Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead Episode 492: The Last Autumn (Frostpunk)

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Three Moves Ahead 492:

Three Moves Ahead 492


The Last Autumn (Frostpunk)
Rob is joined by Cameron Kunzelman and Ethan Gach to return to the world of Frostpunk before the frost as the panel considers the game's latest DLC, The Last Autumn. In some ways it's an expansion the reveals some of the worst traits of Frostpunk, but in some other ways it reinvents and reimagines the game as a trickier and more credible management game.

The Last Autumn (Frostpunk)

 

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As a person who hasn't played the game, the whole part of the episode about worker relations and how doing the "right thing" for your workers was just whether or not you had the resources to push the "good button" gave me an interesting idea for a system to complicate matters.  I seem to recall some strategy games balancing "giving people what they want" with corruption in some abstract way that just sounds kind of cynical and arbitrary, but I think it could be more grounded..

 

Consider for example if all labor relations events were grounded on recent events--you get a notification that a worker was injured in a factory, and a few minutes later, you get a notice that there is a demand for more safety structures or unionization.  However, the more often you say "yes" to these demands, the more fake labor relations requests you get--requests that give you, say, half or none of the benefit in terms of morale improvement as a result, and half/none of the morale penalty if you turn them down, but all the standard costs and headache.  So if you say yes to everything, you will not only end up spending resources on things you don't need, but doing it more often because you get more requests.  Saying no to everything means every 'no' is a substantial penalty, but you are bothered less, which some merciless tyrants would appreciate.  All it would really take is a little bit of text that tells you what happened, and then a request that is either reasonable or unreasonable afterwards.

 

I didn't think about it until I started writing this, but a lot of games focus very specifically on the current state of the world--in short, you aren't relying on dynamic memory to say, X happened, so Y will happen, or Y happened, did X happen a minute ago?  While I'm sure that a lot of games I don't play (especially the big heavy Paradox ones) do engage memory in that way, it certainly seems like a very basic mechanic that could be more widely used.

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