Realistic Start - Low amount of foreign workers

[What Zitt Tooya]

Hello, I'm still somewhat knew with this game, let alone Realistic Start. I've figured out how to start building basic infrastructure but any part that requires workers takes so long as the border provides ~15-30 workers a few times a day. Even with my construction office buses constantly picking up the new waves of workers, it feels like I'm struggling to build anything since I have only a few amount of workers on a jobsite at once.

Anyway to get more workers off the bat?

[ling.speed]

Besides managing the CO and its busses better for marginal increase in pickup and working efficiency, not much afaik.

You can cut on what needs building thou. Initial workers that will help you build need place to sleep, electricity, few trucks moving water/sewage from/to customs, and maybe a small shop to get food. Thats it. Everything else (starting with hospital) you can relatively quickly build with own hands already.

[Bailing_Out]

Build a 2nd customs house, close to the border but with no part sticking over the border. Twice as many workers this way

[Silent_Shadow]

The easiest way to solve this problem is to build a pair of free bus stops near a customs house, link them to each other via the "where should workers go?" mechanic, and have a bus do nothing but pick up foreign workers at the customs house and force them off at one of the stations. These foreign workers will then cycle between the stations waiting to get picked up, and because they don't have a travel time limit like citizen workers do, they will never disappear (their waiting time limit is constantly refreshed).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2940593229

This creates a good worker source for COs or you can make a bus line with the 80 seat buses to take these workers closer to a site with many construction jobs and let them walk on or keep them at a station for nearby COs to use with other buses sized for the job (like minibuses for power lines or small buildings).

[whisper]

Since foreign labor is the biggest problem in the realistic mode start (second biggest is traffic at the customs office) I strongly recommend building an initial settlement VERY close to the border with only ~1-1.5k citizens and basic needs, which can be done pretty fast even just with foreign labor and resources, and use that labor source to build the construction area and the first proper city. You can invite citizens to the border settlement the first summer, it makes the early game MUCH less painful compared to trying to build a real city with foreign labor.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I just wrote a very long tangential reply in the what shenanigans did your republic go through thread on this topic, that basically what I found most interesting is the way these often made by corporations and near universally made by neoliberal corporatists aka Capitalists city sims treat raw materials and labour, that is to say, basically the entire consumer Capitalist neoliberal paragigm is predicated on infinite access to cheap raw resources and cheap workers/slaves, because Capitalism literally needs those two in order to maintain infinite growth otherwise it implodes under the weight of its own debt cannibalism. And so the constant issue of cheap unskilled workers and/or highly skilled professionals in a society is an interesting one to me, and shows the true intention of the corporate order toward the simp nationalists evidently too witless to understand they are union busting pawns of the establishment and nothing more.

Originally posted by whisper:

Since foreign labor is the biggest problem in the realistic mode start (second biggest is traffic at the customs office) I strongly recommend building an initial settlement VERY close to the border with only ~1-1.5k citizens and basic needs, which can be done pretty fast even just with foreign labor and resources, and use that labor source to build the construction area and the first proper city. You can invite citizens to the border settlement the first summer, it makes the early game MUCH less painful compared to trying to build a real city with foreign labor.

IIRC isn't there no mode for 1917 start? Because there shouldn't be any foreign labour at all since start, unless you began at 1950 where basically Soviet empire already was made and so huge blocs of millions of people at a time is moved around everywhere.

Basically what this shows me is every single society that is requiring a constant input supply of cheaply paid or unpaid workers being imported is literally doomed to fail. It's literally going to fail within however many generations since it began and nothing can stop that, just like anything needing infinite access to cheap resources like rubber in nonstop growth is doomed to fail just as surely as any civilization that's predicated on nonstop farm growth in one area using constantly growing pops in one citystate until soil exhaustion hits is literally going to be doomed to fail.

