Ah, The Last Autumn, the DLC that's such an ambitious overhaul I'm having to basically do an Analysis Series for it by itself within the Frostpunk analysis. Seriously, it changes so much: even many things that look like they ought to be identical are actually different from in other scenarios, having tweaked parameters and also just fitting in differently due to the context being so different.

The narrative context is also very different, with many mechanics overhauled, gutted, or added in support of this notion. Instead of being a population of refugees struggling to survive the icepocalypse by huddling around a Generator, you're an employee of the company that is building these Generators, tasked with leading a specific such operation. A really obvious one up front is that temperature is irrelevant to the scenario by default: if you take a long time, it'll actually eventually be a concern, but initially the global temperature is +3, meaning everywhere is perfectly comfortable even if it has no internal Heat at all, and on Medium difficulty it's very easy to clear the scenario before you have to worry about keeping people warm. Indeed, it has to drop twice to have any ability to matter mechanically, and three times to be strongly consequential, since most buildings have at least +1 innate Heat.

Oh, and you don't have a Generator acting as the core of the city. You're building that Generator, but you never use it, not even if you finish it. That has a lot of implications on its own, starting from the fact that the game does away with the inane mechanic of 'homeless people will instantly die in the middle of the night if the Generator isn't running'; instead, if you have homeless people, at exactly 5 in the morning a few people will fall Ill. (It'll be 2 or 3 people the first night if you have literally no homes yet)

A related point is that the normal nightly Illness checks are... nearly irrelevant unless you take long enough for the temperature to drop multiple times. I say 'nearly', because you'll get a very low rate of Illness no matter what; I'm not sure if this is some manner of bug or an intended feature the game makes no effort to convey, but it can be confusing, and means you always need at least a little medical care even if it seems like your citizens should be completely safe from Illness.

Conversely, while the Generator doesn't exist, the game will still demand you connect most buildings to the central ring of roads for them to function. No narrative justification is offered for this: don't question the baked-in gameplay mechanic lingering in an inappropriate scenario!

Anyway, another difference is that a very large area around the Generator is designated as what I consistently call the Generator Build Zone. (This is not the game's term for it, but the game's preferred term is... not the best at clarity) This zone is special, and many structures cannot be placed inside of it, and conversely all the Generator tab buildings must be placed inside of it. A small number of buildings are special and can be freely placed inside it or outside it, which is handled in a slightly-unfortunate way where considering building one of those buildings will simply not display the Generator Build Zone. Fortunately, the Generator Build Zone is also visually distinguished by a large area of brown dirt ringed by a... fence or something, I'm not sure... so it's pretty easy to eyeball it regardless. This 'don't show the Generator Build Zone if it's not relevant to this building' problem only really haunts Builders Mode in Endless Mode.

Also dramatically different is the existence of this:


Telegraph Station
Costs 20 Wood and 35 Steel
Size 5x5
+10 Heat (For some reason??)
Logistical Capacity is spent here, and citizens appear here when shipped in. Workers cost 2 LC, Engineers cost 4 LC, and Steam Cores cost 20 LC. Logistical Capacity rises continuously (Even before the Telegraph Station is unlocked or built), up to a maximum of 99, and orders arrive exactly 24 hours after the order is placed. Medium difficulty gains about 21.5 Logistical capacity over 24 hours, Hard gains very slightly less than 20 LC in the same time, while Extreme gets about 18 LC. Cannoted be placed within the Generator Build Zone.

Don't be fooled by its build icon (And cost...) being the Beacon's. While the in-game model does release the balloon for some reason, it's otherwise a completely new graphic, and indeed a completely new building with new functionality. It's kind of like the Evacuation Centre from The Fall of Winterhome, but backwards, shipping in citizens and Steam Cores rather than shipping them out.

Note that the Logistical Capacity numbers I've given are guesstimates from eyeballing it in play, relying on the shipments to give me consistent timing. I don't know what the actual internal numbers are, nor what the intended difficulty modifiers are to the generation: I'd assume it's using the Resource modifiers, except that would result in harsher drops than the higher difficulties actually suffer. If you want an authoritive number, I dunno, code-dive the game yourself and harass me on Discord once you've got the numbers ripped out of the code.

Also, I really should emphasize the part where shipped-in citizens simply spawn in at the Telegraph Station, not from the shore even though the ame clearly intends for them to be coming in by boat. As such, you ideally have the Telegraph Station placed relatively conveniently to worksites, not placed way out of the way. You'll probably do this naturally just to avoid wasting any of the trees, but still, if you think you've got a strategy for optimizing that involves putting the Telegraph Station in a corner somewhere... probably a bad idea.

Now, earlier I mentioned the cold is largely irrelevant to The Last Autumn, but never fear: it has brand-new systems for making your people suffer and die!... systems it takes a while to introduce you to, and which are funky in their exact implications.

