Optimal Laws for On The Edge

[Shining Hector]

Hey everyone, going through my second run of OTE now, and I think I've figured out the optimal laws to get from New London in the beginning. Current playthrough is on Hard FWIW.

The main thing is picking up as many worthwhile laws from New London as you can to get a headstart for when you have control over Book Of Laws again.

Biggest no-brainer is holding off on shipments of steel/cores until the last minute (Day 8 18:00), which nets you Emergency Shift and Extended Shift for free.

Next is getting Food Additives ASAP. It's far superior to Soup for this module, given the tight food constraints. You can get it at the earliest on Day 5 at 00:00 by putting up the Administration and Transport Depot before Day 3, requesting food as your first favour, and then requesting food again once you get High Favour again.

Past that, you're mostly just saving law passing time once you get control again. I got Corpse Disposal by running two Emergency Shifts, the first on a Workshop, and the second on the Army Warehouse, so that I'd lose a Worker rather than Engineer. Once you have Average Favour again, you can request a way to dispose of the dead.

I think you can only get either Fighting Arena or Public House from New London, not both, as I got Fighting Arena and then later tried asking for a favour with max discontent and High Favour and didn't get the option. Of the two, Fighting Arena is the superior one, as it doesn't require staffing and has a 36 hour cooldown. All you need is 50% discontent (spread a single worker on Extended Shift to every abandoned building near the Beacon if you don't have enough) and Average Favour for that.

Once you have a Gravely Ill patient you can get Radical Treatment with Average Favour. You can still get this Law even if you have an Infirmary running, which would actually be optimal, as amputees from Radical Treatment through Medical Posts would require researching and building a Factory for the sole purpose of making prosthetics, as well as passing Care House and Prosthetics laws. Even if you don't need Radical Treatment due to having Infirmaries, it still allows you to skip it and pick the awesome Overcrowding immediately as your first Law.

You can also pick up Child Labour by requesting extra workers with High Favour, but I wouldn't recommend it TBH. You wouldn't want it until after getting Food Additives, and without Hothouses or Houses of Healing available on this map, the only safe jobs are Cookhouse and Gathering Posts. It's better to hold out for Child Shelters->Engineer Apprentices, since research is constrained with your limited Engineers and lack of Automatons. You're better off spending all your remaining Favour until secession on Wood requests.

[amordron]

For survivor the trick is not about getting laws. But in general you got the right idea.

I have found the best way to request to result in only a single death via emg shift is.

High food
High food

This gets you the food law it’s random you can’t pick to get sawdust. Even soup thou is fine you will have enough food just staff and unstaff the cookhouse to only cook the food needed till the law is signed.

After that deal with body’s as you would of just used 2nd emg shift killing someone.

After this you are NOT looking for laws. Just take coal from here. This lets you delay getting coal mine and as such need less emg shifts via not needing to use on workshop letting you use them on gps. This frees up people to always work on warehouse to make it so you don’t need to emg shift the warehouse early but will get one on it later and still get all the steel and cores needed pre hot spring. This will result in a much easier early game to the point of being able to entirely avoid grav I’ll even on survivor. As you don’t even need to staff the workshop constantly for tech as you only need to get braised heater sawmill up than don’t need any more tech till after hot spring. This lets you focus sick thou still jiggle the eng when heat is low to use on tech to slowly work to coal mine.

That being said you will have to get them to Sign radical you can’t get sustained never seen it with lots of testing, of you get grav I’ll oh wait you don’t. By getting them to sign it you lose coal and make the problem that caused the grab I’ll worse as likly don’t have coal for heat resulting in more vs accepting the one death and fixing the issue with getting coal. You can get unlimited people later so spending twice the time to treat a grav I’ll only to have a decent chance of a amp is really not worth it.

Discontent laws thou nice are not needed as if you get bad rng and get public house it’s another worksite you don’t got the labor to staff while fighting arena is good the coal allows you to skip coal mine till later letting you have more labor for wood to get the early game under control.

