Creative Accounting: The Sub-Subgenre of Survival Strategy

[Music] in 1994 when outpost came out it was billed as Sim City in space a civic management simulator on the final frontier Sim City had been around since 1989 itself it's actually one of the older computer game archetypes even if it's not as popular today as it used to be then SimCity was a success partly because it leaned into what computers were perceived as in the late 80s business equipment today's high-end electronics market is hugely consumer driven and game design drives a lot of hardware development but that's now back then International Business Machines was the number one name and computer is in their name set the tone in consoles and arcade machines those were for fun and had their own market computer games had a slightly different market the people who already owned computers who were generally older and more serious than intent the Nintendo crowd when SimCity comes along it uses the language of business to convey it's fun and in doing so can appeal to a variety of people who only ever passingly glanced at a Frogger cabinet SimCity is a ledger balancing game keep income up keep expenses down expand one able and see a small thing grown to a large thing but instead of being toil that you do for someone else it's an accomplishment you get to keep that you do for fun on your own this is your city you made it yourself and while it's easy to take for granted the games offer these sorts of feelings and experiences at the time its novelty is difficult to understate in 1991 sid meier's civilization expanded the scope outwards in time and space SimCity was one city over 150 year period civilization is 4,000 years of history in the forging of whole nations in 1993 another wide-angle grand strategy game with a sci-fi event called master of orion coined a term for civilization sub-genre Forex strategy referring referring to the four constant goals of explore expand exploit and exterminate SimCity and the civic management sub-genre went one way Forex grand strategy went another way but there's a lot of wide open space in the gap between the two subgenres outpost when it came out in 1994 was actually a game deeply engaged in the conversation about what kind of strategy games and simulators made sense for the PC of the we remember these other games so what happened without posts that it doesn't also represent the beginning of some noon particular sub-genre a city builder with Forex style economic and population management mechanics and the planet itself for an enemy the thing is it does outpost actually does represent this but the survival strategy sub-genre laid mostly dormant for years partly because of how badly outpost mangled its own release and how its particular outlook became synonymous for a critically long while with outpost status as a massive flop when starting this video I was incredibly surprised to find that I wasn't the only person trying to write about outpost in 2018 over on Rock Paper Shotgun Brock Wilbur did an excellent short piece and what exactly happened without post one's historical faceplant Wilbur points out that outpost one was one of the first major examples of developer misdirection the same thing that happened with gearboxes colonial Marines happened way back here where Sarah online demonstrated a test version to gain critics and released a retail version that was missing many of those features and was routed by players as being fundamentally kind of broken later a patch was released but this was deep in the dial-up era and most people had asked for a floppy disk of the patch to be sent to them through the mail that's supposing who cared that much of course but since outpost was sold as a fully working game in a big expensive box there were plenty who cared a lot and they were pissed even patched outpost is one of the least player friendly games I've ever experienced it is confusing and hostile to a degree that was really unheard of today there is still no way to beat outpost even patched it simply goes on and on and on Red's expanding numbers inflating and the smarmy a I helped her venomously hissing the people hate you commander until you simply can't take it anymore this was the start of something extremely cool but in terms of AI outpost isn't is enduringly famous as civilization or Sim City you really don't have to look a whole lot further than the game itself outpost has an eight minute introductory video showing all the efforts being made to save Earth from a major asteroid collision the starship is the last resort the asteroid gets split in two to buy a nuclear blast however and wolf chunks will still hit earth so starship it is 200 colonists is all you can carry with you to the stars and hope of finding a fresh start for mankind what's really remarkable here is that outpost takes a hard science instead of a pop sci-fi approach to this fresh start your choice is to choose four star systems from a star globe to send a probe to checking for habitable planets likelihood the maximum likelihood is 0.05 one more frequently down around 0.01 bump in other words you're not ever going to find another earth out there you'll have to settle if you're going to settle if you end up picking a star system with no planets your game will end right there in this planning stage but only half after having already gone through the steps of packing your ship and launching it the game wants you to feel the excitement of a new adventure and then think about the deep failure of having crossed a gulf of stars for nothing at all all the last of humanity together in a cold mausoleum far from home orbiting around a non-caring star of the wrong color the point being space is hard space is the most impossibly hostile environment that there is outpost taunts the player with the AI voice telling you any mistake at this point will doom you and your colonists to certain death which is does someone suspect approach for a game with no tutorial and a massive electronic manual that still doesn't actually fully explain the game's mechanics outpost has this strange mix of goofy hopeful futurism and a kind of sadistic glee and reminding the player that humans are only really meant to live on earth and you're running an uphill battle here the pre colony phase is surprisingly long and intricate with each satellite you choose to pack lunch individually along with its own unskipable cutscenesthat's you're like me and you fail at least five colonies before understanding the basic mechanics of the game but the first time it's quite an example of doing more with less just a few windowed prompts and sound effects some short video clips and yet the whole spirit of the endeavor the hopes and the fears of it come through pretty strongly there's a stylistic element here that's kind of unique and quite artful for how inter woven it is with the aesthetics of Windows 3.1 the operator system it's built for and that I first played a computer game on its windows and fonts and various executive reports with their multiple looping charts all attest to the origin of this game genre and the kind of creative reinterpretation of business software you can look at a platformer and say oh this goes back to Mario Brothers you can look at him and mercy to Sam and say I was a little bit of system shock in there but you look at outposts in SimCity and it's Microsoft Excel that they more closely resemble than any game that came before them the strange blend of goofy sarcasm hard science and incredibly fiddly bookkeeping that makes up outpost attests to these roots this isn't a game for gamers because gamers weren't even a thing yet this is a game for a person who stares all day at long lists of other people's numbers deducting crediting balancing and offers that person a chance to use those skills and an imaginative context after all outpost was one of the highest reviewed games of 1994 in outpost 1.5 the patched version you might have had a floppy disk mailed to you for most of the features that led to those reviews including a 93 percent from PC gamer had been restored and I still struggle to see what people saw in the game I love the premise I love the frame but the execution is tedious in the extreme and willfully obtuse and explaining how to do even the most basic things quick should you build a chap a spew or an agro dome first I'm sorry the answer was chap your colony is doomed your residents will die and revolt without housing but a residence doesn't even appear on the build menu unless you've figured out how to bulldoze underground and have at least one underground tube connected to one bulldoze underground pile has to be bulldoze if I just use the digger which you'd think because hey it's Underground you will never even get a hint that these buildings exist as an option and underground buildings are actually over half of the available structures god help you if you've built an underground factory instead of an above-ground one above-ground factories produce useful things underground ones only produce consumer goods for morale so I wanted a new bulldozer but ended up producing 8-track tapes to amuse the 60 people I hadn't accidentally killed yet as they wait for humanity to and in a sad underground tube on an airless rock actually can't imagine much sadder tale in for the human experience the whole underground building part of the game is focused on your colonists their needs their wants the above-ground is mostly where the infrastructure is well this makes sense from a hard science perspective since being underground makes preserving atmosphere and temperature possible without going so far as terraforming the entire planet from a player's perspective it means the grand majority of your effort is digging out nine by nine blocks of boring Rock smoothing these rocks and then filling them one building at a time until your calling is stopped dying every time you click the end turn button after that maybe you can try building two things at once but not in the first couple hundred turns if you want to live I'll put it another way the game has a beginner's mode with unlimited resources and it's still overwhelmingly easy to kill every last one of your colonists once you get the hang of the basics of infrastructure you can start putting effort into research there are no joke over a hundred technologies in the tech tree most of them offer small bonuses to existing structures pretty much everything there is to build is mostly available right away so there is no real escalation into a mid gain and an endgame it's just kind of a flat and endless process of expansion and streamlining there are hints of more in depth calling this management like the option to have your police forest behave with benevolence or hostility the police force keeps your comments from killing each other and also prevents your residential structures from spontaneously converting into red light districts