Summary
Whether it’s through intricate city-building mechanicsor complex combat rules, there are a slew of strategy games known for their difficulty. Something is incredibly rewarding about learning the intricacies of a complex societal management game and utilizing them to make something that’s organized, efficient, and sustainable. When it comes toFrostpunk 2, however, that is easier said than done.
There are certain things players can do to get a good head start in the ruthless world ofFrostpunk, like ensuring they have agood supply of basic resourcesand planning their city efficiently, instead of building all over the place. But there’s also a good number of things a player can do that will potentially doom their playthrough before it’s even properly started.
4Isolating The Starting Faction
Stalwarts And Faithkeepers Are A Force To Be Reckoned With
The first faction players will have to deal with inFrostpunk 2is based on which of the two distinct governance styles they chose to utilize in A New Home, the main storyline scenario from the originalFrostpunkgame. If the player chooses to give the frigid citizens of New London routine, order, and security, then New London will begin with the Stalwart faction. If the players decided to give the citizens of New London purpose in something higher, they start with a faction of zealots known as the Faithkeepers.
No matter what faction is controlling New London, nor what the player has in mind for the kind of factions they want to govern the city, it’s important not to immediately shirk this starting faction. They are an unchallenged presence in the city and can radicalize to greatly decrease the trust the citizens of New London have in the Steward, which can be lethal in the early game. There are amyriad of factionsto ally with inFrostpunk 2,but during the first stages of the game, it’s best to play nice with the one available.
3Inefficient District Placement
Increasing The Demand For Heat Is Dangerous In The Early Game
There is a heat demand needed for districts such as housing districts, and other areas with particularly dense populations of citizens, to ensure they are not freezing to death in thisdark and forebodingworld. Keeping districts close to the generator is a good way to ensure they remain warm but, of course, this isn’t feasible in the long term as districts will very quickly crowd out one another, or they’ll need to be placed on resource nodes such as fertile soil or coal seams that are further and further away from the core of the city. Thereare buildings to helpwith the management of consistent warmth, but these can be quite costly.
Clustering together housing districts reduces the warmth demand of the districts that tessellate, and while the decrease in warmth requirement is marginal, it can begin to add up across multiple housing districts early on to create quite a powerful reduction of warmth demand. When frostbreaking to new districts, it can similarly be difficult to stop citizens from getting chilled very quickly on their way to work, but frostbreaking in a way that lets districts have their tiles clustered closer to the city is another example of how small and steady bonuses can add up to reduce the burden on the player.
2Dismissing Disease
Disease Can End A New Game Very Quickly
The disease is one of the major compensations that players will have to account for when increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of their various districts in their steadily growing city. The cold can be one of the major ways that cities become inundated with disease, and if it’snot taken care of appropriately, it can quickly grow out of control. But this is only one way that disease forms inFrostpunk 2- as many buildings can slightly increase the disease present in the city. Much like how small increments of warmth demand can quickly add up, small increments of illness will spell the end of a player’s early game if not addressed.
The Hothouses inFrostpunk 2can be placed in Housing Districts to give the Excessive Fertilization ability, that increases food production at the cost of disease. Untreated sawmills provide excellent wood in the early game but at a similar cost. Taking on all these production enhancers without accounting for the disease they accrue can be easy to do, considering resources are almost always going to be at subpar quantities at the start of the game, but if buildings or laws aren’t put in place to either get resources from a safer source or push back against the disease, the player will have a bad time.
1Not Building A Surplus
Getting A Stockpile Together Is Essential
It can be very easy to look at a city that is reliably sustaining itself and think that everything is going okay.The people are being fed. They’re warm. Only a few of them are dying, par for the course with the ambitions of a growing City, it’s all going well. But if players have been building just to survive, and not to outwardly grow or horde resource reserves, then when a storm hits the city, or another disaster temporarily (or permanently) wipes out a resource node, the citizens of this city will have nothing to fall back on, and things will descend into chaos very quickly.
Surplus is a mechanic that while touched on inFrostpunkhas been greatly expanded upon in the sequel. It’s understandable that players familiar with the first game might have to readjust their tactics for the second one.