On the edge is not about laws or even tech it’s entirely about getting hotspring than requesting once your there even with next to no tech you win and you don’t need any other law than law than emg extended food law and dead body for one death. Anything else can wait till you have control and even once you have control you don’t need anything in there really with only radical to overcrowding being nice if you fall behind but that’s hard to do. The discontent laws you want to boost production but even that’s not needed as you only need discontent low enough to chain emg shift on steel that you can do without any discontent law just by getting heat up via coal.

You mentioned being on hard honestly speaking to find what’s optimal really should be on extreme as if it dosent work on extreme it’s not optimal accross the board thou can be for the diff. Extreme makes it vary likly to get grav I’ll e fall being on tech or otherwise making you see how little getting extra laws helps as all those extra laws only give you long term value but you need short term value as all the diff is pre hotspring you don’t care about getting jaws don laws that you can sign later if you can get value right away.

[Shining Hector]

Admittedly, you have to save scum to get the laws you want; it's up to you if you want to leave the rest of your game up to RNG.

I tried saving some food until Food Additives, but I found people just starting eating Raw Food on Day 4, even with an unstaffed Cookhouse. You're better off just taking the small hit and cooking everything until you get Food Additives, then using that for the rest of the game.

Good to know you can't get Sustain Life from New London, Radical Treatment is just pointless then, unless you get it immediately before secession so that you can jump ahead and pick Overcrowding as your first law.

Coal hasn't been a big issue so far, I just put a Gathering Post close to each Coal Pile and staff it rather than a Sawmill if I'm getting low. I'd rather spend favors on Wood, since you can just put up a Coal Mine after the Coal Piles run out, but extra Wood never stops being useful for the whole game.

I think it's a good idea to keep at least one Workshop fully staffed, too, though the other 10 engineers usually do end up on healing duty. I agree Sawmills, Heaters, and Braziers are the must have early techs, but (in order) Handcarts, Drawing Boards, Extra Scouts, Medical Post Upgrade, Drafting Machines, Infirmary, Lighter Scout Sleds, Freight Elevators make your life increasingly easier the faster you get them, too.

[amordron]

Originally posted by Shining Hector:

Admittedly, you have to save scum to get the laws you want; it's up to you if you want to leave the rest of your game up to RNG.

Good to know you can't get Sustain Life from New London, Radical Treatment is just pointless then, unless you get it immediately before secession so that you can jump ahead and pick Overcrowding as your first law.

Coal hasn't been a big issue so far, I just put a Gathering Post close to each Coal Pile and staff it rather than a Sawmill if I'm getting low. I'd rather spend favors on Wood, since you can just put up a Coal Mine after the Coal Piles run out, but extra Wood never stops being useful for the whole game.

I think it's a good idea to keep at least one Workshop fully staffed, too, though the other 10 engineers usually do end up on healing duty. I agree Sawmills, Heaters, and Braziers are the must have early techs, but (in order) Handcarts, Drawing Boards, Extra Scouts, Medical Post Upgrade, Drafting Machines, Infirmary, Lighter Scout Sleds, Freight Elevators make your life increasingly easier the faster you get them, too.

Not possible to save scum on survivor unless your planning to remake the whole game and that you can only do for one law and the next not. Thou guess you can backup the save file and reload that way if you really want to but its quite unneeded even for survivor. Non of the laws are 100% needed and thou sawdust is better than soup even soup is better inn its own ways. Eg the run I did with only a single death requires soup if you get sawdust the sick level is not controllable and will result in further deaths. As such the optimal law in that case is soup as it results in the better start. Once you have hotspring the food law you have becomes rather moot so the one that gets you to hotspring cleaner is the "better" one. They both have there pros and cons but the food is not tight enough to require sawdust in a optimized build so long as you are correctly not getting more people.

