Greetings commanders,
here is a listicle with “10 things I wish I knew” when starting your journey in Kaiserpunk while we're working on more updates for the game.
1. Morale = Cash
It is key that you ensure the citizens are happy so they pay taxes! The happier they are, the more you will earn. The actual tax the citizens pay fluctuates, but even citizens without employment pay taxes up to a certain point. As long as you have people “waiting for immigration” (interest to move in) to your new city, you can build more houses and have more citizens paying taxes. But be careful – if they don’t get employed eventually, things will start looking grim for you.
Morale should be your biggest concern to get cash. All citizen types in your population have certain needs. The more advanced and educated the citizen type, the more diverse their needs, which you can view when clicking on a house or in the population statistics panel.
The better these needs are met, the higher morale of the citizen types will be, and the more income you’ll get from them in the form of taxes. If morale diminishes, the citizens will eventually begin to riot.
2. Production Chain Efficiency is Important
To be a true captain of industry, there are several things to consider in the chain of success! Production chains consist of all the necessary resources produced to reach a specific refined resource. For example, the production chain for newspapers is: Wood → Cellulose → Paper → Newspaper.
To make a production chain efficient, you may need more or fewer of certain buildings in the chain. Check their input and output to figure out a number of buildings. For example, a single Forester produces 16 Wood, and a Cellulose Factory produces 20 Cellulose from 4 Wood.
Additionally, there’s a clear benefit to creating an entire production chain in close proximity to speed up transportation and, therefore production, increasing overall output. If multiple buildings within the same production chain are close to each other, they can send transporters between them, avoiding the need to wait for transportation trucks from nearby depots.
Finally, choose the resources you want to track in the Resource Overview in the HUD at the top of the main screen, so you can monitor them easily, and keep an eye on the Open Stock Overview panel to see where in the production chain you might need to adjust production to maintain overall control.
3. Upgrade Your Buildings
Upgrading buildings can make a massive difference for you. Almost all buildings have the option to upgrade up to six things, depending on your current needs. The most powerful upgrades early on can for example be:
- Lower cost by 12%
- Increase production capacity by 20%
- Reduce electricity or water consumption by 15%
- Add +1 transporter trucks for depots
However, there are several other upgrades you can choose from as the city transforms and your gameplay matures. This is a great way to make your city more efficient instead of constructing more buildings.
To give an example, let’s say your income is starting to look red. Should you pause several production buildings to reduce upkeep? Increase morale to get more taxes by producing more, thus short term increasing costs even further? Or should you simply upgrade your buildings to lower costs and balance it that way? Yes, the latter will save you time and money.
4. Keep Your City Secure
This is important for three reasons:
- The safer your citizens feel, the higher their morale, the higher the earnings!
- It mitigates the risk of fires so your precious buildings don’t burn down
- It mitigates and suppresses rioting people
Two very important buildings to satisfy the public service needs for safety among your citizens are the Fire Stations and Police Stations.
All buildings have a risk of catching fire that increases over time. Fire Stations serve two functions: they mitigate the risk of accidental fires in nearby buildings. You can see the fire risk of a building in the upper left corner of that building’s window tab. They also send a fire truck to any building that catches fire to put it out!
Police Stations also serve two purposes: they help reduce the risk of citizens rioting. You can see the riot risk in the upper right corner of the building’s window tab. Police Stations will also send a squad car to any nearby rioting groups to help suppress them, limiting their ability to reach your town center.
If enough of them reach your town center and manage to burn it down - game over.
5. Don’t Overlook Your Defenses
The world around you tries to lick its wounds from the war, just as you do, and some will seek power and grow their empires sooner than others. Even if you don’t focus on building a military to start a war with others, don’t forget others might eventually come knocking on your door.
By building some defences, you at least have a chance to defend yourself if an attack comes. Beefing up your garrisons with infantry, long range and anti-air defenses on the global map ensures you have a defense if someone attacks you by land, sea or air. But be aware, they do take a little while to build.
6. Resources? Smugglers May Not Have Them!
The smugglers might not always have the resources you seek. There are two forms of trade:
- Trade with smugglers or free traders, either by land, sea, or air. This is a good short-term solution. They arrive periodically, and sales happen when they are in town, but they only trade limited volumes. Even if you wish to purchase or sell more, they might not have enough or may not want to trade enough to fulfill your demand.
- Trade deals with AI factions (other powers): This is a better long-term solution since they are stable for your industry. These deals are negotiated, and you usually move larger volumes.
7. What You Build Steers Unlocking in the Research and Development Panel
You steer what you unlock first when you are building and developing your city. The more of a certain category you build, the more development points and building unlockings you’ll earn.
New buildings, units, and upgrades impact unlocking. All buildings belong to a specific development category and contribute a certain amount of development points to that category. For example, a Farm contributes 4 development points per day to the Agricultural category, while a Police Station contributes 3 development points per day to the Civics category.
To track your progress in all development categories, check the Research & Development Panel. If you expand an area, you’ll see which buildings, units or upgrades get unlocked and when. If you specifically need a building that’s still locked, try constructing or upgrading more buildings in that category.
8. Optimize Your Needs by Changing Production Output
You might find that you have enough of some resources needed for a specific production chain but lack other resources, which are created by the same production building. Instead of constructing additional identical production buildings, which would increase upkeep costs, you can switch what the building produces. Click on the building and use the arrows (menu represented by a gear symbol) to adjust production for the time being. This is especially useful if your economy is somewhat strained.
9. Keep the People Pampered!
Apart from the basic demands, each citizen class has luxury needs. The more of these luxuries you provide, the higher their morale and tax payments will be.
So, make sure to give the people what they desire!
10. Salvage Ruins and Scrap for materials
When you start your game, there’s a lot of scrap and ruins scattered around the world, remnants of the recent war. You will see these on the map as yellow markers on the minimap in the left corner. Salvage and/or repair these (you can sell or reuse buildings after repairing) to get a head start with various materials, but remember, you’ll need available workers to actually do the job.
If you wish to see more mini tutorials, here is a full series with a little bit of everything, and we’ll keep adding more!