I love Against the Storm because it breaks city-builder games
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- čas přidán 26. 06. 2024
- Against the Storm is a roguelite city-building game and you shouldn't let that scare you. Polygon's Clayton Ashley explains why Against the Storm challenges what it means to be a city-builder, and why it's so successful at breaking the formula.
0:00 What is Against the Storm?
1:10 Why Against the Storm feels good
2:23 How is it a roguelike?
5:08 What happens next?
6:23 What's the endgame?
7:00 The best part of any city-builder
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As some have noted, those notches on the reputation bar are actually when you receive a new building! Your impatience lowers by a full point each time you gain a full point of reputation! - Clayton
Much appreciation to Polygon for not abandoning these obsessively made niche videos made specifically for me.
Also the best overview video I've seen on AtS that isn't an hour long
clayton has a way of making any game that is the polar opposite of my taste sound extremely fascinating
Against the Storm really makes you FEEL like a beaver
Sold😊
All the pompousness and grace of an African American Civil Engineer with a mortgage and student debt
Beaver life. I ain't got any race preferences in AtS except I love me some beav, they chop like pros
this sounds fascinating - and actually a really nice idea - the amount of times I boot up one of those sims, lose an evening or a weekend to a place, and never go back to that settlement - once it gets to a certain level of automation you don't need to! The variety in the locations sounds great too because it stops you minmaxing into best practice
Precisely why I love this game. You will intuitively 'get' when you feel like the settlement's done; the citizens in this new town have not only survived but proved they're able to thrive: time to move on!
Yes! That's EXACTLY why it works so well and is so addictive! Plus you get this "oh, one more go" pattern... it's great.
The locations and random blueprints really keeps the variety up. One of my towns was a perfect utopia where everyone had advanced food and luxuries. Another one the supply chains never came together and they all laboured on plantations to scrap food together while tunneling for event points in the forest.
My GF did the key art for this game and today is our anniversary! Amazing that you featured it in a video today!
The art is exceptional, I hope your GF is proud! Happy anniversary to you both 🙂
Congratulations 🎉 And well done to her for an incredible job. The art and style in this game are gorgeous!
The art is truly incredible
The art is def one of the main things drawing me into potentially buying the game, so kudos to her!
Congrats
It’s not a co-operage, it’s a cooperage, where the cooper works. A cooper is a barrel maker.
3:15 Actually, whenever you gain reputation, impatience drops. The points on the reputation bar are when you get new blueprints
Played this gem hundreds of hours, immediately felt compelled to check for this comment
Unless you get that mystery where it doesn't - kicks in at I think hostility 3. But yeah.
@@DansenOpWagner Fortunately it's only during storm season, and who's gaining reputation during storm?
Script was correct, the graphic added in wasn't.
I love these polygon videos where a staffer shares a game/genre they are truly passionate about. Then goes on to layout all the minutia about the game that makes it go from good to great. Feels really genuine and Clayton did a great job with this one!
I think it's nuts that more of these kind of randomized elements haven't been added to more city builders. They don't even have to go full rouge-like a lot of city builders would benefit immensely just by having maps with meaningful differences in resource availability to give it more replayability.
makes me sad that CS2 decided to make their progression a skill tree, arguably LESS random than just getting a bunch of stuff unlocked at once like in CS1.
Works for dwarf fortress and the biomes…rimworld too, now I think on it
Yay for Clayton "City-Builder-Talker" Ashley!
Against the Storm rules and took over my life (willingly) for a couple weeks. I hope the devs add more to the endgame!!
It never ceases to impress me just how gamer the polygon team is. People who play games for the love of it, and not just becuase it's their job. :D
I like the Total Conversion Mod "Against the Norm [From Cheers]"
What I loved most is that every town is a new puzzle. And even if you decide on a course, you might have to change plans at the drop of a hat. Orders that are impossible to fulfill? No problem, just make your creatures happy and boost reputation that way. Once you unlock trade routes or gets even more interesting. More possibilities keep opening up. Love the seal progression as well, as each gives you more time to build your towns, to reach further. And this also increases the price of failure, as you will have to spend more hours to start over.
This game is a ton of fun, but I did drop it because of that lack of satisfying late and end game you mentioned.
The overworld upgrades are very useful, but even some symbolic progression between seasons would be nice. Like watching the Smoldering City expand a tile a time because of our work, or have the most distant levels unlock unique upgrades and special buildings, glade events.
excellent video!!!! but the building that makes barrels is called a "COOP-erage" rather than a "co-OP-erage", like the guy who makes barrels is a "cooper".
Not to be confused with a walking turtle, hated by plumbers. Although it's a homophone...
Here I was thinking it was people that made barrels by working together as a team.
It's a worker-owned barrel business!
Cooper trooper
immediate pause to come post this but you got there first
I think it's unfair to show frostpunk and implicitly say it follows the same mold as the other games. It technically has an endless mode, but it primarily works off shorter, constantly tense scenarios, similar to against the storm.
True, but it's not unusual for city builders to have a challenge mode so it's more of a case of Frostpunk prioritising that mode of play rather than doing something unique.
Honestly the biggest issue with that game is that it presupposes that a brutally repressive state is the only solution to living in an isolated enclave within a hostile biome, when in fact the opposite is true (as evidenced by the many groups of people who lived in the arctic for centuries without anything approaching the type of state sanctioned brutality that the game forces the player to sign off on)
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 I'd say it's much more about general sacrifice than that specifically. It's technically an anarchistic commune until you create guards or fath keepers. You can beat the game without doing a single oppressive act, and you get an achievement for it.
