![]() There are basic “Adaptation” laws, which include choosing between burials or corpse storage (for later “use”), establishing care homes or allowing radical surgical treatments, and putting children to work or educating them. The Book of Laws typically offers two variants of any provided law, one callous but effective, the other compassionate with fringe benefits. ![]() There are two additional ways to keep your population hopeful and reduce discontent: passing new laws and exploring the Frostlands with scouts. However, it’s rarely enough to sustain a large population and decreasing temperatures (which plummet to -100° Celsius during storms), while simultaneously dealing with frequent demands to remedy housing, heating, and medical issues. If you’ve researched the right technology, most starting locations offer an infinite source of coal, wood, and steel. Of course, building up your city is only half the story. You’ll find yourself scrambling to shut down workplace heaters and secondary steam hubs, hoping you don’t end up with a sickly population the next day. Few things are more terrifying than watching your coal produced vs. Both are viable paths to victory, but both require careful allocations of resources. On the other hand, researching and constructing expensive automatons gives you a 24-hour workforce that never gets hungry, never falls ill in cold temperatures, and doesn’t object to your ruling style. Fail to keep them hopeful, or let discontent swell, and you’ll find yourself exiled to the Frostlands. The urge to expand, recruit survivors, and generate more resources is alluring, but your citizens have numerous needs that need sustaining. The more citizens you have, the more housing, food, and medical care you need to provide.Ī new player is going to quickly find themselves overwhelmed, even if they set all the customisable difficulty toggles to easy. The more industries you have, the more citizens you need to employ. The more coal you need, the more coal-producing industries you need. However, the more efficient your generator, the more coal you burn through. An optimal city expands radially, ensuring subsequent upgrades to the generator keep an ever-larger area warm. In most scenarios, life revolves around your coal-consuming generator and the warmth it provides (there’s no nuclear power in this alternate history). It’ll quickly teach you the importance of automating resource collection and upgrading the range and power of your central generator. “The Arks” scenario, which has you trying to preserve four seedling arks, was one of my favourite scenarios. Naturally, nothing in the frozen north is that easy. If you can get the basic layout of your city and resource-gathering operations in order quickly, a contented populace and victory are inevitable. Heat, food, and shelter are your primary concern. The narrative context is a nice touch, but Frostpunk would hold up just fine without them thanks to the myriad of systems you’ll need to consider and balance if you want your city to survive. Of course, in any survival game, the complexity of the underlying systems is what dictates its success or failure. Then again, that’s 35 workers, 18 engineers, 7 children that could be put to work…ĭid you establish faith to drive your people forward in the face of hardships or to crush dissent? Did you care for the critically ill and provide burials for the dead, or did you triage mercilessly and eat the corpses when the great storm arrived? Did you care for and educate children, or did you put them to work collecting coal in freezing temperatures? Although all choices offer a mechanically advantageous outcome and shift the numbers around, the narrative context adds weight to your decisions. Attempting to save everyone has its risks when resources are scarce. This all comes together at the end of a scenario – if you survive – with a montage that provides a timelapse of your developing city while recounting your key decisions. There are technologies to research, laws to pass, encounters in the surrounding “Frostlands”, and plenty of player-choice in how you’ll deal with the demands of your people, refugees, and other settlements. Each scenario is, in essence, an opportunity to craft your own story. Despite only offering three introductory cutscenes (one for each of the major story scenarios), Frostpunk feels far more narrative-driven than many games in the genre.
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