Against the Storm - Fantasy roguelite city builder

[Arryosha]

Has anyone played this? It has good reviews and an interesting concept but looks like a mobile game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1336490/Against_the_Storm/

 

[Eyestabber]

I have. Fun game so far, not nearly as casual as it looks.

 

[zapotec]

It looks like a slot machine not even a mobile game

 

[Catacombs]

Give mes Warcraft III vibes.

 

[Eyestabber]

So I played this for a little under ten hours and I think this game is definitely worth keeping an eye on. It's a fun city builder with objectives similar to Caesar III, but without any combat. There's a very complex production chain with multiple formulas to reach the same final product with varying degrees of efficiency. Different species have slightly different needs and excel at different things. For instance, humans are good at farming and brewing while beavers are great for chopping down trees and turn them into planks. Lizards excel in meat production and are more than happy to work in hot places (eg: smelter, kiln, cookhouse) and harpies excel at alchemy and love making clothes. There are several basic food resources and a couple forms of "advanced" food that make certain species happier. Buildings have three basic resources: planks, bricks and cloth and unlike food, there's no way around producing these three resources.

Efficiency also plays a big role in the game. Earlier factories will open up more options (eg: crude factory can produce all three building materials) but will suck balls efficiency wise, meaning you should work towards a more advanced replacement. Even after getting a couple blueprints you still have to face a versatility X efficiency decision. There's also meta progression in the form of upgrades to the "Citadel" that can provide both minor bonuses as well as completely new tools to the player.

I think the game has a very solid foundation. My only gripe so far is the excess of recipes and blueprints that can result in a bit of RNG-related frustration. But I'm pretty sure more buildings will become "guaranteed" as the development moves forward. I recommend you ppl try the demo.

 

[Eyestabber]

Alright! Won a game on maximum difficulty and on one of the most hostile biomes! This time I actually didn't bother trying to setup brick and cloth production, I went straight for exports and the profit was enough to keep me afloat while buying everything else I needed. With a Human-Beaver-Harpy settlement biscuit production gives a big resolve buff to EVERYONE, which is nice. Late game I managed to go Utopia with a temple and a tavern. Never produced any of the required luxuries, just bought them all from the ghost trader. A Flawless Rain Mill that I found on the wilderness carried my economy pretty hard, alongside the usual beavers lumber mill. Weird that basic trading requires a bit of meta progression considering how incredibly important trading really is. Was also fun going for a sort of "hybrid" win condition.

Bought the game legit on GOG, btw.

 

[user]

This game is a fucking gem. 60 hours in. I don't even particularly like this genre, and at first I thought it was just another hamsterwheel like most of its kind. But the emergent problems that you get to solve are great, differ from playthrough to playthrough, and there are multiple ways to achieve victory. The RNG is just the right amount and adds a ton of replayability. The end-game doesn't get boring like it is the case with most of these games, because as years go by the forest becomes more hostile to you. Furthermore you have a specific amount of time in the world map to create colonies and venture further into the world before the cycle ends and everything gets reset and you get compete with other factions for that too later in the game.

 

[Arryosha]

I recommend you ppl try the demo.

I swear I had looked for a demo before creating this thread and didn't find one, but there it was. I've been working my way through that and it seems decent--good atmosphere. But tutorials never give the best impression.

at first I thought it was just another hamsterwheel like most of its kind.

This was exactly my worry, so that is good news. The hamsterwheel in this genre seems to be "Good job meeting your denizens' needs. Now they have a new need, so do the same thing again except with different colors, and at the same time keep doing all the other stuff."

 

[luj1]

Has anyone played this? It has good reviews and an interesting concept but looks like a mobile game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1336490/Against_the_Storm/

Wow that looks really cool actually

 

[Eyestabber]

Reached the level cap today. Despite all the fantasy races and fantasy resources, my suspension of disbelief held. Until I saw this:

Harpies being able to straight up PRINT MONEY without it causing inflation? Now that's a bit too much fantasy for me.

