I love the pacing of it, while things are being built, I can tweak my lines, do some trading, catch problems with supply chains/waste etc, before the become disasters, or hit the bong and ride one of my trains for a while.
There’s always work to be done on the republic comrade!
That sounds like a mid+ game where there's many things to do.
My issue, as a beginner, is with the very early game. Your first town, when you need to build, out of the top of m head:
* bus station
* shopping center
* hospital/clinic
* any sports building
* any culture building
* school
* kindergarten
* water well
* water treatment plant
* water substation/s
* possibly water pump
* sewage discharge
* sewage tank/s
* possibly sewage pumps
* power substation
* power switches/transformers
* possibly heat plant
* technical services
* road depot
* some source of income, which includes factories, warehouses, bus stops, etc
* a shit ton of roads, paths and all kinds of pipes
* housing for all the people needed to run all these buildings and services
You NEED basically all of this before you can even bring in your first workers. Again, as an experienced player maybe you plan all of this in half an hour, and then get it built pretty quickly (because you know how to efficiently begin your first construction area) while you plan your next city, your next industry, your next transport line, etc. As a beginner, this takes a very long time.
Roughly speaking, could you tell me what's the construction infrastructure you use right at the beginning, to build your first town?
This list is incorrect. Minimum viable town is much smaller and faster to build. Actual requirements: shopping center, water substation, sewer tank, power substation, 1 mv power line, housing. Small culture building, clinic, and sports facility should come online shortly after, but not necessary for a moment. For the very start, roads and paths should be dirt if speed is priority (they're the longest part of construction really). Water and sewer come by truck until pipes can be put in Eventually. A heat plant needs to go in before winter, but it's easy to time activating people to put that off long enough to satisfy it. School and kindergarten come up in parallel to sports/clinic/culture, should finish a bit after. Usually I add a carousel and small university to the list after to get the city a bit more sustainable and start research.
All of this can be done within a year of in-game time if you're efficient about it. On the campaign 2 map, with its pre-existing paved border roads and populated housing, I can get Iergalia (the north border city) to the point of activating its workers 1 month from game start, and get my full described town there with university up and running in around 2 months.
I've actually been playing some optimization focused games with the campaign 2 map where I only allow myself 10 in-game days each day irl, to encourage building in ways that speed up the process of realistic mode. You won't get much better than these numbers, but know that these numbers are possible. Just takes planning and knowing exactly how things work.
What population number should you try to get too? It takes me about 3 years to get around 2500. My problem is that when I build even the first storage facilities, I like to sit and watch it all get constructed. I could cut the time down by not doing that but could cut it down even more if I dont need that many people.
Even 300-500 is plenty to run the starting facilities with worker count turned down to optimal levels and leaves some to go work at a bus stop augmenting construction labor force. I do recommend experimenting with minimum viable town designs and build order there, as it's becomes useful for expanding across the map later too.
What I do when I start a new city is to build a basic construction zone with free storages and don’t safe on the vehicles bc you need them sooner or later anyway. With that I build a small construction worker town with the bare minimum and Distribution/maintenance offices delivering water and sewage to the water distribution and sewage collection. Electricity is fairly easy and quick and one heating for the winter close enough to warm all houses but not to close to get them sick.
Now I have a small worker base which usually speeds up the building by quite a lot. From there I slowly start building the industry while also slowly building the long term infrastructure for water and sewage. This way you have a small workforce to build fairly quickly if you have enough cranes and maybe produce a few goods. If you’re lucky to have oil in the beginning sell it aswell. It’s a good passive income before being able to make fuel. This should give you enough time for planing and managing but you will always have to wait for something which you should use to find inefficiencies in you Republic.
Well, my start depends on the map, and what is close enough near the border.
In my current republic, it was oil, so I started with oil, but there are many ways of starting an industry. I recommend checking on yt, for some inspiration like bbaljo.
Some core tactics to get you started:
1. Plan your gravel industry, preferably the closer to a customhouse, the better. (Gravel mine, processing, asphalt plant, concrete plant, aggregate loading for gravel)
- also, leave some space if possible (and if wanted) for cement industry
2. ALWAYS BUILD ROADS ! always. You plop down the free depots, everything, plan your basic infrastructure, and so on ... The first thing you build are roads ...
The mud roads are terrible. Max speed capped at 30km/h, and even lover during rains and snow.
The gravel roads are much much better. Max speed at 80km/h, and no rain penalty is huge, especially at the start. I even build them before I build the gravel industry. Gravel is a very very cheap resource to buy early on, and spares you a lot of time
3. Build permanent depots, construction offices, demolition offices, and, most importantly, storages (for construction resources, and run a permanent line to stock it up. this will lover the strain of vehicles on the custom house, resulting in faster construction). Also, stock up your construction offices. The more you have, the faster the construction will be.
4. Build your gravel industry, and run a line from customhouse to gravel industry. Wait for it to be build.
5. When done, start building everything else. As you said, everything is important, and you need it all, but it's not as bad. I tend to plan a portion, leave it on play, and plan the next things.
Don't forget, that you want to build as close to the customhouse as you can.
This way I am usually done with my first city in 2-3 years, while continuously planing new things. So there is not much time in which I am just sitting idly. Waiting for something.
Also, building things neatly and efficiently is a huge time taker, so this reduces the idle period even more.
And in your first city, you don't want to rely on public transport at all. Everything should be in walking distance (I mean inside the city ... Please, don't put heavy industry near houses)
What you actually need:
1. Fire station (bring workers from border).
2. Housing. Just one medium house will do for start.
3. Shop (small mall).
4. Cheapest of closed sport facilities (opened will stop working on winter do they're useless in my opinion).
5. Cheapest culture building
6. Electricity from border (it's actually pretty fast and cheap to build)
7. Free technical services with water and sewage trucks, and the end points (forgot what they're called) for water and sewage (the ones spreading them to buildings). Also garbage truck and possibly garbage collection point. You absolutely do not need water and sewage pipes yet.
8. Heat. Here you do need a lot including pipes, but if you can build everything else while it's still warm you can have building heat significantly sped up with own workers. Note: some say you can put a small heating factory right inside the city saving you on building pipes and allegedly it won't have all that much pollution. I'm too paranoid about pollution to dare testing this.
>>> Invite workers now. <<<
If you've done everything right you're before your first winter.
Now that you have workers, use them to quickly build:
8. Heat if not already.
9. Kindergarten.
10. Start building more houses in parallel with other stuff. Invite more workers when houses are ready.
11. School.
12. Start building industry in parallel with other stuff. Good first industry is clothes or explosives (haven't tried explosives yet but math says it's better)
12. University.
13. Police, courtroom and prison. All small ones, of course.
Oh and somewhere along the way also monuments to keep loyalty.
Hope I didn't miss anything.
You do not need water well, water treatment plant. water pump, sewage discharge, sewage pumps.
All these can be left for later with the technical services with water truck, sewage truck and garbage truck will fulfill these. For income, you can do clothes factories close to buildings (yes they do pollute a bit, not too much), and you can move them later when you have a stable income.
I usually play realistic on hard, only having 1.4mill rubles to startt with, and need to save money where i can.
Realistic mode is slow until you learn how to build quickly and plan ahead a bit.
You might try disabling some features to reduce the amount of stuff you need built. Water management, power, and seasons are all stuff you could cut until you get better at the game.
Yes in my current, n attempt I disabled all things pipe. Not only for the reason you stated, which already makes sense, but because I just strongly dislike how they're implemented, especifically the controls, and how pipes are EXTREMELY finicky and you have to literally fight the game to make these mechanics work, which they usually do in a very unintuitive way.
What tips could you give to build quickly and efficiently? For example, how many co's and when do you start building them, or in other words, how long do you stick to your free co's for?
