Update #8

Content Update #8 sees the implementation of the new Government loyalty game mechanics and new GUI.

Government Loyalty

The secret police building is where only the highly educated citizens can work. They will have duty vehicles assigned to them which look like personal cars but are assigned to the secret police building. This allows the secret police to travel undercover to residential areas and install spy equipment into citizens homes to gather loyalty information on the people living there.

Every citizen has government loyalty. The higher the loyalty the more productive they are at work and the less negative influence they have to overall happiness. Citizens with lower loyalty can be restricted from working within certain critical jobs such as school, TV or radio stations, to reduce the risk of negative influence (and therefore lower government loyalty) over students or other citizens.

Map by Aezzy

Finally, you can now build monuments to influence government loyalty. Building monuments will increase government loyalty by up to 50% for citizens who pass by them.

More info for government loyalty:

https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-33

New GUI

Using community feedback, the GUI has been updated for ease of use. There is a new construction menu with customizable screen positions and a quick stats tab to access information on your citizens as well as your republic’s economy.

map by JCKiller

More info about new GUI:

https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-30

https://www.sovietrepublic.net/post/report-for-the-community-31

Content Update #8 features:

• Build monuments to increase the loyalty of your citizens

• Use secret police to install spy equipment and find out how loyal your citizens really are!

• Utilize information gathered by the secret police to ensure citizens do not use their positions to affect other citizen’s loyalty

• New construction menu with customizable screen positions

• Quick info tab to access citizen information and your republic’s economy

• New complex rail signals mechanic update

• Optimized traffic flow added for parking lots and other buildings

• Orphanage added - Look after your republic’s children should the worst happen to their parents

• Many other gameplay and mechanics improvements

Report for the Community #37

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. It is time to hurry up and bring all your harvesters into the fields before the winter hits and your crops decay. For us it is the time to announce that next week we will switch the current beta version into stable, and it also means that we will be able to change our focus on something new and for most of you more exciting stuff. But even before that, we were able to make something extra that we added into this update, and we want to share some of these things with you.

At first, let us have a look at the beauty and pride of soviet engineering, the T815. In late soviet and early post-soviet eras these vehicles carried massive amounts of materials in Czechoslovakia and there were no highways or other important infrastructure being built without using them. That means this vehicle deserves a special treatment and unfortunately it was a bit neglected in the past by us. We refreshed its model and added new color skins. But it is not the end because we plan to add more variants in near future because dumpers were not the only variants in broad use. We know this is not a game changer as there are already some models with different variants available in the workshop, but it gives a bit of flavor to the game for those who remember the days when they saw these vehicles all over the Republic driving to their destinations.

And besides that, we added two more vehicles and you may be interested especially in the roller made in Czechoslovakia. It will be a powerful addition to your construction mechanisms because it is level 27 and is faster to do its job than the American roller and it is available more than 10 years earlier than that. And we also added a new diesel locomotive T678 (nicknamed Pomaranč or Orange in English) which is available from 1961 to 1967 and gives you opportunity to get a strong and cheap engine to carry your wagons in early game.

We were also improving the overall graphics of the game by adding new 3D terrain setting. It should prevent creating so obvious tile patterns in certain situations but it depends on map and how even the terrain is, so it may not be visible in all circumstances. And then we finally dealt with the cursor which was shaped as cube and was not the favorite feature among players. Lot of people did not like that but now we do not have that cube shape anymore. We changed it into circle and made it much smaller. If you zoom in it will be bigger but not as big as the cube used to be. The next thing that was not looking good in game were the roads under construction because the gravel texture for them was blurred and ugly. We updated this texture and now it will look much better.

Now let us have a look at fixes and tweaks we made during past 2 weeks that may be important to speak about. We restricted the building of roads, and you will no longer be able to draw roads over rail junctions or rail dead ends. Just be aware of that while you will plan your infrastructure. We also made underground pipelines and cables which are under construction more visible in underground mode. We also corrected the terminal reservation for signals to avoid deadlocks and fixed an issue when train would not find route (mostly in the station) causing signal to turn red when the train flips on the signal. Then there was an issue with excavators’ strength not counted properly while terraforming without money. That was fixed too. Next thing we needed to deal with was the broken anarchy (free placement) workaround modders used to place stuff as we updated how structure collisions work, some mods relying on free placement broke. We hope we successfully fixed that and modders will be able to use non-collision again.

