This mod made dealing with earthquakes a lot more manageable especially on realistic mode.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3484665712

In my opinion there is no general answer for your questions. It depends on your settings and the map of course.

Hello, realistic mode comrade. Welcome to Soviet Hell!

I jest... Realistic mode isn't rigged, but it can kill your nation at the worst of times. However, most of the time, I found out that the disasters were more or less a making of my own due to bad (micro)management. Except earthquakes. Earthquakes suck.

Regarding earthquakes, IMHO it is fine and not considered "cheating" to reload the last autosave, especially before you have proper contingency plans ready (a good CO network, great firefighters coverage, etc). Major earthquakes (> 6.0) in the first 15 years of gameplay are usually a game over, so reload. The earthquakes will not reproduce upon reloading.

That said, you were rather unlucky with the RNG if you got major earthquakes every year. For me, they're like, one every 3-4 years. And only one every 10 years or so is major (> 6.0).

As for tips on realistic construction works, I've already shared some of my insights on how to optimize it, you can have a read in this thread (page 4): https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/784150/discussions/0/3935643680467374695/?ctp=4

I also give my insight on how to efficiently start a second city: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/784150/discussions/0/597407749214746547/

After going through these threads you still want to discuss some things more in-depth, I'll be happy to do it, just let me know what things you struggle with specifically. Sharing knowledge is good karma.

Originally posted by **SMASH**:

First off, I wasn't expecting it to be easy, but I'm starting to think Realistic Mode is a bit rigged. The default disaster settings are too much; I was copping major earthquakes every 12 - 14 months and getting stuck in a slow death spiral... so I turned that down a bit and found that I'm still struggling to get momentum and keep a happy, healthy (living) workforce even though I'm managing to get all the services, supply chains and workplaces set up prior to even building houses.

So, I was hoping for some advice' what strategies work for you? Do you build a proper construction office early on or make-do with the free ones? Which industry do you find is best to start investing in first? Do you build wide or tall? Many small settlements or just a massive sprawl?

This asks a lot of questions, which don't really accept short answers well...

Realistic disasters : More of an infrastructure check than an imbalance. Plan contingencies, man your fire stations.

Realistic priorities : Your first industry is people. Your second industry can be anything, but i enjoy doing either clothing and/or chemicals.

So that means you must prioritize building your town before anything else, and try to have your first invitations as soon as the technology/map allows.

To that end, C.O: The free ones will serve to get you building the first infrastructure but you *will* need more vehicles soon to fast track the building. This is especially true if you are not starting in 1960.

I would recommend getting 2 large C.O up, even if you do not fill them up immediately. 1 large on is not enough, 2 may be a bit much for your first town, but it will do. Alternatively i've made due with 2 medium ones before to start with, but i appreciate having the option of getting a few more vehicles later on.

For your free C.Os, i would recommend understanding that construction phases are different and do not all require workforce / the same mechanisms. As a general example, a building starts with ground works which you don't require workforce for and can only send excavators with materials. Likewise, roads(and footpaths) only require a bulldozer if they're long enough. For the exact length, you can figure that for yourself in game through the following.

As a result, my advice would be to have all 7 free C.Os configured that way:
- 1* 2 buses, 2 road cranes, disable auto discovery, assign manually.
- 1* bulldozers, disable buildings, only do roads, footpaths, factory connections
- 1* 2 excavators, 1 covered hull, 1 mixer disable roads, footpaths, factory connections
- 1 * 4 dumpers
- 1 * 4 open hulls
- 1 * 2 dumpers 2 mixers
- 1 * 4 mixers

Once you have your built COs, refuel those, keep the free CO with buses on manual assignation. Buy tower cranes and move the road cranes to another separate free CO on manual assignement and you will use those only for pipes now. Have one build CO assign mechanisms to roads and the other to buildings, if possible, tick the box "deliver mechanisms with trucks", at least for bulldozers. When you have a city with workers, you can reassign both COs to be versatile with the capacity to tackle anything, but for now it's better to specialise.

