Kaiserpunk News

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

Greetings Commanders!

As we are approaching the release, it's time for another dev diary! Today, it’s time to dive into one of our favorite topics—production, logistics, and all the exciting things that make your industries tick! Production and logistics are the heart of your empire, where the production of weapons, machinery, and supplies becomes central to an empire's ability to sustain war efforts. In Kaiserpunk, production runs both deep and wide, with a wide variety of resources, along with multiple refinement and production stages.


Heavy industry, mass production, and the 20th century... I don't think we could have thought of a better fit. Add weapons and combat machinery to the mix, and sadly, that sums up the first half of the last century. On top of that, it may seem cold, but it's also fitting that your residents, despite the fact that you take care of them (or should at least), end up as faceless numbers, a statistic, churned out by the ever-growing industry of your new capital and the ceaseless fighting. The 20th century was both beautiful for the resilience and innovation humanity showed, and at the same time, very ugly and dark. An interesting and stark contradiction.

But let's not get caught up in philosophy, shall we. Let’s focus on the industry part: the production chains and getting goods from one place to another. We've covered this in quite some detail in an earlier dev diary that you can read, so I thought I'd run through some of the key questions. The 21st is just around the corner, and we'd best be prepared ;).

A production chain is a series of buildings that starts with one resource, refines it, adds more resources into the mix, and in the end, spits out a completely different resource. A chain can be as simple as one or two buildings to create construction plywood, or it can consist of a long series of branches, gradually zeroing in to create that light bomber you've been eyeing for your air force.

None of these goods can teleport or fly. They need to be delivered from building to building, which is where depots come in. Depots dispatch transporter trucks to carry the resources around your city. Be careful, though, since the number of trucks available in a single depot is limited and before you know it, you could be shovelling more work onto a depot than it can carry out. A nice little detail that you can do, as the high-and-mighty governor, is to place buildings that depend on each other close to one another. That way, they can skip the "depot step" entirely.

Upgrade before building anew! Almost all buildings in Kaiserpunk can be upgraded in some way. Always look to that first, as it comes with much lower construction and operational costs. Money doesn't grow on trees, not even in Kaiserpunk. And you'll need the money... training and supplying armies is not cheap. A strong, resilient industry is the cornerstone of any powerful global empire.

Oh, and I almost forgot: experiment! Try different approaches and have fun. Be creative! Use the actions at the bottom of the HUD to your advantage. Copy blocks of your city that work perfectly and use the Move tool to shuffle things around. You’d be surprised how much you can gain by giving your city a nice “facelift” and a bit more organization.


We hope you enjoyed this dev diary! To make sure we cover any questions you might have, we’re hosting an AMA over on Reddit this Thursday, March 13th, at 6 PM CET / 9 AM PST. You can start asking us questions now, though! We look forward to answering them!

Until next time - Stay well everyone!
Overseer Games

Greetings Commanders!

Before we jump into today's topic, we know you’ve been awaiting an update on the release date—and the time has finally come! Kaiserpunk will launch on March 21, 2025!

On top of that, we’ve teamed up with a great partner, Elda Entertainment, to ensure we can focus on what truly matters - the game itself! Elda will help us spread the word about Kaiserpunk!

Before we continue, we just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your support so far. We’ve now surpassed 160K wishlists, and we are incredibly grateful for your excitement about the game—just as excited as we are! Without further ado, let’s get into the topic of the day, Warfare.


So, what do you actually need in your capital to build a successful war machine? The short answer: everything.

Your infantry needs food rations – you'll produce them in your factories. Your tanks need shells – you'll manufacture them in your Munitions factories. Your bombers need kerosene – you'll refine it in Refineries. Of course, you'll need plenty of raw and refined resources beforehand to even get to final products. And workforce... don't forget about the workforce to actually do all that work.

Then, once you deploy your new troops to the battlefield, you'll need to produce even more because armies consume vast amounts of supplies to operate efficiently. Remember: logistics wins wars. Simply spamming army units won't cut it. They'll be out of ammo, luck, and life before you know it.

