Time to side with the intellectual elite and beat the working class! all Worker/Engineer Laws are only visible 1 step out, annoyingly inspectorate scales count to Engineers (Probably actually to Efficiency) Convicts work most places Workers work, but must be guarded at all times at both ends. insufficient Overseers to Convicts overall can lead to riots convicts don't build/demolish Forced Labor free-ish no non-Safety sites. doubles other modifiers Engineer housing less horrible than I remembered.(doesn't force homelessness, can upgrade tents) still lame Factory Inspectorate Requires: Nothing. Law Cooldown: 48 hours. Unlocks the Factory Inspectorate and initiates a quest to build it in 2 days. The building! jank: refuses to inspect places you're not working at, and this includes that promising a Strike you'll improve Workplace Safety is impossible to help with the Inspectorate Factory Inspectorate Costs 60 Wood and 25 Steel. Size 8x5 Manned by up to 10 Engineers at all hours. +2 Heat, improves Workplace Safety by 1 at up to 3 buildings, preferring to prioritize the most dangerous locations, with the workplace count scaled to assigned Engineers. Only one can exist at any given moment. Alright? To be honest, I basically never have three places that use Workplace Safety running at once. Phase 1 only has two worksites of any relevancy, and normally you'll run one, then the other. Phase II has 4 relevant workplacs, but normally you'll only be running up to two at once: constructing necessary materials, followed by the building itself. Phase IV only has two pieces to build, and of course it's the final phase so even though each part requires two types of resources be built, there's seriously no reason to have 3 workplaces running for most of that stretch; once you can start the second part, you don't need to build any more resources. It's only in Phase III of the Generator construction that you have decent odds of actually caring about improved safety at three different buildings for a rasonably long period. Since the Inspectorate doesn't do anything like 'stack' its benefits onto a building if you're only operating one building that cares about Workplace Safety, it's prone to giving less than its full theoretical value. Tying up 10 Engineers is also a pretty hefty price. I'm... admittedly unsure if loading it fully vs not matters at all, but at least when 'playing honestly', you're going to want 40 Logistical Capacity of Engineers prepped before committing to Engineers, which is pretty pricy; it's around 2 days of Logistical Capacity, for reference. (Exact count depending on difficulty) You need this awkward thing if you're committing to Engineers, though, and it is a passive Workplace Safety improvement, which is genuinely nice; you can run 1 less Ventilation Plant than when committing to Workers, or use Safety Procedures less so work gets done faster, or more easily hit -0 Safety on Generator components to trivialize the forced Accidents. Also note that Factory Inspectorate has two events it eventually triggers. One is a choice between +10% global Efficiency for 2 days vs -2 Strike Risk for 2 days. I'm... not sure why you'd ever want to go for the Strike Risk reduction. 10% Efficiency isn't a lot, but it applies to literally all workplaces, so the total impact is liable to be decently high, and the event is more or less guaranteed to fire so early that Strikes are unlikely, and if you've reserved Bath House and Public House, your first two Strikes are basically consequence-free. The second event is your Engineers pushing you to pass Overseers. You can either commit to passing it in the next two days, or go 'I'll think about it' and suffer a minor Discontent hit. The Factory Inspectorate's general concept is... fine? Kinda? The framing the game itself offers is that it's about making sure the Workers are following the rules, because what Frostpunk is going for with this tree is the Engineers turning into control freaks, but honestly this whole bit makes plenty of sense as 'the Inspectorate is checking for potential problems and getting them preemptively solved'. While Frostpunk is vague about Engineers, it's most consistent about them being experts on, y'know, engineering, and that's sensible to act as a basis for spotting problems that a layperson might not readily notice on their own in the context of a construction site. Next Law! Internal Promotion Requires: Factory Inspectorate. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Adds the Internal Promotion ability to the Factory Inspectorate. This ability spends 50 Wood and 50 Steel to instantly turn 5 Workers into 5 Engineers and has a cooldown of 24 hours. Passing this Law also slightly increases Motivation. Huh? What? This is possibly the most confusing, or perhaps more accurately the most confused, Law in the Engineer tree. Frankly, possibly in all of Frostpunk 1. First of all, over in the Workers tree one Law you get lets you assign Workers to Engineer-specific jobs, and they're terrible at such jobs and for medical jobs they will literally get people killed with their ignorance. But over here in the Engineer tree where we mistrust those foolish ignorant Workers and the glorious Engineers must put an ever-tighter leash upon