Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is now live with v1.0 for those of you wanting to jump back in!
Gah, my only play games on 1.0 strategy to reduce backlog doesn’t work if too many games get to 1.0!
This one’s in great shape…so fill your boots! 
Good review in RPS on workers and resources 1.0 . Looks too fiddly for my patience. I do like how the supply and “cheats” can be turned on an off almost at will.
From Sin Vega, my favorite reviewer left at RPS:
It’s about co-ordinating all your pieces so they’ll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don’t organise its parts. It is… a lot. It’s too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.
Many of you already know you would hate or have no time for it. You ought to trust your own instincts. But some of you are going to adore it like I do. Play it in the simplest modes at first, spend a few disposable towns to pay the deposit of learning its basics, its still scratchy UI, and its esoteric underlying logic. Give it some room, and you’ll be glad you let it take over your life.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is on sale on Steam right now. I bought it, and I’m glad I did. I’m still working through the tutorials, but I’m very impressed with the nuts-and-bolts approach to city-building. The Soviet theme is fascinating – never before have I wanted to Google a Czech truck built in the 1960s. Yes, the economy is a bit overwhelming, but I like that, lol.
What else is it like? It feels a little like the A-Train series, actually. I can ride along on my trains and watch as things I’ve built progress. A reviewer also suggests this game has a dash of the old Pharaoh game in it too. I can’t evaluate that claim until I get out of the many thorough and helpful tutorials, but I hope there’s truth to it. It even has a little of Anno eye candy. No one is going to buy this game to ogle Soviet residential buildings and tractors, but…I found myself ogling Soviet residential buildings and tractors.
Pretty impressed so far!
I just could not penetrate W&R when I tried it, despite tutorials in-game and on YouTube. It feels like a game that doesn’t want to be played. (And I put 100 hours into LogISTical!) That’s not to say I don’t get why people might like it, but it’s definitely in that obsessively fiddly kind of simulation genre.
I’m not sure what the Pharaoh comparison would be, honestly. The core mechanic of Pharaoh is the walkers. But they’re not the same as W&R’s workers finding transportation from their homes to work, etc.
One of the things I adore about the A-Train series – and @Malkael deserves a lot of credit for helping me appreciate this with his amazing posts in the A-Train thread – is that all its weird systems and idiosyncrasies and sometimes overbearing intricacy seem to be in service of cultural specificity: A-Train is very much about distinctive Japanese approaches to infrastructure and economic development.
Is that what’s going on with Workers & Resources? Is the detail in service of making the game feel somehow distinct to the Soviet Union, or is it just a detailed and complex economic model?
Oh, it literally lets you pick between barely differentiated historically accurate date-unlocked Soviet bloc trucks and tractors. (This is the kind of design choice that absolutely turns me off. So pointless as far as play goes. But as you’re demonstrating, there is an audience to whom they’re important!)
I am not sure either. Maybe the game eventually has us build some giant Soviet-style monuments?
The designers certainly are trying to evoke a distinctive Soviet approach to economic development: centralized planning, quantity over quality, aggressive extraction of fossil fuels and other natural resources, efficient public transportation, utilitarian housing for workers with no “luxury” land tiles, drab architecture, little concern for the natural environment, etc. Of course, any city-builder has “centralized planning,” so that alone may not be enough to distinguish this title from all its competitors. But the other features do make it feel more like the USSR than, say, Japan. I’ve visited Russia – I studied Russian for years in school – and what I see in this game “feels” right to me.
That said, my initial impression is that W&R isn’t quite the “economic-cultural simulator” that A-Train is. W&R is more complex, and that’s saying something, since A-Train itself is pretty complex. But A-Train’s cultural contours are exceptionally distinctive: its peculiar obsession with scheduling, its odd juxtaposition of modern infrastructure with traditional culture, the baseball and the ryokans, even its anime-style characters and chit-chat.
I’ll keep playing W&R and report back. :)
I would say so, yeah.
It’s been a long time since I played it last, and it’s been updated with a bunch of game modes and difficulty settings to make it less overwhelming, but the interesting thing to me once it clicked was that I was effectively planning an entire society from soup to nuts - Like a proper communist!
There are so many interdependent systems that it’s crazy. If you wanna build a supermarket, you also need a farm to provide the meat. If you wanna build a farm to provide the meat, you gotta provide the labor and the machinery. If you wanna provide the labor and the machinery, you gotta provide the housing and the infrastructure.
That is the game.
It bounced on me really hard the first time I tried to play it, because it didn’t explain anything, and the terrain tool was terrible to work with (and essential for pretty much everything you needed to do) so I ended up pressing the “F this” button.
But then I watched a Youtuber called Colonel Failure having a bunch of fun with it, and I decided to jump back in, and once I grasped the complexity, it finally clicked and became pretty addictive. So much micro-management, so much planning.