the red light districts still provide bonuses and you can build them on purpose if you want to but if you're poor and managing your colonists morale then these high crime residences become all you have I guess the colonists get very surly and all the time if they're too bored which certainly sounds like something humanity would do but also feels a little counter to the spirit of the mission the game's mechanics simply don't tolerate your lack of structures in the beginning and starts you off facing famine unrest and resource poverty the seed structures that you begin with helped but barely you can pack up to 20 turns worth of food and life support with you at the beginning but if you haven't clicked the exact right things in those first 20 turns then the dying begins and manual just tells you to expect it quote during the first 60 turns or a mortality rate will be high realistically however this hardship will produce a human race that was tougher than it was end quote outpost is in Zion so that the birthrate is insanely high the first few dozen turns to counter the massive die-off but if you make it past all of that it evens out and both rates go down by design apparently this also blends social Darwinism with Darwinism classic while you're at it the player removed from such concerns and their little vinyl cam chair the manual is in this way both helpful and telling you that everything is meant to be terrible and shitty in the beginning and hugely irritating and telling you that it's all for the greater good is outpost broken or are you just not thinking about it hard enough it's difficult to tell and the game seems to revel in conflating the two conclusions throwing a blanket of thematic justification over the most irritating game design choices and emissions our post also taunts you with a rebel colony an AI controlled splinter group that takes half the starships resources at the beginning of the game the AI knows exactly how to play and so sets up its whole economy and infrastructure with a blinding quickness that made me pretty resentful altogether the rebel colony serves two purposes one is that lacking in tutorial you're actually supposed to watch them do things and copy the techniques it's one of the few examples I know of in games of using jealousy to try to create a teaching moment for basic game mechanics the other reason is the mattock even with the earth dead and an indefinite endless future of living in a series of hamster tubes ahead of them people are still fundamentally ornery mean and prone to disagreement the rebel colony never explains why they left despite mechanics in the game like communication satellites and towers that suggests like you might be able to interact with them without posts either that feature is broken or that feature is so obscure I just never found it what can happen is if overall morale is low colonists will defect to the rival colony if everyone leaves the game doesn't even give you the courtesy of a game over screen you just get to keep watching the rebel colony thrive and tell you get bored I was reading in the manual trying to find information about the Raval colony and the manual mentioned terraforming in a space program according to an old obscure forum thread it is possible with a lot of effort across over a thousand turns to turn the atmosphere breathable and you even get a small cutscene when you do the game doesn't end there but it is as close to a whim as you'll get without post for me this is all hearsay I'm flatly unwilling to put a thousand turns into a single game of outpost the absolute ocean of fiddly counterintuitive feedback free nonsense you'd have a cross to reach the shore of a satisfactory conclusion is daunting at minimum soul-crushing at maximum outpost actually had a NASA scientists on its development team and that shows in a couple of ways the first is certainly in the hard science tonality which does stand in positive contrast to the guardians of the galaxy vibe but that a lot of modern sci-fi has the second is that looking at outpost is like looking at the control console for a space shuttle there are a million million blinking lights a lot of them very dire in their implications but when you reach out to flip some unlabeled bit in hopes of figuring out where to even begin your copilot screams for God's sake don't touch that one do you want to kill us all when it comes to space get it right the first time or die that's just the way of it you can lose a billion dollars worth of equipment in a heartbeat because of a tiny rounding error on your math it's worth making art and making games that reflect and celebrate that that actually pay respect to the incredible intelligence and bravery of the scientists and astronauts of the world space programs but if you do it's also worth providing an in-game tutorial in outpost your role is essentially that of despotic space accountant if you fail a great little video clip plays there's an astronaut in a suit seen from behind it looks like maybe he's climbing up a ridge to see what lies beyond but the camera pans around and a skull grins from inside the glass of the helmet here lies humanity we look to the Stars and they just beat the hell out of us then you get immediately booted out to the Windows 3.1 program manager it's such a game over that the game just shuts itself down outpost presents space as not very fun and a lot of work that's accurate on both counts you want wide open space you go to Nebraska you want a coil in tubes for you and while your body withers go into orbit yet the idea still fires the imagination the trick of making an engaging survival strategy game is to find a way to balance the deep hostility of a new frontier with mechanics that still resonate in the context of a player's leisure if all work and no play made outpost a dull game outpost two divided destiny would try a brand new balance it would reorient toward a different third sub-genre of strategy gaming realtime military strategy as popularized by 1992's doom 2 from Westwood or blizzards original Warcraft which also came out in 1994 and left a bit of a larger legacy of an outpost did instead of a SimCity in space divided destiny pictured itself as riding the wave of RTS popularity billing itself as a more contemplative command & Conquer it's not as sequel so much as it is a reboot it takes the main colony rival column a dynamic from the first game it begins by assuming both colonies were broadly successful on a new Mars like world called new terror like command conquers GDI and nod or Warcraft's orcs and humans it would have these two factions with a distinct aesthetics and units whose single-player campaigns were mostly identically balanced in level design like a military art yes it would orient its economy around mining trucking and trepidatious satellite base expansion on like a military RTS all the city management features that defined outpost 1 are also preserved more or less intact with simplified mechanics at a lot of the player to bounce from concern to concern in the real-time environment without so much of a risk of sudden disaster or death because of some detail you overlooked it's a game about balance that is itself pretty well balanced outpost 2 is actually one of my pet favorite games and I've always been curious why it was so quickly and completely forgotten and going back to it it does feel tremendously forward-looking and if it was released today with small graphical updates I feel like it would find a welcoming audience but outpost 2 wasn't much one thing and it wasn't much the other at the time neither a truly complex hard sci-fi civic manager nor compellingly strategic war game it's arguable that it's not really that great at either one thing singularly the more elements are particularly poor in their pacing complexity where you send incredibly expensive units that take forever to produce at each other in tiny awkward clumps where the most vehicles wins despite having a two dozen technology deep weapon research tree the hard sci-fi edges have been rounded off to focus more on the players autonomy and decision-making unless Sun the cruelty and capriciousness of life on a hostile world I'll freely admit that outpost 2 is overshadowed and outclassed by games like civilization or command & Conquer but what other game was even willing to try to blend the two in the first place outpost 2 has a pacing that I found compelling and an approach I found refreshing and its preferencing of peacetime activities using traditionally martial mechanics the weapons development part of the tech tree is a small one morphed by social research and economic research with their new buildings and mechanics disasters like electrical storms tornadoes lava eruptions and creeping nano plague called the blight do more damage and are featured more prominently than the combat ever is it's a fight for survival the conflict between factions taking a backseat to the unrelenting hostility of a planet that was not meant to hold you and does not want you outpost to more than outpost one is in a sub-genre of its own a civic centered war game a hostile cruel city management's in a true survival strategy titled the factional split in outpost 2 is really good one Rodan and how the colonists wish to coexist with the planet the original colony Eden believes in terraforming the planet and creating a replacement earth their unique social structures the consumer factory where luxury items can be made for massive morale boosts it's like that 8-track producing factory an outpost one though this new game mercifully spares us the underground structures Eden's outlook is both forward and backward minded pushing their science to the limit to remake what was lost a significant chunk of people split away from them into the Plymouth Colony who have accepted that the earth is dead and that the only path to long-term stability for Humanity is to live in harmony with the new planet their unique social structure is the forum where colonists come together in the spirit of argument and curiosity they are pragmatic rugged and lived completely in the moment the fact that there is war between Eden and Plymouth is kind of disappointing because the axis of their conflict is a disagreement on how does and not how to die with GDI and knob you have the good guys and the bad guys same with orcs and humans a violent conflict is literally written into them they both like to go to war they're both eager to go to war and are written with a strong preference for blood and thunder even in Plymouth however both make valid points if he actually could make a second earth that would be a golden age of humanity that could last thousands of years all that space all that possibility suppose though that it's a pipe dream and you can't actually do it then he'll have wasted a hell will are a lot of resources and effort that he could have put towards making the actual circumstances