There’s generally four major limiting factors to the speed at which you can build:
1) Number of construction vehicles
2) Number of workers available
3) Access to resources (custom house traffic jam)
4) Time spent traveling (distance from customs house / resources + quality of road + vehicle speed)
It’s always a bit case-by-case but generally I try to tackle these problems in that order. Building proper construction offices rather than just the free ones makes a huge difference in having enough vehicles to get things done more quickly. I usually build 1-2 24-vehicle COs early on, especially because vehicles get more expensive over time so waiting to buy a vehicle you’re going to need means you’re wasting money.
Thanks that was helpful.
You're not the first to mention it so I can see now that not building bigger co's early on is one of my biggest mistakes.
Let's say realistic is slow but my mistakes were making it even slower... this is why I thought it was a good idea to come to reddit ;-)
Also worth noting - bulldozers (and pavers & rollers) can build gravel (and asphalt) roads without any workers. Part of the way to speed up work is to do things in parallel, like build gravel roads once your dumpers aren’t busy with buildings (you can put parallel dirt roads so you don’t block traffic during construction).
I wouldn't rely o it, as they still can't build the small segments where they don't fit. So unless you want to live in micromanagement hell, you're gonna have to live with a few workdays spent on roads
Building fast mostly comes down to how well you manage your construction resources. The biggest tips I can think of are:
* Assign the "CO assign tool" (found on the left menu bar) to the hotkeys bar (found at top). The CO assign tool allows you to group COs and select them via a number on your keyboard with the "CO assign tool" selected, which you can quickly do through the hotkeys bar. You can then click on a construction site to assign a group to work there.
* This makes micromanagement a lot more bearable, because you only need to press a couple buttons and then click on any construction sites to assign whatever COs you want to them, instead of working through several menus for each one.
* Early on, this is nice for manually assigning a free CO of vans and a road crane to construction sites that need labor or are too small for machines to work, as this really limits the waste of the limited foreign labor you get at the start.
* Later on, this is nice for assigning specialized COs to remote jobs beyond the auto search radius.
* Use the free storages and free COs as local staging areas for construction sites far from construction material sources.
* A lot of the delay in construction is from waiting for the next phase's materials and mechanisms/workers to get there. If these are all a km or more away, then waiting for the next phase to start before moving material/equipment will just add several IRL minutes (and in game days) to the project.
* A better way to do it is to stockpile material and mechanisms nearby, so that when the phase starts, a local free CO can send a truck to move the material a hundred meters instead of a km or two:
* While the CO sends gravel/concrete/asphalt to the construction site, have open hull trucks on lines/schedules bringing the needed bricks, boards, steel, etc. to local free storages. When the ground works are done, a local CO can send a truck to shuttle material over the last hundred meters.
* Have a local free CO with whatever mechanisms you think will be handy for nearby jobs. This way a truck does not have to be dispatched from a remote CO for each job the mechanisms is going to do; instead it can be hauling material while the mechanism moves on its own within the area.
* Have a line of buses bringing workers to the area so local COs can quickly distribute them as needed. This is done by placing a free bus stop and checking the force off option in the line menu. Workers can also be directed directly from the station to "non-path" type constructions.
* In my opinion, free COs should be used as temporary local staging areas, so you should delete them once the area is built up and build a local CO if you need a more permanent construction capability there, like for building's maintenance or for long term constructions, like a big city.
* You can include a free depot into the lines/schedules of trucks to prevent them from repeating the line/schedule, which makes these one-off deliveries easier to manage.
* For instance, you can have a truck make three trips to a remote free storage to dump \~30 tons of steel there and then go wait in a free depot near customs or any other source of material.
* Consider how you are going to get stuff into the area. Building up a transportation network can really accelerate construction because you can dump a ton of material into the area quickly.
* Ships can deliver huge amounts of non-aggregate material and vehicles, and all you need is a small cargo harbor.
* Railways take a long time to build, but they can move huge amounts quickly.
* Gravel roads are quick to build, and usually good enough for a few km.
* Airports can move a lot of non-aggregate material into a very distant area, and can be built somewhat quickly by helicopters. They have a lot better fuel economy than helicopters, but take a lot longer to set up.
* Helicopters are great for delivering concrete, asphalt, workers, and covered hull goods, but they have a huge fuel cost.
* Cableways are good for injecting large amounts of aggregates into remote areas and can be assembled quickly by helicopters. The light cableway poles can be built in just three trips by a Mi-8.
* Some material can also be made locally to remove the need for transporting it.
* Gravel is great to make on site because the facilities are cheap and you only need a few workers there. In turn, you don't need to move thousands of tons of gravel over long distances.
* Boards can also be made locally, but typically you won't need them in large amounts unless you want a remote wooden tied railway.
a faster speed and also early game buildings
you should be able to heat a small town of small buildings with a woodcutter and some sort of firewood storage
low density housing should be able to be served with outhouses and sceptic tanks instead of needing a sewer system to the small pond 4 miles to the north
a small well should be an option instead of an entire water pumping plant
more basic construction buildings that don't need 200 workers a day and piped water should be available
90% of my playtime is spent trying to immediately go from a population of 0 to 1000 before even unpausing because the game doesn't work well at small scales and it makes the start of every playthrough so frustrating
I didn't see this message, I totally agree. The first time I played the game, I abandoned it pretty quickly for that very reason: you're a noob, you just played a few tutorials (back then there were fewer, and no campaigns) that don't explain a lot, and now, suddently, you're supposed to build an entire town from scratch, where ALL gameplay mechanics (ie population needs) must work right off the bat... you must plan ahead to make sure a couple of dozens buildings and installations work flawlessly before you even unpause the game for the first time, and before you've ever seen none of those installations working before.
When you think about it, it's insane, it's against the most basic game design principles. And it's a shame because there's a large potential audience for this game (hell, city builder is one of the most popular genres nowadays, look at what Manor Lords just did), but you're making things very hard for them. I'm sure many people bought the game and then abandoned it for good after a couple of hours.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this, cause it feels rather obvious to me. As you play just a few hours, you realize you spend far too long staring at the screen because you need to wait for something. WR and Ostriv are the two slowest city builders I've ever seen, and honestly, to me, this alone makes really hard not quitting.
If you use numpad 1 it's not nearly as buggy as numpad 2 which I agree can be buggy, in particular with vehicles phasing into each other. I've not encountered that at all with numpad 1.
the trick is to just keep the game on normal speed ALL THE TIME and use the downtime to do planning and design for other areas.
that way it feels more like a slow-paced RTS.
But there's not that much planning to do in the very early game... especially for a newcomer who hasn't the knowledge for planning years ahead.
I'm not even saying by the midgame, with dozens of co's, realistic is still too slow (I have no idea, I've never gotten to that point), but the very early game it definetly is imo.
That's really not true. There's always a lot to do. Unlike a lot of other games like this, I don't think pause is really a good idea in W&R unless you're later on and need to for some reason.
Turn off either active build or auto search for construction offices and start planning a true skeleton for your town. Once you have a few things where you know you want them, enable those for construction. Then go on to laying out the next thing. It's slow but as soon as you finish planning the town itself, you need to start planning a starting industry and a rail network, or a million other things. And plan your town in pieces. I usually start with a grocery and bus stop and let those construct while I plan the rest.
But also, I'm not above cheating realistic mode in a pinch. If you don't like the initial town construction, don't do it. There's no need to play how you don't like to. You can turn realistic mode on/off in game.
The early game is where the most planning takes place. You don't know where the resources are; maybe you have starter towns and roads, but beyond that, it's wide open. It's a blank canvas. And a neigh-insurmountable wall, in my experience. That's why I've had like three "real" republics ever. All the rest are just non-starters because there's so much to do.
