crack it you basically get no demands, so it doesn't fulfill the intended "you only get what you can actually take"; it really should be a combo of ticking down overall support to capitulation if you actually hold 50%+ of provinces in all targets or the capital PLUS a ticking down of value of any given goal you hold 50%+ in, rather than the current setup where just having footholds in all of an offensive war and then immediately switching over to holding the front gets you everything you want.
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Nov 1, 2022 17:54
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So it turns out that if a major is in default it boosts their base desire for peace just enough to enforce one demand.  Five years of free cash to un-turbofuck all the things that are going wrong now that I'm out of the customs union.
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Nov 5, 2022 06:49
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Weembles posted:I don't know how it works or if the game takes it into account, but it looks like the game has a mechanic for local prices for commodities. Or at least the stub of one - every item has the exact same price everywhere in the games I've played. It's the infrastructure/market access mechanic. States can only ship (infrastructure demand / infrastructure use) of their produce to the greater market and must try to sell the remainder locally, almost always resulting in a lower price; in addition areas separated by sea must use convoy capacity to interact with the greater market. It just rarely comes up except as a malus to swat on new colonies, or if you're ocean-spanning but navally weak and end up in a war where your convoys are getting picked off.
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Nov 5, 2022 20:10
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Slavvy posted:"""'fun"'''" In any discussion about vidya, a medium so influenced by cross-Pacific cultural intercourse, it's important to recognize that 'fun' means 'poo poo' in Japanese.
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Nov 22, 2022 03:46
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As implemented, rail transit is always going to reign supreme, you have to produce wildly outsized amounts of Transportation just to keep up on infrastructure while every Automobile could have been an industrial or naval Engine. The complete disconnect other than map-painting players between "has rubber" and "has notable 15+ SoL pops" comes way after that in terms of blocking. Even if you're using automobile-centric military PMs, which are themselves obsoleted by aircraft almost immediately, there's no penalty for switching industrial PMs so no reason to manufacture them except in wartime. I guess maybe, maybe if you anticipate having an endgame GP military that's entirely armored and the amount of engines the tanks will need when you go to war is causing unsustainable losses to your motor works without the added income stream.
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Jan 8, 2023 02:29
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Lostconfused posted:As for the Taiping Rebellion, yeah, I have no idea what happened there. That's why I'm just complaining about it feeling broken lol. It was a no win situation for me because Britain joined the fight against me. Even though I managed to convince Russia and Germany to go to war on my side, they both capitulated half way through because of the new casualty exhaustion mechanics. But on the other hand it apparently did nothing to the other side. The thing with V3 warscore is that it drops like a rock, BUT, it's capped to never drop below "maybe considers peace on current lines" until you at some point control either some of every war goal (if the goals are conquest/colonial transfers) or some of their capital state. Usually it's extremely gameable in the player's favor if you have any sort of navy and ability to support a single competitive army, because the UK's happy to send a million heavily armed men to the Raj in 1850 to turbomurder 250k of your peasant conscripts, and the second a couple hundred of your regulars survive stepping off their boat into unguarded-because-there's-no-front-there loving Selsey they're on a quicker-than-it-takes-to-move-troops-back capitulation timer for anything the rules will let you demand even as they continue the slaughter. Taiping is such a ballbreaker because their goals are, IIRC, to pop off a couple of random extra states--could be Formosa if you're lucky, could be pocketed and unreinforceable Ili and Ngari behind 5,000 li of rebels if you're not--while your goal is annexation which means boots on the ground in their capital (which could well be Tianshan.) And if any of the Euros get involved, them just landing and opening a front in Beijing is enough to doom things immediately even if you root them out.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:sweet christ on a cracker, Workers & Resources does not gently caress around Gravel's definitely the big hump of the early game; I don't think there's anything else that "there is definitely logic to this but gently caress if I knew what it was until I sat there for a while" until rail signaling. Have to figure out vehicle scheduling and balancing for peak load until shortages are over into a transition to a flow model, don't strictly have to, but are definitely encouraged to, figure out storages, conveyors, road grades, building to heights, and mechanisms all at once, plus a bespoke version of resource prospecting relying on the actual terrain textures rather than minimap. A few things that make it easier in the future: - Deposit quality is directly linked to whether the 5m×5m space on the map has a rock texture. The map generator likes to place rock flats sometimes, and these are just as good--you can see them looking around, or try to place a farm on them and see how it avoids them. - Deposit quality isn't strictly speaking that important. You will always need a lot of gravel, but the one other abstraction besides "no commute home" is "non-construction machinery is drones" and a backhoe will match the loading time vs. pulling in/out time of even the biggest dump trucks at surprisingly low levels. - Because of this, strictly speaking, unless you're playing cosmonaut or with the recently-added vehicle maintenance option on, even if the quarrying area is up high in the hills you do not need to connect the quarrying area to your primary road network. If vehicles don't need to drive in on purchase/out on EOL, you will still need a fueling station and road depot for the dumpers/fuel truck to support operations, but you can pipe diesel up and conveyor the rock down, no need to further complicate things by getting workers up there. Even with those modes, you can build the jankiest possible dirt-and-plank-bridges path secure in the knowledge that it needs to be traversed every few months to years on no particular deadline rather than every day.
