Progress vs Adaptation

[Terratrox]

I heard that Adaptation was easier, but I was legit out of food even with 2 permanent food outposts maxed out. I depleted the Frostland of absolutely everything and I still wasn't into chapter 5 yet.

Is Progress easier with the infinite nodes? Or is there some other way to get resources in the lategame that I'm missing?

[Geist]

I don't have much experience with the game, having only completed the campaign once on normal difficulty and once on Captain's. Food wasn't a problem for me in either case. But to answer your question, the progress buildings on the infinite nodes don't really give you much food. I guess either you grew your population too fast or you took too long to progress through the story. When I finished the story, I still had most of the available food resource tiles unused. Basically, the 6 fields available at the start that are immediately accessible + the stuff from the outposts was enough to finish the story for me.

[Harris]

In Frostpunk 2, infinite food comes in two forms:

1) Reason - Panaceum Factories
2) Equality - Food Hoarding Inspectorates

Adaptation > Progress mostly because of:

1) You get resources from outposts as opposed to colonies. This is both easier because you don't have to babysit multiple colonies at a time, and because your FPS doesn't tank trying to process whatever's happening in all of them.

2) Adaptation ultimately gives you a massive heat demand reduction on every district, encouraging you to build a lot. Progress doesn't come with that, and its advantage of lower workforce requirement is made irrelevant by simply having more people. Having a few thousands uemployed people to spare is always good in case of civil war or something.

3) Finally, main debuff associated with Adaptation is disease. There are lots of ways to manage it, and worst case scenario you have some of your people dying. Now, Progress comes with squalor. Squalor is terrible: only 3 ways to bring it down in the entire game, and 2 of them are not passive. And it actually disables districts. And with #1 in mind, your gameplay will consist of jumping between your multiple colonies to repair your districts all the time.

Generally speaking, there are two playstyles when it comes to need:

1) providing the need (duh)
2) negating the debuff associated with not providing the need => providing the need by not providing it

Naturally, in reality where resources are limited and it takes effort to get them, second playstyle is infinitely superior.

Where this applies in the whole Progress > Adaptation debate, is Progress is straightforward. To solve your heating issues you build more mines, and if you have 10 mines then you save 1000 workers due to mines being more efficient. Meanwhile way of Adaptation is reducing heating demand so that you consume less. It means you don't need to spent heatstamps researching some tech, and don't need to spend as much on building stuff.

Like, a simple Heatpipe Watch law in the early game can mean a difference between having to build a coal mine, and being able to forgo it entirely and beeline a permanent coal outpost - which will provide several times the coal and come with the benefit of never getting disabled by protests, squalor and such.

[Geist]

Or in other words, if you don't want to go into one of the two extreme directions with the inspectorates or panaceum you can't play the Utopia mode because food will run out?

[Terratrox]

Originally posted by Harris:

In Frostpunk 2, infinite food comes in two forms:

1) Reason - Panaceum Factories
2) Equality - Food Hoarding Inspectorates

Adaptation > Progress mostly because of:

1) You get resources from outposts as opposed to colonies. This is both easier because you don't have to babysit multiple colonies at a time, and because your FPS doesn't tank trying to process whatever's happening in all of them.

2) Adaptation ultimately gives you a massive heat demand reduction on every district, encouraging you to build a lot. Progress doesn't come with that, and its advantage of lower workforce requirement is made irrelevant by simply having more people. Having a few thousands uemployed people to spare is always good in case of civil war or something.

3) Finally, main debuff associated with Adaptation is disease. There are lots of ways to manage it, and worst case scenario you have some of your people dying. Now, Progress comes with squalor. Squalor is terrible: only 3 ways to bring it down in the entire game, and 2 of them are not passive. And it actually disables districts. And with #1 in mind, your gameplay will consist of jumping between your multiple colonies to repair your districts all the time.

Generally speaking, there are two playstyles when it comes to need:

1) providing the need (duh)
2) negating the debuff associated with not providing the need => providing the need by not providing it

Naturally, in reality where resources are limited and it takes effort to get them, second playstyle is infinitely superior.