Radicial is vastly better than sustain you would NEVER want it to be signed just like you don't want ti be be signed in general in survivor unless playing a moral run. Sustain not only take people out of the job pool it takes bed spots that snowballs your sick problem. The goal is not to get grav ill in the first place and if you are getting them sustain only adds to the problem radical solves it. Sustain further has issues of the grav ill you had before signing it already had there time to death ticking than you sign carehouse that further starts it ticking as they walk there than further ticks it more as they walk to inf resulting in there death in survivor where the time to death is that short. Yes you can get them to inf but quite often you just don't. It easy to deal with amps if you want or better in this case just let them die as you can replace people with ease so wasting a request slot to deal with the 1-2 you get just is not worth. As that request slot would get you enough coal to stop more from comming vs snowballing out of control.

Keeping a workshop fully staffed on survivor just is not possible if your not wanting grav ill. Esp if you got sawdust. Hand carts/elevators thou nice is NOT life saving and not required till later on just by keeping the warehouse staffed + 2 emg shifts ext shifts otherwise you easy get in time to send you get 5 cores and 250 steal that is more than DOUBLE the req amount. There is no need to rush hand carts at all at the expense of getting deaths. Esp as we are talking about the optimal way which I will take it to mean way with the least deaths on the highest possible diff. Extra scouts is the same thou nice as it gets them out of the food pool its doing nothing to help you pre hotsprings as you are already able to scout 3 locations than return for hot springs these 3 locations (2 scouted than returned one to place clsoer to hot spring) have all the resources you want as you do not want to get the survivor locations early. The other locations have almost nothing for resources making it not worth the 50 wood for the scout team + tech that early that can be used to reduce your sick via getting GPs medposts and tents up. Infirmary is the same thou nice you should be aiming to not have grav ill making it not needed that early. Scout speed is nice but you get to hot spring before your food runs out without it while it dose little if anything to help you that early. Med post upgrade is worth it but request t1 tech and if your at t1 tech getting coal mines to make coal no longer a issue is the key as once coal issues is solved the sick issue goes away quite quickly as you can grab bunkhouses after as you will start to have the spare resources to set up. Once the sick issue is solve via those two you are stable and basically cant lose able to take your time for everything else. Anything else has always resulted in grav ill building up keeping eng out of workshops more and more vs dealing with sick early (in my runs) and allowing more eng to move back into and stay into tech sooner allowing for overall more tech than trying to rush eff for the long term. The trick is to deal with the pressing issues first.

The above is the key point of why you cant use hard to talk about optimal going into survivor. The rate of sick and rate of getting tech is quite different. There is no way in hell your getting all the tech you listed as nice to have pre hot spring on survivor not even close you might get 7 techs pre hot spring if you don't move eng out but at the cost of being alot worse of sick wise (which is fine if only going for completion but thats quite a bit different than optimal that should be aiming for as deathless as possible while setting you up in a good place for the next part, when talking about a start). Not the 11 listed

If you are talking about optimal for hard do say so as that is quite a bit different than talking about optimal going into survivor. Optimal for hard allows you to rush eff a lot more as nothing really matters as you can win sleeping (i basically did via going in blind not even noticing the favor system was them requesting from London blindly and never requesting from settlement as never noticed it and still won on hard with 2 settlements fully done up and 3rd lvl 3. There no real point about talking about optimal on hard where basically everything works just fine.

[Shining Hector]

All interesting insights, but as I said, my current playthrough is on Hard, and the subject of the thread was about the Laws you can get New London to pass for you and the pros and cons, not an exhaustive analysis on tech choices in Survivor, which I haven't done yet for OTE and can't really comment meaningfully on at this point. That particular derailment is all on you.

[amordron]

Originally posted by Shining Hector:

All interesting insights, but as I said, my current playthrough is on Hard, and the subject of the thread was about the Laws you can get New London to pass for you and the pros and cons, not an exhaustive analysis on tech choices in Survivor, which I haven't done yet for OTE and can't really comment meaningfully on at this point. That particular derailment is all on you.