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Aug 22, 2023 17:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:How feasible is it as a goal to look at what you need to build the most basic residential building and pursue setting up industries to provision all the required materials I didn't find it very useful when learning; you're going to run pretty much the whole gamut of non-endgame raw materials the second you attempt to make anywhere livable. I found it a lot easier to focus on the resources end, why this tiny ersatz Yugoslavia has independence or a reason to develop at all. Find a good open space near a decently large customs post with access to a resource or good farmland, and focus on exploiting and exporting it to keep the coffers full, while learning how to balance the logistics of importing what you can't manufacture yet--when the time comes you'll be in a good position to set up a new town closer to another resource that can be combined with the one you have in one industry or another and "import" from it. In particular, now that you've figured out gravel, find yourself some coal (which you'll absolutely need to import anyway at first on all but the easiest options setups or all but the best starts anyway--half a year to get heating up before everyone dies of exposure) and while you haven't based your path on "the most basic residential building" in terms of the tiniest and cheapest-to-autobuild housing you have found your way to the inputs for the gravel/concrete/prefab panels trinity that's the bulk of materials for the Khruschyovkas that will be your bread and butter. The further anything is up the processing chain, typically the less inefficient it is to import or export. Your primary import cost unless you're playing with severely restricted cash is not the cost of the good, it is the cost of delivery in either time at the border, fuel, and the vehicles to handle it (if being done from your side) or the delivery cost calculated on pathing (for autobuy,) which means things like machine parts or electronics or even clothing are quite efficient to bring in as you don't need large quantities. Steel, sadly, is required for everything, at the merger of two separate multi-building resource-deposit-gated industrial chains, and takes a large amount of labor to turn out in quantity--it's going to be your single biggest blocker. It's worth noting, though, that water with a path to the map borders is the biggest and best customs post for bulky goods if you start with enough cash for a port and a boat or two, or on more restricted starts as soon as you can spare the extensive labor to build them yourself. Learn to use distribution offices. There are certain niche cases for setting routes, I'll admit--if demand is steady and you put effort into syncing the route length with consumption, you can specify i.e. a single 5t truck delivering in sequence to five corner stores that each can store 1t of groceries while a DO would make five point-to-point trips, and in the very early game for buildings that deal with no more resources than they have parking bays (say, bars) you can simply tell the truck to stay out back for the few weeks it'll take all those five tons of alcohol to be drunk. But this then takes the truck out of action, and requires you to manually tweak the logic every time you expand. On the other hand, a DO will look at any buildings it's assigned for any excess or deficit and shift things around in the background. Learn the tricks of your construction offices. The construction office setup the tutorial or basic experimentation leads you to is to place individual COs near where work is to be done to reduce travel time, but the way the game handles construction is as a set of two-phase steps: delivery and assembly. And assembly always consumes labor. Sometimes this is useful--people get antsy if they don't have a job, and standing around watching one dude shovel is a job. But more often it leads to bussing people who could be doing something useful out to the site in hopes that the steel which hasn't even been mined yet will show up today. It's best to have a minimum two, one with trucks to get the material on site and then a second with busses/cranes/the assorted paving stuff that you only assign when there's a solid buffer; as you get more into the game you can specialize it all the way down to excavation, framing, finishing, engineering, highway, and staffing. Even if you intend to use autobuild, don't be afraid to place something as if you're going to build it yourself. If autobuild is allowed in the difficulty rules, it can always be done at any time in either rubles or dollars, it's even prorated for how much prep you put in, but it can't be cancelled once started other than by cancelling the entire build. There's a tickbox on the bottom right when placing housing controlling whether it will automatically source immigrants. It is on by default. You don't want it on, especially learning when you might have forgotten something vital or mistimed things. When placing a building, existing or planned utilities will draw a line to it if it's in range as a consumer/placing utilities will draw lines to all existing or planned potential consumers. Know which utilities you toggled on in the game rules, and make sure they're all available. Or, to give a rough rundown of what I'd do on an unpopulated map: Find an area around 500m-1km from a customs post (and power connection if you've that turned on) with gravel access and, at the least, open fields or a resource. I think under the new hardest research rules you're not given a survey and have to build a university and research prospecting yourself, but if you're not jumping in the deep end it'll be a minimap view. Build or plan a connection to that, ending in a small grid. Near the middle, build or plan all utilities and amenities you have turned on, plus a bus stop or two. People will walk around 500m depending on road quality, most utilities have around a 300m radius from the local substation. Build or plan a couple of the cheaper large flats, making sure you have the blue dotted walkability lines to everything plus whatever (pretty obvious) lines for your utilities. Build or plan your gravel industry wherever it goes, and run a road to at least the processing plant. Asphalt plant, concrete plant, and (ideally) a cement production complex (or at least a cement silo) either on it or near an intersection