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I made it to within the last couple of days on my first attempt, but ended up getting to a point where nothing I could possibly do would reduce Discontent fast enough to save me. If I enacted the New Order I'd get executed and if I didn't I'd get banished from the city in the middle of a -140F ice storm, i.e. executed It's super fun, though, already about to give it another go
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Apr 25, 2018 03:30
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Beat the first scenario on my third attempt. I didn't stockpile anywhere near enough food, didn't have enough hospital capacity, and while I had vast quantities of coal coming out of every orifice, I didn't have the generator upgraded enough to make full use of it. Over half the city's population died, and I was forced to implement the New Order and go full fascist in order hold things together up to the end, but we made it. It's a testament to how good this game is that I want to immediately try the scenario again to see if I can do better. e: also, with regards to what caused the apocalypse, I haven't found any explicit confirmation but from the story bits I've found so far it's strongly implied to have been a large asteroid strike.
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Apr 25, 2018 23:30
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Tinfoil Papercut posted:I'm curious as to where the generator actually is. "North of London" is what's described, but they also said they traveled for weeks. they probably just made up a fictional location, but the best IRL fit for 'heavily glaciated far-northern coastal region with extremely rich natural resources' would have to be Greenland, which isn't straight north from London but is north-ish. the Ark scenario is heavily based on the real-life Svalbard Seed Vault, which is in far northern Norway, so that's another possible location, but there's far too much land on the world map for that to make sense (the real-life seed vault is on an island)
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Apr 26, 2018 01:16
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it is at least technically possible to be a good guy, you just have to completely ignore a game mechanic (laws) after a certain fairly-early point in the game. Many of the early laws have choices with tradeoffs, and frequently the tradeoff is 'do the more efficient thing or do the morally right thing', but eventually no matter which path you take you will reach a point where the only remaining choices lead you deeper into fascism. the problem is that things will get really bad, and some of those later fashy laws are extremely powerful (the later Order laws can periodically provide massive Hope bonuses for such low resource costs that they're basically free, for example), so it gets really tempting to bring down the jackboot even though you don't technically have to.
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Apr 26, 2018 02:01
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that's kind of weird, because This War of Mine, while extremely bleak, definitely had good endings. it was possible, albeit difficult, to finish the game with happy endings for everyone where all your survivors went on to recover and have normal lives after the war ended.
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Apr 26, 2018 02:07
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The lowest natural temperature ever recorded on Earth in real life is about -130F, so it's definitely within the realm of possibility in an apocalyptic ice-age type scenario
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Apr 26, 2018 03:46
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2 upgraded coal mines will produce more coal than you will possibly need until you start approaching the endgame, and 3 mines (the maximum you can build in the default scenario) will usually see you through the endgame as well, especially if you use automatons or put the workers on 14-hour shifts.
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Apr 26, 2018 04:39
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maybe all the people saying you never have to go evil are just way better at the game than I am, I went full fascist out of desperation in the middle of the doom-storm because the city was collapsing and it was the only way I could save the playthrough everyone survived, too, gently caress your 'was it worth it?', game. if the options available are 'dystopia' or 'the extinction of the human race' then the dystopia is totally worth it.
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Apr 26, 2018 23:23
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if you get the Hope bar high enough, new people will stop joining them, and if you keep it high for a while people will start leaving the Londoners if you can't quite pull that off, prisons and beatings will also do in a pinch, there's a mass arrest button
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Apr 26, 2018 23:40
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as a last resort, if you have enough guards, you can physically prevent them from leaving. some of them will die, but it's better than losing like 150 people
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Apr 26, 2018 23:44
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Child shelters/child labor is one of several bilateral choices you can get where the 'good' option seems to just be straight-up mechanically better than the 'bad' option. Soup/sawdust meals is another (your hospitals are going to be overcrowded as it is, why the poo poo would you make that worse?). Honestly, having tried both, the big Faith/Order choice seems to be one too - Faith gets a couple of obscenely powerful buildings which have no Order equivalent, it has more laws, there are both more hope-boosting opportunities and they're easier to access, and the fascist turn on the Faith path happens a lot later in the law tree, so it's possible to access most of the Faith bonuses without Crossing The Line and going full dystopia. Order seems to be outright worse in almost every way, with the sole exception that Order handles discontent a bit better, and there are many other ways to handle discontent.
