W&R Issues

Content:
CRASHES
BUGS
VISUAL BUGS
HIGH PRIORITY SUGGESTIONS
MORE SUGGESTIONS


--- CRASHES ---

- Footpath construction crash:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/771789493170470973/798773809501962250/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/696790271840747691/697432628294320138/footpath_crash.jpg


--- BUGS ---

- Clicking on certain things on specific locations on the screen can cause that same, singular click to instantly activate a button that then pops up under your mouse cursor. The buttons this happens to are the "really demolish this building?" buttons and the buttons in distribution offices and forklift garages to delete or change their orders. This is a pretty severe issue in my opinion, because it makes people accidentally bulldoze buildings or accidentally delete all the orders in their distribution office, just because their mouse was positioned over where the button would pop up.

- Certain things can be accidentally clicked on, when they are BEHIND an info screen that you actually wanted to click on: The "really demolish this building?" buttons, the buttons on the info screens for distribution offices and forklift garages, the first person camera and end follow cam buttons, the buttons for the screenmarks, minimap and messages.

- When you have the general demolition bulldozer equiped and you hold the mouse button down in a place right next to a building, the "really demolish this building?" popup will get triggered many times per second, which creates some pretty terrible noise.

- When you have a bunch of planned roads (coloured white) and attach a building to them with an automatic road connection, the planned roads will automatically be marked for construction, forcing you to click on each individual road piece, when you want to buy them.

- The footprint of a building BEFORE it is placed down is larger than it is AFTER having placed it down. This makes it harder than it should be to place down a building in some situations, especially it is much harder to place down a building next to an existing road, instead of first placing down the building and then placing the road.
In this screenshot, I'm placing down an aggregate unloading station on top of an existing one and it can easily be seen how many of the footprint cubes are green. If the footprint was accurate, the green cubes here would either not exist at all, or they would be red:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/692449927787315251/705452603332493383/unknown.png

- Car owners can park their cars and enter public transit stations, however this doesn't seem to have function right now. The car owner waits for a minute in the station, but doesn't walk from there to any other building or enters a bus. They just leave and go back inside their car.

- When mousing over the elctrical connections of a substation, it doesn't show lines connecting to construction sites that would be in range. It does show these connections when you place down a new substation, just not on already existing substations.

- When you are currently auto-building some building or road and turn on the landscape editor, the constructions will be instantly completed and the cost of the construction will have vastly increased. If you are unaware of this, you can accidentally lose millions like this.

- Planes and ships can have a schedule that consists of only "go to foreign soviet countries, then go to foreign soviet countries again". This causes them to kinda get stuck on the border of the map and the player has to use the vehicle list screen to change their schedule or manually sell them. This can happen on accident when you want to export a ship/plane and accidentally click twice on the "go to border" button without noticing it or without realising that it won't be sold when you do this.
This isn't really a bug, but it's a pretty weird thing that can happen accidentally.

- Pressing 'N' even while typing in a text box to change the name of a city or to name a save file will still accelerate the growth of your crops. I'd suggest making the 'N' debug hotkey only function when the cheat mode is active.


--- VISUAL BUGS ---

- The cable of cableways isn't tense enough in most situations. This can look really silly, like in this screenshot:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1649971635808798609/9838E370133A11D842589C0D92692F5BED588208/

- The animation for rail construction trains resets immediately to it's non-constructing form when you pause the game.

- The net of tennis courts is invisible?


--- HIGH PRIORITY SUGGESTIONS ---
(Improving things that often confuse new players or problems with the gameplay)

- 1: Uneducated workers
Problem: Players are constantly confused about uneducated workers not entering their work place commuter buses.

Suggestion: Either uneducated workers should not show up as workers on public transit stations (and instead show up as students) or they should be allowed to work on fields and mines.


