Ok, I've got to start thinking about leaders and civs. For leader traits, I probably should pick among financial, spiritual, philosophical, creative, and imperialistic. I guess my civ choice should depend on my start, so that I can get appropriate starting techs. With no city states to conquer, early UUs probably won't matter too much (exception: Fast Worker), but Renaissance or Industrial UUs would be interesting. Early economic buildings would be very good, on the other hand. (The Netherlands, I like you but your dikes are just too late in the tech tree.)

Side note: It's my first pitboss game, so take that with a grain of salt, but I feel like restricted leaders would make for more interesting trade-offs: I want these traits but those starting techs.

...one falls down to rushing impi.

So I have a map candidate.

Attached Files

  pb40a.zip (Size: 9.68 KB / Downloads: 8)

Hi, Hoi, Bonjour, Hallo, Hola and Olá to my humble spoiler thread for this PB40.

If you are a player, I say welcome to you, too. I'm really excited to play against you, but then again why are you reading this. So bid you kindly to leave and come back at the right time.

My password will be

I used to be a big fan of city-building games like Pharaoh and Zeus, but I haven't really played any lately. I've bought Frostpunk a couple of days ago and I'm liking it a lot. I went in completely blind and I'm still on my first playthrough, but I wanted to share my first impressions.

Frostpunk is a very unusual city building game. It takes place in a steampunk setting that's thrown into a sudden ice age. You control a small group of refugees from London who are huddled around a giant coal-powered generator in a hole in the snow. You command workers to gather resources, construct buildings, research, etc. as usual. You can also send out scout parties into the frozen wasteland outside of your hole, where they discover additional resources and other refugees. This is the only means of growing your population, so keep your people alive! Scouting also reveals more of the story of the game: What happened to other cities? Where did the ice age come from?

Besides their material needs, the game also tracks your people's discontent and hope. These are affected by living conditions and by Laws. Roughly every day, you can pass a new law in the city. These can unlock new buildings, or new uses for your existing buildings, and often make you choose between a civilized and an efficient alternative. For example, will you build a graveyard and have funeral services that keep your people away from work for hours, or will you dump the dead into a hole outside the heat zone? Will you build a shelter for children, or make them work? No points for guessing which options will be better for your peoples' morale. That's also why the developers call it a society survival game, I guess.

I don't think I've come close to losing the game so far. I feel like the challenge is more in keeping your city somewhat liveable than in winning the game, but who knows, maybe it's going to really ramp up the difficulty. The game also offers a hardcore mode that is more difficult and only lets you save on exit (yay!) and doesn't allow you active pause (boo!). I think I'll try it for my next playthrough.

Still, the game mechanics really reflect the setting. It feels like you never have enough people to get all the resources you need: You need food, of course, you need building materials, and when the generator runs out of coal, your people's homes get cold. At the start of the game, this only causes some discontent and a slightly higher risk of illness. But the temperature varies over time, with a definite downward trend. (Your lonely generator can pump out only so much CO2.) When I ended my last play session, things looked pretty good, actually. I just weathered a short cold (err... even-colder?) period, and had built up a bunch of better insulated houses in anticipation. When it was over, it was actually pretty cozy, given the circumstances. But the forecast started showing an even bigger temperature drop roughly a week away, and I have no idea if this one is going to be permanent. I'll need to research techs to push the generator even further. That will also burn more coal, and I don't know if I can get enough with my current technologies. And during the previous cold period I also had a problem with keeping all the workplaces heated, so that's going to be even worse. I probably can get by with the lower generator setting if necessary. I can handle some discontent and illness.

I'm a little bit sceptical about how the story is integrated with the gameplay. Due to a story event from scouting, hope in my city took a massive drop, and a group of citizens started trying to convince the rest to return to London. Your goal then is to raise hope back up again to stop them from recruiting and convince as many of them to stay. This event also unlocks one of two new sets of laws to help you: You can choose between Discipline and Faith. My situation was decent enough at the time to handle that challenge, but this could have been much worse. There was no warning at all that something big would happen when I scouted that location.