leading to coal if you know you have convenient coal; probably a bypass around town leading here. Two COs on the inland side of town; two DOs, an open storage, a warehouse, and if importing coal an aggregate storage on the border side of town. Probably a tank for bitumen. A depot somewhere on the bypass. Set the open storage to take roughly equal amounts of the big four construction materials, planks, brick, steel, and prefab panels. Set the warehouse to take mostly food but with small amounts of clothes, electronics, machine parts, electrical parts, and alcohol. Have one DO set to to take all of these from the border to the storage/warehouse, and give it a mix of big open-hull and covered trucks. The other should be set to take the food/clothes/electronics/alcohol to the relevant shops, and have only small to midsized covered trucks. Oh, and a tanker for each to handle definitely bitumen for the asphalt, and fuel if you have it on. Give one CO an assortment of trucks, tell it to feed from the open storage/warehouse, and you'll probably want to untick the autoassign box in its interface eventually so do it now. Give the other only busses, and make sure it's assigned to nothing and sourcing labor from the customs post; you'll want to assign it manually to buildings as they get a good buffer of materials on hand. Do all of your planned industries, where possible other than small stores, feed from and output into a storage? If not, rework them to. It's the difference between a bad traffic day dinging happiness by 0.25% and a bad traffic day causing 90% casualty rates from hypothermia. Give the order to autobuild what you're autobuilding, and start with imported labor what you're building yourself. Only now unpause. Wait for it all to be done and for the various stocks and gauges to start filling up. Only now, bring in people. Once the people are in, stable, happy and healthy enough for your accounts to become your biggest worry, stop importing what you can produce (that is, tell the "import" DO to stop pulling aggregates from the border and start pulling them from the yard attached to your own plant, the materials CO to go to your own concrete and asphalt plants rather than the border, etc), and repeat the process toward your next resource using your own stocks rather than the customs post as the source. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 20:02 on Aug 22, 2023 |
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Aug 22, 2023 19:43
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If you don't have oil up, it's definitely better to just truck (or even when you're working with enough volume, train) in the bitumen, yeah. Asphalt and concrete are true fuckers in that they can't be stored at all, you either have a staffed plant when the foreman calls for it, or a truck goes out, loads the hundred kilos that was left in the pipes, and that's the load for the day. On the plus side, unless you're playing with the new-this-patch maintenance option on, they're only for building and asphalt in particular isn't needed in huge quantities other than passenger/pedestrian roads. I will say for oil (and for bauxite, though not for fuel or aluminum), the extraction is like gravel where you don't need to or even really want to send shifts. If you can get construction out to it, including Uncle Joe's or Uncle Sam's construction, it's often best to just build pipes and have it work automatically. The old standard start used to be having one of those two pulled up by pumpjacks or a backhoe on the opposite side of the map from where you were building, putting it on trains to the border for a couple hundred thousand a year, and using that cash to rebuy some at your actual city until you got around to pushing rail across the map. But more recently they've turned up the diminishing returns on exports/scaling over time on imports.
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Aug 23, 2023 07:25
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IIRC, the agent logic does, or did earlier in the year, something like: Spawns at its flat at the beginning of its shift. If it has a young child and detailed education is enabled in the game rules, sends them to kindergarten within walking distance. If this fails, despawn with an unemployment penalty to happiness. Looks for work not disallowed by the assignment logic at a walkable distance greater than 0. A worker-enabled bus/train/tram/ski lift reports infinite jobs available if any are available. Starts a five-hour timer, and walks to the work. If the work is work, despawn after 8 hours. If the work is a station, board the next vehicle, or despawn after one hour with no vehicle with an unemployment penalty to happiness. When the vehicle reaches the next station, rerun the work-search logic, and stay aboard if no work is available. (Note the nuance with 'walkable distance greater than 0'--workers will not transfer to another bus line at the same station. If you want workers to transfer between busses, there needs to be an up station and a down station within walking distance of each other.) If the five-hour timer expires, despawn immediately with an unemployment penalty to happiness. (This cracks me up to no end, my high school bus routing was this hosed 90-minute loop of back roads where the driver absolutely refused to let us get off at anything but our designated stop, and mine was the last around 500m away from the first, so I'm envisioning them doing the poo poo I did once my academic career was well and truly torched anyway and just peacing out through the emergency exit when we hit traffic.) Repeat until either the time limit or a worksite is reached. In any case, spawn again 8 hours after beginning of shift. Start an eight hour timer. Ignore the child. Select a need and path using the same logic, except with passenger rather than worker lines if needed, to a residential services building that offers it. Despawn satisfied when the need is fulfilled, or unsatisfied if the timer expires. (Some needs, like food or clothing, are always relevant and have severe health/happiness/loyalty maluses plus an enhanced chance of being rolled again/require a larger amount of goods next time if unfulfilled. Some, like alcohol or religion, are less punitive and also are cumulatively rolled less the less they're fulfilled; drinkers and faithful will be mad in the short term but also trend towards teetotal or nonbeliever.) Repeat the next day.
