Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic News

Dear Community and Players,

We are pleased to announce that our game is now back in the store!

We thank you for your patience, support and understanding as we navigated this tricky situation.

We want to apologize to those who were looking to purchase the game and were unable to. We realize that we underestimated the situation, and it quickly escalated to a point that posed a threat to our game. We greatly wish that this had not been the case.

But we are now back on track and you can fully enjoy the game! We are excited to get back fully to the development and put this matter behind us.

3DIVISION
Dev Team

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. Even we are going through tough times while developing the game, we decided that we can bring you some news about the work we have done recently in the game. Currently we do not have any news about takedown issue. We will keep you informed. As you can see in previous special report, the game has been taken down from Steam Store due to DMCA takedown notice in relation to recent realistic mode we added into the game. We filled a counter-notice and now we need to wait.



And as we are waiting on legal issues to be resolved, we can continue working on new features and other game related stuff. Lot of graphics in the game is outdated and needs an update. Most urgent ones in our opinion are small grocery shop, small store, pub and brick buildings. We decided to replace them by making proper details and level of detail meshes for them to save performance while they are being used.





If you are already using these buildings, they will be just replaced after the update, and you will see them in their new form.



Another reason for this step is that we are working on researches for the upcoming update and residential buildings from prefab panels will be locked behind research. That means you will probably have to use brick residential buildings when you start a new republic. But we want to remind you, that you can turn ON or OFF any difficulty level in our game. So, if you do not like to play with research you can just turn the feature off.





Then we have some useful information for you that somehow went under the radar about already existing mechanics. As not every player has a longer term republic developed many of them did not even notice why electronics became a major complication for your economy over time. When we did an update to make electronics production more challenging, we made couple of changes and one of them you may know. That is that the consumption of electronics is growing gradually until year 2000. It is simply 30% higher after year 2000 than it was in year 1960.

But we added another change which we forgot the introduce. There is a mechanic which is making the production of electronics and electronic components more expensive over time and consists of two parts. First is the production decrease over time. In 1960 you have basic production and it goes slowly down until year 2037 when the vanilla electronics assembly line and electronics components factory will produce only 30% of resource compared to year 1960. The other is the factory’s consumption increase when the factory is consuming more resources for production over time. For electronics assembly hall it goes up to 200% in 2060 and for electronics components factory it goes up to 170% in year 2030, compared to year 1960. But these values apply to vanilla buildings because modders can define these values in their factory’s .ini file.

What does that mean? If the electronics assembly hall is producing 4,5 t of electronics in year 1960 it will produce only 1,35 t of electronics in year 2037 per workday at maximal utilization. On the other hand, if it needs 1,5 t of electronic components (or other resources) to produce that in year 1960 then it will require 3,0 t of electronic components in year 2060. And this makes electronics more valuable and difficult to produce somewhat simulating the technological advance. Another thing is that this is the main reason why the price of electronics goes up so much over decades and you may consider to invest lot more into production of this valuable resource especially, if you are planning your republic to continue over in-game centuries and you may also consider using electronics as low volume and high value reserve resource (it is not succeptible to inflation as money) for rainy days, because the game can surprise you whenever you keep expanding and that is the beauty of it as we are making it more complex and challenging to play.

And that is all for this report. Even if we are facing attacks, we still have enough resources to continue the development of the game even if the game would be banned for months or years. But the truth always wins. We will keep you updated about the game development process or any publicly suitable information that may affect it. So enjoy life, have fun and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support
3Division Team.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is a citybuilder about wrangling supply chains and logistics. Sin is a big fan. Unfortunately the supply of the game itself from Steam has been halted, and its developers allege that it's due to DMCA takedown notices filed by a "once a respected member of our community."

Read more

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is a niche, hardcore city-builder that's actually really good if you're into that sort of thing—"that sort of thing" being management games and workers' states. Unfortunately for anyone curious but uncommitted, it's no longer available for purchase on Steam because of a very strange DMCA takedown request filed by an angry fan...
Read more.

UPDATE 2023/02/16

THE GAME HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN DUE TO A DMCA REQUEST. The issue is described below. You cannot purchase the game at this time.

In short, one of the players who created a guide on how to play the game is now claiming that they own the rights to the game mode (Realistic mode). Thank you for your understanding! We are working to resolve the issue.

Original announcement:

Hello Dear Comrades!

Peter Adamcik, the general secretary of the People’s party 3DIVISION here. Recently we got the first enemy of our Soviet Republic. This enemy is making our life harder and significantly slowing down the development process. He is, ehm, he WAS once a respected member of our community and one of the best party members, but he decided to betray our Republic, our Party and our ideals.

It all began when we started work on realistic mode. He thinks he invented it or made it possible. Well, if he had kindly asked, we would have added him into the game's credits, we would probably do it (together with other guys who made various guides/challenges or contributors), but first we need to finish the game, then we can update the game’s credits! But he decided to contact us as a lawyer, and started to abuse the YouTube report system issuing copyright strikes to one of our most helpful influencers bbaljo, prior to getting our opinion on this issue. As he chose to use extortion and abuse, we became angry about this, and decided to never mention the name of the challenge he allegedly “invented” again, and ignore him.

