Greetings future Governors!
With Friday's release fast approaching, today we’ll highlight two aspects of the game: citizens and the research and development panel. For some of you who have followed us for a long time, the first part may feel familiar, as we covered the topic of morale last year. However, it’s an important aspect that’s definitely worth revisiting.
Your Citizens
As with all city-builders, balancing the needs of your citizens is crucial. In Kaiserpunk, these needs are represented by morale, which can be influenced by both world events and conditions within the city. Each citizen type has different needs, with higher-class citizens demanding more. However, you'll need more educated citizen classes to enable advanced industries, so be prepared to meet these demands.
There are four tiers of citizens classes for you to manage:
- Laborers - Operating basic industries, farms and other menial labor
- Manufacturers - Primarily working in factories
- Technicians - Working in more advanced production and public service buildings
- Specialists - The highest and most educated class in your city, employed in only the most advanced roles
These four classes have their own unique needs and functions within your city.
Citizens pay taxes as long as their morale is high. The higher their morale, the greater the tax income:
- Basic needs - Simple food sources like vegetables, bread, meat etc.
- Luxury products - For example, newspapers, clothing, radio sets, or alcohol.
- Public services - Such as fire safety, education and health care.
- Employment rate - If you can't provide enough jobs, it will negatively impact morale.
Keeping all classes happy is key to success, give the people what they need, and they will pay taxes and support your wars. Fail to do so, and they will eventually riot, burning down your city center.
Research and Development Panel
While building in Kaiserpunk, you’ll accumulate development points based on buildings from specific categories, such as agriculture, manufacturing, living, or military. Regions you’ve conquered will also add certain development points. The more points you accumulate in a given category, the more new buildings and upgrades you’ll unlock within that category. Additionally, all production and utility buildings in Kaiserpunk come with 6 upgrade slots, allowing you some options to steer them in certain directions depending on your goals.
A few examples:
- Your economy is struggling so you upgrade a few of your more upkeep heavy buildings with oversight offices that reduce their upkeep cost by 12% per upgrade to help lower costs.
- You’ve ended up in a situation where you can’t produce enough food to sustain your current population and you need to increase migration, so you upgrade your farms with both Irrigation that increases their output yield AND mechanized farming upgrades that also lowers the workforce need.
- You start struggling with the long distances your transportation trucks must cover to fetch yields from your farms. To solve this, you apply storage upgrades, allowing the farms to wait longer for the trucks to arrive. Additionally, you upgrade nearby depots with loading ramp upgrades to provide more trucks for that area.
That’s it for today's dev diary! Tomorrow, we’ll be back to talk more about your armies and military units so stay tuned for that.
Until tomorrow - Stay well everyone!
Overseer Games