them to make sure they don't screw things up... we get the option of slapping 5 Workers on the back and saying "Yer an Engineer, Harry!" and having these Workers go do tasks requiring an education is... totally safe?? This is deeply confusing. Second, this is deeply thematically dissonant with the rest of this Law tree. The Engineer path is all about Engineer Snobbery, looking down upon and mistrusting those Ignorant Workers because they didn't go to university, a class warfare that entrenches the class divide, but it... includes meritorious promotions whereby the lowly Workers can escape their class? Huh? Third, this is perhaps the most representative example of The Last Autumn making a broad mistake in assessment: in other scenarios, your Engineers are clearly more valuable than Workers and you're always glad to have more, and The Last Autumn seems to believe that Engineers are still more valuable than Workers in it as well, putting their Logistical Capacity cost at twice that of Workers and giving you this option to spend a good chunk of resources on turning Workers into Engineers... but in The Last Autumn, Engineers are a specialist option you don't need very many of. Unlike in other scenarios, Engineers cannot work almost all jobs that Workers can work; only a tiny handful of buildings allow either at them, with the overwhelming majority of your labor needs being for Workers. While Internal Promotion has some value for letting you get more out of your Logistical Capacity, it's not much, and frankly the main reason it has any value is that the Enginers tree specifically increases your Engineer jobs with multiple of its Laws. I basically wish the game had created a 'middle' class of Trusted Workers or something, where you didn't promote Workers to full Engineers but instead to thugs who could be entrusted with some of the violent jobs that we'll be getting into later but still couldn't be assignd to medical buildings, Workshops, etc. That would be more realistic, more consistent with what the Engineer tree is like overall, is absolutely a thing that has happened in real life repeatedly, and if it came with this effect costing a bit less, it would make this whole thing more mechanically worthwhile. Next Law! Overseers Requires: Factory Inspectorate. Law Cooldown: 48 hours. Unlocks Overseer's Station, and initiates a quest to build two within 2 days. The building! Overseer's Station Costs: 15 Wood and 5 Steel. Size 3x2 Manned by up to 5 Engineers at all hours. +1 Heat, raises Efficiency of workplaces in its radius by 15%, but for very workplace covered it also raises Discontent a little. Can be placed within the Generator Build Zone. Has the ability Overseer's Inspection, which costs 10 Food Rations and has a 24-hour cooldown, raises Motivation by 25% for 24 hours, but also increases Discontent and Strike Risk for 24 hours. awful ability that confusingly claims to improve Motivation in nearby workplaces Another big increase to your Engineer needs, demanding 10 more Engineers at minimum and even more if you eg want to get more Efficiency at all your Fishing Harbors/Docks. This is a really big problem with the Engineer route: you have to spend tons and tons of Logistical Capacity on Engineers (Or tons and tons of Wood and Steel on Internal Promotions) to really leverage its benefits, and the benefits aren't very good. Overseer's Inspection is also sucky, since you're spending Rations to get an Efficiency boost at the cost of a Strike being more likely to occur, which can easily put you in the hole for labor, at which point you're just screwing yoursekf all-around. It's also further hampered by having two negative events tied to it, both of whuch firce you to choose between accepting a Motivation loss or suffering an increase to Strike Risk for 2 days. So that's not great. The Overseer's Station is also the first sign of a broader point: siding with the Engineers is Frostpunk revisiting Order and trying to make it a less thematically broken and more mechanically appealing Law set. To the game's credit, it succeeds pretty decently at the thematics being better; the Overseer's Station is essentially a Watch Tower, but where Watch Towers were prison towers shining spotlights on convicts your citizens and this inexplicably improved the mood of the people being watchd, Overseer's Stations upset people exactly the way you'd realistically expect, and the appeal for the player is using this to squeeze more labor out of people. The 'mechanically worthwhile' part is... much more questionable, unfortunately, and I'm broadly unfond of Frostpunk running with this 'micromanaging people can get more work out of them!' approach being a thing it treats as kind of working other than how much people hate you for doing it. This remains broadly a frustrating aspect of Frostpunk's design, that it so often organizes unethical courses of action as 'objectively superior, it's just unfortunate people hate you when you want them to do the objectively correct thing'. Next Law! Security Outposts Requires: Overseers. Law Cooldown: 48 hours. Unlocks Security Outposts, initiates a quest to build two in 2 days, and immeiately lowers duscontent a little. Huh? Lowers Discontent? Uh, anyway, the building: Security