A critic about the new maps DLC

[Deco Boladasso]

I did love the DLC, and i think that good maps based on real socialist countries are great. However, I have some things I would like to point out and discuss:
i)there are only populated maps, and this makes it hard to play on realistic mode, specially because it has no industry;
ii)some maps as Poland have too much population;
iii)some maps are too small (like Austria);
iv)some maps have western borders were they shouldn't (like in Poland, having western borders with the GDR);
v)some maps have issues in my pov when it comes to realism and I'll use East Germany as an example, as a)you have West Berlin populated and thus you have people kinda comming from the West to work on the East, I think it would be better to leave that space without population or usable buildings, with just some infrastructure and western vehicles that couldn't be accessed without tearing down the wall; b)Brandembourg Gate is misplaced; c)there's the Berlin Wall but no wall on its western borders with West Germany; d)I'm not sure if that's intentional but there are too few resources on the GDR map; e)connections to the West (cities on border) doesn't match real checkpoints on the GDR's borders;
vi)there are few to no usable rivers on the maps;
vii)maps from socialist countries on other parts of the globe would be a nice addition due to the Biomes DLC (such as Chile, Afghanistan, Vietnam, parts of the USSR or China, etc);
viii)it would be great, as we have post-war Eastern European countries, to be able to change the start date and have some outdated infrastructure in those countries, so we could play as if taking over after the Communist governments were set up.

Please feel free to share your toughts on the DLC. I did enjoy it, but I did find these were issues with this content.

[Bata Sale]

Hey devs, kudos on adding Yugoslavia map, but the city of Podgorica was called Titograd at the time.

[OLO]

Maps look fine and interesting but to reflect realistic locations dev place maps and city and .... mountains . I understand the reason why ....
Because of that, some maps are simply not FUN to play - like Yugoslavia 50% is useless (unusable)
Austria turn out to be to small (in scale) - I get it .. its small country after all :)
N korea - well again mountains ruins the experience
Poland GDR and France seems to be playable (fun)
Once gain - they made maps very well but someone decide to make it Difficult as equivalent of FUN .
They pass point of "difficult" to point of "NO FUN" to play.
Once again - I pay for this DLC to support devs - lets hope they will come with some more worthy DLC in future :)

[MrKrabs]

Originally posted by OLO:

- well again mountains ruins the experience

What´s wrong with mountains?
I find easy pkayable maps quite boring.
In general some challenge gives some spice to the game imo.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384708163

[gwahazar]

I guess, due to lack of surface flowing water mechanics, poop goes only to the sea level, thus can't flush it in the mountain range.

[MrKrabs]

Hah, I totally forgot about that.
Luckily there is a mod for that.
But I got your point.

[Deco Boladasso]

Originally posted by OLO:

Maps look fine and interesting but to reflect realistic locations dev place maps and city and .... mountains . I understand the reason why ....
Because of that, some maps are simply not FUN to play - like Yugoslavia 50% is useless (unusable)
Austria turn out to be to small (in scale) - I get it .. its small country after all :)
N korea - well again mountains ruins the experience
Poland GDR and France seems to be playable (fun)
Once gain - they made maps very well but someone decide to make it Difficult as equivalent of FUN .
They pass point of "difficult" to point of "NO FUN" to play.
Once again - I pay for this DLC to support devs - lets hope they will come with some more worthy DLC in future :)

Exactly. And yet it not realistic too. It would be one thing to have it hard because its realistic: lets say, huge coal and ore are on the mountains and so its harder to extract. That is ok. MIsplaced buildings, terrains that doesn't match the real country, missing key cities on some maps while others have too much of a city spam, lack of resources to most countries: that is not funny.

[kessie51]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

I don't know why people are saying these maps are unsuited or too hard for realistic mode, as having a native population instead of paying for immigrants cuts out a huge starting expense, and you can just ignore native citizens until you need/want them. Larger populations also reduce the price changes from trading, so if anything populated starts should be the easiest starts you can get.

It would be ideal to have an option to have unpopulated maps. I don't think I'm alone in preferring them, but I accept other people feel differently. So why no choice? It seems so obvious I cannot understand why it wasn't issued that way.

As to your argument about costs, many of the population are uneducated, which you seem not to have allowed for in your costings. If I want to invite uneducated immigrants I still have the cost to educate them but get a large boost in loyalty in return. I'm not convinced that applies to inherited populations as they are clearly not "Foreign".

