Purpose Laws! These are kind of annoyingly complicated to cover the broad strokes of, because scenario design is moderately variable in regards to Purpose Laws, and in particular their 'default' behavior is not their behavior in the 'default scenario' of A New Home. So first of all: Purpose Laws are entirely inapplicable in The Arks, The Last Autumn, and On The Edge; you simply don't get them in those scenarios. I'm... not sure why this is so for On The Edge, but the other two scenarios make perfect sense on this point. Second: in The Refugees, The Fall of Winterhome, and all Endless Mode setups, you immediately have access to Purpose Laws with absolutly no fanfare. You probably shouldn't go straight to them, mind, but you can. Third: in A New Home exactly and specifically, Purpose Laws will start out hidden, but eventually you will be forced into immediatly and permanently committing to either Faith or Order. This is presented as necessary to resolve the schism of the Londoners wanting to run back to London, and so both Purpose branches have some mechanics for interacting with the Londoner count. This unfortunately lacks an equivalent utility in other scenarios, producing moderate jank around Purpose Law design when you're playing other scenarios. Purpose Laws themselves are much more, uh, purposeful about the 'Laws as a research tree' and 'Laws that are mutually exclusive' design elments that showed up in Adaptation: for starters, both of these are core to Purpose itself being divided into a Faith tree and an Order tree: House of Prayer gates all other Faith Laws and blocks all Order Laws by virtue of being incompatible with Neighborhood Watch, and of course Neighborhood Watch is the same in reverse. That's, rather oddly, the only time Purpose uses Law incompatibility, which is... kind of weird... and the Law tree aspect is far from perfect in its design, but still, it's not nearly as confusing as Adaptation about these broad design elements. This page is starting with Order even though visually Faith is 'first' (Faith is up, Order is down) predominately because the entire Purpose tree feels built around Order's concept with Faith kind of forced into Order's framework purely because of the dev desire to preseent the player with a Significant Choice regarding the Londoner movement. I'll explain this more properly at the end of this page, but for the moment I'll point out that The Last Autumn's new Law trees revisit all this stuff but integrate some Faith elements into the Adaptation-equivalent while Order elements get directly recycled for the new Purpose-type Big Choice In Response To A Crisis, consistent with my read of the Purpose tree. Anyway, first it's time for the root of Order: Neighborhood Watch Enables construction of the Watch Tower building, and initiates a quest to build 2 Watch Towers. Requires: Nothing. Incompatible with House of Prayer, and thus locks off the Faith tree. Law Cooldown: 36 hours. Alright, what's a Watch Tower? Watch Tower Costs 10 Wood and 5 Steel. 4x2 size? Can be manned by up to 5 Workers and/or Engineers. (Children are never valid, even with Child Labor -All Jobs) Has a small radius around it; for each citizen currently assigned to housing within this radius, slightly raises Hope. +1 Heat, is manned at all hours. Oh boy. Okay, this is the point where I wish I could justify starting with Faith first, because a running thread with Order vs Faith is that Order tends to be massively inferior to Faith for no clear design reason, and it would be nice to be able to go 'hey, remember the House of Prayer's parameters? Yeah, Watch Towers are massively inferior in really bizarre ways'. Alas, I must do an annoying semi-out-of-order thing instead. Alright, so there's a bunch of layers to this. House of Prayer and Watch Tower are both fundamentally buildings that put out a radius to raise Hope based on how many people live nearby: their core functionality is essentially identical. The details then skew heavily in favor of House of Prayer: Watch Towers must be manned, but inexplicably Houses of Prayer don't require assigning people to be priests or something. Order thus imposes a labor tax for getting this Hope bonus that Faith does not. A knock-off consequence to this is that Watch Towers must take up valuable Heat Zone space, and eventually must consume Coal on running their Heaters so their citizens don't start getting frostbite and all, whereas Houses of Prayer apparently have everyone telecommute or something because there's no need to keep them warm at all because nobody ever sets foot inside of them. Order thus imposes city planning strain and Coal strain that Faith just... doesn't. Furthermore, Houses of Prayer have a much, much larger radius than Watch Towers. I suspect the internal number is only twice as high, but a doubled radius more than doubles how much space is actually covered by that radius; two Houses of Prayer placed well in a smoothly-planned city can easily cover over 200 citizens all on their own. 4 Watch Towers will not be adequate for that. This, by the way, directly undermines the two obvious advantages of Watch Towers: they cost half the Steel and a third the Wood and take up around half as much space relative to a House of Prayer, but if you're having to build at least twice as many to meet your citizens' needs, that's mmmmaybe a small Wood savings at best. Oh, and for some reason the House of Prayer comes innately with an ability to inject some Hope in for literally free every 2 days, whereas Wach Towers get... nothing. What the heck game, why is this so blatantly and heavily stacked against Watch Towers? The only meaningful advantage Neighborhood Watch has over House of Prayer is that it's much easier to break into Order than Faith super-early if that's what you want to do, since both Laws require 2 copies of their respective structure for their quest: Faith demanding 60 Wood and 20 Steel upfront is genuinely quite taxing in the early game, whereas Order demanding 20 Wood and 10 Steel to get started is much more reasonable to squeeze into an early-game budget. But this itself comes with big qualifiers regarding the respective payoffs for delving into each Purpose branch... Watch Tower is even more baffling from a narrative standpoint. We set up prison-style watch towers across the city, and regular citizens feel better as a result? Excuse me? This is so self-evidently complete nonsense I'm having trouble finding the words to explain it, especially because I have difficulty imagining an actual human being even needing it explained to them. How does one look at this and go, 'Yeah, I'd feel happier if my neighborhood installed watch towers so people could watch us quite literally like hawks at all hours of the day'. I'd maybe be able to accept it if Frostpunk had actual external enemies as a core part of gameplay and Watch Towers were explained as 'our people feel safer knowing somebody is watching for potential attackers'. The mechanics and visuals would still be very, very incongruous, mind, but I'm plenty willing to accept gameplay simplifications that end up looking kind of absurd or terrible if taken literally. This isn't that, though. I'm