Greetings Commanders!
Before we enter the topic of the day, we wanted to bring to your attention that we’re hosting an AMA over on Reddit today, at 6 PM CET / 9 AM PST. We would love to chat with you and cover any questions you might have, big or small so join in and ask us anything!
Now, let’s talk about the essentials of city building in Kaiserpunk. Everything starts with your initially humble Town Center, which serves as the heart of your new capital that eventually will become the capital of your entire Empire. This Town Center is where you both progress your city-state’s development and choose your social pillars, but more on that in another dev diary.
Once you’ve laid down your first road and built a few houses, immigrants will begin to arrive. This early in the game, they come with hope for a better future and are eager to settle in. Let’s hope you can keep that optimism alive! To ensure their well-being, make sure your people have access to food and the necessary luxuries. To achieve this, you'll need to establish your basic industries, which will require access to both water and electricity. Your choice of placed buildings and what you upgrade will determine what you unlock in the development tree. If you focus on industry, more industrial buildings will unlock; if you focus on agriculture or military, the corresponding categories will unlock faster.
As your city grows and you begin producing more advanced goods, you’ll need higher-educated citizens, who won't be satisfied with simple bread and fish. Your industries will therefore continue to grow to meet these new demands, and on top of that, you’ll likely want to remember to defend your people and the region you’ve worked so hard to establish. The world around you is changing; even if the world map appears still, things can shift quickly as new leaders rise, and you will eventually run out of resources…
This brings you to the next step: training soldiers, building tanks, airplanes and ships – each requiring its own set of production facilities and equipment. At this point, perhaps you might feel the urge to test your strength against some neutral neighbors, and so the world begins to react around you. There’s lots to do in Kaiserpunk, and city building is the heart of it all.
Going a little deeper into the actual city-building, roads, bridges and tunnels are the glue that holds your city together. They have an upkeep cost, and the distance between buildings plays a significant role. Roads also allow your transportation trucks to get around town, transporting resources and goods between depots and your production buildings. As your city develops and access to resources is enabled, you’ll be able to build better roads. While they come with a higher financial upkeep cost, they allow your trucks to move around faster, improving your production capacity. More advanced roads also give the city a more sophisticated and modern feel.
We’ve already dedicated our last dev diary to industries, so we wont repeat ourselves. It’s worth pointing out that, while you can, of course, build your city however you please, it might be a good idea to dedicate certain parts of the city to production and cluster production buildings together–such as grain, wheat, bakeries– while reserving other areas for housing your citizens. Why? Well, while your industrial sectors benefit from good access and structure to enable smooth production, your housing doesn’t really require efficiency or transportation. However, they do need access to public services like fire stations, education and healthcare. Ensuring your citizens' needs for these services are met is key to keeping morale high—and high morale is crucial for getting your citizens to pay taxes, which keeps your city's economy running smoothly. You’ll do an even better job if you plan your layout with this in mind!
It might be challenging to predict the requirements of your city’s infrastructure from the very beginning as the city expands. Therefore, there are several tools in the game to help you build faster and with more precision. Apart from demolishing, you can move an existing building if you find it’s been misplaced, copy buildings to quickly generate more of the same, or plan and create a temporary blueprint to set up exact copies of several buildings, parks and plazas with just a few clicks. In Kaiserpunk, the city can become massive, and with quays, you could even fill the whole ocean with buildings if you'd like.
Apart from the tools, there are also plenty of decorations! While these particular elements of your city have no real game mechanical function, we think they’re essential to give your capital that extra something. If you’re spending hours on your city, why not make it a bit aesthetically appealing? It’s supposed to be a world capital, after all. In addition to buildings and roads, you can create and decorate parks, plazas, flower fields, neatly arrayed hedge rows, fences, statues, and more. There are many options to make your city a nice place to live.
We can't wait for you to dive into the game and see the grand metropolises you'll create. The wait is almost over—just one more week! Stay tuned as we keep rolling out these diaries to keep you hooked in the meantime.
Until next time - Stay well everyone!
Overseer Games