Quick and Dirty Guide to Running a City Without Having a Civil War

[oddball]

This game is actually pretty straightforward when you know a few things:
* laws are the source of problems
* you don't want to pass laws and you especially don't want to pass laws on cooldown
* laws are a trap

Basically, if you only pass laws when you are forced to by the game or for very specific bonuses followed up by passing an offsetting law that takes the other side of whichever political attribute (adaptation vs progress for example) you will never have civil strife and everyone will be broadly content with you and you can build your city in peace.

This also stands for the tech tree. Mix up your tech choices so that for example you do forager food and frostland but nerd resource and you will have a good balance.

You don't want to make one extremist group like you because that will make the other extremist group hate you and then you'll have to build a police state to contain their rage. You need to instead make both indifferent to you and then build out material prosperity such that they start to love you because they've all got big screen tvs and a Big Gulp cup of oil.

Be very careful about promises. Factions will get mad later if you change a law that you promised them. Agendas by contrast don't really matter because they don't care if they lose. Bribe somebody with a meaningless action (research or build or allow vote on) to vote it down if you don't want it. There is a complex negotiation system and a way to bribe people to vote no for a reason, take advantage of it.

Be very afraid of going over 10k population as that's the point where you enable crime and squalor and a number of other systems. If at all possible shunt your surplus population off into colonies and be careful about growth until you've laid the bones of a strong economy.

From an economic development perspective here are the fundamentals:
* try to align your housing districts so they all touch each other. Don't worry about hubs early, it's cheap to tear down districts and change your layout because you get a large refund when you do it
* it's better to expand and invest in an existing district than to build a new one. The output efficiency of a basic district relative to the mats/workforce consumed is pretty poor. Buildings are a great deal
* hub stacking is not important until the late game when you're using infinite deposits, have huge stockpiles and can plan the final layout in advance with pre-frostbroken territory
* you get the steam core back when you destroy a steam core building. use em!
* workforce reduction from hubs only works against the BASE DISTRICT WORKFORCE so not against the buildings. They're less good than you think unless you are drowning in energy and mats and desperately need workers. At -70c the air transport hub is using 140 heat in addition to 50 mats.

The two tech trees that matter early are heat and exploration. Yes heat, but just settlement heating, coal mines and housing insulation. Settlement heating is the single most important tech in the game IMO. Get those up, get the buildings up in your logi districts to improve harvesting and scout quantity and fund your city off what you find. 5 scouts is like 150 pops and they can sustain a coal field outputting 600 coal. Keep an eye on your starting stockpiles and build extraction districts to stretch em if you are having trouble finding a good settlement/harvest to cover it.

IMO getting two or even three research buildings up ASAP is key. You want to be making good heatstamp income before that happens tho, otherwise you will be paying for more scientists than you can reasonably sustain.

After the early game rush to satisfy basic needs and get tech going the most crucial thing is to get your money fixed by supplying enough goods and prefabs and get the generator upgraded. Generator (maybe just in outposts?) seems to burn other resources when it runs out of oil even if you pick the only burn oil tech option in Utopia. I often get factory as my first building because prefabs and goods (which turn into heatstamps) are what gates your growth. Then get buildings for the other stuff. Stockpile hubs are worth getting pretty early as you need the extra capacity.

In city resource extraction gets good in the midgame when you get buildings and the good hubs (stockpile and productivity ones are pretty good) and a lot of population to staff buildings. Colonies are important in the midgame to keep your main city population getting over 10k.

Late game is about the infinite deposits in your city, putting industry districts next to them w/ hubs buffing the productivity of all, turning settlements into outposts and similar.

[[TAG]Alblaka]

Two annotations on hubs:

You SHOULD care about hubs early. They're cheap for what they do. A Heating hub can cover ~5-6 districts at maximum, turning 25 material into 240 heat at a 100 worker cost.

The Air Transport hub is garbage for the reason you mentioned, but the stockpile hubs are pretty darn powerful. They give +60 workforce per district (and as mentioned, you can stack up to 6 districts on some locations, albeit realistically the limitations on which districts the different stockpiles apply to will see you with less). And cost NO maintenance whatsoever. No material cost and no heat cost, meaning they're also not influenced by temperature drops. They just cost the small install cost and the 100 workforce. So if you have the ressources and at least 2 identical districts, stockpile hubs are a (long-term) free workforce reduction. And also happen to give stockpile, which can be conditionally useful.


So my usual opener (and for Captain level, that kind of number crunching is needed) is to align the initial 5-6 settlement hubs in a star formation around an empty spot (for the first few temperature stages the adjacency bonus nulls any heat demands, so the heating hub is only needed once you start installing multiple heat-demanding buildings or temperatures drop by 3 levels), and then snake extraction districts to a spot that I can attach 2-3 industrial districts to, building the Material Stockpile Hub right away to immedeately get some workforce discount.

[oddball]

Stockpile hubs are an exception I agree. They're worth it. I assumed most people would see that though because you need them first and foremost for not dying to a storm because you don't have enough stockpiled LOL. You start with em unlocked for a reason haha

The heating hub is situational. If you have a ton of districts in one spot sure you can get value out of it. But you're also spending a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in frost breaking to make that happen, your deposits probably aren't lined up for it etc etc. Much better to just get the adjacency bonus for generator + district for your early housing -- and if the map lets you, lining them up to take advantage of a later heating hub -- put the extraction districts wherever is convenient and then see about lining up an industry district near the heating hub for the housing districts.

[Silly Clown]

Bro - copy and paste this in to the guide section. This info dump is gold!

[oddball]

Fair shout I will do that

[oddball]

I have now made this post a guide, thank you for your suggestion. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334657361