also not necessarily critical of the idea of your citizens cheering on the passing of a Law that's really obviously 1984-esque creepy dystopian behavior. While I personally will probably never understand the thought process of such people, there is an abundance of evidene that real people can and do cheer on laws that are self-evidently going to be extremely bad for them personally, somehow not predicting the obvious outcome. But that's not what Frostpunk is doing here. You, the Generator Dictator, are not passing this Law with rhetoric about safety and then having people slowly realize that what's actually being implemented is an unnerving police state dystopia; they're mechanically genuinely pleased to be sitting under Big Brother's watchful eye, and remain so forever. The fact that they raise Hope is especially wild; if they lowered Discontent, I'd be less sure how to read that, as Frostpunk's Discontent has similar undertones to eg Unrest in Master of Magic, where lowering this Unhappiness Quotient can mean 'people are less unhappy' but can also mean 'people are less willing to act upon their unhappiness'. In that case, I'd be unsure whether the game intended for the effect to be 'people like this' or 'your watchmen scare them into compliance'. But Hope lacks this murkiness: with 1 (Or 2, depending on how you count it) very clear exception, Hope going up/being high is a very clear 'people approve' indicator. I get that the devs probably wanted House of Prayer and Watch Tower to have mechanical symmetry, but then why are they so unalike in other problematic ways? I also get that the Londoners mechanic is anchored in Hope and both Purpose branches are supposed to be about the Londoners, but that could've been achieved some other way, such as borrowing the Temple's 'a wrongdoer has mended their ways' mechanic I'll be covering next page. Watch Towers/Neighborhood Watch is one of Frostpunk's most baffling collages of decisions... Oh, but on a more trivial note, a bit with Frostpunk I actually do like a lot is the consideration of Mr Announcer Guy, the fellow who tells everyone to go to work every morning and go rest every evening. See, his announcements are actually changed by your Purpose Laws! In the case of Neighborhood Watcch, he switches from sounding like he's just doing Town Crier 'speak very loudly' stuff to now sounding like he's being heard through old-fashioned intercom-type speaker systems, specifically the kind you might see on a military base back in the day. It also changes his lines in the sense of using different words and even expressing completely new sentiments. Advancing further down Order will further change his lines; I've not pinned down the full list of exact 'this Law triggers this change' and probably won't ever bother, but the effect is pretty nice, especially regarding a topic I'll be getting to... later. Morning Gathering Each morning, citizens will gather around the Generator, slightly raising Hope each time this happens. Passing this Law also immediatly raises Hope. Requires: Neighborhood Watch. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. As a gameplay thing, Morning Gathering is pretty straightforward: you want it signed at some point since it's basically free Hope. It's slightly annoying that it adds a new daily task for citizens, as it affects pathing and whatnot, which can matter in janky ways, but that's more commentary on how careless Frostpunk was with citizen behavior design than anything else. My main frustration with Morning Gathering is that it makes so much more sense as the entry point to Order than Neighborhood Watch. You could dump Neighborhood Watch entirely -and I guess replace it with somehing else so both Purpose branches have the same 11 Laws- and make Order way less terrible of a branch just right there, and it would completely sidestep the absurdity of 'I love being monitored at all hours!' being the Order entry point. Anyway, the biggest reason to want Morning Gathering is it leads to: Foreman Enables the Foreman ability at any workplace that is valid for Extended Shift and Emergency Shift. Activating this ability raises Efficincy at that workplace by 40% for the next 24 hours. This ability costs 10 Food Rations to activate and has a cooldown of 2 days. Requires: Morning Gathering. Law Cooldown: 18 hours Foreman is unique among Order Laws for genuinely having nothing meaningfully equivalent over in Faith. This makes it basically the only serious argument for committing to Order instead of Faith, and it's genuinely a pretty decent Law. 40% more Efficiency is a pretty big boost, especially if combined with Emergency Shift or applied to a workplace manned by an Automaton so the full 24 hours of its effect can be leveraged. Hothouses are particularly straightforward her, as applying Foreman to a Hothouse that's on Extended Shifts or under Emergeny Shift will be net positive on Food even when talking a basic Hothouse on Extreme (So long as it's fully manned), and in general if Food is a solved issue it can readily translate to bringing in all resources moderately faster with minimal issues. It goes especially well with Automatons, as its effect on Efficiency is additive with their innate Efficiency modifier. Thus, a workplace staffed by humans rises from 100% Efficiency to 140%, whereas one staffed by an Automaton rises from 60% Efficiency to 100% Efficiency; that makes such an Automaton produce about 67% more resources than it would without the Foreman. You'll still get more in total from a human-manned workplace under an Emergency Shift plus the Foreman, mind, and there's other problems I'll get to later, but it's good to be aware of this quirk when eg you have enough Food Rations to use Foreman some, but can't just spam it everywhere, and/or if you don't want to use Emergency Shift just then; prioritizing Automatons for Foreman usage will give bigger dividends than you might intuutively expect. Do note that upgrading an Automaton's innate Efficiency ablates this effect; Automatons can reach up to 95% general internal Efficiency, at which point a 40% additive increase is only about a 42% increase over their base. Oh, and note that Foreman will eventually cause an event to trigger where a random active workplace gains +20% Efficiency for 24 hours. I'm moderately unfond of this event, as it's one of the more egregious events about the RNG being able to be (un)helpful in a manner that can genuinely swing a run's chances by a noticeable amount. The event can be amazing if eg it dumps itself on a Steelworks you just used Emergency Shift on because you have desperate need of more Steel right now, or it can be basically useless because it dumps itself on a Cookhouse that's already converting Raw Food into Food Rations faster than the Hothouses are generating Raw Food, or it picks a Gathering Post or Sawmill that's just about to finish anyway, or it picks a resource type you're closing in on your storage capacity for. I especially find it frustrating that it's willing to target Cookhouses, as this is almost guaranteed to be a waste of the event. Anyway, from a pure game design standpoint, Foreman is basically fine. I'd have preferred