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Post by Rune Lai on May 28, 2023 18:54:11 GMT -5
I finished the first scenario in Frostpunk and since I wanted to talk a little more about it than I figured would be appropriate in the "What are you playing?" thread, I started its own thread so if I feel like adding more later for other scenarios I can. This game is not hugely plotty, but there are events to keep the player on their toes, so spoilers ahead.
The intro scenario is called "A New Home" where you as captain of a band of refugees from steampunk Victorian London, by luck, stumble across one of the outpost generators that was set up with the express purpose of providing a refuge for survivors in this great freeze (which is speculated by scientists to be caused by volcanoes to the south). It's not like there was no warning before the new ice age began, but obviously this particular group left London as late as they could because it's already super cold and most of the land is already covered in snow and ice.
Gameplay is primarily focused on building a new city around the generator, and the generator is everything. Coal fuels the generator, the generator provides electricity and heat, and without both of them there is no survival. This becomes important in the finale.
My first attempt was definitely a learning curve. I didn't know which buildings to prioritize or the best way to manage work shifts. People frequently ended up sick and/or discontent and the Londoners, a rebellious group that thinks going back to London on foot would be safer than staying, ended up departing with 35 people. My second time I managed to convince everyone to stay (though it was kind of funny that the game would leave the rebel count at 1 until the event timeline wrapped up no matter how many times it would say people converted back).
After your scouts discover the remains of Winterhome, another settlement (since there were supposed to be lots of them, not just the one we opened up), morale falls and people need to find meaning in life, so you have two ways of going about it; providing order, or providing faith. Each option gives you different laws you can pass that affect your city. Providing faith felt a little too cultish to me for my first go around, so I went with order, which lets you go full on authoritarian dictator if you want, but I just wanted to keep order so I didn't do anything crazy like set up propaganda offices. (Maybe I should have, since my hope meter was rarely more than half full.)
My second playthrough I went faith to see what options it would give me, and I think it actually works better with how I wanted to lay out my cities. What I didn't realize on my first go around is that building an efficient city is important, because it lets you save on coal by not powering buildings that aren't in use. If I have a cluster of buildings built around a big heater and they're all work buildings, I can turn off the heater at night. But homes need to be heated 24/7 and in my first playthrough I built with no plan in mind so I had to keep the entire city warm day and night.
Aside from building like buildings with like, the reason this worked better for my faith playthrough is that I could put my halls of worship just outside the ring of heated homes (because oddly people don't care whether their churches are warm) and I could cover most of that circle of homes in the circle of hope offered by the church. But with order you have to build watchtowers and guard posts to get the same hope benefit, and all of those are staffed with people and have to be kept warm, so those structures need to be inside those heat circles, which leaves less room for actual houses.
I'd still like to try order again and see if I can make it work if the next scenario lets me make that choice. We'll see.
Anyway, as you play, gather information, and more survivors arrive, it becomes apparent that the worst is yet to come. I was not good about my resource management the first time around, so by the time I was given the option to develop equipment to have my own scientists estimate the onset of an oncoming storm, I only had 5 days until it would hit. Reaching this milestone unlocked a list of everything I would need to have a chance at survival, and I needed to research a lot of tech to fully power my generator and weeks' worth of supplies that I just couldn't get in the remaining amount of time. I had coal to last a few hours, not a few weeks when I got the survival criteria.
So I quit rather than watch my city freeze in misery.
My second playthrough I knew what was coming and I had people working extended shifts almost everyday since they arrived unless they asked for a break (and I would honor their request for 3 days of regular hours before sending them into overtime again). This time I researched almost everything in the tech tree and had a fully capable generator well in advance. I also had enough coal stored for a month at the rate I was using Level 2 power. I was pretty sure I'd have to run it at Level 4 during the final storm, which would double the cost in coal, but I planned to keep the city's internal mines open., so even if I would have to shut my outposts, which were bringing in additional coal and steel, I wouldn't be hemorrhaging too much. I also had a month's worth of food, since hunting and hothouses (kinda like a greenhouse) would no longer be possible once this uber storm hit.
When the storm preparation starts, the overworld map changes direction from its usual north is up orientation, and I didn't really know why until my second playthrough. When the storm starts getting close, you can see it coming from the east, and it creeps closer and closer as the days go by. One of the things you need to do in preparation for the storm is recall all your scouts and outpost teams since anyone caught in the storm will be killed, but I didn't realize the storm was physically wiping out parts of the map in time to save my steel outpost team (they were the furthest east) since I thought I would have the full duration of 7 days to wrap everything up.
But aside from that loss, everyone made it back to the city in time and we holed up. I thought I was in pretty good shape with over a month's coal and food. We had kilns to burn wood (which we had a lot of) and the mines were still running. It looked good.
I could see the weather forecast was gradually going to drop the temperature by several degrees over the next few days, but it looked survivable and my people were in relatively good spirits all things considered. (Faith is really nice for giving people hope. And we were so prepared that even when one of my workshops stopped work and just wanted to pray for a day, I told them it was okay to take the day off. It wasn't going to make a difference at this point.)
But that last stretch... wow... The devs could have made it comfortable to survive with a fully upgraded generator, but they throw more events at you, like having to shut down most of the mining due to the dangers of running the machinery in the deeper shafters. More hope falls as people fear it's the end. People start making demands for alternative coal sources, which required research and extra building I hadn't planned on. I like that they keep it interesting even during this final week of the game rather than let the player coast after having made all their preparations.
A few days into the storm it becomes apparent that even a Level 4 generator is not enough to keep everyone warm. In a pinch you can put the generator into overdrive at any point in the game, which is nice if you need extra heat for a day, but if you run it like that too long then the generator will stress out and explode. And no generator means no survival. You have to put your generator in overdrive to survive, but you can't do it the entire time from the moment people start getting chilly homes because the machine simply would not last that long. Sometimes this meant leaving people in freezing but not quite frozen homes, and praying not too many people get sick (or even die) because you need to make sure you'll have enough hours for overdrive during the absolute worst stretch right before you can come out the other side. It was a ridiculous -218F at the end, which was so cold I had no concept of what that even meant. (I looked up Antarctica's weather after this and it usually doesn't get below -112F even in its coldest parts.)
After the weather forecast hits the sun on the other side of the worst freeze, then that's it. You don't need to defrost everyone and restart operations. You've won.
It felt pretty good. As the game ends, it plays a timelapse of how your city grew as it tells you the story of how your initial band of eighty survivors made the decisions they did and how they felt about it. The people in my ending were largely optimistic. Even though they had some trying times and sometimes they had to turn away other survivors who wanted to join our city (late game refugees who had more sick than I had beds to care for), they never felt they crossed the line.
The entire game, I only had 16 deaths and ended with 400+ survivors. The deaths were the 10 steel outpost team members who I didn't realize were going to get caught in the storm, 5 scouts who died saving other survivors from polar bears, and one person who died really early on from a heart attack while working a long shift. I built a cemetery when the first guy died, expecting I'd need to add more later, but because he was the only one who died in town, there was only ever one person laid to rest there. >.> Amazingly nobody died in the final freeze, though a lot got sick. I didn't think I'd need it, but because I was so over-researched in tech, my medical facilities had the best insulation possible so they were the only buildings that were actually warm during the final freeze. Everyone else was just warm enough to not be dead.
In retrospect I think I could have taken in a lot more survivors, because in the end it was coal and generator management that became the sticking point, and not food. Even with no food coming in, we had more than enough food to last the storm. And maybe we could have actually saved a few of the sick even if we didn't have beds right away. But I couldn't be sure, and I really wanted my people to survive. (And it takes a while to play through, so I didn't want to wipe after ten hours of real world game time.)
In the end, good game. I really liked being forced to make tough choices, and even the complete misery of the final week when I realized I couldn't possibly keep everyone warm, or even a little chilly, was pretty good. I mean, I signed up for that with this kind of game, and it delivered.
There are a number of options I didn't take because I was trying to be as morally upright as I could, but I do wonder which ones would cross the line. There's one point where you can rob some exiles from another settlement, which I didn't do, and I'm pretty sure that would have been bad. Since I chose the faith path I had the option to install myself as the Protector of the Truth, which is basically making the Captain's word law, and I could see doing that if I was really desperate, but I didn't need to go that far.
