Tips and Tricks for Players Struggling with A New Home on Hard

[OdinTheGrand]

Here is a playthrough for A New Home on Hard Mode.

There is one death due to Emergency Shifts and several due to the failed Gloomy Cave Expedition (Lame 50/50; nothing you can do about that besides save scumming).

I want to bring to light a few things that will help newer players attempting hard mode:

1. Do NOT get child labor. This law is a trap and keeps you from getting the much better apprentice laws. More on this below.

2. Use Emergency Shifts and learn how to manage your discontent. Do not be afraid to anger your people; they give you a comfortable 2-day window to do something about it which is way more than enough time.

3. Hope is much harder to increase than discontent is to reduce. Play accordingly.

4. Overcrowding is better than extra food rations in the early game where medical crises can occur. Extra Food Rations are better when you have an occasional sickness spell. The conclusion is that overcrowding is much better in more dire circumstances which is why I suggest to get it always.

5. You definitely want to get snow pit into organ transplants. I messed up in this video and picked cemetary because I didn't want to waste the law cooldown time. This was a mistake.

6. You generally don't want to get extra generator range. You're going to need steam hubs around your workplaces (steelworks and walldrills) so you might as well put housing around them too.

7. Every population center has every house within range of a fighting arena and a chapel. Discontent will drop big time when you do this and have the public house and moonshine. This lets you use emergency shifts almost constantly.

8. Double-count your workers! Use them for non-essential gathering (coal and surplus wood or steel) during the day and then move them to hunters huts during the night.

9. The MOST IMPORTANT THING IS RESEARCH! You want at least one workshop running all the time. Note how I alternate my emergency shifts among my workshops. More on this below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP-jVmn0CrA&feature=youtu.be

Child Labor is a Weak Law!

Why is Child Labor a trap? It's benefit is only marginal in this scenario because you have so many workers anyways. You only need enough coal and food to survive to the next day at any given point in time. You only need as much wood and steel that you're going to spend in the next day. What this means is that any extra workers to get more than what you need is essentially wasted and not necessary. Child labor does exactly that. It provides more workers for non-essential gathering.

Think about it this way. Your population is about 20% children at any given point in time. If they could work everything (which they can't and they can't work workshops or medical tents even with the all jobs law) then you could argue that this is a 20% increase in productivity. This is pretty good but like I mentioned above, completely wasted.

However, it would be nice if they could work workshops and improve your research time. The children would actually be useful then. Fortunately, there's another law where they provide exactly that: a 20% increase in workshop efficiency. And you don't even have to build more workshops!

Research Time is the Most Limited Resource in the Game!

One workshop provides 100% benefit to research efficiency. Adding a second only provides a 30% benefit. Adding a third is 20% and the fourth is 10%. Every addition thereafter is just a meager 5%. Four workshops gives you 160% research efficiency during the day.

This is important because if you have one workshop that's working 24 hours a day then you're still working at a significant fraction of your day-time research efficiency all night long. You can easily get 1.5-to-2 technologies done in a day. This is why emergency shifts is the most powerful law in the game.

You want to set up a rotation among your workshops so you can split the cooldown while still have at least one workshop working all night long. Even in the beginning if you plan on just working one workshop you should still consider building two just so you can move your engineers into the other workshop and use an emergency shift.

For research choices, think ahead! What do you need at this exact moment? If all your needs are satisfied then what will you need tomorrow? If all those needs are satisfied then what will increase your productivity to ease any potential crisis?

Research time is really the only thing that's limited in this game because every second you waste you will not get back. When you consider wood/steel/coal/food then anytime you reach a maximum or have your needs satisfied then you can stop gathering those resources. You're not wasting anything. The difference is that you can keep researching all the time.

Never waste research time! If there's nothing you absolutely need to research then don't wait; pick something you would eventually need or have to research anyways. If you can't afford to research the tech you want then just research something you can afford.

[DEADPOO]

10. With many Hunting Huts you can forgo Hot Houses. Mid to late game you have an excess of workers, build Hunting Huts. They don't cost steam cores or need to be heated.

[Lord Of Dorkness]

Originally posted by DEADPOO:

10. With many Hunting Huts you can forgo Hot Houses. Mid to late game you have an excess of workers, build Hunting Huts. They don't cost steam cores or need to be heated.

Hot Houses can be run 24h with an automaton, though. The hut's can't.

Or for that matter, be buffed with corps-fertilizer if you're nabbing the pit anyway.

Sure, it is an either 2 or 3 core investment, but that constant trickle of food I personally found makes a lot of difference, and in New Home with Tesla City argubly it's an affordable one-time cost.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Double-count - so... exploiting then