a less repetitive mechanic, but whatever. My only serious complaint is that it not being available in The Arks to really show off that Automaton synergy is a really disappointing casualty of The Arks not having Purpose Laws. In terms of thematics and narrative elements... ... well, I kind of like the funky synergy with Automatons. I have my doubts this was in any way a planned thing, mind, but the Order branch is broadly a very industrial set of Laws, and it's kind of nice that it's the Purpose branch that finds Automatons more appealing. Otherwise, though, Foreman is... janky. Like first of all that 10 Food Ration price is contextually absurd. I'm paying someone ten days of meals to boss around people for one day? The Food Ration prices on building abilities that spend rations are pretty wacky if you think about them realistically in general, but Foreman is the most egregious example in my book. Shouldn't this be more like 3 Rations? It's also probably the most egregious building ability about spending Rations but not affecting hunger at all: I bribed someone with, again, ten days of meals, but nobody is made less hungry by this? Are my foremen just setting their food bribes on fire? Are they hiding them for later and then forgetting where they put their food bribe? Seriously, what? Related to the above is the janky point that I'm ostensibly putting an additional person in charge, but this has no mechanial reality to it. Just as I am the Tyrant Ghost Ruling From The Generator, I guess I'm bribing other Generator Ghosts to be the Foremen?? Because I clearly don't pull anybody from my actual human population for the job! Probably most frustrating is... this mechanical implementation would honestly make so much more sense if it was 'feed the laborers well so they can work hard'. This would do away with the Ghost Foreman issue, it would make it genuinely more palatable for the food to mechanically vanish into the ether -I'd read it as 'their hard work is directly fueled by and quickly uses up the food'- and it would even make the 10 Ration price perfectly reasonable if a bit game-ified: all standard workplaces are 5, 10, or 15 citizens for a full work crew, so splitting 10 days of food among so many people is vastly more believable than piling it all onto one person somehow. Of course, that wouldn't fit with what Frostpunk is trying to do with Order, but, well, I'll get more into that at the end of the page. Guard Stations Unlocks Guard Stations, which are a direct upgrade to Watch Towers. Immediately slightly raises Discontent, and initiates a quest to build 2 Guard Stations. Requires: Neighborhood Watch. Law Cooldown: 36 hours. You probably can guess the generalities, but here's the details: Guard Station Costs 15 Wood and 10 Steel. 4x2 size? Can be manned by up to 5 Workers and/or Engineers. (Children are never valid, even with Child Labor -All Jobs) Has a small radius around it; for each citizen currently assigned to housing within this radius, slightly raises Hope and slightly lowers Discontent. +2 Heat, is manned at all hours. Having at least one functioning Guard Station in existence also opens up new options for resolving various events, which are usually advantagous. Oh boy, round two. First of all, let's note that Guard Stations and Watch Towers can stack: you can double-up on the Hope bonus if you want by making sure every home is watched by both types of buildings. This is almost certainly a developer oversight. Second, let's note that this worsens the comparison to House of Prayer in regards to resource costs: a Guard Station costs half the Wood as a House of Prayer and the same amount of Steel, while still having a much tinier radius, no larger than the Watch Tower radius. Since the dev intention is pretty clearly you're supposed to move on fully to Guard Stations, Order is seriously just getting screwed on this front. The Guard Station reducing Discontent is technically an advantag Order gets over Faith -Faith is overall a bit worse at reducing Discontent than Order- but I've already been over how Discontent isn't a crucial thing to be able to reduce on demand. I also would in fact argue that Guard Stations are pretty clearly worse than the humble Fighting Arena for Discontent management; you can stack their benefits, of course, but it's still pretty wild that Order has this slightly advanced Law I can genuinely characterize as 'bad Fighting Arena', and actually arranging such stacking puts a fair amount of pressure on your city planning to boot. Third, I find it incredibly frustrating that the event resolution mechanic is inexplicably delayed to here, rather than being tied to Watch Towers. One of the few advantages Order has over Faith is that it can access that mechanic quicker, but... only by 1 Law, or 36 hours, whihver aspect you prefer to focus on. That's something, but Order would be so much more viable if accessing it immediately let you start bullying people into shutting up and working without complaint while Faith had to slog through 2 Laws and 3 full days before it could do the same. It's especially frustrating because of how arbitrary it feels: why is it adding some searchlights and calling the prison towers 'guard stations' instead of 'watch towers' results in the Generator Tyrant being allowed to order his thugs to go threaten people with violence? Third, while Guard Stations are warmer than Watch Towers, they're still frustratingly susceptible to temperature. Like Child Shelters and Care Houses, I'd really have preferred if housing technology passively improved the base Heat of these buildings; more precisely, I wish this was true and also you only had the one tier, either using Morning Gathering as the root for Order or simply going straight to Guard Stations and not bothering with the pretension of a slow slide into... the thing I'll be talking about later... Also, notice that passing this Law raises Discontent: why were my citizens fine with installing a 24-hour surveillance network when I called them 'watch towers', but adding searchlights and calling them 'guard stations' is a step too far?? I seriously don't understood Frostpunk's logic with these buildings. Next Law! Patrol Enables the Patrol building at Watch Towers and Guard Stations. This ability has a global cooldown of 1 day, spends 10 Food Rations, but lowers Discontent and raises Hope. Requires: Guard Stations Law Cooldown: 36 hours. Patrol has a brief event chain: event 1 is a man angry with your decisions, where you choose whether to have Discontent rise or Hope fall. Event 2 is that a woman claims guards have been harassing her under guise of doing their duty; you can suffer a Hope hit for no reason, get a slight Hope increase for free, or get a slightly larger Hope increase in exchange for permanently reducing Patrol's effectiveness in some unspecified way. I'm not actually 100% sure the Patrol loss of effectiveness option actually, y'know, lowers Patrol's effectiveness. I'm inclined to think it does in fact do so, but it's difficult to be sure; it seems to be a pretty small reduction. If it doesn't work, well, then obviously it's the best choice, but if it does function, then the free Hope