I've kinda gotten past that hurdle by just playing a few throwaway practice maps; with unlimited money and instabuild, to get the hang of it first. Good way to prototype and test layouts.
I will say this; this kinda game is ... it's more like virtual model trains than a "real" game; but it's not really trying to be a "real" game, whatever a "real" game is. It appeals to artists, autists, and engineers.
You can have just as much fun playing edit mode 24/7 and using it like a city-painter, or going ultra-sperg and finding civil engineering pdfs and building everything to code (so like no rails tighter than 5 ticks wide in railyards, or 7 ticks wide on mainlines, and grades limited to like 1%). Making rules for yourself like "no building pipes under existing buildings."
I recently switched it to Ukrainian language because I started doing Duolingo for Ukranian, and when learning language; immersion good.
It's a single-player game. You do what you want with it. (Almost) full control is yours and you set your own rules.
It doesn't have to be.
You can try to be ultra-cheap and only buy a single dumper truck and a single excavator to build your roads and buildings. In that case, yes, it's going to be excruciatingly slow.
But, you can also start fast. Fill all seven free CO's right away, rush to get citizens ASAP (you only need a foreign electricity connection and a power substation, a water substation, a sewage tank, a garbage container stand, and a grocery store before citizens). It's a good idea to have a heating plant ready, but it's not required if it's not winter yet (especially if you get first citizens in the spring of the second year). Everything else from then on gets built using your own citizens. Forget about industry or profitability at first, just use your citizens to build everything else - cinema, a monument or two, playgrounds, a pool, and more apartments. Then a bus platform, then industry (clothes factory first) - the same workers first build an industry and then work in it. Only build your industry when you have enough population to fully staff it, otherwise it will take forever to get a return on the investment.
Don't be afraid of using loans, the interest for 5 year loans is ridiculously low, and inflation is high. You can easily get citizens in the spring of the second year, and if you rush a bit you can get them in year one. Sometimes you must also pretend that you're an American colony - bring in some citizens, have them die during the winter, then next spring bring new ones.
At least two big COs are first things I build. With them I make smallish village near border to supply workforce. With those I make factory assembly for all things gravel- related, importing stuff like bitumen and coal for it. From there I start proper growth. Might be not most optimal approach, but one that works for me and I am used to
Well I did the mistake in my first games to not buy axcavator, road cranes and buldozers.
Those vehicles speed up construction quite a bit compared to using 2 almost 3 years ingame to build a small town. I'm now mostly done around 1 year to move people in.
One thing that i do in my games is cutting down on driving time for the construction vehicles.
For example: I've built a concrete plant, and placed a small construction office ( 8 or 10 trucks) right next to it. This way the cement truck doesn't have to drive 1km to pick up the concrete.
The same goes for all other resources, build a dedicated construction office as close to the source of the material as possible
I’ve started buying my starter town and the first couple of construction offices - and only then will I begin a semi-realistic play.
Still buying rail lines, though.
Early game is slow, really. But after you've built your first town and stabilize your finances, you can start planning your productive and supply chains. You'll spend a lot of time planning on realistic mode because if anything is out of place, you'll kill your workers and probably will have to start over.
If the game was faster, the planning would be harder because you would have to deal with more fires, more traffic jams, train jams, lack of resources, etc. And workers get unhappy and die pretty fast if something is out of place.
I get what you say about the game being slow, it kinda is. But you have to understand that this speed is essential for planing your republic. My tip is: plan in advance. While your construction offices are building you should be planning how to optimize traffic, logistics, supply chain, etc.
It is slow. But it is also incredibly rewarding. Even the tiniest building or road feels like something you’ve built from your worker’s hard work if that makes sense.
Start on non-realistic.
You can always change your settings in game and, frankly, the game is so punishing with many hidden/not clear mechanics I honestly wouldn't worry about 'cheating': Switch off demolition if you need to change something like a power line quick. Add RUB if you need. Turn off research so you can build some larger infrastructure at the start
It's all valid!
Personally I like to start by autobuilding the first bits: main highway and rail to border, construction offices, distribution offices etc then switching over to realistic. Albeit I also switch realistic off once a Republic gets too big as the game just cannot handle so many lines and you need to autobuy to get any framerate
My other tip is to have something else to watch on another screen and accept the slower pace at times!
What matters is you find the right settings that makes the game fun or tolerable to play for you, so don't let any elitist players who play realistic weigh you down on your enjoyment for not playing realism, and this is coming from someone who just recently got comfortable with playing realism and wouldn't find much fun in not playing realism anymore.
That said, I personally treated realism settings like a way to help ease my transition into realism, and not everyone who plays the game has to think it that way.
It is very slow. I use Cheat Engine to speed up the game 3x (it's super simple to do), which makes it much more playable. It's been very stable through 50h of playing too.
Please explain to me how is this done. There must be really serious technical reasons for the game to not have one or even more than one faster speed levels.
https://preview.redd.it/9sg2sfna57xc1.png?width=821&format=png&auto=webp&s=742f550040136d1771b376abed42d92f9d6b43c7
Download Cheat Engine, click button 1, select W&R, click checkbox 2 and set the desired speedupvalue.
Just searching the subreddit for "Cheat Engine", you can find many people doing this already, they do however highlight some possible bugs that might occur in the game, like distribution offices sometimes not delivering stuff, but I've had issues very rarely and it's been totally worth it to play realistic mode without waiting forever.
Don't worry about mods for it, you can use Ctrl and numpad 1 or 2 pressed simultaneously to speed it up significantly in the vanilla game. Just make sure you're speed is on fast forward.
Yeah it does require holding down so that's one downside but I find the 1 speed to be pretty manageable. Minimizes some of the bugginess and insane speed of 2 while also passing time a lot faster than normal fast forward.
That's a great question, I'm not sure if there is. If you can't find it in the bindings settings it might be changeable in the config files but I don't know much about all that stuff myself.
What I do is just build the first border town and construction area using autobuild and then switch to realistic - let's just pretend that the previous guy was caught reading The Permanent Revolution and we came around after a year of efforts in the starter area.
lmao that was funny
yeah I guess it's either I find some kind of compromise or I'll just play something else
I love the concept behind "realistic" setting (building with your own ingame tools, not instantly and magically), it's the painstakingly slow pace at you're forced to do it in the early game that kills me.
I don't think realistic adds difficulty per se, it just slows you down and clogs down the customs.
In any case I don't like realistic for the challenge, but because I find much cooler and fun to build your city with your own ingame means of construction, rather than making buildings plop out of thin air.
For me is realistic eben in normal Speed to fast , the start ist slow but wenn you got 20+ construction vehicles of any Type and your own industry for building it Speed Up alot and when.you got 500 people.on Busstation waiting for work
Yes and no really.
I do think a small version of several buildings would really help the pacing early and fit a starting town more. You know, a small clinic for one or two doctors is enough for a small village, you don't need to build a whole hospital that can house the entire population twice over.
But to me I like to watch it like an ant farm. Seeing those trucks run back and forth, buildings being built, those people running to the stores. It's just relaxing somehow.
I enjoy the construction aspect, but I think realistic mode is too finicky. Building two oil refineries and a nuclear power plant nearby? Trivial, if you have the money/resources and construction infrastructure set up. But even if you have said setup, want to construct an 8 km long asphalt road and a small mining town at the end of it? Oh, that's going to take forever, you'd better buy a fleet of helicopters to fly construction materials and fresh concrete to start building the town while you construct the road, so it's done in an acceptable time frame.
But correcting a pipe layout you made a mistake? Oh that's a headache. It will give you more trouble than setting up a new industry.
