Frostpunk

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

"The City Must Survive"

– A phrase to justify a thousand misdeeds

Frostpunk is a 2018 survival Strategy game released by 11 bit studios, with the overall premise that due to the Eruption of Krakatoa the entire world has experienced extreme cooling. And by extreme, we mean that -20 °C is considered a WARM day. This results in a long winter that wipes out most of humanity, save those who managed to make it to the giant Coal burning generators that allow you to produce heat and survive.

The universe itself is Steampunk that is not nearly as gaudy as normal steampunk, and also takes a page out of the 40k book by being incredibly dark. Child Labor, Propaganda, and even declaring yourself god all being possible actions you can take throughout the game. The developers hold no punches and depending on how much you abuse your power you'll be called out as a massive dickbag by the end cutscene.

Things that Rock

• The City must Survive
• Automotons look like awesome combinations of Mechanicus and steampunk tech
• The ending cutscene
• Foreman. These are straight up broken and are an outright requirement for completing some of the DLC
• Steampunk that for once isn't obnoxious and overdone.
• Diverse setting. While you never play non Brits, the Americans, French, and even other colonies of Britain are either mentioned or directly interacted with.
• Voice of God
• Beating the game on hard difficulty
• Beating the game on any difficulty
• Dreadnoughts. Think a midget version of an Ordinatus, without doomsday weapons and powered by Coal.
• When replacing housing, you can simply upgrade existing structures at a discount. No need to demolish and replace houses.
• Propaganda machines to incentivize your subjects workers
• Child Labor
• Sending a child to be burned alive in emergency repairs to the generator. Rule Brittania!

Things that suck

• The whole world is cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide. Humanity is boned even if it outlasts the storm: no ecosystem, and a few dozen humans.
• The Order Law tree is outright broken compared to faith.
• You will constantly have to micromanage buildings and your workforce unless you want to lose.
• Foreman. They take the challenge out of the game.
• Heating. This isn't so bad if you plan carefully, but if you don't, you'll strongly regret it.
• The Storm
• Unions in The Last Autumn
• The Last Autumn in general
• Refugees showing up at the worst possible times
• Being considered a terrible person for not bringing in said refugees when you had no infrastructure to support them anyway.

Vanilla Game

In the base Campaign, you are a group of survivors from London who have fled north in the hopes of finding a giant steam generator. Once you find it, you activate it and construct basic infrastructure, making sure you can keep the generator active at all times. After you get settled in, you begin exploring the surrounding area. You discover resources, survivors, waypoints, and eventually a sister settlement: Winterhome.

After exploring Winterhome, you realize the city is deserted and dead, apparently from an uprising against a repressive dictator that resulted in damage to the cities generator and the eventual death of the city. People are now afraid, and pretty much lose all hope. From here, you rally them either under the banner of faith or the promise of Order, and continue to upgrade your infrastructure and take in more refugees along the way.

You continue to search the area, discovering the fate of the Americans (Nikola Tesla ended up becoming a dictator and was chased out and overthrown in a revolution. Those who fled either died in the wilds or nearly died before you discovered them) as well as hundreds of ravished, starving, and lost refugees, all of which you can choose to not bring in. By about midway through the game, you send up a weather balloon, and discover the worst: A giant storm is approaching, and it will drop temperatures to a blistering -150 °C/-238 °F below zero! (−89.2 °C is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, just to give you an idea of how utterly FUCKED your city is.) The storm will prevent most mining, food gathering, and other supply runs, so you must recall all your outpost teams and scouts, and stockpile reserves. After that, you must wait out the storm.

After the storm passes, you will get a cutscene that tracks everything you built and commentary on how "evil" you became, dependent on which laws you passed, reminding you that being a dictator doesn't have consequences even in a post-apocalypse.

Strategy

If you want to win, Order is the outright best law path to take once it becomes available. Foreman are outright broken, and even effect automatons. Speaking of those, getting Steam Core outposts in Tesla city is perhaps the best investment in the entire game. They are far more efficient than motivated workers, only require coal to operate, and can operate in any temperature, no matter what. Spamming them makes the storm that much easier.