boost is the thing to go for. This second event is, unfortunately, an example of how Frostpunk semi-regularly designs its events in a manner that is pretty common to this type of multiple choice test mechanic and that I've always been critical of: having multiple options but designing it so that if you know how it actually works at least one option makes zero sense to actually pick. In this case, I framed option 1 as 'you can suffer a Hope hit for no reason'; the game presents it as 'you punish the woman', presumably framing her as a liar or something, where the flavor text suggests there might be possible outcomes a player might plausibly want, but... no, it's just The Wrong Choice. I suspect there is a specific reason Frostpunk does this in this particular case, but I'm not a fan. Anyway, Patrol is, mechanically, something you ought to grab eventually. I wouldn't call it great or anything, but the option is nice, and in A New Home you ideally do aggressively raise Hope, so spamming Patrol if feasible is what you want to do there. It's fine, I guess. Narratively, we return once more to Frostpunk's deep confusion about Order's relationship to public opinion, where patrolling guards improves morale but also fires off events exclusively centered around your citizens being upset by your guards engaging in patrols. sigh Next Law! Propaganda Centre Enables construction of the Propaganda Centre, initiates a quest to build the Propaganda Centre, and immediately slightly raises Discontent. Requires: Guard Stations Law Cooldown: 45 hours. what no game seriously ugh Okay, let's... cover the building whose name really ought to be something less on the nose... Propaganda Centre Costs 40 Wood and 40 Steel. 6x4 size? Employs up to 10 Engineers. Slightly increases Hope so long as it's functioning. (If New Order is signed: instead slightly lowers Discontent so long as it's functioning) Can use the Propaganda Bulletin ability, spending 10 Wood to slightly raise Hope, which has a cooldown of 2 days. +3 Heat, is manned at all hours. Also completely uselessly provides flavor text on what your citizens are upset about. There can only be one Propaganda Centre in the city at any given time. Oh boy, round three. Alright, let's start with that weird, weirdly high Engineer staffing point. First of all, this is another way in which Order gets screwed for no clear reason in very obvious ways: Faith has absolutely no buildings that demand Engineers. Zero. In fact, Faith provides Houss of Healing, which are basically Infirmaries that don't cost a Steam Core and can be manned by anyone (Even Safe Jobs Children!) but slightly slower at healing people, so Faith can massively free up existing Engineer labor; as the game treats Engineers as a precious resource and is largely right to do so, this is a pretty big painpoint for Order. And like... why does it want 10 Engineers? That's rather high: the only normal Engineer-demanding duties in Frostpunk are Medical Posts, Infirmaries, Workshops, Factories, and the Propaganda Centre. Three of these only want up to 5 Engineers innately. Infirmaries want up to 10 by default, but you can upgrade them so they only want 5. This leaves the Propaganda Centre as the only Engineer-demaning builing that just plain wants more than 5 Engineers. Why is it so demanding of Engineers?? This is confusing both from a 'pure game design' perspective and from an 'in-universe narrative' perspective, to be clear. The Propaganda Centre is absolutely not as valuable as... any of the other structures that demands Engineers, so this 'Engineer price' is pretty self-evidently overpriced, whereas narratively... yes, the Engineer vs Worker divide is a very broad and simplistic categorization, but outside of exactly the Propaganda Centre, Engineers are only really treated as a silly hybrid of medical experts and mechanical engineering practitioners; neither of these broad skillsets seems like it has any overlap with propaganda production. Even going more simplistic and framing Engineers as Smart Guys Of All Stripes... propaganda is not something that people stereotypically present as The Domain Of Particularly Intelligent And Educated Individuals. Why isn't this a 'Workers or Engineers' building? Returning more to 'pure game design', the Propaganda Centre also inexplicably repeats the strangeness of the root Purpose Laws: its most direct equivalent is The Temple, which just like the House of Prayer inexplicably does not need to be manned and by extension does not need to be kept warm, so Order once again is suffering a labor tax, a heated space tax, and a Coal tax for benefits Faith gets without any of those issues. Whyyyyy??? Then Propaganda Centre also gets screwed on the layer of event behavior, producing a three-event chain that's largely bad news. First, somebody will uncontrollably die, and you choose between whether to suffer a further Discontent penalty or a further Hope penalty. Then you get a dumb event where you choose between 'raise Discontent AND hurt a number of citizens' and 'raise Hope'. Finally, a third event will try to kill a bunch of people at a workplace, with no indication this has anything to do with the Propaganda Ceentre, and you get another dumb choice of 'have no further consequences' or 'suffer a further Hope penalty'. I say 'try to kill', because the wiki indicates the event can be cheesed both by not clicking on it and also by simply removing all the citizens from the workplace before you click the event. And no, the Temple doesn't have an equivalently unpleasant event chain. It has an event that is good or does nothing depending on your scenario, and a mildly bad event that can fire if you also have a Public House. Basically the only nice thing I can say about the Propaganda Centre is that its activated ability costing Wood to raise Hope is unique and Wood is often your easiest resource to part with in many scenarios. That's... something. ughhhh why is Order designed like this it's so obviously terrible I don't understand how the devs arrived here Prison Enables construction of the Prison, initiates a quest to build a functioning Prison, and immediately slightly raises Discontent. Requires: Guard Stations. Law Cooldown: 45 hours. Well, let's get the building itself covered. Prison Costs 40 Wood and 40 Steel. 