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Aug 23, 2023 15:46
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I'm not honestly sure, but I'd guess based on observed behavior and how I'd program it: People each have a preference for various things--most are shown when you click on them, some like food and clothing are not and we can presume that they always have 100% enthusiasm for "eating" and "not being naked" while religion and alcohol you can wean them off--and a capacity for (most of) those things. During leisure time, they draw down their stock of some of these things, and then fulfill their needs in an order weighted by preference vs. (stock:capacity). Correction, I think if they do fulfill a need during leisure hours they'll jump straight into trying for the next one until the eight-hour timer is up rather than despawning. When spawning for leisure cycle: If they own a radio and or/TV, continue processing, otherwise move on to normal leisure activities. Adjust preference for art, the Party, and education upward based on station's rating% * listener's enthusiasm% maybe * influence allocation% for each of these categories. I'd bet add say "1kg" * rating% * influence allocation% of art and education to their stocks. Adjust preference for sport and alcohol upward or downward based on station's rating% * listener's enthusiasm% maybe * influence allocation% for each of these categories. Note that these sliders start in the middle rather than at one end. Adjust preference for religion solely downward based on station's rating% * listener's enthusiasm% maybe * influence allocation% for each of these categories. When despawning for leisure cycle: Increase happiness (a preference) for each stock filled to a target number, scaled off the relative preference for each stock. Decrease happiness and loyalty for each stock not filled to a target number, scaled off the relative preference for each stock. Decrease preference for certain unfulfilled stocks that do not have a pegged preference? maybe just booze and preaching? Decrease loyalty by a smaller amount, regardless. You can't, unless it changed very recently, have religious programming, only antireligious. So no shipping them 1kg of god over the airwaves, just pulling their enthusiasm down. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 18:39 on Aug 23, 2023 |
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Aug 23, 2023 17:02
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That is the quick and easy way to automate its distribution. To elaborate for the thread, not every building that takes fuel really "needs" it; the wiki's wrong, if something can be driven to a gas station it usually will be if necessary. Basically, there's three tiers of "needs fuel" check: a soft one with no penalty at exactly 1/6 of capacity (the last tick on the gauge), a hard one at 0 that slows speed to a limp and disables the ability to work at a worksite for relevant vehicles, and an emergency one somewhere under 0 that stops the vehicle dead in the road blocking traffic until you engage with the hyper-funky flatbed towing. The first adds the nearest available fueling station (all dedicated ones plus its home if there is fuel there) to the first slot in the destination queue, so if on road it will finish its trip and then go gas up but if on a worksite it will see that it's successfully at the worksite and then immediately proceed down the list. If the first slot in the queue was already a valid fueling station, it pulls double duty. The second, IIRC, adds it as the zeroth slot--even on the road, gas ASAP without U-turning. (The "without U-turning" is how you can even hit the third without trying very hard; if a long-haul truck sets off on the highway at 17%...) It's of extremely niche usefulness to note that land vehicles do not actually "need" fuel and there is no bottom to the tank, only various degrees of refusing to move forward directly/at full speed/at all without a refuel on the horizon. If you're willing to turbomicro to save a couple of rubles you can have interstitial fueling stations off dirt roads that you simply designate until the out-of-fuel truck is almost there and then bulldoze once it can see the next one. So, roughly, you have to distribute to: Sea and air ports, including fire stations with smokejumpers. These simply won't depart without the fuel to roundtrip what they're doing. General fueling stations for road or rail. You really want to distribute to: Hospitals, a person's chance of death on any given tick exponentially rises as their health decreases, there is a low per-person but high overall chance every tick of taking a catastrophic loss of health, and it doesn't start ticking back up until they reach the actual hospital, so 30 game-minutes or so out of the way while they're bleeding out in the back of the ambulance is actually significant. Worksites or COs which have slow and awkward vehicles. Your excavator or bulldozer will depart the quarry or construction site and spend all day trundling back to town at 10-20"kph" (not actual KPH, it is in no way capable of crossing the map a dozen-plus times in a day-night cycle). "Pull" DOs in remote areas which do not yet have a fueling station, which otherwise will only remember to fuel up when they're in town if they hit at least the first check while already bound for it. (This also makes it better to pull than push, as "pushers" won't be assigned to the building and thus can't use it.) COs/technical servives in remote areas. You only need to if your fleet is stretched to its limits: Fire stations, if they flag outbound they will still go to the fire first and if they flag returning they will make a normal refuel trip during downtime as soon as they get home. Technical services and bus/open hull/covered COs/DOs in a built-up area, police, secret police. Police in-game are operativniki, not uchastkovi; they do not prevent crimes from occurring, simply hand a case to the courts once it has, and while there is a slight malus to case progress based on time between the crime and its investigation, the structure of the game is that you will not get them until there is already a big queue of past crimes built up and they are tuned to clear that. While I'm thinking about it, happiness and the semi-hidden affinity stats, criminality and loyalty. Happiness ticks up with fulfilled needs, down with unfulfilled needs, low loyalty, and with passing the scene of an unsolved crime. Happiness too low causes emigration, and birthrate and productivity at work scale with happiness. Loyalty ticks upward upward with propaganda broadcasts, with being allowed a personal vehicle, when passing a monument, with time in education with a loyal teacher or receiving broadcasts with loyal hosts, and on a very low level with consuming alcohol. It ticks downward over time. It can be seen on an average level by default, but can only be seen individually when someone's home has been visited by the secret police recently. Productivity also scales with loyalty. Criminality is generated randomly per-person, and ticks upward with low loyalty, with unemployment, and with with passing the scene of an unsolved crime (which of course the offender did while they were committing it.) It ticks down with time spent in prison. A