As you can see there were not that many critical issues during past weeks, and we can stick to the roadmap and do our last steps before we switch the public test into stable. That will give us room to refocus and hopefully we will bring you fresh exciting news about upcoming features of the update planned to be released in December. Until then do not forget to enjoy the life, have fun, and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team

Report for the Community #36

Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. It was less than two weeks ago, the week after last report was published, when we have released the 0.8.5.2 version of the game for public testing, and we already made a good progress in fixing and tweaking the game during this time. We have released 3 updates since then and the changelog is quite extensive. Now, we would like to go through some the points in this report as it may be good to provide further explanation about these changes and fixes. The main focus was still on GUI tweaking though, and we really appreciate your feedback.

Let us start with something new. We added switches to rails and barrier models at dead ends of roads, pathways and rails. You can see them in these pictures and take it as work in progress because we need your feedback and there can be some tweaking for this in near future. It is a visual change, and it should not affect gameplay, but it may look weird in certain situations, even it looks good in simple setups, in complicated junctions it may not be so. It needs some tweaking based on feedback as anything new added to the game.

As we mentioned in the beginning there was quite a bit of tweaking for GUI based on your feedback. We added few options how you can customize your panels. You can now auto-hide the left panel and the construction panel on the bottom. Also you can change the scale of bottom Level 1 and Level 2 menus. We also moved the small window in which you adjust the way how you build stuff to the right bottom corner above the minimap, and it is possible to move the bottom panel to below the Top panel now. Then we disabled the CTRL+G function as it was replaced with G key. This now hides not only your GUI, but it also hides your cursor, yellow highlight selections and blueprint outlines of planned buildings. This should give you ways to take better screenshots and videos from your Republic.

Then we took some time to adjust the government loyalty because the feedback we have got. It seemed to be too insignificant for some of players to bother with, so we raised the impact of government loyalty on the overall performance of your economy. Low loyalty will now affect birth-rate based on your difficulty settings (Unsatisfied Citizen Reaction Level). Low loyalty will now decrease the productivity of your workers even if they are happy and healthy, and high loyalty will boost it even beyond 100% depending further on happiness, satiety and health. Very low loyalty (less than 30%) will decrease the happiness of your citizens instantly based on your difficulty settings. We also added a code that allows you to reset government loyalty if you open an older save and new “Reset/Randomize Government Loyalty” button to cheat menu. Then the effect of loyalty on happiness was removed for citizens living in untouched old city buildings on prepopulated maps.

Besides these the impact of different ways to affect government loyalty was tweaked. Personal cars can now give you maximum 75-85% loyalty based on the unsatisfied citizens reaction level and quality of the car. Radio Broadcast can help you gain up to 70-80% loyalty for citizens without personal cars and 80-90% loyalty for those with personal cars. The only way how to gain 100% loyalty will be TV broadcasting and it will be possible only for citizens with personal cars as other will be limited to range of 80-90%. The boost for citizens’ loyalty from monuments is now 40-50% based on difficulty settings and the effect of monuments was decreased by 20%. You will also be able to see worker’s productivity in Worker’s Window and there will be a warning notification messages about low loyalty.

From other changes that may be interesting to talk about we can mention that we lowered the distance you can place buildings next to roads and the minimal distance which allows you to connect roads and rails. Previously it was at least 10m and now it will be 5m. It still depends on terrain so you may not get the shortest distance while building on a slope. Then we fixed the problem with possibility of placing building too close to each other on hillsides, when the terrain was burrowing the existing building during flattening. We also added warning messages about fuel to harbors and terminals and warnings for construction window in case the road connection is needed for the construction and is missing. Another thing that will solve some issues is about ship refueling. Now ships will refuel at each stop on the schedule if there is fuel available. And finally the ship with fuel coming to pumping harbour without fuel is able to refuel itself even if there is no fuel available in the harbor initially.

Another set of issues was connected to new yellow route signals. We thank all of you who provided feedback and saves with issues because it helped us to tackle some problems, we were not able to create on our own. The new route signal uses a block reservation system, and it should stop a train when there is another train heading to a certain block. Of course, there were unnecessary delays and deadlocks for some of you because not everything worked as intended and some trains were waiting on yellow signals even if they should not. There may still be issues, but we hope we can fix them as soon as we will be able to identify them with your help.

Then we have something that was not mentioned in any changelog yet and it is already present in the game. We added a new measurement tool, and you can find it in terraforming submenu. You can measure distance, elevation or cursor height with it. It can help you to plan better, will remove the need of using workarounds and GUI more options to measure objects and areas on your map. It is quite easy to use, and it shows most of information you may need.

The last two weeks were really productive and helped us to move forward a lot. We have still some time before the deadline for stable version release so we will use that to deal with other issues and improve the game before we release it for players who are not interested in testing the new features earlier. We hope we will succeed and then we may start focusing on the next update and bring you more information and news about that. Until then we wish you success and lot of happiness in your lives. Stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team