I finished the second campaign! It was a long haul, and one of my rarest Steam Achievements: only 0.1% of players have achieved it. I enjoyed it, but it took too long, mostly because I played illogically. If any of you ever try this campaign, don’t repeat my mistakes! Some tips:
- It would have been a shorter slog had I established a profitable export industry early on, perhaps allowing me to quick-build future structures using rubles. Clothing might have been a good candidate. Instead, I lost money constantly for decades, and so I had to minimize spending by building using Construction Offices, relying on my own industry – gravel mining and processing, asphalt, concrete, mechanical parts, steel, fuel. That worked, but it took much, much longer.
- The Construction Office process, too, might have been quicker had I built more housing to put more workers into industry and construction. Too often I just jumped into the next campaign goal instead of pausing to address my chronic labor shortage.
- Plan ahead to expand your utilities – electricity, water, sewage, in that order. Even if you’re building a single connection, consider using “switches” to leave open connections for later use. (A “switch” is just a 3- or 4-way connection – a splitter, the capitalists call it.)
- You need electricity before water. Drinking water won’t work without power to run your pumps, and every water connection needs a pump. If you build a water-treatment station, you need a pump after it, and probably before it too. Unless gravity is really helping, every water connection requires an electric-powered pump. Sewage is easiest: it doesn’t require power or pumps, so long as you run it down even a gentle slope. (F2, showing contour lines, is your friend.) Don’t bother with a sewage treatment plant: your residents can live with the smell.
- Distribution Offices are great, but you can’t rely on them for everything. In particular, they won’t haul vehicles and containers. The game did tell me that at some point, but I still would forget. Also, DOs can be more expensive than just buying a truck and telling it where to go. The DO does save fuel, since it’s smart about telling trucks to wait if no one needs them, but I had fuel in abundance.
- Likewise, “Factory Connections” – the yellow arrows you sometimes see to connect buildings – support many connections, but not all. In particular, they won’t move aggregate for you. I guess the idea is that these are conveyors holding goods, vehicles, containers, etc, not dusty and small bits of gravel. Again, the game explains this in one of the tutorials, but it’s easy to forget.
- The second campaign tells you to focus on your capital city, and that’s good advice. If you build into a second pre-existing village, you will “activate” it, meaning your citizens will demand all your modern Soviet benefits. If you leave the villages alone, they will sullenly go on with their subsistence existence, which is usually what you want.
- I recommend finishing the vehicle/airplane/tourism branch before the nuclear branch of the campaign. I didn’t start making a profit until the 1970s, once I built an airport and started tourism. Even those profits weren’t fabulous, but they were enough to allow me to start quick-buying stuff. In particular, they let me quick-buy all the expensive buildings I needed for the nuclear part of the campaign. Uranium is quite far from your starting city, so it will be hard to use construction offices to construct uranium mines. I ended up building a whole glowing UraniumTown by the mines because I could afford just to quick-buy nuclear facilties, housing, hospital, firestation, etc. If I had been strapped for cash, I’d have had to rail the uranium back home and build everything else with COs. That would have worked, but it would have taken forever, lol.
Here are a few screenshots from my playthrough. I’m tired now, so this will be a poor man’s AAR. I’ll try to emulate the @Malkael gold standard in the future!
Screenshots
My Republic’s capital, Hurbaky, at game start.
The Hurbaky-Jastok metro area at game end.
My nuclear power plant and its two cooling towers. One of the cooling towers is from the Ukraine expansion; cheaper, but larger. I foolishly built all this on a bluff, and I ran out of room, so the second cooling tower is the smaller stock version. You can also see a few stats here. I started with 10m rubles and 2m dollars.
One of my two IL-18 aircraft landing at Jastok Airport. You can see the nuclear plant in the distance to the left, and Hurbaky cathedral in the distance ahead. This shot may give you a sense of the immense scale of this game. The nuclear plant is only a km or so away, and the Republic stretches on far beyond it. This game is a Republic builder, not a city builder. If you’ve ever played a city-builder and thought “I need more room,” this game is for you!
The airport attracts tourists to five hotels of varying quality. My star attraction is the 5-star Hotel Ukraine, courtesy of the Ukraine DLC. (As I mentioned upthread, that DLC’s proceeds go to support relief efforts in Ukraine.) It’s the big red brick building here. My more modest “Mountain Hotel” is to the left. Nice view of the water, and upwind from the sewage discharge.
Here’s Hurbaky Cathedral. An earthquake destroyed it once, but I rebuilt it, using a Construction Office, which took at least a year. There are other, smaller churches in town, but this one is the big attraction. The Party disapproves of building new religious structures, but some citizens (and tourists) want religious worship, so I quietly approved the repairs.
Finally a few night shots. Here’s Main Street Hurbaky, featuring Lenin, who stands opposite the Technical University. I added a billboard with his name, just so people were clear on that. Also, I allowed only 50 private cars in town, to avoid traffic jams. I could have built wider roads, but nah.
In the foreground is a cargo train, loading up oil to take to the USSR. (Oil exports made only small profits, because I flooded the market and drove down prices, until I joined OPEC late in the game, in the 1970s. I made more money shipping bitumen, another byproduct of the refinery process, which I also used in my asphalt industry.) In the background is Jastok’s industrial center, dominated by oil wells, storage, and the refinery. For most of the game I ran on coal power, to the left.
This train is exporting mechanical parts to other Soviet republics. I also ran two passenger trains, on the right, to and from the nuclear power plants. The trains in this game are beautiful and fun to operate. The switch system isn’t as elaborate as, say, Rail Route, but it’s still cool – if a bit confusing at first. I’ve seen videos of people with trains that cross the entire republic. I’d like to try that in my first sandbox game, which I’m about to start.
Thanks for reading!