So to recap, you build your construction area, you build your town, you grow your population enough to the point where you can have enough people to man an industry, and you build that industry.

Once you have a working town with a couple of fire stations that are manned, realistic disasters are less of a hassle. They aren't rare, sure, but they're not always destroying your city. Most times it's just a couple fires.

About learning how to play on realistic mode, there are plenty of video tutorials on that and you can learn more in there than we could ever teach you here. But in general there are many things you can do, like using trucks to provide water to a water tower instead of building a cleaning station early, skipping the early parts of the production chain and importing what is needed to produce finished goods which are more valuable.

The most interesting industries early on is something that is debatable, but I would say that clothing is a good one. I also reccomend making your own food as you're already likely importing crops. If you're on mods, selling energy from hidroeletric damns or sollar pannels is also good because its almost free. You must diversify you economy as much as you can due to inflation.

About disaster events and difficulty spikes, one thing that I do is to increase some difficulties latter into the game, specially if I'm playing on early start. To me, this simmulates the society becomming more complex. I would never turn on disasters early on because it can cause a death spiral or slow you down too much. I generally don't turn on fires early on when I'm on realistic mode.

When I do play on realistic, I generally create my own maps. This gives me a better shapped country, well distributed resources, and better terrains. Sometimes terrain that was generated is just bad: even tho its mostly plain, its not really plain and you have to both spend money and see stuff being weirdly placed around. So I do create some elevated terrain, but in a more realistic way. I also make rivers who actually can be used to navigate into the country, which helps a lot specially considering that the train system in the game isn't the best and attempting to make everything be transported by trucks is a no-go. I would also reccomend placing at least one construction office near each border connection, as it would speed up the game if you're playing on realistic (I find it kinda hard to believe the soviets would create cities out of nowhere without placing huge construction assets in there, and also it just saves you the time of watching these construction offices being built).

I'm not the best player around but feel free to ask me anything else you need, comrade.

The free construction offices are sufficient for starting, but you'll want to build actual COs later on, as you will want your free COs for the ability to make quick expansions or to rebuild something quickly in an emergency. The main problem with building a "construction complex" with COs and storages at the start is that it takes time and money that could go towards more starting industry and a larger starter town, and you probably won't need it for a while after the initial construction frenzy is over.

In my opinion, the best way to use the free COs is to stockpile materials near constructions in the free storages and have vehicles in a nearby free CO make the final delivery; this allows trucks on lines to be moving material before the construction phase calls for it, which greatly cuts down on the time to build something, these trucks will always be taking full loads to the area (maximizes truck/customs throughput), and it frees up slots in the CO for more mechanisms to be working or for more gravel/asphalt/concrete to be taken to projects at a given time.

Try to save money for more industries and population, as the more income you can get, the faster you can expand. Try to spend no more than 125,000 rubles on the vehicles you'll be using for construction (it sounds like a lot, but it isn't), and only use foreign workers on construction phases that only they can complete, with a road crane present if possible.

Use the "CO assign tool" (found on the left menu bar) to make micromanaging your COs a lot easier, especially if you put it on the hot bar (found on top, click the "vvvvvvvv" tab). This is a great way to quickly and easily assign a free CO with a couple vans and a road crane to constructions whose ground works have finished, and other such specialized COs can be assigned to specific jobs just as easily.


For surviving earthquakes without save scumming, you mostly need to harden critical infrastructure so it can lose some buildings and still continue to function, at least until you can make repairs. Due to how this game works, there is a lot of stuff that can be considered critical, such as heating, power, sewage, shops and services, transportation, fire fighting, and so on, so all of it needs to be doubled or at least designed to work long enough for repairs to complete.

How exactly each system can be hardened varies; heating for example could get away with overlapping heat exchanger coverage, so if one goes down, others can keep temperatures merely uncomfortable instead of lethal until repairs are made. You should also have multiple fire stations in case one goes down, because fires are assured to happen with earthquakes. Water and sewage can be covered by trucks if you depressurize the water system (marking pipes to substations for demolition and immediately suspending them works well for this). Heat exchanger/pumps and other critical infrastructure/services should have two independent sources of power, as they will not function without power.