5x3 size? Employs up to 10 Workers or Engineers, active all 24 hours, with a base Heat of +3. Only one Prison can exist in the city at any given time. Does literally nothing unless the Roundup ability is used. The Roundup ability has a cooldown of 1 day, greatly lowers Discontent, and locks up a partially-random number of people in the Prison. (Up to 10 at a time. The Prison can only store up to 30 prisoners) Prisoners live in the Prison continuously for 3 days consuming half as many Food Rations and cannot be assigned tasks of any kind. In the A New Home scenario, using Roundup immediately causes the Londoner count to drop by the number people it imprisoned. If a shift of Prison guards fails to have anyon report to work on time, all prisoners will be instantly released and a huge Discontent penalty will be applied until at last on guar rports to work, at which point all prisoners will be locked back up. (The Discontent penalty only applies if prisoners were actually released) Using Roundup and ending up with more people selected as prisoners than the Prison has capacity will also leave prisoners free and result in a significant Discontent penalty until there's enough open space to lock them all up. Oh boy, round 4. If you're playing exactly A New Home, the Prison has... some appeal. Its ability to end the Londoner movement is uniquely great; most effcts for peeling off Londoners work slowly and/or only peel off a low percentage of the current Londoner count; the Prison can be used once you get to 30 or less Londoners to rapidly end their movement, and only two very specific Laws are at all competitive with the Prison for this. Outside this, it's an amazingly bad building. Including that once the Londoner movement is ended, it's sucky even in A New Home. A Discontent management tool that operates by grabbing random people and not letting them work for 3 days is terrible, especually one that can massively spike Discontent pretty easily on accident through its 'prisoners not in prison' scenarios. It's also an even further manpower drain just to keep it manned, needs to be placed in a Heat Zone to make sure it doesn't get way too cold, and comes with another bad event set; the first event happens automatically and forces you to choose between 'Discontent goes up' and 'lock this guy up and suffer a Hope penalty'; the latter option is an easy way to accidentally go over the prisoner limit! The other events only occur if the Prison is sufficiently cold. The first event firing has you directly choose between raising Discontnt and lowering Hope. If you choose to suffer the Hope hit, the prisoner will later die. If you choose to suffer the Discontent increase, the prisoner will become an Amputee but you get to choose between raising Hope or lowering Discontent. Again: Faith has a pretty directly equivalent Law that's just nowhere near as terrible. Yeesh. Though on the topic of the Prison's temperature: it's kind of hilarious that its base Heat is +3. That's very high; Frostpunk largely caps passive building Heat at +3, and +3 is largely reserved for final-stage technology. Real prisons are infamously prone to having absolutely terrible protection from the weather, and indeed that reality is probably precisely why the Prison has an event chain for the Prison being dangerously cold; I'd expect the Prison to either have the default manned-building-minimum of +1 or the default value for Law-derived buildings of +2. Why is is it so warm? Anyway, next Law! Agitator Enables construction of Agitators and initiates a quest to build 3 Agitators. Requires: Propaganda Centre Law Cooldown: 63 hours Alright, what's this building? Agitator Costs 10 Wood and 10 Steel. Socketed into a street segment, and so competes with Steam Hubs but not other buildings. Raises Effiiency of most nearby worksites by 20%. Has no effect on worksites currently manned by an Automaton. The Agitator is one of the most blatant examples of Frostpunk just making Order very inferior to Faith. Faith has its own version of the Agitator -the Shrine- and it's just... better. The Shrine costs just as much, has the same placement mechanics, and throws in increasing Hope for free. Furthermore, they both have one event, but the Shrine event is a nothing event with no mechanical impact, whras the Agitator event forces you to choose between having a random Agitator stop working for 8 hours or sending guards to retrieve a stolen part: the latter option does nothing, then a few in-game minutes later either your guards succeed and the Agitator starts working, or your guards are injured and the Agitator is going to not work for 8 hours, just like if you'd picked the other option but with some people in medical care. The Agitator Law furthermore has that bafflingly high cooldown of 63 hours, whereas the Shrines Law cooldown is a quick 18 hours?? And furthermore Shrines is a much more accessible Law, unlocked by House or Prayer: Shrines can come onlin 36 hours after you get started on Purpose, whereas Agitator requires Propaganda Centre and thus requires Guard Stations and thus can't be passed until 117 hours into running Order. That's a day and a half to get to Shrine vs just short of five days before Agitator go online -assuming you beelined for Agitator, mind. This isn't even touching on how Propaganda Centre is a sufficiently sucky burden I would genuinely argue against going for it if it weren't for the fact that it does gate access to Agitators and their effect is too good to pass up. Also, remember how I said Foreman is really the main thing Order has going for it? Note that it too is less accessibl than Shrines, rquiring working through Morning Gathering and so only coming online 18 hours after Shrines. Further, Shrine/Agitator behavior overlaps heavily with Foreman, but Shrines and Agitators are overall the better option: Foreman providing a 40% boost every 2 days is on average roughly equivalent to Shrines and Agitators providing a 20% boost continuously unless you assume Foreman is always combined with Emergency Shift. In that case... well, if you assume no Extended Shifts but do assume Emergency Shift is being used in both scenarios, then a Shrine or Agitator will add 6.8 'man-hours' every 2 days while the Foreman-on-Emergency Shift scenario is adding 9.6 'man-hours' of work every 2 days. (ie Foreman is around 40% more value) If you instead assume Extended Shifts are being used, Foreman is the same but Shrines and Agitators rise to 7.6 'man-hours' added, so Foreman is only about 29% ahead. And Foreman requires constantly burning Food Rations and combining it ith EEmergency Shifts to look this good. All that is to say that Foreman only really helps justify picking Order if you do in fact intend to also get Agitators, and furthermore Order just plain is screwed here in that Faith can immediately get to good Efficiency boosting and Order has to wait longer no mater how you cut it and is just plain worse off except maybe once it has both Foreman and Agitator. Ow! Also, notice that bit about Agitator not affecting Automatons. I will be coming back to this another time. Narratively, I... don't know how to take Agitators. Real folks in real reality have in fact done the Agitator routine, and they did in fact believe it would improve motivation and loyalty to drown people in slogans and all. I personally don't see how it could produce that effect and know for a fact that there certainly are people it doesn't produce that effect in, but I'm unsure if that's 'it just doesn't work that way' or if that's 'I'm largely familiar with the stories of people who it didn't work on, but they're not actually representative'. So I'm not really sure whether it'd be fair to criticize the game for having the Agitator successfully make people get more done. I kind of want to criticize it on this, but... maybe I'm just wrong here. Next Law! Pledge of Loyalty Immediately raises Discontent, but from now on Hope will passively rise if it gets very low, and a variety of events around 'informers' will occur at random, regularly offering the opportunity