Self sufficiency

[Tombo]

How many in-game years does it usually takes you to develop fully sufficient country? That doesn't need anything from the outside? Is it actually your goal? Or what is the goal in this game for you?

[johntarmac]

So what have we ascertained so far.... any map can be self sustaining until you grow your population to the size it cannot be self sustaining.

[forzion]

Publicado originalmente por Wartburger:

Forzion, the vanilla food factory doesn't produce 800 tons of food from 1200 tons of crops. The inffo window of hte factory shows 20 tons food from 42 tons crops. That makes in your example a sensible difference of 200 tons! Unless you use mods which give you abnormal advantages, my assessment about self-sufficiency on a vanilla map, in a decently populated republic, still stands.
Just a statistical example of the numbers we're talking about.
Once, I started a new republic on the vanilla map, before seasons, and I wanted to change from the classical oil start., so I decided to produce my own food for internal consumption and alcohol only for export. After twenty years, my republic had a population of 55 K. During those twenty years, I had produced 33000 tons of food, without export, on the contrary, I still had to import food, brecause my own production could not keep up the pace. To produce this amount of food, I used 69300 tons of crops in 20 years, or 3465 tons per year! I repeat once more, that was before the introduction of seasons. So, please, explain how you would produce enough crops to keep food production going and cover the supplementary need for crops for the other resources in the case of total independance?

Sorry for desinformation. I wrote without ability to check the information outside my home so it was misleading.,

I will use your own numbers now. So I mentioned that my 11 fields connected to one agrofarm were able to produce about 1700 tons of crops in one year. With 20 such farms you have 34000 tons of crops. That should be enough for 25k people. Am I right?

Other isssue is how much people and city areas you have. If you fill most of space with infrastructure it is natural that you cannot produce enough crops after a your population grows to certain extent. That way it is natural to buy crops from other regions. There is nothing wrong about it. For example the city of Moscow cannot produce enough food for itself and many other regions in the world because their land is used for something else.

That means more workers you have less independent you can be.To have 20k workers with independence is possible but to have 200k in such a small map is not. And it is absolutely OK.

Publicado originalmente por johntarmac:

So what have we ascertained so far.... any map can be self sustaining until you grow your population to the size it cannot be self sustaining.

[forzion]

Publicado originalmente por Wartburger:

@forzion
So you mean that building 220 fields (20 farms with each 11 fields) is the solution to the problem? Please have a look at my last intervention, where I wrote:
Quote. I didn't say that it's impossible to feed your people with farming, but I wrote that it isn't possible when you want to stop all imports. At the moment you want to produce everything yourself, you can't feed your population anymore, because of what specialists call "Ground space management" on the vanilla map. Unquote
With 220 fields on your map, where will be built the rest of the infrastructure to do everything on your own, as we are talking about self-sufficiency? That is the real problem, together with sustainability (duration in time).

IMO it is simple. You choose what you want. the area to use for. If you go for industries you cannot use your soil for farms. We do not need to argue about it. It is about planning. You can plan and create a self-sufficient map but there are conditions and limitation you need to take into consideration.

You can have maybe 20k population self-sufficient but you cannot have 500k population self-sufficient. The land is limiting you because this is a small map not the whole earth. It is like arguing about how fast can we travel. You can travel about 50 km/h on a bike for example and you can travel 800 km/h on a plane. With bike it is not possible but I am sure someone would like to try that. These maps are like the bike, are quite limited. If you want to go beyond that limit you need to change the vehicle.

[forzion]

I do not like how we need to argue about game which should be fun to play. Why we need always to be right?

I did not spent enough hours playing the game to be able to achieve self sufficiency. I got my republic to about 20k population starting hard with about 300 workers invited from abroad. I was eliminating any maintenance imports step by step but it takes time to self build your country and wait for you workers to multiply.

IMO it is all about logistics. It is not that you cannot produce enough food but you cannot move it to shops in time.

I begun play in small and expanded slowly over time. building power steel oil and others step by step. If I started producing food I did not need to import it anymore. If I started producing alcohol I did not needed to import it anymore and then steel and we can go on.

You wrote that you do not need extra goals and we are arguing about someone having goal to be self-sufficient. I say it is possible at certain conditions but it is really hard to achieve then you set conditions in which it is even harder. The only way to prove what is true is if someone achieves the true self-sufficiency.

I do not need to prove I am right or you are wrong. It is enough to know there is at least one challenge nobody was able to overcome and that is maximal self-sufficiency on vanilla map.