The game has three more scenarios, and after that there's paid DLC if I want to keep running with it. I'm not 100% positive, but if Epic Games puts it on sale at some point I think there's a decent chance I will.
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Post by Rune Lai on May 30, 2023 2:23:14 GMT -5
After playing "A New Home" long enough, other scenarios unlock, and I decided to go with "The Arks" since it was the next one listed, though I could have gone with the other two.
"The Arks" runs with a slightly different premise. Though we still need to get a refuge up and running, the goal is not necessarily the survival of the team (though they would like to survive given the chance).
If you're familiar with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, that's essentially what the people in this scenario are building. With the world falling into decline, they hope to store and keep warm a wide variety of seeds that humanity can use in the indeterminate future to recover after the ice is gone. The scenario is instantly failed if the arks get cold enough that the seeds inside are destroyed (and the game gives you a warning if you're in danger of that happening, just in case you don't notice any temperature changes).
You start with a team of 45 scientists and it quickly becomes apparent that we're not expecting more people to traipse in. One of the goals is to build enough automatons so the outpost can be run entirely by them long after the scientists are gone.
Because the scientists have a clear purpose there isn't much need to manage hope and discontent and you don't need to choose between order and faith. You can still pass laws, but those are the basic ones that handle things like shifts, rations, and burials. Though hope and discontent status bars can change, it's generally not enough to affect the scenario outcome. The scientists are well aware that they're working in service of a higher goal and may never see the fruits of their labor. But because their numbers are limited with no means of reinforcement, there's a lot more micromanaging in this scenario, especially while getting the automatons built.
You can build mines, hothouses, and other resource gathering/crafting buildings as in A New Home, but there aren't enough people to staff all of them full time, so I would only put people in the hothouse or cookhouse if we were running low on food. The factory would only run while we were building automatons (or the two times we made someone a prosthetic). As much as I could, I had people working on researching new tech, and once we got enough automatons, that's what 90% of the labor force ended up doing.
The scenario is shorter than A New Home, in that the storm is coming sooner. I only made one scout team this time because I was just so focused on hitting the goalposts at home that I didn't feel I could spare the manpower, so I didn't get to explore everything before it started looking pretty dangerous outside. Though, having a settlement full of scientists, I didn't need to set up additional equipment to get the storm's ETA. As soon as I got the settlement fully automated (at least as far as the seeds' survival) the storm ETA and the suggested criteria to survive it appeared.
It looked tough in that I was short of just about everything (most notably coal), but I did some quick mental math and realized it should be doable, especially if the automatons could keep working through the final freeze. (I only had one automaton in A New Home, because I used most of my limited Steam Cores on buildings, but because The Arks has such a small human crew I don't need as many advanced structures to support them.)
And in the meantime I would put everything I had into researching the last bit of tech that I needed to make sure I had a fully upgraded generator going in. I figured I had this in the bag.
So of course that's when the lone survivor of a scouting party made it to me. D: He came from New Manchester in order to get help. Unfortunately he came from the exact opposite direction from where my scouting team was currently exploring, so it took a day for them just to get back and then head out again. >.>
The scientists also wanted to know what my decision would be should push come to shove regarding whether we would help the other settlement. From "A New Home" I was pretty sure I could feed more people, but more homes would be a different story, so I told the team our mission comes first.
When the scouts found New Manchester and informed me that the settlement would be doomed without our help due to being in such poor shape, I told them to leave, we wouldn't help.
But then that one survivor came up to me and asked if we could do something and ugh... It's hard to tell a desperate guy to his face to give up on everyone he cares about even if he's just a bunch of pixels, so I said fine, which gave me a new set of criteria that I was pretty sure I would be unable to complete, but hey, the goal is still the seeds' survival, and if we complete even one of these three scheduled deliveries maybe somebody will make it out of New Manchester alive.
Unlike A New Home, you don't take in the new survivors. Instead the scientists plan on shipping them three conveys of relief supplies via automaton. This puts you in a dilemma, because even if you have the supplies (which I didn't) you have to give up some of your limited number of automatons, and you need a minimum of five to run everything according to the objectives (though the other scientists will ask for six if you start sending any).
I actually had spare automatons because my scouts had brought back a few extra steam cores in their last run, enough that when I worked my settlement's butt off I was able to send the first shipment of 600 steel and 600 wood with an automation in time, and I could still spare another two for the second shipment, which would have been 2000 rations, but I had only needed 500 for my settlement to survive so I planned accordingly, and wasn't able to ramp it up past 1200 before the storm hit.
I was expecting to buckle down for the storm again, and I had all my generator techs researched even though the objective didn't request that of me this time, but as soon as the storm hit the scenario ended and went to the epilogue wrap up.
The epilogue acknowledged that we tried to save New Manchester, but even though some people survived the initial storm they died soon after. However, we did save the arks so the scientists accomplished their mission.
Now knowing that I didn't have to actually play through the storm, I probably would have prioritized things differently in the final week or so when I was trying to slam out techs, since that ate up a lot of the steel I otherwise would have shipped sooner.
Since I didn't complete the second part to saving New Manchester, I don't know what the third objective would have been, which makes it hard to judge how much more difficult it would be to play this again and save everyone, but I want to give it a shot since I think I could have improved my city layout now that I know it's not going to grow beyond the starting 45 and the 1 survivor from the other settlement, and I didn't get a chance to explore as much as I wanted which might have netted me additional steam cores to build more automatons if I'd gotten a second scouting team up and running.
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Post by Rune Lai on May 31, 2023 1:24:07 GMT -5
Replayed "The Arks" and this time managed to save New Manchester and accomplish the scientists' mission with three days to spare. Phew.
I have to say I really like the music that plays during the epilogue. It's very calm and a bit wistful in the beginning, because of the settlement's position and the fate the scientists find themselves in, but as you watch the settlement grow and you hear about how the scientists decided to help, the instrumentals grow stronger and more stirring as you find out New Manchester made it through the storm. I seriously felt tears in my eyes when the words showed "We saved the Arks, but more importantly, our humanity."
(Admittedly this is one reason I like 11bit Studio's games. Until you get really good at the game mechanics, or you're replaying a scenario, you often find yourself in situations where you want to help but there's nothing you can do, or the only choices are between bad and less bad. So when you get a win, it really feels like a win.)
I'm doubtful it's possible to save New Manchester on a first time playthrough without using a guide, because their needs have specific thresholds and the scenario requires you to vastly overproduce basic supplies and automatons for your settlement. I shipped off what would be two months' worth of rations to New Manchester, and the third and final objective to save them was 6000 units of coal. My first time around I was able to make it to the required 8000 for my scientists to survive with a couple days to spare, but my second time I had to come up with an additional 75% for the relief package.
Fortunately I made a second scout team this time and prioritized equipment for them. I was just swimming steam cores from all their finds and ended up making so many automatons I started running out of jobs for them to do.
I was a full 5 days ahead of my previous attempt by the time I got my settlement fully automated, so that gave me a whopping 17 days to prepare for the storm, and having gotten off the ground so quickly and scouting everything out was what gave me the materials I needed to craft enough buildings and automatons to provide for both my settlement and New Manchester.