Citizens basically need extra services and shops to ensure there will be enough capacity after some shops and service go down, but since an earthquake can only strike in one place, you could build these extra services and shops in a central place and use public transportation to give nearby areas redundancy instead of building copies in each town or neighborhood.


For starting industries, your main options will be oil, clothes, fabric, food, alcohol, explosives, and burning imported hazardous waste and exporting the ash mix. Try to build a few of these to pay off your expenses for the fuel, power, and whatever else you import. To get the workforce, it is usually best to spend your otherwise mostly useless dollars on uneducated third world immigrants and then spend a few weeks giving them a basic education. Once you have a small income, you'll want to get a technical university online and research an industry that can make you a lot of money, like oil refining or bauxite mining, and then take out a loan to build it.

if u have nato customs and soviet customs nearby. U can make decent starting cash just buying poop from nato and dumping it and or selling water... this sells for super cheap butttt then your gonna purchase vehicles from nato and truck em over to soviet customs for sale. dont drive them maunually they need to be trucked in. this is where the actual money is made. sell everything at nato and then buy vehicles from them and sell em to the soviet. its like double the money. start building your town get the passports for tourism bring in nato guests and do the same thing spend the cash u earn on vehicles and sell. this works pretty good early game. you can even earn from gravel with this method basically anything. i used this method on the british isle worked decent. there is an ocean right beside the nato border where u can dump the ♥♥♥♥. Your nato boarder will rarely see action early game so fill it up with cheap cheap sales.

Yeah I hate earthquakes, now I start with normal global events. My first earthquake happened RIGHT after a snowfall (1962), it destroyed my electric substation supplying the heating plant and started 4 fires; okay maybe I should have built 2 and placed the fire station closer. Another start: my second earthquake (1962) was an 8.8 one (also right after a snowfall) and outright leveled 2 residential buildings, killing 25% of the population, destroyed the high voltage transformer leaving everything without electricity and there are 4 fires; okay now this is utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I raged quit xD.

I like to plan everything first. I build a gas station and a 24 CO with gravel roads leading to them right away, place everything there except buses and road crane. Later on I add a 12 CO dedicated to small constructions (waste stands, etc.) and a 12 CO for concrete mixers. I plan the first city with 7-8 110 res and 8 154 res buildings in mind with plenty of space between residences (+10 m side to side, 12 m to ped paths). 1 110 and 5 154 res is my stopping point to start researching prefab buildings and replace older res blueprints.

Clothing ind start is unbeatable, but I prefer to start with construction ind first (gravel, concrete, asphalt, boards are optional) since they require barely any workers and you will need them anyways. Asphalt ind is the worst profit wise, but it can insulate you from oil price shocks (build a 90t liquid tank, you can load/unload from it with a dist office)

Basically my plan is this: start a minimally viable town asap next to the border (small clinic, house of culture, footbal field, etc) to get education going, build const ind, build police, prison, etc., research prefabs, build a clothing ind and fully staff it. Add another clothing fac. 1 cov hull can supply both. Now you are in the green and you can slowly expand without loans.

Remember to buy steel from nato once you start running out of rubles (<100k rubles). Build a big storage fast to take advantage of steel price drop because of coal price crash (if it happens: send every op hull you have when price reaches the bottom). 1 tower crane and 1 big bus, 1 road crane and 3 microbuses are enough to build everything (withing 1.5 km from the border). Micro manage COs and buses to complete one building at a time (use the "construction offices assign tool"); check the "notify me when finished" box to keep track of finished constructions.