See this is the thing I think those of you who I'd call Moderns seemingly don't think about, where all you seem to fixate on the stars under some expectation you'll find rubber forehead aliens like you as opposed to true aliens, with it only occurring to some scifi fans the literal graveyard of species that the stars are, but it occurring to even fewer what the graveyard of empires the human earth truly is and had been and how perilously close to being counted among them each are, but much like a "I'm not the other girls" attitude they had the same occurs at the apex of each decadent civilization where they arrogantly assume that they are somehow different. This is partly why the Soviet version of the Socialist utopian dreamers failed so hard, and is exactly why the modern global order will fall apart like wet tissue paper in under the century, most likely within the lifetimes of people reading this.

The earth is already littered with long lost empires. Angkor Wat was only semi-recently rediscovered, beforethen it was truly buried beneath the jungle, just like the abandoned towns of black death era France were only discovered centuries later during aerial reconnaisance of WWII. Earth life itself only continues through its boom and bust cycles because of its ability to re-reach a certain enclosed homeostasis with no need for anything other than cheap, plentiful, inexaustible and "free" resource of sunlight, and tectonic plates ensuring some measure of atmopsheric renewal over million year timespans, and even that is going away in a billion years as the sun begins expanding into a red giant and finally burns out.

What I am saying is the writing's already on the wall. Wuhan Virus was a minor disease that almost brought down the neoliberal order. Now imagine what a real disease can do. Something like smallpox or pneumonic plague. The problem is scale, and city sims make it really obvious how hard it is to scale up and keep things going in homeostasis. The problem becomes when something tips the order's balance, can be a disease or natural disaster, something that makes the already delicate balance of the fragile system tip over into cascade failure mode where collapse and mass death is inevitable certainty. And one of those big warning signs for the Capitalist order that people should've known since the 1990s was the overreliance on importing labour rather than making your own, overreliance on trade with outside partners, overly relying on literally stealing ♥♥♥♥ from other people and lands like it's still the 1700s and acting like calling colonialism by another name makes it not only morally okay but also administratively competent, which it's clearly not. You're not seeing price rise because of inflation. The majority of price rise is due to corporate price gouging and profiteering, like for instance the comically laughable price of RTX 4080, which somehow people are still brainwashed by corporate propaganda aka marketing into thinking to buy for reasons that elude me. But it's also us directly hitting the wall with resources. You're going to see truly full on end stage Capitalism tier antics over the coming couple decades right before it fully hits the wall, things like door to door spongebob child coffin tier peak terminal neoliberalism stuff. Like for instance why bread prices doubled with the war in Ukraine, which was a major area everyone relied on globally for wheat prices, which nobody talks about the reason for that war and that is securing the last remaining resource strongholds on earth, despite the fact Ukrainian farmers don't get paid ♥♥♥♥ for feeding the world. Or the way phosphorous, lithium, all these resources are running out, even SAND for concrete is running out.

It's for these reasons I question that the average city sim player even is connecting the terrible dots into one big terrible big picture implication. The result of wuhan virus aka SARS 2.0 was really easy to extrapolate for that reason, so none of it was really surprising to me. I assure you people are going to get caught off guard with the next coming crises over the following 20 years. And interestingly, you could truly see some of the dire warnings why by just playing corporate backed city sims and realising what happens when you try building a system around infinite growth that relies on infinite magic resource growth and infinite easily exploitable slave labour or cheap foreign serf worker pools in careful homeostatic balance. Namely, what does happen to your simulated city when you finally can't import cheap foreign labour or you run out of access to those resources, even briefly.

[Bailing_Out]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

The easiest way to solve this problem is to build a pair of free bus stops near a customs house, link them to each other via the "where should workers go?" mechanic, and have a bus do nothing but pick up foreign workers at the customs house and force them off at one of the stations. These foreign workers will then cycle between the stations waiting to get picked up, and because they don't have a travel time limit like citizen workers do, they will never disappear (their waiting time limit is constantly refreshed).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2940593229

This creates a good worker source for COs or you can make a bus line with the 80 seat buses to take these workers closer to a site with many construction jobs and let them walk on or keep them at a station for nearby COs to use with other buses sized for the job (like minibuses for power lines or small buildings).

I gave you the clever award, wish I could give you more. I'm going to be using this

[GoRun]

20 foreign workers per day or 600 per month per customs is a game rule. Devs made a hard limit so starting town is needed.