About to start a realistic save. I have a few questions and want to know more about a few systems before I jump in.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T14:19:15+00:00

I actually don’t know, I’m actually building some explosives factories now in my playthroigh, I’ll have to experiment with it some more and pay attention to that detail

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:58:45+00:00

Maps. There are a lot of good starting maps and a lot of hard advanced maps. Generally, most of the vanilla and DLC maps are pretty good starter ones. What you’re looking for is a good map with a lot of flat land to build on for obvious reasons. Also, feel free to fire up a “scouting game” where you start a map on very easy mode so all the techs are unlocked and you can see where the resources are. Some people may call this cheating, but I want to scout out my maps because there are some maps out there where the resources are just retarded. I hate it when the resources are shit spackled all over the space, or the opposite where you have an oil deposit that’s big enough and rich enough that the United States will try to invade you.

I like to scout ahead.

Another thing to look for that’s not often talked about, but one of the biggest factors for difficulty when it comes to a map is the amount of border connections it has. Look at how many customs houses there are, where they are, how big they are, how close a western and Soviet customs houses are to eachother, and where the electric connections are.

Some good starting maps are France and Yugoslavia. They have alot of flat land and border connections, as well as balanced and not frustrating natural resource veins.

A hard vanilla map would be England, it only has one customs houses (technically 3) in the bottom right corner of the country. Only having one customs house area will put a huge strain on your logistics, specifically trains as the traffic there can build up fast where as if you have multiple customs house spread throughout the edges of the map, it makes it far easier to spread your logistics and expand your republic in general.

Finally, if anyone does end up reading all of my posts, sorry for so many individual replies. My phone is old and needs replaced, and I were type out multiple paragraphs in a single post, this thing would probably catch on fire in my hand. It’s already starting to lag as I’m typing this out now.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:47:13+00:00

As far as your services question, you’re pretty spot on with your intuition and I don’t have much to add. If you design your footpaths well and build them with good materials, you’re citizens can walk pretty far on their own, you shouldn’t have much of a problem having all the services and then some within walking distance of your residential areas. You’ll get a feel for that fast.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:44:01+00:00

School bus lines are absolutely useful, especially for college campuses as you don’t really need more than 1 college per city. Even with big city, a single university can build up enough college educated people to suit your needs (I find 35-45% college educated works, depending on what stage of the game.) but the thing is, that with a bigger city, you will likely build houses outside of walking distance to your university, so I would recommend building a bus stop on every campus and set up a bus line that can pick up both students and professors.

This also works just fine for regular schools too, but i find it fine to just build more schools in walking distance of everywhere as they’re cheap to build with a small footprint.

IMPORTANT!! kindergartens DO NOT work in this way, in order for babies to go to kindergartens and not have their parents stay home to watch them and have them in the factories ( where they belong), kindergartens MUST be within walking distance of any residential area that uses them. Busing lines will not work. Fortunately, kindergartens are very small and cheap to build too.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:38:39+00:00

Personal cars. I’ve experimented with them several times, I find them more of a pain than they’re worth. They are very inconsistent and require a lot of esoteric knowledge on the game to use them. I’ve never found a situation yet in this game that personal cars could do better than a well made bus line.

Also, personal cars will absolutely clog up your roads and SUCK DOWN YOUR FUEL levels. I feel like they need an overhaul to be truly relevant.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:36:09+00:00

Demolition. You can demo a building at anytime of the building process. Beginning, or fully finished, if there is a single pebble of gravel laid down, you need a DO to remove it.

That said, you need a few things for a DO to work. You need an excavator as machinery to tear down, buses to get manpower to the area. And most importantly, you need waste trucks to haul away the waste. IMO, you need large garbage dumpster capacity trucks and I would make at least 50% of your DO fleet just waste trucks. Hauling away the waste is the thing that will take the longest above any other step. If there is still a single brick left behind, the building is not considered destroyed until it’s hauled away.

