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!
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[@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: RealROI%/CalculatedROI%/ProfitPerWorker Steel: Mechanical Comp.:

[@NickKrige]

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

[@poilboiler]

Heavy data.

[@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.

[@afr11235]

Absolutely agree. The power of cement is that it concentrates the value of gravel and doesn’t use many workers at all.

[@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

[@bballjo]

Would love to see your results and setup:)

[@comradeSirius]

@@bballjo Similar to your one - setup next to existing city from tutorials with bus stop 2km from customs and simple countdown of research+buildup and then results. Would take a while and currently I am working other vids for tomorrow, so not in a condition to do so

[@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.

[@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.

[@bballjo]

Yes l, profit margin is the correct label. But if a label is the only problem with this test...I think it's telling the story pretty well.

[@Rdlprmpf12]

@@bballjo Well, in my opinion the margin is not important at all. If you import 100k and export 150k (50%), that's obviously much better than importing 5k and exporting 20k (300%). Raw materials have +inf margin, but you still don't consider to export wood, do you? The important column is profit/worker, because the workers are expensive in the long run. Another important one would have been real ROI, maybe simplified to monthly profit/steel investment. Another one (especially for the starting phase without rail) is profit/truck, because the customs house quickly becomes the limiting factor. The combination fabric+clothing is so much better than each by itself because of the difference between export and import price of fabric, which is extra profit in this case. In general each industry becomes a lot more profitable if you use the product yourself (you can calculate import price instead of export). Long term that's a big plus for the refinery - at the beginning you don't use a lot of fuel yourself, but the demand will be increasing steadily as you grow.

[@pierrebertier8417]

Great ! I love it 🤩 Thanks Bballjo

[@seedz5132]

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)

[@Civik444]

great video, cant wait for new season x

[@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

[@bballjo]

Yep...which is what I said in the conclusion;)

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

Maybe I missed something, or maybe it's considered general knowledge, but how do you calculate ROI? A few general additions: Nuclear is great in that you can run an industry that makes a good profit for each of the research steps. (Or maybe not just the mine - can't remember if uranium oxide is a separate research step - if so then I would go through that too as setting up trains or ships to export uranium just while waiting for uranium oxide research to finish might be a loss. Might be possible to export using trucks and repurpose those trucks as for example construction vehicles. Bauxite/Aluminium is missing from the comparison. That is also an industry where you can start making some money while the research is ongoing. The quantities for exporting processed bauxide or aluminium oxide is way higher than the exports for nuclear though. Common for both bauxite/aluminium and nuclear is that the resulting product is more or less useless for domestic usage, so you won't get the bonus of avoiding the difference between export and import prices (except if you build an airplane manufacturing plant, but there is no way that you would build enough airplane manufacturing plants to use up most of your aluminium production). Compare with steel where you can partially count the import price rather than the export price as the value of the produced product as you will likely use a lot of it for future constructions. This is true for power, food, clothing, electronics, meat and alcohol too. For the ROI I would say that you need to have separate values for either if you import all construction materials or if you make concrete, asphalt and possibly gravel on your own but still import the open/covered hull materials. Some buildings require huge amounts of concrete. Perhaps calculate a ROI of sorts for producing your own concrete and/or asphalt? Oil/refinery has the benefit that you can start out with pumping your own oil and sell the raw oil while research and then construction of the refinery is ongoing. At most you might lose part of the investment of one pipe that you need to reroute when the refinery is built, in order to export fuel/bitumen rather than oil, and possibly import oil. Considering both construction costs and maintenance cost, and also transportation costs, it would be interesting to se calculations/tests for the "non-worker" industries, i.e. crops, oil, raw bauxite, wind power (and in theory stone, which in practice for sure would make a loss...). In particular those industries still require workers for reconstruction and vehicle maintenance, and also for fire protection unless fire helicopters has been researched. Re wind power: I've seen Charlie use separate networks for wind power which seems to be the way to avoid the classic problem when the power grid get a hickup each time the wind calms down, resulting in a lot of false "... is without power" warnings. I assume that checking the "high priority" checkbox on the substations powered by wind ensures that wind is prioritized over other power sources. I haven't seen any recent tests re what quantities of shop goods citizens consume at various ages of the republic. The only well known thing is that electronics consumption increases. But would you for example save money by not giving uni education to all citizens, and if so how much? Would the non-uni educated citizens still gain as much loyalty and thus productivity as uni educated citizens, and if so does this happen at the same rate as for uni educated citizens or is it slower? If there is a real difference in cost in having uni educated v.s. non-uni educated citizens then that should be added to the calculation for cost per worker for the various industries, as for example nuclear and vehicles require a lot of uni educated workers while for example the refinery doesn't. I find it interesting that alcohol gives a better profit per worker than fabric+clothes. A great thing is that adding farms can remove all need for imports, while fabric still requires import of chemicals. Also re ROI: Maybe also do a test/calculation of a minimum viable rail setup. I.E. the small depot, wooden tracks, a refueling station, one cargo station or a building with built in rail, and a rail CO. Perhaps build all using the "disassembled" track builder, and perhaps use one of the cheap super slow diesel locos, in order to for example import crops for fabric, food and/or alcohol, using the OG warehouse with built in rail and a line set to wait until unloaded (and possibly just load whatever is available for export when going back to the customs house). P.S. don't forget to count in both eastern and western money in what you can spend before you have to take a loan. Of course this requires decent connections to both borders, but still. Also: Why are there two bulldozer rows in the comparison? :O

