home
Frostpunk
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2024 Robin Scott. All rights reserved.
0 of 0

File information

Last updated

Original upload

Created by

Practical Incarnation

Uploaded by

PracticalIncarnation

Virus scan

Safe to use

Tags for this mod

Tag this mod
Current section

About this mod

Small balance mod to improve viability of inferior options, fix balance issues with overpowered options, to improve the overall game play experience.

Permissions and credits
Goals
Improve balance of the game, by providing options and decisions that have different trade-offs. Try to make no option be superior in all cases to others.
This is done by improving the viability of inferior options, and nerf overpowered options.

Secondary goal is to balance the mid game and late game difficulty with the early game. Frostpunk is very difficult in the early game, but becomes increasingly too easy, often making the end game anti-climatic.

Changes
Economy
  • Steam Hub coal usage increased - Range 1 from base 3 to 6, Range 2 from base 6 to 9
  • Wall Drill nerfed from base 16/h to 12/h, Steam Wall Drill nerfed from 20/h to 18/h
  • Steam Coal Mine nerfed from base 60/h to 48/h
  • Coal Thumper building now costs 25 wood, up from 15
  • Steam Coal Thumper building now costs 70 wood and 50 steel, up from 35 wood and 25 steel
  • Charcoal Kiln building now costs 20 wood and 20 steel. Produces 24 coal from 8 wood per hour, buffed from 21 coal from 7 wood.
  • Large Resource depot storage increased 4x, stores 21600 coal, or 7200 wood/steel/food/rations

Manpower
  • Steam Steelworks takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Advanced Steelworks takes 20 staff, up from 10
  • Steam Wall Drill takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Advanced Wall Drill takes 20 staff, up from 10
  • Steam Coal Mine takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Advanced Coal Mine takes 20 staff, up from 10
  • Coal Thumper takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Steam Coal Thumper takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Industrial Hothouse takes 15 staff, up from 10
  • Cookhouse takes 10 staff, up from 5
  • Infirmary takes 15 staff, up from 10. Mechanization reduces it to 10, up from 5.
  • House of Healing takes 20 staff, up from 10
  • Factory takes 20 staff, up from 5

Abilities
  • Emergency Shift is removed for Workshops
  • Emergency Shift for food (once accepted in event), costs 20 food, up from 5
  • Extended Shift discontent rises 5% per workplace, up from 2.5%
  • Extra Rations for the Ill now raises medical efficiency 75%, up from 50%
  • Faith - Sermon is removed
  • Faith - Evening Prayers costs 40 food, up from 20
  • Faith - Ceremonial Service costs 80 food, up from 20
  • Faith - Night-time Procession cooldown takes 4 days, up from 3
  • Order - Foreman costs 20 food, up from 10
  • Order - Patrol costs 20 food, up from 10, cooldown takes 2 days, up from 1
  • Order - Roundup cooldown takes 2 days, up from 1

Events & Quests
  • Ignoring certain Protest events (most notably Long Hours of Toil for stopping Extended Shifts), discontent can rise 20%, up from 10%
  • Failing Quests from Protest events (most notably from Long Hours of Toil, keep Extended Shifts off for 3 days), discontent can rise 20%, up from 10%

