Welcome Comrade! In the Spirit of The Glorious Peoples' Revolution, I've been tasked to make this land a great example of Soviet power and progress! Or at least we'll cover up what we fail at and never tell anyone.
So I picked this game up for a bargain bin sale price of just ten bucks today and it looks and feels great. Part Sim City/Cities Skylines, part Railroad Tycoon/Transport Fever and a goodly measure of Tropico especially the vibe while you're playing what with the people all scurrying about under the crushing scrutiny of your secret police and the non-stop background music playing -- not Caribbean tunes to sway along with but good ol' Socialist Anthems to get your Commie heart pumpin'!
There's a lot under the hood with this one. It's reportedly got quite the severe learning curve what with all the micromanagement needed to get everything to work well, but at this early juncture, since I'm just a noob, I got the thing set at "baby steps" mode and it's pretty much just ploppable pretty city buildings without much of a care for how it all works. I'll figure it out through trial and error. Forums and YouTubers say the tutorials are a bitch with this one, I guess worse than Paradox games so I'll just use my extensive experience and familiarity with games like this and wing it. We'll see how that goes. So far, of course, nothing is working right as one has to set up all the supply chains manually and I have to figure out how to do that but that's half the fun.
Here's one thing that blows my mind though. Cities Skylines likes to toot it's own horn about the potential size of cities, but look at the mini map in context of the city I'm starting out here. This first city I'm building is right about at the center point of that "Capital A" looking shape on the mini map... yeah, just that little black dot in the middle of the point where the top of the capital A is. I haven't looked it up yet but I'd guess each square of the grid on the mini map is about five miles x five miles in area so the whole map is, what, something like 1,600 square miles?* That's crazy!
The game is giving me messages saying my population happiness is too low, but it says it's at 86%, what the fuck do they want? I gave them a freakin' Ferris wheel, dammit! Don't make me send in the KGB. I guess I'll check out more YouTube videos for hints and tips on how to be a better cruel dictator, er, I mean benevolent Glorious Leader for my people.
EDIT: *Actually, a YouTube reviewer clocked the map I was playing in at around a 160 square miles total so each square of the grid is 2.5 miles x 2.5 miles, so I was just about doubling it in my estimate. Still crazy huge.