HARD mode discussion: successes? Failures? Strategies?

[codepants]

I had a "successful" game on easy or medium (can't remember which). Starting with millions of dollars and rubles makes it pretty easy to create everything you need with some million rubles left for fixing mistakes. I was self-sufficient after about 3 years.

I decided to start over on hard* and whoa... completely different experience. $500k USD and r1m. You really have to plan! It's not like you can build whatever you want or make mistakes. You have very little to play with and will always be waiting on money to come in. Unlike in easy/medium where you just build whatever you want.

One major difference is you can't afford good roads everywhere. Mud roads become your best friend and you have to choose wisely which you'll upgrade to gravel. I haven't been able to afford any asphalt roads yet. Same with footpaths - mud ones are free.

Power lines are similar. On easy/medium I just used the "best" medium voltage wire all the time. That's too expensive now -- I start with the cheapest and upgrade only when I have to. It's so much more immersive.

*All settings are "hard" except I turned fires down to normal. In my other game they were happening 1-2x a day and I didn't think I could handle that on hard. I didn't get a fire station in this game until my second year.

I'm curious who else has played on hard and:
- If you used the pre-built map or not. I think it would be very difficult to not use pre-built map, since housing would take up so much of your starting budget! Also, no way anyone can afford TV or radio station for a few years, so people will stay religious and thus need to visit churches.
- What your strategy was. Which industries did you build and what did you export, in what order?

Here's what I'm at so far:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1725122624

March of year 3, I started in 1960.

South of my screenshot is a coal deposit. My first try was to mine coal and export power. Coal processing and a power plant are so expensive though; power is a consistent source of income, but doesn't have a huge margin. I quickly went broke.

This is my second try. In the upper right there's oil. I built schools, kindergartens, shops, etc. in the two larger cities, and bused all workers to the oil factory. Imported power and just spent the first 6 months putting all my profits back into buying oil trucks to export fuel and bitumen. After getting I don't know how many trucks, maybe 35-40 I was finally reducing the amount of resources I had in the oil refinery. A few times I came very close to running out of money (less than r500), and therefore power, and having to start over.

Eventually I was able to add the farm you see in the middle, allowing me to self-sustain food, meat, and alcohol. Over time I added another two farms (one you see in the upper left, the other is off-screen to the left) which send their crops to the original one for processing. I now make about r20k a month exporting food and alcohol (which is not that much for all the freakin farms I have!)

This all took about a year. Eventually I could afford a gravel plant so I started making gravel roads to the customs house; I now export the same amount but for less fuel. After exporting the initial surplus of fuel and bitumen I had to cut my oil truck fleet by about half. As I've added more industry I've needed more fuel myself and had to cut it even more.

Year 2 I managed to afford a power plant; I imported coal and exported power for a very small profit (~r200/mo). Then I was just importing construction, electronics, and clothes, which is still where I am.

Eventually I could afford a coal mine (same place as in the first game, down south) and processing plant. At this point I was running out of college-educated people to run schools, etc., so I added a technical university with the surplus rubles you see in the screenshot. I still don't have enough professors to teach all the students there, but at least I am creating new ones instead of just having them die and be gone forever.

I just added a brick plant and I'm thinking about getting into steel next, though it will be an expensive startup cost -- iron mine + processing + steel plant are about r800k all told.

- - -

Anyone else have better luck? Anyone self-sustaining or raking it in by the point I'm at?

Any other strategies? I can't imagine how slow it would be exporting anything but oil.

Also, what do you do with the small towns? It seems like it would be a lot of headache to relocate everyone on the map to your starting place, but maybe worth it?

[tesTTrucker]

My experience....

2 oil rigs, one oil rafinery, one electric plant (import coal), one farm with 2 smal and 2 medium fields, one destilery (importing crops since it is not enough for better productivity) - exporting fuel, bitumen, alcohol and electricity. Yearly profit about half a milion rubles. Ofcorse. only gravel roads . I fullfil some other needs - for example hospital and cinema. Anyway. Im pretty frustrated with leveling terrain - so I'm going "on a vacation". Hope the devs will fix it soon. This is such a amazing game with a great potential.