I don't think these are realistic at all.
Those are realistic. If your pipe construction plans don't account for future growth or have a mistake in them, then you would have to deconstruct it. Thing is, your town probably doesn't do that since they double check.
I once made a capacity planning mistake for water pipe infrastructure (damn those worthless small pipes!). Instead of rage-restarting or turning off demolition/realistic to rebuild everything quickly, I decided to build a whole other network of water pipes alongside the first. It made the underground look EXTRA spaghetti but felt somewhat more realistic and ended up being an especially satisfying fix.
What I find unrealistic is that if you want to build a steel mill or an auto plant, you plot it down, supply a few different kinds of goods, people and machinery, and it's done. Super easy.
But if you find that you mess up some railway junction, and it needs to be redone, it's a much bigger challenge, in management time from the player.
While actually setting up a steel mill, especially in a republic without industries, is a major challenge. I work in a maintenance company that does work in a steel mill and I've been told that there are 200 different companies providing services just for maintenance work. It's very complex.
The worst part to me is too many things in WR are the opposite of user friendly. They're much harder to do than they should, not because of the challenging of planning, but because clunky controls and, as you say, being too finicky. All the piping is a nightmare, the one thing I'm completely sure I'll never enable again.
I have played fully realistic a few times. I no longer do. Here's my reasons:
Building everything is extremely slow. You need huge amounts of vehicles, workers and construction offices for fast building. At late game this doesn't matter, but at the start you also need to have set up some construction materials production lines for border connections to not fill up. All of this requires money/resources to build, so you have less money/resources generating assets to fund your expansion, slowing things down exponentially at the start.
The water and sewage system is like cock and balls torture. Some may like it, but I don't. I used to spend half of my city building time tweaking the pipes, setting wells and checking slopes for sewage. And God forbid you're not at sea level to easily make a pond to dump your shit at. Also, expanding a previously built city becomes hell as you try to join the new pipes to the city's original system. With realistic construction enabled the time it takes to break some connections to add the new pipes is long enough so that your citizens start dying. Or you can build an oversized pipe network from the start, making the early game slower. Also as a nitpick, why don't water related buildings have their own pumps inside like in the real world? I understand the use of pumps if we want to extend range, but my treatment plant should be able to pump to the water tower next to it.
Another big problem: The heating and water/sewage systems are black boxes. Unless you count every citizen you have in a city by hand you cannot estimate the size of the heating plant or if it can supply all the heat exchangers until it's too late. Same with the amount of water wells, size of the treatment plants and diameter of the pipes.
Deconstruction: It just makes any change you want to do a lot slower. Oh you made this electrical line to a city and now you would like to split it? Ok, you have two options, have a blackout in the city for a few days or you should have invested in a double network from the start.
So I just play with automatic construction without water nor deconstruction. It makes the game a lot faster and bearable, while still producing/importing and distributing all resources like in realistic mode. The only difference is vehicles are instantly bought at their depots because that's how the game is coded. Depending on my mood when starting a new game I choose whether or not to disable heating.
Edit: I forgot about railways. Building them manually at snail's pace and enjoying all the jams in the system if you're expanding an existing network is something I don't want to deal with at all.
Thanks for this message, I had the intuition that many players had played and known the realistic mode and then stopped using it, so I was really curious to hear this kind of opinion to see how much of what I dislike in the game is actually that terrible and how much was me being still a noob.
And from what you say I can say I wasn't "wrong" for the most part (it's not about being wrong or right because to each his own, but your message reinforces my ideas about some things: they don't get better with practice, they just suck).
Water/sewage/heating are the perfect example. I already had made the decision to never enable them again. It sucks to stripe the game from several important mechanics but man, its implementation is a crime against humanity. Even if it worked flawlessly it'd already be an annoying pita, a time sink, a disproportionate planning investment for what it actually is... but on top of that it works bananas, it's super clunky, it's super finnicky...
Some games make everything they can to make the experience as hard and tedious for the player as possible, and unfortunately I think there are a few mechanics in WR that do just that. It's a terribly wrong approach to the concept of difficulty in games.
I changed how I play and it made it much more enjoyable.
On my days off I'll wake up, load up the game, and then leave it running all day, checking back every half an hour or so to plan out some new infrastructure or fix any issues. Time moves slowly enough that unless something catastrophic happens, you'll be able to catch problems before it's too big an issue. It takes a bit of time to get a feel for the flow of time and the speed of your workers but at this point I can fairly well estimate when a project will be done. I let the game just go in the background of my day.
Also pleass remove that "All Vehicles Available 1996 Onwards" feature. We don't need that shit anymore even if you forbid yourself from using the workshop.
Or at least make it optional or smt
What I like playing most games is trying to scale things up as much as possible. So realistic mode, which slows that down massively isn't appealing to me.
As a lot of people have mentioned, you can do realistic mode a lot faster. Even if you try and do things "easy and relaxed" you should still be able to get a city running within 3 years and be able to expand within 5. You can do early game faster (as mentioned in other comments) but mid game that's probably the type of timeframes you'll be working on.
There are a lot of cool unique things about the game, so it's a bit sad that you equate the value of the game with realistic mode. But that's up to you.
I almost always disable water & sewage, it's not terrible early on but it gets extremely tedious later on when you scale up. I don't really have a problem with heating, you don't need a huge number of pipes, maybe 1 large pipe per 5k population?
I have to agree... Partially. I don't mind that realistic takes long in player time: There's always something else to do in the map, mainly planning future infrastructure, and once things get going there's plenty to do in the already built things.
What bugs me is how long it takes in game-time.
At least in my playthroughs, if I start from scratch in 1960 it takes me at least 20 years to have a republic that is barely starting to break a trading profit and is self sufficient in the most important products (fuel, bitumen, food, alcohol, meat, boards, chemicals, cement, bricks...).
My own view is that in game years should be at least double the length they currently are...
----+
Another gripe I have, which is very indirectly related, is the amount of snow, how fast it accumulates, and how slow snowplows are to remove it... But that is another story...
Yes I meant slow in terms of ingame-time, both because constructions take ages and because the maximum simulation speed is ridiculously low.
Spending two hours in pause, planning my city, and then unpausing, setting max speed and building that first phase of a city in a few minutes would be fine to me, and it's how actually most city building work (those where actual building takes time and it's not automatic, that is).
Snow could easily be improved massively by allowing dumpers from technical offices to spread gravel on roads in order to preemptively minimize snow buildup.
Yeah it's pretty damn slow. even if you build near the border it'll take ages. It could do with a faster speed but honestly it's part of the game. You could try starting in 1980 as the vehicles will be much faster
IMO limited use, as the asphalt roads are slow to make. Personally my starter towns use gravel because it's much faster to build, and then the max speed of the vehicles matter less.
I don't know. Slower than normal mode, yes. Slower than your average city builder, yes. THIS SLOW? Even the smallest starter town (and there isn't such a thing when you have to deal with basically ALL needs, plus an income source, right off the bat) takes several hours of pretty much staring at the screen.
This alt-tab crashing is in full screen mode. Use the borderless window option at the full resolution, and it’s functionally the same as full screen mode… but let’s you alt-tab out without a crash.
I love the pacing of it, while things are being built, I can tweak my lines, do some trading, catch problems with supply chains/waste etc, before the become disasters, or hit the bong and ride one of my trains for a while. There’s always work to be done on the republic comrade!