Not a derailment. The thread as you said it’s about the laws you can get them to pass and the pros and cons. While taking about what is optimal to do for those requests. This can’t be done without knowing the play field and in order to know the pros and cons you must speak about them within the overall picture. You can’t just say sawdust is better as it gives more food as like pointed out above the sick in survivor becomes non manageable assuming lookig for a optimal playby. While soup gives enough food.

While you can’t really say this is the optimal law setup without knowing the optimal build not possible as you can’t have a optimal law setup without a optimal build they go hand in hand. As such it is all under the subject of the thread.

While you brought up that this thread was before going into survivor as such brought that up as the diff in question. Even if your current play by is on hard if the discussion is about going into survivor where speaking about that hear mentioned that at the vary start of the first post. If this was about optimal laws and build for hard would need to be specified. As generally speaking optimal means the best for the top diff unless specifically mentioning it for a given diff, that was not done. Esp when that diff is mentioned as what your going into.

[Shining Hector]

Fair enough. So I'm playing Hard now, I've figured out the mechanics for Laws passed by New London and put them forward for discussion. I'll take your word for it that they'll only pass Radical Treatment, which makes sense as I've never seen them pass Child Shelters, either. Other than that, until I have time to go through a Survivor run, and unless someone else wants to jump in, sounds like we probably don't have much interesting to talk about, right?

[amordron]

Originally posted by Shining Hector:

Fair enough. So I'm playing Hard now, I've figured out the mechanics for Laws passed by New London and put them forward for discussion. I'll take your word for it that they'll only pass Radical Treatment, which makes sense as I've never seen them pass Child Shelters, either. Other than that, until I have time to go through a Survivor run, and unless someone else wants to jump in, sounds like we probably don't have much interesting to talk about, right?

They wont sign shelters. Tryed rerolling quite a number of times each option.

Food gives soup vs sawdust it seams to highly favor soup def not even odds. Seams closer to 3/4 times soup. (all testing done on extreme)

discontent can give public house or fighting arnea I have found it tends to favor arnea at avg public house at high but at both you can get either law. I have been able to get both before from new londom by getting one at avg than one at high but it seams to be rng behind geting it to show up a 2nd time its not constant it used to be what I aimed for on survivor but as optimizing more and more found it to not be worth.

Deal with grav ill always gives radical

Emg shift and extended as you said is from not sending of start

Body law is snowpit or cem it feels to be a 50/50 toss up to me but cant tell to little sample size as din't put much effort into this one as dint really matter much.

You can get the alternative food source law to unlock if you want but new london wont sign it but will be unlocked for when you get control of the book.

Otherwise haven't been able to get any other law to show up.



As for speaking about hard honestly as far as optimization goes so long as you as you said go food food bodies to get food law of either one than bodys of either one at that point the game should feel basically impossible to lose while being able to make the settlements quite easy so long as your on top of requesting supplies, Even than I woulden't be signing extra laws from new london and focusing on getting extra wood out of them to build up your snowball, than get steel from the other settlements as good on wood). Store the wood into medposts build than paused to be removed as you need wood at no wood loss. You are limited in hard by the amount of resources you can get to get the settlements up lowering discontent dosen't really help you do that as so long as you can chain 24 hour shifts on the warehouse (doable without discontent laws) all other resources you have access to are in finite amounts so no need to rush them harder with the slight bit extra 24 hour ♥♥♥♥♥ you will get from discontent laws. As you will have more people than jobs for awhile after unlocking hotsrping only need enough resoruces to get to hotspring gthing more of your limited piles faster dosen't help you getting more "free" resources is a larger gain for the long run. So really comes down to food -> food -> body -> get wood/steal/coal (on hard don't really want coal as tech is so fast you will have coal mine up before you need coal). No other law really matters radical is worthless if no grav ill that on hard you should be able to avoid child labor is a waste as they basically can only be used in cookhouse other than the first few days on piles.

Yes you can optimize it more but don't really see the point on hard.

