Kaiserpunk: Tips and Tricks

Kaiserpunk is a hard game, but there are many unique and fun mechanisms that make the game fun and manageable. You may still fail a lot – which is the goal, right, for people that like Banish? So some tips here may help some of you.

How Kaiserpunk operates as a city management simulator is a bit different from other city-builders. So here are some tips for you to consider.

To understand how to make money, you have to understand that the game developers mislabeled cash printer as “residential building.” In this game, tax revenue is directly tie to residential buildings, impacted by:

• How many cash printer employees, I mean citizens, are in a building;

• How much employee welfare, I meant needs, are satisfied for a specific building;

• What employee class the building hosts.

Building industry and expanding territory raise costs (both in cash and in resources, which I will get to), so it is very important to make sure you can afford an industry or a territory before you consider expanding them. Oftentimes, though, you can take out “loans” for expansions, in the form of building more cash printers/residential buildings. You can take several paths to take this “loan”:

1. Build an highrise or house for a population class you have access to but does not need much in your city (e.g., once you have access to Specialist class, build a Specialist house even when you don’t need them at all).

• 2. Overbuild 1-2

extra 

highrises or houses for a population class you will soon throw into planned new industry/production buildings (e.g., if you need only 50 Laborers, build two Laborer highrises!).

The reason why building extra residential buildings work safely is because, so long as a class’s unemployment is below 20%, they are very unlikely to revolt. Option 1 works because you can afford to have a higher classes to be completely unemployed while a full house brings in several thousands of tax. Option 2 works because you would have a larger population base for a lower class, and excess lower class populations are great tax bases and army reserves. Having the extra money printers… I meant highrises and houses built literally means printing money from thin air, with some people inconsequentially mumbling in the background: “oh why can’t I get a second job elsewhere in a coal mine or something!”

You cannot plan a Kaiserpunk city the way you plan for a normal human city. The populations in the Kaiserpunk world are, as I have established, dedicated employees of cash printer corporation you own. Yet they are also gifted teleportation abilities after suffering traumatic experiences after the Great War, and the collective traumas have allowed our cash printer employees to simultaneously operate machines some hundred miles away with breeze. Also your buildings can teleport and be moved at will as well, and your depots have teleportation portals for goods! Plan you city with these in mind. Some tips:

• Separate your residential area and your industry areas. Your populations need no commute time, and where they live (print money) and where they work (their second jobs) can be thousands of miles away and they will still be happy as a flappy bird. Connect your city hall and a residential area through a singular dirt road (no fancier road is needed between them since you won’t need firetruck or truck to transit between your city hall and the money factories; keep the road maintenance cost down). You can build a circular money printing industrial zone with the center being the essential service buildings (which you should build as early as possible). Expand your residential zones for each classes slowly in the circle, and segreg…damn this is the 1910s, I meant separate the different classes’ neighborhoods once you have schools and radio buildings, and make sure you have space in the middle for water towers and electricity stations. Eventually, it should look like four bubbles overlapping together, one for each class.

• Your depots are installed with teleportation portals, meaning goods can instantly teleport to a) other depots and b) your magic resource storage cloud. This means you can build compartmentalized satellite industrial zones around mineral resources and farmlands. Heck, build the cotton farm next to the oil and you can make streamline luxurious clothing production or have forestors placed at the center of arms and bullet production through some tetris maneuvers with your buildings.

• Minimize transportation distances between related production buildings and depots. Remember, if the entrance of a production building for A is close enough to the entrance of another production building that produces the input for A, it does not waste depot logistical resources. You should definitely still make the truck # depot upgrade as soon as it is available and affordable and later use copy to place extra depots for larger industrial zones.

• You can then place all the markets and military bases around your city hall, with a depot teleporting supplies to them. You just need to make sure you have road connecting to all satellite production towns and your residential/cash printing zone(s).

Other Tips

• Play with unlimited resources. If not, make sure you optimize the ♥♥♥♥ out of your water-consuming production through upgrades and paced expansion. Energy and mineral inputs can be imported so long as you spam and export production that do not use a lot of water or mineral resources with shallow reserves on your map.

• Diplomacy is great! Make sure to get to know what the political leaning of a country by tapping the information button first — your own political choices will impact relations with other countries passively. Use your foreign countries’ unlimited resources to trade excess and fill shortages or shore up critical supplies; buy those oil, guns, and meals with easily producible bullets or pistols; and do the research exchange – even if it is just 10 points for 11. The mechanic may be clunky, but hell is it effective and rewarding.

• On the grand strategy map, make sure your supply lines to your frontline armies are not overstretched. Build front line supply nodes when you can.