Start with town/people or industry?

[Reck]

When starting a new game is it best to start with creating some industry, thing like warehouses, trains, mining resources, maybe something like oil to sell and do this using external resources to build the buildings and external workers. Then later build a town and get your own people in to take over the industry?

Or is it better to start off building your own town up and get your own people and then use them to kick start some industrial activities?

Maybe both are viable or maybe one is always better than the other, that's what i'm trying work out.

[Silent_Shadow]

Generally I would say that starting a town asap is more important because you can use their labor for construction, they start having children right away to grow the republic's workforce, and you can get a cheap clothes factory running pretty easily.

Setting up an oil field might be the exception, or bauxite if you play without research on.

[Zentra]

Whatever works best for you. With that being said, I am reluctantly beginning to lean toward what Silent said above when it comes to the more realistic games. I do both with success and failure. I have had decent success in the past doing build-out first but I am getting more dangerous. It also takes too long to grow compared since labor is more limited and expensive overall. (even if you pool from multiple custom's houses)
I don't want to do the live method yet. For now, setting things up without people, even if using the expensive border workers is chill. You don't have to worry about providing for your "existing" citizens needs. I like that chill planning stage..... However, I often get way too far ahead of myself and get into an early debt or loyalty curve that ends up killing me.
So yeah, I do agree, if you can get people established and taken care of AS you start, you will be on the road to potential success/profitability much faster.

[Krossof]

1. storage for everything (make them full before inflation hits you)
2. all factories for buildingmaterials (not the big ones; no steel, no bricks, no plats, no wood)
3. little settlement for like 200 citizen, only provide what the absolutly need. no police, no heat, no school for example - deconstruct it later, and kick the worker out if the crime rate is too high.
4. big city for atleast 5000 ppl. buy +- 1k.
5. production industry that keeps 3000 ppl busy (so 1000 worker slots) everything else will be used for city services +-200 worker slots. i usully go for Car and Train factory


For the Problem with Loyality drop @Zentra:

everytime you can set a loyal% the workers for that building must get a personal car.
it will insanly boost the Loyal%.

Why should you do it?
In School and in university the students get +-20% of the teachers loyality. dont tell others, its a secret.

So if you give your teacher a car it works like giving 20 ppl a car.


For reference, my republics are at:

120% production efficienty
95-98% with a job
in realistic mode with lowest money start
profit after 18 months. latest (no oil)

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by Krossof:

2. all factories for buildingmaterials [...] no wood

Why no boards?
You can setup a functioning boards industry for less than 20 workers and 50,000 rubles.

[GoRun]

@krossof cars without radio/TV station give loyalty? did devs change that ?

[GoRun]

You can play only with foreign workers but more Customs are needed. (21 foreign worker per day per customs or 630 per month.)
Best is to build shop and house to invite first 100 citizens, they build 2nd house for 100 more citizens. 500 workers can build heat plant before winter. next year you can work on profit and quality of life.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by GoRun:

@krossof cars without radio/TV station give loyalty? did devs change that ?

Its been that way for ages.

[gwahazar]

Definietly with town. I made mistake and started building wood and gravel industry, while these products are very cheap, labor force is expensive.

[Sirius Czech]

I am usually going as fast as I can for a basic city for ca 1500+ workers while building only the absolute necessary basics out of it from foreign workers:
- bigger station,
- shopping mall (meat truck direct, small DO to refill)
- 1-2 largest brick houses,
- water+sewage substation
- electricity
- garbage stands
///
next to a city
- cargo station + covered warehouse (+ big meat storage planned)
- large construction office (probably built by this point)

what is placed, planned, has usually groundworks done and most are probably even supplied with materials by the "invitation point"
- kindergarden
- medium sized school
- party HQ
- hospital
- cinema (aka culture)
- some sports (indoor pool for year round operation or some school gyms from robs)
- some smaller monuments

It is not great to invite people without EVERYTHING from the second part, but definitely doable (proved like 2 times myself :D)

Then I invite around 30 workers, see how they go, then gradually increase it to ca 200-300 workers (basicall those 2 brick houses full). With "free cranes" in COs I simply set those building in my city to get finished one by one with only people from the city, while I set up an industry for them to work in.