I think when I do the third scenario I'm going to make two teams even if it doesn't initially look like I need that many.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 1, 2023 2:41:46 GMT -5
The third scenario is "The Refugees" which is interesting since it's framed as a class struggle, which is very Victorian. This group consists of a bunch of common folk who upon learning about the coming winter (and that their lords left them in the dark about it) commandeered one of the transports from the lords who were otherwise going to leave them to die, but the transport broke along the way, leaving them to walk in scattered groups the rest of the way to the generator. (None of these transports ever seem to make it to the generator in any of these scenarios. ) I started with 43 survivors, and immediately started work in scavenging for supplies. When I noticed I couldn't assign all of them to work, it seemed a bit weird until someone suggested I could have the children work too. Yep, child labor it was going to be. My first law was allowing children to work, but only in safe jobs. The key thing with the early part of this scenario is that you've got to build a settlement, but you're short-handed unless you make use of the children, and boy howdy are there a lot of kids. More groups of survivors are constantly straggling in. They're usually workers or children, and not the more highly trained engineers, which means they can only do the jobs that don't require an education, and in the children's case, they can only do things like scavenge or work the cookhouse (unless I pass another law allowing children to work the dangerous jobs too, but I wanted to avoid sending kids into the coal mine). The waves of refugees come in groups of 15-40 and arrive every 1-2 days, but at least the game tells you upfront that you need to take in 10 waves of refugees as part of the objective, at least 250 of which have to survive. This meant I had to constantly expand housing and means of obtaining food, but after a few lean days with everyone subsisting on soup, I started feeling pretty good. That was about the halfway point, which of course is when a group of newly arrived refugees talks about a particularly awful lord by name and how they hope he doesn't show up at their settlement (because it was originally intended that the lords survive here and not the commoners). So naturally I expected this guy would show up. The scenario gives you a breather after the final refugee waves, which are all "your people" and then you get about a day and a half after the first group of lords is spotted to prepare for their arrival. There are rumors that Lord Craven is coming, and he's the specific bastard who tried to have the commoners' transport shot down, killing everyone. But this first wave consists of just tired, hungry people who may have been lords in the past but recognize they have no power anymore. And there are a hundred of them. I was used to dealing with waves of 15-40 people at a time, and my settlement was so crowded I was getting concerned about where I'd find space to put everyone. (It's a much smaller map than "A New Home.") My settlement was quite right to be worried about finding beds and food to feed everyone, but I managed, though we had to go back to soup for a bit. I built the fighting arena for the first time to lower discontent, added a pub for after work fun times, and served everyone a dose of moonshine with every meal (because apparently they care less about being on soup if they've got alcohol). All three of those were things I'd avoided in previous scenarios, but I really wanted to keep the discontent down since people are usually a bit cranky in my towns with all the extended shifts I run. When I saw the second wave of lords though, and that it was another hundred people, I wasn't sure if I could take them in. I was literally finishing up housing for the previous hundred while they were hours away from arriving, and I was informed there were a lot of sick, which was awful, because I had sick people all over the place from the people who had to sleep in the snow while I was building housing for them. But, I figured I could handle it. I'd gotten pretty confident in my Frostpunk skills. My settlers complained, and there was some drama between the lords and the commoners that gave me minor hits to hope and discontent, but the worst that happened was that a lord got sent to the infirmary for trying to cut in line at the cookhouse. That wasn't great because even though I'd managed to build three infirmaries and six medical tents, there was a line fifty people long just wanting to get a spot, but my engineers had researched a lot of medical tech, so turnover was good and the waiting list shrinking by the time the third group was spotted. Unsurprisingly this was the one which had Lord Craven. I was seriously thinking of not taking in yet another hundred people that I didn't have the materials to house (though thankfully managed the infrastructure to feed), and besides this was the Lord Craven party, so I could feel pretty justified in saying "Tough luck, buddy," right? But dude rolls up with seventy children in tow and the game shows you a picture of him and a few kids looking sad in the snow. The game says they're going to camp outside the city if you turn them away, which meant that they weren't going to leave, so I let them in (though I would have liked an option to say "Everybody but Lord Craven") and I basically told everyone else that I would handle the discontent, which sounded like I was going to be in for an awful ride. (The kids by the way, were mostly orphans, and I feel like Lord Craven was using them as a shield to get into the settlement when he might not otherwise be allowed.) The game then sets up a threshold for hope you have to stay above and discontent to stay below, and tasks you with remaining in control of the city for a full day. As luck would have it, the workers had asked for a break from the usual 14 hour extended shifts I run, so everyone was pretty content. There was no overtime, there was a fighting arena and a pub, everyone got alcohol, so there was barely a hint of discontent, and I'd managed to keep my promises and save a lot of people so my hope was high. The final issue before the end of the 24 hours was a lynch mob forming around Lord Craven. If I had guards or faith keepers (of which I had neither because it wasn't a priority) I could have stopped him from being hung, but I figured this was fair so even if I had the option I probably would have let the mob have him. He died unrepentant so it wasn't something I felt particularly bad about afterward. Then once the 24 hours are up, the scenario ends, which I found a bit disappointing. I was waiting for some last minute "Oh no!" problem to deal with, but I guess that was the three hundred additional refugees, which I managed to do anyway. I mean, it was pretty nuts trying to feed and shelter them all, but that's also because I was trying to build long term in case I had to weather the storm as a final end game criteria after I got all the refugees. That didn't happen. Overall, I think it was a pretty good run. Nobody died in the settlement (except for Lord Craven), even when we had over a hundred sick people. There was one band of lords my scouts found who had given up and just asked to be given a nice burial after they passed on, and since they had asked (and I really didn't want to bring in another 50 people on the brink of death) I respected their wishes and let them die. Other than that, everyone made it. The epilogue goes into a spiel about how the class differences gradually vanished (which I think they'd have to if everyone is to survive) and only dinged me a little for having put people on a soup diet for a while. Otherwise most of the narration was positive. It was nice seeing the time lapse of the city being built, but I didn't find this one quite as moving as the Arks. After I finished, I looked at the Frostpunk wiki article for this scenario since I heard it had multiple endings depending on what you do, and apparently there's a whole other arc that kicks off if you refuse any of the lord groups entry and they camp outside your city. To be honest, it sounds like a real mess and I probably would have liked it less than my manic food and shelter building. I was specifically avoiding building guard posts (or setting up faith keepers) because I liked my "we're all in this together" band of commoners. That's why I opened a pub and gave everyone moonshine to manage discontent rather than post guards. If I didn't let the lords in there would be raiding, there would be fighting, and ultimately the lords would end up dead or exiled. I'm kinda glad I learned all this after I finished the scenario rather than before.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 3, 2023 21:50:35 GMT -5
The final scenario that isn't paid DLC is "The Fall of Winterhome," making it a bit of a side story/prequel to "A New Home." Winterhome is the first ruined settlement the survivors in "A New Home" discover and it's just a husk with nothing but the dead, an exploded generator, and evidence of in-fighting by the time they reach it. It's possible to find some survivors from Winterhome later, but you don't really know exactly what went down. Except now you do. The scenario intro lets you know that the previous captain of Winterhome was a terrible manager, and his incompetence followed by the malfunction of the all-too-necessary generator led to an uprising that left 80 people dead and a third of the town in ruins due to the fires and rioting. And that's when you take over as the new captain. As a result, there are already some laws passed and you can't undo them. So for this scenario child labor is automatically a thing, even for the dangerous jobs, and we don't use cemeteries, but instead keep the bodies in snow pits for later usage, which I've never done before, so that was new. You're also told that you've inherited a city with a bad layout and holy crap they weren't kidding. It's not like I'm a Frostpunk vet who min/maxes in order to play on the hardest difficulty, but even I could tell that this city's layout was junk. But there were 400+ people already living here and so many ruined buildings to tear down that I didn't have time to do any full scale remodeling. (Incremental remodeling though, that I could do and did, because fixing the layout let me put newer, warmer houses around a steam vent than the starter layout did and get rid of older, colder houses that people shouldn't be living in.) This was by far the hardest scenario I played, and without a doubt that's because this was originally free DLC and didn't ship with the base game, so it would be expected that players picking this up would be people who already finished the original content and wanted more, so it's unafraid of kicking you in the teeth right off the bat. Considering that "The Refugees" didn't amp up the challenge as much as I thought it would, this was a welcome return to balancing on the razor's edge. But it didn't help that I ran into a persistent bug where people would ask me to warm up their homes, I would agree to heat some of the homes but not all of the hones (overpromising and underdelivering gets you in trouble), and then the game would give me a failure message before the two day deadline had passed. What the hell. A quick search online showed that other people had