Early Starts Discussion

[Walta Gaming]

I would love to make a thread dedicated to early starts where we can discuss strategies, challenges and suggestions for an official early start mode down the line! In particular I am interested in learning what year people start in and how do they deal with transportation and construction. Do you use a lot of cable cars and ships to offset the slow trucks? Do you run your construction industry slow and steady or do you build a massive fleet of trucks for quick construction? Are you able to handle horses or do you start in the 1910's when trucks are available to be used? Do you use vanilla buildings or use themed buildings from the workshop? What kind of settings do you use (ie starting money, realistic mode, etc...)?

[Silent_Shadow]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Eldiora:

MIght be a stupid question, but you are all writing early starts from 1900. My earliest start date I can choose is 1960, do I have something wrong in my game?

You have to mod the game to do early starts.

[Walta Gaming]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Eldiora:

MIght be a stupid question, but you are all writing early starts from 1900. My earliest start date I can choose is 1960, do I have something wrong in my game?

There are a few scripts in the workshop that change the start date of the game to whatever you want. However if you do this you need about 100 mods to make the game look and play like it's in the early 1900's. It's a load of fun through starting off with super slow trucks or even horses. The game pace is much slower so you need to be more careful with planning and focus more on trains / ships as opposed to the 1960 start where you can use hundreds of trucks to run most industries.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zentra:

Almost all of my Early starts are in 1929-1932. Nothing like a good Depression, eh? I just like the era though. Some cool vehicles back then. With mods, I can actually have a decent start with a workable catalog of vehicles to work with. There are even some cool steam trains you can run that act like diesels. No steam needed. Just fill with fuel. Some are fast! Anything earlier tends to go way to slow for no real good reason (to me). When I do play in that mode, I tend to slow time down 4x with one of the available scripts so that I linger within the 30's-40's for what seems forever. When a new vehicle comes available it's more impactful for sure. It's almost worth a parade! LOL. In that mode, I think I made it to the 60's once. That last run, I regretted not being fully sustainable due to heavy inflation. Slowing down time does not "save you" time. It just slows your progression. Inflation will speed along just fine though. It was impossible to play further since I wasted resources and time in making it look nice rather than solving real needs. It went bust before I could solve. However, it was fun.

That's my favourite era as well although I find the usual game pace to be slow enough. I have never played a game for more then 25 years since I usually make too many mistakes and have to start over after 15-20 years.

Also seems like in the workshop all the good early start vehicles are western which ads an interesting dynamic. In one of my games I played with infinite money but challanged myself to build all my vehicles. Even with limited money this might be a good idea in the 1920's and 1930's to get the good trucks / construction equipment then produce it at a small vehicle workshop. I am just not sure how to make a good income of dollars without a boarder nearby. Shipping something out might work but it would be super slow for a ship to travel the whole map and back. Maybe even starting a mini town on a western boarder would work (ie. just export oil)?

[Novu]

Use this. It is a mod. Normal game only starts in 1960.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2469811942

I have done two starts in 1900 and my most recent game started in 1880. Build everything with horses. It takes 20 years just to get a starter town constructed in realistic mode.

[MrKrabs]

It is possible to start before 1960.
However it´s not in the game yet.
Maybe it will be implemented at a later stage as a DLC.

Check here.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2042302963

[MG83]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Ah yes the easy way to start. I guess it makes sense you can make money just exporting raw resources although I find it a bit silly since you can make money without having a town setup. Just feels weird running a republic without having any people living in it. In one of my 1900 starts I tried to rush steel but that was a flop. It took until 1908 to set everything up and by that time I had too much debt to keep going. Since then I only do clothing with ships or trains if a river is too far away.

Well steel in the game makes almost no profit so it causes debit. If you mine your coal and iron then its ok due to profit of coal and iron compensates it.

I do not find it silly due to many real life economics of several countries are exactly based on exporting oil and raw materials :D But i agree its sort of easy method to get high amount of income :)

[Walta Gaming]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von MG83:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Ah yes the easy way to start. I guess it makes sense you can make money just exporting raw resources although I find it a bit silly since you can make money without having a town setup. Just feels weird running a republic without having any people living in it. In one of my 1900 starts I tried to rush steel but that was a flop. It took until 1908 to set everything up and by that time I had too much debt to keep going. Since then I only do clothing with ships or trains if a river is too far away.

Well steel in the game makes almost no profit so it causes debit. If you mine your coal and iron then its ok due to profit of coal and iron compensates it.

