I want to be train pilled but I'm bad at the game and the YouTubers making guides are not to the quality I'm used to: A modern man's struggle with workers and resources
Send help for the love of God. I've killed thousands and had to restart my Republic so many times making mistakes that it feels like there should be easier ways to avoid. I'm playing realistic mode for reference.
As a general problem, I keep on failing to resist the temptation to build an ugly little 400x400 meter box cram packed with spaghetti walkways and utilities wherever they fit in order to min/max walking and infrastructure range. After 70 hours of the game my first city is actually surviving to the point of net gain and I'm trying to make the next jump. I've carefully prepared before allowing any growth beyond 3000 (I learned my lesson when everyone froze to death... And starved... And ran out of water... And died at 45 due to pollution...) but now I don't know what to do lmao. My people are happy, healthy, and well enough employed by a clothing industry with a food factory and distillery ready to go into production, but I hate trying to do anything in the city because it's so so so cramped. Do I try to make the shitbox less shit? Should I just build a new better city some ways off, or keep new development close to old development so I can still make good use of the infrastructure? Whatever my decision, I can't make a larger city work on buses and trucks alone. The fuel costs and traffic are a pain and I wish I could use all those cool trains or even just trolleys, but I can't figure out how to make it happen lmao. I have learned to save before trying a project only for it to fail miserably and kill everyone or bankrupt me when it completes in 6 months to a year, and I just had to revert because it turns out trolleys can't interact with fuel bus platforms, and my ENTIRE city depends on its platform, so that's not going anywhere.
Where is a quality source for guides on how to build industries, make rail work, and so on and so forth? I've been watching bballjo's videos as well as reading the wiki, and honestly, they're not so good. It's unironically been making me wish I was better at the game so that I could make the kinds of guides I wish I had right now; well scripted and on topic, edited well with pre-recorded clips to clearly show what's going on, and not just saying "this" or "here" or "there" or "that" and using specific names so people less familiar with the game don't lose the thread. Also, digestible. Each guide feels like it should only be 10-15 minutes MAXIMUM, with shorter being better. The longer 'guides' just become too much to absorb at once and harder to sort through to find the bit you actually need. Does anything like what I'm describing actually exist? Or is it all streamers style some guy in a gaming chair rambling more or less on topic for an hour?
Credit where credit is due, I was able to claw a surviving city together by pulling out the main lessons from jo and other ramblers content, but it's getting worse as I get to more complicated systems.
This is a long post that has become more complaining than I wanted it to be. I'm really enjoying the game and I want to progress out of the "early" game, but I don't know how to make train run good or scale up. Please send me good written or video sources for how to city good. Also, don't make me an urban planner after the revolution, at leastv not until I have a couple more hundred hours in this game lmao.
i don't like the ramble-y "let me just open my webcam and record" tutorials as well. it's just a lot of dead air and rambles that distract from the main point of the video. not digestible, no prepared setups, no demonstration and worst of all most of the actual useful tips are dispersed throughout so you gotta watch the whole 2 hour thing, can't put it on the back burner as well since you might miss a crucial detail.
Today I doubled my shit box's population to 5000 and got rail laid down. Are my semaphores ordered in any kind of coherent order? Absolutely not! But my one train (yes it's a "Pig" don't @ me it's cute and affordable and it only has to go like 400 meters lmao) is getting back and forth between my industrial park and the customs house just fine thank you very much. So I'm actually good at the game, and once I get this tram line figured out and merged well with my track, oooohh baby, this industrial park is finally going to be operating at full capacity. Then I can get the rail DO installed and let the money spigot run for a while as I set up an oil field on the other side of the map and oh baby we're off to the races with whatever the fuck I want