person's likelihood to commit a crime on any given tick scales directly with criminality. So, roughly, from a blank slate you are headed to an eventual longterm collapse state through emigration because unhappiness because crime because (disloyalty because people need reminding what the Party has done for them) or (someone who randomly rolled high got away with it, why not me too). The crime side is very easy to handle once you get it off the ground; when police and courts actually exist, and once you break a potential cycle of them taking the oldest cases and their effort being wasted as they time out, things will settle down. This might require manually clearing the queue. The loyalty side is a little trickier, but not much. Theoretically, you're supposed to have full secret police coverage--schools and broadcasters can have a minimum loyalty set for workers, but anyone without an up-to-date file is considered fully, almost impossibly, loyal. However, there are also toggles for housing to only allow move-ins of particular loyalty or education levels. Any immigration to housing can be chosen from several sources, of which Soviet experts with a decently high initial loyalty is one. And housing (or transit stations in their function as pseudo-housing for another pass of the find-a-job routine) can be set to work at particular buildings. So you can construct smaller housing that is only assigned to work at schools and broadcasters, assign all other housing within walking distance not to work there, fill it with people that are known or at least very presumably loyal, and prioritize secret police once you get them on making sure that no one's there's acquired a grumble--if they have, move people in and out until they move out but not back in. Once all these positions are filled, attended, and above 35%ish, you will hit positive rather than negative feedback loop. skooma512 posted:I didn't know that the work commute is only one way and that you're not expected to bring them back. Going all in on it would take a major, major rethink of the game, given that steel mills are framed with steel, concrete plants are built on a concrete slab, and of course you need trucks to haul steel and mechanical components to the vehicle production line. But it is basically the idea of cosmonaut/realistic mode beyond getting off the ground; compare Polikarpov's million rubles of gravel alone imported to the ₽1.4m and $700k you get total. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 22:52 on Aug 23, 2023 |
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Aug 23, 2023 22:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:- is the simulation intelligent enough that if I had an construction office that only had dumpers assigned to it, and a second CO that only had buses assigned to it, that it would still complete construction projects properly, as long as both COs were assigned to the same project? In order: - No(t really). Once assigned, a CO will send everything it's assigned to handle that the current phase demands as soon as it becomes available; labor is always demanded and will always be sent, even if the materials are not on site and the workers will do nothing, hence the recommendation to split staffing off and manually assign later/unassign when the next phase starts. - The individual pop does not have a fixed job, but, you can take more control that is directly available in that they do have a fixed residence and that residence can be assigned to only work particular buildings or travel from particular transit stations. This additionally has the nuance that while they will only go to the assigned buildings, they will eliminate full ones from the list. You can also micro degree-holders in, who will try to fill technical jobs before manual labor. It's very common to have a particular apartment building, say, set to go 70% to the heating plant and 30% to your central bus stop; of the first 10 people leaving a shift, 7 will go to the plant (its max capacity) and 3 will go to the bus stop, then of the remaining 90 all 90 will see the plant is full and go to the bus stop. I don't believe there is a view for unfilled jobs, but unfilled jobs are not considered a problem by the simulation; a 500-worker steel mill simply turns out 50% of peak capacity with 250 workers, 10% with 50, and so on. If you want to try to micro it, you can simply place 500† pop worth of new housing in the residential areas that are either explicitly set to work there or that drain onto bus lines leading there, but it's best not to pursue perfect efficiency as then small hiccups can spiral into an unemployment problem--this is a game of learning to love slack. † See discussion of time scaling later. - Per https://steamcommunity.com/app/784150/discussions/5/3410929406913916326/#c3410929607715672322, 120kg/game year of food per game year per pop and 30kg of meat. (Historical musing, the two combine nicely close to the Japanese 石 of 180l, which was itself an estimate of how much rice stipend per year was required to supplement gardens.) They also require 4kg of clothing and alcohol. - Per the more recent ratio calculator at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oZT_cWQTIKWqJXQIemeFQIy2H57uZqSrbI3LS0OOsdU/edit#gid=925225702, you can expect around 60 tons/year/Ha, or 25 for a 0.4Ha small farm, 100 for a 1.6Ha medium, and 300 for a 4.8Ha large. - A tractor or harvester can handle about 16Ha per growing season, of which there is one per year; small/medium/large farms support 6, 12, or 30 vehicles, so since you need both vehicles can handle 48/96/240 Ha. The logic kind of works in a different order than how the questions were phrased, so to phrase it more simply: * Food is produced at a 5:11 ratio to crop input, so α = pop * 0.264. * Meat is produced at a 2:5 ratio from livestock, which in turn are produced at a 1:2 ratio from crops--all together, a 1:5 ratio of meat to crops. So β = pop * 0.15. * Clothing is produced at a 1:2 ratio from fabric, which is a 1:4 ratio from crops. So γ = 0.032. * Alcohol is produced at a 1:5 ratio directly from crops. So δ = 0.02. * Total needs consumption x is α + β + γ + δ, or pop * 0.466 if you're not importing any of these. * y tons crops a year for other industry, where y is the max consumption per workday shown * 365† * staffing% * (roughly) average of happiness% and loyalty%. * x + y / 60 = z, Ha of fields planted. * z / 8 = n, number of farm vehicle slots needed. † Again, see discussion of time scaling later. Land paths, and only land paths, can be upgraded additively in place: mud to anything higher, gravel to panel or to anything on the asphalt chain, asphalt to lit, trolley, or tram, lit to trolley or tram. Wood ties to concrete ties or electrified, concrete ties to electrified. Mud footpath to any other footpath, gravel footpath to any asphalt footpath, asphalt footpath to lit. In fact, when building any of the higher paths ex nihilo, each one is a construction phase. - This can be done by drawing the higher form over the existing lower. It will mostly be out of service during the construction, no switching it to one lane for the duration, but some vehicles already in transit when the order was given will plow straight through. Mud roads are free, instant, and if you have the space are often