Research fix – building start dates

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Author: Brosencrantz

Last revision: 8 Sep, 2025 at 09:34 UTC

File size: 565.35 KB

On Steam Workshop

Description:

Tech tree fixes to a) overcome a bad design decision preventing large residential buildings before 1959 1955 b) give the option of deleting all date locks on research.

I enjoy playing with research enabled. However, when bringing in Early Start the devs made the perplexing decision to gate any residential buildings above 33.8 metres tall behind the "Durable prefab panels" tech which cannot be unlocked until 1955, and gate that behind the "Prefab panels construction" tech which is only available from 1941. Quite obviously, in the real world residential buildings above eight storeys were around before this.

This mod offers two ways of fixing this: one removes the date restriction and the other removes all date restrictions (which really should have been an option in the original game; we can do it for vehicles.) It requires a little bit of manual work.

The relevant file is research.ini in the folder steamappscommonSovietRepublicmedia_sovietresearch. The offending line is in the below:

$UNLOCK_BUILDING_RESIDENTIAL_PANELS $YEAR 1941 $COST 1200 $NAME 11415 $DESC 11416 $RESEARCH_ADD $RESEARCH durable_panels_constructions ————————————— $TYPE_TECHNICAL $UNLOCK_BUILDING_RESIDENTIAL_TALL 33.8 $UNLOCK_RESEARCH high_quality_living $COST 1200 $YEAR 1955 $NAME 11417 $DESC 11418 $RESEARCH_ADD

You can either:

* Open the original research.ini file yourself, delete the lines $YEAR 1955 and $YEAR 1941 from the above, save the file, all sorted.
* Open the folder for this mod, which should be steamappsworkshopcontent7841503536001011, go into the folder "No date locks for residential buildings", copy research.ini and REPLACE the original research.ini in media_sovietresearch. This will delete the dates, as above.
* Do the same but instead copy the research.ini file from the folder "No date locks". This will delete ALL year tags and mean you can, for instance, start your nuclear power plants in the year 1930. I don’t play it this way but all power to you if you want to.

I have also kept a copy of the original research.ini if you want to undo the above (verifying integrity of game files will do the same thing.) Game updates are likely to break this mod and need you to reinstall it. Updates to the tech tree may as well. I will update – but do comment or @ me if it doesn’t work.