Here I have a republic where I produce food and only 600 tons of crops was imported because I was unable to move thousands of tons of crops into my single food factrory in time. And that is far from using up all available place for farms. I imported about 800 tons of food and exported about 1800 tons. I have about 20k people and it is on vanilla map. The issue then is not if I can produce enough food but if I can distribute it in time.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2188344602
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2188344572
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2188344539

[forzion]

I was not upset at all. In my opinion it is good to have healthy discussion and this all shows us how many unexplored options there are for future game developement and how complex it is. There is no simple and effective calculation for the future. It is much better to be open minded and play with some real testing and have fun than to have some imaginary calculation.

[angry_bosmer]

Publicado originalmente por johntarmac:

So what have we ascertained so far.... any map can be self sustaining until you grow your population to the size it cannot be self sustaining.

Actually yeah that seems to be the case. There's a finite space for housing and farming so there's a limit, though reaching that number would be a hell of a commitment!

[angry_bosmer]

Publicado originalmente por Wartburger:

I didn't want to boast, because that is not a valid argument to be used, but I have nearly 2000 hours of playing since I bought the game.

Nice boasting :P

[angry_bosmer]

Also to answer the original questions of ''how long it takes?". Depending on whether you play with building or cash buying, depending on your use of loans or starter money... you should usually manage in the first 10-15 years to have most of the industries. Then its a question of setting up your distribution to properly manage. I never turn off autobuy, I just leave it for emergencies and I try to get my yearly imports to next to nothing.

Its more about setting up all the industries rather than in game time... so the playtime commitment is really high to manage all those chains. You could make a self sufficient country in the first year if you just use all the loans, its really up to you. I don't treat it like a real endgame myself.

My end game is the Pacific Fleet challenge: to build my own pacific fleet (2 kievs, 1 kirov, half a dozen destroyers and a dozen missile subs). That requires something like 1-2 billion rubles in blueprints (late game inflation gets wild), thus the kind of economy you need to even buy the blueprints and build them all in a reasonable time is really crazy. By 1975 I was only exporting 100-200 million which was not even close to enough. Recently started over and I`ll see if I can reach it with only construction and limited autobuild.

[m61a1]

My goal is to do better each time...lol

[noxylophone]

I look at this game as something like a living model railroad. The goal is just to build interesting (and nominally self-sustaining, if not entirely self-sufficient) towns and industries.

[anok_peace]

Hey Wartburg, please stop spreading the word that full autonomy is not possible. It is possible even on the original hilly map. Of course there are mod maps where that's not possible.
There are large flat agricultural areas in the northwest and northeast and a large one between Leszcie and Tirov possible. And many other smaller...
You have to keep the space free for it and build the industries and cities rather in hilly landscapes, which is not easy and gave me a lot of headache especially in the beginning.
The best way to get the most out of the land is to smooth the landscape with the RMB_function of the roads, so that there are gentle slopes in the area, which are also accepted by the fields.

In principle, a self-sufficient economy may require a population of 80,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. Depending on how effective your economy and, more importantly, the distribution of goods is.
In my oldest republic I have a population of 130,000 inhabitants - more would be conceivable, but my processor can't do that - and with around 140 large fields and one modded big greenhouse, four vanilla food factories, two breweries and a slaughterhouse I produce all my own food, alcohol and clothes. Beside all other industries which are also fully developed, partly several times, and also completely self-sufficient.
Without the winter mode I needed almost half less, I never counted the fields before.

But I don't do the building myself anymore, because this republic has become for me mainly a "beautification project" and I don't want to wait forever until everything is finished. But it was and is possible to build 90% self-sufficient, the infrastructure would exist. The limit is often found in the infrastructure like roads or energy. To make changes here is in fact often not possible without the automatic mode, because half of the population will flee. And I personally do not want to subordinate everything to the goal of self-sufficiency

My goal was in any case a self-sufficient economy, as well as a realistic urban development with efficient industry and distribution structures. Especially the last two "goals" are a never-ending project.

[forzion]

At least we have few challenges to face because arguments are useless and any Facts are just numbers which can be interpreted any way with possibility of different numbers and calculation from elsevhere.

I guess there will be opportunities in the future when there will be global events and those will have significant impact on any existing economy forcing people to change their industrial mixes and adjust distribution systems.

The goal when playing any game is to have some fun. For me there are games I played at max only few or dozens of hours and paid much more money for that. After a while I finished the game, got frustrated or lost interest. Of course there are games I pĺayed hundreds and thousands of hours and until now I did not lost interest even I could have a break.

With this game you pay roughly 20 euro/dolar/pounds and you spend hundreds of hours building one single republic with constant advance while planning and tweaking your systems. And there are people who do not want to pay even that much.

For me if I spend at lest 5x more hours in the game as I pay for it in euros, it is worth the money. And then gameplay itself is not everything which the game offers. You can spend time watching others gameplay videos or screenshots, reading discussions etc and spend time not playing the game with other activities connected to the game. And that makes a game good and fun if you get real life connections with new amazing people and you can share your fun a passion.