trouble fulfilling this condition in this scenario, but they at least got to run the timer out. Since it was costing me hope to break a promise, I started over since the failure happened at the very start of Day 2 and I would lose little progress. But when the bug happened again, and I had to start for a third time and I just jammed steam heaters everywhere without waiting for people to complain and I never got the heat the homes request so I wouldn't have to deal with a hope hit for failing or a discontent hit for refusing.. Unlike the other scenarios, you never really get a breather in "Fall of Winterhome." Even once you finally get the city back in order, it's just the first step before allowing the engineers to get to the bottom of what caused the generator to malfunction in the first place. They came back with bad news. It took me a little over a day to hear it, as I just did not have 60 engineers free to work on the problem, but I was able to allocate 40 since I'd managed to get the number of sick people down from a high of 30+ to less than 10, and with one of my tech advances I could afford to leave only 5 engineers on medical duty, allowing the remainder to be split between monitoring the generator and research. (Infirmary was a godsend. I should have researched that tech earlier.) The bad news was that the generator had a critical flaw and was just a matter of time before it ultimately exploded (presumably leading to the exploded generator we saw in "A New Home"). Clearly we had to leave, because otherwise everyone would die, but where? As the captain I could be honest and tell them we'll just have to try, or I could lie and tell them I know a place. The lie greatly increases hope, but I figure there's no way this game would let me get away with such a strong false hope and save the lie's discovery for the epilogue. And besides, I thought it would be weird if only I, the new captain, knew of a place to go and no one else did, because prior to taking over, who was I? Maybe one of the engineers? So the final leg of the scenario is repairing one of the abandoned dreadnoughts (sort of a big landship) that brought everyone here so people can Snowpiercer their way in search of a new home. We need a set amount of coal to make the journey and that amount doesn't change no matter how big a load the dreadnought is carrying, but the dreadnought was previously stripped down so we have to fix up the cabins and pack enough supplies to give everyone who goes food and shelter. I looked at the requirements (which get increasingly harder the more people you try to bring) and it quite frankly looked ridiculous, but I thought I could reasonably arrange for three cabins of people; three hundred refugees, and with luck I might be able to manage a fourth. I doubted I had the steam cores for a fifth and in any case I wouldn't be able to manage the thousands of steel needed in the timeframe I had left. Though people were a little disheartened at first since I told them the truth about our situation, they were still working, so I thought we were on target for the three cabins. They asked if the kids could go first, and I said sure. The dreadnought is located a ways from the town and takes a day of travel to get there. I needed to send a crew of 25 engineers to get repairs started up, but ended up sending like 45 in the first wave because I thought it might get the job done faster, but it turns out that they don't actually affect anything once they arrive, so all that did was hose me out of skilled workers back in the city. After the initial group of engineers, you can start evacuating the city, sending up to fifty people at a time and a set amount of supplies. I had enough coal, and food looked doable, but steel was going to be the chokepoint. I got two transports of kids and most of the coal out of the way, and that's about when things started going wrong. The generator started malfunctioning again, and actually shut down for a while before we got it back online again. (And it would later shut down a second time.) One father really wanted to go see his kid, and the options were to let him go (hope rises) and telling him to wait did not raise discontent, so I let him go, which bit me in the butt later when other people started talking about me playing favorites. Stowaways tried to get into the next transport to the dreadnought and I was told I'd need either guards or faith keepers to keep people in line, but there's a cooldown on new laws and I'd just passed one for prosthetics since someone had told me the handicapped children weren't going to make it without them. Between when I was told to get guards and when I actually could pass the law for them, a bunch of workers straight up walked out on me for the dreadnought. I would have been able to force them to stop if I had guards or faith keepers (at the cost of people potentially getting injured or killed), but I hadn't the chance to get them yet so I had to let them all go, which pissed off the people who remained and were still working to save the lives of the ingrates who went ahead. (And once I finally did get some faith keepers, there's no option to send them to the dreadnought to haul the deserters' asses back to town.) So I lost about sixty people, which crippled my ability to work the town. And really, I don't understand what the deserters expect would happen by charging over there prematurely. Sure, they can "secure their spaces" to make sure they get a ride, but the dreadnought isn't leaving without supplies, supplies they could be helping put together. The only relief was that with them gone I could dismantle a lot of the unused homes for scrap, particularly those that were now in a bad location given the deteriorating generator's lower output. My expectations had already dropped from getting everyone out, to just getting all the kids out, but with the revolt the dreadnought had too many people on it to leave with just three cabins. I could launch, the command becomes available as soon as the last of the coal is on board, but the trip would not be survivable. I think if the revolt hadn't filled the dreadnought past the capacity of three cabins, I would have played to the bitter end and done a partial evacuation, but after I slept on it, I realized that it was likely not worth playing another 2-3 hours of very intense micromanagement only to (probably) end up with a complete failure due to not being able to build a fourth cabin. Only one rebel group made it out to the dreadnought, but that's only because I had the faith keepers the second time that happened, and the engineers tried leaving too, which was obviously a no-go because I needed them working on the generator in case it acted up a third time. Clearly things will continue to get worse and I'll likely lose more people to fights. The logistics of getting everyone on board feel quite frankly insane to me, because not only do you need all the proper materials, but you have to do it while gradually shutting down the city as you send people away, and due to the short amount of time available (I think I had about ten days when I got the report) you have to accomplish both at the same time. So I decided to start over, using lessons learned from this run: - Set steel mills up early, and researching their upgrades is a priority
- Coal mines should go up after steel since they give a better output than the coal thumpers the scenario starts with, but leave the thumpers up since they don't require steam cores and we'll likely rely on them at the end
- Infirmaries are amazing and do so much more than medical tents that they should be researched when not working on steelmill upgrades
- Don't wait on passing laws, set up faith keepers before they're needed
- Take advantage of the snow pit and use bodies for fertilizer in the hothouse and organ donations to get more food and heal people faster
- Concentrate the best homes together, so when dismantling the city, the crappier ones go down first and I can disconnect their steam heaters at the same time, saving on coal
- Leave field engineers out at their stations as long as possible (so they don't eat rations in town) with scout teams stationed to escort them back to the city once we're in the final stretch
- Switch the outpost team from coal to steel as soon as internal coal mining can sustain itself
- Get Factory and upgraded prosthetics researched before evacuation starts so we can make prosthetics using less steel and put people back to work as soon as possible
- Don't bother researching generator techs other than those necessary for aiding repair, they don't make enough of a difference to matter
It's a big list, but I think if I do this I might be able to get most of the city evacuated. Even knowing where I could improve I'm not sure I'll be able to get everyone out because this scenario is just that nuts, but I would be find with just a partial evac. When my best steel output is something like 400 units a day and I need thousands to finish the final cabin I would need to be at my best output so far in advance of fixing the dreadnought and I'd also need to have researched and built the depots to store it all. I'm not sure I'm quite savvy enough to do that.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 5, 2023 1:33:47 GMT -5
My second run at "Fall of Winterhome" was not perfect, and I went through a really dicey period early on where I actually ran out of coal for a few hours, which I'd forgotten had happened to me the first time around too. The thing is you need to use Range 3 on the generator to keep people warm when they're scavenging at the start (and it's at Range 3 by default), but that triples the coal needed to keep the generator running, so when the first cold snap hit, I raised the heat to Level 2, but that ended up using six times the base cost to keep the generator running! When allowed to build on my own I use Range 1 and just build more steam heaters since that's less coal intensive and when I reorganized the city in my previous run it was eventually set up that way.
I focused a little harder on food early this time around and never got the request to feed people before they starve, even though we were constantly running low (and even ran out a couple times) during the first week. I did get two hothouses up fairly quickly since I didn't have to research the tech for them and managed to completely dismantle two tent neighborhoods, one of which became a road to the logging camp on and the other turned into the agricultural district. By the end of the first week almost all of the wreckage was gone and this time when given the opportunity to spare or banish the surviving lackeys of the previous captain I banished them. You can use them as additional workers, but I find I don't need that many early in the scenario and in the end they'll just be more people trying to get a spot on the dreadnought, which can't fit the entire population of 500+ to begin with since the capacity caps at 500 with full renovations.
I also got the second tier of steel mills up within the first week and we never had a choke point where I couldn't build something due to lack of metal, which was really nice. I did have a steam core problem though. Because I decided not to prioritize scouts, I ran out of steam cores before I could build my infirmary, since I forgot it needed one. I think next time (yes, there will be a new time) I'll make sure to send a scout team back early with one.