Where this applies in the whole Progress > Adaptation debate, is Progress is straightforward. To solve your heating issues you build more mines, and if you have 10 mines then you save 1000 workers due to mines being more efficient. Meanwhile way of Adaptation is reducing heating demand so that you consume less. It means you don't need to spent heatstamps researching some tech, and don't need to spend as much on building stuff.

Like, a simple Heatpipe Watch law in the early game can mean a difference between having to build a coal mine, and being able to forgo it entirely and beeline a permanent coal outpost - which will provide several times the coal and come with the benefit of never getting disabled by protests, squalor and such.

So it's a tendancy toward adaptation instead of.... say pissing off the stalwarts with adaptive pumps then settling Winterhome?

[Harris]

Originally posted by Geist:

Or in other words, if you don't want to go into one of the two extreme directions with the inspectorates or panaceum you can't play the Utopia mode because food will run out?

Correct.

The only exception is low-population high-efficiency playstyle where you keep your population to a minimum (whatever your infinite deposits can support). But that requires laws to stop population growth - Sterilization or Algorithm, which are both on the radical side of Reason.

Overall, the change between Frostpunk 1 and 2 is you're now really incentivized to go all the way and "lock in" into capstone. The things you get from it are just too good to miss out.

Originally posted by Terratrox:

So it's a tendancy toward adaptation instead of.... say pissing off the stalwarts with adaptive pumps then settling Winterhome?

Your first choice defines your generator type (oil/adaptive) and the building you get out of it.

What you choose to do with Winterhome after that is up to you, but at that point it's only relevant for the ending. Unless you're going for path of concilliation and care about keeping everyone happy, you settle it.

[Geist]

Originally posted by Harris:

Originally posted by Geist:

Or in other words, if you don't want to go into one of the two extreme directions with the inspectorates or panaceum you can't play the Utopia mode because food will run out?

Correct.

Thanks. Good to know. In this case I won't waste my time to play the Utopia mode.

[bortas]

Originally posted by Harris:

Adaptation > Progress mostly because of:

1) You get resources from outposts as opposed to colonies. This is both easier because you don't have to babysit multiple colonies at a time, and because your FPS doesn't tank trying to process whatever's happening in all of them.

2) Adaptation ultimately gives you a massive heat demand reduction on every district, encouraging you to build a lot. Progress doesn't come with that, and its advantage of lower workforce requirement is made irrelevant by simply having more people. Having a few thousands uemployed people to spare is always good in case of civil war or something.

3) Finally, main debuff associated with Adaptation is disease. There are lots of ways to manage it, and worst case scenario you have some of your people dying. Now, Progress comes with squalor. Squalor is terrible: only 3 ways to bring it down in the entire game, and 2 of them are not passive. And it actually disables districts. And with #1 in mind, your gameplay will consist of jumping between your multiple colonies to repair your districts all the time.

Yes, and als don't forget, you can research deep melting drills before going full adaptation. This way you can use the infinite deposits even when embracing adaptation at the cost of a little bit of tension, which is easily mitigatable.

[Blanch Warren]

Originally posted by Harris:

In Frostpunk 2, infinite food comes in two forms:

1) Reason - Panaceum Factories

Though it's not a lot, mandatory schools can also be switched to provide food per capita

[Wheatley aperture core]

My Advice? Use these cornerstones:

Progress,Equality and reason

Progress:id go to this one because with the machine,mankind will endure,if not,it shall leave a mark

Equality:id go for this one because you can get a food hoarding inspectorate and find illegal staches of food and also if everyone needs to survive,all must be equal

Reason:id go for this one because there you can use my favorite thing:The Algorithm which can manage research speed,populaiton growth and food distrubution

[Geist]

I hope they will patch in a ways to play endless without extremist laws. Like you could in FP1. Then I will maybe play it again. I think the whole "depleting soil" mechanics is bad.

[BenTheVaporeon]

Originally posted by Geist:

I hope they will patch in a ways to play endless without extremist laws. Like you could in FP1. Then I will maybe play it again. I think the whole "depleting soil" mechanics is bad.

yea it doesn't seem like this game has any possible "golden path route"