[Shining Hector]

Have an interesting update at least. I already had an Infirmary up when I got my first Gravely Ill during a -40 episode, so I was able to treat them but still get Radical Treatment from New London by calling in a favour with Average Favour. So once we secede from New London, I'll still be able to select the sweet Overcrowding as my first Law, without ever actually risking amputations.

[amordron]

Originally posted by Shining Hector:

Have an interesting update at least. I already had an Infirmary up when I got my first Gravely Ill during a -40 episode, so I was able to treat them but still get Radical Treatment from New London by calling in a favour with Average Favour. So once we secede from New London, I'll still be able to select the sweet Overcrowding as my first Law, without ever actually risking amputations.

While interesting the question is could that grav ill of been avoided if you got another tech or juggled your eng better. I'm betting by placing 3rd med post to keep over night 15 emg in med than as soon as your workshops opened moved 2 eng from each medpost into that workshop leaving 3 in one you would of not resulted with the grav ill in the first place due to increasing your overall med power by having that 3rd medpost + more meds without giving up any tech time. Than going into coal mines to boost coal or bunkhouses both would of reduced sick amount from than on boosting production in all areas due to less sick so less lost production. Esp as inf is a t2 tech so could of got bunkhouses and built them (you have enough resources from the warehouse) in less time while still getting coal mines ontop with a little tech time left over. Or as at lvl 2 getting t2 braiser would also of reduced sick a ton assuming coal mes already up to support them.

This makes overcrowding not needed as your first law as already have sick under control and a large boost of production on top by not having a ton of sick. + first law can be discontent based if you want than for not only a increase via no overcrowding but a boost from the law itself. Or work towards child eng to boost tech.

While getting infirmary is good, addressing the root issue to not get sick in the first place is better. As even in the inf its still lost of production from them getting sick.

[Shining Hector]

For what it's worth, the Gravely Ill person was a child, and I didn't have Child Labour, so they were apparently just sitting outside in Very Cold weather due to getting kicked out of their tent by one of the refugees I'd just rescued from Nansen's Storm Watch hours earlier, and not having new tents built yet. I actually didn't have excess sick at the time due to rushing from 2 Medical Posts to Infirmary, so that's not the cause, either.

Updated the initial post based on the new information.

[khumak]

I actually prefer to only get the food law from New London and use ALL of my other requests for wood. There is a period of time between cutting down all of the trees and getting your trading in sync with Shipwreck where you can run out of wood and basically be stuck doing nothing unless you have a large stockpile built up.

Soup will work for this campaign but I agree that Sawdust meals are definitely superior when you can't control your own supply of raw food, so much so on survivor level that it might be worth a restart if you get soup instead. You could be ok with soup if you make sure to NOT bring any refugees back with you until after you have your first food shipment from Hot Springs.

I don't mind getting Radical Treatment from New London either if I wind up with some gravely ill before I can control my own laws. I'm not sure if they ever give you Sustain life instead. All of my runs so far where I've requested a law for that they gave me Radical Treatment. Doesn't matter much either way since you're going to get infirmaries pretty soon anyway and both of them lead to overcrowding.

I tend to overbuild medical posts early on as well even though I can't fully staff them. Spreading engineers out 2-3 per medical post to make sure nobody is without treatment is better than 3 fully staffed medical posts and 20 people untreated.

On Extreme or Survivor level I also think faster scout sleds are a big help to get you to Hot Springs and back just a bit faster and try to avoid deaths due to starvation.

[Shining Hector]

Originally posted by amordron:

While interesting the question is could that grav ill of been avoided if you got another tech or juggled your eng better. I'm betting by placing 3rd med post to keep over night 15 emg in med than as soon as your workshops opened moved 2 eng from each medpost into that workshop leaving 3 in one you would of not resulted with the grav ill in the first place due to increasing your overall med power by having that 3rd medpost + more meds without giving up any tech time. Than going into coal mines to boost coal or bunkhouses both would of reduced sick amount from than on boosting production in all areas due to less sick so less lost production. Esp as inf is a t2 tech so could of got bunkhouses and built them (you have enough resources from the warehouse) in less time while still getting coal mines ontop with a little tech time left over. Or as at lvl 2 getting t2 braiser would also of reduced sick a ton assuming coal mes already up to support them.

