this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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Workers & Resources: why do buildings cost money? (hexbear.net)
submitted 4 months ago by Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

No, seriously, why do they? It's not like the construction workers don't get paid their wages if they aren't given such projects, and, unless you are buying the resources from overseas, the only cost for the construction materials for the state is wages/salaries of the workers who are involved in the relevant processes.

Am I being swindled?

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[–] Lurkerino@hexbear.net 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Until you have a construction company in your country you are using foreign resources and labor and must pay for them.

Gameplay wise, there is a button that looks like a crane at the bottom right and one that looks like money, when constructing a building. The crane is for planing construction so your construction companies start constructing them.

Inside the construction company you must select where they get the resources like steel and concrete, usually you want some nearby warehouses, if you make the resources yourself make sure to fill the warehouse with them, otherwise buy them from abroad.

People, if they live close to the construction site will go to work there, if its far away you need to buy a bus in the construction site to move the people.

Bear in mind the game tells you how much working days it is needed to build any building and how many resources you need, its only if you are buying the building when money matters and the game gives you an amount based on how much the labour and resources cost.

[–] sharedburdens@hexbear.net 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Once you make your own construction industry, leveling and manipulating terrain is free too!

[–] frankfurt_schoolgirl@hexbear.net 5 points 4 months ago

It does cost a little fuel. It's always super annoying when you start flattening a hill and then all the bulldozers drive away to get gas.

[–] Lurkerino@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

I only wish its range were global, I hate needing to create so many construction sites all around the map.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Until you have a construction company in your country you are using foreign resources and labor and must pay for them

Which implies that there are no other cities in your country.
Another person has explained to me that that is, apparently, the case or something similar to that is.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago

All of the land that you see/can build on is your country. If there are no other cities, then there are no other cities. If you haven't build a construction industry, then there isn't one.

[–] CarbonScored@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If I'm not mistaken, the game is essentially about starting your own soviet republic under the USSR (and presumably handwaving away the idea of non-monetary cooperation between soviets) so yep, no pre-existing anything.

[–] Diuretic_Materialism@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago

I think the premise is you're a tiny as fuck micro-nation in the Eastern Bloc that was literally just a few villages before WWII, so yeah you're improving a lot from the rest of the USSR.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

When you buy buildings you are buying the resources, having them shipped in, and having foreign contract workers come in with that to actually build it for you using their equipment. It's just it abstracts this away for the sake of gameplay. It's like when buildings are purchasing and importing the goods they need, it's abstracting the actual delivery of them from outside.

It may be a game setting to enable a more complicated build option (so if you're still in the tutorial campaign this may be disabled, I'm not sure), but if you look down at the right corner where you have "finance with rubles" and "finance with dollars" boxes, there should be a third one to the right of them that uses local resources and labor. That doesn't cost money (directly, but if you're filling warehouses of material with the auto-import purchase option that will cost money) but requires construction offices staffed with transport and heavy construction vehicles, as well as busses to take workers to the site, and you need to be sourcing all of those things from somewhere.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

When you buy buildings you are buying the resources

From where?
If you are requisitioning resources within the country, i.e. you are requisitioning them from another part of the state, it makes no sense to have them cost money.
If you are requisitioning them from abroad, then it should be made clearer that your state can't spare any resources for the city, I think. Albeit, I guess, you are already getting all of the explicit stuff from abroad.

having them shipped in

The people who work on transporting resources within the country are not going to not be paid if they aren't working on these projects, either. Where does this money go?

and having foreign contract workers come in with that to actually build it for you using their equipment

Firstly, why does your state not have construction workers?
Secondly, why can't you requisition the workers from the USSR or another planned economy?

It may be a game setting to enable a more complicated build option (so if you're still in the tutorial campaign this may be disabled...

Yeah, I have only glanced at the tutorial.

and you need to be sourcing all of those things from somewhere

Why can't you source it from your own state? Why are your options limited to either producing the resources within the city, or trading internationally with the USSR or, bleh, the western powers?

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

From where?

A neighboring country, either Soviet or Western depending on the currency you use for this.

Firstly, why does your state not have construction workers?

Because you don't have local construction coordinating offices and vehicle depots yet, so you're relying on outside help.

Secondly, why can't you requisition the workers from the USSR or another planned economy?

You do, but they want compensation. It's kind of a gamification of... Actually, you know what? Given the time period it defaults to (starting in 1959), I'm just gonna blame Khrushchev. Maybe it's an alternate history where he was even more revisionist and did more Gorbachev level dipshittery with trying to liberalize the central planning.

A more realistic answer is that you're entirely independent and just maintain neutral terms with both the Soviets and the West, so even though you can freely trade with both neither is going to come in and build things for you or make any sort of demands of you. Which is ludicrously unrealistic considering you're sitting on huge deposits of oil, coal, metals, and uranium, but that's city builder logic for you.

Why can't you source it from your own state? Why are your options limited to either producing the resources within the city,

You're running an independent border republic roughly the size of something like Andorra, maybe a little bigger. Everything outside your borders is foreign, even the Soviets.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

A neighboring country, either Soviet or Western depending on the currency you use for this. Because you don't have local construction coordinating offices and vehicle depots yet, so you're relying on outside help.

Which has the silly implication that there are no other cities under your state, or your state has no industry for producing construction materials and educating construction workers domestically outside of this specific city.

You do, but they want compensation

Well, the workers aren't going to go wageless/salariless regardless of whether or not they are working on the project, and I don't think that there even were contract workers in the USSR.
You would have to pay the relevant state for this sort of deal, though.