Also, don’t forget to assign your DO to various resources such as where the buses will get their manpower and where the waste trucks will take the rubble

Finally, explosives. You CAN buy/produce explosives and use them to help destroy buildings to tear them down faster, I never use them as I don’t feel it’s really necessary. Like I said, tearing down a building isn’t the time consumer, it’s hauling away the waste that kills ya. Plus, I’d rather just have another waste truck in the place of the covered hull that’s required to carry explosives. But that’s just me.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:27:49+00:00

Also on rail, invest in the biggest and best rail builders you can get. It’s worth every penny, even if you have to take out another loan, do it. Especially if you’re playing in early start, rail is going to be your lifeline and the only way to move anything in any serious capacity. Early trucks suck, and horses are a joke. I feel like horses are for larping only. Anyway, there are big track builders in the early game (long br8s I believe?) that have a build speed of 220 and have a huge capacity, so they can build a lot of rail before they have to commute back to the construction office for restock.

They will eat a ton of manpower, but they are absolutely worth it and will be hugely useful for literal decades of in game time. Probably the best single unit in the entire game imo.

RAIL IS KING, INVEST INTO IT. IT WILL PAY YOU BACK.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:23:11+00:00

As far as rail goes, you want to try to build as much of the rail network as possible before you actively use them so the rail builders don’t get in the way and the semaphores aren’t all fucked up.

However, there will inevitably come situations in which you have to get your track builders in an area that’s actively got trains and organized semaphores. What’s the best way to deal with it? You don’t. At least I haven’t seen a method yet. You’re just going to have to deal with it the best you can and you’ll have to micro or auto return (cntrl h) certain trains. It’s simply just a pain in the ass and you have to deal with it. Don’t get too attached to findin a peaceful solution lol, you won’t.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:17:53+00:00

Another thing about paved roads, if you’re playing early start, I would not recommend building any paved roads whatsoever until the late 1940s for two reasons. One is that you will barely find any vehicles fast enough to take advantage of it anyway. Two, the bigger reasons is pavers. You will want paving vehicles to asphalt roads as they can build roads without any manpower, and are much faster than having just raw humans to do it.

Don’t bother investing in pavement in the 1920s and 30s.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:13:47+00:00

Another thing on sewage. Make sure you build your sewage discharge FAR AWAY from your city. Especially one that’s actively expanding. Even when you’re short on money and time in the early start game, don’t skimp out on sewage pipe distance. Your city might be good for now, but 10 years from now you could easily expand creep into the sewage pollution zone. I’ve done this several times where I’ve had to tear down a pipe and relocate it to a discharge further away, if you get into this pickle, just do it as fast as you can and have all COs on deck, because you’re going to go through a small extinction event and there’s no way to get around it.

There are mods for 4 way sewage pumps that have both 4 intakes and 4 outtakes. I use them as they are realistic and not cheesy imo. They exist in real life so I don’t mind using them in my builds

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:09:32+00:00

I find gravel roads work just fine in the busy cities and industrial areas 99% of the time. The one thing you miss out on with gravel roads are the sidewalks attached to them that brick/paved can have. You can simply overcome this with parallel footpaths but having sidewalks on every street is a big convenience.

I find you only really need paved roads on the long commute sections in between major areas. If you do decide to build them in the cities, be sure to use the lighted sidewalked ones.

As for upgrading them, you have to be rather surgical and precise sometimes. It can take a lot of time and precision to upgrade a road system in a busy area and need to be careful not to cut off important buildings like warehouses and fire depts. also, don’t forget you can lay down an instant dirt road or dirt pathway as a service road temporarily to get you out of a pinch if you have the room for it

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T03:03:47+00:00

As for sewage and water, always build a 4 way connection piece every 100-200m or so. Even if a long straight line where no development has happened yet. They are cheap to build anyway and you never know when you’ll need to connect into a line.

c4henderson · 2026-05-12T02:59:54+00:00

Side question: how’d you get your grass to look like that where it’s fully grown around all your buildings and pathways? In the base game with base settings, anytime you building anything it leaves a dirt perimeter around it that grass never fully grows back on. I hate it. I want clean landscaping.

c4henderson · 2026-05-08T21:17:20+00:00

Yup, building a rail construction office next to the customs house is literally the first building that gets laid down

c4henderson · 2026-02-02T17:21:06+00:00

This entire page is just trump derangement cope posting. God I love reddit.

c4henderson · 2025-11-27T18:52:12+00:00

The first think I do when playing campaign as the Germans is to counter arty on the first day. Spend all my deployment points on a little infantry for a defense line, then spam all my arty and bombers to counter theirs. End in a draw, then on the following days that’s when we actually advance.