Outpost Costs: 20 Wood and 10 Steel. Size 3x2 Manned by up to 5 Engineers at all hours. +2 Heat, raises Efficiency of workplaces in its radius by 15%, and for very workplace covered it also lowers Discontent a little. Can be placed within the Generator Build Zone. Has the ability Overseer's Inspection, which costs 10 Food Rations and has a 24-hour cooldown, raises Efficiency in nearby workplaces by 25% for 24 hours and slightly increases Motivation, but also increases Discontent and Strike Risk for 24 hours. It's an Overseer's Station, but now they lower Discontent instead of raising it. Frostpunk, come on, you were doing kind of okay at this for a moment there... Security Outposts also have a lot of events associated with them, all bad for you. You'll be asked to pass Strike Busting and suffer a discontent increase if you don't promise to do so, a different event forces you to accept a Motivation loss or a Discontent increase, you'll be asked to dismantle a Security Outpost and if you refuse you'll suffer increased Strike Risk for 2 days, and if you agree, then building another Security Outpost ever again will constitute a 'broken promise' and spike Discontent heavily and also raise Strike Risk for 2 days.... oh, and there's an event pressuring you to pass Penal Colony, where your alternative choices are to kill 5 Workers and suffer a big Discontent spike, or raise Motivation slightly but also raise Discontent and raise Strik Risk for 2 days. Yeah, this is Guard Stations, but with even more crappy events making it suck. Ugh... Next Law. Class Segregation Requires: Security Outposts. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Unlocks Engineer's Lodgings. Engineers will no longer assign themselves to Tents. What are Engineer's Lodgings? Well... Engineer's Lodgings Costs 35 Wood and 25 Steel. Size 3x2 Houses up to ten Engineers, who will sometimes pretend to sleep inside this building. +3 Heat. Ostensibly affects Motivation somehow. Upgrade to Tent. ... they're Houses. They are literally just Houses. Same cost, same graphic, same statline. They just tack on the Motivation thing, whuch is... lackluster. And no, you can't upgrade Tents into these. And yes, passing this Law instantly renders all your Engineers homeless until you've scrambled to build enough houses for them, imposing a substantial Discontent penalty that will almost certainly raise Strike Risk if you don't get it fixed basically immediately. And yes you're expected to have 50+ Engineers by the time you pass this Law, so you're going to need probably at least 175 Wood an 125 Steel at the ready... oh, and this is in fact affecte by Crowded Quarters and Comfortable Quarters, so if you're giving your Engineers super-cushy living spaces it'll be easily over 300 Wood and 200 Steel you need ready. This Law is particularly terrible on Normal where it's super-trivial to complete the Generator before the temperature starts dropping and so the +2 Heat advantage over Tents has no relevancy, but even on Hard and Extreme where it's more expected that you'll be dealing with the temperature drop, this is a supremely janky Law that gives barely any benefit while being rather costly. Yikes! Next Law! Strike Busting Requires: Security Outposts. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Security Outposts gain the Strike Busting ability. This can be used to instantly end a Strike within that Security Outpost's range, but Workers will become Ill as a result, with a small chance of outright dying, and Discontent rises when using Strike Busting. Passing this Law also raises Discontent immediately. This is basically the only part of the Engineer Law tree that more or less makes sense. It's still a janky Law that doesn't work very well, mind. For starters, Strike Risk isn't a problem so long as you keep Workplace Safety at decent values, unless you're making event choices that increase Strike Risk; I never used Strike Busting in my original Engineer-siding run, and this was only my second run where I was still very clueless about The Last Autumn's mechanics. And even if you get some Strikes, you can appease them really cheaply with Bath House and Public House initially. Even jankier is that Strike Busting comes with a three-part event chain that ostensibly is caused by actually using Strike Busting, but in actuality will occur even if you've never used Strike Busting, and indeed even if you've never had any Strikes beyond the mandatory one. Narratively, a 'popular strike leader' goes missing. Again, even if no such person should exist. You get to choose between stopping all work on the Generator for 4 hours or blowing off the Workers and suffering a Discontent hit; note that the game is perfctly happy to have this event fire in the middle of the night, where you might not care at all about 'stopping work'. If you choose to stop work, a second event fires where you get a free Motivation boost because the Workers appreciate you not immediately giving up on the strike leader. ither way, the final event will fire at some later point, where an Engineer will admit that they killed the strike leader (Ostensibly on accident) and then dumpe his body in freshly-poured concrete under the Generator. You get to pick between punishing this