How is the difficulty?

[TristanMike]

Hi, quick question everyone. Understanding that my question is very subjective, is this a very difficult game ? Say, compared to Banished which I find extremely difficult and not very fun. I am not a huge strategy player but enjoy the collecting of resources, building armies and such, I just don't like feeling that I have to invest my entire life to understand the game to make any progress. Grey Goo is another example of a game that I started out liking but with no real tutorial I have no interest in spending hours trying to learn basic mechanics. I work full time and go to school part time, so that's a big reason I can't really afford to spend days just trying to figure out how to play.

Is this a "hardcore" game ? Can a casual player enjoy it ? Any light that can be shed on this is appreciated.

Thanks for reading and any feedback you can give.

[amordron]

This game has vary adjustable difficulty. Diff is broken into 4 or 5 cats based on mode plus hazards in one mode. Hazards can be turned of if you dislike there random nature.

Each cat is further broken into 4 diffs from easy to extreme.

There is than survivor on top that takes maxes out cats and removes save scumming and pauses.

As such you can customize quite a bit to your needs.

For example the people’s needs cat on easy makes people need to eat every 4 days or go hungry than 4 more days to starv than 4 more to death quite a bit of leeway when total game length is norm shorter than 50 days. But being that up to extreme and now it’s one day for each step only 3 days to death vs 12. This shows just how much leeway you can create for yourself between the diffs.

Tech cat is the same way allowing you to speed up tech speeds by up to 4 times.

While the game has a quite detailed tutorial that you can google and read before buying to give you an idea of what your getting into also.

[Bobywan]

It's easier than banished in my opinion.
Banished becomes harder as the city gets bigger.
Frostpunk gets easier as your tech and laws are unlocked and when you get enough population to sustain yourself.
Still it's challenging and you may not suceed on your first try on normal.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Bobywan:

It's easier than banished in my opinion.
Banished becomes harder as the city gets bigger.
Frostpunk gets easier as your tech and laws are unlocked and when you get enough population to sustain yourself.
Still it's challenging and you may not suceed on your first try on normal.

Strange...
I last played Banished in 2017 and have 410 hours on the clock.
I have played Frostpunk for almost 400 hours.
I found Banished to be very easy and not challenging at all (36/36 achievements BTW).
Compared to that, Frostpunk the Last Autumn scenario on hard difficulty for example, is way beyond Banished in terms of difficulty.

[Bobywan]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Originally posted by Bobywan:

It's easier than banished in my opinion.
Banished becomes harder as the city gets bigger.
Frostpunk gets easier as your tech and laws are unlocked and when you get enough population to sustain yourself.
Still it's challenging and you may not suceed on your first try on normal.

Strange...
I last played Banished in 2017 and have 410 hours on the clock.
I have played Frostpunk for almost 400 hours.
I found Banished to be very easy and not challenging at all (36/36 achievements BTW).
Compared to that, Frostpunk the Last Autumn scenario on hard difficulty for example, is way beyond Banished in terms of difficulty.

The last autumn is the easiest scenario, I did survivor on first try (after learning from playing in normal/hard for all other achievements) and finished the generator with all upgrade on d32 with < 20 deaths from laws and cocaine pills. I'm still stuck on the first few days of refugees/winterhome survivor.

Banished... well, at some point my polulation grew older faster than the people arrived or were born, and accident in stone quarry, most ressources too scarce, maybe, i'm just really bad at it :D

[amordron]

Last autumn most def is the easiest. Not needing to deal with cold really removes a lot of the pain. On top saftey is quite easy to get high as there is no need to rush the gen once you see how short the build times really are and learn to delay making it and spend the time to get better tech before you do producing parts in the safe areas it becomes easy. ESP in later runs as the events are fixed so can avoid loss of production. To boot unlike the other maps that give you a new challenge as the game goes on thou norm easier than the start last autumn you can outright above the later challenges by doing good early.

Compaired to banished I can’t really speak as dint like that game lack of info on what you need and turtorails when I played on top of no scenario maps to ease you into the game to me made it just not a enjoyable experience. As far as new player experience and difficulty goes banished was def harder. That being said donno which is harder in the end as never got that far into banished so can only speak about the diff to get into it.

Also it’s not fair to specifically say what diff and map on frostpunk but not the same in banaished how do we know your not compairong easy to hard as I’m sure there is not just one difficulty and at the same time is hard there 2nd highest difficulty or not been a long time since playing that so donno.

It’s not a bad thing for a games high diff to be way beyond another game so long as they also have lower diffs that are not which frostpunk most def dose with a vary adaptable difficulty. I assume your not trying to claim frostpunk on easy is harder than banished on easy as a new player experience as I found that to be far from what I seen.

[erneiz]

This is not the hardest but not easiest builder either. Another difference to other builder game is this one is more scenario focused, it just happens to be built around a building game mechanics. There are 3 base scenarios and 2 DLC (actually 1, I forgot Fall of Winterhome was free addition to the base game, but there is another DLC coming so 2 DLC is ultimately correct lol), each is only about 2-3 hours long and then the game ends. There is an Endless mode, but honestly you play 2-3 hours of that and you'll be bored too. Luckily there are different maps that were not from the scenario so you can experiment in those maps until you inevitable become bored with those as well. So for a casual player, it's probably worth around 10 hours of game time. But for some players like me, that relatively short play time actually leads to more replays as I keep refining my play-style. Not everyone likes to do this though.
IMO, the most casual friendly builder game out there is Tropico, particularly the newer ones. I think with your limited time, you will find that game to be a better time spent gaming.

[xixou2]

To me last automn is much more difficult than before, I always end up getting fired for being too slow ...

[gRRRz]

Originally posted by xixou2:

To me last automn is much more difficult than before, I always end up getting fired for being too slow ...

spoiler:
It's crazy what you can accomplish with a bunch of cocaine-fueled exalted workers who get pumped through speakers the whole day long