[Buck Fell]

Your experience matches mine. Multiple failed attempts at trying to build a self funding economy in and around Viraw. It's a long way from the border so importing is expensive (30+/ton).

I do mostly the same, hard setting but with 1960 and normal fires. It's not so bad starting on the border and creating a town or starting with medium money but starting at Viraw with hard money is proving to be a challenge.

One thing that really matters is speed. Every day that goes by is more money lost to electricity/food/meat/clothing so being efficient early on with construction crews is important.

[maxiusdor]

I made a coal mining city close to the NATO border and tried Kolata as city for food and alcohol. I learnt later that I had to connect more the one border with high voltage at the soviet border to send more current-

[Vlad Tepes]

In addition to what the others have posted..

I always start in hard mode (financially) but set the fires and citizen anger to normal. You really have to plan.

Some basics:


Build close to the border.
Start using construction (not auto-build)
Build all roads and paths with dirt initially (free). You can always convert these
Build a small community of buildings close enough that you can get about 600-1000 people within walking distance of stores and schools.
One or two bus stops if necessary, run ONLY workers up to your factory (whatever you decide).
Farms are your friend :).. build lots of fields (again, free).
Fabric and Clothing factory. This (as of right now) seems to give you the most bang for the buck.

I start by laying down a construction building and add a bulldozer and excavator.
Make a LOT of fields (free) and one farm with a silo.
Connect the farm-silo-fabric-clothing.....
One bus route from the residential area to the industrial area.

Always needed in town :
Kindergarten
School
Groceries
Shop
Cinema
Pub
Fire dept
Hospital

Best if within walking distance, otherwise dedicate one or two buses to carry ONLY passengers.

Once you get it started, you will make about $10,000 to $20,000 per month. It is a long slow process.

You can then start expanding but be careful, pay attention to the people and their needs.

Converting from the dirt roads to pavement helps with people getting to work.

I usually use dirt roads for everything that only needs fire protection (switches, power supplies, etc.)

[codepants]

For the fabric+clothing chain - you import the chemicals?

[SBGaming]

I've had a number of Hard mode starts (with similar settings: normal fires). Mostly failed, but that is because I spend more time bogged down in the manual construction game, and forget to setup something to export to pay for my imports.

Two of my more successful attempts was with Oil and Power. In one I setup a mock town near the border with a Refinery, some housing, basic town services, hospital and fire station. The money rolled in very quickly, and to reduce the import cost of experts, was also able to build a University. Even with around 100 people on average working in the refinery at any one time, I was making Fuel and Bitumen faster than my trucks could haul it away, due to the short distance to the border. It was also a Large Customs House.

I could have let things run, and then expanded into other areas, but I got bored.

The other attempt I setup a Power Plant and a small town near the Soviet Border. I was originally going to import coal to start off with, but there was a patch of coal on the mountain above. Built a Coal Processing Plant, a Mine and some conveyors, which cost me $500K and 500K Rubles. I spent a bit more building a hospital and Fire station, and hit 370K Rubles left in the bank. I was exporting max power to two Soviet Power connections, and making a decent profit monthly. I ended up just staffing the Coal Processing Plant, and importing Coal Ore for half the price of Processed Coal, and having my own workers process it. I never got around to staffing the Coal Mine, but it would have meant increasing my population and driving people up a dirt road to the mine, and things were already reasonably profitable. I was running 3 Microbuses from the town a short distance to the Power Plant and Processing Plant, which was sufficient to keep things going.

I ended up using my remaining cash to setup a refinery and second town to get Oil Processing going. I imported the Oil at the border, trucked Oil to the Refinery, since I didn't want to build the town at the border, and trucked the Fuel and Bitumen back to the border. I used some Fuel for my fleet, cutting down on those import costs. I added some Fields, and an Agro-Farm later, bought some farm machinery and started producing crops. I ended up just exporting the crops, because I couldn't be bothered setting up a Food Factory. Money rolled in easily enough.