But this guy reported our website, and the website was taken down. He also reported our video about the last content update where realistic mode wass introduced, and the video was taken down. He was successful because those reports are handled by BOTs, not humans. We will issue our reactions, and hopefully we will get answers soon from human employees of YouTube and Wix, who can evaluate his actual claims and agree that this is nonsense.

We are already in touch with Valve, because for sure he will try to take down the whole game from the Steam store.

The reason for this statement is also, because someone who doesn’t know our game, like some lawyer or legal copyright expert, could doubt whether we did infringe his copyright or not. Well, let’s try to figure out!

Here is the link to his original guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995764447

[hr][/hr]
[h3]The Step-by-Step manual![/h3]

What he claims in takedown notices:

"A published step-by-step manual to modify and play video games in an ultra-hard manner for a challenging and realistic game experience"


First, our game was always challenging and provided a realistic experience. 

Second, he did not publish any manual to make the realistic mode possible. Thoughts on realistic mode were in my mind very early when I started to work on the game. However, it was just too complicated, and it was not selected as a critical feature, something that Early Access game needs to have at day one. Also, I was skeptical about the game just being too hard, and I did not know how many players would play it in this the hardcore manner. As I say in every interview, I was just surprised how many people used the manual constructions in the game. I was not expecting this.

But let us check on Storpappa’s step by step manual if it contains any game design we could stole!

Header:



Literally nothing!

Who is that woman on the cover?

Again nothing

0.8.1.9 Update and direct border purchases

Yes, in order for realistic mode to be possible it was necessary to use the custom houses for purchasing resources. This idea came up in the minds of almost everyone who plays the game and wanted to save money by not paying for transportation fees ☺

What is cosmonaut mode?
Just describes the problem that the resources are not going to appear by magic, yes but we need a way how to resolve it in the game, to prevent this, sure I know it’s not realistic, but what other solution is there?

After the patch - SETTING UP THE IMPORTS AREA
So, in his manual is something mentioned about a starter city, well in our Realistic mode, no starter city is needed, it is possible without one, but again one would expect a solution we could implement into the game for this but not...

We implemented free temporary buildings in order to proceed without any starter city

After the patch - resupplying IMPORTS

I do not know, but this section does not even contain any rules...

Startup screen options

Our realistic mode doesn’t restrict to any specific difficulty setting, it is only an extra difficulty setting that can be turned on or off with any other settings. So you can play in realistic mode even with fires, fuel consumption or seasons off.

How do I get resources in the game?

This just describes features of the game. Yes, manufacturing your own resources and being self-sufficient is mentioned even in the original trailer.

But I cannot find any solution about asphalt and concrete?

Oh boy! We needed to implement foreign workers. Moreover, we implemented that it is possible to set the customs house as source for materials for the Construction Offices, to resolve this problem.

How do I build structures and roads?

He is just saying how to use existing feature.

How do I build railroad tracks?
He is just saying how to use existing feature again.

BTW To implement our realistic mode we needed to implement disassembled track builders and allow you to transport them to the Rail Construction Office.


My republic failed, what next?

Just guidance and advice.

Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov

Literary work there.

Isn't this too difficult?

No game design there.

What about Loans?

Something about Loans, Realistic mode in our game does not rely on loans to be disabled or not.

Updates and thanks

Here it is interesting that he is giving a thank you to all people who helped him or inspired him to write this guide. So, is it your work or not? ☺

[hr][/hr]

[h3]Conclusion[/h3]

As you can see there is nothing in his work in terms of game design that would relate directly to game’s code, and he does not offer any technical solutions for the development team to use. He literally just created a guide with some possible way to play the game and called it Cosmonaut mode, but it is not helping the development process. Only one thing he was helpful in, is that the popularity of his guide showed us how much people wanted to play the game in a realistic and more challenging way.

So, let us conclude what we needed to develop, in order to create realistic mode with some unbreakable rules and that it would be possible to play for you:

• Purchases in the custom house
  
• Set custom houses as source for Construction Offices
  
• Implementation of foreign workers
  
• Implemented it to be possible to purchase brand new vehicles in the custom houses (just as for cableway)
  
• Implementation of disassembled rail track builders
  
• Implementation of checking if road depot and rail depo is connected to custom house and mechanics that this vehicle will come to depo automatically.
  
• Two icons in the right bottom part of the window which opens beyond the border customs.
  
• I am sure, I forgot something ☺
  

For the implementation of realistic mode, I want to thank the whole community, and then to Martin and Michal (the two coders in our Team) and the second Michal who came to visit us and I literally spent like 2 days with him thinking how this mode would be possible. Then to all community managers and moderators who help us, and all the players who help us catch bugs while playing our game. Thank you, you are all awesome!