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