Something we haven't explored in detail in any of our previous blogs is combat – the calculus of it. Don’t worry, I'm not going to bore you with the actual maths (that would be wrong on sooooo many levels). Instead, here’s a quick rundown of what you should keep in mind when assessing a potential battle. A checklist of sorts of what should be taken into account:

• Quantity – Of course. Sending eight units instead of one will make a difference. Let's not kid ourselves.
  
• Veterancy – The experience level of the units involved. More experienced troops perform better: higher attack power, better defense, at the same supply expenses.
  
• Unit tier – It's difficult to beat technological progress. More advanced units are more deadly. Simple as that.
  
• Terrain characteristics – Where will you be fighting? An urban jungle or an open field? The difference is massive.
  
• Supply state – Is your army well-supplied, or are they scrounging for bullets and sharing a rifle between ten infantrymen? Supply chains matter!
  
• Leader – Not you, in this case, but the army general. How experienced is your general? What traits have they acquired during their service? Passive bonuses gained via traits can make a huge difference.
  
• Enemy – Who are you fighting? Are you sure you want to send an army packed with infantry units against a squadron of bombers?
  

And that’s just for a single army! Battles can involve multiple land, air, and naval forces, as well as defensive garrisons, turning combat into complete mayhem.

Especially since when you're on the attack, you can't know for certain (without a special military base upgrade) what orders will the enemy governor issue. The AI might concentrate its defenses against a single attacking army or maybe disperse its defensive forces to simply block the attacker, gain some time and upgrade its garrison or bring in more armies. It all depends on the situation and on the AI leader. Some leaders are aggressive, others prefer peaceful resolutions. Even when it comes to armies, some leaders will focus more on their navy or aviation. This approach burrows down to the setup of individual armies. You can easily encounter an AI leader who focuses mostly on infantry with the support of artillery.

Then again, you might encounter a Gandhi-like passive resistance leader (not to be confused with the atom bomb-loving Gandhi from a certain beloved 4X game series) who’ll do his best to affirm peaceful relationships with everyone. That’s where diplomatic trade comes into play. You may think this is just all about trade and in a way, you’re correct, but trade in Kaiserpunk can also be used for more aggressive purposes. If you, for example, trade a lot of military gear with an empire, that empire is likely stockpiling the arms for a purpose and not just for show. Doesn’t have to be used against you though. There are plenty of other, perhaps more suitable targets in the world… 😉

That brings us to the last major point for today: location, location, location. In this case in the world. Where you start your campaign of world-domination matters.

• Starting in Europe, Asia, or Africa gives you the most opportunities to spread your influence, but you will face the most opposition as well.
  
• On the flip side, starting in Australia means you’ll have fewer early threats, but you’ll also have a harder time leaving the home-shores. To transfer your armies across the seas, you’ll need to make some significant development, both in technology and industry. But yeah… you’ll be quite a bit safer in the beginning at least.
  

There’s a whole lot of mechanics that you can play with and use for your strategic advantage in Kaiserpunk. Don’t forget to experiment and have fun 😊.


We’ll also be streaming today at 7:00 PM, feel free to tune in on Twitch or here on Steam if you like what you see and want to hear more!

More dev diaries are coming up until launch! Join Reddit and Discord to chat more about Kaiserpunk.

Until next time - Stay well everyone!
Overseer Games

Greetings Commanders!

Tomorrow Wednesday March 5th at 7:00pm CET we'll be hosting a live stream to show off the latest version of the game, share some news and talk about how development is going and what's coming up!

Join our Game Director and Art Director as we showcase the game and share our thoughts on the design, intentions and the development process of these past couple of years.

You can join the stream over on Twitch @ https://www.twitch.tv/overseer_games_publishing or follow along here on Steam.

We hope you'll join us and look forward to showing off the game to you.

Until then - over and out!