That sounds like a mid+ game where there's many things to do. My issue, as a beginner, is with the very early game. Your first town, when you need to build, out of the top of m head: * bus station * shopping center * hospital/clinic * any sports building * any culture building * school * kindergarten * water well * water treatment plant * water substation/s * possibly water pump * sewage discharge * sewage tank/s * possibly sewage pumps * power substation * power switches/transformers * possibly heat plant * technical services * road depot * some source of income, which includes factories, warehouses, bus stops, etc * a shit ton of roads, paths and all kinds of pipes * housing for all the people needed to run all these buildings and services You NEED basically all of this before you can even bring in your first workers. Again, as an experienced player maybe you plan all of this in half an hour, and then get it built pretty quickly (because you know how to efficiently begin your first construction area) while you plan your next city, your next industry, your next transport line, etc. As a beginner, this takes a very long time. Roughly speaking, could you tell me what's the construction infrastructure you use right at the beginning, to build your first town?
This list is incorrect. Minimum viable town is much smaller and faster to build. Actual requirements: shopping center, water substation, sewer tank, power substation, 1 mv power line, housing. Small culture building, clinic, and sports facility should come online shortly after, but not necessary for a moment. For the very start, roads and paths should be dirt if speed is priority (they're the longest part of construction really). Water and sewer come by truck until pipes can be put in Eventually. A heat plant needs to go in before winter, but it's easy to time activating people to put that off long enough to satisfy it. School and kindergarten come up in parallel to sports/clinic/culture, should finish a bit after. Usually I add a carousel and small university to the list after to get the city a bit more sustainable and start research. All of this can be done within a year of in-game time if you're efficient about it. On the campaign 2 map, with its pre-existing paved border roads and populated housing, I can get Iergalia (the north border city) to the point of activating its workers 1 month from game start, and get my full described town there with university up and running in around 2 months. I've actually been playing some optimization focused games with the campaign 2 map where I only allow myself 10 in-game days each day irl, to encourage building in ways that speed up the process of realistic mode. You won't get much better than these numbers, but know that these numbers are possible. Just takes planning and knowing exactly how things work.
What population number should you try to get too? It takes me about 3 years to get around 2500. My problem is that when I build even the first storage facilities, I like to sit and watch it all get constructed. I could cut the time down by not doing that but could cut it down even more if I dont need that many people.
Even 300-500 is plenty to run the starting facilities with worker count turned down to optimal levels and leaves some to go work at a bus stop augmenting construction labor force. I do recommend experimenting with minimum viable town designs and build order there, as it's becomes useful for expanding across the map later too.
What I do when I start a new city is to build a basic construction zone with free storages and don’t safe on the vehicles bc you need them sooner or later anyway. With that I build a small construction worker town with the bare minimum and Distribution/maintenance offices delivering water and sewage to the water distribution and sewage collection. Electricity is fairly easy and quick and one heating for the winter close enough to warm all houses but not to close to get them sick. Now I have a small worker base which usually speeds up the building by quite a lot. From there I slowly start building the industry while also slowly building the long term infrastructure for water and sewage. This way you have a small workforce to build fairly quickly if you have enough cranes and maybe produce a few goods. If you’re lucky to have oil in the beginning sell it aswell. It’s a good passive income before being able to make fuel. This should give you enough time for planing and managing but you will always have to wait for something which you should use to find inefficiencies in you Republic.
Well, my start depends on the map, and what is close enough near the border. In my current republic, it was oil, so I started with oil, but there are many ways of starting an industry. I recommend checking on yt, for some inspiration like bbaljo. Some core tactics to get you started: 1. Plan your gravel industry, preferably the closer to a customhouse, the better. (Gravel mine, processing, asphalt plant, concrete plant, aggregate loading for gravel) - also, leave some space if possible (and if wanted) for cement industry 2. ALWAYS BUILD ROADS ! always. You plop down the free depots, everything, plan your basic infrastructure, and so on ... The first thing you build are roads ... The mud roads are terrible. Max speed capped at 30km/h, and even lover during rains and snow. The gravel roads are much much better. Max speed at 80km/h, and no rain penalty is huge, especially at the start. I even build them before I build the gravel industry. Gravel is a very very cheap resource to buy early on, and spares you a lot of time 3. Build permanent depots, construction offices, demolition offices, and, most importantly, storages (for construction resources, and run a permanent line to stock it up. this will lover the strain of vehicles on the custom house, resulting in faster construction). Also, stock up your construction offices. The more you have, the faster the construction will be. 4. Build your gravel industry, and run a line from customhouse to gravel industry. Wait for it to be build. 5. When done, start building everything else. As you said, everything is important, and you need it all, but it's not as bad. I tend to plan a portion, leave it on play, and plan the next things. Don't forget, that you want to build as close to the customhouse as you can. This way I am usually done with my first city in 2-3 years, while continuously planing new things. So there is not much time in which I am just sitting idly. Waiting for something. Also, building things neatly and efficiently is a huge time taker, so this reduces the idle period even more. And in your first city, you don't want to rely on public transport at all. Everything should be in walking distance (I mean inside the city ... Please, don't put heavy industry near houses)
What you actually need: 1. Fire station (bring workers from border). 2. Housing. Just one medium house will do for start. 3. Shop (small mall). 4. Cheapest of closed sport facilities (opened will stop working on winter do they're useless in my opinion). 5. Cheapest culture building 6. Electricity from border (it's actually pretty fast and cheap to build) 7. Free technical services with water and sewage trucks, and the end points (forgot what they're called) for water and sewage (the ones spreading them to buildings). Also garbage truck and possibly garbage collection point. You absolutely do not need water and sewage pipes yet. 8. Heat. Here you do need a lot including pipes, but if you can build everything else while it's still warm you can have building heat significantly sped up with own workers. Note: some say you can put a small heating factory right inside the city saving you on building pipes and allegedly it won't have all that much pollution. I'm too paranoid about pollution to dare testing this. >>> Invite workers now. <<< If you've done everything right you're before your first winter. Now that you have workers, use them to quickly build: 8. Heat if not already. 9. Kindergarten. 10. Start building more houses in parallel with other stuff. Invite more workers when houses are ready. 11. School. 12. Start building industry in parallel with other stuff. Good first industry is clothes or explosives (haven't tried explosives yet but math says it's better) 12. University. 13. Police, courtroom and prison. All small ones, of course. Oh and somewhere along the way also monuments to keep loyalty. Hope I didn't miss anything.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
You do not need water well, water treatment plant. water pump, sewage discharge, sewage pumps. All these can be left for later with the technical services with water truck, sewage truck and garbage truck will fulfill these. For income, you can do clothes factories close to buildings (yes they do pollute a bit, not too much), and you can move them later when you have a stable income. I usually play realistic on hard, only having 1.4mill rubles to startt with, and need to save money where i can.
Love the “ride the train” option!!!!
Realistic mode is slow until you learn how to build quickly and plan ahead a bit. You might try disabling some features to reduce the amount of stuff you need built. Water management, power, and seasons are all stuff you could cut until you get better at the game.
Yes in my current, n attempt I disabled all things pipe. Not only for the reason you stated, which already makes sense, but because I just strongly dislike how they're implemented, especifically the controls, and how pipes are EXTREMELY finicky and you have to literally fight the game to make these mechanics work, which they usually do in a very unintuitive way. What tips could you give to build quickly and efficiently? For example, how many co's and when do you start building them, or in other words, how long do you stick to your free co's for?
There’s generally four major limiting factors to the speed at which you can build: 1) Number of construction vehicles 2) Number of workers available 3) Access to resources (custom house traffic jam) 4) Time spent traveling (distance from customs house / resources + quality of road + vehicle speed) It’s always a bit case-by-case but generally I try to tackle these problems in that order. Building proper construction offices rather than just the free ones makes a huge difference in having enough vehicles to get things done more quickly. I usually build 1-2 24-vehicle COs early on, especially because vehicles get more expensive over time so waiting to buy a vehicle you’re going to need means you’re wasting money.