You'll want to focus Steel as a resource as well, as Steel is not easy to acquire, but is required for most late game research and buildings, all of which is incredibly valuable. This includes the best research unlocks in the game, such as Housing redesign (discount to build houses, the best living quarters in the game), steam hub and generator efficiency (reduces the amount of coal you burn), and overdrive couplings (overdrive far more viable and easier to use).

As for the adaptation laws, generally avoiding putting children directly into the workforce can pay off really well. Short term, they really only work as light labor, but as apprentices they can buff your medical or engineering jobs, which includes research. Avoid sawdust like the plague: It is a trash law, and soup makes the storm that much easier to survive.

Extended shifts are good if only for those times when you will be absolutely boned without extra resources or supplies, but generally should used on your Research Centers. Speaking of those, stacking about two or three will be the most efficient, as anything more provides negligible benefit.

Hospitals and medical stations should be built to accommodate up to about 1/3 of your population at any given time in case of fatal incidents such as the storm, poor housing placement, emergencies, or a horde of damn refugees deciding to show up that bottleneck your medical infrastructure into the triple digits. The disabled can be brought back into the workforce, and this is the wiser decision, as they can lend helping hands in a variety of jobs once you unlock prosthetics and the factory needed to build them.

Housing in general should be built carefully from the first moment you start the game. In general the best idea is to build housing within the rings of the primary generator, with all other industry either unheated or heated by steam hubs.

Greenhouses pale in comparison to fully kitted out Hunters Huts in terms of resources/worker. They also need a steam core you desperately need for other, much more pressing things, so it's best to ignore them.

Much like HOI4, this game requires you to jump around a lot between multiple different production lines and jobs, prioritizing which ones are the most important. Sometimes you'll have jobs completely unfilled due to not having the hands to go around. Additionally, don't forget to remove laborers from all but your most important jobs once the storm hits: If you do, they'll try to work in freezing weather and get sick, and that is not something you want to happen, period.

The Fall of Winterhome

The fall of Winterhome is a DLC released for the game that tells the "story" of the fall of Winterhome. Contrary to what the vanilla game insinuates, there is no cannibalism and mass murder beyond the initial civil war that the people use to overthrow the tyrant. After that, you are tasked with essentially redesigning the entire city and ripping out useless burned out buildings.

With the situation stabilized, you must have your engineers inspect the generator, and they reveal that the machine is damaged beyond their ability to permanently repair it. You must plan to evacuate everyone to a dreadnought that you previously used to travel to Winterhome.

Racing against the clock and your own ability to gather resources, you manage to secure space for survivors on the Dreadought, power it up, and flee Winterhome.

Strategy

Winterhome is far harder than the original game. Using Child labor is a requirement due to the sheer amount of destroyed buildings you have to remove. Gathering huts come in valuable here, as they can gather from multiple buildings at one time and clear them out with fewer people than needed. You'll need to disassemble most of the city and rebuild it to be more efficient.

In this scenario, Steel and coal will be your greatest priorities, and research is largely irrelevant compared to a need to have either of these materials. Thus, keeping the Automaton you found on the bridge is the best early game move for your foragers. You'll want to upgrade their speed, as this will affect the Snowtrain that you use to transport people to the Dreadnought, cutting the time it takes to ship supplies, people, and coal to the vehicle.

Order is required if you don't hate yourself and want to evacuate as many people as possible from Winterhome, because as stated, Foreman are overpowered.

It is a good idea to at least research the techs that allow you to repair the generator faster, as if the generator dies, you will lose right then and there. Make sure to have plenty of supplies on hand to make this happen, and always keep as many engineers as you can on hand to get the machine repaired ASAP.

The Last Autumn

This one is what happens when you throw Karl Marx into the game, and then add capitalism. In essence, your task is to build one of the sites for Liverpool to evacuate to when the winter hits, along with site 120 and 119. After setting up some initial infrastructure and importing needed supplies, you get to work right away. As soon as your situation has stabilized, you set up infrastructure to begin building one of the generators.