Engineer, suffering a Discontent hit for doing so, or endorsing the murder, in which case Strike Risk is permanently reduced by 1 but Workers will periodically be vanished. So yeah, you implement Strike Busting, and your Engineers want to turn this into secret police nonsense. Okay. Next Law... Penal Colony Requires: Security Outposts. Law Cooldown: 48 hours. Unlocks the Penal Colony, initiates a quest to build one within 2 days, and unlocks the option to order Convicts from the Telegraph Station for 1 Logistical Capacity apiece. Convicts can only work most Worker-exclusive jobs (Plus Cookhouses, but not the Public House) but only if a manned Security Outpost is currently covering the building in question, and must be housed in a Penal Colony. Oh boy, we're returning to the Prison and trying to make it less obviously awful. Let's loo at its building: Penal Colony Costs 25 Wood and 40 Steel. 5x3 size Acts as housing for up to 25 Convicts. (Not affected by Crowded Quarters or Comfortable Quarters) +2 Heat. If you have more Convicts than Penal Colony capacity, Motivation will fall slightly, and Convicts have a chance of vanishing forever. If a Penal Colony is not covered by a Security Outpost, the Penal Colony will not function, potentially triggering the aforementioned problems. If your ratio of Convtcts to Security Outposts is too skewed toward Convicts, this can result in riots. not affected by Chapel (bath house?). can move into Care House, which feels unintended Alright, this is... genuinely slightly less awful than Order's Prison. Instead of managing Discontent by tying up labor, which is a terrible trade, the concept here is that you're making up for your 'top-heavy' Engineer focus by piling in cheap labor that the Engineers need to watch at all times, with the Penal Colony being the housing for this cheap labor. It doesn't really work in my book anyway, mind. The need to cover the Penal Colonies with Security Outposts is awkward, requiring careful pre-planning to ensure you're not needing 20 extra Logistical Capacity of Engineers for every 25 Convicts you want working; if you don't manage the preplanning necessary to make those Engineers 'free', that's 25 laborers at a Logistical Capacity cost of 45 Logistical Capacity. This is technically more efficient than shipping in 25 Workers, but you're only saving 10% Logistical Capacity in that scenario. You're also spending 5 extra Food Rations to keep this running, which is a problem sibce food in The Last Autumn isn't super-generous. That's also when taking the 'local' view, where it's most favorable to this whole 'prison labor' thing because I get to ignore the Logistical Capacity cost of putting Engineers on Security Outposts for every worksite you value. In actuality, siding with Engineers over Workers obligates you to spend a minimum of 80 Logistical Capacity on Engineers, and more likely you'll be spending 120-160 Logistical Capacity on them, unless you spend hundreds of Wood and Steel on converting Workers into Engineers. Either way, this 'cheap labor' option is burdened by significant expenses, including the costs in building Penal Colonies themselves: Workers only need 10 Wood per 10 heads by default for a Tent, whereas each Penal Colony imposes a significant Steel cost, when Steel is always precious and Wood is... not so precious. Convicts also basically require you to commit to the bit, as something the game doesn't warn you about is that if a worksite has both Workers and Convicts assigned simultaneously, this adds +2 Strike Risk. (To be fair, running only Convicts on a worksite instead makes Strikes basically impossible) As such, you can't just ship in 20 Convicts to push a Generator site from 30 laborers to 50 laborers and expect this to work out. Convicts also can't be assigned to any duties except building the Generator and its special resources, and between these two points integrating Convicts into your workforce is not smoothly done without a certain amount of pre-planning, such as saving up enough Logistical Capacity to ship in 50 Convicts all at once so you can hard-switch to them handling tasks like building the Core, or arranging things so you'll order 20 and have them take over the Machine Shop or Foundry while Workers focus on other tasks. Their limited range of duties gets particularly painful if you end up not completing the Generator before the freeze but do complete it noticeably before the freeze thaws, as they become completely useless at that point. There's a partial solution to that, but... we'll get to that. On top of all these rough aspects, Penal Colony being passed also prompts multiple negative events. There's an event prompting you to pass Roundups, and if you refuse to promise that you get a Motivation loss. Your first batch of Convicts arriving inexplicably results in your Workers greeting them with violence, and you get to choose between 'Discontent rises' or 'Discontent falls, but several Convicts become Ill'. Lastly, bigotry against the Irish occurs, which prompts you to choose between 'Discontent rises' and 'Motivation falls'. It's warmer than Tents, which is even more funny/janky than the Order Prison being oddly warm since there's no pulling ahead of the Penal Colony for your Worker