your bypass of choice. - Yes, a route is a series of "pathfind to x" orders called when leaving the previous stop and the display is just the currently optimum pathfind, hence the behavior of existing trips continuing through construction zones. - Yes, with the caveat that if you use loading/unloading stations (which speed up the load/unload as well) you can attach both the new and old to it and swap over cleanly--sometimes even the new and old to each other as well and not have to truck between them. - Almost-yes. If you started on coal/steel in the north and oil is in the south, it would take game years to get a full rail connection up, but you can quite easily cash-build an export operation without them connected. And in fact on many maps there are preexisting old towns, populated or abandoned. However, you must be careful with empty "failed"/unserved development, as people may try to move into it if they are dissatisfied with their current digs, and you will be stuck with your current cash levels. - Not really. Each of the different time cycles in the game works off its own scaling; for example a day-night cycle is 60 seconds but also an 8-hour workday is nominally 60 seconds. (There are mods that try to tweak this, but ironically they're built around "average or experienced player should have done everything they will by calendar 1990" and thus go by doubling or quadrupling the day-night cycle but not tripling it.) Except a "workday" for a person is not 60 seconds, it is however long their commute takes plus 60 seconds and their output, time off after, and demands during their time off are then scaled based off this number. Neither land vehicles, aircraft, nor boats actually cover their listed speed, but a 15-knot boat can keep pace with a 50kph tram. What this does mean is that the "numbers the game shows you" are right without further math; a plant that supports 100 workers wants housing for 100 of them to live and will then work round-the-clock, you don't have to build for second and third shift. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 14:51 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 14:40
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Yes! (ish. Electricity, if enabled, and cost of labor are the other factors.) Note that prices charged will scale up the more of something you import, and prices offered will scale down the more you export. There is a very, very feasible initial plan in rushing an automotive plant and taking after actual Yugoslavia; Soviet border posts pay top dollar for NATO vehicle designs, so you can pull a Yugo or Polski Fiat. Stairmaster posted:how many customers can a single worker at a store handle? At once is displayed in the store's info pane. Total capacity during a shift is probably four or eight times that if everything lines up perfectly, but mostly just if you're getting lines in front on the regular and workers/goods are getting in it's time to expand--it's especially hard to make a rule because customers will sometimes buy in advance/do a big restock.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:46
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Holy poo poo, never mind what I've said about split COs, they finally actually fixed them sending workers to do nothing. Still a good idea to specialize because now the buses just sit idle while those slots could be filled with the truck that delivers what that phase needs, but that's a lot of micro that no longer needs to be done. E: Aaaaand it's still fiddly around phase borders, too. Or around jumping the gun and flooding the site the second the first load gets delivered. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 19:15 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 19:01
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Per Steam timer, I'm now around 20 hours counting reloads to scrap bad plans into the save I started when it came up in the thread. Late in tomorrow's play session, I should be able to finally invite my first citizens. Realistic mode owns once you know what you're getting into.
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Aug 25, 2023 22:19
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Any pointers on vehicle repair? I've been able to limp along by microing things to a depot next to my garage, and I should have more leeway in the future because it's not a 6x bulk buy all rusting out at the same time anymore, but I'd like to get them smoothly reporting in at around 70%.
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Aug 26, 2023 23:32
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Rail office takes engines and cars, and builds its own train for the task. You can set max length so it doesn't attempt 1km monsters. Its weakness is that, like all dos, it's point to point--you can't ie make a heavy rail ring where you do just fill 1mt of coal on a looooong train and have it unload at all stations, it will carry one station's request, come home, carry next, ~. Not a huge problem until very late though. Border posts are primarily capped by the simulation only allowing one vehicle in motion per parking lot at a time. You can place more with the right mods, but in vanilla the solution is rail hookups where only one train can move in/out at a time but it can be arbitrarily large and mixed, possibly transitioning into sea where each vehicle simply disappears from the map/the cargo and cash numbers get updated when it reaches the border. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 06:13 on Sep 14, 2023 |
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Sep 14, 2023 06:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:I spent all day yesterday setting up uranium ore mining and uranium oxide export with realistic building, and I rewarded the workers by having them build a Palace of Communism for themselves to enjoy W&R accurately simulates both western technological egotism and late DDR/RSFSR "but muh Levis!" import fetishism, so you want to do the opposite--get a production license for the definitely not a Beetle personal car and then ship then en masse east. At a bare 1970 start to check, though prices are of course slightly randomized per save: Even the Tatra T613, a legit luxury sportscar competing with the Corvette with a body designed by a coachbuilder that usually worked for Ferrari and Maserati, exports to WP for ₽1,972 and NATO for only $547. Production time 174 working days--2.1t steel, 68kg plastic, 14kg fabric, 660kg mechanical parts, 80kg electronic components. Meanwhile the Beetle ("Beat 1200" in game) exports to WP for ₽2,285 and NATO for $1,294. Production time 47 workdays--materials 810kg steel, 30kg plastic, 14kg fabric, 200kg mechanical parts, 25kg electronic components. Export values of the raw materials are steel, ₽312.44/$366.87--plastic, ₽552.48/$676.09--fabric, ₽310.92/$407.06--mechanical parts, ₽547.23/$654.37--electronic components, ₽1,080.48/$1,364.99. So total materials opportunity cost of T613, ₽1,145.65, value add per working day ₽4.75; value of exporting 2.1t of steel west alone is $770.43, $223.43 higher than finished vehicle. Beetle cost is ₽410.46, value add per working day ₽39.88--$488.13, value add per working day $17.15, so viable for building dollar current account as well.