However, disaster strikes when an accident in the workplace constantly floods the worksite with toxic gas that can fluctuate, and the workers get smart enough to form a union. This introduces you to a new set of laws: Labor laws, which can either make life easier or harder for your workers. Eventually, you choose to side with either the Technocratic engineers or the Populist Workers, resulting in an entirely different set of laws.

Regardless, you begin to work harder on the Generator as the other generator sites fail to complete their task, leaving the fate of Liverpool in your hands. Increasingly, the workers at your site become more unwillingly to comply due to the rapidly deteriorating conditions inside the shaft, forcing you to negotiate with the Union more and more. If you save the workers from the wilderness, they make this worse, being rabble rousers who will try to stir things up.

The wilderness is a very important place to explore in this scenario, and reveals that the french had their own efforts to establish colonies within the region you are developing, as well as why the Winterhome generator failed: it lacked critical supplies needed to complete it present during it's construction, and so was built without them.

As the end of the scenario nears, you have to stockpile supplies, as you will be cut off from all shipments of food, workers, supplies, and steam cores. In this time, you must keep the generator active in order to survive without shipments from the homeland, and try to upgrade the generator the best you can to give the People of Liverpool a fighting chance. The scenario ends when the icebreaker ships arrive from the homeland and come to move all of the labor back to England, and you ponder the results of your work.

Strategy

This scenario is hard because it turns a lot of stuff upside down. The first things, as always, is to make sure to harvest all the temporary supplies that get you started and build housing. Housing is much less of a concern due to the only housing really available being tents.

The difference being that in this scenario, the Engineers and Workers cannot be used interchangeably. They are locked from performing certain jobs unless you take the inferior law tree. You can make up for this shortcoming by bringing in convicts from the mainland, but this will require guard outposts and prisons, as well as tick off the workers.

In terms of laws, the Engineers are better to side with due to the fact that they have ways of making the workplace safer and also motivating workers to have ridiculously high efficiency, though this is just barely enough to keep you above floundering.

The Factory Inspectorate (engineers) and the Vents are critical to your success, as are the docks that allow you to bring in supplies from the mainland, such as steel and coal. Primarily, you should import these two, and try to acquire wood with sawmills. You'll have to balance the amount of docks and the level of your unloader stations to ensure there are no bottlenecks.

Scout teams should be sent out to find resources, and ignore food sources until near the end of the game, as this food will be invaluable. NEVER underestimate your need for food, and reduce the production of hearty meals at least several days before the Cold hits, as food is very difficult to acquire outside of the fishing harbor.

On the Edge

Canonically the latest that we have delved into the plot of Frostpunk (also nice to know that your efforts in the main campaign actually paid off). In it you lead a semi-permanent outpost expedition from New London to harvest supplies from an old military warehouse, named Outpost 11. New London sends you food and supplies, and in exchange you send them steel and steam cores harvested from the warehouse.

New London starts sending you less food than was agreed to and increases their requests, which is kind of not acceptable at all, so you do like the Americans did and tell them to fuck off and form your own enclave. You then decide to send scouting teams to find supplies that could supplement your own limited resources.

Turns out you don't need a generator to survive the storm. Three small enclaves have survived the storm: A mine full of children, a prison ship full of prisoners, and a hot springs with a bunch of farmers. With each one there is a diplomacy tree and series of events that can cause you to have better or worse relations with them, and you can invest into them to make them more profitable.

It's up to you to treat them like an Empire or a mutual cooperative, but ultimately you notice New London seems to have sent a masssive group of people, presumably an army. However these turn out to be refugees, and they inform you that New London is on the brink of collapse. You can choose to let New London die, or save them. Bear in mind that if you have good relations with the other enclaves, saving New London is very easy, because the latter means you have to have massive medical infrastructure to support them.

The campaign ends with the traditional cutscene, along with the revelation that your Outpost's area, called the New London Territory, ceases to exist in 1916. This was the dev's way of dropping the news a sequel is coming.