Some advice for the whiteout?

[Stübi Senpai]

This is probably just me being dumb (Or maybe something you can infer better if you played the first game), but is there a way to calculate or predict how much stored fuel you need to survive the whiteout? I was fine for food, but very rapidly ran out of fuel reserves a good chunk before the whiteout ended, and trust ran out before I could recover afterwards.

For reference, I had the second tier of oil pumpjacks researched and had about 150k of it stored in my main city.

Don't get me wrong, I probably did a bunch of things wrong besides not just storing enough oil that I'm gonna try to improve on a new attempt. One of my other big issues is having to rebuild districts after their underlying ressources run out, which then "breaks" a bunch of adjacency bonuses. I also don't have a decent idea on which researched to prioritize yet.

Any other advice besides some fuel numbers is of course welcome.

[Northwind]

Very simple advice:
1:Turn on the overheating mechanism of your generator.
2: Use hubs, especially heating hubs around your citydistricts to keep overall heat consumption down.
3: There are also laws that will lower your heatconsumption, that could be useful to have in effect before a whiteout.

[MadDjinn]

Turn off buildings, not districts.

Something that should likely get changed is how temperature scales on buildings that require heat. During a whiteout, it's a 6x multiplier for heat, meaning that 40 heat building is costing you far too much to keep on. The district it's in apparently has no meaningful change aside from the usual temp related ones.

--> minor aside, but I'd also like a change to heat bonuses from other districts be about how much of the district is surrounded, rather than 'touches that district 3 times'. If the other districts are a wind block, then logically it doesn't matter how many of each is touching to get that block.

As per storage, how much you need depends on how effectively you reduce heat requirements. The whiteouts have a time limit, so just compare the timeline to your burn rate. 30ish weeks? is about right. Overdrive does help, and use it earlier not later.

Also, leave the big storage piles out in the wild if you don't need them right away. The game doesn't care if you're 250,000/50 000 in stock, but over storage of fuel right before a whiteout can be good.

Keep in mind that outposts and other settlements don't all turn off at the same time. You can keep getting deliveries if the locations are outside of the actual storm space. Ofc, that also affects pre and post city in the storm times as well.

[Ridesdragons]

Originally posted by Airatome:

Also, dont DELETE your districts. Just turn them off. The adjacency bonus still applies and they won't use up (or produce) resources. Why take away all that heat when you can just unstaff it?

as I pointed out in my thread, not true. always delete districts that aren't doing anything. turned off districts do not provide adjacency bonuses. if you want to free up workers and save on heating, drop it down to 20%. never turn it off.

Originally posted by Stübi Senpai:

... is there a way to calculate or predict how much stored fuel you need to survive the whiteout? I was fine for food, but very rapidly ran out of fuel reserves a good chunk before the whiteout ended, and trust ran out before I could recover afterwards.

to find out how much fuel you'll need, there is actually a method of figuring it out.
1. when you hover over the whiteout indicator (before it hits), it'll tell you how many degrees it'll drop. every 10 degrees C is an extra 10 heat your districts will need. note that the whiteout will need to be close enough for it to tell you how much it'll drop. it'll most likely drop by 40 degrees or so, though.
2. count how many districts and hubs you have, excluding heating hubs (they don't get colder when it's cold out because they have 0 base heat demand). exclude the central/generator district.
3. determine what kind of fuel you're relying on and its fuel efficiency. if you are using oil and have adaptive pumps, 1 oil = 2 heat. if you are using oil pumps, 1 oil = 5 heat.
4. maths. take your number of districts and hubs, and multiply that by how many degrees the temperature will be dropping during the whiteout. then, take the central district/generator, and multiply it by how many tens of degrees it's dropping, then multiply that by 35. add the two numbers together, then divide by your fuel efficiency from step 3. then, figure out how long the whiteout will last, convert that time into days, and multiply that by the previous number. this is how much ADDITIONAL fuel you'll need beyond what you're currently supplying (ignoring existing stockpile). do note that this does not take into account any pre-existing heating discounts you currently have, so this number is actually more fuel than you actually need. but it gives you a good estimate.

for example: let's say you went oil pumps, and so are using oil. you've got a whiteout on week 100 and it lasts until week 150, and during the whiteout, it'll drop 40 degrees. you have a combined total of 30 districts and hubs that are affected by temperature. this means you'll need ((30*40)+(35*4))/5=268 extra oil generation per day, or 268*(50*7)=93800 oil stockpiled to account for your new expenditure.

as mentioned elsewhere, overdrive will help drive fuel costs down, and in general, oil pumps are really good at dealing with whiteouts.

[Airatome]

What RidesDragons said 👆

In testing out my own advice when I DIDN'T actually have a massive amount of heat so that everything was at 0 ... Turning a district COMPLETELY off does indeed rob the adjacency bonus away. So reducing its output to minor is the only way to keep the heat bonus in tact while lowering how much it's costing you to maintain.

[Stübi Senpai]

Thank you for the advice. Probably means I want to pay more attention to not build district clusters that rely on districts that will face deconstruction in the future. I had my industrials next to my extraction districts, and when the latter ran out of resources I suddenly had lost a bunch of adjacency bonuses.

[Ridesdragons]

Originally posted by Stübi Senpai:

Thank you for the advice. Probably means I want to pay more attention to not build district clusters that rely on districts that will face deconstruction in the future. I had my industrials next to my extraction districts, and when the latter ran out of resources I suddenly had lost a bunch of adjacency bonuses.

relying on adjacencies from districts that'll soon run out of resources can still be helpful, so long as you make sure to rebuild new districts in the old's place. for example, replacing a decrepit extraction district with another industrial district, or a food district with housing (this has limited viability, as housing goes up to 12 tiles, unlike all other districts)