[@bballjo]

the ROI calculated in this video is simply profit/COGS, it ignored setup/construction cost, because over time they head towards 0, yes maintenance costs would fall into this, but I doubt the ROI would change on an order of magnitude (i.e. a good ROI around 150% would probably still be a good ROI after maintenance, lets say around 140%, just guessing) Your 'General additions' are fine, but they are have a very different target/setup/idea/goal, so they dont really apply/fit here. Alcohol more profit per worker than Fabric chain...in this test, they are so close, that I would consider them almost equal...chaning 1-5 workers would make a huge difference there, and thats a very normal fluctuation, plus I didnt max out the industries, I only worked with up to 255 workers. Dozers...Pretty sure I explained that in the video ;)

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

@@bballjo Agree that in most cases the initial setup cost tents to go to zero, but so does interest on loans. Also some buildings require way more construction materials than others. Especially if you divide construction material with resulting work places for example the gas power plant is really expensive to build (but is also one of the most profitable industries for workers without uni education). Will have to rewatch the video re the bulldozer :)

[@bballjo]

@Thesecret101-te1lm goes to zero still allows for a simplification to say they are zero...plus, the biggest cost for almost all projects are the workers...if you have those there are rarely any buildings that cost more than 100k in materials, which is just another way to say they are all in the same ballpark of 10s of thousands, which solidifies the assumption of using $0 for the test. Loans....why worry about loans? You can completely play without loans...

[@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.

[@master1941]

Well, see you all at Steam tonight to test the industries.

[@KerboOnYT]

Science!

[@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%.

[@ZenobiaofPalmyra]

I could barely keep a republic of about 6,000 afloat on the money I was making, even keeping in mind I was grow my own crops.

[@bballjo]

It's highly related to volume and frequency, and if you use ships vs anything else...

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

This is a reason for steel being a decent choice for a second industry. The imports for constructing your starter city and starter industry will drive up the steel prices, which helps pay for the cost of setting up a steel industry. Still perhaps not the most profitable choice, but still.

[@Gino12164]

@@Thesecret101-te1lm only the problem for steel production is research. it takes a lot of time to get to that point.

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

@@Gino12164 Yeah, thus a second industry, ready to be built when research has been done while the first industry does it's thing.

[@weltraumvogel2]

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.

[@bballjo]

ROI...check the other comments please. Diminishing returns...the test is with trucks, and low volume, which makes that not really a problem. Hard starting money is plenty to start with any of these industries...that was the main reason for making this.

[@nyoodmono4681]

By now i think the best way is ot rush a city, research the resource map and then build all the oil pump jacks to export oil. They only need power and one truck each until piplined.Then are the basis for fuel, asphalt and chemicals. Also Farms are great, i have 6 large farms running by 1985 and they show 3 million worth of grain after the autumn harvest, while i exporting whole year with only 3 or 4 trucks each farm.

[@bballjo]

What do you do if you have no oil available??

[@HomeworldChanal]

@@bballjo I guess thats a hint?

[@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)

[@bballjo]

Thanks!

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

My calculations shows that the gas power plant (=oil power plant) earns the most money of the resource+worker consuming power plants, and coal isn't bad. Both nuclear plants has about the same loss.

[@seedz5132]

oh, didn't see your answer before making mine you can get (almost) perfect ratios on the chain... But you'll need 6 oxide plants > 5 UF6 plants > 10 nuclear fuel plants supplying this beast with ore won't be a simple task though (but possible with trains and/or boats) ;)

[@PetruRatiu]

If I understand correctly, the main source of ROI drop is fuel usage for trucks. Does switching to trains for transport make a significant difference? I bootstrapped my first city in my playthrough and I'm currently wondering whether it's worth to begin building trains or I should wait until road transport becomes an issue.

[@bballjo]

Of course!

[@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.

[@bballjo]

Pays for the loan?!? You don't actually need a loan...so if this setup requires you to take a loan, that probably already tells you all you need to know about the returns...

[@hivecasts]

@@bballjo I don't really set up right next to the border, that puts my expenses up, but It works. I take general loan of 500k roubles just before I get workers so I don't think it's just because of the power plant. Also I do loans so I could rush out some industries out faster (explosives, gravel, start of rail construction), while still having a return of loans. I presume everyone does that :D.

[@bballjo]

Gravel and rail are both super expensive to setup, and super slow to pay back...power plant is also super expensive. Explosives aren't a great investment either....I'm guessing those all are the reason you need a loan. There are much better starting options. For starters, I would wait to build rail until you have solid income.