But anyway, here are some random tips to anyone who decides to pick this game up:

• A single farm can't handle a large patch of fertile camps. You need to put two farms, like this:
  
  Set both farms for the same type of production and that's it. Once you get a few upgrades you can use a "half farm" (single worker) and eventually transition into one farm with maybe one field going to waste every storm.
• Notable buildings you should always take: Kiln (wood -> coal is godly), Carpenter, provisioner, weaver, granary (requires a few lvls), Rain Mill, Lumber Mill, Ranch (raw food -> more raw food is godly), Grove (don't waste time crafting bars when you can get them directly), Leatherworker (can work purely out of Ranch outputs), Apothecary, Brick Oven (there's an OP cornerstone related to Pie production), Grill (skewers can be produced using solely raw resources), Tinctury, Stamping Mill (notice all things with "mill" in the name are good)
• When choosing your embarkation bonuses, take a look at your caravan and make sure you have the raw materials needed for cloth. Spawning with no source of cloth will severely cripple your progress. Bricks are also necessary, but I advise you always embark with stone anyway.
• Trade is the lifeblood of your settlement. There are five types of "packages" in the game, all traders are willing to buy packaged goods. Non packaged goods can only be sold to certain traders.
• You always start out with way more parts and wildfire essence than what you really need. These items are very valuable and can be sold for a nice profit. Just don't sell your last essence/set of parts or you will regret it.
• Provisions are a key resource and only two buildings can produce them: provisioner (no bonuses) and manufactory (happy harpies). Never skip on one of these buildings otherwise you'll be forced to rely on the makeshift post for your provision needs.
• You don't actually need to be able to produce all three building materials, just check the "recipes" screen to see what you DON'T produce and buy all the stock offered by a trader. Remember to disable its usage on building material production as well.
• Mines are powerful but require a huge investment. Coal is valuable in all stages of the game but copper is not. Don't commit 4 beavers + 40 planks/bricks to extracting a resource you can't find a use for (copper). Coal OTOH is always useful as either fuel or raw materials.
• Buy flamethrower ammo. It's actually cheaper than producing it, even when using harpies. Never sell it and remember to set up a limit in your blight posts.
• When choosing a new cornerstone ALWAYS think on the short term. You need a boost right now, not 20 minutes from now. In 20 minutes everything already went to shit because you thought taking a snowballing perk for a resource you aren't even producing would eventually pay off.
• Prioritize harvesting. It kinda goes without saying, but harvesting berries with two harpies will outperform a farm with two humans.
• Import economy WORKS. If you have money laying around you can simply buy luxuries from traders and package them in your carpenters for a huge profit and no resource consumption.
• Prioritize the middle tree on the meta progression so that you can unlock factions and dailies ASAP. These new mechanics will increase the speed at which you get the resources needed for meta progression.
• Beavers rule, harpies drool. Srsly, you'll quickly learn why beavers are the master race in this game.
• Keep in mind the fact that production actually MULTIPLIES your resources so advancing a tier is always worth it. In most games your initial goal should be to stop eating raw food and stop burning wood ASAP.
• Take note of all the "middle" resources in the game like flour. Don't produce them if you can't either use or package said resources. Any building that can make "pack of trade goods" is your friend in this situation.
• When selecting a new blueprint you can hover over and a tooltip will show you whether that building merely improves on another or brings an entirely new option to the table. In most cases being able to do new things is better than doing the same thing slightly better. Eg: weaver > lumber mill if you already have the carpenter.

Anyway, the game is really good and perfectly playable despite its EA status. I strongly recommend it.

 

[Catacombs]

Anyway, the game is really good and perfectly playable despite its EA status. I strongly recommend it.

You should write a full-blown review for the Codex.

 

[anvi]

I wish building games weren't all the same shit.

 

[Eyestabber]

Anyway, the game is really good and perfectly playable despite its EA status. I strongly recommend it.

You should write a full-blown review for the Codex.

At this point in development a review would not be worth much. The roadmap still includes a bunch of major content like buildings, biomes and a much awaited 5th race. Right now you can enter the beta and see there is a full rework of the gathering system being developed and playtested.

I'm very optimistic about the final product, but it's worth pointing out there is no eta on a release date.

 

[Catacombs]

Anyway, the game is really good and perfectly playable despite its EA status. I strongly recommend it.

You should write a full-blown review for the Codex.

At this point in development a review would not be worth much. The roadmap still includes a bunch of major content like buildings, biomes and a much awaited 5th race. Right now you can enter the beta and see there is a full rework of the gathering system being developed and playtested.