During first half of the year they MUST construct a heating plant + pipes into the city + everything remaining from second category, with additional 3-5 brick houses (and they finish them as they come in needed). By winter having 600-700 population is ok, having heating plant is mandatory and you can basically build your first industry (usually clothing but up to you) at the same stop where heating plant is, so you can set up around 60% workers to always work in that plant and rest to split between surrounding industry.

Then do whatever you want. Grow city, make construction materials, eventually implement technical university, food+meat industry, crops planting ... whatever you want :)

This is my start ;)

[Krossof]

I want to highlight:

If you go clothing factory as many ppl in other threads recommend, you must ASAP build your own agar fields. with 3 clothing factories you will make a loss quite fast due to price changes.

i personaly do not recommend it. just get a car factory and everything else one time and sell overproductions.


a bit tryhard run before garbage patch.

Year 1962
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198041149931/screenshot/2094795101411929674/

Year 1963
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198041149931/screenshot/2094795101411908582/

dont forget im building a ton of stuff so 4 vanilla offices are 100% busy the complete time, if you argue about the profit ratio.

i guess clothing factory is out of the league.

[pderuiter]

What took me way too long to realize: have cranes. They speed up building construcrion like you wouldn't believe.
They do nothing if you have no workers on site, but having a tower crane means 160 workdays can be done by 40 workers. Even road cranes are decent in the beginning (and easier to get)

[Sirius Czech]

Originally posted by pderuiter:

What took me way too long to realize: have cranes. They speed up building construcrion like you wouldn't believe.

I do believe and an provide an exact quota - the level of a crane is directly equal to number of workers it can support (= speed up). So standard road crane with lvl26 can easily support up to 26 workers.

The support is equal to around 5x speed up (a little bit more iirc, but round down for simplicity). Basically two road cranes lvl 26 on building site = up to 52 workers with a working bonus. And tell me - how many times you really need more?

That is the reason I do not use tower cranes at all - instead of a flatbed + towercrane I use 2 roadcranes and they are faster on their own and usually it doesn´t matter if you have a tower or a road one, as large building sites have many slots for cranes and you are hardly getting 400 workers on a site at one moment anyway ;)

[Silent_Shadow]

Tower cranes are worth it on the huge buildings like the steel mill or the radio station due to limited slots, but otherwise are usually overkill.

[Sirius Czech]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

Tower cranes are worth it on the huge buildings like the steel mill or the radio station due to limited slots, but otherwise are usually overkill.

in theory, yes. on the other hand - how many workers will you trully have there at every single point? Because you would need a massive reserves of free workforce to utilise such investment.

As being someone who kinda balances workforce for actual industries and as a result my non-working % are quite low, there is absolutely zero sense in sending like 5-10 buses full of people to be building it, I can easily let 2-3 to be working on it and rotating. This way I do not even need to min-max a lot, because materials are being delivered and people actually work all/most of their hours on site anyway.

They might be interesting for huge sites like skyscrapers etc., but most buildings I just tend to send materials in and then "open" them for workers outside CO (usually 30-50) and that is enough, the city is growing. In starting episodes of new series you will see this as well ;)

So I do not use tower cranes at all. They might be interesting if devs would decide to balance out crane slots for buildings, but my problem is usually that there are too many cranes there (and therefore are not present elsewhere), not that I lack them :D

[Catsander]

Originally posted by jan.mitiska:

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

Tower cranes are worth it on the huge buildings like the steel mill or the radio station due to limited slots, but otherwise are usually overkill.

in theory, yes. on the other hand - how many workers will you trully have there at every single point? Because you would need a massive reserves of free workforce to utilise such investment.

I hate it when I have a bus coming in with 80 workers and all I have is a road crane. Such a waste of 40 workers. Why I try to only use road cranes with small busses and tower cranes with bigger busses or workers outside CO.