of the new planet bearable and livable Eden's architecture is commercial and impractical II attractive lots of Windows and swooping flourishes Plymouth's architecture is industrial metallic designed to resist winds and shudder against dust what sparks the conflict in the first mission of campaign is that flemeth's fears about eden are entirely grounded in reality in the first outpost once you research nanotechnology you could build the hot lab where terraforming technologies could be developed but the hop hot labs could explode killing hundreds they were meant to be kept away from the colony like the unstable tokamak reactors eden is pursuing this tech dream they're hot labs have developed a nano swarm that could create an atmosphere in months not years except that it kills everyone the labs eats the seals of laboratory eats the colony and then burrows deep into the crust where it continues to convert material in the fault lines into atmosphere triggering a chain reaction of tectonic and volcanic activity that threatens the myths colony this is the blight the first mission of each campaign is evacuating the primary economy even before the blight spreads Plymouth before the lava burns it all away you begin the next mission with a handful of trucks and a lot of hostile regret Plymouth sees Eden as the aggressor even fills Plymouth it fired the first actual shot of the war when you get to that point it's much more complicated relatable and in-depth than banished these orcs through the dark portal from whence they came but Warcraft had the advantage of being actually good at war an outpost to the wartime elements have all the drama and majesty of that one Monty Python bit with the fish slapping dance the campaigns introduced combat slowly getting you invested in the civic elements of the game first each campaign while following a different story does follow the exact same pattern of missions mission one is colony evacuation mission two is basic base building mission threes advanced base building and then mission four finally introduces combat once you've gotten to the point in your research during mission three that you can build weapons platforms you begin with almost nothing in the second mission the second levels basic lab has to recompile databases on astronomy psychology geology making sure the knowledge they need to leave the planet is intact after fleeing the destruction of the original colony you've got just a few buildings but for both factions it's clear that not many more will need to be built the blight will destroy the planet and a starship will have to be constructed by the six mission you need to go retrieve pieces of the old starship you sent out from the dying earth and outpost one lying in pieces all over a distant Mesa after having fallen out of orbit each faction wants the parts so war begins it's pretty cool to have a real-time strategy game that waits until you're five hours and six missions beep before even kicking off its primary conflict but the war is outpost two's secondary conflict at best in previous missions you are on a strict time limit to accomplish a wide number of goals in an interesting design maneuver changing the difficulty of the campaign doesn't alter the fundamental mechanics and said it starts you off further along in the mission with some goals already accomplished and some buildings already built if you take too long either the blight or the volcanic activity will overwhelm you difficulty adjustments just affect the margins for error and distraction the real-time elements and the threat of impending creeping doom at attention that outpost one for all its hostility to the player never really managed with its turn-based ledger balance in gameplay science progress is maintained across the campaign too so if you do extra research beyond the mission rules you'll get to keep those bonuses going ahead like in homeworld although units and resources don't similarly transfer once you go off to salvage the starship parts and start the war though tension and turns to tea diameter units move along agonizingly slowly across the landscape which is fine when you're primarily doing resources but frustrating when you're doing combat maneuvers primarily the heavier the weapons platform the slower it moves meaning that all of your cheaper units get to the front lines and I'm not really exaggerating a whole minute or two before your better ones show up unit AI is almost non-existent if you're not issuing individual orders and micromanaging the battle then any units that aren't within spitting distance both your units and the enemy units will simply sit there picking their nose while the battle goes on the kind of weapons also get excessively complex Plymouth has arachnid units cheap and small and vulnerable that do sneaky things like reprogramming enemy units or disabling them edan has area affected acid gas weapons that do tremendous friendly-fire damage to their own troops each side has high explosives self-destruct weapons and they all move slowly clumsily towards each other for a few brief seconds of pew pew with lasers and then a half dozen truckloads of rare materials are left scattered and smoking on the ground and everyone takes a long break to gather more resources and have that again for 45 seconds and another 10 minutes or so the campaign sometimes does a little better than this like mission 7 where you have to mine resources at the IceCaps and a remote facility under constant attack from the opposite faction you can't build the bits out you can only harvest and defend by too big a military it makes it hard to finish your mining objectives finding a good balance is tricky and satisfying in this mission it's like a special bonus mining challenge but again the joy here isn't in the battle the joy is in the balancing of the numbers and an economy well done the best part of outpost 2 is the long form colony game scenarios for each faction where you have to either reach an extremely high population or complete the space program and launch a new starship like with the campaign but as a fully mechanical arc and not a narrative one it's the colony games that best showcase outpost 2 is remarkably compelling nonviolent RTS loops uneasy no combat occurs unless the player starts a war with Lynette on the eden starship map the only map with a dedicated enemy base on harder difficulties attacks come regularly but serve little purpose besides being just one more rhythmic disaster on top of the earthquakes lightning storms tornadoes and meteor strikes the heart of the loop population management first and foremost is controlling mortality early on death is constant like the original outcomes you begin with less than a dozen scientists which is usually under the maximum for a single research project you'll need some medical centers to stem the mortality rate and universities to train new scientists and workers but you'll have to research those things first and then staff them afterwards it's a race to get your survival infrastructure going before all your skilled workers take the bucket once the population is stabilized worker availability and labor management is the biggest limiting factor and expansion their colonists always need more of something more housing more recreational opportunities more food more power but unless you can keep the birth rate higher than the death rate you'll end up running backwards idling buildings in your own colony as the workers needed to stack them expire Billings that felt abstract in the turn-based outpost become more readily understandable and useful like the disaster instant response team or dirt facility in both outposts dirt reduces disaster damage by a certain percentage but without post to each building has health bar that takes a noticeably smaller hit when connected to a nearby dirt a dirt can even save buildings like residences that a direct meteor impact would otherwise destroy building damages cosmetic as well with different levels of damage in different stages of construction making it obvious at a glance what spurred how far along a project is and more outpost one's impenetrably Vega systems weren't fundamentally as flawed as they were obscure lacking and meaningful player feedback it's hard to see why you're failing a colony an outpost one and you can only tell you're succeeding if no one dies when you hit the enter in the orbit here an outpost - you get vocal feedback visual feedback and a campaign that acts as a progressive tutorial for the big freeform colony games one of my favorite things about outpost - and one of the biggest reasons why it stage stayed large so firmly in my memory after all these years since it came out is the sound design units and buildings all have short sound clips that are expressive without being repetitive and improve Civ when your university is done training scientists there's a single toll of a bell and a second of plague clapping just enough to inform the player without tracking them industrial buildings make steaming pressurized pipe noises the forum has a low murmuring noise the recreation centers the sound of pool balls breaking the AI helper has stopped being smarmy and instead sounds anxious and worried when things are bad and pleasantly hopeful when things are good there's an incredible charisma to it Warcraft 2 & 3 is highly stylized user interface and functional iconography is still being used in large parts by Blizzard today outpost 2 not so much what these little details of sound design can have extreme Pavlovian effects on a player when it came back at outpost 2 after more than a decade from having played at last I remembered instantly how everything worked at the moment I clicked on the command center and heard the little martial drumroll that indicates its readiness to serve outpost whose colony games are such good standalone strategy experiences that it's easy to argue that outpost 2 didn't need any kind of plot at all but it has a bigger Longer more intricate plot than most games being released today it accomplishes this by virtue of having each campaign accompanied by chapters of a novella a different novella for each faction with new chapters unlocked each mission chapters are told from multiple perspectives involving politics intrigue and personal struggles that are never mentioned during gameplay and have no mechanical bearing on the game yet the missions do illustrate the larger conflicts of the novella and this is both what's good and bad about the mixed media approach that outpost 2 takes the novella is more intricate and more complicated and arguably a little better than the missions and reading it takes longer than the actual playing of the campaign that's not to say either experiences especially short a mission is 20 minutes to an hour of time and so are these long chapters but you'll get 12 of each for either the Eden or Plymouth campaign in terms of how outpost 2's campaign