feels more like a 4X building type game with hex tiles instead of a city builder where you place individual buildings
But wait! It's not just districts, you have multiple "one tile only" buildings as well as spots in your districts for special housing as well. Like how districts that may start with 6 squares expanding into 12 or more because you need to expand out in order to place a research building or watch tower or prison or other tech
Another fun one is how research also links to laws leading to the hilarious outcome of spending multiple weeks researching a tech only for your people not to support it in the end. "Tough shit kid" although that never happened until I hit the "radical ideas"
I haven't gotten so far in the story for factions and turmoil to matter but I'm sure there are already exploits you can do such as building things and tearing it down.
The problem is there's not much variety in what factions can do either. They either want laws passed, want research done, or want buildings made. Beyond that with how many factions there are you're guaranteed to have one that will side with you and if you're feeling dangerous can be given the wonderful idea of asking you to pass a law or research a tech you already would.
Because of how you can ask each faction for money too and how much you can get, it's almost a joke to do anything "construct buildung" related
Oh and
my new favorite thing to hate about the game. The time limits always go "1 week" if you pause and usually only show the real time limit if you're pressing play.
Also not a fan of the guaranteed death with emergency shifts as well as how little it affects the day to day. I had full 0"% approval rating literally everyone on emergency shifts and was going to be kicked out in a year if I didn't shape up. And all I did was focus on rising my image with a few strategically placed buildings and exploiting the reputation boost when you research a tech in some factions name to go from despised to respected in 8 months. The deaths, while numerous, never were a problem because of how many people I have. The only time I was screwed was when I forgot to turn on the generator at the outpost from the prologue. Them literally throwing people your way is insane, as long as you don't do something like ban women from working and force them into being baby factories you will be ok.
The lack of specific numbers on everything is super fucking annoying too. Like reputation. It's obvious that you can go lower than 0 or higher than 100% and while it was like that in the last game, it wasn't as exploitable.
The factions giving you bonuses out the ass for tech research and throwing money your way every year and also getting a boost to rep if you promise anything means very rarely are you "proper fucked" as long as you spin the plates fast enough. Having a 10-20 week wait between laws which is where the factions are guaranteed to fuck you means nothing when you're measuring everything else in less than a week increments.
Of course I did play on easy but I also wasted all of my early game on fucking up my construction and snow clearing.
There's very little consequences because of how long it takes the laws to come after you. Another complaint is how "undecided" almost always means 50% will agree with me.
Even if I'm despised, or beloved the "undecided" doesn't take that into account. I usually would just "let it ride" because of how often a group of 70 undecided would end up passing whatever law is placed in front of them.
rings kind of meaningless when the game tells you "By the way, 423 people died because of crime"
Exactly, numerous things lead to death too. Anything emergency shift related. Anything about "minimal" in squalor, hunger, crime, sickness, etc
But it's never enough to hinder you because you're getting tens of thousands of assholes coming to the city every year. Remember how even one person sick fucked you in frost punk?
How you basically had to speedrun a hospital because the sick never got better without one? Well I never bothered with a hospital and as long as people have a home and food they'll get better bizarrely quickly. In general most of the "problem" like crime or sickness would vanish overnight if you pass the right laws or pick the right buildings. One prison was all it took for crime to be non-existent in my entire city. And apparently human experimentation or alcoholism isn't a big enough problem to hinder you outside of a flavor text.
I never understood why people hated "macro builders" in this genre. I assumed it would be the logical next step in city building. The same way the president cares more about their cabinet than the employees inside it. But now I understand why. This shit can't be programmed well worth a fuck.
There's so little they can really do and their wants/needs are so low in number it really is pathetically easy to push them around. While frost punk 1 was a game where a single person deciding not to go into work sent you into a panic attack. Now 100 people dying every week doesn't even lead to you batting an eye. And why should it? 99% of the time materials are so sparse that you only can build a handful of buildings leading to most of the people standing around unemployed. The way the tech tree works is that 10% of workers might be needed for the district with 90% needed for whatever building upgrades the game expects you to slap on down in your buildings. Of course they didnt properly calibrate that either. The steam core requirements mean you aren't going to be putting down multiple 600 worker buildings on your district, and the lack of tech levels means there's not a single fucking reason to bother building the early level "upgrade buildings" when you get more efficient ones immediately if you just finish up that part of the tech tree. It's not like FP1 where you have to research 6 different things to get the top tier building. Outside of laws everything you research is two levels deep. Meaning it's not difficult at all to research all the shit you want/need without focusing too much on research.
Remember in FP1 where even if you put every fucking engineer on research it still felt too slow? Well in this game it's the opposite. I was hitting the one week "minimum" for every tech with just two research buildings. And with just 4 of the things you're researching endgame techs in less than 2 weeks, which combined with every tech unlocked giving you points with a faction you're practically pounding on the council door to get your laws passed because of how slow waiting every 10 weeks feels like. You can pretty much research rape most factions into falling in love with you, and that's even if you treat them like shit, demanding money every chance you get and actively refusing to follow through on promises. It takes very little for them to like you either, Im a retard who only discovered promises or hyping up a faction right before I quit. And still despite treating every faction like a paypig they still showered me with respect
Oh and did I mention tech buildings also have an emergency shift option? You can practically finish the entire tech tree before upgrading your generator in act 2 if you really try.
Another big relief in this game is doing away with worker classes too. No more kids/engineers/workers like in the previous game. Where just losing one engineer before a month in might as well cause you to restart. Even on normal mode. Now even the automations are just shoved into the generic "worker" category.
Heat stamps are annoying and actively limit you so much they turn around and become a godsend. Because you can't alter the time it takes to make them or increase them through building you're stuck meaning workers are meaningless which means treating people nice is now meaningless. The factions are easily subdued and the ones that aren't have an equal or side faction that can put them in their place
It really feels like a knockoff sequel from another company in a lot of ways. The same way fallout 3 has the trappings of fallout 2 but is a different and worse product. So is frostpunk 2 to 1.
Every step feels hilariously improperly balanced where the fear of sickness chasing you in the 1st is replaced by you killing thousands of people a year and exploiting the politicians without ever needing to touch your "evil law/religion tech" because you can't do anything until you get the cash from a unfairly stable system. People are rationalizing it on the subreddit as a natural continuation of FP1 where you stop giving a shit around the time you can research coal thumpers because of how easy the game gets once everyone's needs are accounted for. But making a sequel where it's as boring as the mid-late game of the first is a retarded idea.
Everything is made hilariously piss easy in the name of making it easier on a macro level. No more temp levels that constantly need monitoring, it's all on auto, the generator turns the coal into fuel and heats everything to the appropriate level. At best you can research to lower the needed values but that's all you get. It feels like a sanitized sequel, like a publisher chopping off anything unique in order to get more sales from the consumer. Death is cheap and the game absolutely doesn't need nor want your attention for the most part.
Beyond that 10 weeks between laws passing and another 10 weeks to vote is way too long.
Especially when research buildings and just in district buildings in general being way easier to make than districts.
Honestly I say wait til 2026 if you plan on picking up the game, by that point the dlc and mods will make it something special.
This game sucks
