Complex city-builder Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic leaves Early Access in June

Hooded Horse and 3Division have announced that the ridiculously intricate city builder, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, will be leaving Early Access on June 20, 2024.

I’ve played a lot of city builders in my time, and Workers & Resources is easily the most complicated. Not only do you need to build homes for your citizens and workplaces and industry to employ them, you also need to make sure that your supply and production chain is working as efficiently as possible. 

Supply chains are hardly anything new, but usually, there’s some abstract automation there. As long as you have your roads connected, normally, your products get where they need to go. For example, you might need to connect your factory to a cargo train. And then you need to ensure that the train is able to get where it needs to go without bumping into other trains. Then, on top of that, you need to connect its destination to the train so that whatever was produced gets to the next step in its journey.

It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how things work. A recent update added a “campaign,” which largely acts as an extended tutorial. Even with that, I kept making costly mistakes. This feels like the sort of game where it’s going to take a few attempts before you really understand enough to be successful.

That said, the genre really needs something that really pushes the complexity. I love city builders that gloss over certain aspects in the effort to keep things accessible, but you need some place to go when you really want something to sink your teeth into.

The 1.0 release will include a number of upgrades to the current version. Here’s the bulleted list from the press release:

• New buildings to enrich the lives of citizens through entertainment and fitness, including the amphitheater, and a large stadium.
• Additional playgrounds for the younger generation to stay healthy.
• Brand new Western vehicles to expand the nation’s transit network.
• Revamped education system to maximize the potential reach of teachers.
• Graphical improvements to the electronics components factory, woodcutting post, sawmill, panels factory, and many more key buildings.
• Improved factory connection nodes to facilitate a better flow of resources across complex production chains.
• Plenty of other quality-of-life fixes and HUD tweaks.

Sounds awesome. I really need to take another crack at Workers & Resources. I was starting to get all its systems organized in my head before something else got my attention. Something catastrophic, no doubt. The 1.0 release sounds like the absolute best time to try again.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic leaves Early Access for PC on June 20, 2024.