need to boot up On The Edge and do its Heating tree here, cause the tiers are different so probably everything else is different. On The Edge is the second DLC scenario, and the final one as well. I'm not going to be doing a big series of posts for it like I did with The Last Autumn: while it has some ambitious changes of its own, it's overall a closer experience to the first 4 scenarios, and I would say the biggest part of its differences are due what you're lacking, not what to the mechanics specific to it. The concept for On The Edge goes thusly: you're an Outpost of New London, sometime after the events of A New Home. You're specifically a Steel Outpost, so your job is to ship 100 Steel to New London each day, just like A New Home's Steel Outpost. In short order, things go wrong, and you reach out to other enclaves of survivors and arrange to survive without New London's support. In support of this concept, your 'city' is very limited. It has no Wall Drill points at all, it has only one Coal Deposit, and it doesn't have an Iron Deposit. (Though this last point is misleading, but we'll get to that) You also have absolutely no access to Raw Food production: no Hunters Huts, and no ability to research Hothouses. You also don't have a Generator, and by extension On The Edge recycles Braziers from The Last Autumn instead of having Steam Hubs, you don't get Outposts (sort of), you technically retain Automatons but they're meant to be useless so the game doesn't give you any of their techs, and of course you don't get any of the techs for the resource buildings that are useless to you. (eg no Wall Drill research) You also start the scenario unable to pass Laws entirely, with hovering over the locked icon informing you that it is New London who decides your Laws. You never get Purpose Laws at all, either, sticking solely with Adaptation Laws. On The Edge does have several unique things to it. First is the Army Warehouse: Fixed resource site. Manned by up to 20 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children, by default working from 8:00 to 18:00. Unaffected by Heat Zones, but can run a Heater once that is researched. At 100% Efficiency, gathers 9.36/8/6.928/6.4 Steel per hour. (This is 93.6/80/69.28/64 Steel per day at default work hours) After a few days, gains the ability to instead gather Steam Cores; switching between resource types takes about 15 minutes, during which time no work is done, and Steam Cores are gathered at 0.234/0.2/0.1732/0.16 per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This is 2.34/2/1.732/1.6 Steam Cores per day at default work hours) You might notice that even on Easy, you cannot deliver 100 Steel per day with this thing at default work hours. You'd need Extended Shift, and even that's not enough if you're above Normal difficulty. Yeah, you're set up to fail; we'll come back to this. The Army Warehouse itself also comes with a series of techs to make it better, all placed on the far right of the Resources tab, taking the place of the Steelworks tech chain. First up: Handcarts Costs 10 Wood. 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing. Increases Efficiency at the Army Warehouse by 20%. Wooden Supports Costs 10 Wood? 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing. Enables the Wooden Supports ability at the Army Warehouse. This ability spends 50 Wood to increase Efficiency by 50% for 24 hours, with a 24-hour cooldown. Note that since Efficiency modifiers stack additively, this will only be a 50% increase over not having the ability activated if you don't yet have Handcarts researched. Freight Elevators Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Handcarts. Increases Army Warehouse Efficiency by another 15%, for a total of 135%. Straddle Carriers Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Freight Elevators. Increases Army Warehouse Efficiency by another 15%, for a total of 150%. For reference, an Advanced Steelworks brings in 13 Steel an hour by default, while the Army Warehouse will, once fully upgraded, bring in 12 Steel; while it starts with higher collection than a regular Steelworks, in the long haul you should think of your city as having less than one Steelworks in play. Especially since in other scenarios you'd stack on a Shrine or Agitator for a further free Efficiency boost that the Army Warehouse doesn't have access to. This is mildly anachronistic: real straddle carriers were invented in 1913, predominately to carry lumber, and On The Edge is set in... maybe 1888? That said, the silly steampunk elements are already 'ahead of the curve' in general, so getting this developed 25-ish years too early isn't actually ridiculous in context. Mixed Crews Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel. 