to imprison a random citizen. Requires: Propaganda Centre Law Cooldown: 36 hours. This is a Law that has me suspect Order is so bad in part because developer ambitions outstripped their ability to execute those ambitions, as Pledge of Loyalty has a concept of 'informers' that seems to have been intended as an actual mechanic; one event has an option that informs you that you'll gain 3 Informers, as if this is an in-game resource of mechanical consequence. It's easy to imagine that the Propaganda Cntre was meant to be more involved in a similar manner, and more generally that Frostpunk might have intended to have a more detailed and complex modeling of the social conditions of your city that Order was meant to hook into mechanically. In any event, Pledge of Loyalty is kind of a crappy Law, aside that it has unique utility in making Hope penalties less able to lead to unavoidable game overs. Oh, I haven't explained that yet, have I? Yeah, if Hope ever hits 0%, just like Discontent reaching 100% you'll get a quest demanding you fix this in short order, specifically getting Hope back over 25%, and if time runs out you instantly game over. While I'm dismissive of the Discontent-based game over threat, this is because most Discontent penalties go away over time or are caused by bad conditions you should endeavor to fix regardless, and also you get a lot of tools for managing Discontent; I'm dismissive of many Discontent management tools in part because there's so many that individual ones are easily ignored in favor of others. Hope, by contrast, does not rise on its own, and most Hope boosts are quite small; the Discontent game over quest can sometimes be satisfied by a single Discontent-lowering event, whereas no Hope-raising event will ever deliver 26% all at once. Hitting 0% Hope can easily be that you're now dead with zero recourse because you simply don't have enough Hope-raising capacity to have any possibility of meeting the goal within the timeframe. As such, where Discontent has barely any metaphorical teeth to it, Hope is something it's very important to at least not let zro out, and ideally to keep up as much as possible. There's some scenario-specific qualifiers to this, but I'll get to those when we get to them. But yeah, Pledge of Loyalty is kind of lame. It's also one of the more egregious examples of the game's Law summaries often being really vague and sometimes downright misleading; in my very first run of Frostpunk, I signed Pledge of Loyalty because its summary made it sound like a free Hope boost, and was very put out by it turning out to mostly just cause trouble with barely any benefit to show for it. Among other poins, it undermines that thing Order is trying to do that I'll be talking about... pretty soon, actually. Next Law! Forceful Persuasion Provides the Forceful Persuasion ability at the Prison. This ability has a 1 day cooldown and releases all current prisoners instantly, but some portion of them will become Ill, Gravely Ill, or even die. The ability also heavily lowers Hope. Passing this Law immediately raises Discontent as well. Requires: Prison Law Cooldown: 45 hours. This arguably makes the Prisob less overwhelmingly bad since you can Roundup people and then get them back to work in much less than 3 days, but the whole 'can literally kill people' thing makes that only meaningfully true if you have more population than you need (And don't mind suffering unneeded deaths) and the part where using it is devastating to Hope is a big problem. I've used it exactly once to test its mechanics, and will probably never do so again. Oh, and passing the Law triggers some crappy events even if you never actually use the ability. Two events that force you to choose between raising Discontent or lowering Hope, with one of those events killing someone no matter what, and another event where the Hope-lowering option requires a functioning Guard Station, hurts or even kills people, and in exchange lowers Discontent some. Yaaaaay. Next Law! New Order Hope is relabeled to Obedience and is maxed out and will never be a problem again. An Execution Platform building will automatically have its construction planned near the Generator. Passing this Law immediately hurts and kills a random number of people. In A New Home, instantly ends the Londoner movement regardless of how many people are in it. Requires: Pledge of Loyalty OR Forceful Persuasion Law Cooldown: 72 hours New Order is completely unique in the game for having two Laws independently able to unlock it. Even The Last Autumn's brand-new Law sets don't ever repeat this, nor does Faith's directly equivalent Law. This, uh, is another way Prison sucks, as there's no need to bother routing through it even if you want New Order. New Order also has some... display oddities. It and its Faith counterpar are simply invisible initially; passing Wach Towers but never advancing through Guard Stations will leave New Order invisble. By extension, you can't check it in-game until it becomes visible. Once it is visible, it has a 'burning' effect on its icon that Laws don't normally have, and the description it offers is vague, one might even call it ominuous. New Order is what the entire Order tree is built around. Not building up to: I mean that every part of Order is anchord around what New Oder is meant to be, that being the player falling into desperation and temptation and ultimately becoming an absolute dictator as a result of the dire circumstances Frostpunk is forcing the player to cope with. ... It, uh, doesn't work as a big artsy payoff thing. Like, to be clear, I'm sure there are players out there who did in fact have th 'correct' experience. I'm... doubful they make up the majority of Frostpunk players, but such players most certainly do exist. Nonetheless, I'm going to contend that Frostpunk did a really bad job of laying the groundwork for the effect it wants. I'll first briefly cover the least important and most subjective point: Frostpunk is just not that hard a game. In spite of labeling itself as the 'first society survival game', there are many much older civbuilding type games where survival is much more demanding; I personally have never passed New Order or its Faith equivalent for any reason except testing, because no scenario has challenged me enough that by the time I'd worked through Order or Faith enough to have the option I had any possibility of finding it tempting. I'm sure other players did in fact struggle enough to experience the intended temptation, but I haven't, and poking around online my impression is that it's at least moderately uncommon for players to actually have that experience. That out of the way, the biggest reason I'm arguing This Does Not Work is something I've already kind of alluded to, but which a reader could be forgiven for dismissing these allusions as jokes: In Frostpunk, you start from being an absolute tyrant dictator whose will is law. That's just how the gameplay works by default. You choose what gets built, where it gets built, when to get to it. You choose what worksites are manned and which ones are ignored, and the game even gives you tools to micromanage this, where you can