This time my law management was on point. I had faith keepers up before there was trouble (and I could force people to work when they'd otherwise want a break) and approved organ donation and using bodies as fertilizer early enough that they could make a difference. Giving people moonshine with their meals actually ended up being the last law I passed whereas last time it was the first law I passed for its hope benefit. I waited on my second playthrough because it doesn't functionally do anything other than make people feel better, whereas other laws allow me to do more things or more with what I have.
I forgot that faith keepers also can lead processions around town and when you do this discontent goes down a lot so I ended up having a fairly tranquil late game with no outright riots (just the one probably scripted group of attempted stowaways, but that's it). The engineers did end up asking if they could all go to the dreadnought as their skills are useful for building a new settlement, and of course they can't all go otherwise there will be no one to repair the generator, but this time I met them partway and agreed to send 25 of them. (Later I sent another 10, which was not required of me, but I felt it appropriate as the city continued to downsize.) Those that remained, recognizing that there would not be room for everyone, later volunteered to stay and run the generator until the bitter end.
Overall, this attempt went so much better than last time, but I couldn't save everyone, and it honestly made me a little sad once I realized it was impossible.
The reason why I say there will be another go around is because I only managed to launch with four cabins, saving 400 people and leaving 225 to die by the explosion or the cold in Winterhome. I was within striking distance of enough food for a fifth cabin full of people, and even enough steam cores for construction. , The main bottleneck was steel. Coal was easy, and rations actually aren't that hard to accumulate if you leave everyone on a soup diet the entire game. But I needed another two days past the deadline going full blast to get enough steel. I did use some steel for emergency repairs of the generator. It wasn't enough to make or break a fifth cabin this time, but it might the next time around. I used about 50 extra steel making extra prosthetics, but again, that wasn't make or break, and getting all my amputees up and about put another 30+ people back in the workforce. It's just I didn't want to click on exactly how many I needed since it was literally dozens of them and you have to either click once for each additional prosthetic or hit the infinity button and hitting infinity was better (until I realized I over produced while not paying attention).
Next time I'll try to get the third tier steel mill up faster and have one group of scouts beeline for the iron mine so I can switch the outpost team sooner. I ended the scenario with way more coal than I needed (having two coal mines was nice, but I definitely could have dismantled them sooner) and switching the outpost team earlier would give me another 200 steel a day. I even set up a third thumper in case I needed more coal after the mines were dismantled, but that ended up being unnecessary. The weather is actually not too shabby in the final stretch, and warmer than it is during part of the scenario's middle.
In the end though, I finished all of Frostpunk's scenarios, so it's enough to call it game complete, even though I'm not done with it yet.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 7, 2023 22:33:51 GMT -5
I changed my priorities at the start of my third run through "Fall of Winterhome," focusing on improving steel production so much that I had the third tier of steel mill upgrades up by the end of the first week. This was not without cost though, as my medical research was delayed compared to last time so I had a lot of sick people who were sick for longer, and since I delayed proclaiming the law for radical treatment (allowing for amputations) in favor of emergency shifts I was worried that a few people might die the first night, but I managed to get enough steam heaters and medical tents up that we managed.
Still, the sick were definitely backlogged compared to my second run, but fortunately the game gives you enough people that even though I had a whopping nine medical tents up at one point, there were rarely too few hands for whatever needed doing (especially with the kids working too). It helped that I went nuts with gathering huts this time. I think I got three built in the early hours of the first morning before people even went to work. I had so many huts clearing away debris that I didn't even get all the events where you pull out survivors. There's usually three; a child, a bunch of ruffians who worked for the previous captain, and a bunch of engineers. I got the child, but no ruffians and no engineers, which I didn't even realize until I got to only one pile of debris left and realized that their events hadn't triggered.
That meant I didn't get one of the hope boosts (for finding the engineers) I normally would in order to fulfill the criteria for moving on to the next objective; examining the generator. I would end up having to build an additional shrine since I was just a smidge short. This also meant I was heading into the later part of the game with fewer engineers than I had the last round, which I figured would still be doable given that I at least had a good headstart on my research, but was a little concerned about heading into end game shorthanded as I started to wind down the city.
On the scouting front, I got a second scout team up relatively quickly, but didn't bother with giving them speed boosts this time since my priority was getting steel and medical tech up in that order and there are a limited number of places they can visit anyway. I managed to time it so that they were finishing up as we were getting ready to tear down. On the bright side, since I knew exactly how to unlock the iron mine now, I sent my first scout team on a precise path to find it, and I sent my outpost depot team there as soon as it was both available and they dropped off their last delivery of coal.
I also managed my coal much better this time around, so even though I did run out at one point early on, it was not as disastrous as my first and second runs, so the generator did not shut down all the way. This time I preemptively lowered the range of my generator and made sure people didn't work in colder areas without a gathering hut, and dismantled any homes that weren't going to get heat from either the generator or a steam heater.
By the time we were ready to examine the generator (about the midway point), I already had a large resource depot dedicated to storing steel, another large depot for coal, and multiple smaller depots for rations. Everyone was living in one of four dedicated neighborhoods with adequate heating, and I had ten teams of hunters and two hothouses going to produce food, of which there was quite a bit since everyone was subsisting on soup. I even decided to let things slack for three days and give everyone full meals when they complained (since I knew I ended up with tons of spare rations on my second playthrough). Things were looking promising.
I also took my time discovering what was wrong with the generator during the investigation phase. You have just over three full days to do it, but once the news breaks, everyone's hope goes in the toilet and the investigation period is the only calm period in the scenario where you're panicking over a deadline. There still is one, but the mood is good, so you want to keep that good mood as long as possible before everyone starts working inefficiently since they've lost hope.
I ended up not waiting as long as I wanted though because during the investigation period the generator makes a lot of weird noises and starts stressing out the longer you go without finding the answer, which makes discontent rise as people freak out, but I still took over two days, which still landed me just ahead of schedule by the time the bad news broke. I had 13 days to evacuate the city, one more than my second playthrough and four more than my first one. Definitely was in a better place this time, even though I wasn't tracking much faster on the objective unlock. My researched techs were in a much better spot and my supplies solid. The first post-engineer transport went off entirely full of people and supplies, as did the second, and the third. I was doing so well that I actually got the last of the steel out one shipment before the last of the survivors and I'd been sending 50 every day.
I was worried that steel would be the hold up, but I was so efficient in stripping down the city of the homes we no longer needed, the facilities we could no longer man, and keeping the steel workers going on 14 hour shifts for two weeks straight that we finished a day ahead of my estimate and three days ahead of deadline. The transport for the last 25 people ended up being the hold up.
I filled it with engineers, figuring that they had done their best (and not all of them would fit anyway) and sent out the final transport, but the game keeps going for the 24 hours it takes for the transport to arrive. During that time, people still talk, and you hear them wonder why they're still in town, if they're out of room in the dreadnought, and I couldn't help feeling a bit sad that I couldn't do anything for them. Since the game does not cut away after the final transport leaves and I'm still in command of the city (and even had to deal with another generator breakdown emergency) my feeling is that the player captain has chosen to stay behind, and that seems fitting. You never put yourself on the transport when filling it with people, and I imagine that the remains of Winterhome would completely break down the instant the captain departed on a transport.
The epilogue is a little more hopeful than my previous completion. There's still an acknowledgement that they couldn't save everyone, but the collective group marvels at how many they did save. In less than two weeks we overhauled a dreadnought to house five hundred people with enough food to last for several days in hopes of finding a new home.
I told a friend "This game keeps making me question whether I can actually manage something," but the thing is, I often find I can which is why I find it rewarding. After the initial shock is over, I adapt, and if not on the current playthrough I can succeed on the next. Most other strategy/management games don't take me from overwhelmed to "I can do this!"