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Apr 27, 2018 02:22
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beat the game a second time, with Faith instead of Order this time, and holy poo poo just that one choice made a night-and-day difference in difficulty, Faith is so much loving better than Order that the only reason to choose the latter is if you're going in blind or are playing a gimmick run
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Apr 27, 2018 05:22
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Gammymajams posted:I think I'm going to buy either this or Surviving Mars this weekend. How does the replayability/ complexity of each compare, if anyone has played both? I want to get value for money since I think there are more interesting games out right now than I can afford time and money wise. Thanks in advance. I have some complaints about Frostpunk but overall it is an extremely loving good game, the gameplay is very satisfying, the graphics are gorgeous, the tone and atmosphere are spot-on, and while there's little randomness there's still more than enough variation on the way any individual scenario can go to give you plenty of replay value. The scenarios are also short enough that you can conceivably play through one from start to finish in a single long evening, and most of that evening will be jam-packed full of interesting decisions and strategic choices you have to make.
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Apr 28, 2018 03:06
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sun chat/cause of the apocalypse chat: The sun dimming is something that happens naturally every once in a while (on a cosmic timescale, at least, we're still talking hundreds of thousands or millions of years here), and IRL lowered solar output is one of the hypothesized causes of planetary-scale ice ages (it's not enough by itself, but it's one possible contributing factor). Hell, this actually happened once in recorded human history; the 'Little Ice Age' in the 1600s-1700s coincides with a period of low solar output. The game (or, well, Tesla, specifically) straight-up says that the lower solar energy wouldn't be enough to cause an ice age by itself, but it's not the only thing that happened. All the journal entries read together imply that the Earth basically hit the climate-disaster lottery, and suffered not just a period of low solar energy, but also a massive volcanic eruption and an asteroid strike, and all three together are triggering a period of intense cooling.
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Apr 29, 2018 02:00
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Mars regularly gets above freezing in the summer, at least close to the equator, and on particularly warm days can get up into the 60s Fahrenheit, which would be slightly chilly if you were buck-rear end naked but pleasantly comfortable in a light jacket or sweater. the temperature variations are huge, though - those comfortably warm summer days still have nights that average -80 to -100F. most of the storm is about as cold as an average Martian winter night, while the coldest part of the storm is a good 40-odd degrees colder than the coldest night of the coldest Martian winter ever. Ironically those temperatures would be less dangerous on Mars, because the air is much, much thinner, so you wouldn't lose heat as quickly. You could survive walking around in it for short periods if you were wearing extremely thick and well-insulated clothing, but we're still talking minutes here. An unprotected human would start seeing frostbite effects in seconds and would be unconscious in a couple minutes tops. I'm assuming the reason the temperature is so ridiculous is because the game is taking wind chill into account. Realistically the actual air temperature would almost certainly not get that cold even in the middle of a snowstorm during a global ice age, but the combination of extremely cold temperatures (-130 to -150F, which are plausible in that situation) with extremely high storm winds could definitely drop the effective felt temperature in the open down into the -200 range. Even a stiff breeze can knock a good 10-20 degrees off the apparent temperature; a 40-50 MPH gale can knock 50-60 degrees off. It would be much, much less cold in an enclosed building - still dangerous, but with heating, good insulation, and thick protective gear it is at least plausibly survivable.
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Apr 30, 2018 16:58
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jokes posted:I prefer the steam hubs but I think they're interchangeable. The generator with range (and steam hubs) might be slightly more efficient than just steam hubs if you're going to use all the space you can (like in refugee scenario). Kids definitely still need to be housed, the child shelters are only open during the day
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May 1, 2018 06:43
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Phenotype posted:You can turn the building heaters off, though? Yeah, but it's binary on/off, you can't adjust the level - which means that at higher tech levels a bunch of your building heaters will be wasting way more coal than they actually need to be using
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May 1, 2018 23:57
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:02 |
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Groetgaffel posted:Someone else said it earlier, but it's probably accounting for windchill. it would have to be in order for the temperatures during the worst part of the storm to even be physically possible. -130 to -150F is plausible during a snowstorm in the Arctic in the middle of a global ice age (on very rare occasions we've actually recorded temperatures that cold in nature in real life), and high winds can easily knock 40 or more degrees off the effective felt temperature. Very high winds, like those you might find in an apocalyptic hellstorm, could plausibly get the effective temperature down into the -200F range, even though the actual air temperature wouldn't actually be anywhere near that cold. It's an unlikely scenario but the endgame storm is at least possible, it could hypothetically happen in an ice-age climate collapse scenario, and the effective felt temperature actually could get that cold for brief periods during the worst part of the storm. the actual air temperature getting that cold, though, is more or less impossible so long as the Earth has an atmosphere, it doesn't get that cold on the surface of loving Mars realistically with windchill that severe the hydraulics in your robots should be freezing up, (the best antifreezing agents available at the time couldn't even come close to handling those temperatures) but given that they've invented completely autonomous AIs in the 1880s I'm willing to accept that they invented better antifreeze too.
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May 9, 2018 23:00
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