housing. From a more narrative standpoint, the Penal Colony system also works better than Order's Prisons, but still doesn't work well. The game hasn't really given itself the mechanisms for this to land right: for example, the game directly references the notion that prison labor undercuts regular labor, so even free workers are worse off when prison labor gets thrown into the labor pool (Because now they have to compete with ultra-cheap labor), but you, the player, don't cut checks to anyone. The closest thing to a regular paycheck the game has as a mechanic is the need to feed people, which no, Convicts don't eat less or something, and Logistical Capacity only barely gestures in the direction of uneven pay. Even indirect representation doesn't really exist; Convicts don't threaten the existing Worker jobs, because you can't ship out Workers to ship in their Logistical Capacity in Convicts or anything of the sort, and even if you could the fact that Convicts are so narrow in their allowed jobs means they literally can't displace Workers for the majority of the jobs in the scenario. So even generously ignoring that paychecks have no mechanical existence, the game fails to properly represent this hazard it's explicitly pointing to. Nor does the game bring in any of the real-life perverse incentives prison labor can produce, not properly. It gestures at one of them, and I'll get to that in a minute, but overall they're just not present. It also is one of the clearer examples of the Law system straining against the context of The Last Autumn. In most scenarios, the player is the Generator Tyrant, unquestioned ruler of all whose word is law, with no higher powers. In The Last Autumn, you are playing what amounts to a kind of middle manager, given a task by distant rulers and relying on the willingness (and ability) of the people above you to support your decisions. With most Laws you can kind of gloss over this because the Generator project is isolated and all, but this is a Law that hinges on Britain being telegraphed "Hey, can you ship over a bunch of prisoners for me to use as cheap labor?" and whoever all is at the other end just going "Sure!" and that's the end of the matter. I'd sooner expect the decision of whether to use prison labor at this site to be something hand down from above, and if indeed the foreman of this project made such a request when their bosses did not impose it in the first place, I'd expect this to not be so straightforward as just 'Yeah, okay, here you go." It would've made much more sense for Convicts to simply be a mandatory mechanic, introduced automatically not long after the Telegraph Station was unlocked, and for regular shipments of Convicts to occur outside the player's control, or let the player buy them as per the actual game but for there to be some kind of pushback if the player doesn't buy a regular quota of Convicts, the folks back in Britain complaining they need to empty their prisons and you're Not Doing Your Part if you don't help empty the prisons back home. The actual implementation is just... eeeeh... Next Law! Rationalized Healthcare Requires: Penal Colony. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Enables the Rationalized Healthcare toggle at Penal Colonies. Whule this toggle is active, Convicts no longer receive medical care, and if they die they are 'buried beneath the Generator', meaning they don't add to your bodies count for Morgue or Cemetery purposes. This is the 'partial solution' to Convict problems I mentioned earlier: just work them to death! It... somewhat helps with how leaning on Convict labor makes it much easier to overload your medical system, and it's an option for 'phasing out' Convicts when you're either close to completing the Generator or have already completed it but the freeze has already hit. They'll get sick, then die with minimal consequences to you, and so stop eating food and needing a place to sleep. It's a slow way of doing it though, and frankly I'd rather the game had given you a button to execute the prisoners en mass when you're done with them. Make clicking it prompt a little cinema of Engineers shooting one prisoner after another, followed by cutting to bodies thrown in a big pile without care, do your best to communicate to the player that this is brutal and ugly. Maybe throw in screaming and sobbing to really rub in how horrific this is. It would have the bonus side effect of being more mechanically useful. Next Law! Roundups Requires: Penal Colony. Law Cooldown: 48 hours Security Outposts gain the 'Roundup' ability, which converts up to 15 Workers into Convicts, but significantly raises discontent on use. Has a 1-day cooldown. Passing this Law also raises Discontent immediately. The first time you actually use Roundups, it triggers an event going basically 'are you sure?' If you back down, Motivation falls and nobody gets turned into a Convict, while if you stick it out Discontent rises. There's also an event where you choose between 'Motivation falls slightly' and 'Discontent rises and a single Engineer becomes Ill', plus another event pushing you to pass Servitude, which for once going 'not now' is mechanically optimal, giving free Motivation. Roundups itself is... potentially appealing