Frostpunk 2 - Long Live The Oil

[Mark.L.Joy]

You missed the opportunity to diss any other open world game where you press forward 99% of the time which would be an apt comparison, elden ring has much more to it than this game.
And it is a big deal when comparing it to its predecessor.

 

[cvv]

And it is a big deal when comparing it to its predecessor.

Agreed.

The point was with little effort you can reduce even the greatest games into banal retardery.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

No, you can't, it's very obvious as you showed, my observation thought is very much valid, the population is now the only limiting resource in the game, you wait for it to increase or you send expeditions, expeditions require population and are limited by events so it's still a timer where you move sliders around ie you watch paint dry, it's not even pretty paint since we get a strategic fov now and only see white

Heat is also gone it' another number limited by... population...
The events and choices are still in but those were never enough to hold the game, they are also personal in scope when we have a more strategic view now so they feel out of place.

The devs have no idea what the appeal of the game was.

 

[Haba]

>Survival-oriented post-apocalyptic setting where mankind's very existence is at stake
>You cannot lower the age of consent to increase birthrate

Can't lower it because it doesn't exist.

If it bleeds, it breeds.

 

[Raghar]

The city building aspect is even weaker in FP2. Everything is hex-based and you have to "frostbreak" the area you want to build first which becomes very annoying very quickly. In part because you can't just "frostbreak" one or two hexes, you have to pay for eight each time when you often need far fewer.

Not only 6 sided tiles, I saw 5 and 7 sided tiles.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/frostpunk_2?as=1649904300

 

[Trash Player]

Complaining about the gameplay is missing the point. It is intentionally just the window dressing for the narrative. Not liking the game is a totally legit stance though.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Way worse than the first game. No idea why they removed the workday mechanic, it was the main gameplay appeal. Moving everything to global resource is also retarded idea, it reminds me of when Civ 5 did it with happiness. Another problem is that the game is too easy, resources are limitless and there is no time pressure.Darkest Dungeon 2 all over again.

 

[cvv]

So far I really think the biggest problem is the annoying politics system. I tried to largely ignore it but it seems it's much more important than I thought, sadly.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Gameplay wise factions don't matter until they are forced into conflict by script the last 2 chapters. You go from all 4 been devoted to you, to all 4 hating you. Pretty amateurish design, the whole game screams of mobile.

 

[-M-]

Finished the campaign and found it very lackluster. Felt very much like a greatest hits of FP1 by an out of tune cover band. Some very odd design choices. The whole thing takes roughly 15 years of in game time and it feels like very little happens. Also during that whole time you power an entire city from oil found in a wrecked tanker that's already been used for years by a group of nomads? Speaking of, those nomads you play as in the prologue only reappear for all of half a minute and do absolutely nothing. Should have just started the game with New London (I like how the in-game cutscene showing the city has the generator on full blast and then it cuts to gameplay where it's immediately off because the city ran out of coal).

By midway through Chapter 2, the city was pretty much taking care of itself. FP1 had the same problem, but the decisions you made in that game felt much more impactful. I chose to colonize the Frostland thinking I could actually build other colonies, but it's all done through the Frostland screen (yep, like a mobile game). You do get to build at the oil tanker and later

Spoiler

Winterhome

but it's very lacking.

The whole politics mechanic feels very gimmicky. The factions never feel like they're working for their interests. They just want you to build something because the game says it's associated with that faction. You give them an agenda (for increased trust) and they will throw up the same law over and over again no matter how many times it fails. Very primitive.

Found the UI to be pretty horrendous (wrong info or not displaying obvious stuff) but a lot of that can be fixed post release. And I don't know if it's an Unreal 5 issue or incompetent devs, but saving a game goes from 1 to 2 seconds in early game, to over 10 in the later chapters. I get that with a bigger city there's more to handle, but this just feels like poor optimization.

I've never found 11bit to be great game designers, but their earlier games they did a much better job of putting on a shinier veneer than this one. I guess we'll see what they do with the DLCs.

 

[thesecret1]

Tried it yesterday, played about halfway through the campaign before gamebreaking bugs put an end to the playthrough (essentially, the bug gave me infinite oil income for free because the trade mechanic shat itself, at which point there was no point to play onwards). The game was very easy even before that (granted, I only played on a harder difficulty rather than hardest) and felt a lot less tense than FP1 – I was frequently putting time passage on highest as I waited for some resource to get high enough to build something. The whiteout comes to play so late in the game that you can easily afford to do that frequently. I also hated the research tree. It feels like 80% of the techs there are just dogshit. "Hey you can research a sawmill that makes you cut trees faster!" but the speed of harvest is rarely important (unless you go with the game route that accesses deep deposits, I guess) since what you're limited by far more is that the deposit is going to run out (and building a better sawmill just makes that happen faster). A lot of the research also deals with laws but they're all so damn shit! "This law will make it so you get a higher heatstamp income" – what it actually means is that instead of 30 heatstamps per week, you earn 31. WOW! And they're all like this – the modifiers given by laws are so pathetically low that they don't really matter for the most part, making the whole mechanic largely irrelevant. So in the end, what I was left with, was a research tree with a couple actually useful options, and shitloads of useless garbage. Completely unlike FP1 where virtually every option felt very useful in some manner, depending on playstyle.

Overall, if I were to sum it all up, FP1 featured an incredibly tight design, where FP2 does not. You had a lot less options in FP1, a lot less freedom, but the decisions you did get to make were all the more impactful. In FP2, the game feels like it plays itself for the most part. Also, with how districts work, every city you make in FP2 is going to look like absolute shit.

