Against the Storm - Roguelike City Builder - Dec 8 (incl. on Game Pass)

Ah, I did not know that! Again, I don’t recall the game ever mentioning what the stars meant. Very helpful, thank you!

Yeah, it’s possible the early demands from the queen tend to align with the small selection of available buildings. It was always “Oh, a brewery and the queen wants beer/ale/whatever. I guess I should pick that”.

I’m guessing that’s why in the youtube playthrough I’m watching the player held off on selecting their blueprints until more of the queen’s demands appeared ie so they could tailor their selections to match what was needed.

Is there any reason not to immediately deliver on a demand when you have fulfilled its requirements? Other than if you had two demands competing for the same resource and you wanted to deliver them in a different order?

Fulfilling a demand gives you reputation and reduces the queen’s impatience. If your impatience is already low it can be useful to wait a bit so you’re not wasting it. Also, storm effects and (possibly) dangerous grove events can block the impatience reduction when they’re active.

I’ve never come close to losing due to impatience but there are some achievements for consistently keeping impatience low, which means more exp and faster unlocks.

Oh, and sometimes the queen demands critical resources that you don’t want to ship until you have some in reserve. You don’t want to give her all of your firewood and have your hearth go out.

They really need to make this more obvious, the game didn’t really click with me until I realized this.

I’ve been paused, looking at how I seem to be screwed, realized something like “wait I can make tea with bugs?!”, and then totally reconfigured my supply chain to get myself unstuck.

Funnily enough, in the last couple of minutes while watching the youtube playthrough on my lunch break the player actually said they were holding off so it wasn’t wasted (though they didn’t explain exactly what they meant). What you’ve said makes sense. Thanks.

This game suddenly sounds much more interesting :)

I love it and have lots of thoughts, but currently have been insanely busy with work and when I get home want to play it rather than talk about it. I’d tried the demo but the 3MA podcast episode encouraged me to dive back in. I watch a Youtuber, Katherine of Sky, play a bit before restarting.

The demo/tutorial was certainly not comprehensive enough, but I was glad it was there so I could give it a test drive. I ended up doing a lot of pausing and reading of tooltips which often are well done and point me in the right direction. I still use pause liberally and then speed the game up to get to a point where I need something else done or queued.

There are so many little things that this gets right as far as QoL improvements and taking the un-fun parts of city builders out.

I’m still on my first run and on the third reset of the map (I forget the term from the game that results in the map clearing and you start new colonies with different challenges and effects). I think I failed the queen once.

I love the upgrade tree and the bonuses you can choose form when you start a colony and a dozen other things. Mostly I like the challenge of starting a new colony, attempting to efficiently build it up and then getting to start over. The whole glade revealing and randomization makes it different each time even if the changes aren’t significant.

I’ll try to read through more and add something this evening.

Short 37 episode play thru here:

She loves the game, so that helped. Also, she had a pretty solid handle on how things work, so I guess she’d played it awhile before she did that series. It probably pointed me toward things that I started the game knowing how to do. I did only watch two videos before I was convinced by it and the 3MA gushing love for it, so I can’t comment on whether all 37 are worth the watch. :)

Thanks for the link. I should have done that. :)

I didn’t know this when I bought the full version because I am an idiot, but there’s is a place to reference the Content Creator when you check out, so put her in there if you so desire and found her videos useful. I wonder if I can go back and send them a note to give her credit.

I don’t have game up at the moment, but what’s the specialty bonus that some buildings have?

I want to say the basic workshop has one called ‘Technology’ with a blue icon.

Lizards are comfortable with Warmth and proficient with Meat
Beavers are comfortable with Technology and proficient with Wood
Humans are comfortable with Cooking and proficient with Farming

Comfortable citizens have +5 resolve. Proficient citizens have a 1/10 chance of producing double resources. The bonuses are by building rather than by product – Lizards in a smokehouse (warmth, meat) are happy and efficient even when they’re only making pottery.

Since scarcity kills faster than low resolve, I always use the right species for the proficiency bonus but will only go for the comfortable bonus when it’s convenient.

Well explained, thank you!

This game is just a little bit addictive, I’m finding.
I think it’s starting to click a bit. Keep the Lizards near the fire pit, humans on farms, and beavers can do technical things.
It took me a while to get the idea of collecting rain, but that was because I didn’t have the building for it.

The biggest lesson to be learned is to be careful with the quests. Sometimes, you just won’t have the building for it. Such as in my case, no religion yet, or easy way to get coal, so I had to skip those.

I decided to do an AAR of today’s Daily Expedition!

This expedition defaults to the Hard difficulty. It’s played in the colorful Coral Forest biome. (This will affect what bonus resources are collected when cutting wood. Coral Forest has a very wide range of random stuff.) It comes with some of the most useful embark resources: Parts (the cog icon) in particular is nice to start with because you have no way to manufacture more and they get used up by many basic buildings.

It also comes with some unusual Modifiers. Each Storm is going to last twice as long! And I won’t get a choice of Orders–these are the goals that you want to complete to win the session, and often smart picking of orders is a key to winning. This could be a challenge!

I’ll be heading in with a larger than usual contingent of villagers: 6 humans, 6 lizards, and 3 beavers. A shame, as beavers are particularly suited to early-game tasks like chopping wood and making building materials, but we’ll get by.