- 2: Resource shortage notifications
Problem: Your supermarkets can run out of food without you noticing, until you randomly notice the death spike in your demographics statistics. Similarly, some of your industry buildings might run out of resources, which potentially causes your power plant to run out of fuel, and you only notice once you see blackouts everywhere. Another related problem is that you can't tell if your logistics network can actually properly serve a supermarket or factory, unless you stare at the info screen and let time pass for some minutes to check if any problem arises.

Suggestion: Add a bell icon button to every building that can store resources. Pressing that button would toggle it on for the building, and it would make it so that you get notification messages whenever the building completely runs out of one of its stored resources. The notification messages would appear when the building gets the red text warning messages like "buyers can't buy one of the resources" in a shopping centre or "production has been halted because one of the resources is missing" in a factory.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/735793961922199563/799610751249154048/unknown.png


- 3: Reorganise citizen stat bars
Problem: The citizen stat bars can be divided in two different kinds of things. Satisfaction bars (food, clothing, etc) and preference bars (sport, alcohol, etc). However, they are both displayed in the same way ingame, which causes people to erroneously think that it would be best to max out all the preference bars, because they misinterpret the bars as showing the citizen's satisfaction on different aspects.

Suggestion: Move the "clothing" bar up next to the food one and divide the bars into "satisfaction" and "preferences" like this:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/735793961922199563/799612107419156520/unknown.png


- 4: Minimap orientation
Problem: On the minimap, the soviet border is in the east and the NATO border in the west. This causes people to release maps of real life locations with the minimap standing on its head, just so they can have the foreign borders be in the correct locations.

Suggestion: Either rotate the minimap, so that the soviet border is in the east, or let map makers choose specifically which sides of their map border to soviet/NATO.


- 5: Direct vs indirect factory connections
Problem: It is pretty much impossible for new players to know that you don't actually need forklifts for factory connections to work, and that the non-forklift setup will suddenly stop functioning once they put a 4-way factory connector piece between the two buildings. In addition, direct factory connections can transport vehicles/containers, but factory connections using forklifts can't.

Suggestion: Maybe this can be improved by adding some new visuals, but personally I think factory connections should probably be split into two things: Factory connections and forklift roads. They would both use the same factory connection connector on buildings that they use now, but the difference would be that the new factory connection road would only be placeable directly from one building to another and the forklift road would always require forklifts. Not only would this make the divide between these two functions clearer, it would also remove the need for forklift roads to be limited by a max length, so that players could just draw forklift roads like any other road in the game, instead of having to place them down by first placing multiple 4-way connectors and then connecting them together.


-6: Simulation speed
Problem: Vehicles move with normal, real life speeds, but factories produce a whole day's worth of goods in a single minute. This makes it so that to properly make use of a factory's production, you need to spam tons of vehicles, leading to an unrealistic amount of traffic on the roads. The vehicles with low resource capacity are hurt most by this time acceleration. Especially forklifts and cableways are bad at transporting resources, because they just cannot handle the huge amounts of resource production per minute that factories and mines put out.
The same happens with citizen wait times on public transit stations. Because citizens only wait at a station for 1 minute, you need to spam so many vehicles that there's at least 1 vehicle at the station each minute. You end up with large chains of buses and trains.

Suggestion: Add an optional pre-game setting that lets you decide between "normal" and "slow" speed acceleration. "Normal" would be the way it is now, and "slow" would essentially slow down all factory production, civilian wait times and resource consumption by half. Meaning you would essentially only need half as many vehicles driving around as you do now, and making forklifts and cableways more viable to use.
This is an optional setting, because it depends on the personal preference of the player. Myself and other people would prefer having less vehicles, because the large amounts of vehicle chains can look a bit strange. But other people might prefer the "normal" acceleration, because it adds more movement into the game.
This option could in addition also slow down the movement speed of pedestrians, to make them look more realistic, similar to how they look in the update trailers.


- 7: Customs traffic jams
Problem: The customs houses use the old type of vehicle stations that only let one vehicle in them at once. This leads to massive traffic jams.