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Sep 15, 2023 14:37
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Chain (at least used to) work only if there's a walk involved. Agents will see other stations with routes leading to worksites as worksites and path there, but will not see the station they're currently at as one.
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Sep 15, 2023 20:37
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It's reached Paradox par, is about the best way to put it. All the systems but one (puppets, who you still can't tell "bro I conquered Arabia for oil, start building pumpjacks instead of art academies") do the things they claim to do in ways that don't break down until you think about them, from a basis that feels about right to pop-history. Flaws are that the political sim hasn't decided and probably never will whether you're choosing a cabinet or a legislature, the economic cycle of the game boils down to either clicking every minute to build new tooling workshops to support the lumber camps and iron mines that you built to support the last batch of tooling workshops if you're a big country or just queueing to pop/slots cap and watching the century go by if you're a small one, and the military side is based entirely on war weariness and nothing lasts more than a year or so after the initial stalemate is broken. E: Also, the military side only works with goals articulated before war breaks out, about matters restricted into a neatly-fenced bidding system. V3 World War 1 really is over by Christmas '14, based entirely on whether the Entente or Central Powers control Serbia, with the result being Serbia either does or does not stay a puppet; it's technically possible to Versailles an opponent but only if it's demanded from the very beginning and it only can be demanded if the target enters the prewar bidding minigame with a level of bad boy points only achievable by a successfully map-painting human. And of course politics and military don't interact; the most jingoist or fascist politicians will demand is a standing army and security force, they'll never so much as give a Convene Estates mission to take a province, and ardent pacifists will sit at max approval forever as you conquer the world as long as you only use conscripts and ban the use of regulars or colonists. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 21:32 on Nov 15, 2023 |
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Nov 15, 2023 21:13
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John Charity Spring posted:you've seen the light of Workers & Resources and can never go back Doubly so because a lot of the pitch for C:S2 was essentially "what if a model like W&R, but with only liberal levers available to the player". It's ended up a far worse launch than say V3 as a comparison, a failure on all levels. - Technically it's an absolute mess. My computer's aging, sure, but it's still just about average on Steam survey with a 1060 and a Ryzen 2600. This gets me about 10fps and 5-10 second simulation ticks on fast at minecraft settings. I'm not a building-by-building plop exactly the model you want city painter fan, so I don't really care about most modding until it hits a mature enough stage that I can get entire theme packs, but modding was delayed from "it's all ready, we just have to turn on the backend we made to be compatible with console and gamepass" to "uh, 2024 probably"--and this also includes custom maps, while the included ones are pretty drat boring. - To the extent the model works, well, it shouldn't be surprising that the levers involved are almost useless. This is a game in which how many gas stations spawn governs how enthusiastically your commercial districts as a whole grow, and also a game in which your commercial districts doing well tend to replace low-value buildings like gas stations with higher-value shops that then demand more gas stations; I'm taking my test run very slow and I've had multiple distinct phases of C refuses to build -> have to zone several km-plus-long strips as low density C -> they all immediately fill with gas stations -> wages go through the roof because of lack of labor -> rents go through the roof because of high wages -> R refuses to build at more than a trickle because immigrants apparently only look at rent instead of rent minus expected wage. Can't even kindle things with public housing, you get to place about ten public housing buildings total and the rest the best you can do is subsidize existing residents' rents (which they don't need, because again the rents are so high to begin with because everyone's loaded.) You can define depots and cargo rail/shipping, but the AI just tries to average all stockpiles with averaged-out mixed loads; it doesn't matter if your commercial district is near the harbor and your industrial district is clustered around mines, that port-main freight depot- secondary freight depot line will happily haul all the food that comes in by ship up into the mountains for commercial trucks to go carry back downtown, and all the ore dug up downtown for industrial trucks to come haul back to where it was unearthed. That's when it isn't taking things in by ship to immediately send out by land, an interaction which is almost a pure negative to you because the financial workings of transport are abstracted down to "a port or depot creates around 100 decent jobs paid direct from the city budget" and "a port or depot is a node other than edge-of-map from which buildings can import or export"--no duties, no tariffs, no added C or I demand for the needs of the crews, just a way to redirect traffic. And while you can have some level of influence on what develops by directly permitting extractive industries on designated parcels of land, the numbers just aren't there to be more than a drop in the bucket of even a county seat-scale city, nor is there any pricing model--a mine is, again, just an extra node from which industry can access iron at maybe a shorter drive. Now, of course, we're posting in C-SPAM, we know liberal levers are pretty drat useless, but these are things the A-Train was getting right enough to be engaging in the 1980s. - But also the models just don't work. Again, there's something supposed to be a pricing model, but it's not in yet. Mail collection and distribution is modeled and is in fact one of the major happiness-effecters, mail sorting is heisenbugged, so eventually post offices just get full and you have to build new ones. Traffic flow control is treated as a suggestion by cims; if the only way to drive somewhere is down a bus lane or so on that bus lane will just fill with private cars anyway, and if they want to make forbidden turns they'll do it. Police patrol on a realistic level at realistic speeds, which can gently caress traffic that's supposed to be scaled down to match the time compression; however, they will happily drive directly by crimes in progress, which are only handled by a separate dispatch. Every child, an age bracket representing 0-14, is assigned the job of attending elementary school every day, while only a ratio of teens, 15-18, attend high school; at 200,000 population you will need 30 huge-rear end (like, 125x50m, this is the only option, there is technically a choice between small and large but large just replaces part of the landscaping with more classrooms) elementary schools and two high schools. And because everything outside your territory is just a blind and random traffic emitter/accepter, doing something like putting your industry near the downwind border and having a street out to it for commuters while it's "supposed" to truck in imports from the border just results in several hundred cars a day trying to path from your initial highway connection to that new outlet. Another big pitch for the game, tbh, was that you start with even less land than 1 but can eventually grow to far more, and putting industry downwind really underscores why this is a problem; you do need some initial industry, and it ends up having to be right on top of residential in a way that means either constant bulldoze-and-redevelop cycles or getting to use only about half the map for residential. Extractive industries being tied to resource patches just make this even more restricting. And even city finances are essentially meaningless; losses are papered over with matching government subsidies, that just increase as you build even more expensive poo poo, while you can be sitting on literal billions and still be charged credit card levels of interest on a $5m bond issue. Oh, and the vaunted mixed-use support turns out to just be residential buildings that also provide certain flavors of C. Not all flavors; that odd fixation on gas stations means that an all-mixed neighborhood doesn't work. Certainly not any flavor of I or office, which have to be placed separately. Nor is there any distinction in how polluting I is, which on the one hand does make it plausible to plop just a couple in a residential block and have them fall under the threshold for pollution but on the other hand means those are as likely to spawn as oil refineries as furniture workshops or commercial kitchens.
