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Brief & quick tips to succeed at not getting punked by frost

By [TAG]Alblaka

A short list of general observations and advice to new and intermediate players.

Note: This guide contains outdated information since the 1.3 update.

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[TAG]Alblaka
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Category: Gameplay Basics, Maps or Levels

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

22 Sep, 2024 @ 4:47pm

19 May @ 2:37am

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Guide Index

Overview

General advice

Ideology balance

Comments

General advice

Your primary story objectives are goals, not instructions.
If the game tells you to do X to proceed, it doesn't mean you should only beeline towards X. You're expected to do all of everything on the way, and then arrive at X when you're ready for it, not the other way around.
Frostland Exploration is op.
A Logistics district uses 400 workforce to, once upgraded, give you 20 Scout Teams.
10 Scout Teams can harvest one frostland mine or a large herd, giving 250 coal, 400 coal, 300ish food, 500 material...
To generate that same amount of ressources in your city you would need at least a district + a building (sometimes two) clocking in at 1000+ workforce and plenty more resource investment.
Rush a Logistics district at first opportunity, you won't regret the investment.
Minimize amount of districts, always upgrade.
Each district built requires space, heat and workforce. Expanding a district costs none of these, gives you more leeway with adjacency and hub boni, and improves the district's output by 25% or 33%. Buildings cost more in heatstamps, but usually less in prefarbs, and are vastly more efficient in terms of workforce, so before building a new district (usually food/extraction/industrial), research and build those buildings first.
Understand district heat requirements...
Each district has a base heat requirement, 40 for Housing/Food, 20 for the others. Buildings add more base heat requirement, anything from 20-60. For each temperature level, this base cost is increased by additively stacking +50% (so x1, x1.5, x2, x2.5).
Any heat gains from adjacency, hubs, or tech, are flat boni that are not scaled by anything.
Reducing the amount of workforce in a district also reduces it's base heat (and materials) demand proportionally, but does not affect any flat boni.
The flat heat gains will not be able to compensate for dropping temperatures very long by themselves, but when you run low on fuel, just throttling your high-heat demand districts can give you 0 heating demand at 20 (or 40)% production, since the flat boni will cover the now reduced heat demand.
Hold 4 to display a pretty neat overlay that will instantly show you which districts are churning through your coal stockpiles (usually Industrial / Food). Tuning those to a lower workforce is the key to not running out of fuel halfway through a Captain-difficulty whiteout.
...and use Heating Hubs accordingly.
Heating hubs turn 100 work force and 25 materials into 40 heat for each district in range. You can trivially get at least two district for each hub, with proper planning more like 4-6. This means a single heating hub can 'produce' up to 240 coal from 25 materials with just 100 workforce. It also synergizes with above mentioned throttling, as you can stack multiple heating hubs on a high-heat district to keep it running 'for free' even during whiteout levels of cold temperature.
Heatstamps are the name of the game.
There's a lot of ressources in the game, but the one you will consistently be limited by is Heatstamps. You need them for construction, even more so for expanding districts and high-tier buildings, not to mention research. Raise Funds from communities is the best (and early available) way to get consistent heastamps inflow, on a 50-week cooldown. Unless you got a good reason to expect relations will drop in the near future, liberally use the interaction whenever available.
If you have ressources to spare, Stockpile Hubs are free workforce
Stockpile hubs cost 100 workforce and NO HEAT nor material upkeep. This means regardless of temperature, they are free to maintain. Since they give a 60 workforce reduction to affected districts, placing a stockpile hub in between two matching diistricts is +20 work force, with no downside beyond the initial investment. Bonus points if you match it up with 4+ districts.
Don't forget about the generators overclock!
It's available from the first moment of the game, and costs nothing to run (as long as you turn it off again before it hits 80%). Since it then cools down for free, too, it's essentially a 'free' ~30% uptime heat doubling mechanic. Always use it, unless you can see a cold period coming in you want to keep it in reserve for. Particularly mandatory to be used during whiteouts.
Don't grant agendas, don't spam promises, but always check promises before teching.
Grant agenda gives a very minor relationship boost, and will almost invariably screw over whatever setup of laws you're trying to have. Note that due to community hesitancy, Granting Agenda to one community will have it always beat the other community in whatever it tries to vote in the council, as itself will be in full support of the law, whilst the other community will only be in hesitant opposition, thus forcing you to throw them a Voting Promise just to compensate for the Grant Agenda.
Instead, whenever you're free to select the next tech to research, check respective factions or communities 'Make Promise'. If the tech you wanted to research is among the promise options, make the promise and harvest a much more notable relation boost plus free Trust.
Also, don't queue promises, as that will prevent you from reliably passing laws (and blocking law changes after researching promised law techs: Keep in mind your promise only extends to researching the law and giving the faction/community a chance to pass it. You are not penalized for not having the law pass.
Generally, don't bother with Promote/Condemn.
Promoting a faction seems like a free way to get relation, but it's not worth the large influx of new faction members. Communities are easier to keep happy, and more flexible for voting (plus easy to satisfy/sway up with random research promises).
Likewise Condemning does almost nothing to a factions numbers, but seriously pisses them off and gives them free fervor. It's just a bad button to click all-around.

