Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. Another week has passed and we come to you with another report as we promised. This time we will talk about sewage, and we can discuss few changes we made for the current Crime and Justice update. There we two updates for public testing last week and the actual version available now is 0.8.6.9. There may be more tweaks coming and we hope these changes can address some of significant issues players need to face due to changed productivity mechanics.
But first we want to introduce the basics for sewage. It will work similarly to water, which means buildings will be connected to network through substation. You may think it is quite simplified that way, but you will have to face other challenges, so planning every connection would be just too much from gameplay perspective. The most important will be how the terrain will be sloped because the sewage water will require a slight slope to flow down into Sewerage Plant where it can be purified before you let it flow into nature. You will have significant use for the measurement tool in this case, and you can already see how much complication this may add to those, who want to continue with their existing saves.
You will have option to use pumps if the terrain is not helpful so you can build even if there will not be the right slope to help sewage water to flow downhill. Then you will have to options how you will treat the sewage water. There will be a Sewerage Plant to treat it before dumping it into nature or you will be able to release the sewage water directly into nature without treating it. The water entering the Sewerage Plant will have its own level of pollution and the water exiting it will have its level of pollution. The more polluted the water dumped into nature will be the more pollution it will cause.
Another idea regarding this is for smaller towns or situations when your facilities stop working correctly. We are considering adding new tasks to technical services, such as distributing drinking water using water tanks and collecting sewage water. This may be used also for parts of city that does not have sewage and water distribution network available, but it will be limited as it will require a proper number of trucks doing the job.
And now about latest changes on the test branch. The productivity drop had severe effect on heating and power production so we increased the production there in a way that even if you have low productivity, you will still have reasonable output, if you will fully staff the power and heating plants. This way you will have better odds to survive another winter. Then there was an issue with crime for those starting with strict rules because the price for buildings managing crime is quite high. We added a modifier to crime which is affected by the size of population. This allows players to play without necessity to deal with crime with small population. Only later you will need police, court, and prison. The threshold when crime is at full effect is when your population reaches 12.000. We also made the rail distribution office drive-through, but you will need to rebuild it first if you want to use it this way.
There were also some fixes which you can find in changelog. From now we are going back to normal schedule, releasing new report every 2 weeks. We hope we will be able to finish this Crime and Justice update for you soon, and you will be prepared for the challenges the game will offer afterwards. Just do not forget these upcoming changes are huge and no previously planned republic is guaranteed to survive, if you switch new mechanics on, so play with that in mind, and hold your biggest plans for the final release. Until then enjoy your gaming, have fun while testing, stay safe and tuned for the next report.
Thank You for Your Support
3Division Team