I also don't like remote places being deserted and losing loyalty because they can't access stuff while infrastructure is being built. Maybe that;s due to the way I play but aren't we always being told we can play how we want? To remove such a fundamental choice is completely out of line with that,

Basically, the usual rules of life are; Whoever pays the money gets to choose - except we can't. That's wrong.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by kessie51:

It would be ideal to have an option to have unpopulated maps. I don't think I'm alone in preferring them, but I accept other people feel differently. So why no choice? It seems so obvious I cannot understand why it wasn't issued that way.

You do have this option. You can just set the slider for population all the way to the left if you want an unpopulated map, but you probably meant a clean map devoid of buildings, which can also be done by copying just the terrain into a new map editor file and then replacing the missing customs houses and foreign power connections in the map editor.

Originally posted by kessie51:

As to your argument about costs, many of the population are uneducated, which you seem not to have allowed for in your costings. If I want to invite uneducated immigrants I still have the cost to educate them but get a large boost in loyalty in return. I'm not convinced that applies to inherited populations as they are clearly not "Foreign".

All adult citizens are educated at the start of the game and some are even university educated, so you don't have to pay ~400,000+ rubles for your first 1000 workers. These workers even come with their own housing that you don't have to pay for or even heat, and their housing quality is going to be as good or higher than most of the starting apartments you can build before researching better ones. The cost savings are huge.

Also, all uneducated workers need is around a couple months of schooling to become basic educated workers. Since each worker needs about 1 ruble per workday (roughly 1 ruble per three days) and since two workers can teach 12 students, it costs maybe 30 to 48 rubles to fully educate a citizen from an education level of 0.00. That's far less than the 400+ ruble fee for each immigrant.

Originally posted by kessie51:

I also don't like remote places being deserted and losing loyalty because they can't access stuff while infrastructure is being built. Maybe that;s due to the way I play but aren't we always being told we can play how we want? To remove such a fundamental choice is completely out of line with that,

Native citizens do not change their stats until activated, so you can just leave them somewhere until you are ready for them. From there, your choices for these remote towns and villages are:
• Ignore them and let the citizens who wouldn't be on an unpopulated run escape or die.
• Abandon them; relocate their workers and allow the villages/towns to fall into ruin.
• Put them on life support; i.e. only spend resources to repair the buildings.
• Connect them to another town for services/jobs.
• Build the services and utilities they need to exist on their own.

Fixing loyalty and other stats is pretty easy too and costs far less than paying for more immigrants, so all of these approaches are valid. These are also far more choices than just having to get immigrants, so I really don't agree that your choice is constrained here.

Originally posted by kessie51:

Basically, the usual rules of life are; Whoever pays the money gets to choose - except we can't. That's wrong.

Well, you pay for what is there or you don't buy it; that's what you get to choose. You don't throw money at someone and expect them to accommodate your every request.

[Taffer]

I would have really liked if the maps were like Scenario's, with scripted events and goals to finished for gold-silver-bronze or something, that would be really an instant-buy. Now im like, there are already dozens of maps to play and each one takes 100s of hours on realistic, so why have more?

[Lone Shadow]

Having population and buildings and towns suck. Even if you set population to zero, the only way to play is to manually go around and stop citizens from moving in on each settlement which takes ages. If you don't do this you end up with a couple of citizens moving in to some obscure area with no infrastructure and then complain and cause dramas.
They should've had the option of playing the map with no infrastructure pre-built like they did with the first DLC.
Some maps are ridiculously small, with minimal resources and building room.
Also if you try playing on these maps, many of the houses etc are not available to duplicate. You can't expand an existing town in the same style housing in many cases.
Love the game, have well over 1,000 hours but the new maps suck.

[Sirius Czech]

Originally posted by Lone Shadow:

Having population and buildings and towns suck. Even if you set population to zero, the only way to play is to manually go around and stop citizens from moving in on each settlement which takes ages.

Takes about 10 minutes max, probably less. Just open statistics tab, go to "areas", click "whole map" and there you have a list in alphabetical order. You can open like 8 tabs on your screen, click them off one by one, and close by Esc afterwards. Areas unable to tick have no houses in. Repeat with all settlements on the list.
Voilá - you are ready to go and noone will move in any of those settlements ;)

[vajeeking]

Let's just be honest this DLC was a bit disappointed, cause half of players want to play empty maps also without existing infrastructure and DLC not give that option.

[Sirius Czech]

afaik blank maps for this specific DLC are coming soon, so stay tuned ;)