It's a resource management game and a city builder. You can set the level of detail on what you have to set up, but you can set up every single aspect of your economy and city. You build a farm and then must build tractors and combines and trucks to service the farm. You build a food factory to turn produce into food. You build trucks to deliver produce to the factory and food from the factory to the grocery store. The grocery store needs workers, it all needs workers. So you need housing. You need to build busses to get workers from the housing to the factory (they walk if it's close enough). You need fertilizer for your fields or they won't be nutritious. So you can build a fertilizer factory. Then you need all the stuff to support that. You need power and metal and wood and bricks, so you have to build all that.
You can also import goods from the broader Soviet Union or from the West. It's like if Cybersyn was a SimCity game.
First thing I noticed is you have three currencies when building, Rubles, Dollars, and Build With Resources (i.e. local labor, equipment, and materials).
The train system can be finicky but at least it has a very detailed railroad system, it is almost 1/3 the gameplay.
Not really, you can select how you want to fund your building projects. From the wiki
In Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, the player works towards building a self-sufficient republic by constructing Buildings, Utilities, Infrastructure, and other construction projects. There are two ways to complete a construction project:
Funding with currency
Construction with resources
The cheapest way to build the republic is for the player to build everything himself using construction facilities and the proper resources.
Funding with currency is importing resources and labour (and in non-realistic mode, importing magic labour that doesn't need transporting to site). It doesn't really affect your internal "market".
It's good but steep learning curve with a lot of things you'll spend learning outside the game. Fully socialist economy means you'll be collecting resources and turning those resources into industries in order to do build society, provide jobs and so on. Instead of just zoning and leaving things up to the market. This obviously has a lot more complexity though as you learn exactly how all the chains work, how vehicles are managed to do logistics across all the chains, etc etc.
Once it does all start to click into place it's rewarding though.