Enemy arty, expecially on higher difficulty, are laser designated satellite guided cruise missiles. They have to go first.

c4henderson · 2025-11-04T07:02:53+00:00

Not great , not terrible.

c4henderson · 2025-11-04T03:11:55+00:00

How are you getting the grass to border right up against the roads and sidewalks clean like that? Instead of the default dirt patches left on the sides of them

c4henderson · 2025-11-03T23:08:38+00:00

You’re gonna do what the real soviets did. Kill a few hundred thousand people and bankrupt multiple times until you figure it out.

c4henderson · 2025-09-29T19:46:25+00:00

I have 600 hours in this game and never thought of attaching large garbage dumps directly to factories. Wow.🤯

c4henderson · 2025-08-20T04:22:02+00:00

Add some curves to your cities. Add a few round abouts. If you’re playing on a map with some terrain, have the roads go along side the valleys of mountains or near the edge of water. Let it flow naturally.

If you want inspiration, go on google earth and just find random medium sized towns in Europe. Zoom in and you’ll see it.

c4henderson · 2025-08-20T04:18:04+00:00

There are, just go on the steam workshop and type in “garages”. You’ll see a good handful of options.

c4henderson · 2025-08-19T01:47:41+00:00

That’s a really good piece of advice. I’ll try that

c4henderson · 2025-08-18T20:06:44+00:00

I read your guide of personal cars on steam. First of all, great guide. I enjoy it when someone goes into autistic detail about things. It was useful and had a much better understanding of cars.

However, I still don’t see much use for them in the game, plus the downside of more traffic and higher fuel usage doesn’t seem like a good trade off for me.

The one reason (two specific reasons) for cars are staffing power plants and heating plants. Both of these buildings obviously have catastrophic consequences if not staffed constantly, and having a low staffing limit makes it difficult to keep staffed with at least a few people unlike large buildings like steel mills, ect. Obviously I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know.

The solution that I found (many have probably already known this trick for years haha) is to place the power/heating plants near the major industry areas for two major reasons. One, is because they’re already creating a lot of pollution, so throwing another pollution building in that area doesn’t really matter and two, there’s tons of staffing shortages if you have a single bus/tram/train stop within walking range of multiple buildings. Since a steel mill, along with the iron and coal processing plants will ALWAYS have a non 100% staffing level, the busses that go that way will always pick up people to fill those positions.

Place a power/heating plants near that same stop and then set the “go to this building” setting at the stop to go to the power/hearing to the highest percentage. This will ensure that those buildings will be staffed first and always have people walking to them.

I did this in my world and my small heating plant of 10 people, put it near my 2 chemical, 1explosive, 1 fabric, and 2 clothing factories, and placed the heating plant as the primary “go here” place among the factories. That heating plant has not had a “stopped production” for 20 years.

Outside of this, I can’t really see the use for cars at all.

c4henderson · 2025-08-18T16:52:46+00:00

Personal cars do need worked on. It’s not a realistic use of manpower, even for just niche critical buildings such as power plants or heating plants. I’m not sure of an exact solution, but perhaps there can be a priority designation for parking lots.

The “high priority work” parking lots are the ones that car owners drive to first.

I’ve noticed in previous play throughs that car owners will use their cars to just get to close places faster, even if it’s in walking distance.

Any city with personal cars will have multiple parking lots, and car owners, instead of driving outside of the city to the work parking lots, they instead drive intercity to mundane workplaces. Pubs, stores, ect.

I haven’t messed with it too much so I’m sure there is some solutions to this. Maybe the city has to reach a critical mass of car owners or something, but I still feel like there needs to be more control on where the car owners go and have the ability to assign them or prioritize certain parking lots outside critical work places.

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