I have to manually buy every single vehicle? Why are there so many steps to setting up something as simple as a bus line? What the fuck do railway semaphores even do, and why at no point does the tutorial explain when to use which type? Why don't my airports come with places to park my planes, I have to buy them manually? Oh god there's voltage and wattage and different voltage wires and how do I know when to use which and make sure everything has the right amount of power the tutorial never explained that-
On one hand, I want to get into this game, but on the other, it seems like I'm going to constantly have my economy crash and fail and have to start over because I forgot the one obscure step in dozens to set up even the most basic of industries.
Pro tip: start on the easy mode so you start with tons of money. Don't worry about losing millions starting out, just blame it on the inefficiencies of central planning ;) also don't use realistic mode unless you are ready to make everything more complicated and take much longer.
Then just focus on getting one industry up and running, and import everything else from the outside until you have one export chain established. I recommend starting with crude oil since there is not many steps. Once you feel ready you can build a refinery and go from there. Construction materials or food would be a good second step.
Build worker housing last because once they arrive you have to feed them and school them and everything. You can build near the pre-built villages to make things a little easier because those houses don't require as many utilities to be livable.
Also remember that the game isn't really a city builder, it's more of a management sim. Getting a small mining village established takes plenty of work, so don't jump in and try recreate Moscow complete with metro system and international airport if you don't know how things work yet. I honestly still can't figure out how to get rail road signals to work unless it's just one track lol
I like to see it as a factorio style game. You are essentially building and managing a massive system of raw resources and converting them into usable outputs, then using those outputs.
It IS a city builder, but from a completely resource-based angle. And I kind of love it for that. But yes it is extremely complex.
Tutorials that take you through the process of creating a bunch of scenarios would help. A small village based off of one resource as you said, and a bunch of others.
it seems like I’m going to constantly have my economy crash and fail and have to start over because I forgot the one obscure step in dozens to set up even the most basic of industries
:soypoint-1: centralized planning roguelite:soypoint-2:
spoiler
I wish I knew how to play that game, but I struggle with normal-people city builders. The niche complicated one with the cool aesthetic has become a game that I admire from a distance (like Dwarf Fortress).
i used to know how to play it in the hardest mode but i'm so rusty i don't even know where to tell you to start. it's crazy rewarding but it's got a learning curve. look for tutorials outside the game for simple stuff.
As a side note, apparently the game was hit with a bullshit DMCA strike from a disgruntled fan which took it off Steam for now, so if you don't already own it you may not be able to get it for a while
Some of the other comments have good plans, but I thought I'd add some tips I learned the hard way.
- there is a difference between a direct factory connection and a factory connection with fork lifts. The direct ones must be very short, but have infinite capacity. The fork lifts can only carry a few tons per day.
- cable cars are awesome because they're cheap to build, don't use gas, and run continuously. However, they have low capacity. I think it's around 100 workers per day, or ~80 tons of aggregate.
- for intersections between train networks, make a traffic circle. This keeps the signalling pretty easy. Gotta make sure the segments are longer than the longest train or shit gets stalled.
- use a completely different rail system for your passenger and cargo trains (I guess this should be obvious to any Americans). Electric trains are good for passenger rail, but don't use them to get workers to the power plant.
- a small grocery store can feed about 2000 people before the lines start getting long. Because food is a priority, citizens will stand in bread lines all day instead of going to the gym if things are tight. Confusingly, this means that the first sign that you don't have enough store capacity is actually citizens being unhappy about missing recreation.
- there's no reason not to send most or all of your citizens to college. If you don't have any colleges, you eventually run out of school teachers, which means citizens can't get their basic education and you suddenly have no workers.
- only build large farms. ~16 big fields per farm (I think). Build 6 grain silos off the farm, connect in pairs to road cargo stations. Silos will be like 70% full after a full harvest. There are also weird metagame strategies where you use farm fields with no tractors and plant with workers.
- early game you usually have to rely on trucks, which have limited capacity. Good starting industries are those that can be profitable with low export tonnage. I like textiles, 1 clothing + 2 fabric per instance. Add on chemical factories for greater profit. Once you're making money, start working on a steel mill.
Oh I forgot a really useful one: how to prevent stores from ever running low on realistic mode. Connect the store to a road cargo station. For each commodity sold at the store, but the largest truck you can, and set a manual route from the warehouse to the cargo station. Then, check the "wait until loaded" button. This means the truck will sit there at the store full of bread or whatever until it's whole cargo has been sold, then it will immediately go get more, while the store still has it's entire inner stockpile to keep selling. Distribution centers are wonderful, but they don't scale for grocery stores in bigger cities.
there is a difference between a direct factory connection and a factory connection with fork lifts. The direct ones must be very short, but have infinite capacity. The fork lifts can only carry a few tons per day.
What. I've been doing forklifts for everything
Anyone know of where to get a copy of the game? The fitgirl version is 4 years old and indie games tend to have a lot of updates and change a lot over time.
I would also like to legally purchase this game. And will, as soon as I can. It sounds like Communist Factorio, and that scratches an itch in my autistic brain like NT folks cannot possibly fathom.
edit: Oh god damn it, now I'm playing Factorio again. See you in a month or two, comrades. :fidel-salute:
play satisfactory, the factorio developer has mush 4 brains
Given that it is an indie game, I wonder if I could strip the DRM and send it over or something.
W&R has a steep learning curve. You can switch certain parts of the game off while you're getting used to it, such as disabling energy/water management. Starting a playthrough requires a couple of hours of thinking/planning to get things set up and running, but once things start running I find the game moves at a steady pace while you steadily plan.
Getting the poop to flow is definitely one of the more annoying things in the game
Easy starting industry is tourism, you can build it in residential areas and its easy to expand as all you have to do is just build another building, build a residential area that has all the amenities, that is water, heat, sewers, electricity, kindergarden, primary school, grocery store, electronics store, entertainment, sport, hospital, then build a hotel nearby in a place that has good score (close to water or trees or in mountains) and some way for the tourists to get to the hotel, for example a railway to the border, then populate partially the residential area so that all the jobs necessery to keep the population happy are running and some of them are working in the hotel, this way you should already make a profit.
Wait while population increases and you gather capital, next industry you can build is either coal extraction or oil extraction, build it away from residential areas as they will create pollution which will decrease the life expectancy of your pops. Build a railway station for pops and one for the resource, use the railway to get the pops to the job and the resource to the border to export it, at the start export raw resource until you have the capital to build buildings that make use of that resource, then export products of those buildings.
If you dont have the capital to build some expansion there are also loans.
Don't be afraid to set everything to "easy" and only enable one thing at a time as you get a handle on them. All the oldheads like me have been playing since the game first hit steam basically got onboarded that way, because there were only a couple of features at launch and the game has slowly gotten more complex over time.
uh but yeah even that baseline level of difficulty requires a lot of fiddling. My advice is to start by putting a bunch of housing around a bus station, then service buildings around the housing, then having a single bus route to your industrial center where all your pollution-creating buildings and about half of your jobs are located. Do this with infinite money turned on and by importing electricity from the border, and once you can get this very basic city to function you can start adding complexity.
As others have said, take it slow, import power, use only single track single input railways for now.
Oil is by far the easiest way to start. If you can export oil consistently, you've got the room to screw around and learn.