Another thing is that I feel like the story is trying to railroad me into some specific law choices at times...some time after the event I just talked about, there was another one where I could get a hope boost from signing a law that I otherwise wouldn't have considered at the time: The Faith Keepers law creates a sort of religious police force that can be used to quell discontent and doesn't normally do anything for hope. I've got one lone dude staffing their office, because I really don't need them at the moment.

EDIT: Oh, and I completely forgot: The art is gorgeous!

The game can be bought on Steam and GOG.

Has anyone else here played it? What do you think?

Does specialist (and by extension rune master, I suppose) affect the dispel resistance of spell lock, or is it hard-locked to 150?

LK plays SMAC again

What is sad is I get more one more turn urge from this ancient game, then I do from Civ6.  I never dig figure out Civ6.  Some time I will also have to do LK plays Civ6 a few turns at a time.

I start with a beeline as much as possible to industrial automation.  Centurai Ecology for formers is the only other critical early tech.

This is my start after a few turns.

   

I quickly capture some mind worms.  This is the beauty of playing Gaia.  I find one of my favorite early landmarks.  Having that many 2-2-2 tiles without needing any work is great early in the game.
I quickly made contract with the Spartans and Hive in the area.

   

The world's luckiest alien artifact marched 20+ tiles and managed to help to complete the weather paradigm.  

The hive attacked in 2165.  Just a little bit after that I made the revolt to police state.  That war probably won't have started.

   

Considering that end-of-game graphs exist, I was wondering whether I could hijack and modify the existing code to display graphs during the game, and I think it is possible!

I hijacked the Retire button from the main menu, commented out the retire functionality and redirected so that the button just skips ahead to the Defeat screen but no longer actually retires. Made a couple of tweaks so that the landing screen is the graphs screen rather than the info screen. Also made the "Just One More Turn" button always active, and it's functionality is simply to clear out the data tables and close the window, returning to the game. 

Out of time for today, but I have attached a couple of screenshots and the mod file. I tried to document my changes by inserting #CF in a comment on every line where I made an edit but cannot guarantee. This is by no means a finished product but wanted to put up the current progress since I won't be able to continue working on it for a while. When I do have more time I'm planning to try trimming off the extra screens, removing the DEFEATED text, and try adding a dedicated button rather than hijacking the Retire button. 

Screenshots:

   

   

   

Attached Files

  Graphs mod 2018.06.14.zip (Size: 18.42 KB / Downloads: 0)

I turned the raze prompt off. Now it seems I got much more gold than I should when I do decide to raze from the results screen (with R). Razing with the prompt on gives me 300+ gold for the city I am presently at. Doing the "no raze prompt" and then razing yielded more than 1000 gold. The first "scroll" (which would be like conquest) said 200+ and after pressing R the raze "scroll" came up, showing the proper 300+. The actual amount my gold increases was 1100+ gold, though.

On similar vein, the diplomacy message from my ally saying "nice work, here's X gold for attacking our joint enemy" does not actually seem to increase my gold.

So this is about my (still on-going) nature game, sparked by "nature can't beat death (early)" comments.

10 nature, conjurer, specialist, high men. Expert level.

AIs
Rjak, 9 death 1 chaos guardian nomads.
Oberic nature+chaos nomads
Sharee death+chaos gnolls
Sss'ra 9 chaos 1 sorcery specialist myrran beastmen

Started with 4 sprites, got an early earth elemental node, and a bit later a minor werewolf temple. Not that good luck with cheese-able treasure there.

Capital had coal, and one gold and one silver not too far. So I planned for 4 cities with adamantium, though Oberic snatched the spot on the other side of the gold.
Started the capital on the path to mass produce magicians. Spiders was my first research, so after only half a dozen bears, a lot of spiders.

Rjak decleared war almost immediately on contact, and so did Sharee. Sharee was already at war with Oberic, so Oberic became my ally. I had already given him a few spells to pave the way for that. Rjak was expansionist, so I was snatching a lot of small cities with spiders. Defenders were horsebowmen, and a bit later pikemen. Magicians came to good use against the pikes. Rjak only had the sporadic ghoul, easily killed by spiders. Spiders had enough resistance that mostly Rjak rather summoned zombies instead of black sleep - to no effect.

