Hello everybody (and maybe devs, if you are reading this)

Just wanted to give my 2cents on the game. First of all: The game is overall great, immersive and gave me chills even in summer time.

But there are a few problems in my opinion that can and should be fixed to make the game even better:


Balance:

The game was overall too easy imo, having played through the main story and ark once. Without any prior knowledge, I soon had infinite resources and was thus never forced to make any hard decisions. Always treated my folks nice, accepted every refugee without any problem. Being evil should not just be a fluff decision of the player but sometimes a necessity (or at least that's what I think you devs had in mind when you developed this game).

So let's break this done, why was it so easy?

The main problem (imo) is that materials directly translate into food via hunting huts. You can build an infinite number of hunting huts, there will be 0 risk and they will always bring home a set amount of food. That is both overpowered and unrealistic. The "wildlife pool" should grow smaller as the game progresses, making hunters less effective in late game (when you should have the steam cores to invest in hot houses). Also, food production should not scale linearly with how many hunters you have. There should also be some kind of risk involved: Hunters get frostbitten, hunters die, hunter bring back varying amounts of food.

Having an infinite supply of the other resources at some point is fine, it makes the player feel good about having planned correctly and maxed out all resource tech. However, food should always be scarce in an apocalyptical frost setting.


Story: (SPOILERS FOR EVERYBODY WHO HASN'T FINISHED THE MAIN STORY)

After War of Mine, I though 11-Bit would step up their story game a bit. I expected this game to be about a bit more than just survival and the hard decisions that come with it. Especially the totalitarian doctrines you can employ, why not have some kind of conflict with other settlements brewing? But no, just a big storm, that's it, you win. Also no explanation why the earth is cooling down more than any scientist can explain. I mean, this is basically steampunk, why not go a bit in the fantasy direction? Aliens, evil super-scientists, whatever. Provide some kind of solution to the problem, not just "it's ok now, we will survive, bye".


Side quests:

I was a bit disappointed about the scouting system. There's nothing left from the gameplay you had in War of Mine when you visited locations. Just a nice picture, a text and max 1 decision to make that even tells you the outcome beforehand. Why not create little side missions with branching multiple choice options? Would be much more immersive and takes your mind off the tedious base building for 1-2 minutes.


But overall, that is critique on a high level. I would still rate this game 4/5 stars as it is now.

What do you think? Do you agree/disagree? Or are there other problems that I did not see?

The game does feel pretty easy yes, I haven't tried playing on hard yet though. First real problem I had was when I tried the 3rd scenario without letting the children work. I feel people should get discontent more with your decisions or something.

The hunting hut does feel like a weird building. It doesn't need heat and the people work at night. I feel like the scouts and hunters should be combined somehow and maybe add a hunting outpost or something. This would make it harder over time because you need to go farther as time goes by because hunting zones would "mine out". You could also give it a bit of random amount of food and give zones with lots of food a chance of death. It also doesn't feel logical that you need to build more hunter buildings since they don't really work there, the scout system would work better with it. Maybe remove the research to have multiple squads but make it more and more expensive to create extra ones.

I think the story could be more and better, but is left open for extra scenarios / DLC and because with the decisions you make could interact badly with the story. Btw in the third scenario you kinda have a conflict. I'm ok though that you don't know what exactly is happening.

The scouting does feel like something they added on when the rest of the game was already 3/4 finished. I do like how it tells the story that way though.

So for my own thoughts while playing the game...

- Love the atmosphere. The art and music are top. Maybe warmer days could give some more color to really show a difference.
- The game itself feels a lot like Banished but with more story and less replayability.
- Have people that are not working do the building first. eg. medics when there is only 1 sick person. Felt a bit weird when you're used to it from banished.
- I would like some of the early building to be unlocked from the start instead of having to research them. This would give a bit more build order freedom.
- Performance needs some work. Once you get to a certain amount of people the game gets lag spikes (midnight, 5 in the morning and I think others I can't think of right now). So it purely because a lot of logic is calculated all at once.
- It is way to easy to select a person instead of a building and there is almost never a reason to select a person.
- The HUD could use some tweaks:
-- Why hide what future research gives me? It's just annoying, like maybe I wouldn't have started investing in coal mines if I knew it would require more cores. Your second or third replay you will know these things anyway, so there is no reason to hide the information.
-- Research queue would be a nice QOL
-- Why do resources disappear when using the heat overlay?
-- Show type of resource and type of workforce when pressing alt

Difficulty
Difficult in games like Frostpunk is balanced on a knife's edge. A slight difference in efficiency on day 1 puts you slightly ahead in day 2, which you can reinvest to be even more efficient and further ahead on day 3, and so on and so forth. This compounding advantage means even a small difference in performance on the part of the player has a huge effect a couple of weeks into the game.

As an example, I tried lowering just one of the difficulty settings (weather) to see how big a difference it made. It didn't change anything for the first few days, but since the first cold snap was significantly delayed I was able to get greedy with my economic development. Bunkhouses, steam hubs, and heaters all got delayed in favor of building new and better resource harvesting workplaces. That extra resource income meant that when it did come time to prepare for the cold, it was trivial to do so. It felt more like a relaxed city simulator (still fun, but not the kind of game you play for the difficulty).

It doesn't take a big change to make a huge difference in the strength of your city and its economy, and I think in that respect there's no magic difficulty setting they could have made that would have worked for everyone. Some people will glide through normal difficulty taking the golden path without much trouble, others will just plain fail at it, and only some will be in that middle ground where victory is in sight but they need to make hard decisions. In that respect, I think they did a good job of it.

Balance
Having played both the order and faith route... is it just me, or does faith just outclass order? The basic faith buildings don't require heating or workers, and the first building you get that does (field kitchen) can potentially save you on heating other nearby buildings. Am I missing something, or is one path just superior to the other?

Secondly, is there any point to the generator range upgrades? It costs an astronomical amount of coal to run the generator on those settings, much more than it costs to just heat the equivalent area with steam hubs. The generator doesn't appear to provide any additional benefits over steam hubs, nor does it stack with them. Is there a point to this setting that I'm missing, or is the coal cost just way out of line?

As for food, I agree it's kind of weird. There are two big issues here. The first one is that hunting improves way too much with research investment. At the start of the game it only produces 15 food per 15 hunters for every night spent hunting. However, after a mere two upgrades this improves to 20 food per 10 hunters; the food income literally doubles with only two techs! And that's before flying hunters is even researched! Once they're fully researched, it's 45 food for every 10 hunters, or 450% improved over the unupgraded hunter's hut. For a work building that doesn't require steam cores or special resources, that's just way too big an improvement. The second issue is the double shift issue, which lets you have your workers labor by day, then change their job right before nightfall to hunting. They work double shifts, and there is no penalty. Figuring this out makes the early-game massively easier, as it's functionally increasing your workforce by roughly 50%. If flying hunters were a steam core building, and hunters needed to be assigned no later than 8:00 if they are to hunt in the evening, I don't think the criticisms would hold up.