Didn't know you had to assign workers to collect coal from the piles behind the thumpers in addition to manning the thumpers themselves.

[Jay and Silent Rob]

Cost me 2 days without power. Got deposed and exiled the day that I figured it out and got my Discontentment down to a few % shy of saving myself.

That's not fun gameplay. That's just annoying.

[Chronic]

you dont if you build gathering posts

[amordron]

this was mentioned during the tip pop ups that poped up on your screen the moment you made the thumper the first time.

https://frostpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorial#Coal_Thumper

"Coal Thumpers wash Coal from cracks in the rock to the surface. You can order people to gather the Coal from the piles directly, or employ them in Gathering Posts. More than one Gathering Post might be needed to collect all the coal efficiently."

That is exactly what poped up on your screen once you made the thumper.

You should really read the tutorials and tips if your not going to don't really have much to stand on when you lose and go to complain.


Its also mentioned right on the tooltip of the thumper when you place it "produces enough coal for 2 gathering posts" that message alone should of raised a flag of why do you need gathering posts for them for that message to be there.


What you call not fun gameplay I call lack of reading and understanding the basic elements that are highlighted to you before judging.

[Jay and Silent Rob]

Didn't have the resources for gathering posts. And it just happened again. I assumed that if my idiot workers could chop up scattered crates and carry the wood back to the main base through the snow, they could damn sure do the same with a lumber mill. But no. They refused to use the mill until I built a road. But I used my last wood on the mill, so I had to take apart 2 tents to get the wood, and the time it took to sort all of this out was about 2 days. In those 2 days I got royally screwed.

I managed to keep discontent low, but hope hit rock bottom, so I was fighting to climb back out. I got to 14/15% hope and was literally 5 seconds from finishing a task to build more housing, which would have boosted hope above 15%, when I got a game over for not having enough hope.

This game seems to have so much potential but it is just rife with annoying little details like this that make defeat feel like an unwarranted punishment rather than the justified consequences of your choices.

The game needs more nuance, imo. Like you should have options for overworking people beyond just 24 hours of hard labor. In the real world, if you need just 2 extra hours of work from people to complete a mission-critical task you can do that without suffering the penalty of keeping your team working for 24 hours without rest.

[amordron]

Originally posted by Jay and Silent Rob:

Didn't have the resources for gathering posts. And it just happened again. I assumed that if my idiot workers could chop up scattered crates and carry the wood back to the main base through the snow, they could damn sure do the same with a lumber mill. But no. They refused to use the mill until I built a road. But I used my last wood on the mill, so I had to take apart 2 tents to get the wood, and the time it took to sort all of this out was about 2 days. In those 2 days I got royally screwed.

I managed to keep discontent low, but hope hit rock bottom, so I was fighting to climb back out. I got to 14/15% hope and was literally 5 seconds from finishing a task to build more housing, which would have boosted hope above 15%, when I got a game over for not having enough hope.

This game seems to have so much potential but it is just rife with annoying little details like this that make defeat feel like an unwarranted punishment rather than the justified consequences of your choices.

The game needs more nuance, imo. Like you should have options for overworking people beyond just 24 hours of hard labor. In the real world, if you need just 2 extra hours of work from people to complete a mission-critical task you can do that without suffering the penalty of keeping your team working for 24 hours without rest.

This is also mentioned right in the turtorail and tips page. The moment you tryed to build anything and the sawmill would NOT of been your first building. In fact you admit it was not.

https://frostpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorial#Construction

"Buildings inside the heat zone are warmer and provide better living and work conditions. To make the best use of the heat zone, buildings are placed on a radial grid. All buildings must be connected to the Generator by a Street in order to function."



So once again what you call unfun and annoying is a result of lack of reading the resources highlighted to you. IF you don't want to learn the rules of the game your going to have a bad time this is no different than any other game. Every city builder has there points that need to be addressed and needing roads to join buildings is a super common one.

Planning is a key part of city builders like frostpunk you dont wait till your at 0 wood to address a wood issue you address it as soon as you can which should be quite early and long before your out of wood if your looking ahead at what you need that should be a obv thing to do given the vary limited amount of resources around your base. This is also warned to you vary early in the exact same pages:

https://frostpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorial#Resources_and_Workforce

"Resource management is crucial to the city's survival. You need Coal to power the Generator. Wood and Steel are necessary for construction and research. Steam Cores are a key part of advanced buildings. Raw Food is used to prepare Food Rations in the Cookhouse. Later in the game, more types of resource may appear."

There is tons of warning for the errors you made as such these errors where a result of your choices. You choice to not read the info and fall into those errors. That is not unwarranted punishment that is justified punishment for not doing what you should be doing learning the basics of the game by using the tips right there.


As for not having resources to make the posts you can directly place them on the piles as mentioned the first tip page even tells you that.