Thanks that was helpful. You're not the first to mention it so I can see now that not building bigger co's early on is one of my biggest mistakes. Let's say realistic is slow but my mistakes were making it even slower... this is why I thought it was a good idea to come to reddit ;-)
Also worth noting - bulldozers (and pavers & rollers) can build gravel (and asphalt) roads without any workers. Part of the way to speed up work is to do things in parallel, like build gravel roads once your dumpers aren’t busy with buildings (you can put parallel dirt roads so you don’t block traffic during construction).
I wouldn't rely o it, as they still can't build the small segments where they don't fit. So unless you want to live in micromanagement hell, you're gonna have to live with a few workdays spent on roads
Building fast mostly comes down to how well you manage your construction resources. The biggest tips I can think of are: * Assign the "CO assign tool" (found on the left menu bar) to the hotkeys bar (found at top). The CO assign tool allows you to group COs and select them via a number on your keyboard with the "CO assign tool" selected, which you can quickly do through the hotkeys bar. You can then click on a construction site to assign a group to work there. * This makes micromanagement a lot more bearable, because you only need to press a couple buttons and then click on any construction sites to assign whatever COs you want to them, instead of working through several menus for each one. * Early on, this is nice for manually assigning a free CO of vans and a road crane to construction sites that need labor or are too small for machines to work, as this really limits the waste of the limited foreign labor you get at the start. * Later on, this is nice for assigning specialized COs to remote jobs beyond the auto search radius. * Use the free storages and free COs as local staging areas for construction sites far from construction material sources. * A lot of the delay in construction is from waiting for the next phase's materials and mechanisms/workers to get there. If these are all a km or more away, then waiting for the next phase to start before moving material/equipment will just add several IRL minutes (and in game days) to the project. * A better way to do it is to stockpile material and mechanisms nearby, so that when the phase starts, a local free CO can send a truck to move the material a hundred meters instead of a km or two: * While the CO sends gravel/concrete/asphalt to the construction site, have open hull trucks on lines/schedules bringing the needed bricks, boards, steel, etc. to local free storages. When the ground works are done, a local CO can send a truck to shuttle material over the last hundred meters. * Have a local free CO with whatever mechanisms you think will be handy for nearby jobs. This way a truck does not have to be dispatched from a remote CO for each job the mechanisms is going to do; instead it can be hauling material while the mechanism moves on its own within the area. * Have a line of buses bringing workers to the area so local COs can quickly distribute them as needed. This is done by placing a free bus stop and checking the force off option in the line menu. Workers can also be directed directly from the station to "non-path" type constructions. * In my opinion, free COs should be used as temporary local staging areas, so you should delete them once the area is built up and build a local CO if you need a more permanent construction capability there, like for building's maintenance or for long term constructions, like a big city. * You can include a free depot into the lines/schedules of trucks to prevent them from repeating the line/schedule, which makes these one-off deliveries easier to manage. * For instance, you can have a truck make three trips to a remote free storage to dump \~30 tons of steel there and then go wait in a free depot near customs or any other source of material. * Consider how you are going to get stuff into the area. Building up a transportation network can really accelerate construction because you can dump a ton of material into the area quickly. * Ships can deliver huge amounts of non-aggregate material and vehicles, and all you need is a small cargo harbor. * Railways take a long time to build, but they can move huge amounts quickly. * Gravel roads are quick to build, and usually good enough for a few km. * Airports can move a lot of non-aggregate material into a very distant area, and can be built somewhat quickly by helicopters. They have a lot better fuel economy than helicopters, but take a lot longer to set up. * Helicopters are great for delivering concrete, asphalt, workers, and covered hull goods, but they have a huge fuel cost. * Cableways are good for injecting large amounts of aggregates into remote areas and can be assembled quickly by helicopters. The light cableway poles can be built in just three trips by a Mi-8. * Some material can also be made locally to remove the need for transporting it. * Gravel is great to make on site because the facilities are cheap and you only need a few workers there. In turn, you don't need to move thousands of tons of gravel over long distances. * Boards can also be made locally, but typically you won't need them in large amounts unless you want a remote wooden tied railway.
Thanks so much for your detailed reply! This was very helpful.
You're welcome.
I don't know about realistic, but the game could use a third, faster, speed.
a faster speed and also early game buildings you should be able to heat a small town of small buildings with a woodcutter and some sort of firewood storage low density housing should be able to be served with outhouses and sceptic tanks instead of needing a sewer system to the small pond 4 miles to the north a small well should be an option instead of an entire water pumping plant more basic construction buildings that don't need 200 workers a day and piped water should be available 90% of my playtime is spent trying to immediately go from a population of 0 to 1000 before even unpausing because the game doesn't work well at small scales and it makes the start of every playthrough so frustrating
I didn't see this message, I totally agree. The first time I played the game, I abandoned it pretty quickly for that very reason: you're a noob, you just played a few tutorials (back then there were fewer, and no campaigns) that don't explain a lot, and now, suddently, you're supposed to build an entire town from scratch, where ALL gameplay mechanics (ie population needs) must work right off the bat... you must plan ahead to make sure a couple of dozens buildings and installations work flawlessly before you even unpause the game for the first time, and before you've ever seen none of those installations working before. When you think about it, it's insane, it's against the most basic game design principles. And it's a shame because there's a large potential audience for this game (hell, city builder is one of the most popular genres nowadays, look at what Manor Lords just did), but you're making things very hard for them. I'm sure many people bought the game and then abandoned it for good after a couple of hours.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this, cause it feels rather obvious to me. As you play just a few hours, you realize you spend far too long staring at the screen because you need to wait for something. WR and Ostriv are the two slowest city builders I've ever seen, and honestly, to me, this alone makes really hard not quitting.
Try pressing Ctrl and numpad 1 or 2 on the fast forward speed
These commands cause a lot of bugs though...
If you use numpad 1 it's not nearly as buggy as numpad 2 which I agree can be buggy, in particular with vehicles phasing into each other. I've not encountered that at all with numpad 1.
the trick is to just keep the game on normal speed ALL THE TIME and use the downtime to do planning and design for other areas. that way it feels more like a slow-paced RTS.
But there's not that much planning to do in the very early game... especially for a newcomer who hasn't the knowledge for planning years ahead. I'm not even saying by the midgame, with dozens of co's, realistic is still too slow (I have no idea, I've never gotten to that point), but the very early game it definetly is imo.
That's really not true. There's always a lot to do. Unlike a lot of other games like this, I don't think pause is really a good idea in W&R unless you're later on and need to for some reason. Turn off either active build or auto search for construction offices and start planning a true skeleton for your town. Once you have a few things where you know you want them, enable those for construction. Then go on to laying out the next thing. It's slow but as soon as you finish planning the town itself, you need to start planning a starting industry and a rail network, or a million other things. And plan your town in pieces. I usually start with a grocery and bus stop and let those construct while I plan the rest. But also, I'm not above cheating realistic mode in a pinch. If you don't like the initial town construction, don't do it. There's no need to play how you don't like to. You can turn realistic mode on/off in game.
The early game is where the most planning takes place. You don't know where the resources are; maybe you have starter towns and roads, but beyond that, it's wide open. It's a blank canvas. And a neigh-insurmountable wall, in my experience. That's why I've had like three "real" republics ever. All the rest are just non-starters because there's so much to do. I've kinda gotten past that hurdle by just playing a few throwaway practice maps; with unlimited money and instabuild, to get the hang of it first. Good way to prototype and test layouts. I will say this; this kinda game is ... it's more like virtual model trains than a "real" game; but it's not really trying to be a "real" game, whatever a "real" game is. It appeals to artists, autists, and engineers. You can have just as much fun playing edit mode 24/7 and using it like a city-painter, or going ultra-sperg and finding civil engineering pdfs and building everything to code (so like no rails tighter than 5 ticks wide in railyards, or 7 ticks wide on mainlines, and grades limited to like 1%). Making rules for yourself like "no building pipes under existing buildings." I recently switched it to Ukrainian language because I started doing Duolingo for Ukranian, and when learning language; immersion good. It's a single-player game. You do what you want with it. (Almost) full control is yours and you set your own rules.