if you do in fact plan to go to Servitude. If you're not planning on doing that, though, basically the only use I can see for it is to combine it with Rationalized Healthcare in an attempt to thin out your population so they're less likely to starve en mass during the freeze. Convicts are worse Workers, and you can ship in Convicts more cheaply than Workers: turning Workers into Convicts is only beneficial if you're just really struggling with Strike Risk, which yeah, the Engineer tree tries to make hat more of a problem, but... not really necessary, certainly not on Normal. wish it was after Servitude, not before Next, final Law for Engineers! Servitude Requires: Roundups. Law Cooldown: 48 hours. Unlocks Panopticon, and initiates a quest to built it in 2 days. Completing this quest slightly raises Motivation. Yeah, the apex of the Engineer tree is to fully embrace slavery. Here's the building: Panopticon Costs: 100 Steel. Size 3x8? Only one can exist at any given moment. Must be placed within the Generator Build Zone. (Has 5 separated segments visually, but only one matters mechanically) Has the toggle Forced Labor: while Forced Labor is active, Convicts provide twice as much Efficiency (So long as their workplace has only Convicts), but Workplace Safety is worsened by 3 anywhere Convicts are assigned. Addditionally, a Convict will periodically die so long as Forced Labor is active. monitors Convicts when selected, which is thematic but not mechanically meaningful. no cinema or anything; weirdly low-key forced labor deaths can happen really quickly, somewhat exasperatingly visual design is basically opposite of the original panopticon concept: original is central and faces outward, game version is a ring outside facing inward Real quick: this also has three events. One where you choose between raising Motivation or lowering Discontent, another where you either raise Discontent or can make Forced Labor actually lower Discontent while active but at the cost of also raising the rate Convicts get sick, and lastly there's an event where teenagers are part of your most recent batch of Convicts and you choose between ignoring that or sending 15 Convicts back. So here we are at the end of the Engineer tree, and it's Order's Orwellian nightmare revisited, this time focusing less on the personal tyranny of the player and more on an omnipreseent judgmental gaze demanding more and more work of everyone. A panopticon, if you're not familiar, is the idea of arranging things so a large number of people are potentially visible to a much smaller number of watchers, but the watchers cannot be seen by the people they are watching. The idea is that the watched must paranoidly assume at all times they personally are being watched, and therefore don't engage in misbehavior away from the eyes of the watchers because they can't know for sure their misbehavior will go undetected. Frostpunk will actually namedrop the man who originally put forth the concept when pressing you to pass Servitude, and interestingly this is one of the few cases where Frostpunk comes across as meaningfully informed about the relevant history: the panopticon concept as formulateed in the lat 1700s, and the British government did in fact make several attempts at executing the concept in the early 1800s, so The Last Autumn occurring in 1886 and having a British company tempted to build one is actually pretty on-point as plausible alternate hisory, especially the part where it's tied to prison use; while the man who came up with the original concept imagined it as a pretty broad type of structure, it was most heavily used for prisons, and indeed the British government liked the idea in part because they were trying to put prisoners to use on practical labor, exactly as you use Convicts in The Last Autumn. Anyway, if the Panopticon concept sounds to you like a horrific nightmare that is unlikely to improve behavior and far more likely to unhinge people entirely, then you have correctly predicted how it tends to work out in reality. Frostpunk sadly doesn't seem all that cognizant of this aspect of subecting people to panopticons, instead viewing it primarily through the lens of being an unethical way to extract more work from employees... this lens admittedly has a lot of relevancy to modern audience given the depressing number of corporations and countries that are actively utilizing 'digital panopticons' and/or wish to push the concept to still further extremes with no explanation for how they imagine his to be a good idea, but I'm still underwhelmed by how the game doesn't really make the Panopticon seem all that horrifying a concept. Mechanically, the Panopticon is kind of necessary to justify going for Convicts. Doubling their output finally makes them potentially worth all the bother of setting up this entire prison labor situation... though the massive Workplace Safety penalty makes it a dicey proposition on the most dangerous parts of Generator construction. Once the Core is built and the poison gas mechanic is done, you can power through with the Factory Inspectorate and 1-2 Ventilation Plants, getting the super-massive labor nearly for free, but prior to that point you're probably going to be risking Accidents potentially