Oh, crap. I finally learned how to play Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic

Despite being a professed lover of city-builders (and other management-style games), I have never been able to penetrate the iron-hard surface of Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. I once took it on for review back at its 1.0 release in 2024, but I just couldn’t get through.

I know the basis of economy, production, and urban development, as set down by games like SimCity, Cities: Skylines, Banished, Timberborn, Against the Storm, and so on, but Workers & Resources takes it to a deep, dark depth. Every facet of it has complicated mechanics to learn, both from a mechanical perspective and a logistical one. Peeling back one layer of the onion is a time commitment, and I wasn’t sure if it was a reasonable one. Was the juice going to be worth the squeeze?

I’ve finally done it (to an extent), and I have the answer: What have I done!?

THE LEARNING WALL

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is, essentially, an extraordinarily complex survival city-builder. Largely, you can ignore the “Soviet” part of the title, if you want to, because there isn’t really a political side to the game. While your republic is invariably sandwiched between East and West, and there’s a matter of propaganda and party loyalty, you’re not able to choose between a capitalist or socialist structure, and you won’t be pressured by either side. You can trade in Rubles or Dollars. That’s about where the Cold War themes end.

Instead, it’s more about building and managing an economy. And it has all the layers: resource acquisition, worker management, production chains. However, there’s a lot of intermingling systems to work out, and saying that greatly undersells how complicated it is.

Where do I even begin? 

CHOO CHOO

Let’s start with trains, my perpetual bugbear. In a game like Cities: Skylines or any of the SimCity titles, it’s as simple as dragging tracks across the landscape and plopping down stations. Suddenly: trains!

In Workers & Resources, not only do you need to place tracks, you need to place depots, various types of stations, buy the trains and their individual cars, and, most importantly, make sure they can navigate around each other. This requires placing track changes, semaphores (signals), and organizing your tracks carefully. Otherwise, your trains will try to kiss, and that’s not good for anything. But there are different kinds of semaphores, train conductors have very little self-sufficiency. They really don’t know how to deal when they bump into each other.

It’s extremely fidgety. Laying down functional track is a skill that has to be built. Even after all the time I’ve spent learning it, trains still occasionally get stuck. There’s a lot to learn.

And that’s one facet of a rather sprawling game. Every other facet has its own learning curve because the level of depth is disgusting. You’re building a planned economy. This means you need to produce something, and you need workers to do the production, and the workers need a way to get from home to their job, and you need to keep them happy, and happiness is more than just a roof over their heads.

And they breed! This means exponential population growth, which means you constantly need to build more homes and more places for them to work and more places for them to find happiness. Not a tremendous issue when you’re starting out, but as your population grows, it also grows faster. Fucking humans and their… fucking.

GOOD HELP IS HARD TO FIND

You not only have to move people, you also need to move product. Again, this is something that you get in most survival city-builders. Typically, your colonists will bring produce to a warehouse or whatever. But here, you’ve got a whole country. So if you’re mining coal in one place, you might process it right next door, but if you want to use it in heating plants somewhere else, you need to move it by train, truck, boat, or plane. And this means you’re managing the transportation logistics, as well.

Like, sure, you’re the leader of a country, but, in the real world, you’d delegate this sort of thing. You’d have a minister of transportation or whatever, and their job is to make transportation work. Ideally, they know how to do it well. They specialize. The ministers in Workers & Resources just show their dumb, AI-generated (gross) portraits to give you advice and tell you when things are on fire. Everything else is up to you to micromanage. (2026 update: Hooded Horse has patched the game in an effort to remove the AI-generated images, as the publisher is taking a full no-AI stance).

You can trim down your responsibilities when setting up your difficulty. It doesn’t automate the systems, it just removes them, replacing them with magic, I guess. You can change it so you don’t have to concern yourself with waste or keeping your vehicles fuelled and buildings electrified. It’s helpful. It means you don’t have to worry about learning everything the first time you play. Or, if it’s just too much micromanagement, you can cut it out. I wouldn’t blame you. In fact, I’d recommend starting slow. You’ll find plenty of challenge, anyway.

Because, even on the easiest setting, it’s still a lot to learn. And then you can scale up. Want to make it so realistic that any goods that you import must be shipped inward from customs? There’s an option. I haven’t even dipped my toes into self-sufficient construction wherein you create offices, buy equipment, and make sure all the resources are available to build infrastructure. It’s a long way to the bottom.

A LOT TO LEARN

There are bits of this game that are overly fiddly. Well, most of Workers & Resources could be considered overly fiddly. It’s a big reason why it’s so hard to learn. The issue is that, despite how realistic and complex it is, it still has abstractions to make it, you know, a game.

For example, the warehouse system can easily throw you off. Industrial areas, in general, can be troublesome to configure. There’s about a half-dozen storage buildings, and each only holds certain types of goods. They connect via supply roads, and can either be connected directly, or by using forklifts to manually move goods between each of the buildings on the connected route. Connected factories will push or pull resources, but warehouses won’t transmit goods to other warehouse. That necessitates forklifts, which is a less automated and slower process that requires careful configuration.

I could get deeper into this, but the fact that supply paths can’t intersect with traffic roads or train tracks means your industrial areas need to be carefully planned for maximum efficiency. In one sense, cool! That means it’s a skill that you can grow and refine. Each new industrial area will be better than the last. On the other hand, damn. That is a lot to learn on top of all the other things you have to learn.

THE MEANS OF (RE)PRODUCTION

I can’t believe this has been out of early access for just over a year, because that’s when I started playing it. I’ve been picking it up, failing, putting it back down, and then eventually returning to it, because there aren’t really any comparable games. I don’t think I’ve ever dropped and picked up a game so rapidly.

This time, I finally cracked it. I was first able to make my nation financially solvent, and from that platform, I kept expanding into new industries, learning how to manage them. My understanding of the flow of resources grew, and my nation blossomed from one city into a country-wide network. 

My population reached a point where people are just procreating too fast. When they hit 21, if they don’t have a flat to move into, they’ll get upset and might “escape” the country. But they multiply so fast that I can create entire cities from scratch, and within the (in-game) year, they’re over-populated. There are tools to clone entire areas, so I could just duplicate a city, but that doesn’t sound like a fun way to play. A bunch of identical cities? Boring. You can “research” tech to slow down the birth rate, but you can’t equalize it. It’s like every socialist is hard-wired to have three or four children.

From a practical standpoint, I could probably just let people escape and face no ill repercussions. However, I’d feel like a failure. I feel like a failure normally, but I’d feel like a failure in this context. I wish people could just emigrate. The country is clearly not behind the Iron Curtain.

THE SPONGY CURTAIN

What’s unfortunate about all of this is that it’s also very time-consuming. I’ve now passed the 100 hour mark in Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, and while I’m slowing down (and hoping to take a break), I’m not done with it, even with the overwhelming breeding. I’ve considered starting a new game, upping the difficulty in certain areas, but I should probably shelve it for now.

I’ll most likely be back. There’s nothing quite like Workers & Resources’ deep, uncompromising approach to the genre. And now that I’ve gotten over that initial hump, I feel I can enjoy it for what it is. Last year, I wasn’t sure if it would even be worth all the work it takes to learn how to play. Now, I understand that’s a weird question. How does one even answer that after the hardships? What is clear is that I feel accomplished. That’s a great feeling for a game to give.

But it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s really hard for me to tell you that, yeah, give it 20 or 30 hours, and it will grow on you. But that’s sometimes how it is. Hard work can make even the smallest reward seem more meaningful. Now go do some hard work for the glory of the republic.

The information in this article is based on a digital Steam version of the game. It was provided by the publisher.