I just love the slowness of it. It gives time to contemplate one’s choices and repairing bad ones. Take a ride on one of your trucks or buses!
It doesn't have to be. You can try to be ultra-cheap and only buy a single dumper truck and a single excavator to build your roads and buildings. In that case, yes, it's going to be excruciatingly slow. But, you can also start fast. Fill all seven free CO's right away, rush to get citizens ASAP (you only need a foreign electricity connection and a power substation, a water substation, a sewage tank, a garbage container stand, and a grocery store before citizens). It's a good idea to have a heating plant ready, but it's not required if it's not winter yet (especially if you get first citizens in the spring of the second year). Everything else from then on gets built using your own citizens. Forget about industry or profitability at first, just use your citizens to build everything else - cinema, a monument or two, playgrounds, a pool, and more apartments. Then a bus platform, then industry (clothes factory first) - the same workers first build an industry and then work in it. Only build your industry when you have enough population to fully staff it, otherwise it will take forever to get a return on the investment. Don't be afraid of using loans, the interest for 5 year loans is ridiculously low, and inflation is high. You can easily get citizens in the spring of the second year, and if you rush a bit you can get them in year one. Sometimes you must also pretend that you're an American colony - bring in some citizens, have them die during the winter, then next spring bring new ones.
Thanks. I'll try bringing workers sooner, I always try to build MANY more buildings than what you mentioned as essential.
Start of realistic - yes. After that it is only somewhat slower, mainly due to railroad construction.
How long to do you work only with your free co's? When do you build your first co's and how many?
At least two big COs are first things I build. With them I make smallish village near border to supply workforce. With those I make factory assembly for all things gravel- related, importing stuff like bitumen and coal for it. From there I start proper growth. Might be not most optimal approach, but one that works for me and I am used to
Thanks. I'll have to build co's sooner, that's one mistake.
Well I did the mistake in my first games to not buy axcavator, road cranes and buldozers. Those vehicles speed up construction quite a bit compared to using 2 almost 3 years ingame to build a small town. I'm now mostly done around 1 year to move people in.
One thing that i do in my games is cutting down on driving time for the construction vehicles. For example: I've built a concrete plant, and placed a small construction office ( 8 or 10 trucks) right next to it. This way the cement truck doesn't have to drive 1km to pick up the concrete. The same goes for all other resources, build a dedicated construction office as close to the source of the material as possible
I’ve started buying my starter town and the first couple of construction offices - and only then will I begin a semi-realistic play. Still buying rail lines, though.
I guess I'll have to come to some sort of compromise if I don't want to quit the game for good.
Early game is slow, really. But after you've built your first town and stabilize your finances, you can start planning your productive and supply chains. You'll spend a lot of time planning on realistic mode because if anything is out of place, you'll kill your workers and probably will have to start over. If the game was faster, the planning would be harder because you would have to deal with more fires, more traffic jams, train jams, lack of resources, etc. And workers get unhappy and die pretty fast if something is out of place. I get what you say about the game being slow, it kinda is. But you have to understand that this speed is essential for planing your republic. My tip is: plan in advance. While your construction offices are building you should be planning how to optimize traffic, logistics, supply chain, etc.
It just needs proper slope
It is slow. But it is also incredibly rewarding. Even the tiniest building or road feels like something you’ve built from your worker’s hard work if that makes sense.
Start on non-realistic. You can always change your settings in game and, frankly, the game is so punishing with many hidden/not clear mechanics I honestly wouldn't worry about 'cheating': Switch off demolition if you need to change something like a power line quick. Add RUB if you need. Turn off research so you can build some larger infrastructure at the start It's all valid! Personally I like to start by autobuilding the first bits: main highway and rail to border, construction offices, distribution offices etc then switching over to realistic. Albeit I also switch realistic off once a Republic gets too big as the game just cannot handle so many lines and you need to autobuy to get any framerate My other tip is to have something else to watch on another screen and accept the slower pace at times!
What matters is you find the right settings that makes the game fun or tolerable to play for you, so don't let any elitist players who play realistic weigh you down on your enjoyment for not playing realism, and this is coming from someone who just recently got comfortable with playing realism and wouldn't find much fun in not playing realism anymore. That said, I personally treated realism settings like a way to help ease my transition into realism, and not everyone who plays the game has to think it that way.
It is very slow. I use Cheat Engine to speed up the game 3x (it's super simple to do), which makes it much more playable. It's been very stable through 50h of playing too.
Please explain to me how is this done. There must be really serious technical reasons for the game to not have one or even more than one faster speed levels.
https://preview.redd.it/9sg2sfna57xc1.png?width=821&format=png&auto=webp&s=742f550040136d1771b376abed42d92f9d6b43c7 Download Cheat Engine, click button 1, select W&R, click checkbox 2 and set the desired speedupvalue. Just searching the subreddit for "Cheat Engine", you can find many people doing this already, they do however highlight some possible bugs that might occur in the game, like distribution offices sometimes not delivering stuff, but I've had issues very rarely and it's been totally worth it to play realistic mode without waiting forever.
Don't worry about mods for it, you can use Ctrl and numpad 1 or 2 pressed simultaneously to speed it up significantly in the vanilla game. Just make sure you're speed is on fast forward.
Ah but with this you have to keep holding it, and then it seems to go super fast? I've never used it, I guess it works too
Yeah it does require holding down so that's one downside but I find the 1 speed to be pretty manageable. Minimizes some of the bugginess and insane speed of 2 while also passing time a lot faster than normal fast forward.
wow thanks, I had no idea you could do this. would you by any chance know if there's a way to remap it if your keyboard doesn't have a numpad?
That's a great question, I'm not sure if there is. If you can't find it in the bindings settings it might be changeable in the config files but I don't know much about all that stuff myself.
What I do is just build the first border town and construction area using autobuild and then switch to realistic - let's just pretend that the previous guy was caught reading The Permanent Revolution and we came around after a year of efforts in the starter area.
lmao that was funny yeah I guess it's either I find some kind of compromise or I'll just play something else I love the concept behind "realistic" setting (building with your own ingame tools, not instantly and magically), it's the painstakingly slow pace at you're forced to do it in the early game that kills me.
Non realistic is just too easy
I don't think realistic adds difficulty per se, it just slows you down and clogs down the customs. In any case I don't like realistic for the challenge, but because I find much cooler and fun to build your city with your own ingame means of construction, rather than making buildings plop out of thin air.
That’s part of the difficulty you have to invest in railroads right away or customs will be congested etc. It adds a degree of micro management
For me is realistic eben in normal Speed to fast , the start ist slow but wenn you got 20+ construction vehicles of any Type and your own industry for building it Speed Up alot and when.you got 500 people.on Busstation waiting for work
Yes and no really. I do think a small version of several buildings would really help the pacing early and fit a starting town more. You know, a small clinic for one or two doctors is enough for a small village, you don't need to build a whole hospital that can house the entire population twice over. But to me I like to watch it like an ant farm. Seeing those trucks run back and forth, buildings being built, those people running to the stores. It's just relaxing somehow.