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Handcarts. Adds a third resource collection option ro the Army Warehouse, which works on Steel and Steam Cores simultaneously, but each is collected at 50% the speed of focusing on them alone. I unfortunately feel this is somewhere between 'buying a convenience feature' (Which I'm generally critical of in games) and 'mildly a trap choice'. While it's nice to be able to set the Army Warehouse to the mixed option and just forget about it, your hunger for Steam Cores in On The Edge is nowhere near your hunger for Steel, proportionate to their collection rates, so it's only actually somewhat nice if you need Steam Cores somewhat soon, letting you get them at a leisurely pace without interrupting the flow of Steel entirely. As the Army Warehouse can switch between types really quickly, it's honestly fine to switch in the middle of work right after a Steam Core is actually pulled out, and of course you can also switch from Steel to Steam Cores in the middle of the night to avoid any lost work time. Spending time and resources on unlocking Mixed Crews is just a bad deal, especially on higher difficulties where you have to be pickier with your researches. I wish this had instead just modified the existing types to also pull in the other resource type at, say, 20% speed for free. You could just sit on Steel and let Steam Cores trickle in for free at that point, which would be a much clearer improvement. Army Warehouse Insulation Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Freight Elevators. Increases the Army Warehouse's Heat by +1. it will be too cold Steam Lorries Costs 120 Steel and 80 Wood. 10/12/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Straddle Carriers. Steam Cores in specific are collected 25% faster from the Army Warehouse. Excuse me? Administration Costs: 25 Wood and 15 Steel. Size 6x4 Unlocks the ability to communicate with other Settlements. Only one exists in the city, and it cannot be dismantled once constructed. In On The Edge in specific, it must be built very close to the central flagpole. (In Endless Mode, it can be placed anywhere it can fit) Now we get to part 1 of where most of On The Edge's ambition lies: other Settlements! That exist as more than Scouting nodes! First of all, this building unlocks once you have proper access to the Army Warehouse, simply being added to your People tab... unless you're in Endless Mode. In that case, it instead unceremoniously unlocks once a Scout Team makes contact with yuor first Settlement. In On The Edge, though, when you first gain access to this you will only be able to talk to New London. You can get a reminder of what they want out of you, but you can also make requests, and you'll see two verbal statements about how New London feels about you: only their 'favour' matters, not 'relations'. 'Favour' builds up continuously over time as an invisible number, which gets summarized to you as 'low', 'medium', or 'high'. At Low Favour, you can't make requests of New London. At Medium, you can request (??????), plus potentially help with specific problems, while at High Favour you can request (??????). By 'help with specific problems', I mean that multiple bad conditions can give you the option to ask New London for help with that issue. New London will then usually pass a Law that's meant to help with the issue: in most cases, the Law is fixed and predictable, but annoyingly in some cases they pick randomly from multiple possible options. Issues you can ask for help with include: High Discontent: They will pass Fighting Arena or Public House. Low food: They will pass Soup. Insufficient labor force: They will pass Child Labor -Safe Jobs. Gravely Ill Patients: Just Radical Treatment? Corpses: They will pass Corpse Disposal. Additionally, New London will pass Emergency Shift and Extended Shift at specific scripted moments no matter what. Note that New London doesn't care about Law tree requirements and doesn't care about Law cooldowns. Them passing a Law technically puts the Book of Laws on cooldown, but this is nearly impossible to have matter: you'd have to successfully get New London to pass a Law and then almost immediately reach the point where you get control over Laws. Eventually, New London will get mad at you for failing to meet the impossible 100 Steel and 2 Steam Cores every day demand, and you will be pushed to have your Scouts try to find other people to work with, and a new Scouting node chain will spontaneously appear south of your city. Following this chain will take you to Hot Springs, at which point the scenario really gets into what it's meant to be about: building up a friend network with other Settlements. But that requires talking about... also comes with the useless clerks Transport Depot Costs: 45 Wood and 25 Steel. Size 4x5 Can only be built at a specific arbitrary location, defined per-map. Necessary to send and receive Shipments between Settlements. Can deploy a Construction Team for 50 Wood, 50 Steel, and 10 Workers, who can establish an outpost at another Settlement by permanently settling there, and are also used for establishing a 'safe route' later. ... the Transport Depot. First of all, Construction Teams are yet another variation on Scout Teams/Outpost Teams/Forager Teams. Unlike those, there's no interaction with research for these; you just