control who gets assigned where down to the individual if you're willing to fiddle with the relevant tidbits. You choose what Laws are passed, when, and in what order; the only 'input' your citizens have on Laws is that the game won't let you pass Discontent-raising or Hope-lowering Laws if you're too high on Discontent or too Low on Hope, respectively. You set work hours at will, you activate building abilities on command, you assign and direct Scouting and Outpost parties entirely at your discretion, you decide research direction, you decide whether to run the Generator and what temperature to run it at and how far to extend its heat, you decide whether buildings run their Heaters, and of course most scenarios perpetually pester you to Make A Decision with events. You are the Generator Tyrant, absolute ruler of your domain, from day one of most every scenario. (On The Edge and The Last Autumn make some efforts to make this less completely true, but they also don't have Purpose Laws at all, so they don't help with this particular topic much) This is pretty standard for civilization-building or citybuilding games, of course, but such games tend to either kind of gloss over the fact that the player has such an iron grip over their society, or they deliberately embrace the implication of these mechanics and directly place the player character as a tyrant who probably rules with an iron fist. (Or they're the Civilization series, but these posts aren't about Civilization's design problems, and anyway I'm not up to date on the exact nature of the more modern iterations of those games) Frostpunk is instead attempting to say society starts from something vaguely democratic and then wants the player to respond to a crisis by slipping into authoritarian behavior, apparently clueless to the fact that its core mechanics automatically place the player as an absolute tyrant; at best, following Order to its end could be described as slipping from a benevolent dictatorship to a malevolent one... ... and even that characterization is very strained given Adaptation gives the player plenty of tools and incentives to be an abusive taskmaster dictator whose cruelty is mostly limited by the risk of a complete revolt occurring if the abuse isn't kept at a vaguely tolerable level. Good play in Frostpunk already tends to be exploitive and abusive; in A New Home, which the Purpose Laws were clearly built primarily for its context, a successful player has probably spent over a week mistreating their citizens by the time the game bothers to raise the Faith or Order question. And unfortunately, this misguided design goal has unfortunate impacts on Order's design well before the laughable New Order Law. For example, I commented earlier on how Foreman's mechanics are a much better fit to 'feed your people well so they can work hard', but there was probably never any possibility of the dev team pivoting to that, as the Foreman ability's concept is part of the broader Order umbrella of top-down authoritarianism; Order's Laws were pretty clearly concepted around the player turning their city into a police state dictatorship where the ruler's will is enforced through violence from above. I similarly wouldn't be surprised if this is why Order pays a labor tax on its basic Hope building while Faith lacks that tax; because part of representing the police state behavior is the process of factionalizing the citizens, 'othering' some people as bad actors while empowering other people to perform violence on the Bad Others, and this wouldn't land at all if eg Guard Stations didn't require assigning people to be those violent thugs. By a similar token, this is probably why Order is so heavily burdened with bad event chains that worsen morale and even get people injured or killed; of course the police state is both deeply unpopular with the people placed at the bottom of the new social system and also directly shapes those with privilege and power into abusive bullies. Too bad this contributes to Order sucking as your Purpose choice, though. The whole thing is a frustratingly predictable design failure. The main reason I have any hope Frostpunk 2 might be better at this than Frostpunk 1 is that The Last Autumn does a new idea that fits less poorly to Frostpunk's mechanics framework. (It's still not a good fit, mind, but 'less bad' is still improvement) Secondarily, while The Refugees and The Fall of Winterhome both give the player access to Faith, neither of them tries to actually repeat this broken design; they just don't trash the already-designed mechanics and let you play wwith them in new contexts, which... fair. Another unpleasant layer to this whole thing is that though Frostpunk is clearly criticizing authoritariasm, it has a frustrating level of buy-in to the correctness of the authoritarian justifications or reasoning. The Prison is a particularly clear example: purely punitive imprisonment of people, in the world of Frostpunk, can swiftly enact permanent change in their behavior and outlook. In real life, that's... not what happens with punitive imprisonment. Organized crime quite literally accepts a certain amount of prison time as simply part of the cost of doing business, governments imprisoning people hostile to the government pretty predictably just makes those people more hostile to the government, and tons of studies show over and over that if you want to do things like reduce crime rates, punitive imprisonments are one of the least effective things you could possibly try. By extension, Frostpunk doesn't seem to understand that authoritarian governments like to imprison dissidents and whatnot because it's a way to silence voices, one that doesn't generally risk the kind of backlash that executing a popular opposing voice is prone to proucing. The point isn't to 'reform' them into a loyal citizen -because humans just don't work that way- but just to isolate them so they can't incite others into anger at the government, can't educate people on how to better fight it, and can't organize effective resistance. However, this buy-in goes a bit deeper than just Order Laws; Emergency Shift and especially Extended Shift are arguably much worse than Prison about having fundamental buy-in to the correctness of authoritarianism and all. In real life, cracking the whip and demanding people work extremely long hours for weeks on end is not simply A Mean Thing To Do; it's also a dumb thing to do. Humans get tired, they get hungry; they need breaks to take care of themselves, to eat and sleep and so on, and tiredness starts causing problems well before the point someone is literally falling asleep at their workstation. People who are tired and/or hungry and/or ill work slower and make more mistakes... ... all of which means that Frostpunk's simple game-ified model of labor where an hour of labor is an hour of labor is simply not true to reality. Extended Shifts being a free 40% more everything in Frostpunk held back only by how people get mad at you is absurd; it should be causing illness, it should be resulting in accidents, it should not produce value just as fast per hour as those first ten hours of labor. Emergency Shifts should