is artistically weighted the novella ends up stealing both the show and the rhythm the real-time elements work against the novella creating peaks and valleys of player engagement where you'll spend missions working against the clock and clicking on dozens of things in a single minute followed by equally long if not longer periods of time where you sit quietly leisurely and just scroll the page each are accomplishing some fun and memorable science-fiction storytelling in world building the problem is that they don't blend oil and water sitting apart from each other in the same class the climactic video for Eden's campaign has the novellas main character the last man bore on earth still living surveying the colony as the blight destroys it the last shuttle with flemeth's children whose safety he had arranged with help from the main character of the Plymouth novella safely safely blasting off for the new starship if you hadn't actually bothered to keep up with reading the story or had been skipping chapters to just keep playing the campaign anywhere between most - all of this would come as a total surprise if you've been keeping up with both it's super rewarding and then there is even an epilogue which retreads the video climax but in more detail adding that the blight had begun to do its job of terraforming the atmosphere and when axon moon takes his helmet off it isn't straight up suicide maybe there was something to rebuild on new Terra after all I enjoy where this narrative leaves us as a species - filled worlds and still off to a hopeful bright future on a third maybe they'll do better out there than their ancestors maybe not either way it sure beats cowering in a tube listening to 8-track tapes while everyone starts and the power goes out a post one was a great idea and if it had shipped in a finished state and bothered to include some method of teaching itself to the player it could have done so much better than it ever did outpost 2 solves almost all of the accessibility and feedback problems about post one but in trying to market itself as a full-blown realtime strategy game and not a civic management's in with RTS elements it left people who went in expecting something like the comparatively lightning fast cannon and conquer games confused by the experienced outpost who was at the time too much of a chimera to be a hit too raw and awkward to resonate fully yet both outposts clearly represented something unique they were the games who birthed the fascinatingly niche sub-genre of survival strategy in 2018 two prominent games would restore this neglected withered branch of the video game family tree to full bloom the first is surviving Mars by him amant games him amounts claimed fame as the Tropico series satirical civic management franchise with a Banana Republic theme that small nor sequels and spin-offs including a very popular pirate themed tropical the tropical games are notable for having economies with a very high difficulty curve where SimCity and the light can often feel casual and low stress Tropico was always squeezing the player and hitting them were there weak hannahmont in other words is a highly reputable company to take on a survival strategy project they are already designing civic managers with a high degree of aggression and struggle surviving Mars is a very ambitious game easily as complicated as the original outpost but a thousand times more delightful to actually play Sarah and Mars also takes a hard science approach emphasizing the hostility of the Martian environment and the impracticality of life there over a pop science manifest destiny expansion is slow difficult and can often create instabilities across your entire economy and the one round is surviving Mars I played were actually reached to the in-game stage I had ended up over populating my small domes almost six hours earlier and when they experienced crop failures had led to mass starvation which led to factory understaffing which led to parts shortages which led to total dome failure and the death of hundreds again I planted the seeds for this disaster with my own ineptitude a full six hours before the consequences ended up manifesting themselves that is the kind of game surviving Mars is as unforgiving as the vacuum of space of course that's the fun of it too there are a hundred different decisions in a hundred different areas you have to make and impulsivity and shortsightedness in any of those decisions and have catastrophic Domino like consequences like they used to say any mistake at this point will doom you and your colonists to certain death surviving Mars takes more than a few key design features from outpost although I half expected they never thought anyone wouldn't notice at this point the best is the way you begin by packing for the trip choosing from a huge array of starting bonuses budgets and cargo arrangements the game's mechanical difficulty is locked in at a default across all playthroughs it's only here that the game has a difference between easy medium and hard based on what kind of starting resources you choose and there is so much to to and balance like outposts surviving Mars had no native tutorial when it shipped it's only just this past week after I already played the game that they patched one in like outpost your first few attempts are doomed to failure as you learn the systems by trial and error with errors coming fast and hard until you finally learn to duck them for good like outpost 2 this is all done in real time increasing tension pressure and making the principal accounting work that lies at the actual heart of the gameplay so much less tedious than the original outpost in a lot of ways is the emphasis on economy and outpost 1 and on population management and outpost 2 that's the biggest difference between the two games even bigger than the introduction of RTS elements surviving Mars has many of the same kind of nonviolent RTS elements that outpost to have but little of the flavor of that game because of how deeply economic and accounting base the game is in its fundamental structure let me give you an idea of what you're juggling and surviving Mars the most basic elements in the game are water metal and concrete concrete and water can be harvested automatically by drones metal must be harvested by human staff humans need water food and life support they get these through structures which take metal and concrete but also three advanced materials polymers electronics and machine parts machine parts can be made with metal but polymers must be made with water and fuel water is also needed to produce fuel in the first place and for food electronics can only be made with rare metals which need a fully staffed extractor separate from the regular metal extractor all these structures need power all these structures require periodic maintenance by drones who must ferry materials specific materials like machine parts to the structure before their maintenance cycle is complete if you miss that maintenance window the structure will break if the structure that breaks is one of the production structures for some kind of material you need for other maintenance cycles those buildings will shut down as well in a cascade failure you can buy new materials and have them shipped from earth but this takes days and you pay huge sums of money for tiny amounts of resources the pipes and cables that carry water air and power are prone to frequent failures and breakdowns solar panels the cheapest power source lose effectiveness and uncovered in dust and can't work at all at night wind turbines the alternative basic power supply require large amounts of precious precious machine parts to maintain a whole wind fund everything you create in surviving Mars causes shortages and deficiencies somewhere else in the resource chain creating a perpetual need to expand and stay inches just inches ahead of your whole economic engine running out of fuel shuttering and collapsing so it's not like SimCity where you can make poor choices and wind up with a bunch of empty zones that will eventually fill up if you give them time surviving Mars is geared towards slapping you across the face for even the most casual inefficiencies in your infrastructure and dome composition like they'll post your mistakes are fatal ultimately this is the biggest hurdle to getting into the game in the first place because it requires a kind of extreme conservative patience and rewards restraint much more than expenditure when I was first learning I kind of hated this because I didn't know what any of the buildings really did and the only way to figure it out is by doing surviving this experimental phase is almost worse than killing everyone with your ineptitude because the inefficiencies and deficiencies that he created in the early stage will continue to compound and compound and then come back to make your mid gain an endgame imbalance to the point of feeling impossible to even get through a failure state only occurs if absolutely every single one of your colonists died meaning that even end up with entire games worth of resources tied up in a colony that is fundamentally uninhabitable there's no coming back from that but it would be at least polite to have the game give you a game over screen here instead of suggesting maybe continue to fiddle with something that you broke completely hours ago without realizing it thank God at least you don't have to sit through nine billion short videos of satellites launching into orbit before you're allowed to begin again once things start to click for you though it's deeply pleasurable to keep such an ornery complicated system of requirements satisfied and smoothly running I kept running into major food shortages until I understood that you can choose different crops other than soybeans and set a routine that keeps soil quality up and water consumption down you can put the farm on a second shift schedule and take advantage of workaholic colonists to get off of first shift at the factories and want more work to you need to keep an eye on who's working what job as well calling that's working in a field outside their specialization receive a massive productivity penalty which tech breakthroughs can mitigate slightly Martian universities can take on specialized labor and train them up for the positions that are actually necessary this is admittedly fiddly and tedious on any scale beyond the first couple of domes and getting into a rut where you start ignoring these labor mechanics because it's a hassle is also one of the things that can create major cascade failures in your economy but there is something compelling about the depth of the labor mechanics that slightly just ever so slightly outweighs the annoyance of them colonists all have names nationalities specialties even traits and flaws that give them bonuses and penalties a genius columnist generates extra research points but if they're also a