Like every expedition, I start in a medium sized glade with a Main Storage building and a central Hearth. The hearth burns wood or coal and gives every villager a place to rest and warm up. I start with some coal, but it’s not going to last forever! Both for that reason and because there’s only a few resources in my starting area (some eggs and roots), the first thing I do is start building two woodcutters.

There’s also some starting choices to make:

First, what's called a Cornerstone.

These are permanent ongoing bonuses (sometimes also penalties).

Metallurgic Proficiency won’t affect a lot of my production, especially early, so it’s not a must-have. Fungal Guide could turn out to be GREAT… but only if I end up growing or harvesting mushrooms, which depends on the resources I find on the map and the blueprints I get. It’s tempting, but the last offering is a no-brainer. Free Fiber every minute sets me up to not have to worry about a fundamental resource chain: Weaving Cloth, a vital building material.

I also have to pick my 3 starting blueprints. This is important. I get offered three sets of three blueprints, and I pick one from each set.

My first choice is between three farm buildings. These are built near fertile ground tiles and then go on to produce certain crops every season. Other basic goods are gathered from finite harvesting spots, so farms are a more reliable ongoing source of food, etc… IF you can find enough fertile ground.

My choices are:

  • Grove (produces berries and “crystallized dew”, which is a weird kind of ore)
  • Plantation (produces berries and fiber)
  • Small Farm (produces grain and vegetables)

The Small Farm is a pretty essential building, making two kinds of food. I take it to make sure I can keep up with my villagers’ appetites.

Next choice is between three manufacturing buildings:

  • Workshop (makes the three basic construction goods–planks, cloth, and bricks)
  • Carpenter (makes planks and a couple of later-game resources)
  • Supplier (makes cloth, pottery, and trade goods)

I take the Workshop. I have access automatically to the “Crude Workshop,” but the regular Workshop makes the same stuff while using fewer raw resources to do so.

Lastly, I am offered three more manufacturing buildings:

  • Kiln (makes coal from wood, pottery, and jerky from meat)
  • Lumber Mill (makes planks, tools, and flour)
  • Supplier (this got recycled when I didn’t pick it last time)

The Lumber Mill I find to be another essential building. Making enough planks to build without gobbling up all your raw wood is important. And there aren’t many sources of flour, so while the lumber mill is not very efficient at making flour, it’s likely to be our best option for most or all of this expedition.

I also get my Orders

Normally I get a choice of two for each of these, but not with this expedition’s special rules.

Luckily, these first three orders are very agreeable ones. The first requires me to build a trading post, which I have in my starting set of buildings and will definitely build early. The second is to build a farm and grow grain. I got that farm building in my starting blueprints, so we’re good to go there. And my last Order is to clear 1 glade. Nothing could be easier.

I’ve already finished building my two woodcutters and I’ve assigned three workers to each (a combo of beavers and humans), and I have designated the trees that I want them to chop. Specifically, we’re cutting narrow channels that lead to the nearest small clearings. These clearings will have some kind of resources to gather, and they’ll be guaranteed safe, unlike the larger clearings that we’ll be tackling later.

I plop down some more buildings: A Crude Workshop to make basic building materials (we’ll need them to make the improved Workshop building). A Scavenger’s Camp, for gathering the snake eggs that are in my starting area. And a Trading Post, since I have an early Order that requires it!

After some chopping and building (unassigned villagers do the building, and I’ve got lots to spare at first), here’s what my burgeoning settlement looks like:

We’ve broken into two clearings, at the bottom and the left side. There’s some fertile ground in that latter one (the long dark green grass). The glassy blue areas are clearings we haven’t chopped our way into yet, so we don’t know what’s in them.

And once my Trading Post is done I can already fulfill that Order! (It also required some Amber, which is a kind of premium trading currency, but I started with more than the order needed). For completing that order, I get 6 tools, 5 parts, and 20 grain. A good start on my food supply! And those tools are super-handy, too. They are used to tap into supply caches that I’ll find randomly in the surrounding clearings, which in turn will give me a boost of various resources.

I also get one Reputation for completing the Order. That moves me one twelfth of the way toward victory! It also gives me a choice of a new blueprint. I can get a:

  • Furnace (makes copper bars from copper ore, but I don’t have a source of copper yet)
  • Apothecary (makes tea, which is great but only later on)
  • Bakery (turns flour and other foods into biscuits and pies, which are advanced foods that different species of villagers appreciate)

The Bakery is pretty important, so that’s my choice!

There’s actually a lot to do next, so my next post will begin with a flurry of activity!

Nice!

I got that same mission, but mine played very differently. Looking at the pics, I got the same perks and orders and I never got a lumber yard. And I went with a Mushroom farm.

All in all, the most interesting missions are those that have no merchants. Those are a real challenge because you can’t get a lucky building or needed goods.

The worst missions are those that have no farm land, because you are constantly running low on food.

Yeah, given that I can win most sessions pretty easily now, it does take a challenge like not having traders to really feel like a squeeze. I think it’s probably something they should work to tighten just a little bit at hard difficulty.

Wait, where do you get these? I just click the “Play Game” button and then choose a hex to expedition (expedite?) to and that’s it. I didn’t know there were daily challenges.

Also, thanks to y’all for making me get this. I’ve done maybe 10 expeditions so far and this game is great.

Also, is Discord the only place for documentation on this game?

I think I unlocked it in the tech tree.