be even worse; insisting ten people work with heavy machinery without sleeping or eating, just staying on the job for 34 hours in a row, is a recipe for people to end up maimed or dead, not because of a Death Note heart attack killing them 'of overwork', but because somebody at the Sawmill will get themselves caught on the sawblade or end up crushed under a falling tree because of how dysfunctional they are from lack of sleep and lack of food. You can argue 'oh, it's a game, the models are simplified, it doesn't mean anything', and honestly there's tons of games out there hre I'd fully agree, but Frostpunk is a game that's trying to make pointed remarks about how abusive and exploitive behavior is bad, authoritarianism is bad, etc. The fact that it so consistently goes to 'people don't like it when you're mean to them' is, unfortunately, one of the most common and frustrating ways people try to criticize such behavior; frustrating because it's just a bad angle for this type of conversation. The people you need to convince to stop exploiting and abusing people generally do in fact already understand that they are meany-faces and their employees don't like them; if they were going to be moved to stop by a plea to stop being so mean, they wouldn't have gotten to this level of exploitation in the first place. It also intersects directly with the 'buy-in to authoritarianism' point I'm making. The authoritarian point of view looks at the premise of 'if you maximally exploit the common citizen, they will be upset, and they might revolt' and goes 'oh, okay, then I just need to punish resistance, propagandize at people that they shouldn't be upset by their miserable treatment, and ensure my military is so loyal and strong they will definately defend me and definately win by a landslide if a revolt does occur, that way nobody will consider revolting'. Emphasizing how mean it is to exploit people doesn't change authoritarianism's calculus; it is in fact an entire model of society premised under the awareness that the state is being mean and regular people won't like the state, and so pointing out how mean authoritariasm is works much like telling a hunter that if they shoot that deer, the deer woll die: saying this accomplishes nothing, because in both cases the effect you're pointing out is explicitly the goal. It's much more effective to be pointing out how exploitation and abuse are actively counterproductive, increasing costs of operation and reucing how much work actually gets done. Frostpunk even has a little bit of this built in to its mechanics! But mostly in the temperature mechanic, where keeping people warm enough they don't get sick (Or at least get sick less often) reduces how much labor time gets lost to treatment. An even this is still kind of jankily handled; the regular Illness state doesn't prevent people from working or reduce their effectiveness as a laborer any, among other frustrating aspects of how Illness is handled I'll get more into another time, and it's only really the threat of becoming Gravely Ill if untreated that's why you ought to both minimize Illness and prefer to swiftly treat it. And outside sickness and temperature, Frostpunk... tends to model the world in a manner that makes authoritarianism's actual downsides largely irrelevant and even validates authoritarianism's belief that sufficient propaganda and military power can make the populace's anger functionally irrelevant. Which, uh, makes it kind of amazing how terrible the Order branch actually is, but that's predominately by virtue of Frostpunk having it compete with Faith, make Faith way better in very bizarre ways, and saddle Order with weird gameplay disadvantages that often have nothing to do with reality. Like Law cooldowns and the Law 'tech tree' construction: these are very much pure gameplay mechanics, so the fact that Order suffers 450 hours of Law cooldown time if you pass all 11 of its Laws while Faith passing all 11 of its Laws only results in 378 hours of Law coolown time isn't some representation of a flaw with authoritiarism as a system, nor is Faith getting much easier access to Shrines than Order gets access to Agitators. They're just arbitrary gameplay decisions with basically no connection to reality. Order sucking is mostly off a mixture of those plus super-bizarre ways Faith gets mechanical advantages, like that Houses of Prayer inexplicably don't need to be staffed or kept warm; a version of Frostpunk that had gone the other way on these kinds of decisions (Randomly let Order not spend labor on buildings this makes no realistic sense on, reorganize the Purpose trees so it's Order that gets easy access to Agitators an Faith that takes weirdly long to get to Shrines, etc) would be a version of Frostpunk where I'd probably be arguing Order is the objectively superior choice (Especially if Houses of Healing were somehow made much worse), and this wouldn't involve changing any of the real-world representational aspects. The whole thing is frustrating. Anyway, now that I've talked about all that, let's actually discuss the useless Law that is New Order. Firstly, the Execution Platform: img Execution Platform Costs nothing. Uses no buildable space: set just south of the Generator. Has the Public Execution ability. This ability has a cooldown of 1 day, kills a randon citizen, and greatly lowers Discontent. If Discontent had any actual teeth, this would be worth caring about, but it doesn't, so unless your goal is to kill people because eg your city's food generation is insufficient, there's basically no reason to ever click this. Second, New Order has a bunch of events associated with it, which can kill people, push Discontent up or down, and one event chain will ultimately slow research own by 25% or 50% for 24 hours. I'm not going to detail the full lot; they only really matter as far as 'New Order is bad', 'Order is bad', and 'the game really wants you to know that it thinks authoritarianism is bad'. The wiki also insists that tearing down Order tab buildings will now cause Discontent, but I haven't confirmed that mechanic as yet. That would be slightly annoying given having more than one Guard Station becomes basically a complete waste of manpower, resources, and space once New Order is passee: Hope is no longer a mechanic, Discontent is not only a joke in general but can be neutered trivially with Public Execution, and you only need one Guard Station to have access to 'send guards' options in events. This also touches on the jank that the Propaganda Centre and Prison become even more terrible since New Order basically completely supersedes their utility. In fact, most Order Laws are substantially superseded by New Order: only Foreman and Agitator don't become worthlss or close to worthless by signing New Order. So if you do intend to sign New Order, you really shouln't bother with Patrol, should skip Prison entirely, and the only reason I'm not advising skipping Morning Gathering is it gates access to Foreman. Seriously, New Order's design just... doesn't work. ---------------------------------- Next time, we wrap up Purposee with those Faith Laws I keep talking up so much. See you then.