Continuing my game of Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. I grabbed a map of Cuba from the Steam workshop a couple weeks ago and have been chipping away at it. Playing on “Realistic Mode” with all systems enabled, but medium money / happiness / fire / disaster / world events difficulty settings.

The population has reached 5000 and is growing faster than I can put buildings up. I’m long overdue for starting a second city, but overcoming problems with the first continues to be a priority. These problems have included a fire at the main power transformer causing a total power outage, a lack of pressure at the water treatment plant threatening the supply of drinking water, and a looming financial crisis as imports continued to exceed exports into the eighth year of the republic. The financial crisis was solved moments before being forced to take out loans by the completion of a coal mine, ore processing facility, and the rail infrastructure necessary to export it at volume - a project several years in the making.

While this put the republic’s finances on a sustainable trajectory, the facilities generated so much waste that a new crisis emerged. While a waste processing facility, incinerator, and construction waste recycling plant had been built along the way, the volume of waste was so great that the logistics of trucking it several kilometers were tremendously strained. With multiple technical offices, distribution offices, and waste transfer facilities set up in strategic locations, it is barely enough to keep the trash moving. Over 1000 tons of ash have been produced at the incinerator already (there’s a Steam acheivement for this). Then, the “carpocolypse” struck, as a large portion of the original fleet of vehicles began reaching levels of wear that could not be managed by a vehicle repair station. A bunch of old buses needed to be moved into storage, but it was a good opportunity to replace them with newer, faster models and consolidate a bunch of redundant lines into higher capacity buses - reflecting the large increase in population. There are still a bunch of incredibly rusty trucks driving around though.

Anyway, with the finances sorted out, railroad tracks are gradually being laid down to allow construction materials to be carried many kilometers away to a less mountainous part of the island suitable for a second city, port, and agricultural industries.