I'm very optimistic about the final product, but it's worth pointing out there is no eta on a release date.

Right. I was talking about a review when it releases.

 

[Gerrard]

I played the demo for a day and honestly felt like it started getting monotonous and I've seen everything it has to offer. Some of the design choices like the resource substitutes, while cool on their own, go directly against the whole concept of having to deal with randomly generated maps and making do with what you find in them.
Lack of any kind of actual enemies/combat also seems like a very weird choice considering the theme.

E: After playing some more of the TPB edition and the full features, the games end before I even have to engage with some of them, like the public services buildings.
looking at the newest update also doesn't paint a very good picture of the devs

DEVELOPER NOTES
Hello there, Viceroys! It’s Thursday again, so we bring you another juicy update. This time we focused mostly on balance - in the form of camps, rewards, biomes, and resources. There’s also a fair bit of new UI and UX improvements, so let’s get right into it.

First off - the camp changes. Many of you have already seen a sneak peek of this on the Experimental Branch. And while the first version of this change was not very well received, the second iteration turned out very promising. That’s why we decided to improve it a bit, adjust the balance accordingly, and release it to the main version of the game. To put it simply, from now on you will have access to additional essential camps at the start of the game - the Small Trappers’ Camp, the Small Foragers’ Camp, and the Small Herbalists’ Camp. These are called Small Camps because they work similarly to normal camps but are slower and can only collect small resource nodes. To gather big or gigantic nodes, you’ll need a regular camp (which can be acquired as before - from Reputation rewards, bought from a trader, or found in glades).

They are adding EVEN MORE buildings, when the game already has too many redundant buildings that never see use (to be fair they did remove one camp type though).

 

[JamesDixon]

I tried it and you can never actually complete a full city. When you fill up the prestige meter you win the map which can be done with as far buildings as possible. Once you complete the prestige goal the win screen comes up which gives you the option to continue playing or not. If you choose to continue playing you will not earn new buildings, deeds, and the like, so it's pointless to actually continue. Seriously, for every prestige point you earn you unlock a new building for that map. When you win you have filled the prestige meter which stops you from earning even more prestige to unlock buildings.

My final score is 2 out of 10.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Picked this up 'cause of the sale and after trying the demo. Demo gave me a good enough impression after two and a half hours I was sold on it. Luck of the draw with your buildings/cornerstones/orders really spices things up, and the relatively short runtime for a mission keeps it nice and lively. The only unfortunate part is now I'm thinking about shelving it until it's released to prevent giving myself early access burnout by playing a bunch before it's "Done" like I did with Darkest Dungeon. It's definitely playable and enjoyable as-is but they've got a bunch of shit on the docket to add to it so I may be better served by waiting. Just wanted to plonk my money down since I had enough Steam credit lying around to cover the cost, there was a sale on, and their early access page mentions that they'll likely raise the price later when it's more complete.

Kind of surprised there hasn't been something similar to this earlier. The meat and potatoes of the city building is similar to plenty of things, but the missions being so short and having the roguelite meta-layer (Which annoys me in most roguelites/likes but this is one case where I dig it) and the ever so slight overworld meta-game that also gets wiped every so often is really cool. It's interesting because it brings to mind other games as I play it but doesn't feel directly comparable to anything, for example I get the faintest whiff of Majesty when I'm playing since like with Majesty I play cranked up on max speed and pause to adjust orders and react to things and there's a little bit of similarity in trying to "Solve the puzzle" in the case of a Majesty scenario or dealing with what you're dealt in this, even though mechanically the games are dissimilar.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

New update came out a bit ago and there are only a few days left to vote for frog. VOTE FOR FROG.
I'm at around 9 hours played in this and the more I play the more I enjoy it. Great game. Probably the biggest pleasant surprise out of the blue for me since Slay the Spire.

 

[MuckMan]

Voted frogs naturally. Has anyone tried the new Rainpunk mechanic? Because so far I have ignored it.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/3659774324617359177

Foxes won with more votes than frogs and bats combined, nothing stops the yifftide. Other than that it's a pretty small update, adding a 60 second cooldown on favoring a race makes sense since it was far too easy to game it during storms, and 60 seconds is short enough that it's not such a weighty decision you really have to think much about it. And production buildings taking resources from resource collecting buildings if they're nearer than a warehouse is nice and might lead to slightly more efficient setups but shouldn't be a gamechanger. What I do kinda wish they'd do is make unassigned people ("Builders") move resources around at a lower priority than building, just so workers could get a slight efficiency boost if you've got a bunch of people with their thumbs up their asses at the hearth.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

why do these faggot foxes always win these fan votes? WTF? Is it because there are a bunch of fat losers who have fantasies about fucking furry jap three tailed fox things? Fucking degenerate freaks ruin everything.