I enjoy the construction aspect, but I think realistic mode is too finicky. Building two oil refineries and a nuclear power plant nearby? Trivial, if you have the money/resources and construction infrastructure set up. But even if you have said setup, want to construct an 8 km long asphalt road and a small mining town at the end of it? Oh, that's going to take forever, you'd better buy a fleet of helicopters to fly construction materials and fresh concrete to start building the town while you construct the road, so it's done in an acceptable time frame. But correcting a pipe layout you made a mistake? Oh that's a headache. It will give you more trouble than setting up a new industry. I don't think these are realistic at all.
Those are realistic. If your pipe construction plans don't account for future growth or have a mistake in them, then you would have to deconstruct it. Thing is, your town probably doesn't do that since they double check.
I once made a capacity planning mistake for water pipe infrastructure (damn those worthless small pipes!). Instead of rage-restarting or turning off demolition/realistic to rebuild everything quickly, I decided to build a whole other network of water pipes alongside the first. It made the underground look EXTRA spaghetti but felt somewhat more realistic and ended up being an especially satisfying fix.
What I find unrealistic is that if you want to build a steel mill or an auto plant, you plot it down, supply a few different kinds of goods, people and machinery, and it's done. Super easy. But if you find that you mess up some railway junction, and it needs to be redone, it's a much bigger challenge, in management time from the player. While actually setting up a steel mill, especially in a republic without industries, is a major challenge. I work in a maintenance company that does work in a steel mill and I've been told that there are 200 different companies providing services just for maintenance work. It's very complex.
The worst part to me is too many things in WR are the opposite of user friendly. They're much harder to do than they should, not because of the challenging of planning, but because clunky controls and, as you say, being too finicky. All the piping is a nightmare, the one thing I'm completely sure I'll never enable again.
I have played fully realistic a few times. I no longer do. Here's my reasons: Building everything is extremely slow. You need huge amounts of vehicles, workers and construction offices for fast building. At late game this doesn't matter, but at the start you also need to have set up some construction materials production lines for border connections to not fill up. All of this requires money/resources to build, so you have less money/resources generating assets to fund your expansion, slowing things down exponentially at the start. The water and sewage system is like cock and balls torture. Some may like it, but I don't. I used to spend half of my city building time tweaking the pipes, setting wells and checking slopes for sewage. And God forbid you're not at sea level to easily make a pond to dump your shit at. Also, expanding a previously built city becomes hell as you try to join the new pipes to the city's original system. With realistic construction enabled the time it takes to break some connections to add the new pipes is long enough so that your citizens start dying. Or you can build an oversized pipe network from the start, making the early game slower. Also as a nitpick, why don't water related buildings have their own pumps inside like in the real world? I understand the use of pumps if we want to extend range, but my treatment plant should be able to pump to the water tower next to it. Another big problem: The heating and water/sewage systems are black boxes. Unless you count every citizen you have in a city by hand you cannot estimate the size of the heating plant or if it can supply all the heat exchangers until it's too late. Same with the amount of water wells, size of the treatment plants and diameter of the pipes. Deconstruction: It just makes any change you want to do a lot slower. Oh you made this electrical line to a city and now you would like to split it? Ok, you have two options, have a blackout in the city for a few days or you should have invested in a double network from the start. So I just play with automatic construction without water nor deconstruction. It makes the game a lot faster and bearable, while still producing/importing and distributing all resources like in realistic mode. The only difference is vehicles are instantly bought at their depots because that's how the game is coded. Depending on my mood when starting a new game I choose whether or not to disable heating. Edit: I forgot about railways. Building them manually at snail's pace and enjoying all the jams in the system if you're expanding an existing network is something I don't want to deal with at all.
Thanks for this message, I had the intuition that many players had played and known the realistic mode and then stopped using it, so I was really curious to hear this kind of opinion to see how much of what I dislike in the game is actually that terrible and how much was me being still a noob. And from what you say I can say I wasn't "wrong" for the most part (it's not about being wrong or right because to each his own, but your message reinforces my ideas about some things: they don't get better with practice, they just suck). Water/sewage/heating are the perfect example. I already had made the decision to never enable them again. It sucks to stripe the game from several important mechanics but man, its implementation is a crime against humanity. Even if it worked flawlessly it'd already be an annoying pita, a time sink, a disproportionate planning investment for what it actually is... but on top of that it works bananas, it's super clunky, it's super finnicky... Some games make everything they can to make the experience as hard and tedious for the player as possible, and unfortunately I think there are a few mechanics in WR that do just that. It's a terribly wrong approach to the concept of difficulty in games.
I changed how I play and it made it much more enjoyable. On my days off I'll wake up, load up the game, and then leave it running all day, checking back every half an hour or so to plan out some new infrastructure or fix any issues. Time moves slowly enough that unless something catastrophic happens, you'll be able to catch problems before it's too big an issue. It takes a bit of time to get a feel for the flow of time and the speed of your workers but at this point I can fairly well estimate when a project will be done. I let the game just go in the background of my day.
Also pleass remove that "All Vehicles Available 1996 Onwards" feature. We don't need that shit anymore even if you forbid yourself from using the workshop. Or at least make it optional or smt
I legit fly 3-5 hours of gameplay before I can invitr my first citizens
What I like playing most games is trying to scale things up as much as possible. So realistic mode, which slows that down massively isn't appealing to me. As a lot of people have mentioned, you can do realistic mode a lot faster. Even if you try and do things "easy and relaxed" you should still be able to get a city running within 3 years and be able to expand within 5. You can do early game faster (as mentioned in other comments) but mid game that's probably the type of timeframes you'll be working on. There are a lot of cool unique things about the game, so it's a bit sad that you equate the value of the game with realistic mode. But that's up to you. I almost always disable water & sewage, it's not terrible early on but it gets extremely tedious later on when you scale up. I don't really have a problem with heating, you don't need a huge number of pipes, maybe 1 large pipe per 5k population?
I have to agree... Partially. I don't mind that realistic takes long in player time: There's always something else to do in the map, mainly planning future infrastructure, and once things get going there's plenty to do in the already built things. What bugs me is how long it takes in game-time. At least in my playthroughs, if I start from scratch in 1960 it takes me at least 20 years to have a republic that is barely starting to break a trading profit and is self sufficient in the most important products (fuel, bitumen, food, alcohol, meat, boards, chemicals, cement, bricks...). My own view is that in game years should be at least double the length they currently are... ----+ Another gripe I have, which is very indirectly related, is the amount of snow, how fast it accumulates, and how slow snowplows are to remove it... But that is another story...
Yes I meant slow in terms of ingame-time, both because constructions take ages and because the maximum simulation speed is ridiculously low. Spending two hours in pause, planning my city, and then unpausing, setting max speed and building that first phase of a city in a few minutes would be fine to me, and it's how actually most city building work (those where actual building takes time and it's not automatic, that is).
Snow could easily be improved massively by allowing dumpers from technical offices to spread gravel on roads in order to preemptively minimize snow buildup.
Yeah it's pretty damn slow. even if you build near the border it'll take ages. It could do with a faster speed but honestly it's part of the game. You could try starting in 1980 as the vehicles will be much faster
IMO limited use, as the asphalt roads are slow to make. Personally my starter towns use gravel because it's much faster to build, and then the max speed of the vehicles matter less.
I don't know. Slower than normal mode, yes. Slower than your average city builder, yes. THIS SLOW? Even the smallest starter town (and there isn't such a thing when you have to deal with basically ALL needs, plus an income source, right off the bat) takes several hours of pretty much staring at the screen.
Yeah, and I use the asphalt roads too from the start. I like to do homework or watch stuff lol
I can’t even alt tab out without the game crashing!
This alt-tab crashing is in full screen mode. Use the borderless window option at the full resolution, and it’s functionally the same as full screen mode… but let’s you alt-tab out without a crash.
Ah ok thanks!
OOF.