What is the best industry? | Tests | Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Guides

I am about to start on something new, that wont allow mistakes, so I needed to know what industry is actually the best.


My tests, tutorials and how to guides are aimed at new players, who may have skipped the in game tutorial or found issue with the same. This game has many hidden features, and I aim to show you all of them.

WR:SR is an amazing sandbox city/republic builder, that allows you to control all aspects of your new country, from citizens happiness, health, education to production chains, vehicle and resource production, import export. You can do all this by truck, train, ship, and in the near future plane. There are a million ways to make your republic your own and that’s what we will do.

HAVE FUN!

[bballjo]

Obviously I did not test all industries...but if you ask, I will try to add the Real ROI and Calculated ROI here as we go on.

Format:

Steel:
Mechanical Comp.:

[NickKrige]

I dunno why but watching you slowly sink off screen really made me lol

[canislatransit]

I also would say cement is often overlooked, at least for an early game industry. If you can get a supply chain with two gravel quarries feeding it and use one of the train cement storages for export you can make a surprising amount of money. It won't singlehandedly fund a republic, but it definitely can keep you from dying from debt before you can get your most profitable industries fully researched, in conjunction with agriculture industries it's definitely a decent way to start. I also like to invest in oil extraction early and research the refinery ASAP.

[SilentSnoo]

You're really describing profit margin, not the return on investment (ROI). Profit margin is your profit divided by your expenses, which tells how big your profit is compared to the cost of running the industry. The return on investment is the revenue over some time period divided by the cost to set up the business, which tells you how long it will take for you to break even on the money used to set up the industry.

There may be industries with a high profit margin, but if they require an investment several times the yearly profit of the industry, then you will not see a net gain in the republic's finances for several years, while a less profitable industry may require only a tiny investment and thus can start generating a net income for the republic in perhaps a month or two. Early on, the high ROI industries are better for expanding the republic or at least covering the payments on a loan for an industry with a high profit margin.

[mattbowdenuh]

I always start with food. Can setup the trucks to export food, import crops with the same trucks. Plus, youre eliminating your expense of food. And you can do that anywhere on the map because its not resource dependent. Then once you have a farm up and running with your railroad, its great. And you can add some tourism to that once you have all of that worked out.
And for my second industry, it just depends on what resources are around. Oil is basically free, but the issue is the export. Ships are expensive, pipelines are expensive, railroads are expensive, trucks just dont cut it. Same goes for bauxite.
So prob food + clothing (with fabric) are the safest starting industries that dont require research. But the nuclear fuel is quite eye-opening.

[seedz]

you're a little skewed on the nuclear fuel ratios : a single UF6 plant will happily supply 2 Nuclear Fuel plants without any problems ;)
the ratio that's annoying is the oxide to UF6. you either get 1 oxide to 1 UF6 and get some down time at the UF6 plant, or 2 oxide to 1 UF6 and overproduce oxide
or... you go NUTS and do 6 oxide to 5 UF6 to 10 nuclear plants to have almost perfect ratios all the way (good luck supplying the ore)

[LowryYT]

watch man get slowly absorbed by the spreadsheets

[comradeSirius]

As both author and a streamer of hard challenge for this game myself I have to point out a flaw in your ROI calculations: ROI is not much useful counted your way.

The biggest issue I have with this is that ROI is most important at the game start and early phase. In general that shortcut means "return of investment" and while technically all building costs tend to be less and less important overtime, during first few years they are extremely important. So here goes my question:

Can you modify the spreadsheet in a way it would count those costs in as well? Lets start with a scenario of having a city ready with technical uni and some spare workers in 1962 - how much can you truly earn in 3-5 years from now? Because that´s what matters, right? When we are in trouble financially or just want to optimize, we need to know how high the initial investment will be (including research, which costs time and opportunities). So lets do 2 columns for 3 and 5 years (max loan time), add costs for vehicle/infrastructure needed for the business to run (needing a railroad for things to work compared to few trucks makes a huge difference).
It would also be great for the industry spot to be around 2km from customs, as transportation costs are somewhat important and having everything right next to customs house really helps businesses with higher tonnage throughput.

And then simply count how fast can you research and build such area (and for what costs) + add what you need for sufficient throughput (waste included, as some of those businesses are crazy in these terms) and check the differences. They will be large.

Basically it will spit out two values - ROI aka number of days you are on your own money before you started AND the total sum after the time has passed (3/5 years).