unceremoniously unlock the option once you make contact with your first Settlement that isn't New London. (In Endless Mode, you instead unlock the Transport Depot upon a Scout Team reaching a Settlement for the first time, and Construction Teams are available immediately) Construction Teams thus maintain much of the jank around that collage of mechanics; people on a Construction Team don't eat or get sick, but still complain if no empty beds away them in your city. They're especially like Outpost Teams in that they don't travel to a location faster if it's known and travel faster than Scout Teams by default, though this is much less wonky in practice since they don't get speed upgrades, they're very expensive, and there's much less reason to 'float' Construction Teams. Unlike Outpost Teams, Construction Teams can't pick up stakes once you've had them deploy at a Settlement. Instead, they just vanish permanently. Second is shipments: anytime you make a material request of New London or any other Settlement, a shipment spawns from that Settlement and spends a while actually traveling to your city, much like Outpost shipments. However, you also make shipments out, and that too requires the Transport Depot to be active, though you perform the actual inputs at the Administration building. Anyway, in On The Edge in specific, once you have both the Administration building and the Transport Depot completed, 15 Children and 10 'Administration Clerks' get shipped out to your city alongside some Raw Food. What are Administration Clerks? They're a special class of citizen who can't be assigned to any jobs and won't even build buildings; they are literally worse than uyseless since they still eat food, want housing, and can get sick and need medical care. You can see them eg participate in a Fighting Arena, but... yeah. Useless. New London, meanwhile, demands you ship out 100 Steel, and wants you to do so every day, much like an actual Outpost does. Ideally you do this very quickly: at the point at which the Army Warehouse's ability to harvest Steam Cores is unlocked, this requirement becomes 'ship 100 Steel and 2 Steam Cores', which is incredibly burdensome, and while On The Edge intends for you to ultimately balk at New London's demands and give up on maintaining your shipments, you will get a game over if you reach 18:00 on day 8 without ever making any shipments to New London. So ideally you ship out 100 Steel before the Steam Cores are discovered, and then blow off New London forever. Anyway, New London ships out Raw Food to you daily initially, but after a few days they switch to only shipping Raw Food in response to you shipping out your demanded shipment. This is actually how shipments with with all other Settlements: you ship out your thing, and in response they ship out their thing. Note that all such reciprocal shipments work kind of... counterintuitively. Conveniently, but counterintuitively. Specifically, when you click to send your shipment out, the reciprocal shipment launches simultaneously: you might expect it to only launch once yours has arrived or something, but no. Conversely, uh, we need to talk about those other Settlements first in more detail. See, the Settlements that aren't New London aren't simply passive partners like traditional Outposts. They're all struggling communities that you are intended to help build up, not just trade with. This takes the form of multiple tiers of building them up, where several requests all appear, and most of them will nonetheless be trades where you get something in return immediately. In such cases, while reciprocal shipments are shipped out instantly, the next round of requests won't appear until the ships for solving the current round of requests have actually all arrived. So that's kind of inconsistent-feeling. With all three Settlements, getting to their fourth round of requests always includes a request to build a 'safe route': reaching this point demands you upgrade your Transport Depot... Upgraded Transport Depot Costs: 45 Wood and 25 Steel? Size 4x5 Can only be built at a specific arbitrary location, defined per-map. Necessary to send and receive Shipments between Settlements. Can deploy a Construction Team for 50 Wood, 50 Steel, and 10 Workers, who can establish an outpost at another Settlement by permanently settling there, and are also used for establishing a 'safe route' later. Upgrade to the Transport Depot, and needed for any 'safe routes' to actually give their benefits. ... which, uh, doesn't do anything other than help complete the 'safe route' request, and you'll also need to have a Construction team go out and spend resources at three nodes between your city and the Settlement in question. The purpose of completing a safe route is that it causes that Settlement to ship resources out to you every other day, for free, forever. This... isn't actually that valuable, honestly, as for one thing the scenario is going to be close to done when you're getting your first safe route completed. In Endless Mode, that issue doesn't apply but you don't