Actually, you know what? Given the time period it defaults to (starting in 1959), I'm just gonna blame Khrushchev

corn-man-khrush

You're running an independent border republic roughly the size of something like Andorra, maybe a little bigger. Everything outside your borders is foreign, even the Soviets

How does this work? Where am I getting the initial funding? Who am I? Who authorised this? What is this madness?

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How does this work? Where am I getting the initial funding? Who am I? Who authorised this? What is this madness?

In the second campaign, the backstory is that you're basically supposed to be an eastern european country that was colonized by a western power that built some infrastructure to aid in resource extraction, except you revolted against them, gained autonomy, and established a socialist state of sorts, with your objective being to attain autarky and modernize the scattered villages throughout the country.

So there at least, I'd guess the $2,000,000 balance is from seizing the US-backed dictator's wealth, and the 10,000,000 rubles you start with were either the result of selling captured western equipment to the Soviets or a sort of hands-off foreign aid grant from alternate timeline more-liberal-brained Khrushchev.

Well, the workers aren't going to go wageless/salariless regardless of whether or not they are working on the project, and I don't think that there even were contract workers in the USSR.

This made me think of two things, one related to the game and one not. The first is that nothing domestically involves currency that you deal with, all the money is foreign currency used for trade; that means that your internal economy is running purely off some kind of labor voucher system and abstracting away both the wages workers earn and what they spend on goods and services as an overall balanced and isolated system.

The second is that AFAIK starting under Khrushchev (IIRC) there was a tacit acceptance of a so-called "second economy" in the USSR, which involved comparatively small scale private exchange for crops grown in personal plots, craft goods, and contract services like repairwork that existed outside the centrally planned institutions.

Tangentially, that's making me think about the centralized state-run farm equipment depots in the game, and how one of Khrushchev's more notably hair-brained and disastrous reforms was privatizing that sort of thing so that farmers had to own and maintain their own tractors, which made maintaining them way more expensive and reduced overall agricultural efficiency since "idk lmao everyone do it for themselves" is much worse than having centralized depots staffed by mechanics whose whole thing is maintaining them and who have all the tools and materials on hand to do so in one place. Also that contemporaneous to that in China, farm machinery was rare and the rural communes weren't really communes yet, so the farmers who'd managed to get access to tractors and the like quickly turned around and became private contractors who'd go and use the tractors on other farmers' fields for compensation and within just a couple of years of that being the status quo it was already creating a problematic wealth inequality between farmers in general and the sort of contractor tractor-kulaks that had to be addressed by the state.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

and how one of Khrushchev's more notably hair-brained and disastrous reforms

Have you heard of Liberman, by the way?
His reforms were truly worthy of the name.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

Which has the silly implication that there are no other cities under your state, or your state has no industry for producing construction materials and educating construction workers domestically outside of this specific city.

You do spend a lot less money if you do have other cities under your state, but that's usually not the case if you start a new game on a random map though. You can set up a custom map with a starting city tho (it's sometimes hard to get to a stage where sewage works on an edit-map since you can't test the sewage system as you go along)

[–] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago

someone should write a book about this thonk

[–] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Idk how the USSR or it's republics did accounting, but even under socialist conditions it would be conceivably helpful to account for building construction on a per unit basis because it lets city planners evaluate the relative value of labor and resources being put into a building.

For example if you have two sites where you can build the same apartment block but one is flat ground and another is hilly or marshy ground, then it makes sense to calculate the amount of labor, additional resources, and specialized equipment you would need to level the slope or build extra foundations on the swamp.

Lots of companies and organizations also carry out internal accounting where they invisibly pretend to pay themselves and their own divisions for work because it allows management to see where money is being used and how much.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

However, why make all of the relevant actions cost money?

[–] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Probably because it's a gameplay abstraction? The alternatives are to either have a full supply chain of all things your people need to live and pay them with goods, which would be really complex and not very historical, OR you hire workers and pay them even if they're sitting around but then many players see that as a sort of timer and source of unpleasant stress.

Money is just a convenient abstraction for allocated resources in either case.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The alternatives are to either have a full supply chain of all things your people need to live

Unless we are dealing with a city-state, a part of that supply chain can be situated in other cities/areas of the country. Apparently, though, we are dealing with a city-state (with no prior city), according to the responses that I am getting.

and pay them with goods

Except no (as in, not generally)? The workers get paid regardless of whether or not they are assigned on projects, and they use the money to buy goods and services from the state. What is the significance of paying them specifically with goods in this context?

[–] frankfurt_schoolgirl@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

Yes, you basically play as a city state. The whole premise of the game is that you are developing an independent 24x24 km square republic with no modern industry. Maybe that's not realistic, but neither are a bunch of other things in the game.

[–] notceps@hexbear.net 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

They don't? Like there's cosmonaut mode which I've done, that goes all in on the idea of not importing anything from other blocs except for the starting stuff.

Money is only used for a few things

  • Buying resources from the two blocs
  • Buying labor from the two blocs
  • Buying vehicles from the two blocs
  • Inviting workers from the two blocs
  • Transport costs when you don't want to pick up whatever you bought at the border

If you have your construction office set up properly then buildings cost literally nothing

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My issues are/were with the fact that you can't requisition this stuff from elsewhere under your state. Apparently, there are, indeed, no other cities in your country, from what I gather.

[–] notceps@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago

Really depends on your map, some have nothing built in them some have some towns and some even have industries so you actually can requisition stuff from elsewhere, your country is just the map there's no 'elsewhere', but you can for example relocate people living in one town to a coal mining workers district, or use the already existing sawmill to source logs you might need for construction.

[–] Mardoniush@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

You can totally make things without paying for anything other than a minimal starting industry. Look up tutorials for cosmonaut mode if you want to go hermit kingdom. (or if you're really insane, sputnik mode where you install mods turning the place into a horse drawn 1917 economy)