This makes overcrowding not needed as your first law as already have sick under control and a large boost of production on top by not having a ton of sick. + first law can be discontent based if you want than for not only a increase via no overcrowding but a boost from the law itself. Or work towards child eng to boost tech.

While getting infirmary is good, addressing the root issue to not get sick in the first place is better. As even in the inf its still lost of production from them getting sick.

Like I said, I haven't yet played OTE Survivor, but I think getting every Law from New London is almost always going to be worth it regardless. Even Laws you won't end up needing, of which Radical Treatment is the only one I can think of, let you skip ahead early to better ones, Overcrowding in this case.

For relevant tradeoffs and priority:

Emergency Shift and Extended Shift - free, just don't send the shipment to New London early, which you shouldn't be doing regardless

Soup/Food Additives - 2 favours (drops you from High Favour to Low Favour). Absolutely worth it, letting you stretch your food out is probably the single most important Law in the module

Radical Treatment - 1 favour (requires Average Favour). Very nice mainly because you get to skip it and go straight to Overcrowding as your first Law, which is awesome

Public House/Fighting Arena - 1 favour (requires Average Favour). Nice for discontent, and brings you closer to Moonshine

Cemetery/Corpse Disposal - 1 favour (requires Average Favour). You'll need it eventually regardless, plus it saves Law signing time to get it early. Corpse Disposal also brings you closer to Organ Transplants, which is always helpful

Child Labour - 2 favours (drops you from High Favour to Low Favour). not worth it in this module IMO, just use your favours for Wood/Coal and get Engineer Apprentices later

Basically every Favour could be instead used for 100 Coal or 50 Wood, and I think all except Child Labour are going to be worth that sacrifice

[khumak]

Finally got around to trying On the Edge Survivor and man that first week is rough. I did manage to get through to Hot Springs with zero deaths though. What I did was use my first 2 favors for food and then Soup (yeah I wanted Sawdust meals but oh well).

Unfortunately having just passed the food law that meant I had to deal with the medical issues without radical treatment. So with over 40 sick people the morning of day 5 and no way to deal with gravely ill yet, I built a fourth medical post and spread all 15 of my engineers across those 4 medical posts until I got the sick people under control. So zero research for 3 days unfortunately, but zero gravely ill and zero deaths. I used the rest of my favors for wood.

Braziers are definitely essential if you don't want a medical death spiral but all those sick kids that get dumped in your lap on day 3 really puts a dent in your medical capacity.

[erneiz]

The last time I finished, I used my first favor for coal before food, thinking that I don't have enough workforce to gather coal on top of the crucial wood and steel. Then it hit me to just demolish the road to the Beacon and I have just enough for 2 Med Posts, 7 Tents, 1 Workshop, and a Gathering Post on coal on the end of day 1. This solved my early coal problem and the rest is just smooth sailing. And I also used to think that Sawdust meals are necessary to be at 0 death (outside Emergency Shift) but turned out that's not the case and Soup works just fine. I'm starting to think that maybe this is even doable without Emergency Shift as long as I don't fully develop all the other settlements since you can get them to Loyal even without doing that.

[Shining Hector]

So finally did my Survivor run. As I thought, it's worthwhile to get every law except Child Labour, which isn't worth the two favors for what it gets you, and this is about the only scenario where Engineer Apprentices is better anyway, mostly because of how late you can pick up Child Labour. I wouldn't deliberately get gravely ill just to pick up Radical Treatment, but it's worth sacrificing 50 wood or 100 coal to get a headstart on Overcrowding if you're there anyway, and it'll probably be your last favor from New London regardless.