You can extend shifts by 2 hours at the end of the day and 2 hours at the start for 4 extra hours, without forcing 24 hours there is a later law for that. Considered one of if not the most powerful law in the game.

[Chronic]

So what i do is. Build 2 coal thumpers next to each other, then i build 4 gathering posts. Costs alot of resources but will never have to build coal resources again. Maybe add in a coal mine later when you research

[amordron]

Originally posted by GrowlingChihuahua:

So what i do is. Build 2 coal thumpers next to each other, then i build 4 gathering posts. Costs alot of resources but will never have to build coal resources again. Maybe add in a coal mine later when you research

Its not a good idea to swap from thumper to mines pick one and stick to it. It might work in normal but on higher diffs you do not want to waste tech time getting two paths only want one (other than hazard endless). Thats the same for all resource trees.

2 thumpers and 4 posts is not enough coal to never need coal again. You need 3 steam thumpers and 12 posts in order to have enough coal to maintain a rather effectively laid out new home build when playing deathless. Obv if your allowing 3/4 of your pop to die will need less coal but lets not talk about those kinda of builds as thats only bad habit. 2 steam thumper and 8 posts can be enough with enough autos to make workplaces not need heat but its tight esp when adding in refueling of the autos. IF you have autos staffing them thou thats another story but you norm want to use your autos in a workshop than steam core buildings than steel first. Thumpers are not really that labor effective of a use for them. As there easy to heat buildings due to being nicly piled.

Placing thumpers near each other is fine but if you dont have good overlap you can result in them working less effectively as you need each thumper to have the exact same amount of posts hitting them eg if one has 2 posts hitting other has 3 posts hitting from the 4 posts the one with only 2 will fill up and the one with 3 will empty out due to how posts spilt there labor resulting in losing labor due to times where the thumper is full and not piking up coal or empty to nothing to gather. Need both to have 3 hitting in this case of the 4 to in effect have each have 2 posts net result as the 2 that hit both will both spilt 50/50 than resulting in the labor being split correctly.

[Jay and Silent Rob]

Originally posted by amordron:

There is tons of warning for the errors you made

This is probably the biggest problem with the problem I ran into.
Go play the New Home campaign and count how often the game interrupts you to give you a brief popup on 20 different things. Take note of how quickly you end up with 6 missions and not enough resources to do them all. Keep track of how much information is thrown at a new player.

Now ask yourself how reasonable it is to assume that every new player should remember 100% of the information the game demands them to figure out. A clear tooltip explanation could have fixed this problem for absolutely zero effort from the developers. Just a note on the tooltip explaining that no roads means the workers won't even haul wood by hand in an emergency. They will literally ALL die before a single one of them just walks over to the mill and grabs some wood.

It's not reasonable. I just lost for the third time because prioritizing the things that killed me in my first two attempts left me without the resources to cover other issues in my third. This time I prioritized making sure everyone had housing and warmth early on because last time I struggled to expand my heating zones enough to warm housing in the second ring and so I had massive rates of illness (which is stupid because the cold does not make you sick. That is a dumb cartoon trope that doesn't apply in real life until you get to the situation of frostbite, which kicks in when it's severely cold) and then when my generator died just once I lost like 20 people in one night.

But by prioritizing housing and warmth, I skimped on food, and that caused a lot of discontent. And because I then had to spend a lot of resources on food, I delayed getting a beacon up and delayed setting up mills and drills and thumpers and mines, so I risked running into resource shortages. Knowing I NEEDED a beacon to recruit more workers, I focused on that and prayed that 1 thumper and 2 gathering posts would keep my generator going.

It did not. I had frequent power outages and my discontent went from 15% to 100% in about 3 days, then the people began demanding different structures that we didn't have the resources for every single day so I alt+F4'd out of there.

It just seems to me that you're forced to follow a very, very specific build path to succeed at the game and the only way to figure out what that is without a guide is to fail over and over again.

And that's just bad game design. I'm tired of seeing the same popups about camera controls and making the choice to cut that dude's leg off and dealing with dumb workers making dumb demands already.

[amordron]

The info tossed at a new player is quite reasonable esp with pause. You can pause and think all you want and should be. This in not a rts. This is a survival city builder.

As such you can relook up info when ever you want while the info pops up when you need it not right away. Like your thumper example it pops up when the thumper is made if you paused for a sec and read you would of known the issue right away.

If you are new to city builders you should be playing on easy not normal via the scenario menu. Default diff is normal as most players will be fine at this level and from seeing on the fourm most players are and get a first win on normal after a loss or two. Some players take a bit longer and as such should turn down the diff for the first win.


You never have 6 missions on a new home at the same time exaggerating dose not help your point. You can have promises of that amount of your really far behind but you should not be making promises you can’t keep and the game even tells you that. A promise is not a mission a mission the game ends if you fail a promise only a drop is discontent or hope will happen.

Buildings needing roads are given a constant reminder ever single time you make a building there is a icon the pops up over the building to tell you for ever single building you place not in range of one.