Suggestion: Make them use the newer type of drive through vehicle stations, like in this mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2091824985&searchtext=customs


- 8: Student halls
Problem: Student residence halls are unintuitive, because you would expect that it makes sense to put them next to your universities, but because of how people can currently only move into them, when they are in walking distance of their current home, it actually makes more sense to put them next to other apartments, instead of near the uni.

Suggestion: Whenever a student finishes their studying action for the day at the uni and they currently live in a normal apartment, make them check for student halls in walking distance of that uni and make that become their new place of residence.


- 9: Electricity overlays
Problem: Power lines are incredibly hard to see. It is also hard to see where overloaded wires are and which buildings are not being supplied with power. The screenmarks overlay for voltage is not helpful.

Suggestion: When selecting any power pole in the infrastructure construction menu, highlight all existing power poles, the power lines between them and the buildings with electrical connections (transformers, switches, substations, etc) in a bright colour, similar to how selecting a train signal highlights all train tracks or how transport lines highlight buildings and roads. Disconnected and dead end power poles should be highlighted in a special colour. Overloaded power lines should also be highlighted in a special colour.
- When selecting a substation in the construction menu, make it highlight all buildings that currently are not connected to any other substation in a bright red.
- When you click on the screenmark overlay for voltage in the top right, it currently just dumps a ton of confusing numbers on the screen. I would suggest that with buildings that don't have any voltage, instead of displaying "0.000 Volts", it should display an easily noticeable warning triangle sign on them or something like that.
- I think it might also be useful if there was an actual notification message sent to the player when a building (any amount of buildings with more than 0 desired productivity) has been disconnected from the power grid for 5 or so minutes, similar to how it notifies you of fires.


- 10: Keeping buildings staffed
Problem: It is nearly impossible to consistently keep a building staffed at 100% capacity. This is especially a problem for important, low capacity buildings, like power plants and heating plants, which can potentially lead to a catastrophe, but it's also very problematic for hotels, because having a fluctuating amount of workers in your hotel means that now and then, some of your guests won't be served and you can't prevent that from happening.

Suggestion: Let workers queue up on fully staffed work buildings, when they can't find any other place to work at in the area, similar to how students can queue in schools and universities. They would wait until either a timer runs out or a spot opens up, because someone else's work shift ended. To prevent too many workers from queuing up at one small work place, there could be a limit to how many workers can queue at a building. The limit could be equal to the amount of worker spots on the building.


- 11: Exporting planes/ships
Problem: Exporting planes and ships is a bit tedious right now, especially smaller (faster to produce) ones, because you have to make sure you check the factory every now and then or their production might accidentally halt, because of not having storage space for vehicles.

Suggestion: Add a toggleable button on plane factories and drydocks to automatically tell its produced vehicles to export themselves to the east/west.


- 12: Launching planes
Problem: When you tell a parked plane to start, but it can't start driving immediately, because the runway is occupied or the tower doesn't have enough workers, you have to wait and keep clicking the button until it finally works.

Suggestion: Please make it so that it automatically starts driving once that condition has cleared, after you told it to start once.


- 13: Upgrading roads
Problem: Upgrading roads using your COs can be really difficult, because it can cause buildings to be cut off for days and you are forced to do the upgrade in many small pieces, to minimise the potential damage. Upgrading the road to the asphalt plant isn't even possible unless you build a second plant.

Suggestion: Let vehicles and pedestrians travel through roads under construction as if it was a mud road.


- 14: Rail CO
Problem: Rail construction vehicles have a hard time reaching certain rail construction sites.

Suggestion: Maybe they should be able to turn around on waypoints or something could be marked specifically as a turn-around junction, like a wye.


- 15: Flatbed diameter
Problem: Players get confused when they can't load a vehicle onto a flatbed, despite it not being over the max weight, because the diameter of the vehicles don't match.

Suggestion: Flatbeds should probably also mention something about the diameter of what they can transport, instead of only the weight.