First of all: Workplace Safety. At the start of the scenario, this simply doesn't exist. A few days in, you'll be told someone nearly fell and got hurt, and the desire to Quantify Things causes your people to assign Workplace Safety values to buildings. This is effectively The Last Autumn's version of temperature: at -0, a workplace is Safe, and nothing bad can happen. (Well, not quite, but I'll get into the exceptions in a later page) At -1, the place is Unhealthy, and people working there have a low but existent rate of falling Ill; you might expect this to be around equivalent to being at -1 Heat, but the rate of Illness looks to be closer to -2 Heat's effect to me. This makes design sense for reasons I'll get into in a minute.

At -2 Safety, the place is rated Harmful, and people get Ill quite a lot, roughly comparable to -3 Heat. At -3 Safety, the place is rated Dangerous, with Illness being very common and Accidents being possible, while at -4 or worse the place is rated Deadly and Deadly Accidents can occur.

Accidents and Deadly Accidents effectively take the place of the 'frostbite' risks of low temperature, but work differently. Instead of randomly having individuals get suddenly in a very bad state, a worksite that suffers an Accident instantly has a noticeable percentage of its assigned crew fall Ill or Gravely Ill: Deadly Accidents, meanwhile, can furthermore turn people into Amputees or even kill them, still occurring en mass in one fell swoop.

Furthermore, -3 and -4 (or worse) Safety bring in another problem: they raise Strike Risk by +1 or +2, respectively. Furthermore, Accidents happening also raise Strike Risk at the location the Accident happened, by +1 for 2 days. What's Strike Risk? Well, it's another new mechanic that also starts out disabled: in its case, when you're 70% of the way through building the Shaft Structure, an Accident will occur (No matter what its Safety level is at), a Strike will occur, as well, and from now on Strikes are enabled. Strike Risk is another 4-tier system: at +1 Strike Risk you can potentially have a place run for a couple of days without a Strike occurring, at +2 and +3 you're unlikely to get through a full day without a Strike occurring, while at +4 or higher a Strike is essentially guaranteed to occur within moments of trying to do work at the site.

Strikes themselves are your Workers going on strike, which is to say refusing to work and making demands of you. This occurs at a specific worksite, and you have to negotiate with the Workers to try to end the Strike. You can bribe them with Food Rations, but this has a chance of failing and resulting in them just demanding more. (But the food bribe is still eaten, to be clear) If the site's Safety is poor, you can instead promise to bring it below Dangerous, in which case the Strike will fully end the second the worksite is safe. Additionally, you can promise to pass certain Laws: note that doing so ends the Strike immediately, before you've even passed these Laws. I'll be pointing these out as we get to them, but ideally you hold onto these Laws so you can use them to end a Strike for essentially free.

Once a Strike has been resolved peacefully, -4 Strike Risk is applied to all workplaces for 2 days, making it very difficult to suffer a Strike anywhere.

A final wrinkle to all this is the consideration of Poison Gas: sometime after Safety is first activated, you'll be informed that the Generator's power source belowground is something emitting toxic fumes. Once this activates, Safety falls everywhere by 1 step, and from then on the poison gas will shift in intensity over time, roughly comparable to temperature varying in other scenarios. This is more tightly clamped, though, only able to be -1, -2, or -3. Also like temperature variation, the game will give you predictions on the change, but, uh, they're suckier predictions: you'll always be told that either the poison gas will get worse 'the next day' or get better 'the next day', but the only part of this that's reliably accurate is that the next time the poison gas intensity changes, it will be up or down as the game is claiming. The game is perfectly happy to say 'the gas will get better tomorrow' and have it sit at -3 Safety for three days in a row. I suspect the poison gas is operating on a fixed schedule just like temperature changes are, but I haven't tried to A/B test this; it's possible it's actually random per-run or something and I've just not noticed. It's not like anyone else online has bothered to document this whole thng.

That said, all this stuff about Workplace Safety and Strike Risk I just described as being universal systems? That was a kind of lie. In actuality, Safety and Strike Risk only apply to buildings in the Generator tab: this means the construction of individual Generator components, plus the three buildings that make the special resources spent only on the Generator. I'll be getting into this more in later pages, but I feel this is probably the biggest misstep in The Last Autumn's desigm, as it creates so, so many problems that these aren't truly universal worksite mechanics.

This is, however, why it makes sense that Workplace Safety is more aggressive than temperature about negatively impacting the health of your employees: where temperature can potentially be making Illness rolls for nearly your entire population, Workpace Safety is only making such checks on people who are currently working on the Generator in some capacity.

On top of all these changes, The Last Autumn has many more: so many, so thoroughly, that unlike other scenarios this isn't going to be one page, but rather a series of pages covering the technologies and Laws and buildings much as I did collectively for the other scenarios. The Last Autumn isn't quite so drastic as to justify calling it 'a completely new game', as the broadest systems still tend to work the same or very close (eg the rules for how citizen labor transmits itself are unaltered, in all their janky glory), but it's shockingly ambitious for a one-off DLC. It's actually kind of frustrating we didn't get a few different 'building a Generator' scenarios; this feels a lot like 'base Frostpunk, if you could only ever play A New Home', in that I'd love to see The Last Autumn's mechanics and capabilities lensed through alternate scenarios, but you can't. There's not even an option to use its Laws in Endless Mode in place of Adaptation and Purpose.