What you would get this way is
- viability of pursuing such endeavor (nuclear fuel is really expensive to start with)
- diminishing returns factored in (it is a big difference to import for exports for one month or for few years, the larger the volume, the worse the outcome)
- fuel comsumption of vehicles involved
- optimal ways to supply/export certain businesses

And there are things you really didn´t factored in that would make a BIG difference. And also other ways to make money were not included in the comparison. Most glaring misses are
- steel from imported iron -> makes tones of money when using ships/trains to import iron/coal and you also use it for your own development (so at least costs of the steel mill and conveyors should be counted in import prices then instead of export ones to showcase this)
- tourism, especially supplied with your own products (alcohol, food; both fits into total 255 workers/shift category); beware of waste
- crops planting, as with brutally cheap solid fertiliser you get tons of extra crops => alcohol/food per year. The costliest part is the silo big enough to sustain this, but combo of farm+silo+distillery/food factory is on OP one, especially due to farming requires zero workforce
- cement; due to no research, it should have been mentioned here. Vagons for it are not so costly and building this on your own gravel reserves require only single quarry to sustain the big beast (though 3 gravel processors and some warehouses). But all of this then consumes only (ew, up to 100 in total) workers and cement is not that worthless when exported via train - one train can easily dish out tens of thousands of rubles (my 7vagoned ran for 50-60k around 1970s pretty often). All it needs is coal.
- bauxite to aluminum at all was not mentioned, though it is known to be a lifesaver when everything goes south (due to minimum people requirement for initial phases).
- chemicals in huge plant are absolutely great as well and all it requires to set is a small logging camp and few trucks to bring in oil, gravel and crops (basically give it one large road cargo station and you´re set for ever.

I would love to see those results.

BTW vehicle plant has a nice bonus of when you own a blueprint for one truck type, rest of similar trucks from the same size are heavily discounted in terms of blueprints, so going full Mark E in 1962 isn´t a bad idea at all after all if you want to export excess trucks to the east

[hai.nguyenhoang]

Very enlightening!

Personally would've liked to see how bad electricity exports are, but oh well (my spreadsheet calculations show for example that power export with the twin nuclear power plant is basically burning money, the roi on it is very bad and that's not even including dealing with nuclear waste)

One other thing to point out is that vehicle and nuclear industries are also the ones that require smart workers.

As for exact nuclear fuel production chain ratios, it's something like this:
1 uranium mine with 48% quality -> 1 uranium processing plant -> 0.85 uranium conversion plant -> 2.04 nuclear fuel fabrication (why didn't this get "plant" in its name...)

(Obviously it's a bit hard to build exactly 0.85 uranium conversion plants or exactly 2.04 fuel plants)

[wwlb]

My dream is to build a republic which get profits entirely from wood & boards and is actually prosperous. Unfortunately, logging trucks eat all the profit with their ridiculous fuel consumption without roads.

[juiceFORfunNOTyet]

Great video! You just do all the hard work for me)

[Civik]

great video, cant wait for new season x

[Strategygeneral]

For the nuclear fuel, is it better extracting the uranium and turning it from raw to fuel or is it better to import UF6?

[ZenobiaofPalmyra]

Also exporting does decrease the price of a good, which is also related to the number of vehicles you send out. For food, the price can dip as low as 30-40%.

[Tovzor]

i kinda feel that it would be better to consider roi as profit per worker, which is in line with why nuclear came best. i would argue that workers are by far most expesive resource and other imports are pale in comarison

[weltraumvogel]

Hm....how do you calculate an ROI without taking the actual investment (building the needed chain) into consideration? ;-}

Also the diminishing returns (import prices going up way quicker compared to exports), is a thing to consider.

So yes, this is kind of helpful, but not really for a "realistic" start with 1.5 Mio Rubels starting money.

[-slasht]

Does burning imported hazardous waste in an incinerator using foreign workforce and exporting the resulting mixed waste near some remote border crossing count as "industry"?
You get a few hundred bucks per ton of hazardous waste imported and mixed waste can be exported cheaply.

It doesn't scale too well due to the prices dropping off when you trade too much but in the early game it is quite powerful in my limited experience.

[Floletni]

What about buy steel and produce machineparts to sell them? I dont know how its called in the englisch version of the game.

[hivecasts]

I would really like to add that since we already use coal for heating I like to make a setup for coal import (Agregate unloading, small storage) and add a coal power plant to the setup. Yes, investment is a bit big, but it requires almost no workers (bus for heating is usually more than good enough) and I find it basically nulifies my food requirements early on and pays for about half of loan as well. Even with non-18 MW poles I still get about 20k roubles of export per month on top of clothing/fabric set up. That way I find I start up quicker. You might wanna try the add it to setup with clothing. Also I see no explosives here, I find they also bring good ROI, but I haven't calculated it.

[PhilippVonVangerow]

Ich würde auf pflanzenbasierten Industrien, Chemie und die Raffination mit Pipelines setzen. Das entlastet einen von einigen der lebensnotwendigen Importen und in der Gewinnbetrachtung hat der ersparte Import generell einen höheren ROI, da die Importpreise generell höher sind und außerdem nachfragebedingt weiter ansteigen.