Enabling Debug Console:
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You can open the debug console while the game is in progress by pressing
INSERT key. From there you can insert cheats.
(alter gameplay but disable score)
Code Effect
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einstein – You get 1 point in all trees.
Gameplay Tips:
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Written by Waervyn
Constructing your buildings close to each other has two advantages. The first one is
of course that trucks simply have to spend less time trucking from one place to the
next, and time is money. However, there is a second reason why this is beneficial.
Whenever trucks get dispatched, a 'dispatch cost’ is charged. This cost is based on
the amount of distance the trucks have to drive. Therefore, having short distances
not only directly saves you time, it also saves you money.
Trade routes can be set up using the little arrow symbols in the top right of the
screen as per the tutorial. The way these work on a financial level are not clearly
explained though. When you set up a route, you can add goods to be transported. In
the case of trucks, the used trucks actually carry more goods than the normal
transportation trucks can. Each 'slot’ in the traderoute windows represents one
truck. This means you can have a maximum of four trucks in a route.
Now the important part is that a trade convoy with 4 trucks costs exactly the same
to dispatch than a convoy with 1 truck. Therefore, setting up one route with 4 goods
is more efficient moneywise than setting up multiple routes with one good.
One more about trade routes! The trade route window allows you to do some more
complex things. First of all, you can add more stations to the same route. Let’s
call them building A, B, C. Let’s say you want to bring for water from A to the
others, and both B and C should receive 2 of these waters. To do this, add both B
and C as extra stations, and fill up the four slots with water. You will now see
four red icons showing water in station B. However, this means we would unlock 4
water at B, and not have any left for C. To amend this, click on the little icon
next to the X on a slot of building B(looks like a pause-button turned 90 degrees).
Now these will turn grey. This means they will not be unloaded to B, but will be
transported to C instead, which is what we want. Normally a new convoy is only sent
out when the first one has finished the entire route.
To change this, you can increase or decrease the number of 'convoys’ assigned to
a trade route. This means multiple can be active at the same time.
Don’t make your trade routes too complex, as you can easily get stuck due to the
lack of options the game currently provides with storages. Let’s say I have a trade
route from A to B containing four different products. All the producers bring their
products to the truck depot, and they are shipped from there. The problem is that
a storage only has limited space. If one of your goods produces faster than the
others (hard to prevent), you’ll start flooding the storage with this good. As
soon as even one of the goods is not present in the storage anymore, the traderoute
will not drive anymore, and you’ll lose out on a lot of money. Therefore, either
plan supercarefully, make multiple traderoutes from the same storage, or use multiple
storages.
I personally prefer career mode over free mode, as it’s way less overwhelming to
a new player, as there are basically less options available at the start. However,
be very careful when choosing your initial unlocks, as you can easily get stuck
here. For example, if you unlock the textile factory as your first one, you will
not be able to use it for a looong time, as it needs to have access to cotton,
which you only get from a tier 3 farming building. When you unlock wheat farms,
they can’t do anything with their products except sell to the state, until you
unlock something like animal farms. Safe buildings to start with are 1): Water
siphon + orchards, as you can directly sell apples, grapes and oranges to many
towns or 2): Lumberyard + papermill, as the wood provided to the papermill can
be turned into paper and cardboard, which in turn can be turned into carton.
You can buy products from the wholesaler! Let’s say you start an industrial start
with the lumberyard + papermill. The papermill will also be needing water, but you
can’t produce it as you used your unlockpoints for the lumberyard. To circumvent
this problem, go to a town and click on the wholesaler to see if they have water
available for you. If so, click on 'destinations’ just like normal and send the water
to your industry. This will cost you money, but will allow you to produce your goods
and still sell at a profit.
Watch out for the upkeep costs of trucks. Whenever you set up a 'destination’, the
game immediately assigns 3 trucks as a default. However, if you build stuff close by
each other, you won’t be needing 3 trucks. This means the trucks will not be doing
anything, but they will still cost you upkeep costs. Decrease the number of trucks
you need to prevent this from happening.
It is very easy to over or undersupply things in this game, which can completely mess
up your traderoutes etc. Unfortunately we do not yet have tool to help us with this
problem so for now we’ll have to do some calculations. Let’s say I want to know how
many water siphons I need to supply my wheatfarm with 4 fields. Each field needs 1
water every 15 days, while each water siphon provides water every 7.5 days.
To calculate how many siphons we need we can do: (7.5/15)*4 = 2. This means 2 siphons
will be able to 'fuel’ the wheat plantation. You can use this calculation even for
more complex buildings which need multiple inputs.
Production buildings fully stop working when even one of their outputs is full. A
cattle farm produces three things: meat, leather and milk. I can sell the meat to
the city and use the milk to make cheese, but let’s say I haven’t got a building
that uses leather yet (you cannot sell it directly commercially , although you can
sell it to the state at a bad price). Even if you cannot use the leather, make sure
you take it out of the cattle farm (either to store or sell to the state).
The reason for this is that the farm will completely stop working if it is full of
leather, even if there is no meat and milk at all and you have plenty of resources
to make cows. It simply will not start anymore. Therefore, make sure the 'output’
part of a production facility is always cleared out.
There are so many things you can produce in this game it can easily get overhwelming.
To make this a bit easier to understand, make sure to have a look at the recipe book
in the game (click on the book icon in the top right). Here you can search for something
you’re interested in, either by clicking on the titles or by typing in the search bar.
The nice thing is that you can click on the inputs in order to figure out how to make
that particular thing. Let’s say I want to know how to make summer clothes. I find
them in the list and click on them. It needs fabric, but I don’t know how to make
that, so I just click on the fabric icon and it tells me how to make fabric etc.
etc.