To some extent isn’t all city builders with production chains? I own this but haven’t played it yet. I got the impression that the uniqueness about the game was resource granularity- like you need to manufacture concrete for buildings and other low level stuff. Maybe I misunderstood though.
No, that’s exactly it. I probably did a poor job of explaining it. The difference between Workers and Resources and other builders isn’t the basic concept, it’s the vastness and detail of the machine you’re building.
I should’ve specified that what I described was just a snapshot of the chain - it keeps going and going.
I also shouldn’t have said infrastructure, I should’ve said transportation, which is a more complex system. You’re responsible for all of it.
You have to provide the cement, the power, the coal, the food, the education, the bus, the train, the digger - and the fuel for the bus and the train and the digger. You name it, it’s on your desk.
And I should’ve emphasized that these also require Transport Tycoon-style supply chains. You have to make sure that you have the right amount of trucks to deliver the right amount of stuff on time, and likewise, that your bus or train network is capable of delivering the right amount of workers on time.
If I recall correctly, the workers even run on shifts. Or at least there’s a timer to when they stop and have to be replaced.
And if you aren’t getting enough fuel to your gas stations, then the busses and trucks can’t refuel, and the whole thing breaks down. In order to get enough fuel to your gas stations, you have to get enough workers to your oil fields and refineries, and in order for those refineries to run, they need power, so that’s a whole other machine-within-the-machine that you have to create.
It’s madness!
And of course, the more of those supply chains you create, the more those supply chains clog up your roads and train lines, so then it occurs to you that you have to be smart about how you plan your roads and train lines. None of it feels friendly or convenient.
Which to me is a great thematic experience. I feel like a completely overwhelmed Eastern European bureaucrat some time before the Iron Curtain fell.
But the vastness and detail of the machine is also what makes it so rewarding. Once it clicked for me, it was one of those games where I blinked, and then I had spent an untold number of hours building something immensely complex, and then I could sit there and marvel at it :)
There’s also a “priming the pump” aspect to it, where you have to spend your starting cash to import the resources to build the buildings to get your whole native production chain started. Which is dozens of buildings, right?
Yeah, but the last time I played it wasn’t even close to where it is now, so I wouldn’t want to accidentally refer to something that’s been changed in the meantime.
But when I first played, that was something that worried me, because you have a certain amount of roubles and dollars, and my fear was that I was gonna run out of money before I got anything going. But it turned out not be an issue. I had more roubles than I could possibly spend.
Until you create the infrastructure and supply chain for construction, construction costs money. Once you have it, it becomes free.
So you start building the machine, and it becomes more and more cost-effective, until finally you can start to export stuff and make a profit.
There was also a very clever (and necessary) mechanic where you can “order” a resource. If you don’t have the production chain for gas, you can pay a premium price for it, and it will magically restock - with the penalty being that you’re paying for it.
That’s completely essential, because obviously you’re not gonna build a whole society all at once, so for a long time there will be things you don’t have.
I imagined it as someone in East Germany calling the Soviet Union and being like “Hey, we’re out of this thing, please help!”
I just bought Workers and Resources yesterday, and have dabbled a bit. Everything Meles typed above seems accurate. Incredible amount of stuff going on in this one. If you like games like Factorio, you’ll probably love this.
Edit: Also, I liked the instruction in one of the tutorials along the lines of: “Build a bus line from the prison to the coal mine. Hard physical labor will fix most people”.
The presentation of this is pretty cool.
Thanks for the clarification!
In Realistic mode, you lose the ability to automagically get more resources when you need them. Everything must either be imported from outside the country (or produced locally) and then transported to where it’s needed.
I found money to be pretty scarce in Realistic, and it’s a constant plate-spinning exercise to keep all your industries working properly. It scratches some of the same itch as Factorio for me, in that there are always about 10 things competing for my attention. I love it!
I’m really enjoying it so far. First I did all the standalone tutorials, although I couldn’t quite finish the last transportation tutorial because I had trouble laying metro track. Now I’ve started the campaign, which is again walking me through tutorials that are, if anything, more basic. I almost might suggest a new player start with the campaign rather than the tutorials. The campaign doesn’t make me worry about electricity or water at the outset. Instead I’ve been building farms, coal mines, railroads, the Communist Party HQ, Secret Police, and now a university. It was very satisfying to set up my first, very simple cargo train route to export coal.
I had one very Soviet experience. I couldn’t figure out how to expand my coal storage, so I started destroying coal to make storage room so I could meet my production quota. I succeeded!
Yes! Comrade!!
How does Workers and Resources compare to Shadow Empire in terms of complexity? Shadow Empire is too complex for me and I’m worried that W&R will be too.