lazy alcoholic their productivity takes a huge hit and they lose sanity if you don't build a bar I'll be scrolling through the lists of potential applicants and see something like Jeremy Horowitz sexy vegan botanist and it's not just kind of funny it's kind of informative - sexy colonists get a major boost to their likelihood of producing offspring which becomes especially critical once the original staff begins dying of old age around the eightieth in game day eventually you'll receive a notification when all of your original colonists have passed on the end of an era so keep hiring expanding growing out your dome network and they'll keep drinking and shopping and working and raising families a good balance supposing you don't accidentally create a vulnerable life support system and let everyone die of hypothermia when the dome shut down due to a lack of preventative maintenance the system of automated drones that do all this maintenance work can cause a lot of frustration on this axis because you cannot directly control them merely set priorities for their attention having to wait twelve in-game hours for a drone team to show up at a leaky pipe with the net we'll need to actually fix it while your crops fail from the resultant drought is excruciating all you can do is mentally shout work faster damn you as a robot employees work according to the priorities that you set for them hours ago which is I guess an authentic managerial experience it's your fault if it goes wrong but the actual fixing of it is out of your hands by design the various charts and baths figures available to the player are more varied and more immediately useful and readable than those in outpost but their purpose and your relationship to them is essentially the same as in 1994 the frame is Mars the survival of the human race is in the vastness of space but in the deep down core of surviving Mars the name of the game is still balance the accounts income versus expenditure across a dozen sorts of resources with managerial staff and concerns tossed in for good measure it is just as much again routed mechanically in the language of business as any late eighties early nineties sim in terms of presentation though the difference of 24 years between the two of them is obvious the most interesting contrast between outpost 1 and surviving Mars is the shift in art style not from 2d to 3d but from full hard science to a more expressive stylized mix of industrial realism and domestic fantasy no more living underground even if that makes much more scientific sense surviving Mars has your society living under giant glass domes gracefully arcing into the dusty sky the dome is automatically covered in grass and walkway networks it's to the player to build all the factories shops and residences that will make it hung with activity the style for all of these buildings in extreme contrast to the NASA inspired infrastructure designs is deeply mid-century modern if it took a poster for a colony and slapped it on a wall in the fallout universe you wouldn't think twice about it being there it is not simply that these colonists live in an atomic era they decorate for it too with coffee tables as elegant and swooping as the great steel beams that support the dome a successful colony is a space utopia in the style of the most optimistic Golden Age sci-fi campers by a scientific realism of more recent popular works like Andy where's the Martian the blend is better than one style alone the mechanics are harsh temperamental and cruel and the buildings that serve an expressly mechanical purpose are similarly grounded in reality the intention the hope of the colony is something grand and impossible not just human life on Mars and it's boast base subsistence oriented way but a new Martian society and culture the game comes with a variety of radio stations each with its own DJ who give wonderfully post-national feel to the endeavor Colin has come from India China Russia England everywhere on earth but once everyone's here they're all Martians the Martians born colony get to define their new culture from scratch it's a new phase for Humanity optimistic bright inclusive kind the architecture reflects solo is wonderfully and the mechanics give it meaning and weight by making it all agonizingly fragile the old adage about not throwing stones in glass houses games new gravity in a circumstance where the air outside the glass house isn't actually breathable optimism and togetherness our resource as much as anything else morale having been a consistent mechanic in both outposts as well surviving Mara's adds even more metrics not just to morale but sanity and health humans need more psychic maintenance than your wind farms will ever need machine parts and ain't that the truth right there this is this respect is the specific thrill of survival strategy there are consequences built into the environment that straight city builders don't have there's a fundamental antagonism to the environment that adds tension and conflict that a real-time strategy games combat would have but in pursuing real-time strategy economic mechanics without constant ongoing warfare then all this struggle has a creative resolution based on critical thinking and personal whim much more than the high-speed rock-paper-scissors of making armies in something like Starcraft surviving Mars is bolder and more brutal than something like SimCity it is more thoughtful and casual than something like command & Conquer prop ago for all its antagonistic difficulty is still a civic management sim with surviving Mars hannahmont revitalized a long-dead sub-genre with a game that's got equal footing in the strengths of modern and antiquated game design it is a truly impressive title all it really lacks is a good story this isn't to say that surviving Mars doesn't have a story on the contrary it has 12 of them you can select which one or randomize them when you start a new game but the stories of surviving Mars are of tertiary importance at best adding definition and structure to the mandan end game when the numbers begin to inflate past the point of being easily understood it's something you do in between planning dome interiors and laying out power cables which are the real game for the survival strategy game Frost punk however the story is the mechanics being used to shape and craft the narrative as much as any of the written words in the script Frost Punk is not about the hostility of an alien world but a what-if scenario where in a high-tech 1800s steampunk kind of world the earth turns its back on humanity and tries to freeze us all to death it's a strange little cross between binging who's snowpiercer and Hugh Howie's wool in terms of theme and art coupled with kind of high-stakes extreme accounting that we've come to see define the gameplay of a survival strategy rather than a traditional segmented mission by mission campaign frost Punk has three long-form scenarios with progressive interlocking goals not entirely unlike the comedy games about post - what's different is that in contrast to the Boilermaker structure of outpost to his campaign where you get a pint glass full of story and a short shot of gameplay side by side on the same order the narrative of Frost punk is thoroughly blended the primary scenario is called a new home and begins with 80 exiles from London Rovin North to find one of the great coal driven generators the group reaches one located in a deep circular hollow shielded from the driving winds Hollow is littered with scrap metal and supplies leftover from the generators construction it is perfect so a new city in the snow is founded radiating outwards from the heat of the smoke belching wonder that will keep the city alive even as the temperature drops lower and lower until finally as storm arrives as such apocalyptic proportions that it seems like the entire city is exposed directly to the vacuum of space we never leave the earth but the earth dries its damnedest to evict us anyway you have approximately 40 days between the cold morning you arrive at the generator and the death storm this tight timeline eliminates some of the mechanics that you'd see in other survival strategy games like birth or education instead children in frost Punk become a divisive issue you can issue a law one of two ways either you put the children to work which is extraordinarily helpful housing them alongside the adults and working within the factories or you can house them separately and keep them out of the regular work force where they provide efficiency bonuses to either medics or engineers as the children run errands and do clerical work for the specialized indoor professions giving up the labor especially at the beginning is a tough tough choice you'll likely have to work the adult population much harder to make up for the resource shortage passing unpopular laws to extend shifts and force 24 hour emergency work shifts these raise hope these reduce hope and raise discontent if you hit maximum discontent you've got 24 hours to convince people not to string you up by the neck or there is a coup and then it's game over and I'll post one in surviving Mars poor morale reduces the efficiency of your economy the cash flow is still the key and frost funkin imbalanced economy in dangers the heat you need wood metal and rare steam cores to expand but he only fundamentally need coal and food to survive human needs come first and human concerns drive the numbers gain surviving Mars has you approaching labor like a manager trying to hire the best trained up the worst and arrange them according to skill in order to maximize profit frost bunk has he wondering how far you can push the men and women in your care until they buckle under the pressure how much work you can get done before the light in the sky fades in the cold winds howl you aren't a manager you're a despot how far will you go to keep the generator running frost punk is in my book a better game than surviving Mars because of how this more narrative driven approach makes failure States rewarding and interesting when you've stumbled in surviving Mars it's because of some minor but consequential detail that you just overlooked or ignored and when you trace your failure back to it there's not much to say other than whoops my first few failures on Mars were just that they were failures they were rooted in mechanical ignorance and overeager expansion my first failure in frost Punk was an amazing story all to itself it took me a while to get oriented in the first few days and I didn't know that the storm was eventually coming so I built my city out based on whim stretching my resources to the maximum to grow the city as quickly as possible shortages jammed me up and I lost days on housing projects waiting for wood that I was using 24 hour shifts to harvest in the meantime my scouts were probing the frost land for another generator city that should be out there