I think part of that is because it's such a curated experience. Though the map of "A New Home" is slightly randomized each time you start, and not every playthrough will see every event, you have different goals each time and different scenario specific obstacles thrown at the end, whether it's the storm of the century or the trying a save another town that you didn't know existed a few days ago. So you can take the experiences you learned from the previous scenarios, but you still have to adapt and deal with the unexpected.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 14, 2023 19:51:38 GMT -5
I did my Endless Mode run, which I had a planned stopping point for, but otherwise could play as long as I wanted. There are two versions by default; Endurance and Serenity. I would have preferred Builders, which is supposed to be a middleground between the two in terms of difficulty, but that's DLC only. Endurance basically puts you in the harshest of environments and you can see how long you last. You get stormed in (like the end game storm of "A New Home") every few days, which sounds awful. Serenity is supposed to be for people who'd like a chance to make a nicely organized city without focusing as much on survival (though if you're not careful people can still die) so even though you still get storms, it's like once every couple of weeks and only lasts for a day.
I went Serenity. Basically, the temperature fluctuations and occasional storms are enough to remind you that you're still in a Frostpunk world, but aren't so bad that you have to drop any plans for an industrial district because you suddenly need space for six medical tents. The only objective most of the time is just to survive the next storm, but there are occasionally a few others!
Sometimes one of the scouts manning the beacon (which I did not know was manned since you don't assign anyone to it) will spot some people out in the wilderness which you can recruit to come to your city. Sometimes they're people who are getting by in a storm shelter (and the game lets you know they seem adequately prepared so you don't feel like they're gonna die if you don't take them in), but other times they're genuine stragglers in need of assistance.
There are multiple maps to choose from, including the maps from the base scenarios, but I decided to go for a weirdly shaped one called Canyon precisely because it's an odd shape. This generator is in a canyon so you have to build long instead of in a ring like most maps. It's a little annoying because your people have to walk so far to get to their jobs if you're making them work with resources at either end of the canyon, but I like how the middle turned out. I put all the housing close in to the generator and made industrial hubs around the natural resources the people would be working with until I got a nearly completely automated city.
By the end it was pretty cushy. Outside the average of -40 to -70F temperatures, most of the population don't even have jobs but sit around at home all day and just show up at the cookhouses to eat or hang out in the heated garden (which is not a feature in the normal scenarios). Everything other than the scouts, guard towers, and infirmaries were manned by automatons. I even had automatons doing the last bit of tech research for me (now that is lazy). I could automate the infirmaries too, but that feels creepy and impersonal so I left humans taking care of humans.
There are two questlines that are unique to Endless Mode. One is finding relics from before the great winter, which you build an archive for so future generations can see what their ancestors had and what they can aspire to regain, and the other is a Christmas arc. Since I'm not playing during Christmas I don't have access to the Christmas arc right now, but the relic one is interesting. Basically your scouts stumble across abandoned dreadnaughts that they can explore for relics of their pre-frost society that they can store for future generations of humanity. The relics range from anything like the first attempt at a new technology to a child's toy of an animal that likely no longer exists. All of them come with little lore snippets and one of them suggests that a weapon of mass destruction might have contributed to current weather conditions.
My city was pretty much perfected though and no challenge was left by the time I got about 5-6 relics out of a total of 15, so the rest of the mode was more or less played in fast forward until I collected everything. Since my city was so automated all I really needed to do was monitor the generator power level and direct the scouts. Everything else could be left on its own as there was plenty of coal and food and you stop getting new citizens after your city hits 700 people.
I went Order for my Endless Mode so I could learn more about how it worked and decided that I much prefer Faith. It's just easier to build around and you don't have to staff the temples the way you have to staff each individual guard and watchtower. Aside from that, I don't like the guy who calls everyone to work in the morning. He keeps telling everyone how they have to work harder, even though I've made this cozy paradise for them. So when I do my final hopefully perfect "A New Home" run I'm going to use Faith.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 17, 2023 23:42:55 GMT -5
When I started my third "A New Home" run with the goal of getting a deathless run, I'd forgotten how sad a state the game begins in. I don't remember if "The Refugees" started with some known techs, but "Fall of Winterhome" did and so did Serenity Endless Mode. I needed to research everything from the indispensable beacon to basic heaters and steam hubs.
I think I may have actually gotten off to a slower start than my second playthrough (I feel like I'd gotten the workshop up on my first or second day that run), but I was very focused on exhausting my early resource piles as soon as possible and made use of gathering posts, which I neglected on earlier playthroughs. This let me do more gathering with fewer people, and once I passed the soup law I was able to sustain everyone from our initial convey (including survivors we picked up later) using three hunter huts and without spending a steam core or the research time on a bum-rush to get a hothouse.
This let me get early sawmill, coal mine, and steel mill techs unlocked relatively quickly, so I wouldn't hurt for build and fuel resources, and with the initial resources piles out of the way I had more freedom to build my city the way I wanted rather than having to build around things.
Though I wanted this to be a deathless run, I did allow myself to reload if rng didn't favor me, specifically because there's an event where you can save some survivors from polar bears and there's better than even odds your scout team is going to die in the process (they died my last two runs and my third too until I reloaded). The point isn't really so much as to get a happier ending (since saving everyone humanly possible doesn't give you any bonus), so much as to overload my city and see if I can really support everyone, since every person saved is another person who needs to be fed and sheltered.
Technically someone did die along the way, there's an event where one of the faith keepers (or guards if you go Order) is murdered by the Londoner food thieves, but I'm not sure someone actually died. I mean, I suppose I should have checked my population count, but normally the first time someone dies you have to decide what to do with the body if you don't already have a cemetery or snow pit set up, and I wasn't prompted (nor did I have to assign a new worker to the faith keepers). My run finished without a single cemetery built, and now that I think about it, my previous run ended with only one body in the cemetery and it was the guy who died from a heart attack during a 24 hour shift so I didn't have a faith keeper corpse that run either.
As with my last "A New Home" playthrough, eventually all the Londoners changed their minds and decided to stay. I wasn't paying attention, but I think they even did it before deadline. My hope bar was completely maxed, discontent was barely a nub, and everyone was looking forward to the next day.
When the third leg of the scenario started with the new refugees arriving, I took the entire first group in, and instead of waiting, I sent my scouts out to find the newer waves and hurry them along to their new homes which were already built and waiting for them. My two infirmaries couldn't immediately handle the load of sick that came with them, but eventually I got two more up for a total of four and managed to get everyone healthy before the storm landed.
This time I saved both my outpost teams and all my scouts, even when I had my scouts take the extra time to guide all the refugees to my city to make sure none of them died along the way. It felt pretty close with that last batch I pulled out since I had to make more runs with all the doubling back I did, but they got into the city with a couple days to spare. (But as before, the projected deadline is for when the storm hits the city and not when it will hit your people if they happen to be in its path.)
I actually was a bit nervous heading into the storm because my coal supply wasn't as high. Last time I had a ridiculous month-long supply for running at half power and then it shrank to a week's supply once I was in the storm and had to ramp everything to full power. This time in the week leading up to the storm I only had a 6 day supply! But because I was much more focused this time around, I managed to research the highest tier coal mine in the days before the storm (I never got that far last time) and since I hadn't bothered with hothouses when hunters would do, I had the steam cores to build the best of them.
Even at maximum generator output, as long as I had all my coal mines running (and I had a kiln on the side to burn extra wood I no longer needed for burning) I was still generating twice the coal needed in a given day.
Of course, once the storm locked me in all the bad things started happening. The mines froze, reducing output to 20%, even the mine operated by an automaton, but I still had the kiln going, and a 9 day supply of coal I knew would last me the entire storm (which isn't quite a week long). In fact, knowing that people were going to ask for a coal thumper, I had actually researched it ahead of time so when they asked me to build one to replace our mines, I built it right away. And then because it was warmer in the work huts than staying at home I had everyone who could fit work there.
At least until people started freaking out about the storm and stopped coming to work. But everything necessary was stockpiled, so it wasn't quite the panic it was the first time around when I felt like I was on the edge of my seat as much as the people in my city. The musical score is good though, and I enjoyed it much more this time around.
I think I was too in the moment to pay as much attention before, but the developer put the soundtrack up on YouTube and when I heard it, it immediately sent me back. It really encapsulates the spiraling sense of despair and oppression caused by the storm.
Ultimately, everyone made it through the storm, though there were about 100 people sick at the end, and I don't blame them since they were in freezing homes and the warmest buildings we had were still rated "Chilly."