have resource shortages, so infinite free resources is... sure, whatever, but not actually valuable. The Settlements in question are threefold: Hot Springs, Shipwreck Camp, and Children's Mine. This includes that Endless Mode will use those three as well, though it has somewhat different events and requests and all for each of them. They are however broadly similar in basic framework in both On The Edge and Endless Mode: Hot Springs is first and foremost your unlimited source of Raw Food,Shipwreck Camp is first and foremost a source of unlimited Wood but also has a secondary specialty in providing labor (Workers primarily, but even Engineers), while Children's Mine has the very unfortunate specialty of being primarily a Coal source. I call this 'unfortunate' because in On The Edge your Coal needs are very low and easily met with the one Coal Mine slot your city does in fact have; you don't need a Coal Settlement. Within On The Edge in particular, you are meant to be the Steel source for this web of communities, and you will in fact spend a lot of Steel on upgrading Settlements if you pursue that. I like this general setup in theory, where you're one of four Settlements covering the core four resources of Frostpunk, though in practice it's dragged down by Children's Mine being pretty useless. Also unfortunate is that the game intends for a bit of trade web to be going on, but doesn't really have the chops to make it work well. Friendly Settlements don't have their own resources in any mechanically meaningful way, there's no variable pricing on goods based on demand, and each Settlement has only one fixed, infinitely repeated resource trade you can perform with them plus the ability to harass them regularly to give you stuff. Since the other Settlements aren't really being modeled in an at all meaningful way, you can get stuff happening like you burn Favour at Hot Springs to get a shipment of 100 Steel, which you then turn around and send right back to Hot Springs to fulfill a request of theirs, where it's sort of ridiculous that they didn't just cover the request with the Steel they apparently had on hand. Anyway, I mentioned 'Relationships' being listed and not mattering with New London, but it does matter for the other Settlements in On The Edge. (And I think in Endless Mode, but I haven't hammered out how, exactly) Basically, as you work on building up Settlements, you'll get little dilemas, where generally your outpost team is having some kind minor clash with the Settlement and you're asked to either side with yuor people or side with the Settlement. As this is painfully common with games using this type of framework, Frostpunk unfortunately defaults pretty heavily to making these choices be 'do you want what is mechanically optimal for you, or do you want what makes the jerk you're talking to happy?' For example, Hot Springs will at some point have 10 people get injured, and they want to send them to your city for treatment: if you agree to this, Hot Springs is pleased, and then the 10 people show up and 5 of them die in your city instantly, saddling you with mechanically meaningful dead people. If you disagree, Hot Springs treats the people on-site, doesn't like you, has 5 people die anyway, and blames these deaths on you for not agreeing to Hot Springs' insane desire to make mortally wounded people hike half a day through the icepocalypse to maybe get better medical treatment if they live that far. Though on the other hand it also has cases where as far as I can tell there's The Correct Decision and The Wrong Decision, which isn't exactly better. There's just not enough mechanical complexity with Settlements to do nuanced and interesting things with dilemas. Regardless, why do you care about the Relationship status with Settlements? Well, uh, you possibly don't, but maybe you do. See, once you break with New London, you get radio silence from them for a few weeks, then a 'punitive expedition' shows up that's... actually refugees, because it turns out that somehow New London has been so mismanaged that everything is falling apart and basically everyone is going to die. At this point you are prompted to talk to all your Settlement buddies and see how they'd prefer to respond, and then you talk to New London again and either promise to help them or tell them 'lol no'. In the event that you agree to help New London, you will have 4 Shipments you need to send to New London to save them: one for 3000 Coal, one for ??? Raw Food, one for 50 Workers, and one for 250 Steel and 2 Steam Cores. (Inexplicably, this jumps to 5 Steam Cores on Extreme: I don't think any other resource needs change here?) At this point your Relationship status with each Settlement matters: if you've gotten a Settlement to the highest relationship status of 'Loyal', then they will immediately cover one of these shipments for you: Hot Springs will cover the food, Shipwreck Camp will cover the Workers, and Children's Mine will cover the Coal. You'll always have to cover the Steel and Steam Cores shipment yourself, though. Do