Ideology balance

Progress
goes hard into throwing about the biggest numbers for everything, with high input demands for high outputs, at very low workforce requirements. As you get up to the radical techs, Progress gets absolutely insane worforce requirement reductions, to the point where you'll end up with a large bulk of worforce you can't possibly employ anywhere. Which is kind of fun, but also not very helpful, mechanically.
Progress also likes to spam out Squalor, and there are no truly good buildings for counteracting that, since even the Waste Incineration plant just generates Disease instead (which you then need another building for).
Adaptation
gives low inputs, medium outputs, medium workforce. The low base heat demands of their buildings make managing heat during cold periods A LOT more manageable.
But what truly sets it apart from Progress is the fact almost all Frostland-related choices of Adaptation are strictly superior to Progress. As written above, Frostland Exploration is OP, and that indirectly makes Adaptation OP (including the Adaptation Path of the story).
It also helps that Adaptation's downside is generally small amounts of disease generation, which is straight up the easiest sideeffect to deal with, as you have early access to various laws that give enough disease reduction to cover several Adaptation buildings, and once you unlock Pharmaceutical factories, disease becomes an afterthought.
Equality
gives a lot of Trust and Tension-reduction, making your colony exceptionally resilient to bad chains of events. But it generally costs resources to do so, either by reducing production efficiency (which is a global multiplier to all your outputs), or by straight up costing heatstamps (as mentioned, the most scarce and limiting resource of the game).
I suppose the compensating factor is that Equality is generally made up of 'morally right' choices and techs. So if you want to do a feelsgood playthrough, that's probably the intentional (mechanical) handicap you have to wrestle with.
Merit
stacks production effectiveness, which is probably the second-most valuable stat in the game, as it simply increases all your production outputs at no increased input cost. It also adds a few laws and buildings to get more heatstamps, which are the single-most valuable resource in the game.
In theory, it Merit has the downside of reducing Trust and increasing Tension, but since it will stack you with resource abundance of all varieties, you can trivially buy out Trust and Tension by spamming Communication/Fighting hubs, completely negating the downside.
It's arguably a bit disappointing as to just how hard Merit blows Equality out of the water in terms of mechanical balance. But similar to how Equality seems more like a 'correct moral' choice, Merit, in particular the radical techs, go straight up dystopian evil by establishing debt slavery.
Reason and Tradition
are remarkably less different. They generally give the same stats in similar manners, and don't have a consistent scheme for input/output changes of their respective buildings.Mechanically, I don't think either beats the other, so usually the deciding factor here simply becomes how it's matched up in the factions with other ideologies that are more relevant for decision making.

11 Comments

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[TAG]Alblaka [author] 25 Dec, 2024 @ 8:03am

Yes. Reducing workforce demand reduces the workforce demand. Reducing heat demand reduces the heat demand. Those two effects don't interact, and nothing in the game implies they would.

If you're getting this confused with the slider for reducing a building's throughput (which reduces both workforce and heat demands, also input demand and output production), note that this very implicitly scales down the operations of the building whole i.e. less greenhouses of a district are actually active. Less workers doesn't automatically reduce the heat demand of the greenhouses themselves.

Zeky 24 Dec, 2024 @ 9:28pm

something needs to be clarified, the amount of net workforce doesn't dictate the heat consumption, reducing the workforce usage of districts using warehouses and hubs will not reduce the heat demand

SteelCrow 3 Dec, 2024 @ 5:47pm

These are really great tips. I will say about Equality, that the benefit of the trust and tension bonus is they act like moral capital, making stuff like emergency shifts more tolerable, or allowing more of them before they lead to repercussions. Everyone suffers together.
Rushing researchers is especially strong. Additional Institutes have diminishing value, but from my use every one has a separate Rush Researchers that all give the same boost. No more cycling a pair through night shifts, but heatstamps are still the ultimate limiter like you said.

Techhead7890 11 Oct, 2024 @ 3:11am

Good rundown of the ideology meta atm, thanks for the info.

GunF0x 7 Oct, 2024 @ 10:40am

Thanks for the AWESOME guide, very very well written and cohesive. Super helpful for someone learnin FP2(or FP) for the first time, I came from Age of Empires and Yes Your Grace, this is a whole new ballgame :D

knocked it out of the park bro, HOMERUN!

[TAG]Alblaka [author] 26 Sep, 2024 @ 12:04pm

There's a chance for an accident if the generator is at 80% or more overheat, with a gurantueed critical accident if it hits 100%.So 0 to 80 % overclock is free.

lily40k 26 Sep, 2024 @ 11:49am

isnt overclocking damaging the generator? i remember something like that so its not free... no?

[TAG]Alblaka [author] 24 Sep, 2024 @ 1:28pm

I agree that there are specific use cases for using Promote/Condemn, but explaining those in detail would exceed the attempt to be quick & brief, so I just summarized it to the most applicable tip to new players.

Ultra 24 Sep, 2024 @ 12:16pm

Promote/Condemn is really useful if you want to go all the way with a specific faction. There's no downside to having a low relationship with someone, only high Fervour has any consequences at all. If you're supported by the adjacent faction, you can spam Condemn and immediately Deradicalize them to completely destroy their population with no downsides; even more so when you get access to Secret Police and can make people disappear. By doing that and promoting your chosen faction, you can pretty easily control public approval.

If you're only passing laws that align with your faction's ideals, you can guarantee that every law you want is going to pass, and conversely, any law one of the opposite factions proposes will fail. You need to keep the faction adjacent to the one you're oppressing happy so you can Deradicalize them, Granting Agendas is a great tool for that since any law they propose is guaranteed to fail. You just need to make sure to plan around the laws you need to pass.

[TAG]Alblaka [author] 24 Sep, 2024 @ 5:10am

Fair point, the cornerstone being the extreme that goes beyond even the 'radical' ideas, might go a bit too far. I was mostly referring to the earlier laws in that regard, which pretty much boil down to 'treat workers fairly' vs 'exploit workers'.

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