Research
  • Tier 0 base research times changed to 4,6,7,9 hours (easy/normal/hard/extreme), down from 5,7,11,13, to adjust for loss of emergency shift for workshops
  • Tier 1 base research times changed to 6,8,10,12 hours, down from 6,8,12,14
  • Tier 3 unlock Mechanical Calculators base research time changed to 11,13,17,19, up from 8,10,14,16. Each individual techs not changed.
  • Tier 4 unlock Difference Engine base research time changed to 15,17,21,23, up from 9,11,15,17. Each individual techs not changed.
  • Tier 5 unlock Automatic Prototyping base research time changed to 19,21,25,27, up from 10,12,16,18. Each individual techs not changed.
  • Generator Range Upgrade 1 is now researchable at Tier 0, base research time changed to 3,4,5,6, down from 6,8,12,14, and costs 10 wood and 10 steel
  • Steam Hub research now costs 20 steel
  • Coal Thumper research now costs 20 wood
  • Charcoal Kiln is now researchable at Tier 0, base research time changed to same as Tier 0, research costs 10 wood and 10 steel
  • Steam Coal Thumpers research costs 60 wood and 40 steel, up from 30 wood and 20 steel
  • Steam Coal Mine and Industrial Hothouse research costs 80 wood and 50 steel, up from 40 wood and 25 steel
  • Flying Hunter's Gear research costs 100 wood and 60 steel, up from 50 wood and 30 steel
  • Coal Thumper Injectors and Advanced Coal Mine research costs 120 wood and 80 steel, up from 60 wood and 35 steel (changed to be same as most of Tier 5 techs)
  • The following techs now costs an extra steam core to research:
    • Steam Hub Range Upgrade
    • Steam Hub Efficiency Upgrade
    • Heater Efficiency Upgrade
    • Automaton Integration
    • Automaton Integration II
    • Engineer Automatons
Rationale
Steam hubs vs Generator Range upgrades
  • Steam hubs were overpowered, making the Generator range upgrades completely useless, as it's inferior in all cases. The change will make steam hubs use a little more coal than the Generator range upgrades, making it a trade-off between the Generator using less coal, while steam hubs takes less research time and are more expandable and flexible.
  • Steam hub range 2 now uses less coal than range 1, making it a viable upgrade
  • Generator Range Upgrade 1 is now faster to research than Steam Hubs, the idea is to give the player the option to delay Steam hubs and go for Range 1 instead of skipping it for shorter research times in the early game, at the costs of higher total research times later since you'll eventually need Hubs

Wood Economy
  • Wall Drills were a little overpowered, while the upgrades were too weak and not worth it. The progression is changed from 16/20/24 to 12/18/24, making upgrades more viable.

Coal Economy
  • Steam Coal Mines were a little overpowered. The progression is changed from 24/60/90 to 24/48/90.
  • Coal Thumpers were a little too strong compared to Coal Mines and Charcoal Kilns, and Steam Coal Thumpers was too weak an upgrade.
  • Charcoal Kilns were too weak, being available earlier and being more manpower efficient should make it more viable.

Manpower Efficiency
  • In the mid and late game, in all scenarios aside from the Arks, the player often has excessive manpower, close to half the city is often not needed to work. This is due to the large manpower efficiency increases in later tech tiers, specifically the Steam and Advanced resource production buildings. This breaks the economic balance in the late game, as supply outstrips demand, rendering manpower "free", and efficiency irrelevant, and resources no longer a concern, as you can throw people at everything. This is largely the reason why the late game becomes trivial. Thus all Steam and Advanced level buildings have their staff requirements increased, reducing the rate of manpower efficiency increases from tech. This means more of the city population will need to work in the late game.

Abilities and Discontent
  • Emergency Shifts were absurdly overpowered due to its effects on research. A 2.4x research boost on Day 1, and the 24h research can be maintained by alternating Emergency shifts on 2 workshops, makes it impossible to balance against the alternative of not using it. It'll always make research either too fast if used, or too slow if not used. Thus for balance, it is removed for workshops, and Tier 0 and Tier 1 research times have been adjusted to partially reflect it. The baseline target for research pacing is if Emergency shift is used on a workshop once on Day 1, and then switched to Extended Shifts afterwards. This also enables viability of other options for not choosing Emergency Shifts for the 1st law. For example, Child Labor is now a viable option, as you only lose 2 hours of research if you delay Extended Shift to the 3rd law, instead of losing 10 hours.
  • Extended Shifts is the most powerful law due to its 40% production and research boost everywhere with little trade-offs. The discontent costs didn't matter. Now with increased Discontent costs, and the Long Hours of Toil protest increasing Discontent a lot more, it's more difficult to automatically enable it everywhere, you have to choose which workplaces to enable it for. Note that the balance for Extended Shifts is not completely solved, due to modding limitations, and the ability to exploit and abuse Ultimatums. House rules and self-restrictions on use is recommended.
  • Both Faith and Order early abilities are too strong in reducing Discontent and can be spammed too easily, they have been toned down. Higher food costs means food production becomes more important as well. And if Discontent and Hope are still a problem, there is more incentive to pass the harsher laws and crossing the line.
  • Extra Rations for the Ill was too weak compared to Overcrowding, since the capacity for treating the sick is most important in the early game, and overcrowding was much higher, and the tradeoffs wasn't enough. Now the gap is smaller, making the benefits for Extra Rations worth considering. Extra Rations is a little slower, but half the sick that would have been treated in overcrowding can work. Night-time only treatment strategy is even more effective.
  • Faith House of Healing was too overpowered, allowing the player to delay or skip Infirmary, saving research time and steam core costs. Now with higher staff requirements, the trade-off is stronger.