The gen gives you a low coal warning 24 hours before it’s out of coal so you no there is a issue well in advance to pause and address it so on the case of your thumper issue it is also warned well in advance.

Your issue is not a lack of info nor a need to remember a lot it’s not reading the warnings and tools you are given. Those warnings are the tool tips and the info are right there and seen the moment buildings are places and can be sold if made when paused at 0 loss.

The tooltip saying they will not take the wood from the sawmill dose exist and i even linked it to you above it’s vary clear you are picking to not read them it’s not them not being present. Added with the icon for the building not having a road on top showing the building is not active.

You vary much get sick from the cold in real life there is a lot more than frostbite that cold leads to. Regardless thou this in not real life the rules of the game say cold makes you sick so that is fact real life is not important here the rules of the game are.

You are not forced to follow a specific build there is tons of ways to play to the point of people doing hard without ever making any food source or building doing the hardest diffs without ever turning on the gen. Yes there is a limit where you will get killed as there should be otherwise would be no challenge for the game but esp on normal where you are playing you are no where near forced into a given build. In fact there are achivments that force you out of the common builds even to prove that.

Honestly sounds like you are playing the fireman and dealing with issues as they pop up vs planning in advance city builder games are all about planning in advance not reacting to fire. Yes sometimes you have to react but for the most part most problems should be dealt with before they are problems.

Or rather than complaining about the game not giving you info or teaching you stuff that it vary much dose do you just don’t read them why don’t you try asking for advice there are many players on here that will give advice to handle given problems if you ask.

[Jay and Silent Rob]

Hint: New players don't have the requisite knowledge to plan things out in detail. And, again, because you refuse to grasp this fact: Most people don't want to go back and re-read each of the dozens of tooltips and tips the game throws at them every time they have a problem, especially when a slightly better tooltip on the building in question would do the trick 100x better.

For example, On my fourth attempt, I just switched to Endless Mode and had a lot more fun without the campaign's events spamming me. Got to day 52 without much effort. But one thing that did help a lot was realizing that a lot of coal sources get automatically turned on despite being useless. When you upgrade to 3 range heat from the generator it automatically enables that and triples the generator's fuel cost even if you've been on 1 radius of heat all game.

Then it turned out that I should have been micro-managing the generator's power level to turn it down during the day and up at night. So I needed to always be switching between the heat view and the normal view. That's cumbersome. There should be information for that on the screen normally. As should information about waves of illness. Sometimes I'd just have 12-20 people fall ill at the same time and couldn't find out the cause.

Overall, imo, the game doesn't tell you enough or give you enough control to warrant how hard the campaign is for a new player. I'm a Dwarf Fortress player, so I know all about carefully planning a base and all about games that escalate in difficulty until a loss is inevitable. Games like DF do it right. So far, Frostpunk does not.

[nickle]

Originally posted by Jay and Silent Rob:

Hint: New players don't have the requisite knowledge to plan things out in detail. And, again, because you refuse to grasp this fact: Most people don't want to go back and re-read each of the dozens of tooltips and tips the game throws at them every time they have a problem, especially when a slightly better tooltip on the building in question would do the trick 100x better.

For example, On my fourth attempt, I just switched to Endless Mode and had a lot more fun without the campaign's events spamming me. Got to day 52 without much effort. But one thing that did help a lot was realizing that a lot of coal sources get automatically turned on despite being useless. When you upgrade to 3 range heat from the generator it automatically enables that and triples the generator's fuel cost even if you've been on 1 radius of heat all game.

Then it turned out that I should have been micro-managing the generator's power level to turn it down during the day and up at night. So I needed to always be switching between the heat view and the normal view. That's cumbersome. There should be information for that on the screen normally. As should information about waves of illness. Sometimes I'd just have 12-20 people fall ill at the same time and couldn't find out the cause.

Overall, imo, the game doesn't tell you enough or give you enough control to warrant how hard the campaign is for a new player. I'm a Dwarf Fortress player, so I know all about carefully planning a base and all about games that escalate in difficulty until a loss is inevitable. Games like DF do it right. So far, Frostpunk does not.

First of all: you have to adapt to the gameplay, no game works viceversa.

Secondly, you can just hit pause and take your time to understand everything you have to. There's a ton of tips, and if you really feel like ignoring them you can discover things on your own by trial and error.

Again, this game is very harsh only if you don't know how to adapt and learn from your mistakes. No one finished the game successfully the first time (nor the second).

So my advice is to take it slow, save a lot, try different strategies and check guides on the web.

Just don't throw it on the game, man, because if 99% of the players don't think there's a problem with the gameplay and then there's you, chances are that YOU are doing something wrong :)

[Mace]

If you're not having scouts out by day 3 at the latest you're going to have a bad time. Day 2 or earlier is ideal. The more people you have the easier it gets because you can ramp up production of everything.