Hope they overhaul all this since steam reviews shit on them for many of the same reasons, but until then I rate it

 

[cvv]

building a better sawmill just makes that happen faster

I only played the prologue and beginning of the 1st chapter but I think the idea is with a sawmill you need to build fewer extraction districts which is huge because those things eat workforce like crazy.

what it actually means is that instead of 30 heatstamps per week, you earn 31

Yeah I noticed that. I was actually struggling with money p. hard in those two hours or so, constantly begging the factions to chip in. You need a lot of it, all the time, and the income was a trickle, at least on Hard. Walked away from the game thinking money is the main bottleneck.

 

[thesecret1]

I only played the prologue and beginning of the 1st chapter but I think the idea is with a sawmill you need to build fewer extraction districts which is huge because those things eat workforce like crazy.

I was never short on workforce. Whenever I felt I was going to lack any, I just grabbed one of the many survivor groups on the frostlands map. Now, in theory, this should be a drawback since it means you're running with high population, right? More population means you need more houses and food, more goods, etc. But it's actually not because the higher your population, the more heatstamps you get (in fact, it's the only way to get a higher heatstamp income, AFAIK), which is what I've been bottlenecked the most. And the higher cost of food and other resources is handled by building more districts, which is not a problem because, again, I had a large population... As such, the only real problem was resource deposits running out, which building better sawmills wouldn't help with at all.

Yeah I noticed that. I was actually struggling with money p. hard in those two hours or so, constantly begging the factions to chip in. You need a lot of it, all the time, and the income was a trickle, at least on Hard. Walked away from the game thinking money is the main bottleneck.

Yeah, that's what I meant. You need a big population to get meaningful money income, and the population kind of solves all the drawbacks of high population on its own. This is compounded when you realize that due to the silly district tetris you can do on the map, having more districts can actually save you heat expenses more than having just one, since if you wrap them around each other enough, you'll get large heat cost deductions on them all.

 

[-M-]

City Run Alcohol Shops is the one law/research that gives any meaningful boost to heat stamps.

I really despise the heat stamp implementation because it makes so much of the game a passive experience, which is one of the worst things you can do when designing a game. Couple that with all the clumsy/awkward mechanics really makes for a subpar time.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Money is the center of the balance in this game as any other resource can be found on the map. Next is population, at the end game these are the only things you will lack. Just finished on the hardest difficulty first try, it was very easy and I ended picking to get endless outpost resources which I think is worse than endless ground plots (food, materials, etc.). When you know that in the last chapter you will need guards it makes the civil war not that hard. Have ~100 guards and stock up ~1000 stamps and you are golden. All in all it's meh, first game had better gameplay loop and was somewhat hard as you could had bad rng on some events. For all the complains that it was too puzzle-y at least the puzzle was interesting and you could play it at least two different ways. In the 2nd game there is no difference on how the game plays out, you will do the exact same thing every time all the time.

 

[cvv]

Just finished on the hardest difficulty first try

Your first run was on the Captain difficulty and you finished without restarting?

Provided you're not bullshitting this is serious decline. The Survivor diff. in F1 is one of the hardest challenges in any game of this type. The idea anyone could finish, say, the Winterhome scenario on Survivor first try is completely preposterous.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Just finished on the hardest difficulty first try

Your first run was on the Captain difficulty and you finished without restarting?

Provided you're not bullshitting this is serious decline. The Survivor diff. in F1 is one of the hardest challenges in any game of this type. The idea anyone could finish, say, the Winterhome scenario on Survivor first try is completely preposterous.

First run was on 2nd difficulty, but then did hardest and never restarted, didn't even load a save. I'm telling you once you get the loop it's super easy. Even when you fail to regain trust at some point you can vote yourself with negotiations. I think I could have beaten it even on survival (that mode where you can't pause) as the normal speed is very slow and it's like a pause anyway. There is so little stuff you have to pay attention to and most of the time you wait to get money anyway so there is no pressure at all. Promises also have 30-40 weeks timer so it's impossible to fail them. Game is way, way easier then the first one.

 

[Raghar]

Way worse than the first game. No idea why they removed the workday mechanic, it was the main gameplay appeal. Moving everything to global resource is also retarded idea, it reminds me of when Civ 5 did it with happiness. Another problem is that the game is too easy, resources are limitless and there is no time pressure.Darkest Dungeon 2 all over again.

I kinda missed playing some relaxing game. I play Patrician 3 again from beginning with max pirates and low income start, and it's decent.

 

[Gerrard]

That's a yikes from me.

 

[-M-]

It sold 350k copies so far, which is only 100k more than the original over the same time period.

I know it's a niche game, but that seems rather low to me for a sequel to a mostly well regarded game.

 

[Infinitron]

It sold 350k copies so far, which is only 100k more than the original over the same time period.

I know it's a niche game, but that seems rather low to me for a sequel to a mostly well regarded game.

 

[-M-]

Just finished on the hardest difficulty first try, it was very easy and I ended picking to get endless outpost resources which I think is worse than endless ground plots (food, materials, etc.).

The game acts like the decisions are a lot more meaningful than they turn out to be. Regardless if you choose to defeat or embrace the frost, you still need frostland outposts to supplement your resources. Choose to make the generator run only on oil? Still need to take in coal for liquefaction. Steam exists (barely) but there's no reason to use it because the game is about to end by the time you find it. I found the campaign to be a big letdown, and the last three (of five) chapters are incredibly short.

I found the endless colonies to be slightly easier, since Frostland exploration has the depth of a mobile game and you can just click to get everything without worrying about building things in the city and dealing with disease and squalor.

It feels like this game was designed with Utopia/builder mode first and the campaign was an afterthought, while the original was the reverse (I think builder mode took a few months to implement after release).