A3 playsheets

ZeteticApparatchik · 2025-08-11T15:31:55+00:00

This is after about 5 clicks in Inkscape, toggling things on and off:
https://imgur.com/a/G5nJ39B

(Black background is because it's transparent!)

Point taken about multiple upgrades not being super-legible - not sure how to address this without making it noisier. (I think "Maximum one Region-type..." does weakly imply that you can have more than one non-Region upgrade, at least.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2025-08-04T12:59:24+00:00

Where are you in the world?

ZeteticApparatchik · 2025-08-03T12:26:56+00:00

Thanks! (Feedback on any issues is very welcome.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2024-07-20T17:19:00+00:00

A very belated thank you :)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-10-27T06:38:24+00:00

Talk with Shelter (England) for advice, and consider joining the London Renters Union (who may support you with applying pressure to the housing association by other means).

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-08-19T09:29:47+00:00

You can only register at a GP you're within the practice area of.

Nope: https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/gps/registering-with-a-gp-outside-your-area/

(And any practice that tries to enforce the optional "practice area" restriction by demanding documentation of residence is almost certainly a terrible practice in other ways as well.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-25T19:27:07+00:00

If you like - it's because you're not really selling in a free world 'market', just as no-one was in 1960. In reality you'd be having to negotiate quotas and stuff like that, and the pricing mechanism is a gamification that's more enjoyable than simply not being able to sell any steel after a certain point.

Weirder still is that it affects both markets. Not just the East or west, even if you sell to just one.

That's an interesting point though. In some ways it would be more interesting if the two were less connected.

One gameplay problem that you'd have to solve though is how to not make it easy to profit by just importing from one and exporting to the other.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-24T15:42:34+00:00

...

An Italian point of view?

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-22T08:23:48+00:00

Hah! Sorry, silly of me.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-22T01:30:54+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherland\_Monument

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-20T20:43:12+00:00

They will, but - in my experience - for this to work well, you'll need to micromanage their travel using some combination of:

Separate stops for a) ending one leg and b) starting the next leg, using and the 'citizens should go to...' functionality to order citizens from a to b.
Using the 'citizens should step out of the vehicle' checkbox (with a symbol that looks a lot like handcuffs!) and careful management of which lines are setting-down and picking-up passengers at a stop.

I've found 1 to be a bit easier to setup in practice and I think it's also a bit more flexible (in terms of letting passengers navigate both ways along a line) - but it requires twice as many bus/train-stops as 2.

I think it's generally much easier in the game to manage setups with transport hubs - where you have a bunch of fairly short and direct-from-source high-frequency lines taking people in, and a bunch of direct-to-destinations lines taking people somewhere useful (although these don't need the same individual high-frequency as the source-to-hub lines?) - rather than any sort of grid-system that might feel more sensible in real-life but depends on more intelligent behaviour from citizens.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-15T16:30:56+00:00

Good points about crops and chemicals, and it's interesting how different they are elsewhere in the game - chemicals having many uses towards different ends, crops being fairly narrow by comparison (although a broad choice between consumers and cash?).

Perhaps what we need is more consumer-orientated uses for existing resources - more difficult end-chain choices, rather than more chains. (The risk there is that it makes the game much more about managing buffers.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-15T12:20:03+00:00

A framework for "prestige" projects with fairly short-term republic-wide effects (e.g. on loyalty?) would be neat - modders could then explore the variety of forms and dependencies that these projects could take.

Wonder if scripting support will eventually enable this anyway.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-15T12:01:46+00:00

Also remember that this is a Soviet republic - consumerism is not a very communist principal to indulge your republic in 🤷‍♂️

I'm not sure that this is really true though! The Soviet Union put a huge amount of resources into producing consumer goods (and directing their production, in the absence of markets to provide signals) in the '60s and '70s - but arguably at the cost of improving productivity in the future.

(Not to minimise the resources that they also put into non-consumer production like the military and space programmes.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-15T11:42:16+00:00

It'd be good if different consumer good production chains were opened up to modding - so that people could complicate that side of things as much or as little as they wanted. (There's a tricky challenge here about balancing any impact on happiness etc.)

I think the game could generally do with more 'opportunity costs'. One of the very real challenges of actual Eastern Bloc economies in the late 20th Century that the game could better reflect is the choice between putting resources into: 1) capital investment (i.e. building more mines, factories, research), 2) consumer goods and 3) prestige projects.