[@hivecasts]

@@bballjo I don't know. I find explosives to be solid since they are "truckable" :D. It's not great ROI (it's about 50%), but it's OK. In last setup I did (away from border) I actually did rush oil and put a gas power plant (cheaper than coal for about 90t of steel, requires no asphalt) and I can say that it's a better option by that. But if nothing else works, doing a simple coal setup next to heating plant works.

[@Grueneslichti]

Sehr aufschlussreich; ich wäre neugierig auf die ROI der kompletten Bauindustrie, inklusive Stahl und Ziegel ^^ Strom wäre sicher auch eine interessante Wahl; Kohle, Gas, AKW oder doch Wind (Solar gibts auch, aber ohne Batterien SEHR Mikrolastig)

[@bballjo]

Those all require more than trucks, meaning trains or ships...but you should be able to calculate the basic import/export numbers pretty easy

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

Producing your own bricks, boards and prefab panels seems to mostly be something you would do to reduce import traffic overloading customs offices.

[@col.firefly]

No Mech Components?

[@Master_Smurf]

i thought you said you will not start new season till release of 1.0 June 20 ? but the sooner the better :)

[@bballjo]

I didn't start a new season until I had access to 1.0.

[@-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.

[@bballjo]

Using foreign workers really isn't worth it in 90% of cases...so no...plus hazard waste composition is different for each customs house, so it may not always be worth it at all.

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

Imports can be super slow though at some customs offices. Another question here is if the cost of building the cheapest vanilla dump (construction cost per storage capacity) is more or less than it costs to export the waste. In your scenario it would at least be a good idea to have the output from the incinerator sit in a dump for the ash to disperse before exporting it. Not sure if the game accounts for the mix of contents of mixed waste when exporting, but still...

[@PhilippVonVangerow]

Spannend ist ja auch, ob man die notwendigen Anfangsinvestitionen überhaupt stemmen kann. Als weitere Herausforderung bestraft das Spiel durch Preisverfall, wenn man seine Exportindustrie nicht diversifiziert. Gibt es beim Export von Fahrzeugen eigentlich auch einen Preisverfall? Falls ja, auf alle Modelle gleichermaßen oder nur bezogen auf das Modell, das häufig exportiert wird?

[@bballjo]

The price depends on the supply/demand of the resources, not the product, so cars don't have a huge effect on the price, as most of them only use a small amount of resources...but you will still see an effect.

[@cruzergo]

Refined Oil, Nuclear fuel, Electronics, Aluminum, Steel, Cars, Chemicals are cash cows.

[@juniorpasini9137]

So bottom line: Early days import crops and produce Food Midler game import crops/chemicals and produce fabric and produce clothes. Late game, importe chemicals and UF6 and exporte Nuclear fuel. Right?

[@bballjo]

Id go to fabric clothes right away, because its lower volume, so less trucks compared to food.

[@user-nd2tp5yv6l]

Maybe then just use the trains for export?

[@bballjo]

How do you have trains in the beginning when you neither have money or rail?

[@user-nd2tp5yv6l]

@@bballjo No, I was talking in general and not about the very beginning of the game, it would be funny to know the ROE of rails :-)

[@bballjo]

No, this test is about the early game.

[@user-nd2tp5yv6l]

@@bballjo Ok, then)

[@ferikkusucartofn9712]

Steel is also good :)

[@bballjo]

It's terrible if you import both...

[@bballjo]

Just did the calculated math, ROI for steel is 37.75%, which is barely better than electronics, but requires huge logistics to even enable production (lots of trains)...

[@MrGelzo81]

Trucks for coal + Trucks for iron + Trucks for steel + huge electric consumption... The sales would barely cover the costs so I consider steel an Absolute luxury at least until I have at least a decent coal and iron RAIL supply available. Edit: don't ever think to supply ore with the early 70kmh truck, you would be very rapidly disappointed. So add also the huge fuel consumption of those 35kmh megatrucks

[@monarchco]

So should this technically mean you should NEVER produce your own plastic, and should always just export oil and import plastic instead?

[@bballjo]

Absolutely not...it means that plastic (or other industries) are not great candidates for when you're importing all raw resources for it. A great example is steel...if you import coal and iron, you essentially make no money, if you make your own coal, it's an excellent industry.

[@alvinmjensen]

Then we just need to see electricity and waste management.

[@bballjo]

Anything in particular?

[@alvinmjensen]

@@bballjo how to make the most of importing and treating hazardous waste. Should you burn it off or treat it with chemicals?

[@bballjo]

I mean...if you have a choice to get paid for something or buy something else to treat it...what would you think is more economical? Also, it highly depends on your waste composition. A container is considered hazardous material once there is the smallest trace of it in there, which means you would have to pay to even import that hazardous waste....

[@alvinmjensen]

@@bballjo unless they have changed something, you get money for importing it into the game.

[@bballjo]

I don't think you understand what I am saying...they pay you for taking hazardous waste, but you pay for most of the other waste. When you import hazardous waste look at the composition and price of the load...the higher the hazardous content, the higher the price, but you may also wind up with a low percentage. Each customs connection has a different composition, and therefore different price. Not all of them will be worth it.