somewhere winter home one day a man stumbles to the rim of the light of surrounding the city he's a man from winter home he's come to say that everyone there is dead and were all doomed then the game did something really remarkable he'd used that story beat absolutely up my city's balance of morale I had been pushing my discontent because I felt like the hope was high enough to balance it out but on the news of winter homes collapse hope goes down to almost zero a sponger group called the Londoners forms who wish to go back to where they started to the south and give up on the generator entirely so long as hope is low the Londoners gained followers so long as discontent is high the Londoners gain followers if they have enough followers they disregard your rule of law beating her loyalists in the street stealing supplies from your storehouses when the London crisis begins you're offered a choice laws based on order and pragmatism or laws based on faith in spirituality some laws are good guard stations prevent outbreaks of violence shrines raise workplace productivity by giving workers a place to stop and reflect you can have a temple or a propaganda Center depending on which version of the law you choose the effects of each building is the same in this first doom to play through I chose the religious route even in prayers and prophetic processions by the faith keepers helped reduce discontent and raise hope but not by much not enough to fully counter the rabble-rousing being done by the Londoners so I give the faith keeper as more power public flogging public punishment recitations of guilt Earth's avoiding all of these do the mechanical job of reducing the number I want reduced and raising the number I want larger all these are regarded and remembered by the game for their ethical and human dimensions when the Londoner crisis reached its peak and 27 people tried to leave I found I had locked myself out of the more humane responses to the situation hope was too low to try to talk them into staying my food rations were meagre I had nothing to provision them with so I either let them all go off to die or force them to stay with violence administrated by the zealots of the faith keepers I made them stay some died many were injured having wasted so many days earlier in the month though having led the discontent stay so high when storm finally arrived I was completely unprepared for it I told my people that I had been hurting them for their own good but I let them all down anyway in that cold hell it was my name they cursed in their final bitter moments while the tears froze to their faces in their turned to ice in their lungs yes I've failed but I had failed quite spectacularly when he get right down to it when the temperature dropped to 180 below in the coal ran out I felt quite keenly the despair and seeing that comforting orange glow with the generators fire fade to nothing I immediately began again determined to do better by feeling on losing around of surviving Mars had been just irritation I hadn't understood the game well enough for played it well enough and that was that it was an abstract mechanical failure and Frost monk I had also made mechanical mistakes but that process was much more human and organic there's a sense that I had done the best I could and while it wasn't enough I found that my failure was rooted in well-intentioned bad ideas and not simple clerical errors and miscalculations freezing to death isn't a game over so much is a cruel climax it is thematically and mechanically appropriate and satisfying despite being an undesirable outcome this would not be possible in a truly sandbox experience with no definitive ending the fixed timeframes of the various scenarios create extra pressure and tension of the gameplay but also serve to tie up and sever any loose threads left dangling by a botched playthrough if you begin to lose too badly everyone dies none of that lingering around an impossible situation that drags down surviving Mars on my second go-around I had a good enough sense of mechanical requirements of survival that I was able to juggle things much better I chose the order route this time and was surprised by some fundamental mechanical differences between it and the religious route namely without faith hope is difficult to instill in the population the order methods are much more efficient at lowering discontent and restoring peace naturally but where do they leave people emotionally the world is dying and there is little reason to expect it will ever really recover in a meaningful way every week it gets colder at first it's just 20 degree fluctuations down to negative 20 down to negative 40 back up to negative 20 then cold snaps begin to occur going down 40 more degrees for days on end at negative 78 degrees people begin to get seriously ill if you haven't upgraded insulation and generated air output by a few ticks people lose limbs to frostbite drop out of the workforce every time dwellings drop below a livable temperature discontent Rises and hope plummets you can't change the weather it rolls in relentlessly and all you can do is control the damage mitigate the suffering tree out of a patient's where is hope and all this why go on besides a stubborn refusal today I'm not religious myself but I need Utley grass mechanical value of the church and frost bunk when I saw how cleverly the other path had been crafted to stand in opposition to it order law and realism we're all gonna die but if you do exactly exactly as I say maybe not there's an ultimate law kind of deal called the new order which is one of the only laws with an option to back out of it it causes riots and deaths when you enact it but when the dissenters have been purged then those that remain can be trusted to be compliant do you want to go that far or can you content yourself with leaflets from the propaganda sender about how warm it is inside the public houses you just built I didn't sign the new order law I tried to be less heavy-handed with my methods when it came time for the London is to leave a few were convinced to stay by the high hope levels I had maintained we survived the storm but at the end of any game is a fast motion replay of our city's expansion layered with text describing your short but important rule over we had survived but our humanity had not the recap chided I had still gone too far I had won on a mechanical level but I had still lost on an ethical one I'd have to have another go-around the third time was truly the charm like surviving Mars who are many resources are interdependent and in efficiencies in one area it leads to in efficiencies in another area pretty quickly and within the frame of the time limit these early mistakes can compound into massive shortages later on unlike surviving Mars overcoming your own mistakes is often doubly rewarding because your future mistakes stand on the shoulders of your previous ones and represent an actual connected narrative of dashed hopes but starting fresh and nailing it right out of the gate is often the only way to reach a genuinely truly desirable outcome this time I knew what the hell I was doing and I didn't waste a day not only did I use coal mines I use the coal thumpers I use charcoal kilns that convert wood into generator fuel not only did I use sawmills I use the tree mines that break the ice walls that surround you to extract the forests still frozen inside I used otamatone to replace human work crews at their base level with Tommy Tom's are only sixty percent as effective as a human work crew but they work 24 hours a day without complaint a net 10 percent increase over a single shift humans automatron technologies increase that efficiency until eventually they're more effective than two continuous human shifts would be combined I established a fighting arena and dueling laws early on to help Stan get discontent and let the survivors take your anger out on each other instead of on me when the time came to choose between order and faith I chose faith but I never established the faith keepers I would have no zealots in my new city but I still needed something larger than the city to sow hope I needed the long shadow that God would cast so I kept the Tricia's I kept the temple I kept the field kitchens and the shrines it was a religion that the people asked for a religion that the people came to need and the darkest coldest moments of the storm I had prayers to call that could counterbalance the hope lost when the heat begins to fade from the houses and factories as the temperature goes ever downward negative 140 negative 160 getting colder I know what extra rations I would need early and so built storehouses enough so that I'd never throw away a single scrap of food as fun as it was to fail and in frost Ponca truly was kind of a delight to fail to succeed is even better the balancing act required is quite delicate but with half the variety of resources that surviving Mars has frost funk is still pretty manageable even at its terminal end gain stages where you have hundreds of different structures going at once like the old outpost to colony games I played so obsessively as a kid I was mastering and memorizing the scenario engraving it into my brain that's the funny thing about video games is active media you can know this grip to know the story and still derive afresh pleasure from the actual doing of it the small choices and details and clicks that remake the specifics of the story anew a stage actor after all experiences they're all differently than a member of the audience the audience sees it as a singular thing where for the actor it's every night and twice daily that they get up there and try to convey the same freshness the same immediacy of the role it's not just the script then it's the rhythm and the feeling of it that lifts them up and carries them through to a good performance of words they've already spoken a hundred times already this is a big reason why people act in the first place the satisfactions of that creative repetition by my third crack at a new home I knew all my lines I reveled in every beat regardless it was a role I wanted to play it was a role much more complicated and in-depth than being responsible for a steady and product fuel to polymer pipeline the other scenarios aren't nearly as long or complicated as a new home but they each emphasize a different constellation of mechanics and challenge the player to creatively solve problems that are more deliberately imbalanced than those in a new home which is essentially the vanilla gameplay of frost Punk the second scenario of the arcs has you playing a team of scientists attempting to Ferry foresee the storehouses through the worst of the cold and hopes of given the earth resplendent spring in some far-off future you will never find more survivors than you begin with in this scenario again because frost bunk is framed within a few weeks of in-game time