Frankly, some of its mechanics are a big enough shakeup I like enough that I'd love to even just go through eg A New Home with Foragers instead of Scout Teams and Hunters Huts.

That said, The Last Autumn is far from perfect. I'll be covering plenty of rough edges in later pages, but a few things lack a clear reason to put them in a specific later page, so here they are.

First of all, The Last Autumn unfortunately suffers more than most scenarios from being only intermittently interactive, where you speed thtough a day waiting for something to happen that requires your input, briefly deal with it, then go back to maximum fast forward because there's not really a reason to mess with anything else. It is in fact the scenario that most feels like it would work much better if the game were truly turn-based rather than real-time; I've harped on this repeatedly, but other scenarios tend to have more interruptions, especially in the early days, where you actually make choices multiple times per day. The Last Autumn is in fact the scenario I've been consistently slowest to come back to, and the most prone to me procrastinating on returning to an ongoing run, because it's the scenario most prone to resulting in staring at the screen for a couple dozen seconds, waiting to have a reason to touch the controls, over and over again, and that's just not engaging.

Second, The Big Freeze: The Last Autumn starts out with absolutely no evidence you will ever engage with temperature mechanics. Eventually the temperature will start dropping, but it's not immediately clear whether you'll have to engage with temperature mechanis. Finally, you get told that you'll be cut off from suppy shipments due to the ocean freezing, disabling your Docks and Fishin Harbours and denying you Telegraph Station shipments. You get several days warning on this last point, but what's not clearly communicated is that if you don't complete the Generator before the big freeze hits, completing the Generator won't end the scenario. You'll have to weather the big freeze's entire duration to actually get to victory. As this whole thing is sprung on you with only modest warning and very little clarity on the true implications of the whole thing, it's entirely possible to go into it extremely unprepared, with barely any food in storage, a dubious supply of Coal to keep heat running through the whole thing...

... and most frustrating to me is the consideration of an event that fires shortly before the big freeze starts, where a noticeable fraction of your people will leave. The game's own framing really makes it seem like you ought to prefer to employ violence to ensure as many people as possible stay, but you'd have to play pretty strangely or very badly in specific ways for this to be liable to be true; in actuality, having a bunch of people leave at that point is almost certainly a blessing, reducing how many people your stockpiled Rations need to feed and potentially letting you reduce Coal expenditures on keeping housing warm. Meanwhile, the loss of labor is unlikely to be consequential: with the big freeze happening, you'll lose 40 employees worth of job slots just from the Docks/Fishing Harbours ceasing to function. You probably are also out of trees to cut down, you'll probably have little need to man the Cookhouse in short order, labor pulling resources from the Docks-made piles will become increasingly irrelevant... once the big freeze hits, you'll likely have your Maximum Ability To Put Employees To Work drop by upwards of 100~ employees. So you really should just let people leave without issue: the game offering the option to try to prevent this is more or less always a trap.

Third and final is that I find it frustrating that Automatons aren't in The Last Autumn. I understand that they were set up to require an active Generator to function, and I get that their mechanic of 'covers an entire worksite regardless of human labor cap' would be deeply problematic alongside the Generator components, but The Last Autumn makes many custom changes in support of its scenario, and The Last Autumn's mechanical framework would both sidestep some of the fundamental flaws with how Automatons fit into other scenarios (Buying Automatons from the Telegraph Station would be in place of buying human labor, whether you did it directly or bought Steam Cores and built them yourself, thus sidestepping the whole 'but I already have plenty of human labor' issue) and also would be a great fit to The Last Autumn's narrative focus.

I'll be getting into this more in later pages, but The Last Autumn is very focused on class warfare, the people at the top exploiting the people at the bottom, and it would've been very natural for an expression of this to be the option of shipping in steampunk robots to do manual labor instead of hiring human labor that needs a job to live. But no... the only representation Automatons get in The Last Autumn is a loading screen tip where you get told they were deemed 'too valuable' to risk on the Generator construction projects (??) plus you'll hear partway through the scenario of Automaton war machines being used to suppress riots. That's the entirety of their existence here. This feels to me like one of The Last Autumn's biggest missed opportunities.

Lastly, a comment about Extreme: while The Last Autumn isn't as bad as other scenarios about having The One Correct Path at the beginning of the scenario, you really ought to get two Workshops up pretty quickly so you can get your first research finished before night 2, and it probably ought to be Forager's Quarters first so you can both ship out 15 people to stop eating local food and make sure the first batch of Raw Food they send home actually arrives quickly enough for people to not starve. With just one Workshop, you won't quite finish your first research before the second night, which is an annoyingly big swing in hours that is particularly pertinent to Forager's Quarters.

Otherwise, The Last Autumn's early game is sufficiently straightforward and forgiving that even on Extreme I don't really feel like you're forced into doing Extremely Specific Things In An Extremely Specific Order.

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Next time, we cover Administration Laws.

See you then.