Report for the Community #42

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. It was about 4 weeks ago we published the last report and due to holiday season, we skipped one release. But this week we are back, and we have something new and fresh for you. We are currently in the public testing phase of Crime and Justice update for couple of weeks already and we are gathering feedback from you as the balance was changed and many existing successful setups may become broken.

You may notice that the overall difficulty of the game has risen significantly due to achievable average productivity in your Republics while playing on hardest difficulty settings. Most people were used to keep pretty high productivity and as it dropped their heating or power infrastructure may not be sufficient to supply the needs of towns as before. We are still in the process of testing, and we try to find a balance where the challenge of low productivity will have significance, but it will not cause death spirals which cannot be recovered in a reasonable way. There is room for balancing and tweaking of calculation formulas if we got the right ideas for that. We are a bit late due to these issues with release, but it is better for the game, and we hope that we will be able to release this update soon.

Now to new stuff we mentioned and for sure this will raise the overall difficulty even more. We started to put more effort into next update after Crime and Justice. We have our concepts and basics for water treatment and sewage, and we can share something about them with you. This week we will write about water treatment and water distribution and as compensation you will get another report next week about sewage and additional information about crime and justice update release. You may be aware, that we trying to implement features complicated but hopefully funny way, and these mechanics will be not an exception.

We have taken this in a way that other game studios would probably not do, and the most critical things regarding water were already solved (the water delivery and pressures). We have still a lot to do, especially in regards how water and power distribution are connected, setup consumption and other values for gameplay, and deal with water contamination. The basic principle is this. You will be able to take water from a source (well) which should be in non-polluted area as the more pollution there is around the source, the worse the water quality will be.

After you get the water, you will need to treat and purify it in Drinking Water Treatment Plant, where you will need chemicals (the worse the water quality, the more chemicals are required) to make water drinkable for your people. Then you will need to get the water to your residential areas. You will use pipes and there will be substations like with power and heat distribution to connect residential building to the water distribution infrastructure. The way how the water is being delivered will depend on altitude differences and size of pipes. Player will have several options how to distribute the water to citizens. There will be water pumps, water towers and if the source will be situated higher on a hill, he will be able to get higher water pressure.

We would like to add water consumption for some industrial facilities too, but for now we deal only with residential buildings connected through water distribution substations. Of course, residential buildings will also produce sewage water and we will write about that in the next report which will be release next weekend.

We expect that all these new changes may have significant impact on existing saves and there is high probability that some of them may fail, if the player will try to keep the hardest difficulty. You just cannot easily upgrade big existing cities and areas if required without using auto build with money. You may try to salvage your Republic and we wish you success as we want to hear about successful attempts that you share with us. You can use Steam forums for that similarly as for providing feedback. If you are not able to continue it may be sad, but it may give you reason to start fresh, and make new better and more resilient Republic. It is just how it goes with early access. We may try to make the game playable for older saves, but we cannot guarantee anything due to complications we have in our game. There is lot of mechanics that are dependant on each other and if something breaks for you, it can cause a death-spiral you cannot recover.

We hope we will find a way how to balance this upcoming update. It just requires some time and helpful feedback. Many people like the challenge the game can give them, others may try to ease a bit and play on lower difficulty settings, but it should never be in a way, that if you do everything well, you will still fail. Only if there would be a new difficulty for survival mode added where your goal may be to survive as long as you can, but failure is guaranteed sooner or later. It is a game though and we need to take it as a game. Do not take you Republic more seriously than real life, and if you fail you can try again, but never give up in life or in game. There is a way for you and your current or next Republic. Just learn from Your mistakes, share Your experience, and give it another try. Until next time enjoy your lives and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team

Report for the Community #41

Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. We are less than week away from the upcoming holiday season and as we mentioned in previous report there is a surprise, we prepared for you. Unfortunately, we are not able to fully implement and balance crime and justice before Christmas as we planned but at least we can release the update for testing this week to find out what else may be wrong with the game after rebalancing workers happiness and productivity.

We will release in upcoming days a small update for all players with brand new Christmas lights! You can use it to decorate your cities or other areas. Of course, Christmas is not the only reason you may use these decorations to give your Republic a special look and feel.

Regarding the balancing issues we mentioned we just do not want to hurry as in upcoming weeks there are so many other things in our lives, we need to face due to this season, that it would not be worth just to push the update for the sake of the deadline because it may break the game. We have done some testing and made some adjustments already, but there is still a need to see more scenarios in which the actual balance may be manifested.

The overall idea behind the rebalancing is to offer players more options how to manage happiness, health and productivity and add more difficulty for those who like to be challenged by the game. But the game is about development of republic by building residential and industrial areas, and managing workforce and resources, not a survival game where you should be punished for every mistake. So, we want to avoid players getting into slow death spiral due to mechanics when they would waste their time in attempt to salvage their republic when there is no way to recover it. Our goal is to give you options to boost happiness or productivity with some trade-offs.