So now I'm done-done, until I pick up the DLC, but I think I'll save that for another time.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jan 12, 2024 0:52:30 GMT -5
Reviving this thread since I've started the first of the paid DLC scenarios "The Last Autumn." As the name suggests, it's actually a prequel to the rest of Frostpunk and takes place during the final autumn before the great frost arrives. At this point in time the world is growing colder and there's talk of a great winter, but some people just dismiss it as rumor. Not the British government. This scenario tasks the player as the foreman for Site 113 where the end goal is to build one of the generators for a future group of refugees, should the worst happen. (Of course it's going to happen. We've already played the main game.) This site is designated for the people of Liverpool and you start with several dozen workers and a handful of engineers in relatively good temperature (for someone of a northern european background, which is certainly not me). The land is still green, there's a big pit in the ground, and the first order of business is to gather up the supplies we arrived with, build some docks, and of course set up some housing and a cookhouse for food and shelter. I hadn't played in a while, but I feel like I jumped back into things pretty quickly. Gathering posts for multiple resource piles. Tents clumped together for efficiency. Cookhouse built next to homes so people don't have to walk far for meals. At least two tech workshops to keep the engineers researching with optimal speed. And then things started to diverge. "The Last Autumn" is not a survival scenario. Your job is to get the generator built, no matter what. No generator means no New Liverpool. So the whole Order vs Faith decision as rules for a new means of living is thrown out. Instead as accidents happen and bad turns to worse you have to choose between siding with the more numerous and less educated workers, or the fewer but more critical engineers. Also, instead of dealing with Hope and Discontent, you have Motivation and Discontent, with less motivated workers taking penalties to their work efficiency (which is not what you want when you're on a deadline!). As with previous scenarios, there are scripted events where things go wrong. I don't know if all of them happened to me, but it feels like they always come up just when I start feeling good about my progress. I chose to side with the workers, reasoning that even though they are more expendable, in aggregate they are vital to construction. Aside from resource gathering and exploration, you need people to work on the generator itself, which is a massive project that might command 30-60 workers at once. Engineers on the other hand... unless I had an unexpected medical emergency (like some scripted workplace accidents at the generator) I usually had a few to spare. Also, discontent workers are more likely to strike. While one of the last things I thought I'd be dealing with while preparing for the snowpocalypse was dealing with a labor union, I can understand why it's happening from an in-universe perspective. The snow wasn't here yet, and some people are skeptical it's even going to happen. I did, however, initially refuse to set up a worker's council because even though it would give workers more of a say in the project, the Book of Laws warns you that not all of their ideas are going to be good. As I played through the opening days I realized I hadn't prioritized my operations as efficiently as I could have, taking far too long to get my docks up and relying on our starting resources a little too much. I also wasn't sure how big my work population would eventually get so I ended up with some homes being set up in odd locations that I later moved due to another new mechanic addition, the bathhouse, which helps prevent people from getting sick. Since there's no longer getting sick from getting cold, there's sick from getting exposed to the toxic gasses coming out of the hole in the ground we're using for the base of the generator. Because I expect to get habitually kneecapped by this game, the instant I realized there was not only a -30% work efficiency penalty for the crew having low motivation, but a +30% work efficiency bonus for having high motivation, I realized my first priority was to get everyone's motivation up and maintain in the bonus threshold for as long as I could. I set up a pub, I allowed prostitution (which I never did before because it causes hope to fall in other scenarios, but since it's not fueled by desperate people with nothing left in "The Last Autumn" it's a constant source of motivation). As soon as I thought it was reasonable I started serving everyone hearty meals, which is like the opposite of soup. Instead of being half a normal meal, it's a meal and a half. I also gave everyone comfortable housing. Instead of 10 to a tent, it was 8. But because times are rough, the game is constantly dropping motivation everyday. I actually stopped passing laws for a good middle section of my playthrough, because you get a temporary motivation bonus for keeping a promise (because people have a problem only a new law will solve), and I didn't want to use one frivolously.. I wanted to extend my bonus for a day if I could. (And later extend not having a penalty.) I'm not sure I'd say "The Last Autumn" is harder than "Fall of Winterhome," I beat it on my first try, but it definitely benefits from micromanagement and knowing when and where to reallocate your staff. The toxic gasses are stronger on some days than others, and you have a forecast for the next day's gasses, so you can take people out of the central pit on the days when it's really going to suck and have them spend time in the various factories for generator parts instead. (Also people are less likely to strike or have accidents in less harmful work areas) I think because of all the new mechanics the game is pretty good about warning you when something can go wrong. I don't particularly like the placement of the new generator construction panel in the UI, since I keep clicking it by accident when I mean to look at my settlement's resource production numbers, but the panel is helpful because unlike other scenarios, it tells you exactly what you need in parts to succeed in construction and how many parts you need to fulfill any bonuses so there are no surprise criteria to pass at the end of the scenario. It also lays out the four phases of generator construction and how far ahead or behind schedule you are in completing it. This was immensely helpful, as I was able to keep a good 2-3 days (even 5 days at one point) ahead of schedule as far as the start of Phase 3, and that was with my rocky start since I hadn't prioritized my docks as much as I should have. I'd had some accidents, and a couple strikes, but because we were working at a good clip and even had +30% motivation through Phase 2 I managed to stay ahead. But Phase 3 is when things started to go downhill. I got a telegram from London that the cold was getting closer. By Day 39 all resource shipments would stop due to the sea freezing over, and the generator would need to be completed by Day 45, at which point my team would be evacuated by icebreaker. By my count I had 13 days to finish this and because of the constant Motivation loss, my team was finally working in the -30% efficiency penalty. I started running shorter shifts for some of my facilities, which made people happier, but only because the generator itself had started running behind schedule. The core was the last part of Phase 3 to be built and had been delayed since I hadn't prioritized steel as much as I needed to at the start of the game (this happened in "Fall of Winterhome" too, it's always the steel) so while the core team was on overtime, the rest of the on-site construction teams were running shorter days to produce the parts we'd need for Phase 4, but they didn't need to hurry since Phase 4 couldn't be started until Phase 3 was done. The support teams (fishers, dock workers, tech researchers, etc.) worked a varying amount of hours depending on what they did and sometimes it even changed day to day. Somebody who was at the lumberyard one day could easily be roped into the core the next. Or the foundry, or whatever else needed doing. I had more jobs than people so if a job could wait, it did. Though the game starts in autumn weather, the weather keeps getting colder and eventually so cold it starts to affect morale and the workers' health, so I had to divert some of my research time from making the final building upgrades to doing heating research, and even divert some research time away to taking care of sick people. By the end of the scenario it was looking like a proper Frostpunk scenario, with snow, freezing homes, and all. And of course while it's all dire like this, that's when I get the annoying telegram yelling at me that because I fell one day behind schedule that I couldn't miss another deadline or I'd be replaced. (Ungrateful gits. ) But since I had been productive, by the time Phase 3 was done, I already had all the materials ready for Phase 4, allowing us to catch up and finish 3 days ahead of schedule, at which point I was congratulated for leading one of the few teams to actually finish. This was by far my least comfortable playthrough as I found it difficult to be both a good person and get the generator done by deadline under increasing odds, and then realizing that we couldn't call the icebreaker and leave the instant we were done. Instead we had to wait out the weather for a warm day, which was another three days I wasn't fully prepared for. I managed to squeeze out the coal production to last, at the cost of temporarily shutting down the public baths until I could get another kiln and sawmill going (using the freed up workers), but the food ran out the day before rescue arrived. That was ridiculously close. I'd called it quits on a couple scenarios before because I realized they were unwinnable, but this one ran the razor's edge so closely that I had to finish. I also got hit by so many negative dings during the epilogue sequence: bribery, censorship, overtime (really?), and dangerous work. But I did like that during the usual upswelling of theme music during the epilogue it mentioned that Liverpool needed a chance and we gave it, while bringing everyone home alive. I'm not even sure what the bribery charge was. Maybe it was the time I gave some workers extra rations to go back to work right away? At the time I viewed it as a bonus for being doing demanding work in harsh times, but looking at it from another perspective, not every part of the construction site will go on strike at the same time, so maybe it was viewed unfairly by