the only way to add to your cities is to find other pockets of survivors out in the frost lands and bring them back with your Scouts in a new home you slowly climb from 80 up to around 550 people in the arc scenario those 50 are all you have besides of course the automatons your challenge here is to adequately staff human run facilities while you find repair and build enough atomic Don's to completely automate the economy making it so that the scientists can ride out the storm without having to labor in it too it's also to keep the Ark's from freezing you'll find no place for order or faith here it's strictly an economy management scenario in terms of how it plays in terms of moral choice however you are given a big one there's a generator city out in the frozen wastes it's called New Manchester it's failing when your scouts come across it they note the waning week smoke coming from the generator and the chaotic sprawl of development new Manchester is you back when you've sucked at this game without having played a new home first I'm not sure this would be as compelling but I found a beautiful moment of sympathy for new Manchester having killed a city just like it once myself already so they are scenarios pivots from scientific survival to a rescue mission but only if you wanted to your scientists will grumble complain and raise the discontent by a considerable percentage if you insist on sending help sending help it should be noted is measured in thousands of units of precious resources well over two dozen storehouses worth of coal food and more you send these care packages out one at a time so if you haven't emphasized one of the resources very much and why should you have over developed your economy with only 50 people to care for you have to wait days and days to play catch-up while the storm and quiet quietly creeps over the horizon and darkens the sky I had less than a day before the storm hit when I my last care package when the storm did hit my coal was too low it was instant game over in the recap though the narration logs the choice we could have saved the plants or we could have saved the city I chose to save the city that will have to be our legacy I could imagine in my mind of the automaton is cresting the hill of new Manchester what all that coal would have meant to me when I was less than a day away from the storm my first time around I can imagine those survivors in the warm light after the storm coming across their saviors all dead frozen at their posts it's what my scientists had warned me about and trying to talk me out of sending health in the first place they knew I asked them to do it anyway and they did and here we all are on a second playthrough I saved both communities but that didn't stick with me as much as the game I lost the game where I sacrificed it all to do the right thing the third scenario it was a little more complicated and in depth than the arcs and has some of the most interesting story beats out of any of the three scenarios it's a class struggle scenario narrative Lea and a labor-management challenge mechanically the servants of the lords have stolen the Lordships and gone north to take their generator as well you're the first of the groups to leave the ships these survivors and more families than workers and so you begin with few adults and many children you came here to build a free classless society do you really want to begin with child labour giving children special treatment is a luxury only the children of the Lord's were exempt from work in times past so on the one hand you need the labour and the children are used to it on the other hand it begins to immediately replicate some of the cruelties that you were running from in the first place survivors come in tiny tiny clusters at first trickling in of the serving class once everyone's arrived there's enough labour for everything to start humming smoothly and to set up a powerful economy during the couple days respite you get and then the Lords arrive the ice has brought them low and they come to you starving sick and wearing tatters will you turn them away the first group is helpful but the next group of fifty is extremely ill some of them bedridden or amputees who can't work they put a tremendous strain on whatever economy you've set up you need huge huge tracts of extra housing triple the income of food from greenhouses and hunting parties extensive medical facilities for the where you begin with a labor shortage you transition here at the midpoint to a labor surplus that is equally crippling the homeless and the sick are now lining the streets of your city and they raised from Mendes discontent and the servants despite despise the words for needing such generosity after years of denying the same to the serving class you wanted a classless society here at the generator but here is an opportunity instead for a petty reversal it's them who are the wretches now it's us who stand tall in the fine coats don't they deserve such for what they've already taken a large number of people in your city feel that way about it further raising discontent and reducing hope as old divisions flare up again red and raw in the blanket of snow out in the frost lands your scouts can find some interesting and ironic things there's a bank vault with the Lord's riches useless except for the steel of the door itself there is the ocean liner that the Lord's chased you all in frozen now to the shore the liner is luxurious still under the ice and frost and on the deck they find an order from Lord Craven to shoot any of the serving glass on sight the Lord's were going to kill you after all before they came begging for help well ain't that a fine how-do-you-do it doesn't play well back in the city as Lord Kraven shows up leading a horde of starving children 40 new mouths to feed and the most heated main on the frost lands at the front of the colony will you turn them away now the final challenge once Lord Craven arrives is to simply remain in power for 24 hours raise hope above 75% and reduced discontent to under 25% I had built my lumber industries up like crazy and used the surplus to build residences in advance of the incoming refugee waves when the Lord's arrived if they were able to transition immediately into jobs and warmth I stayed the course with the religion for the second time around and the preaching soothed raw nerves I didn't build any police so when the lynch mob came for Craven I could do nothing but he's one death and with his murder a lot of anger found release Malins came to the city we had done it we had faced the worst of winter and the worst of ourselves and held on for a brighter warmer tomorrow it was the only scenario I got right the first time and the only scenario that I'd want to it was only because my economy was balanced that the moral dimension found its bed as well though if I hadn't had all those extra beds there would have been riots and now post one in surviving Mars the games presented counting as a goal in itself they present a balancing of the books and a steady stable income stream as the ultimate satisfaction of the game and they need no other epilogue than and he lived in surplus and profit ever after the end I'll post you and frost bunk put a lot more effort into making sure those numbers mean something like with the ark scenario the time I saved new Manchester and my own settlement I'd completely failed to balance the numbers I needed to balance but the moral accounting of the situation checks out there is more than income and expenditure and those dry numbers processes have visible and deep ramifications on a human level in this game sometimes you sacrifice numbers for the good of the people giving away food and lumber sometimes you sacrifice people for the good of the numbers sending men into a collapsing coal mine to steady it during the storm and keep the generator going at maximum steam in Hue how is wool series he depicts a post-apocalyptic society living in silos with draconian totalitarian rules we see characters rise up to do what they know in their hearts is right against this regime regime only to see that in the context of an outside world that can kill in seconds those well intentioned stands and moral awakenings are more dangerous than anyone realized the ones who built the silos were Mad Men yes but they knew something about human nature the nature of freedom and the nature of chaos they took both freedom and chaos away for the greater good you see so can you in frost Punk do you sign that new order into law do you give the faith keepers ultimate power over your city or do you allow humans to be humans even if it creates more problems and in dangers you all in the long term when it's 60 below in the order a 24 hour emergency shift at the sanno just think about what that would be like sawdust and splinters freezing in the air hands exposed to wind hour after hour after hour no the discontent goes up when you do this whether it's deep space or deep freeze the thrill of the struggle of surviving and thriving and places Humanity was never supposed to as an imaginative pull to it that is impossible to resist games let you experience this on foot in first or third person all the time but survival strategy game and pulling out to the grand overhead view let me experience the context of the struggle more keenly than the specifics and they give you the thrill of building and tuning an engine of survival all by your lonesome as you knew the resource accounting needed to stave off death in wool the main characters last acted in the lower engineering levels of the silo before heading upstairs to a more complicated future is to tune the great diesel generator that hadn't been serviced in maybe a hundred years or more the manual was long lost this service procedure she made up herself how he writes quote Juliet left the control room to watch them listen to the sound of a perfectly working machine of gears in alignment she stood behind the railing hands on a steel bar that used to rattle and dance as the generator labored and watched an unlikely celebration take place in a normally avoided workplace the hum was magnificent power without dread the culmination of so much hurried labor and planning and survival strategy games invite us to step into that exact moment and experience those emotions for ourselves the tension and the release the rattle and the calm with the engines of survival that we've crafted ourselves during the game who remembers outpost hardly anyone but that was twenty four years ago now the question I'd want to ask is of the people who have played it who could forget frost Punk thanks for watching I'd like to start off with a small special thanks to the people at the website outpost universe for putting together versions of the old games that actually 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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 169,073