Productivity will have more impact in future as it has now because with 50% productivity the output of fully staffed facility drops significantly. This may lower your overall outputs and slow your progress. On the other hand, we need to be careful with critical infrastructure like power plants and heating plants or shops where the drop of productivity may cause a disaster as it can break the balance in already existing infrastructure. It is especially critical for those who do not auto build using rubles and dollars because for those it is not so easy to rebuild power or heat distribution network in brief time. These are just some of potential concerns we have regarding game balance.

There are few ways to play the game and we want to keep that in mind. The game offers different challenges for those who build using money and for those who build using construction offices. For those using money the aspect of time has different meaning because they can instantly adjust their infrastructure if they have capital for that, but they may overextend easily and thus loose workforce in the process. On the other hand, building by yourself takes a lot of time and we need to keep a reasonable pace for population growth over time even on hardest difficulty because the difficulty level will also have more impact on overall gameplay though workers happiness and productivity. We will give you more details about this in upcoming reports after we make all necessary tweaks.

We hope you can wait few more weeks as the release of crime and justice update is delayed. If you wish you can get the update earlier on public test branch when released but bear in mind the potential risk for your existing republic. You can always go back to earlier save but you may loose some progress if things go wrong after you switch to test version. And feel free to provide feedback or report bugs if you find some using Steam Forums or our support page. Time is coming to spend some quality time and have fun during this holiday season with our families, not only with the game. Do not forget that it is important for your overall happiness and productivity. Enjoy this time and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team

Report for the Community #40

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. The current situation here in Slovakia is serious once again and you may have heard that we are one of few countries in national lock down. But this cannot slow us down even if it can restrict our freedom of movement, because we can work from home office if necessary, just to bring you the next update which may contain few surprises. Since last report there were two updates released for public test and these were focusing on some fixes.

From fixes we can mention the issue with burned down building when it's path connection was not automatically regenerated making them impossible to reach for pedestrians. We tweaked construction costs for new farms and fixed issue with burned down storages to delete their resources afterwards to not have them back after rebuilding the structure. We also made another change for yellow signal mechanic, to avoid track engagement if train is too far away. There were other fixes too, but these are not to be the main content of this report.

We want to introduce something many of you were dreaming about. It is a brand-new facility called Railroad Distribution Office. It took us a while to figure out how it may be possible to make it work. BTW this building is based according the real world building from Košice (Slovakia), and it serves the same purpose as in the game.

So how this building should work? You will connect it to your railway system, then you bring in or buy few locomotives and some wagons which can be different types. Then you set your sources and destinations with respective percentages (similar as road distribution office) and the Railroad Distribution office will setup trains adding wagons to locomotives and sending them for their supply trips. We know it sounds impressive but bear in mind you will need to build your railroad appropriately to allow these trains to move into their destinations as you cannot add waypoints and restrict them from movement through unexpected locations.

Another minor change we made was adding a new button for vehicles to show which vehicles can be loaded on flatbed or which vehicle can carry the vehicle as cargo.

Next thing we are working on is re-balance of the citizens free time activities. This way we can also give you some insight about how the system works and help you make better decisions based on that. We have currently four groups of leisure activities: Church Visit, Doing Sport, Drinking in Pub and Going for Culture. All these activities have some impact on happiness and other stats (health, religion, loyalty, alcohol addiction, sport, and culture). There can be positive if the need is satisfied or negative if the need is not satisfied. Everything is percentage based and you may be aware that you can get up to 100% for each stat if satisfied constantly. If the citizen is not able to enjoy the activity he is looking for, then he loses a small percentage of stat connected with that activity. Each of these activities provides some happiness if satisfied but may have different impact on other stats.

Firstly, our focus was about balancing out those activities, so in case you provide to citizens sport, pub, and culture, none of the activity will become too strong over time. Also, we are trying to tweak gain of values for every activity, so every activity may have some advantages and disadvantages. For example, alcohol has negative impact on health but provides significant happiness boost and sport has positive impact on health but provides less happiness boost.

Another meaningful change is in the way how happiness is handled. Previously it was quite easy to achieve 100% happiness, but now the happiness will increase much slower. Also, the maximum level of happiness will be connected to quality of living (a preference of apartment where the citizen lives) and naturally also to the difficulty setting.

Finally - a minor change for better screenshots, we added water detail setting to avoid tiling similarly as we did with the land.

That was a little surprise for this week, and you may expect more unexpected stuff to come. And we still stay focused on getting the crime and justice update ready for release. That is our focus, and we are every day closer to our deadline. If everything goes well it may be matter of weeks and it should be so, because there are only four weeks remaining until the end of this month. Now you can spend some time thinking about how much happiness you can get out of visiting church, doing sport, drinking in pub, or going for culture, especially when we have these times when due to lockdowns, we cannot do most of this. It means the happiness of our citizens will drop during upcoming weeks even more but does the government care about that? We hope you care about your workers happiness and health, and if not, it is just a game, and you should care at least about yourself and your beloved ones. So, enjoy what makes you happy but do not harm others and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team