Do automatons get sick? And other gameplay questions

[Panfilo]

In the first game, automatons fully staffed a building 24hrs a day and had their own efficiency progression tree.

The sequel is more abstract with this concept, and instead 'automatons' that you find in frostland simply give you a big chunk of workforce. Since workforce is normally a % of population that can fluctuate this is valuable in the early/mid game. However, there's other things that can influence that value! Such as sickness or injury. But it gets a little weird to think of a robot coming down with pneumonia (damaged, sure but getting the sniffles?). To that end I'm wondering if these upgrades instead provide a 'floor' to the workforce value, that no matter the casualties or illness you won't drop below which would be particularly helpful during a crisis.

The other question I had was about harvesting buildings for your extraction/food districts. So I know most of the buildings boosting resource collection only affects shallow deposits, which themselves are limited. I'm not certain if the building increases the rate of resource collection or provides actual bonus resources per cycle. See, because simply strip mining resource nodes FASTER isn't quite as helpful since you'll just run out faster and hit stockpile limits sooner, all the while dealing with the manpower, heat, and other malus costs of operation. But if it's churning out bonus resources independent of the nodes actual value then it will effectively give you more cumulative resources which could be useful.

[Harris]

Originally posted by Panfilo:

sickness or injury

Automatons can't get sick, yeah. It's a flat value of your workforce. Which naturally gives birth to an idea - "hey, could I have a colony filled entirely with automatons and ignore disease entirely"? After all, you can already ignore hunger provided you've spammed enough food hoarding inspectorates.

The answer is yes, but actually no. You see, to spam automated workforce factories you need to go all-in on Progress, else the tension from opposite zeitgeist buildings will be unsustainable. However, pretty much all the disease-generating buildings are on the Adaptation side of things. It might work if you really invest into reducing tension, but then again automated workforce factories come with their own demands and drawbacks, like crazy squalor. And squalor disables your districts, leading to the tedium of having to repair them manually.

And last but not least we have this situation right now where Adaptation's outposts provide infinite resources, while Progress's deep melting drill only give you access to really large deposits that will eventually run out still. The heating need reduction also scales really well for large cities. Leading to a situation where Progress is a strictly worse choice right now.

Originally posted by Panfilo:

I'm not certain if the building increases the rate of resource collection or provides actual bonus resources per cycle.

It's the rate. Plop a building and you'll see there's now much less weeks before the deposit runs out. So yeah, you're on a timer before you're forced to look for alternative sources. You don't build mines and hothouses because there's some incentive like bonus resources in it for you. You build it because else your people freeze and starve.

[Panfilo]

That's rather discouraging. Soup/food additives law in the first game actually augmented the multiplier for converting raw food to cooked food, effectively stretching the total available food out much further in the long run.

Its weird how there's less methods to get access to 'infinite' resources in the sequel and yet no real compromise measures, except for fuel and industrial efficiency I guess which can wring more end product out of a finite amount of resource input.

Also, what's the point of having both forests and iron deposits both count as "materials" aside from just arbitrarily bifrucating all the upgrades and whiteout penalties?

[=яενєηąŋŧ=]

Forests are "wide" and iron is "tall," IE you'll benefit from either spreading a district over a bunch of nodes, or depleting them a lot faster to then get rid of the district to make room for something else. Not usually a problem, but sometimes it is handy.

As far as production buildings go, they tend to be a lot more workforce-efficient, for one. They're also good for when you have a finite number of deposits to gather from, especially when there's a lot in those deposits. Oil is a great example, or, again, iron. If you expand the district and slap down two smelters or pumpjacks, you're increasing the extraction rate in a way you couldn't by just building more districts.