 

[covr]

Women also voted for foxes but they are in minority. Fucking rabid spreading useless parasites. And they are terrible drivers!

 

[Borelli]

Been playing it for 2 weeks straight before i said enough. More addictive than i would have thought at first glance.
Roguelite + city builder is a fresh new combination, and a timer in missions keeps you on your toes but not too much.
There is some difficulty involved, at least at the beginning due to lack of meta upgrades, and because i chose the keep people happy missions
which i found difficult to solve early game (harpies are impossible to please) while collect resources ones are easier.
The city building is less simcity / impressions games urbanism and more frostpunk like "every ingame day is a turn" of sort (sorry if i can't explain it better) where you have to balance opening up new glades with rising hostility and a ticking timer.

My favourite biomes are the mutated forests where every tree has various resources in it, can solve the whole map just with lumberjacks.
Has anyone tried playing with the self sufficient (i forgot the exact name) perk? The one where there is no trade at all but you get production bonuses?
Trade is really really powerful in this game, luxury goods for some reason are relatively cheap, late game you can keep people happy just by buying them.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Has anyone tried playing with the self sufficient (i forgot the exact name) perk? The one where there is no trade at all but you get production bonuses?
Trade is really really powerful in this game, luxury goods for some reason are relatively cheap, late game you can keep people happy just by buying them.

I have, and even though the 50% production speed bonus to everything is great you're correct that trade's so goddamn huge it's still way more valuable. You might be able to swing it if it shows up as a relatively late pick and you already know you're well situated on resources (Since taking it early is a gamble, otherwise you'll be cracking open glades constantly trying to find that one critical resource) and it's obviously great if you're playing on a map that forces no trading (Which incidentally is pretty ball-busting. Not having trade and not getting that bonus to go along with it is rough) but generally I'd avoid it to keep trade viable. Being able to buy critical resources is great and the chance to buy blueprints/cornerstones/passive bonuses can make a massive difference, trade's the best way to mitigate shit luck with glades or blueprints/cornerstones offered, though I assume that becomes a bit less of an issue as you soak up campaign unlocks and get more rerolls of shit.

I've been impressed with how much extra oomph you get from the rainpunk system but I'm still having a hard time estimating the size of the workforce I need to set aside for it. Just relying on rain collectors is spotty (Feels like you can power one building of each water type most of the time with a fully harpy-staffed rain collector) but then I wonder about if the geysers are worth the effort. Still, last game on hard I had a stockpile of some 400 skewers since a rainpunk'd up cookhouse goes absolutely apeshit. Actually there's an idea, I don't remember if you can hook up a woodcutter to rainpunk or not but if you can then beaver-cutters fully powered up with the anything-trees could be a fun route to take. Your hostility will go absolutely fucking crazy unless you tell them to avoid glades and try to cut out everything BUT the glades but if that works that might be kinda fun to try at some point.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/3667656258520766684
Nothing too terribly exciting for the patch this time around, few new modifiers on the campaign map, made modifiers more common, rejiggered orders, spruced up trading interface, few new pieces of music, etc. Nice shit but fairly small as patches go.

That nerd's comic reminds me of when I first got access to harpies, though. That was fun. Didn't know at the time how picky they were and that was my first stab at playing at very hard rather than hard so I ultimately lost that game, but the fun part was I got the cannibalism cornerstone (Get meat every time a villager leaves/dies) and the slavery cornerstone (Get cash every time a villager leaves/dies) and then I took the strategy of completely ignoring harpy happiness so they could be tastefully raped to death and then chopped up and cooked once everyone was done with them. Probably would have been a winning move now with more experience playing the game but at the time I didn't leverage that enough to try to offset the extra impatience from losing villagers. Not even sure if I knew about swapping firekeepers to try to keep a human tending the fire to counteract that. Regardless, the greatest city builder.