note that this is not actually tied together with how much you built up a Settlement. In practice the Relationship dilemas occur inn response to building up Settlements so you can't have a Settlement Loyal that you put no effort into, but you can have a Settlement only partially built up and still have them cover a shipment for you: Frostpunk has no concept of 'do they have the capacity to spare?', it just cares if they like you enough. If, however, you choose to let New London fail, then Loyalty doesn't matter, So I guess if you intend to do that, you can feel free to make all the Settlements hate you? Regardless, this choice is, weirdly enough, much more strenuous than aiding New London: you must build 20 Bunkhouses or Houses (As in, 20 more than you had when the objective was issued: no pre-building empty Houses) have 5 functioning Infirmaries, have 200 Food Rations in storage, and all your housing needs to be adequately warm, all while 200 refugees hurl themselves into your city and eat you out of house and home when you have basically no ability to increase your food intake. The game also doesn't care about anything slightly organic here: in A New Home, you're pressured to do a bunch of stuff in preparation for the superstorm, but the game wants you to do these things because they're good ideas for ensuring you will make it to the end without losing a gazillion people. Here, though, you can be 1 Food Ration short when the timer runs out, and the game will arbitrarily declare you screwed up and everything was horrible everywhere for the foreseeable future because you suck. Whichever you choose, victory results in your usual end-of-scenario retrospective with a bunch of text on the screen. I mostly don't care about these things, but I do want to pull out one line that says "The real enemy was discord." I don't tend to like "And the moral of this story is..." in general, but this in particular stands out for how wrong it is to the scenario itself: the real enemy isn't discord! It's whatever idiot(s) running New London wrecked everything so badly in so little time after my tenure as Generator Tyrant ended! That is the core source of all the scenario's problems! It's why New London starts screwing over Outpost 11, because New London is falling apart and can't actually easily spare the food that is supposed to go to Outpost 11! It's almost certainly why a bunch of Children get sent out, whether due to the food problem or just simple mismamagement. This stands out in no small part because it feels like an encapsulation of an oddity with Frostpunk narratives: Frostpunk so consistently comes back to 'the people in charge screwed everything up for everyone' as its core justificatiion for everything being terrible, and its mechanics hinge so heavily on the idea that competent leadership can lead people through troubled times, and in fact the game repeatedly positions the enforcement of harmony as itself extremely evil, but then several other parts of Frostpunk really seem to intend your takeaway to be not that bad leadership is bad, or that exploitive social contracts are bad, or anything else you could describe as 'you should speak out against normalized evils and stupidities', but rather... 'the real enemy was discord'? Huh? How is it that the game that tries twice to have the player become an enforcer of concordance who ultimately becomes a murderous tyrant in the name of harmony is also the game that tries to say 'disharmony is the worst enemy', not only at all, but in a scenario where it's just plain a misrepresentation of the scenario's premise? It's so, so bizarre. Hot Springs Medium requests: Raw Food, Steel, ??, ?? Hot Springs High requests: Lots of Raw Food, Raw Foodm Workers?, ?? Shipwreck Camp Medium requests: Wood, Workers, Steel?, ?? Shipwreck Camp High requests: Wood, Workers, Engineers, Wood? Children's Minne Medium requests: Coal, Wood, Steel, ?? Children's Mine High requests: Lots of Coal, Coal, Wood, ?? convict sick are fine if sent to you ------------------------------------------ Returning to broader mechanics stuff, On The Edge has some other subtle differences. For example, Extended Shift's event chain will start as normal, but the third event will never fire and people will never be at risk of death past that first forced death, so you never have to pay Food Rations for it. I should similarly point out that Scouting is oddly weak. Essential to get the Settlements found, of course, but compared to every other scenario, On The Edge has a fairly low number of Scouting nodes relative to its duration, and more importantly these nodes never have big 'paydays'. You just get small amounts of stuff here and there, and tons of nodes are simply empty. Just two Scout Teams can cover every node well before the New London 'punitive expedition' sets out, and it doesn't even require speed upgrades. You should still deploy Scout Teams, of course, and strictly you should try to end the scenario floating 3 Scout Teams just to get fewer people eating food in your city, but in other scenarios