Tip 1: When buying ressources, theres a delivery fee added to the market price. This fee scales with the distance to the according border. If you plan buying ressources for a longer period build warehouses near the border and transport it yourself to save on delivery costs. This also applies to ressources used when using auto-build.
Tip 2: There is a way to cut down on terrraforming costs (Explanation below)
Tip 3: Plan out your buildings without using the auto-build option enabled in the construction menu
Tip 4: When building aggregate production, plan out where your conveyors go and use them where ever possible. Transporting e.g. 210 t of coal ore is hard to achieve with only trucks at the beginning.
Tip 5: Build gravel processing near your quarries to cut down on transport time/costs
Tip 6: Remember that if you import electricity and reach zero money, your production stops entirely, so
Tip 7: always keep a couple of thousand in your bank account
Tip 8: A great way to save a lot of money is to play on the populated map and relocate the citizens from the prepuilt towns to your apartments, rather than inviting them. Dont forget to uncheck the auto-invite option before building the residence.
Tip 9: Get familiar with the workplace choosing mechanic. Citizens will first populate workplace reachable by foot before heading to bus/train stations. Keep the waiting capacity of stations in mind.
Tip 10: Be cautious about expanding to fast into new industries. You rather should choose one chain of industry and getting enough workers to get it working properly before building new stuff.
Citizen satisfaction Tips
Tip 1: Every citizen has free time activities that he desires. However, you dont need to provide your citizens acess to every single need to get them to full satisfaction (i didnt try that on hard citizen reaction though).
Tip 2: If a citizen finishes an activity, there is a chance that he needs more of that activity to get happy next time. For example a citizen with 0% sport satisfaction only needs 30 mins on a sports field to get satisfied, a 90% satisfaction citizen needs 120 mins to get satisfied
Tip 3: Keeping no.2 in mind, when changing the provided activity, your citizens will take some time to get used to the new activity (happens when moving citizens out of the old towns (on populated maps) which are used to the church free time activity)
Tip 4: Providing sports activity is a great way to start of since its cheap. The cinema offers the most efficient way of free time activity.
Tip 5: With the radio/tv station, you can influence the free time activites of your citizens (i didnt experiment on that yet though)
Tip 6: Food however is a basic need which every citizen needs. Meat is an on top food to satisfy the hunger better and slowing health loss rate
Tip 7: The Health stat is not tied to satisfaction, however your citzens die if it reaches 0%
More Gameplay Tips
Tip 1: Citizens waiting in a transport station will always hop on the first vehicle arriving, without regarding jobs capacity at the destination. Keep that in mind when choosing vehicles to use
Tip 2: Citizens will despawn in vehicles when travelling to long
Tip 3: Rather than using one high capacity vehicle, use multiple medium/low capacity vehicles to keep the flow of passengers more constant
Tip 4: Auto-buying ressources in a building that uses a lot of ressources might not satisfy the full demand of it. I have experienced that in the iron processing plant. Counter that by placing a storage facility next to your factory and buy ressources there too and delivering it via connections
Tip 5: I havent figured out if theres a throughput limit on conveyors/pipes. However transport through them is only happening when the source building is staffed (except for storage facilities)
Tip 6: Several construction vehicles (bulldozer, crane. paver, etc) can be transported by open-hull trucks which usually drive faster.
Tip 7: Having dedicated construction offices helps with improving efficiency. Build one equipped to only deliver ressources and another to actually build your projects to start off. Excavators and (road) cranes reduce the required workdays to finish a construction project
Tip 8: Some industries dont need workers to function, if you provide a working mechanism.
Tip 9: If you build electric wires you can spare money for columns, just put them zigzag alongside the road and the distance between columns will be longer.
Tip 10: Having a working education enables you to invite uneducated people from the third world, which saves a lot of money.
Starting industries
Steel: requires coal extraction and processing to be profitable. Steel helps in construction later on, since its the most expensive type of good in construction. Cut down on extra costs by building an iron processing plant and buying the iron ore. Keep in mind that the steel mill can take 500 max. workers to fully work. Four coal processing plants and two iron processing plants are required to sustain a steel mill at max production
Clothing: Building the fabric and clothing factory uses less money and workers. This chain can be expanded with the farm later on too expand in the food/meat chain.
Oil/Fuel: Its a great option because the wells dont need workers to function. I didnt use it yet in the beginning, however i think its possible to survive on it as well, if you find a oil deposit near the border to cut down on transport costs.
Terraforming like a pro
I figured out that terraforming is crucial in setting up your buildings. If you dont take care of that before plopping down the buildings, theres always going to be a gap between them to form the slope.
So usually the first step in any new game I did, (I failed a lot because I wanted to start on the hard option for starting money) is to build a road vehicles depot and buy an excavator (having it in a construction office works too, though when its used for any construction in it, the excavator is not usable for terraforming; the big excavator for dollars is the best one, for 9k $ though). With the excavator present any future terraforming is practically free (except for fuel for the excavator, it needs a working fuel station to refuel (this isnt needed, when "vehicle energy management is" not chosen for the game) Just keep in mind to uncheck any auto-build option for this to work. Also the more free excavators you have the quicker you can terraform. The max amount of excavators to use at once is 7 though
The provided tool for smoothing down the ground is okay, but i found another way to get a smooth area much quicker and more reliable. To do that, find the place where you want to start building up and terraform it with a building. Don't plop the actual building down if you got the building lot smooth. The next step is moving the building towards the edge of your smooth area while keeping the center of the building (red square) on your smooth area and terraforming a new building lot, adding smooth area to the already existing space. I usually use the steel mill for that, because it has the largest footprint. The technical university building is great when you need a straight line for streets or rails.
E voilá, you have a huge, open and smooth area to build your next city/industry. Just keep in mind that you need to do that before building any infrastructure there (including roads, paths and power lines) because any building/infrastructure has a "no terraform" zone around it.
You cannot move entire hills in one go doing that. For getting rid of cliffs you need to lower/raise the land before smoothing it with a building.
Recently I also found out, that if you keep excavators in a disconnected construction office, they will still work while being out of fuel.