It took me many tries before I finally got a successful city going. Something that made starting much easier on both my time and my wallet was building just enough to start moving people in and then have them finish the rest. You can make do with just water and sewage trucks to substations for quite a while cause it seems that everyone will use less water when it's trucked to the subsystems. I started with fabric and clothes as my first industry and by the time I managed to setup another I had chemicals unlocked and built a small one so I could stop importing chems to cut down on my imports. After that I setup my water and sewage since I had my own chems for water treatment, and still made enough to export some. A small heating plant will work fine on the edge of your city opposite of the houses till about 1500 - 2500 people then it needs moved or a large one further away.
After getting enough people to keep the city going I imported people from the west to use up most of my nato bucks and just put them through high school. I made do with the free construction offices until my city was up and running.

Edit: I also setup alcohol before chemicals, but Im not convinced it was worth it tbh.

Things that might not come to mind in your first realistic experience.

before you do a thing pause, time is almost as limited as money, so wile you layout things, do not run time if nothing gets build.
secect any house, does not matter, on the very right there is a popup menu, press the little + symbol and disable automatic building and automatic getting people. you want to exactly controll what gets done and what does not get done in the first years. later you can change these settings to your desire.

travel distance matters a lot!
you might want to move your CO with Bulldozers and Excavators closer to the action and move it where you need it (park the vehickes in a free vehicle depot for a moment) this comes specialy important when you need to do some terraforming.
place gas stations near the COs and Near the actual construction site.

if you do not need a gassatation anymore take it out of the DOs delivery list and wait till the fuel is empty, that way you waste no money on fuel and also do not have to get rid of hazardous waste when demolishing them.

Make a general plan of your first city, you do not need to place every building yet (plenty of time for that when building roads) but you want to have your city core layed out and pipework planed (you can delicer water and wastewater per TS and build pipes later)

Build your city to do 2 things
first, use the workforce to finish construction
second, scale it so it has enought workers but not to many to run your first industry so you can fully switch it on when you are not construction (good rule of thumb Number of Workplaces in all the industrial Buildings x3 for the shifts and exta x1 for the service jobs to keep the workers happy)

plan wastewater as first underground infrastructure after placeing your buildings!
this is important since you can wiggle every other infrastructure up and down but wastewater needs slope, and it gets harder to place it the more stuff is going on under ground already.


a good industry is any that runs on crops .. (cattle is ok, but meat only for local conumption) they are all available from the start or early on, they are all consumed by your republic, so you cut down on imports.
they increase value reasonable from crops to finish products.
do not build farms first, you can add them later once things are working
!!!Plan for rail!!!
you do not need rail right away, but if you ever want to run your crops based industry at close to 100% trucks will not cut it, they are fine to get things started but you want eventualy to be able to deliver by train due to the big volumes involved.


money is always tight in the early game.
if your city is running and you are still constructing stuff, consider inviteing nato people, but keep an eye on your school, they almost all need schooling but they take the edge off when it comes to inviteing people.
just dont overdo it, invite like 50, and after a wile check if there are still 21+ year olds in the school, if not invite 50 more untill you have a feel for how many you can get away with.

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

The free construction offices are sufficient for starting, but you'll want to build actual COs later on, as you will want your free COs for the ability to make quick expansions or to rebuild something quickly in an emergency. The main problem with building a "construction complex" with COs and storages at the start is that it takes time and money that could go towards more starting industry and a larger starter town, and you probably won't need it for a while after the initial construction frenzy is over.

That's why I do reccomend placing at least one CO near the place you wanna start building. It just saves up the time and money to build a new one. Once you do it, it feels like what should be, and using the free ones feels like you were just building a cult in the middle of nowhere.

Originally posted by kiky:

money is always tight in the early game.

I also reccomend cheating to give yourself more money early on. This allows you to reverse some mistakes that would cause a death spiral otherwise, and to speed up early on. In no time you'll have spent the money anyway, but by then you would be likely making a lot of cash. I do opt for doing this than to running the risk of losing the game after many hours were spent on it. It also doesn't change much except for game pace because you still have the strain made by logistics if you're on realistic.

Another thing be careful with loans, in some of my unsuccessful republics they were my spiral. Make sure if you take some you'll be able to pay then back cause if you end up taking out loans to repay the interest early on it's probably over. If you do need multiple loans to finance something take them out as needed.