Rating: 4.9416533 out of 5

Keywords: Outpost, Outpost 2, Divided Destiny, Sierra, Sierra On-Line, Surviving Mars, Frostpunk, RTS, Strategy, Review, Critique, Retrospective

Id: WiQYjPdq_qI

Length: 74min 28sec (4468 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018

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[u/410-915-0909]

This article here seems to be the one he references at the beginning

Still listening but at this point it seems the genre could be described as being the civilian boss who presumably exists above you in X-Com

[u/Ari_Rahikkala]

I would say that I don't quite agree with the list of games in this video and the implication that survival strategy was just absent from gaming for the last two decades before Surviving Mars and Frostpunk... but then when I try to think of examples, it doesn't seem that easy to come up with many.

There's... Banished, I guess? Rimworld might count, though I always saw it as being more of a Dwarf Fortress-alike. The Anno series has some of the same gameplay aspects of having to carefully balance what you build, but from what little I've played of them, the tone is much less about survival and more about making money and expanding.

[u/[deleted]]

I love Noah, I think he's incredibly insightful and well-spoken, and I know it's his style, but I wish that he would at least do multiple takes of his script. It's kinda endearing, but I could do with a little more production quality.

[u/LolaRuns]

One could argue that this video could also be called "OMG, I love Frostpunk", but I really enjoyed it nonetheless since it covered three games I either haven't played yet or wasn't familiar with at all in the case of Outpost. I enjoy his thoughts even if it took a very roundabout way to get there.

Anybody know what the next games are going to be that he plans to cover?

[u/DaHolk]

I don't know. I liked Outpost. And I wasn't a thirty year old economy analyst.

I was 15 and really love(ed) games with research trees and filling existing and new demands and just growing "an antfarm". I have no idea why people keep dissing it this much.

[u/MadFlorist]

I didn't expect I would watch the entire video, but the unorthodox and surprising structure was really intriguing (original game -> significantly different sequel -> time-jump to quasi-spiritual successors) and made me interested in the games Noah covered.