substantially offsetting the value of your cheap and quick-working labor force. It's probably mechanically optimal to pass Servitude when the Core is completed or close to compltion to abuse Forced Labor. It's... not really necessary, but it's probably 'correct play' when doing an Engineer-siding run. -------------------------------------- Overall, siding with the Engineers is a return to Order's themes of authoritarianism, with several specific concepts revisited and trying to make them less mechanically terrible. Compared to Order vs Faith, Engineers vs Workers isn't so blatantly stacked toward one path being mechanically stronger, but as we'll be getting into next page, it's... still pretty stackd, hampered by issues like The Last Autumn not recognizing that Engineers aren't actually very valuable in it thanks to the changes it's made. Its narrative components are undercut even more than Order's, though, haunted by an issue that plagues all of Frostpunk's scenario: the game is terribly preoccupied with factionalism for its purely narrative components, but has laid almost no mechanical groundwork for exploring such within gameplay. What mechanics it does have that offer potential for such seem to go essentially unrecognized in their potential to support the factionalism narrative. For example, within The Last Autumn itself, a recurring thing in events is for the player to be asked to side with the Workers or to side with the Engineers on some topic or another, and a decent portion of these specifically have one choice impact Motivation while the other choice impacts Discontent in a parallel manner. (ie "Do you want Motivation improved, or Discontent improved?" or "Do you want Motivation worsened, or Discontent worsened?") It's pretty easy to imagine a version of The Last Autumn that didn't have Discontent and Motivation, but instead had 'Worker Motivation' and 'Engineer Loyalty' or whatever: point is, have one meter cover how the Workers feel about the player's decisions, while the other meter covers how the Engineers feel. This is a path using the game's existing mechanisms to support the factionalism narrative, but... while The Last Autumn did rework the two meters, it still fundamentally stuck with the assumption that each meter covers the overall opinion of all your citizens. Decisions like this severely limit the game's ability to properly engage with the factionalism themes: siding with one faction can't give targeted benefits or penalties through core mechanics. If a decision is mechanically received positively, it's functionally endorsed by everyone, even anyone who explicitly hates it. This really hampers this 'Workers vs Engineers' concept, and the Engineers end in particular gets nothing to properly support it: Strike Risk can be argued as a mechanic for representing specifically Worker opinions since Engineers can't be assigned to any of the relevant workplaces by default, but there isn't a parallel mechanic for Engineers in specific getting very upset. (Or pleased) The Last Autumn suffers this worst since it puts the class conflict very explicitly front and center, but all the prior scenarios have shades of this same problem: A New Home wants society to be split between the Londoner movement wanting to suicidally flee back to London and everybody else correctly assessing that this is a terrible plan, and both the Purpose paths touch some on further fracturing, such as how passing The Temple in Faith prompts commentery about people not part of The One Faith being pushed to the periphery, and Order broadly trying to depict an authoritarian society developing with a full Us Vs Them mentality between loyalists to the regime and everyone else. The Refugees touches heavily on class warfare in its own right, but in an awkward manner that only kind of works if you specifically refuse to let the nobles in, because once they're in your city the game loses any ability to distinguish between them an your other citizens. The Fall of Winterhome focuses more on fractures in unity forming because not everyone can make it out alive, but this has shades of factionalism to it, shades the game can't follow through on. The Arks is the only (non-Endless) scenario in Frostpunk that arguably lacks factionalism as a concept, and it still touches on it a little with how you get some people going 'we must help the poor city over ther!' and others going 'not if it endangers our mission'; if The Arks weren't designed to be so, so easy to complete your core objectives and also maximally help the other city (Even on Extreme), this actually would have some factional tension to it. It's not until On The Edge that Frostpunk seems to properly recognize that if it wants to do factionalism things, it needs to be able to track factional opinions rather than global opinions. My impression is that Frostpunk 2 at last recognizes this desire to focus on factionalism and builds in serious mechanical support, but as of this writing I've no experience with Frostpunk 2, so I'll be only modestly srprised if I get to the game and it turns out to not be that. That's for another day, though. -------------------------------------- Next time, we look at what the Workers' bloody revolution results in. See you then.