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Dec 2, 2023 23:49
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Lostconfused posted:Migrations laws have existed in the game since launch and they prevent oppressed pops from moving anywhere. The migration laws really need some kind of fiddling, but I don't think they're going to do it--recent patches have also moved Qing like Japan to Closed Borders apparently mostly to shut off state-to-state migration before you win domestic politics. That said, StashAugustine posted:Yeah I think the biggest issue with the game is just that the AI is so incompetent that you can out compete it by just not being braindead. It also encourages autarky just because you can't actually rely on other people to produce the resources you need. Its also something that you can't put on a features list for an expansion, so idk if it'll ever really get working. They did kinda fix land trade being bizarrely better than sea trade, but I think travel costs are just something that has to be abstracted pretty hard
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Mar 19, 2024 05:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:The agitator system seems rather useless from a player perspective. It really feels like you should be able to recruit an agitator to have them advance sentiment in favor of specific parties or laws that you want. Yes, random agitators showing up to stir up support for their own pet causes can throw a spanner into the works as a form of emergent gameplay, but there's nothing to tug on from the other direction where you as the player get to weaponize this. You can, it's hidden in one of the tabs of the government UI. The thing is that the pool's anyone that has spawned elsewhere and been exiled, who's additionally an appropriate ethnicity (and religion if one's established) for your government.
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Apr 3, 2024 05:00
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Yeah, in terms of the actual gameplay while W&R isn't precisely a citybuilder it's more citybuilder+Factorio (that is, both conceptually and physically optimizing production chains and their supporting logistics) than anything else.Your domestic policy choices beyond which buildings you plop and which you don't are a few flat +healths or so on in the research tree, and your foreign policy is limited to managing import/export deals, that is, juggling two trade currencies such that you can always afford to buy from the better option if you need to buy.
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Apr 15, 2024 08:24
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The vibe I get is that whether they're doing ostalgie or ironic ostalgie isn't a settled question among the dev team, and that probably contributes to why the explicit political sim is limited to flavor text and having secret police but their sole job is to assign credit scores.
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Apr 15, 2024 21:43
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BearsBearsBears posted:That makes a lot of sense. What do the credit scores even do for the citizens? Basically, every citizen has a "loyalty" score that's a near-final near-multiplier on a lot of activities--highly loyal citizens are Stakhanovites, loyal radio broadcasters multiply the positive effect of broadcasts on listeners' loyalty, loyal or disloyal teachers straight-up pull their students to their level, when a want goes unsatisfied for long enough to trigger rolling to save vs. deciding to emigrate it heavily modifies the result of the roll. This value trends down over time, as the only things which raise it are education by a loyal teacher, broadcast by a loyal anchor, and a small tick when walking past monuments, while any need or want going ignored lowers it. There's probably also a background decay. Overall average loyalty is available from the beginning, as are warning popups that individual residential buildings are exceptionally disloyal, but individuals cannot be viewed nor does automated filtering of them (ie, if you want only loyal teachers so every schoolkid pops out at 50% or 60%) function ("unknown" is considered to ==100%.) Enter the secret police, who are flavored such that you have to build something suspiciously Lubyanka-looking for as their headquarters to drive around town placing bugs in each apartment and replacing them when discovered. That's the ironic half. The unironic half is that the net produce of their actions is just pinning the loyalty score, as a kind of vibes check or social credit score, to a citizen's sheet and letting builtin employment/apartment-moving filters work on them. You're not hauling the 10%s off to the basement of the secret police building, just not hiring them to teach elementary school, moving them into the flats by the aircraft plant that are most likely to path there for work, or in the very lategame putting them at the front of the list for a new Lada; the gameplay implementation is very much, in my impression, East Germany as it actually existed as a functioning society that's notably chiller on the surveillance-and-binning that we are in 2020s America, rather than as it existed in Hollywood and political emigré rants. So yeah, that's the tension and why I think there's a split.
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Apr 15, 2024 23:11
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