Hard mode early game tips?

[Reedtanguerra]

I'm playing hard mode, and it is legit HARD. I'm on my 4th attempt at the Plains map now, and I got off to a strong start by playing close attention to minimizing the amount of walking the beavers had to do, but I'm back to struggling as soon as I tried to expand off the starting location.

Generating consistent power is a nightmare with all the droughts and unreliable wind. Without solid power, making planks and metal blocks is slow, and I'm not getting to walling off reservoirs of fresh water fast enough to beat the longer and longer droughts. I have to be pivoting to focus on the wrong thing around cycle 4-5 after I build a rudimentary water bypass system to keep the badtide out of my valley. The early game building sequence appears to be brutally important just like Frostpunk (which I adore and play on the hardest difficulty too). If it's not beelining metal blocks for the sluice gates, what should I be doing? I built a new district near the metal and that was probably a mistake because it took a stupid number of extra beavers to get the district crossing logistics running

[alfoxon]

Some great advice in the all the posts above.

I find Tails can be quite slow to develop because of their power gen problems and need to build lodges to grow pop. Teeth will live on the ground without lodges, I did it for 12 cycles one map just to see what happened. Did build them a camp fire and a few ornamental bushes. No they were not super happy with all the bonuses that gives but they did their jobs and i had spare timber early game.

General rule early game is to concentrate on one thing at a time trying 2 or 3 "projects" at a time just seems to slow them all. Even if you prioritise. Plan before you start. Keep it paused and go round the map rotate it have a drink a snack a think. Follow the rise and fall for the land and note where the water sources are. Sounds obvious but it does make a difference on hard to Recon the area.

first get a farm as it takes time to grow crops and you need as much grow time as possible early on, gatherer flag. Then water and water storage. 12 beavers will drink around 27 per day so a ten day drought they need 270 H2O. this means 9 or 10 small water stores. Then a dam. Scientist, research forester. build Lumber mill even using the 1 beaver wheel the Tails have, you can still get enough planks for the forester.

A full fed beaver will last for 5 days without any more food. Then it dies.

For tail aim for Large Water pump and medium water storage ASAP. 3 beaver crew producing 15 water per hour set the clock to a 20 hour day = 300 per day. Beavers drink 2.13 per day So round up to 2.25 to make sure, 48 beavers drink 108 per day. Means you can store around 200 H2O per day.

You may have to factor in putting up with the first bad tide. Depends on the map. But bad tide effects do not spread as far inland as does water.

DON'T PANIC! accept you may need a few attempts as the jump from normal to hard can be a big one. perhaps think I am not going to build a beaver city i am going to experiment with a few options before i commit to going all the way?

[jonnin]

power, you can make do with a couple of the small hamster wheels for a long time. All you need for a while are planks and gears. The water dump will save your life, it can water a large area out in the deserts away from the rivers, keeping large croplands free from radiation, but you need to build a place to dump the water if you don't want to manually flip it off and on every day which gets really old. Dam the river asap, don't wait on that, on almost all the maps this is a big deal.

my techs would be like forester, stairs, platform, levee, gears aiming for windmill and medium water barrels soon. To me the 'nothing can stop us' moment is when you have dynamite, batteries on your windmills, and the largest water storage tanks. At that point you can do anything at any pace. The most important thing is to not grow your colony too large before you have all the key techs. Somewhere between 25-50 until you have at least batteries on your power grid.