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Overall, I'm really enjoying the beta. Game is good, and I like the challenge of establishing a thriving society in this hellhole instead of eking out a living with a small colony. Placement of buildings and districts is pretty straightforward, but that plus the frostbreaking mechanic gives some good early game planning dilemmas as you try to get your budget to work. Some observations from a playthrough I just finished of the Frostpunk 2 Beta: It's far better to go for the iron deposits than the wood deposits. Since extraction districts have their own output, you can basically just build 2 expanded extraction districts on the 2 iron deposits and forget about materials entirely. Goods are the same way, and you can place the goods district wrapped around the iron extraction district to save on labor. Foragers get extremely silly midgame - you can run the +15 exploration team building, then when you get a second logistic district, get 2 of the forager building that reduces the number of exploration teams needed. I had those + a law that reduced the number of teams and exploration suddenly was free, which was hilarious. Your coal will run out, especially if you throw down two mines on one patch. I'd recommend tapping both patches ASAP and trying to reduce the amount of heat you need as much as possible to keep the coal on site as an emergency backup for when the storm hits. Getting a coal mine or two out in the frostlands can help significantly with that. As far as I can tell, Foragers/Icebloods are just straight up better than the Machinists. Everything they have is more coal-efficient, and after the very early game, workforce ceases to be an issue quite quickly (especially if you bring in a group of refugees or two). Also the heatstamps generation from the Merit laws makes the whole run a lot easier because being able to build more stuff solves almost every problem in a city builder. Hopefully there's a balance pass before release that addresses some of the discrepancy.
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Apr 18, 2024 15:15
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Strategic Sage posted:I've never seen this done well. I have seen it done poorly - looking at you, Urban Empire - but sadly I don't expect it to be any different from what I've seen of the FP2 beta. It's just trivial to keep all the factions happy, and if you make it hard to do that then you run a very large risk of not being able to sign laws/progress. I'm not sure this kind of feature is even balanceable, but if it is then 11bit hasn't unlocked the code yet. I suspect the different colonies are going to make things very interesting (as they are their own map, I suspect we will be managing multiple cities and transport routes), and that we will end up with far more than just the 4 factions that are in the demo - you can see a number of other starting factions in the option to start up a new game, but we can't actually play with them yet. The resource scarcity is also a major concern; the coal deposits dry up quickly, and while the external sources of coal are vast, they are also finite. I'm also not sure what you mean by the worldbuilding being gone - everything I've seen in the demo squares well with Frostpunk 1, just on a larger scale. There's even automatons running around, and some voice lines talking about how one of them has seized up and is blocking traffic, which is amusing. There's also some tantalizing law sections that are blocked off, including what appears to be an option to install yourself as a dictator. The game isn't particularly difficult, but neither is Frostpunk 1 when you're on normal difficulty, and we don't go far enough into the scenario to really hit the point where everything in the starting area is used up.
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Apr 19, 2024 14:38
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Strategic Sage posted:Worldbuilding may not have been the most accurate term to use. The whole gravitas/core of the setting is undermined by the changes being made, like Colonies for example. My perspective is the franchise is moving to a situation where it's trying to be a bunch of different things that don't fit together. I get where you're coming from, but I feel like the fate of humanity is still on the line. We don't know how the colonies will work out, and the current situation for the city that we see in the beta is unsustainable. We have no method of ensuring long term food supplies, heating supplies, or materials. There's plenty on the map to sustain the population for a long while, but it's worth noting that your population continues to increase over time (unlike the first Frostpunk), and so that demand created by escalating growth is going to be a problem that needs solving. I can see the focus being more on rebuilding than on just surviving, but there is a very real risk of building too much too quickly and being knocked back down to the point where humanity can no longer survive, especially if the generator is destroyed in the process. Also, we have no idea what was happening with other countries in Frostpunk - we did encounter the French a few times, but odds are that other civilizations managed to get at least a couple of settlements to survive. It's not like the survivors in Frostpunk had the ability to traverse countries, let alone continents. A Frostpunk colony in Arkansas would likely be wholly unaware of a colony in Nevada, for instance.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:13
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Strategic Sage posted:In those words explicitly, no. By their actions, yes. From the Steam page (emphasis mine): quote:“Frostpunk 2 is still a game about the City and its society,” states Jakub Stokalski, game Co-Director and Design Director at 11 bit studios. They literally mention telling a story on the steam page. Not to mention that there is explicitly a story mode that was not part of the demo. Also, most of the advertising is to tell prospective players what the differences between Frostpunk and its sequel are. Frostpunk is a game with a focus on its story. Frostpunk 2 is pretty clearly not going to be different in that regard. The demo that we had is light on story content in the same way that the sandbox in Frostpunk is light on story content. They're the same game mode, and we only have access to a fraction of the factions and mechanics that will be available (you can see many other factions in the game setup screen, greyed out on the bottom of the UI, and later techs and laws are greyed out in their respective UIs or explicitly said to be locked for the demo). And sure, it's entirely possible that the story in Frostpunk 2 ends up being disappointing and the writing ends up being poor. We won't know that until the game releases.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:18
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