- 16: Batch upgrade hidden
Problem: The batch upgrade tool for roads is a bit of a hidden feature right now.

Suggestion: It should probably get an actual button or checkbox in the construction interface (instead of only being activated by holding shift).


- 17: Vehicle station emergency access
Problem: The fact that buildings with vehicle stations need road connections to be reachable with fire trucks is unintuitive. People might build a supermarket (that is auto-importing food), but only attach a footpath to it, without realising that the firetrucks need a road connection for that building, unlike with residential buildings.

Suggestion: Let emergency vehicles ignore a building's vehicle station, so that they can reach them through a footpath.


--- MORE SUGGESTIONS ---

- More hotkeys: Hotkey for turning the wireframe on-off, for turning auto build on-off, hotkey for "finish construction with money", hotkeys for opening the menu buttons at the top of the screen (economy, construction, etc)

- It would be great if we could put existing citizens, vehicles and buildings onto the quick access bar at the top, to quickly reopen the info screen for these objects. This would let people quickly jump to a certain CO or keep track of the life of a specific citizen, etc.

- Move  the "eye" button to activate the follow cam to the top row of the info screen, to the left of the buttons to minimise and close the screen, because pretty much every screen has this button and it would be nice to be able to press it even while the screen is minimised.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/735793961922199563/802584335759835166/unknown.png

- When you currently tell a vehicle to unload 50%, it will unload 50% of its maximum cargo. I think it would be better if it unloaded 50% of its CURRENT cargo. For example, a truck with a cargo capacity of 10 tons, which currently has a load of 8 tons of food. When you tell it to unload 50%, it should unload 4 tons and not 5 tons like it does at the moment in the game.

- It could be useful to have an option to tell a vehicle to load "up to" a certain percentage. Right now when you tell a vehicle to load 50%, it will load 50% of it's max capacity in addition to the cargo that its already carrying. Telling the vehicle to load "up to" 50% would tell it to only load cargo until it's storage has been filled to 50%, not more than that.

- When constructing a building with COs, clicking on the construction site will tell you that there are slots for mechanisms, but it doesn't actually tell you what kind of vehicles can work at this site. There should be a little more information added here when you mouse over the slots.

- Rail CO track builder vehicles should get more information added to their tooltip. How fast they build, how many workers they require, how much resources they can store, and if they can only build tracks (no electric poles and no bridges) like the laying crane uk 25.

- When you get an epidemic, it could become a possible thing to research at a medical university (allocating educated workers similar to how research works in the technical uni). Researching it would give you information about how many infected people there are and how dangerous the disease is and probably also temporarily boost the healing power of your hospitals or something like that.

- Adding sand as a resource that can be painted on maps, similar to rocks, to let map makers make actual beaches instead of having to use stone for it. Sand could be turned to glass, which could be used in the alcohol factory to make it different from the food factory, besides also being used in small amounts in construction and vehicle building industries.

- Being able to preview which buildings will be in walking distance of a building before you actually place it down.

- The ability to rearrange the order of the stops on a vehicle schedule by drag and drop.

- The ability to smooth slopes with the normal terraforming tools outside of the level editor.

- The ability to sort the vehicle buy menu to only show vehicles of a certain family, for example only W50 family members. In addition, the fact that a vehicle is part of a family should be mentioned on the vehicle's tooltip.

- If you currently have a vehicle on follow cam and you also have some action attached to your mouse like the "new stop" button, then when you press esc it will remove the follow cam first and on the second press will deactivate the "new stop" action. I would prefer it if the first press of esc would deactivate whatever is attached to your mouse cursor and only the second press would end the follow cam. There are already enough keyboard buttons to end the follow cam anyway (wasd).

- It would be nice if we could upgrade bridges to the street lamp roads in the same way that we can upgrade them to trolley roads.

- Make the Gaz-66 purchasable, because it is sexy.

- Highlight the fields a farm manages (same as the buildings a distribution office manages).

- The resource capacity of aggregate cableways can be doubled or more.