What industry to start with?

[Duke Flapjack]

I'm a little unclear as to how to begin as there is a plethura of industries to work with. It seems power production is first and foremost, but what after building the plant? Is it best to work on coal supply? Food production? Something that makes Rubles? Something different entirely? This is a very complex game and I'm not really sure what is ideal. How do you play?

Honestly based on the previews I expected this to be something like an Eastern Bloc TTD. I was rather surprised (pleasantly) to find it was as complex as it is. However, it is quite a bit overwhelming.

[assasincubique]

I personally think that the best industry to start with is oil and fuel refinery because it is quite ♥♥♥♥♥ expensive to buy, but also to sell (it is especially the case if you have the fuel gestion on) then coal for the electricity electricity :)

[Eltoron]

I'm starting with construction industry (gravel, asphalt, bricks etc)

[Inukshuk]

I also did coal, into bricks and power. This is what my what my republic looks like right now. on top of the hill is a small mining town. At the base of a hill is a brick, cement and power town.

What I have

[Dr. Fao Xi, DO/MD [31 CHN]]

The best I've found is to start with farms and then wait a month or two for them to grow crops, then you can start with a food factory and a brewery. Both buildings are relatively cheap to build ($36k for brewery, $68k for food factory) and the products are demanded by your population. Booze also sells well for exports, if you can produce enough grain to keep up with demand. I usually start with 4-5 farm areas, with at least a dozen fields each. The farms do not need workers to function, so they are a good start since you don't have to bus workers.

Build the farms out in the open areas away from your city and have trucks deliver grain to a silo attached to a train station, then rail in the crops to the main city to the brewery and food factory. Keep the factories near or in the city, so that you can either bus workers a short distance, or have them walk to the factories. Don't worry about pollution.

Oil is also a good one to start with since it is also automated (but you need electricity), but oil sells for cheap so It's good for balancing a budget if you are importing anything (like food and clothing early in-game), but not really for making huge profits. For that you would need to refine it into fuel and bitumen to export (again, place the refinery near a city or town for easy worker access).

Steel is a great way to earn huge profits, but it's really expensive to start up and takes a long time to build if you are using your own building materials. Selling ore (refined or not) is low-profit, I wouldn't even bother.

[Geronomofo]

Coal, then power, then bricks, then oil.

[gnrnr]

Playing on hard money I've found the best start to be oil with a refinery. Ended up with about 5 prefabs, plus the needed hospital, firestation, schools and kindergardens etc. Keep a really good eye on your school and make sure you have enough people to staff it. The refined product easily pays for the power and fuel consumption. I've finally built it up to now be producing gravel, asphalt, concrete, planks and bricks. I'm still buying in all food, electronics, clothing and coal. Next will be cement and then coal production, though I may chase steel production first, then coal then iron. I have sufficient construction offices now that roads and residential buildings only cost me the steel.

[Ernst Cornell]

probably the oil and crop production chains. both don't need people to work at the start and they sell quite well, specially oil.

the fuel refinery is definitvely a good investment specially if fuel managment enabled, as you need fuel for everything and fuel fetch a good export price. exporting food is also quite profitable, alcohol is probably a bit less profitable but it's good enough. the only con of the refinery and food factory is that you need workers, so you need to build a town with amenities for them.

also getting a construction office at the start is an excellent idea even if only to get the excavator and buldozer for terrain shaping. if you get gravel it also allows you to build gravel roads almost for free, a nice improvement over the mud roads.

finally, power production is an excellent investment, but the coal production chain requires workers, so i'm not sure if it's a good starter.

[MonkeyJack_NZ]

importing fabric and making clothing is good money

[Ernst Cornell]

Originally posted by MonkeyJackNZ:

importing fabric and making clothing is good money

if you have a town close to the border, then yeah it's quite good

[kbourko]

My two cents.

Definitely start with oil. But don't just pump and export it, build a refinery and sell bitumen and fuel instead. For that you'll be needing one refinery and at least five rigs.

Buy many-many oil trucks and guide them to the nearest large customs house, preferably two to avoid bottlenecks. The dirt roads are free, the distance won't matter much, since you can build your own gas stations on the way and order some of the trucks to drop 20% of the export fuel at them. This way you get your own free gas.

Same thing with the oil refinery - build a truck loading station and connect it with pipes to the refinery, it will help avoid the bottlenecks near the entrance to the plant.

You can of course build train service to the customs house if you have leftover money and manage to figure out how to plan the tracks. It all seemed too much of a hassle to me, so I just export via road.

Don't bother about electricity, just import it. Having your own power plant is too much of a hassle, since it doesn't produce constant output of electricity and is highly dependent on the number of workers present at the station. So screw that.

Then next thing: don't bus the workers to oil refinery, apparently it is either the game is too raw, or my citizens are lethargic, but very few take buses to the plant, even if you link the houses to the one bus station and the plant to the other and make just a single bus route with those two stops with a s..tload of buses serving it. It just won't work.
So just build many high capacity houses and gravel paths from them to the plant instead. Don't forget stores, soccer fields, kindergartens and school and whatnot.

That's it. Your rouble / $ account will do great after that.

[Duke Flapjack]

So the basic answer is there is no basic answer.

OK, I suppose I'll have to decide for myself what direction to go when I try again. I may try setting up an oil refinery first and go from there. That seems to be what more people have said than anything else.

[kbourko]

Setting up oil industry is as basic as it gets. Prices for fuel and bitumen fluctuate, but are constantly high and offer decent return. Logistics is not an issue since you'll be using your own fuel for the trucks.

I might also try setting up clothing industry soon. You can buy fabrics abroad into the warehouse located right at the border, then transport it yourself from the warehouse to the factory and then export clothing. From what I've seen, it also offers decent returns.

[Duke Flapjack]

I suppose petro-chemicals are right up the alley of a Soviet republic as well. Can't get a whole lot more communist.

[Midas]

The core problem is a different ones.

Refinery is a good start, but it needs 500 people so you can employ around (3 Shifts with 500 people are 1.5k people, with buffering (Illnes and so on 1.6k) 2k grown up there. For a smooth run you need a train to extract the product, its much more cost efficient than trucks and doesnt fill up to much border point.

An Easy and Cheap to maintain industry for the start is cloth. Just build three factories one for the cotton and two for the cloth itselfs. connect em via industry roads and you just need to import crops and chems. The rest is workhours and power. 6.5t jeans give you around 10k bugs that is enough to import basic needs of the pop. Foodstuff and Alcohol is more for internal usage.
Alcohol has a good money comeout 6t food give 1t alcohol. So 140 for food (importet) makes 240 for export. These industries help you getting your basics done.

So if you whant to get workers via bus/train to an workstation its easy done:

Build the stop. Allocate a residential housing for the station, so the workers go there. NOW the bus can grab em and bring em to your industry to work. Auto Assaign is only good for foodwalk industries.

People that say power is inconstant...
A Coalpowerplant has 20 worksslots. So the daylie need is 60 People. (8h a shift 20 per shift 3 shifts) A residential building with 100 Livingspaces alocated to the powerplant will garantuee you around 95% efficiency.


Farms
Only good with farms is they only need vehicles and MUCH space. Downside is that importing cost money, but saves space.


So my first starting city goes normaly for cloth industrie and power. Than i go for the needs of construction (but import the goods, to cheap to import in the beginning). After i handle 2-4 cloth industry complexes i start with foodchains.

[Nikolay_b]

Start with fuel and bitum.