Mystic Worlds

Frostpunk, The Conclusion

As I mentioned in my first impressions, Frostpunk isn't my usual fare but it's hands down, one of the best non-MMO games I've played in a long time. It's rare for me to complete RPGs, world-builders, etc. I need the random encounters and small social interactions provided by other players.

Frostpunk caught my eye because of the steampunk elements, and I'm glad I took a chance on a genre I don't typically play. I'm sad that there are only (3) scenarios available in the first release. While I could go back and do them on hard mode, there's no real incentive to do so.

I played each scenario for a few in-game days to get a feel for the mechanics and objectives. Around ten game-days into it, you should be able to recognize the strategy needed to survive. All of them require extensive resource management. However, winning the final encounter is different for each situation.

For the second, and especially the third scenario, I slowed things down to savor the moment. The art style, graphics details, soundscape, and music create a very compelling and immersive experience. I enjoyed zooming in to watch what was going on at a micro level versus playing zoomed out all the time like a Mad Hatter City Planner. I didn't see anyone else doing this on Twitch or the few videos I watched. What a shame. It's fun seeing the video of your entire playthrough of the scenario at the end.

The game's video of my playthrough of the final scenario, The Refugees.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW:

• In the first scenario, New Home, you had to have enough supplies to outlast the final blizzard.
• In the second, The Arks, you had to meet a predefined amount of materials by a certain date and you don't know that when you start.
• In the final chapter, The Refugees, in addition to intense resource management, you must accommodate a certain number of refugees who make their way to your city. Following that, which was plenty, you must survive three encounters of gentry knocking at your door with demands. By now your cityscape is VERY CROWDED. If you're only surviving by the skin of your teeth, things are about to get much worse. For the final grandstand event, you have to maintain a certain level of Hope and not rise above a specific level of Discontent, while negotiating the fate of Lord Craven. 

After learning my lesson by surviving New Home by a hair, with only five hours of coal, I doggedly managed resources in the subsequent events. It was essential to me at all times to be gaining ground on production vs. consumption. I was way ahead of the game by the time the final two surprise events were unleashed on me during The Refugees. The hardest part was eeking out every bit of real estate to build more houses and medical facilities, as the final wave arrived with 100 refugees needing medical attention. Woe to those who started out sloppy in the city planning. Whew, it will be very hard to recover by the time they drop those bombs.

High-Level Tips:

1. Stabilize resource collection regardless of where the game is pushing you. You won't meet or outlast the objective anyway, without stable large volume resource production.
2. Use Gathering huts for collection nodes that have multiple resources nearby. This keeps people out of the cold and prevents sickness. If they get sick early in the game it slows down stablizing your resource collection.
3. If you have a lot of sick people check the Medical Huts to see how many beds are being used. If they're all full you need more Medical Huts.
4. Don't put more than 2 people on a Medical Hut unless it gets full.
5. Don't put more than 1 person in the Cookhouse until midway into the game and you're starting to have an overflow of raw food. Use those bodies on collecting resources.
6. You must reach advanced facilities for gathering Coal, Steel, and Wood.  Coal Mine, Steel Works, and Wall Drill are pretty much must have platforms.
7. You will need the vast majority of Heat options researched to survive, including the items that improve collection and reduce usage.
8. Improve your raw food gathering by upgrading Hunter Gear, Skills and the Hunter's Hut to flyable.
9. Scenario 2 and 3 in particular, need more than one Workshop so that you can research faster. I had 6 in The Arks and 5 in The Refugees
10. NEVER have bodies idle. Keep checking to make sure everyone is employed. Put children directly on the coal piles or gathering the original resources left around the area. Until toward the end, when you're so far ahead, no one should be idle.
11. If you enacted a law for a building that has a perk be sure to actually USE THEM. In addition to the AOE effect from simply building them, most of them have an additional aura found by clicking the building itself. DON'T WASTE THEM. Use them strategically.
12. Try the first scenario on Easy to teach yourself the basic mechanics. There's a lot the game doesn't explicitly tell you and what it does, are provided in walls of text the average person probably isn't reading because it takes you to a help page/tab. 10 game days on easy in New Home with everything running well, you know you understand how things work. Restart and play in earnest.
13. I can't express this strongly enough. If you don't understand the basics, you will NOT SURVIVE. You simply can't make it through what they throw your way without knowing how to use the tools provided effectively.