There are people who build in a way I do not like but does not matter this is not a Command & Conquer style game where you need to defeat and destroy others and I really like that aspect. You can have 1k, 10k or 100k people, you can have unlimited or unlimited money, one train or hundreds, with imports or exports, but it does not matter as long as you have your fun. Self-sufficiency is just one hidden milestone with many others following. I have seen some crazy builds absolutely unrealistic and others so beatifully realistic during the existence of the game. I read about great ideas and met some amazing people thanks to this game and much more is comming as it will stay with us for few decades if there will be no end of the real world.

[forzion]

Publicado originalmente por Wartburger:

Forzion, I totally agree with you!
I already wrote several times that I absolutely love this game
(I think I am one of the record holders in hours of playing time), and that it was worth 100 times every cent I spent on it; even declared that WRSR was the very best purchase I ever made what games are concerned. And yes, once more, everbody plays it his way.
But nevertheless, I have the right to express my opinion about the gameplay and its mechanics. And I don't have the habit of advancing something without factual elements. So, I don't like to be treated as a false prophet and my arguments being countered by vague declarations which are only on the "wishful thinking" side.
And numbers really matter. A field only can have a maximum output and not a ton more. This maximum has been calculated already and exposed here.

You know I read or heard lot's of real life facts/arguments which impact real life and can even kill you. And I just count myself as enemy to certrain people just based on my beliefs and my opinions.

So I suggest you should take any accusations connected to game discussions less seriously. In real life you can be above things and here you can too. Many arguments and accusations come from ignorance and lack of experience.

I would guess this discussion inspired some people to try be self-efficient and they will have fun on their way to it even if they will not be able to achieve that. Others are proud what they have already achieved. And some can get new ideas and thus adjust their way of thinking about the game or even real life.

When I look at the title of this discussion and questions under it I can see many objections and ask more questions. The main one is: What is actually self-sufficiency? Or: What are your goals in the game? And then we can ask: How do your opinions and goals impact my gameplay? or: What are the goals of this discussion? or. Do we need to have all the answers?

It is like in real life,we just cannot get any definitive conclusion but we can share ideas in friendly manner.

[Marcus Aurelius]

The question in the title was about "...fully self-sufficient country.
Forzion, I adore you! You have a a very good ability to express things in a pleasant way..
For your information, I looked up the definition of self-sufficiency in the online Cambridge Dictionnary (see link below). It defines self-sufficiency like this.
Quote
"The quality or state of being able to provide everything you need, especially food, without the help of other people or countries: "
Unquote.
But some paragraphs lower it says also:
Quote.
"The fact of being able to provide everything you need for yourself, especially food, without buying from or being helped by others: "
Unquote.
This definition corresponds totally to the one I used in my interventions.
Link: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/self-sufficiency

[forzion]

Publicado originalmente por Wartburger:

The question in the title was about "...fully self-sufficient country.
Forzion, I adore you! You have a a very good ability to express things in a pleasant way..
For your information, I looked up the definition of self-sufficiency in the online Cambridge Dictionnary (see link below). It defines self-sufficiency like this.
Quote
"The quality or state of being able to provide everything you need, especially food, without the help of other people or countries: "
Unquote.
But some paragraphs lower it says also:
Quote.
"The fact of being able to provide everything you need for yourself, especially food, without buying from or being helped by others: "
Unquote.
This definition corresponds totally to the one I used in my interventions.
Link: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/self-sufficiency

There is only one thing self-sufficient in real world. :D

It is the earth. But there is lack of things in places due to inefficient distribution caused mainly by human greed. If you cannot achieve super self-sufficiency in real life why would you bother in game? The point is that there is the element of time always and things change over time.

Let me show you a simple accident you can have in game and it can ruin any temporal self-sufficent country. Your power plant catches fire. All your power is down. Your trains stop working. Your firefighters are blocked by a train at road-rail crossing. Your distribution storage full of food burns down and your people do not get food for next 2 months. Then 20% of your people escapes and you are not able to sustain enough food production. You need to do adjustments while another 20% of people leaves.

Because of this you can focus on self-sufficiency but do not need to bother if you are not absolutely self-sufficient. Accidents happen and element of time is always there.

In my opinion it is na achievement to have zero imports at least one month and even bigger to have them at least for a year. Then there are no automatically generated stats in the game. If someone is able to achieve that with any number of workers then he achieved it. Good job!

Now let me give you one ultimate achievement better tham self-sufficiency. Just build a system where you set everything in such a way that you do not need to do anything except watching and enjoying the view for hours. Everything would just work as intended and no adjustment would be needed. But I would guess that will be not so much fun if completed.