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.
This is good advice that I made immediate use of. My core industry was Clothing at the start just because it was so easy to set up, but I couldn't run it at 100% efficiency without scaling up my workforce. I was ready to max out the whole thing and then start in on a food and alcohol factory attached to the same warehouse, but I 100% could not keep up with the crops import requirement on that with trucks alone. I suspected that might happen, so I had pre-planned a rail loading station next to the warehouse already. I'm now building rail where I think it ought to go for my next industries, but sorting out the details at the end remains a problem for tomorrow. For now I need to make the next population jump because those 5 factories fully employ my spare workforce not required for civil services and amenities. I did use my spare profits to build an oilfield and foreign pipeline, though, and that's a literal money spigot with zero workforce required. Huge boon. I'm going to try and parlay that into a gas power plant and chemical factory next. Other than crops, Chemicals are my most expensive import, so internalizing that production line will boost the profitability of the clothes factories considerably and eliminate the cost of water treatment republic wide, which is small, but not nothing. The export stream will be nice too as I then try to figure out what I want to take a bite out of next; probably oil refining. Once I have a refinery up and running I'll circle back around and consider the steel production chain as I grind towards the higher value exports. Oh and I've been incorporating tourism into my city expansion, so I'll just start trickling in some dollars so I can begin upgrading to superior vehicles too. The small hotel on the edge of my city would be a terrible place to visit, but for now, it's getting me 7k a month so I'll keep taking these rubes' cash lmao.
You may want to consider shutting down some of your small industries (hotels) and redirect the workers to something more profitable (refining or clothes). Farms are inexpensive to run but can lower the cost of running food/alcohol factories to the point they become profitable as neither industry on its own is particularly profitable. I did imported crops to supplement my own crop production for a food factory, but I did the math and it ended up being cheaper to import food, sell the crops, and run a mine instead.
It's really odd that you're importing that many chemicals. Chemical industries are not especially profitable afaik, and the infrastructure is pretty servere. I tend to avoid chemicals until my repiblic is already producing most of the required materials in house.
You should really get an industrialized farm set up if your map allows it. For your current stage in the game, I'd suggest you stick with only solid fertilizer. You wouldn't get much use out of that many crops and crops aren't worth much. Farming basically requires a rail network, so make sure that's planned for. A local farm also cuts down on transport costs (number of trucks & fuel) because it can be closer.
Make sure to not over diversify. Stick with 1-2 main export industries until you have the population/wealth to give you a buffer for unforseen circumstances. Most industries benefit from significant investment; top end industries need infrastructure to maximize their output and bottom industries need extremely large export bandwidth. Especially on realistic difficulty, I find giving yourself leeway and room to make mistakes is vital for alleviating the difficulty. The more extra storage facilities and cash you have on hand directly relates to your ability to make mistakes and experiment.
When possible, you should buy the best vehicles you can. They aren't that expensive but generally save money in the long run.
Related, but big workplaces tend to have less overhead than small ones because you can use bigger busses, need fewer power lines, and so on. That makes them ideal for early game when every single building is a significant cost.
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!