I'm looking forward to the new content they have planned for 2018. I'm especially intrigued by the sandbox/eternal play mode. It's unfortunate that you can't return after winning the scenario to continue playing it for however long you want.  So for now, it's goodbye to Frostpunk but it was so much fun!

Frostpunk Quickie

I had a very enjoyable session this evening playing the second scenario in Frostpunk, The Arks. I'm over the moon from the detailed graphics and animations. I wish I had the time, and a bit more of the inclination, to write a quick guide. I see players struggling to make it through the first scenario on Twitch.

The game does an extremely poor job and teaching the fundamentals. They rush you into looking for survivors before you've even stabilized your own resource gathering. They don't explicitly push you to research and start building resource gathering platforms. Basically, if you run through the freebie stuff you can gather on the ground before you've built the other resource options it's literally game over. This means you can go wah-wah in about 5 to 6 days, in a scenario designed to last to 40 if you make it that far. 

Here's a quickie video. I've been slowing things down to savor the experience.

 

Frostpunk, Not My Usual Fare

For the past week, I’ve had fun playing Frostpunk, a new steampunk-inspired survival game by 11 Bit Studios. I’m not into city-building games and the only survival game I played for any length of time was Don’t Starve Together. In this case, it was the steampunk theme that attracted me to it.

Your challenge in Frostpunk is to build a city large enough to keep survivors warm, fed and fit. You’re also tasked with finding other survivors who were lost on the way north, deciding if you want to take survivors who find their way to your camp and other random events.

You are required to start with the official first scenario, New Home. You must survive twenty days of New Home before the next scenario will unlock. And since the third scenario is also locked, I assume you have to make it through some portion of Ark, to unlock it.

New Home begins smoothingly enough. However, once you have a couple hundred survivors on your hands, it becomes a very delicate balance of continuing to press for resources and maintain the population’s hope of survival. I elected to take on all survivors who found their way to our city, including those who were sick, and therefore unable to work but had to be housed and fed.

By the time I had 500+ survivors and was inching toward the finale, a week at -150 Celsius, the game become minute-by-minute micromanagement. This aspect wasn’t as much fun as the earlier part of the game, where I was focused on building and collecting enough cores to construct gigantic automatons. That’s what I was most interested in doing.

Also, the anal retentive part of me kept wanting to create the perfect city layout, which became less and less possible as the city grew and I had to start slapping things down where ever just to keep the city’s head above water. It’s a race against time and mother nature. I’m eight days away from the mother of all storms and not sure we’ll make it.

I hope to find some time this week to finish the first scenario and survive it - doubtful. It was fun either way. Playing on easy starts to become a challenge halfway through. Some of the confusion could be alleviated by making critical information prominent in the tools tips. Not using the same icons for issues that require a different response. One that tripped me up and I’ve seen people asking the same question on Reddit, is when to build a new Resource Depot versus Gathering Hut. Both issues use the same icon and cautionary/error text. If the response is different - construct this building not that one, the icon and error message should be too.

I’d love a mode where I could focus on casually gathering resources and seeing how many steam contraptions I can build to automate the city versus the race against the 40-day countdown. Random events, storms, and survivors can still be part of it. Just not the escalating circumstances tied to the week-long storm.

As I’ve said, there’s no singular way to “win” the New Home scenario. It’s a combination of your choices, responses to random events, how you prioritized resource gathering, how many survivors you took on, which laws you signed and so on. However, there are some basic things to focus on from the start or survival isn’t likely.

• Harvesting resources is a priority, along with upgrading anything that improves related efficiency.
• Upgrade the generator. You may not survive the precursor temperature drops if you neglect the generator.
• Start scouting as soon as your city and resources are stable. Scouts can find free resources and those all-important Cores used in manufacturing.
• Improve Hunter efficiency to reduce the number of people needed and increase how much food they bring back.
• Keep Hope as high as possible to avoid triggering negative events related to morale. This also gives you some leeway when you need to extend working hours to get you through a crunch.
• Save your game in stages, something I wish I had done. This would allow you to experiment and rollback if an idea wasn’t successful.

11 Bits Studio recently released a roadmap of additions planned for 2018. Of them, I’m looking forward to sandbox mode the most. It sounds like the endless playing mode I’m looking for.  If you have the time and interest, definitely check out Frostpunk. I’m having a blast with it.

Here's a bit of in-game video. I love the ambiance, soundscape and art style.

I’d love to read a book in this sort of setting if anyone has something to recommend. I read all the novels written by Rand Miller, David Wingrove, Robyn Miller for the Myst games and enjoyed them immensely.