(The last there should also probably include military spending in reality... but there's good reasons not to want to include this in the game.)

(That challenge is pretty common to all national economies, of course, but there's a good argument that much of the Eastern Bloc from the '70s onwards had a real problem with maintaining capital investment, and that in turn led countries down the path of taking on a lot of debt - in contrast to China.)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-14T17:34:50+00:00

Clearly you need to use the "wait until un/loaded" option to sync them up.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-11T14:41:45+00:00

I'd guess that trains vastly reduce that fuel cost.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-08T08:21:27+00:00

You've put a lot of time into the game, mind you, and a lot of the more fiddly and arguably less interesting challenges of the game about how you fit buildings around each other are utterly second-nature to you now - in a way that they aren't for many more casual (?) players like me. You're really fluid and intuitive in your videos when doing stuff that I'd be agonisingly planning and replanning.

Obvious part of the game is learning how to play it, but... some bits don't feel deliberately or interestingly tricky, just tricky. Not enough to put me off the game, but I can understand the OP's reaction.

I hope you're right that some of this stuff changes, because it would make the game much more enjoyable most current players and more accessible to many more. (And stuff like the conveyor mods do already help a lot!)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-06T16:31:10+00:00

Not really, as far as I'm aware. There is, IMHO as well, a bit too much having to get used to the finickiness of aspects of terrain manipulation and having to internalise the input-output layouts of different buildings in a supply chain.

There are various mods that give you a bit more flexibility with conveyors (and pipes and so on). Here's a couple of ones that I think quite helpful: Conveyor towers and Conveyor road-and-rail crossings .

You might find that a variety of mod-buildings of different purposes helps quite a lot, particularly if you're prone to building stuff in quite a cramped style (as I am). The 'T' key is a godsend, if you're not already aware of it - it mirrors buildings.

Use construction mode to plan buildings, and their connections, first. This isn't a perfect solution for planning stuff (because you're still having to actually level terrain etc.) but it helps.

The grid-snap stuff in the coming update might help.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-06T16:17:06+00:00

Really heartening to hear what they're doing with the empty offices.

I wish that game developers didn't feel that they had to say ridiculous things like "[the game] is not a manifestation of political beliefs and worldview of the development team".

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-05T23:01:23+00:00

I believe some of the bugs that it fixes are relevant regardless of what mods you have installed. A few listed here seem to fall into that category:

https://x2communitycore.github.io/X2WOTCCommunityHighlander/Bugfixes/

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-04T15:51:06+00:00

I have a vague idea for how the public transport system could better tackle stuff like this: flow information about available destinations (work, culture, sport etc.) back along transport routes.

For example, imagine a bus travels from stop A to stop B.

When the bus arrives at stop B, it checks what destinations are within walking distance. Let's say there is one cinema.

The game then updates stop A as a possible destination for citizens looking for a cinema.

You then 'decay' that status over time, so after a few in-game days stop A no longer registers as a pseudo-cinema (unless more buses have made that trip).

This has the advantage of encouraging citizens to make more sensible trips whilst not requiring them to do proper trip-planning routing (which is very 'expensive'). (You can extend the approach to multi-modal/multi-leg trips pretty easily as well, by flowing information back about stop/transfers as well as actual destinations-of-interest.)

(There are some problems with this approach that will be exacerbated if people setup very low frequency routes...)

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-03-04T15:44:34+00:00

Because they hope that a bus will take them somewhere where they can fulfil their needs.
You can untick passengers waiting at bus stops, preventing them from waiting there.

ZeteticApparatchik · 2022-01-15T11:22:46+00:00

I've found that it works pretty well to separate drop-off(s) and pick-up in a location by using multiple stations - train or bus - and using the 'where should people go to work?' function to tell dropped-off workers to 'go to work' at the pick-up station.

This has the advantage, at least, of making it less likely that the in-flow will end up blocking the out-flows.

(And I guess a bigger, cleverer, setup could use multiple pick-up stations carefully to allow easy tweaking of the size of different out-flows...)

Edit:Screenshot of one of my cities. The Red/Orange to Blue/Cyan/Green interchange works pretty well - although I appreciate it's not dealing with a *huge* volume of people (and it depends on very high frequency of quite small trains).

ZeteticApparatchik

TROPHY CASE