I do not find it silly due to many real life economics of several countries are exactly based on exporting oil and raw materials :D But i agree its sort of easy method to get high amount of income :)

Wait really? I thought steel made a lot of money just like oil. Coal and Iron is pretty cheap to import and steel sells for a lot of money. I guess in my current game I need to stop exporting steel and turn it into something more valueble. In both my steel starts I made a coal facility for bricks, electricity and the steel mill. I import iron since most of the time it's too far away to get too and the mines take up too much workers to be running 2 early in the game.

[MG83]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Wait really? I thought steel made a lot of money just like oil.

i have a profit comparison calculation which did not show high profit there from my calculations (pre waster waste) then i made an entire 5-10 year game play test just for that to see how it will be. I designed an economy where i buy coal and iron from border and bring it to steel mill and turn it to steel and sell it back. My steel mill was at centre of map including the city that brought manpower to it. things bought from border by rail ( diesel rail) then steel sold back same way. end result was stagnating economy where there were no good income of money and after a while price increased and expor price decrased (slowly) then it was no longer profitable as city then i scrapped the idea to put steel mill to centre to make it pump steel to build entire map.

but if you can some how manage to make it with producing your own coal and iron it makes profit. But for that i had to build 3 different cities or 2 as start . Then i said for that idea : "lass es schwimmen in benziiiin" like the rammstein.

https://youtu.be/z0wK6s-6cbo?si=bV26rZg4Gq5FKM_a

[Silent_Shadow]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von MG83:

Well steel in the game makes almost no profit so it causes debit. If you mine your coal and iron then its ok due to profit of coal and iron compensates it.

I do not find it silly due to many real life economics of several countries are exactly based on exporting oil and raw materials :D But i agree its sort of easy method to get high amount of income :)

Wait really? I thought steel made a lot of money just like oil. Coal and Iron is pretty cheap to import and steel sells for a lot of money. I guess in my current game I need to stop exporting steel and turn it into something more valueble. In both my steel starts I made a coal facility for bricks, electricity and the steel mill. I import iron since most of the time it's too far away to get too and the mines take up too much workers to be running 2 early in the game.

Steel can be profitable; it depends on the prices for steel, coal, and iron. Some people also think that the average cost of a workday for citizen workers is 9 rubles or more (in 1960s rubles) which skews their calculations. If you look at the bottom of the "Domestic production and consumption" section in the "Economy and Trade tab," the average cost for a citizen to produce one workday is displayed, and in 1960 it is usually far less than a ruble per workday.

In my game I got these prices:
+ 43 tons of steel per day @ 290.27 rubles/ton (export) = + 12,481.61 rubles/day
- 375 tons of coal per day @ 15.16 rubles/ton (import) = - 5,685 rubles/day
- 200 tons of iron per day @ 16.88 rubles/ton (import) = - 3,376 rubles/day
- 500 workdays per day @ 1 ruble per workday (Econ & Trade) = - 500 rubles/day
- 33 MWh per day @ 1 ruble per MWh (import) = -33 rubles/day
Profit = 2,887.61 rubles

[MG83]

@ Silent are you again talking as you always do as hoax or have you made an actual test to prove your calculations are correct ? i assume 2. option.

[Walta Gaming]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Silent_Shadow:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Wait really? I thought steel made a lot of money just like oil. Coal and Iron is pretty cheap to import and steel sells for a lot of money. I guess in my current game I need to stop exporting steel and turn it into something more valueble. In both my steel starts I made a coal facility for bricks, electricity and the steel mill. I import iron since most of the time it's too far away to get too and the mines take up too much workers to be running 2 early in the game.

Steel can be profitable; it depends on the prices for steel, coal, and iron. Some people also think that the average cost of a workday for citizen workers is 9 rubles or more (in 1960s rubles) which skews their calculations. If you look at the bottom of the "Domestic production and consumption" section in the "Economy and Trade tab," the average cost for a citizen to produce one workday is displayed, and in 1960 it is usually far less than a ruble per workday.