teams who were working hard and didn't strike. I also broke my promises twice for heating everyone's homes once it started getting colder. The first time was totally not my fault. Well, I suppose if I was paying more attention I would have noticed that the weather was getting colder, and realized that my current heating capabilities wouldn't handle a decrease in temperature, making this an impossible request to fulfill, and that would have taken care of the first time. And the second time was me forgetting that braziers (you don't have steam vents in this scenario) aren't as strong and can't actually get any hotter than the baseline so when I increased the heaters it only affected workplaces and not homes so of course I failed again. (Probably something I would have remembered if I'd played this back to back with the other scenarios.) I did have enough extra materials to add one optional upgrade, but ran out of time to implement it before the icebreaker arrived. I went home with 29 sick, 117 hungry, and 2 invalids (others had been sent home earlier); 212 staff in total. Nobody died except for the one scripted guy who's killed by a polar bear so the ending didn't ding me for that. The epilogue narration also let me know that should the worst happen, my crew would be added to the raffle for a spot at the settlement, ending the scenario on a dour note with the implication that all our hard work may have been for the benefit of someone else. Lord Craven from "The Refugees" also gets a cameo in the narration as somebody heading up changes to the generator program, which we know isn't gonna go so well. Perhaps some of the workers from this scenario end up being part of the starter group in "The Refugees." In any case, the final epilogue card told me that New Liverpool was declared ready for a population of 500. Survival Chances: Poor. >.> Yeah, I did the bare minimum. But it was better than nothing. I did think about whether it would be worth overworking everybody and disregarding safety hazards to get the optional upgrades to increase the settlement's survival chances, and I honestly don't know how I would have felt about it. If New Liverpool ended up with a Great chance of survival and five people died, wouldn't that be a fair trade? But I don't really know how great its chances would have been even with all the upgrades. I had all those in my first run of "A New Home" (different location) and it was still a wild ride. In retrospect, for a second run I'd: - Prioritize getting docks and their associated upgrades sooner, particularly for steel
- Build houses all on one side of the settlement to maximize the church and public baths
- Stick to two scout teams, three was overkill and I could have spent the resources on another tech
- Build a second resource depot for food. Between not having enough storage and too many scout teams bringing back food, I depleted the hunting stocks too fast without taking full advantage of my fishing harbor (which goes away when the ice freezes--no ice fishing)
- Be more economic about requesting steam cores and staff via telegram now that I know there's no penalty for not making use of the full resource allocation (and don't ask for the pricier engineers as I ended up employing an excess of them in the cookhouse and the pub)
I'd also like to add on all the extra generator options next time. The extras are all things you use in the base game scenarios so you as the player know how useful they will be for the people of this settlement you'll never play and getting them will likely change their survival chances on the final end card (and maybe some of the narration as you leave). I'll probably try siding with the engineers next time too, even though that would add an unknown factor to my playthrough. Apparently if you play with the engineers you can import convicts and make them work on the generator since they can't go on strike, but I'd rather not go that route. As with the main game, there's always the ability to go too far as a means to keep order. Side Note: There's a Snowpiercer easter egg in this scenario. You can find the ruins of a French survival project which was a train on rails in the snow. It ended badly and your scouts are like "What were the French thinking?" (Though the English language movie is more famous, the original comic is French, so of course the people in-universe who would do this would be French.)
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Post by Rune Lai on Jan 23, 2024 19:43:44 GMT -5
Finished my second playthrough and it was... interesting. I was clearly much better at prioritizing my builds as I finished without doing any overtime and even got one upgrade in. We had four days of food left with three hunting spots to spare, and I managed to hit a balance between coal production and coal usage in the final leg of the scenario so no one was overly cold in the end (just chilly because you can't do better than that with the available tech). Final tally was 4 invalids, 23 sick, and 0 hungry out of 232 staff in total. Nobody died. This time there was no overtime, censorship, or bribery, and I didn't negotiate with food this time so that was definitely the trigger for the bribery charge. But in exchange the epilogue dinged me for other things. This time it was hazardous work, harsh conditions, armed overseers, and being far from home, with the final complaint being what really got me since that's not solvable. The game's previous criticism of dangerous work got downgraded to hazardous work this time. Since the danger levels go Safe > Harmful > Hazardous > Dangerous and so on, I'm guessing if I stopped working in Hazardous conditions this criticism would drop to Harmful Work. Final end card gave New Liverpool 800 hundred citizens. Survival chances: Poor. I could probably drop the Armed Overseers next playthrough since it was something available as an Engineer and there were a couple events my first time through where I couldn't do anything about them because I lacked armed guards from either faction, so I wanted to try them the second time around, but realistically I don't think they really helped much. They did foil a bomb plot for me, but I also suspect the bomb plot wouldn't have happened if I didn't have them. They did help speed up my work to finish ahead of schedule without overtime, but I don't think their effect was enough to make up for the discontent and strike risk of having them around. After checking around online, it seems the criticisms of Harsh Conditions and Far From Home cannot be avoided (which makes sense since they are far from home and there's no way to heat tents past chilly in the end), but it's otherwise possible to beat the scenario with no other complaints. Also the best you can get the generator to be is Acceptable or Average depending on when you finish the scenario (before or after you get frozen in) so they seem roughly equivalent. No survival chance of High in this game! After having sided with both engineers and workers I have to say the engineers offer better benefits if you know what you're doing. It's harder to get motivation up with them (without risking a strike), but they improve the safety of the site by a lot so people can work faster with less risk of getting sick, and their efficiency bonuses help mitigate late game loss of motivation. Siding with the workers is probably better for someone struggling through or is willing to play in a sloppy fashion since their benefits generally involve reducing strike chances, increasing motivation, and being able to resolve multiple strikes in a single agreement (handy if you push too hard in multiple workspaces at the same time). I decided that I'll do one more run of The Last Autumn to try getting all three upgrades, and I'm not going to worry about getting a "perfect" run with only the harsh conditions and far from home complaints, so I'll try working people harder to get things sped up, this time running two shifts to get things done faster during the key bottlenecks, and I'll go with engineers, with no armed overseers this time.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jan 28, 2024 22:53:04 GMT -5
My third run of The Last Autumn was probably overkill. SInce I knew where the bottlenecks were, I always prioritized building the generator or parts for the generator over anything else. There were no hearty meals this time, even when the option came up to improve morale, because I also hired more workers, pushing me close to 300 at one point, and that came with a cost, since the amount of food on land is limited and I can only dedicate one of the harbor spots to fishing (since I need the others to import materials). By the end of the scenario I had emptied out all the hunting grounds on land, the ocean was frozen so the harbor was useless, and I had enough food left for two days, which was cutting it close, though not quite as bad as the first time when people went hungry the final day.
Because I was so efficient in other ways though, I ended up with extra metal by the end of the scenario, probably a good 2-3 days worth of imports more than I needed. I also surprisingly ran out of lumber, whereas my second run still had about 200 units of wood left to log. I'm really not sure how I managed to use up that extra 200 units of wood since I only built one extra building (and skipped two others!) and my second run I'd even spent several days burning extra wood for coal.
In any case, I finished the base generator before we got frozen in, so i had the opportunity to leave on the last ship, but I made everyone stay so we could finish those upgrades, so when we finally left a few days late it was with the rating: Acceptable
I ran double shifts this time which allowed me to finish well before deadline, with me being as high as 8 days ahead of schedule at one point (and I calculated that I'd need at least 6 days of regular work hours to finish the generator upgrades). The double shifts was called out as one of the criticisms at the end of the game, but I didn't care at this point. I think I'd built the generator in the most efficient way possible before deadline and no one was overly inconvenienced.
It was kind of funny though, as I watched my final time lapse of my construction site. I began stripping it down for lumber at the end, and that part of the time lapse happened to coincide with the words "What we gave will have to do." Indeed it would. I'd put together the best generator possible so whatever captain would end up working New Liverpool would have every bit the chance as the captains of the other sites I'd played.
There's still one scenario left, but I decided I'm going to take a break since I wanted to play a new game before January ended on me.
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