Research Progression
  • One of the main causes of the mid to late game snowball that made the game too easy once you passed the hump, was because of the combined effects of excessive manpower plus research boosts. Thus slowing down mid and late game research will make the difficulty pacing better.
  • The added Steam core requirements for researching non-essential efficiency upgrades creates new decisions for players to make on where to spend steam cores.
  • Coal efficiency techs may be delayed or skipped in exchange for resource production or automatons. Games usually have too much coal in the mid game and late game, so this may make coal economy more interesting.
  • Player will have to choose between more automatons, or lesser number of more efficient ones.
  • Engineer Automatons were overpowered, now there is a trade-off of requiring extra steam cores to research
Caveats
  • Most of the mod changes, with some exceptions, do not apply to The Last Autumn and On the Edge scenarios, and Endless Builders mode. Those scenarios and mode have their own mechanics that for the most part aren't changed.
  • Due to the nerf to steam hubs, the game will become more difficult for players who were min-maxing and relying on steam hubs. There will be higher pressure on coal supply.
  • Steam hub description will still state the vanilla coal usage, it is not updated.
  • Charcoal Kilns while researchable in Tier 0, is still shown on the Tech panel at Tier 1, this is difficult to change due to requiring UI changes.
  • Frostpunk is very difficult to mod, requiring binary/hex editing and coding your own tools. Other changes may be too difficult to implement.
Compatibility
  • The mod is likely only compatible with the current patch 1.6.2. It will not be backwards or forwards compatible, due to the file structure of the game being not mod friendly.
  • The GOG version and the Epic Games version are outdated, and the patches will not work on their version of the game. I don't have their version to create a patch.
  • Recommend starting a new game with the mod. Existing saves will have inconsistent behaviour with the steam hubs, requiring flipping the range
    for every active steam hub to reset their coal usage.

Installation Instructions
  • Before patching, revert to the original 1.6.2 game files first. The patches does not work with patched files from previous versions of the mod.
  • To check if the original source files are correct, do a md5sum of the 4 files that will be patched and compare with this:
    ef09678b960f35da2424f28180294a3f  common.dat
    20cd75787f8289202cd9e3270241fb25  common.idx
    0ec430a43a338f166d54478b00d643ed  templates.dat
    0443266e1ec3f62e820841211407efe7  templates.idx
  • The files are created in VCDIFF patch format and needs to be patched with an external program. VCDIFF is an open standard for patching file differences, programs such as xdelta3, which is an open source tool, also available in many Linux repositories, Windows builds can be downloaded on their site. Care has been taken on my part to make the patches as small as possible.
  • 4 files needs to be patched. Please make a backup of your original files first. On steam, the default directory where the files are located should be in:
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Frostpunk

    Files to patch, please make a backup of them:
    templates.idx
    templates.dat
    common.idx
    common.dat
  • Put the VCDIFF files from the downloaded mod in the same directory as the 4 source files.
  • If you use xdelta3, on the command-line you can use the following commands to patch, and then replace the original files with the newly created ones. There may be other programs that provide a GUI to do the same.
    xdelta3 -d -D -s templates.idx templates.idx-balance-mod.vcdiff templates-new.idx
    xdelta3 -d -D -s templates.dat templates.dat-balance-mod.vcdiff templates-new.dat
    xdelta3 -d -D -s common.idx common.idx-balance-mod.vcdiff common-new.idx
    xdelta3 -d -D -s common.dat common.dat-balance-mod.vcdiff common-new.dat
  • The patching commands will create 4 new files. You will need to replace the 4 original game files with the new files by renaming them and putting them in the game directory.
  • A player suggested this online patcher worked well for him. I personally haven't used it, but for those having trouble patching, you can try it.