In my game I got these prices:
+ 43 tons of steel per day @ 290.27 rubles/ton (export) = + 12,481.61 rubles/day
- 375 tons of coal per day @ 15.16 rubles/ton (import) = - 5,685 rubles/day
- 200 tons of iron per day @ 16.88 rubles/ton (import) = - 3,376 rubles/day
- 500 workdays per day @ 1 ruble per workday (Econ & Trade) = - 500 rubles/day
- 33 MWh per day @ 1 ruble per MWh (import) = -33 rubles/day
Profit = 2,887.61 rubles

The issue with these numbers is that there is a huge amount of infastructure needed to keep that steel mill going. There is interest on loans, waste disposal costs, food costs, fuel costs, town maintance etc... 1 ruble per workday sounds way too low when you factor in all the costs assosiated with running a town. It's even worse in early starts where building large industries takes many years and you can't build dense apartment blocks (towns are usually about 3,500 people before you need extra transportation or you need to build more core infastructure).

I think it's possible but at the end of the day it sounds like it's not the most optimal industry for importing / exporting resources. In my attempts it just takes a very long time to set everything up and after 8 or so years when everything is running it usually takes another 5 years to get enough workers on location and to get the coal industry running (importing coal is too much using early start equipment unless you want an army of trains / ships).

It makes sense really, steel is used for a lot of advanced manufacturing so it should not be a big export industry. It makes more sense to refine it then sell those goods (ie cars) for an even bigger profit. I think steel towns can work where steel exporting is used as a stop gap before a car industry can be setup.

[Walta Gaming]

Here's another question, is it ever worth selling excess boards / bricks? In my current game I have these high capacity construction buildings that are barely running because I don't need all that many bricks / boards for construction. My brick factory is attached to an under utilized coal mine so producing bricks is virtually free. I am just not sure if it's worth adding another 10 or so workers to the brick factory then spending money on train fuel to ship them out.

[Silent_Shadow]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von MG83:

@ Silent are you again talking as you always do as hoax or have you made an actual test to prove your calculations are correct ? i assume 2. option.

Why even bother asking with such a poisoned perspective?

Here are the prices I got in a fresh map:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3103325784
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3103325851
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3103325919
Here is the average cost of 1 workday in a very young republic in 1960:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3103328896
I just substitute 1 ruble per day for the price for a workday and per MWh to make the math easier.

I would appreciate seeing the prices you all get for a fresh map in 1960, if you don't mind.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

The issue with these numbers is that there is a huge amount of infastructure needed to keep that steel mill going. There is interest on loans, waste disposal costs, food costs, fuel costs, town maintance etc... 1 ruble per workday sounds way too low when you factor in all the costs assosiated with running a town. It's even worse in early starts where building large industries takes many years and you can't build dense apartment blocks (towns are usually about 3,500 people before you need extra transportation or you need to build more core infastructure).

While the investment cost is pretty substantial for a steel mill, the running costs are more than covered by the profit (over 2000 rubles per day with imports), especially if you make your own coal or iron. Now whether the return on investment is good or not, I don't know, but the steel mill is not inherently unprofitable.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Walta Gaming:

Here's another question, is it ever worth selling excess boards / bricks?

Technically yes, fuel costs are low enough that even quarried stone can be profitably exported by truck, but the margins are pretty low and this adds to customs house traffic, so I wouldn't recommend it.

[MrKrabs]

I take my stones from the quarry to the rock crusher by trucks. If no rocks are required the trucks make a little detour to the customs which is not to far away. Give me some 20 000 rubles per year.
Didn't check the fuel though.
But it doesn't matter to me as long as the wheel is spinning.

With board I do something alike.
But I use the "carpenter shed" mod.
That gives me enough for the CO's.
Any left over will be brought to the harbor where a small ship is passing by. This ship has the task to import prefabs. And on it's way back to the border it takes a few boards with it.

[MrKrabs]

I should ad that I use the "better customs" mod so high traffic at the border is no issue for me.

[Walta Gaming]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von MrKrabs:

I take my stones from the quarry to the rock crusher by trucks. If no rocks are required the trucks make a little detour to the customs which is not to far away. Give me some 20 000 rubles per year.
Didn't check the fuel though.
But it doesn't matter to me as long as the wheel is spinning.

With board I do something alike.
But I use the "carpenter shed" mod.
That gives me enough for the CO's.
Any left over will be brought to the harbor where a small ship is passing by. This ship has the task to import prefabs. And on it's way back to the border it takes a few boards with it.

Ah so worth it if there is excess capacity then. I am stuck with a single rail boarder post right now so I might just sell very small amounts of bricks / boards. Importing iron and exporting waste has almost completely clogged the single track as it is. I may setup another dock with a rail connection to export some of the spare building materials. Maybe I can even get rid of my stone since it's getting very annoying getting traffic popups when my construction industry slows down. Heck I am even overflowing with coal right now since I am just using a small steel mill mod with a vanilla mine.