Send help for the love of God. I've killed thousands and had to restart my Republic so many times making mistakes that it feels like there should be easier ways to avoid. I'm playing realistic mode for reference.
As a general problem, I keep on failing to resist the temptation to build an ugly little 400x400 meter box cram packed with spaghetti walkways and utilities wherever they fit in order to min/max walking and infrastructure range. After 70 hours of the game my first city is actually surviving to the point of net gain and I'm trying to make the next jump. I've carefully prepared before allowing any growth beyond 3000 (I learned my lesson when everyone froze to death... And starved... And ran out of water... And died at 45 due to pollution...) but now I don't know what to do lmao. My people are happy, healthy, and well enough employed by a clothing industry with a food factory and distillery ready to go into production, but I hate trying to do anything in the city because it's so so so cramped. Do I try to make the shitbox less shit? Should I just build a new better city some ways off, or keep new development close to old development so I can still make good use of the infrastructure? Whatever my decision, I can't make a larger city work on buses and trucks alone. The fuel costs and traffic are a pain and I wish I could use all those cool trains or even just trolleys, but I can't figure out how to make it happen lmao. I have learned to save before trying a project only for it to fail miserably and kill everyone or bankrupt me when it completes in 6 months to a year, and I just had to revert because it turns out trolleys can't interact with fuel bus platforms, and my ENTIRE city depends on its platform, so that's not going anywhere.
Where is a quality source for guides on how to build industries, make rail work, and so on and so forth? I've been watching bballjo's videos as well as reading the wiki, and honestly, they're not so good. It's unironically been making me wish I was better at the game so that I could make the kinds of guides I wish I had right now; well scripted and on topic, edited well with pre-recorded clips to clearly show what's going on, and not just saying "this" or "here" or "there" or "that" and using specific names so people less familiar with the game don't lose the thread. Also, digestible. Each guide feels like it should only be 10-15 minutes MAXIMUM, with shorter being better. The longer 'guides' just become too much to absorb at once and harder to sort through to find the bit you actually need. Does anything like what I'm describing actually exist? Or is it all streamers style some guy in a gaming chair rambling more or less on topic for an hour?
Credit where credit is due, I was able to claw a surviving city together by pulling out the main lessons from jo and other ramblers content, but it's getting worse as I get to more complicated systems.
This is a long post that has become more complaining than I wanted it to be. I'm really enjoying the game and I want to progress out of the "early" game, but I don't know how to make train run good or scale up. Please send me good written or video sources for how to city good. Also, don't make me an urban planner after the revolution, at leastv not until I have a couple more hundred hours in this game lmao.
The oil pipeline over the border was a big investment, but it's easily paying off. I'm now getting an extra 60k a month in direct export profits and that was truly the wiggle room I needed. I could afford to import more foreign labor for construction projects and keep my factories running at full capacity even as I was expanding, and then I hit the maintenance bottle neck lol. Oops. I'd never made it far enough in the game to have that problem before. As for the chemical costs, running the fabric factory at 100% uses .5 tons of chemicals per day. Mine is running about as well as it can at this point in the game, so I'm spending just shy of 17k a month on chemicals all together.
But between the pipeline and industrial park I'm currently pulling in 180k-210k per month and I'm saving maybe 10k on food/alcohol and clothing internally, with a positive balance overall of 60-90k even with my COs fully underway (major import costs for all conduction related material, especially steel). With the industrial park staffed so well and still at 6% unemployment I needed just a few new jobs fast which is why I built the hotel. Just a few extra jobs and income with very little investment. I even started to feel flush so I got ahead of myself and built a helicopter construction office, only to realize they don't work unless every source is assigned lol. I thought I could just have them help deliver open storage and gravel at least without clogging the border/customs house any further, but nope, the fuckers won't fly unless they have a concrete and asphalt plant designated. So there's 300k rubles and a couple thousand workdays sunk that won't pay off for another 3 years 🥲. But in that is some good news - I do have enough cash on hand to make that kind of mistake. I still have 500k leftover after purchasing the helicopters, and they're just a delayed pay off now, not an absolute waste of money. It's really the opportunity cost of construction days I've lost more than anything.
I've used my starter pile of cash along with my trickle of hotel dollars to upgrade my DO trucks with the biggest money can buy, and that's reduced traffic a ton as well. My track builders are dutifully laying down track towards where I'm planning my refinery and gas power infrastructure and I've got a road crew building an asphalt highway from the other direction, so when the plant is up I can immediately get some speedy small busses headed out that way for max energy production too.
I guess I'm feeling alright at this point, still just bottle-necked on effectively scaling up construction. The next part of my city is planned well, I just can't actually build it with any kind of reasonable speed.
Edit: Oh! Imagine my surprise when the helicopters started flying open storage and gravel! It wouldn't let me assign projects at first so I assumed they wouldn't work, but they seem to have auto-picked up a few ongoing construction projects. Happy day.
Sounds like you're getting the hang of it!