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