Scout Teams spend a while being a big part of your resource intake. Not so in On The Edge. It's also worth pointing out that this scenario is one of the most glaring about the game's core mechanics not really aligning with intuitive reality in materially relevant ways. In this case, I mean specifically that there's a pile of crates that's near the Army Warehouse, past the Steel Wreckage that's blocking your way to the Army Warehouse, and you really ought to have direct gathering prioritize it: though 'the road is blocked', your citizens are perfectly able to harvest from it anyway, whereas the default road setup gives no room for a Gathering Post to cover it, and even if it did you'd still rather put a Gathering Post somewhere it covers multiple resource piles, not just one. Oh, and ideally you use direct gathering to carve a hole in the middle of the Ruins near the Beacon and then put a Gathering Post in the middle of the Ruins. This is skippable below Extreme, but on Extreme it's more or less mandatory if you want to get through the very tight early game; you can't be careless with Steel because you simply can't afford to have to ship 100 Steel and 2 Steam Cores to avoid a game over, so you really need to minimize Steel expenditures initially and maximmize Steel collection until that first shipment has gone out. On a different note, an unfortunate bit to On The Edge is that they gave it custom soundbites for Announcer Guy, but didn't do an adequately thorough job on making sure they make sense: for example, one of his morning lines is "New London awaits", which makes sense when yu are Loyal Outpost 11, but stops making sense once you go rogue, yet it still can play at that point. That's the most egregious, but there's a fair amount of lack-of-polish to On The Edge of this sort; it honestly feels like the Settlement mechanics were built for Endless Mode in particular and On The Edge was made predominately to be a glorified tutorial on this neat new Endless Mode mechanic. I'm similarly critical of how New London's Law choices are random on certain topics. Getting Fighting Arena for Discontent management is simply far superior to getting Public House, needing less Wood, no Steel, and no laborers tied up in it, and up on Extreme especially this introduces a swingy bit of RNG that's really out of place. --------------------------------------------------- Overall, On The Edge comes across to me like Frostpunk's devs finally coming to grips with the fact that they were always most interested in explored cracks in society, internal conflicts, class warfare, labor exploitation, and so on, with the intense physical stressors being largely a way to drag such issues into the open, as opposed to the game's own pitch of itself as being about the gritty difficulties of survival in the worst of physical conditions. I have mixed feelings about this: Frostpunk's most successful elements that I have the most personal interest in and would like to see explored more are really the 'building up a city and juggling all these various needs even as new problems come along' part of the game. Its social exploration parts are consistently its weakest elements, with the least mechanical nuance and perpetually undermined in their goals by the mechanical realities of what competent play can achieve: A New Home having the Londoners want to suicidally flee back to London, for example, hinges itself heavily on the idea that these people crowding around this Generator are cold and hungry and have inadequate shelter and everything sucks and surely London is better, but even on Extreme it's easy to perform well enough that this view of the circumstances is entirely divorced from reality they're living. So I have a suspicion that Frostpunk 2 continued down this road and I will be unenthused when I get to it, even if it executes these elements more competently: I simply don't have much interest in the Frostpunk devs' fumbling attempts at social commentary and Games As Art, and fumbling less won't change my disinterest. It'll make me say 'this doesn't work' less often, sure, but I won't want it all of a sudden. On the other hand, I broadly feel its better for devs to pursue their actual passions, particularly when it comes to creativity: I have seen many series where it felt very much to me like the devs had a correct assessment of what was the main appeal of their games to most consumers and stuck stringently to that and were basically competent at it, but where the series nonetheless lost an essential quality because the people behind it really, really wanted to make something completely different, but felt obligated to make this anyway. So if my assessment is correct, I wouldn't really want the Frostpunk devs to ignore their interest and make The Frostpunk 2 That Appeals To Me Personally. Of course, given the vagaries of the video game industry's studeios all the above might not really matter to the Frostpunk franchise, I dunno. ---------------------------------------------------- Next time, start on Endless Mode. See you then.