No, seriously, why do they? It's not like the construction workers don't get paid their wages if they aren't given such projects, and, unless you are buying the resources from overseas, the only cost for the construction materials for the state is wages/salaries of the workers who are involved in the relevant processes.
Until you have a construction company in your country you are using foreign resources and labor and must pay for them.
Gameplay wise, there is a button that looks like a crane at the bottom right and one that looks like money, when constructing a building. The crane is for planing construction so your construction companies start constructing them.
Inside the construction company you must select where they get the resources like steel and concrete, usually you want some nearby warehouses, if you make the resources yourself make sure to fill the warehouse with them, otherwise buy them from abroad.
People, if they live close to the construction site will go to work there, if its far away you need to buy a bus in the construction site to move the people.
Bear in mind the game tells you how much working days it is needed to build any building and how many resources you need, its only if you are buying the building when money matters and the game gives you an amount based on how much the labour and resources cost.
Until you have a construction company in your country you are using foreign resources and labor and must pay for them
Which implies that there are no other cities in your country.
Another person has explained to me that that is, apparently, the case or something similar to that is.
All of the land that you see/can build on is your country. If there are no other cities, then there are no other cities. If you haven't build a construction industry, then there isn't one.
If I'm not mistaken, the game is essentially about starting your own soviet republic under the USSR (and presumably handwaving away the idea of non-monetary cooperation between soviets) so yep, no pre-existing anything.
I think the premise is you're a tiny as fuck micro-nation in the Eastern Bloc that was literally just a few villages before WWII, so yeah you're improving a lot from the rest of the USSR.
When you buy buildings you are buying the resources, having them shipped in, and having foreign contract workers come in with that to actually build it for you using their equipment. It's just it abstracts this away for the sake of gameplay. It's like when buildings are purchasing and importing the goods they need, it's abstracting the actual delivery of them from outside.
It may be a game setting to enable a more complicated build option (so if you're still in the tutorial campaign this may be disabled, I'm not sure), but if you look down at the right corner where you have "finance with rubles" and "finance with dollars" boxes, there should be a third one to the right of them that uses local resources and labor. That doesn't cost money (directly, but if you're filling warehouses of material with the auto-import purchase option that will cost money) but requires construction offices staffed with transport and heavy construction vehicles, as well as busses to take workers to the site, and you need to be sourcing all of those things from somewhere.
When you buy buildings you are buying the resources
From where?
If you are requisitioning resources within the country, i.e. you are requisitioning them from another part of the state, it makes no sense to have them cost money.
If you are requisitioning them from abroad, then it should be made clearer that your state can't spare any resources for the city, I think. Albeit, I guess, you are already getting all of the explicit stuff from abroad.
having them shipped in
The people who work on transporting resources within the country are not going to not be paid if they aren't working on these projects, either. Where does this money go?
and having foreign contract workers come in with that to actually build it for you using their equipment
Firstly, why does your state not have construction workers?
Secondly, why can't you requisition the workers from the USSR or another planned economy?
It may be a game setting to enable a more complicated build option (so if you're still in the tutorial campaign this may be disabled...
Yeah, I have only glanced at the tutorial.
and you need to be sourcing all of those things from somewhere
Why can't you source it from your own state? Why are your options limited to either producing the resources within the city, or trading internationally with the USSR or, bleh, the western powers?
A neighboring country, either Soviet or Western depending on the currency you use for this.
Firstly, why does your state not have construction workers?
Because you don't have local construction coordinating offices and vehicle depots yet, so you're relying on outside help.
Secondly, why can't you requisition the workers from the USSR or another planned economy?
You do, but they want compensation. It's kind of a gamification of... Actually, you know what? Given the time period it defaults to (starting in 1959), I'm just gonna blame Khrushchev. Maybe it's an alternate history where he was even more revisionist and did more Gorbachev level dipshittery with trying to liberalize the central planning.
A more realistic answer is that you're entirely independent and just maintain neutral terms with both the Soviets and the West, so even though you can freely trade with both neither is going to come in and build things for you or make any sort of demands of you. Which is ludicrously unrealistic considering you're sitting on huge deposits of oil, coal, metals, and uranium, but that's city builder logic for you.
Why can't you source it from your own state? Why are your options limited to either producing the resources within the city,
You're running an independent border republic roughly the size of something like Andorra, maybe a little bigger. Everything outside your borders is foreign, even the Soviets.
Idk how the USSR or it's republics did accounting, but even under socialist conditions it would be conceivably helpful to account for building construction on a per unit basis because it lets city planners evaluate the relative value of labor and resources being put into a building.
For example if you have two sites where you can build the same apartment block but one is flat ground and another is hilly or marshy ground, then it makes sense to calculate the amount of labor, additional resources, and specialized equipment you would need to level the slope or build extra foundations on the swamp.
Lots of companies and organizations also carry out internal accounting where they invisibly pretend to pay themselves and their own divisions for work because it allows management to see where money is being used and how much.
Probably because it's a gameplay abstraction? The alternatives are to either have a full supply chain of all things your people need to live and pay them with goods, which would be really complex and not very historical, OR you hire workers and pay them even if they're sitting around but then many players see that as a sort of timer and source of unpleasant stress.
Money is just a convenient abstraction for allocated resources in either case.
They don't? Like there's cosmonaut mode which I've done, that goes all in on the idea of not importing anything from other blocs except for the starting stuff.
Money is only used for a few things
Buying resources from the two blocs
Buying labor from the two blocs
Buying vehicles from the two blocs
Inviting workers from the two blocs
Transport costs when you don't want to pick up whatever you bought at the border
If you have your construction office set up properly then buildings cost literally nothing
My issues are/were with the fact that you can't requisition this stuff from elsewhere under your state. Apparently, there are, indeed, no other cities in your country, from what I gather.
Really depends on your map, some have nothing built in them some have some towns and some even have industries so you actually can requisition stuff from elsewhere, your country is just the map there's no 'elsewhere', but you can for example relocate people living in one town to a coal mining workers district, or use the already existing sawmill to source logs you might need for construction.
You can totally make things without paying for anything other than a minimal starting industry. Look up tutorials for cosmonaut mode if you want to go hermit kingdom. (or if you're really insane, sputnik mode where you install mods turning the place into a horse drawn 1917 economy)
Adding to the discussion, there is still an opportunity cost. The workers could be put into work elsewhere. Like, hospital vs a residential building. Both can't be built at once assuming there is no other labour which can be freed up elsewhere.
In the accounting sense, the money is going from the game "treasury" into a blackhole (assuming everything is produced internally), the money is subtracted but not added elsewhere, an imbalance. Not an issue if you can create and destroy money at will, because it has no effect on the real economy.