Electricity can be a reliable income, that doesn't require a large population to run a Power Plant. I had 2 of the 150 worker housing units which were mostly only 2/3rds full, so 200 people or so in that town to keep town services, Power Plant and Processing Plant running. The Refinery is a massive money sink, but can pay off reasonably well. If you can find Oil near the border, setting up some Oil Wells, and just trucking the Oil to the nearest Customs House can also bring in some labor-free cash. Farms likewise don't require any human labor, and the Fields are free, so it's just a matter of building the Agro-Farm, and perhaps a Food Factory to feed your existing population (and have something for export). Perhaps also exporting Alcohol if you have sufficient crop production.

Perhaps a good strategy is to setup something such as Power to give you a reliable income to pay for your imports. Then utilise your local workforce in place of the more expensive Foreign Labour to expand your settlement. A large chunk of the Power Plant budget went to Foreign Labor, so Auto-build only the minimum and then get into the manual construction game can extend what little money you may have remaining. Get something to export setup as fast as possible, or to supply what your population needs so that you can cut down on the cost of imports.

[CealLion]

hard mode is easy, set up a clothing factory close to the border and you're good

[jhughes]

Originally posted by Katnip:

hard mode is easy, set up a clothing factory close to the border and you're good

Or set up a refinery. Initially buy oil in and then use cash to build oil rigs to replace imports.

[Buck Fell]

Originally posted by Katnip:

hard mode is easy, set up a clothing factory close to the border and you're good

That's why I've been trying by not doing that. Try building at Viraw and importing/exporting everything. Quite a bit harder. Quite doable but it's easy to make a mistake and run out of funds and have everything grind to a halt. One time I ran out of cash before I finished the fire station, and then a critical bit of the chain caught fire, scratch one play through.

I try to manually import/build everything though It's actually quite a bit cheaper to simply auto build when you're in the middle of the map. The upfront costs are a bit higher but operating costs are low due to much less elapsed time.

[pryt]

Oil.

There are a few oil fields where you can put 95%+ oil rigs, and then sell the oil directly.

Build a cheap gravel road to the border, power lines too, build an apartment house, a grocery store, a small store, a school, a kindergarten and, most important, a fire department. Invite some immigrants and get going (oil rigs LOVE to burn).

As money comes in, start getting self sufficient, make an oil refinery and sell fuel and bitumen and just buy what you need, as soon you got everything you need, sell smaller amounts and all you need to buy in the end are vehicles and maybe the small road connections to buildings (they take forever to build manually ;))

[Rever]

I find that the difficulty is really effected by how close you set up your first town to a soviet port. It would be cool if part of hard mode prevented to from building close to the soviet ports to start. Not sure how that would look.
If you really want a challenge try starting in the middle of the map or generally far from a Soviet port. Extra hard after that would be add a rule no electrical connections to sell power.

[Vlad Tepes]

Originally posted by codepants:

For the fabric+clothing chain - you import the chemicals?

Yes initially, it still provides a profit. Later I would set up a Technical university and research the chemistry industry.

[Vlad Tepes]

These are all great comments! Interesting to see how others do this. I agree that setting up in the middle of the country would provide a really big challenge.

One thing I tried that failed was plastics. I had set up a small factory, and it was going great (moderate income). then suddenly the price of one of the inputs (can't remember if it was chemicals or what) shot through the roof and I was losing money like crazy.

[maxiusdor]

What tires me, after ALL those patches Games crushes sooo often.

[maxiusdor]

Originally posted by Parasol:

Originally posted by maxiusdor:

What tires me, after ALL those patches Games crushes sooo often.

Please, create a specific thread for this, don't post this here.

Oh, sorry I really posted in the wrong thread but after 3 crashes in 12 minutes you get a little angry too.