Rjak's fort was defended by 8 ghouls and beastmaster, so that was a major hurdle (+3 to attack on ghouls). Losing just a few spiders to undead would have been a major trouble. 2 stacks of spiders did win that fight, because most of the ghouls did not have wraith form: The first stack webbed what ghouls they could, and did manage to destroy the wraith formed and the hero. They then chewed on webbed ghouls while the web was up. They couldn't have won the fight, but they all attacked until red and webs were torn off, and then retreated. I lost only 2 spiders as undead this way, and the second stack wiped what was left.

Sharee was already losing to Oberic, so I rushed in to take Sharee's homelands. Had a few adamantium paladins at this point. It was not contest, except to take the cities before Oberic. Not that gnoll cities are that great, but most Amplifiers (3) stayed intact. I was lucky Sahree did not have volcano, otherwise I would have lost my adamantiums.

With most of the cities nomad and some gnolls, unrest is ever present. But got taxes to 1.75 which seems to do.

A lot of treasure had doom bats to guard it, or water and air elementals, which kept me from taking treasure and nodes until quite late. Cockatrices made short work of bats, and used (resist elements) paladins and magicians against the rest. Perhaps I should have aimed for the treasure a bit sooner. Got one chaos book, astrologer and 2 more nature books.

Broke a tower with 4 great drakes with a stack of adamantium+flame blade rangers. Sss'ra's city was right there, and declared war like 2 turns after contact. His fort is on a small continent with no towers. Took 1 small city from him, and destroyed one doomstack of chimera with a 9 magician stack. Sss'ra now seems to be breaking towers with halberdiers (beastmen), got 2 broken near my cities that I hadn't fully prepared for. Looks like I will lose a couple of my nomad cities when ss'ra scouts them and then volcano+corruption. Hopefully I can keep him away from the one producing adamantium rangers. My high men mainland doesn't have towers nearby, the rest are in Oberic territory, but near the cities I took from Sharee, and there my defenses are weak.

I am planning to alchemize some of the mana I got stashed from treasure to boost magician production as much as possible. Petrify is great against halberdiers and chimera, and magicians can deal with chaos spawns as well. I switched from spider summoning to change terrain / transmute / gaia's blessing s the main casting after those came up. Now I am almost done, but a few Gaia's still on the magician producers. Adamantium paladins, and magicians, form most of my forces now.

Next research is gorgons, which I planned to summon a stack of and bring that to sss'ras fort. Don't know what the defenses are yet, but chimera / chaos spawn / beastman magician seems to be his stronger garrisons.

Beastmen Myrran seems to be breaking towers easy because of strategic strength of halberdiers. Which is a threat pariticularly with chaos, as one would need to keep cities from being scouted. Again particularly because my nature strategy at this stage relies largely on adamantium city units.

We are even with sss'ra on power graph: I got a lot more power and he has a lot more army. So it seems he does not yet have most myrran nodes. Which will likely change soon because halberdiers.

Got unlucky with heroes, I got only a sage and a witch that are worth their while, and no way to use them against sss'ra: Even with elemental armor, resist elements and bless, lightning bolt will decimate them (or any hero). Only invisibility seems to give a chance to survive. I could make a regen item, though, which could turn heroes into lightning rods to soak up combat casting. But the cost of that is perhaps too high, and I am yet to research create artifact.

It was clear early nature can beat aggressive death in the early game, using spiders. But one does have to be careful: undead spiders are horrifying against living ones. Also the AI will spread ghouls thin with city units - if you wait until a proper doomstack of ghouls comes up spiders can be in a lot more trouble. Though my trouble at the fort had a lot to do with guardian+beastmaster, a full stack of wraithform ghouls can spell trouble for spiders. 

Nature does work more by force and bulk, so I predict this will become a lot harder at master, let alone lunatic. Strategies based on untouchable units should suffer comparatively less from hiking the difficulty.