I think they were going for more of a "people's panic leads to terrible things being done" and achieved the effect much better in the last autumn dlc where you're continually pressured to go further and further by both radicals and your own deadlines.
Which is like... A completely fair point? Fascists don't take over when things are going great, and fearful people (Especially you, the captain in charge!) Make poor decisions.
You can find the idea that horrific acts are needed in harsh circumstances incorrect and uncouth, and I'd agree, but enacting an Authoritarian state isn't necessary, it's the failure state.
The end game of against the storm is pretty incredible and it seems like people don’t realize what it is. It never changes from the roguelite nature but the challenge massively increases over time, it’s extremely fun and rewarding and there’s a special end-end game mode you can unlock that rules. It’s not an endgame like in a city builder but it’s one of the best roguelite endgames I’ve played alongside hades and slay the spire
Man, this is word for word how I feel, including the trifecta at the end.
Great game with super rewarding progression.
Isnt the metaprogression a problem for it being a rougelike? In slay the spire you can always decide to go for some wacky playstyle, but with the sunk cost of being 10 hours into rushing the seal, youre not gonna gamble.
Against the storm is really clever - and part of what makes it work so well as a roguelike is that you learn methods for overcoming challenges. You learn how many of your unreplaceable parts you can sell to traders to get just enough gold to get by - you learn what tool is best saved for certain events - you learn that sometimes calling a trader early can snatch you out of a jam - and you learn how to best juggle resolve and favoring to edge out a bit more reputation or keep villagers from leaving. And you learn this intuitively through play, because each system's cause and effect is relatively clear.
ABT - Always Buy Tools!
Listen, I fell in love with this game and thought it was the greatest game in the world and it couldn’t get any better…
And then I discovered, I could build a tiny village of fox people .
I can't oversell the sound design and the atmosphere enough. I love playing this game just for the way it sounds.
Man, I now have a learned visceral anxiety reaction to hearing the storm season music now. Really sells the heavy nature of things.
I know this video is framed as a way to sell Against the Storm to city-building fans that are skeptical of the roguelike elements, honestly as a roguelike fan who's never gelled with city-builders I'm kind of sold. You make the game look like a blast.
That's the direction that took me to AtS. Shorter, semi-random city building sounded like a good fit for me, and I wasn't interested in sweeping, long term projects. And it's great.
Me too! I always liked the idea of them but having so many options makes me feel compelled to optimize. “Here’s a bakery, a mine and twelve mouths to feed, make it work” is more my speed
I've been playing this game a lot lately, but I didn't expect a big channel to talk about it.
By golly Clayton you've done it again. Fastest I've ever gone from not knowing a game existed to feeling an existential need to be playing it. Keep up the good work!
Touched upon in the video, but repeatedly playing sessions of Against the Storm has a fascinating feeling progression as a player. When I started, it was more of a "okay, it's a pretty chill city builder, let's unlock buildings and grow", but as the difficulty levels increased (and increased & increased & increased), it slowly morphed into a REALLY personally-rewarding game of adaptation and risk-reward. For example, while in the earlier difficulties, it's a "let me take a bunch of these smaller glades" approach, later on it's more of a "okay, if I take this glade now, and take the hostility hit, will I be able to keep my harpies staying around this upcoming storm? I could also wait a season, but my food's running low already, etc." It almost feels like an accessible Euro game in some ways, with the reactive aspects of play.
I've accepted the annual exodus of the harpies in all my settlements at this point
I love the chaos/dirtiness of a settlement where you made bad choices and have to scramble to find a new use for the resources you didn't want, building something out of it, before things get worse. It's kind of like Rimworld or Crusader Kings in that the runs I remember the most fondly are the ones where I played poorly and all hell broke loose.
Yeah the cities where none of your supply chains come together so you just shovel everything into trade goods and buy yearly pie shipments to keep the people happy are really fun.
Sometimes you get everything you think you want for a city, but you're missing out on fundamentals that mean you can't afford to build them. Sometimes even letting the hearth go out just so you can use that wood to make coal and planks is necessary. A moment of forgetfulness about a map modifier can leave you scrambling for the rest of the game and force you into decisions about which villagers you're willing to lose.
Those are the kind of settlements that make the game memorable.
I love Against the Storm, but I unfortunately had to stop playing it because I got so engrossed in it I could sit for 15-20 hours straight without food or drink, causing me a lot of issues career- and health-wise.
Really nice to see the game getting the recognition it deserves, it's clever in so many days! I hope to someday be able to play it again in a more healthy manner🙂
Yeah, it's kind of dangerous, that's a fact. You gotta self-discipline with this genre.
@@LimeyLassenVery true! Both inside the game and out of it 😁
i also love against the storm
And it does still have that agony of never rolling a building that can make something you need. Aha! Never rolling a farm or a plank making building is where misery lies in that game. :P Nothing like installing rainengines in a crude workstation because you are that desperate.
And honestly one thing I like about this game is that every horrible outcome has upsides. Like planks for instance are very cheap from a trader and the labour savings can go elsewhere.
@@cazzah49 really the game gets a little trivialized once any real trade is going, but good luck carving enough of your economy that way without exploding first.
@@AdaloreUntil you have several traders in a row that don't have what you need and you're scrambling to decide which glade events you can afford to fail.
We've been getting some absolutely INCREDIBLE clayton videos recently
Yknow this might actually be the one thing to fix my anti city builder stance. I love them, greatly enjoy putting down a few buildings and watch my little ants go to town, but as it grows more advanced it requires less and less player input to function. Great idea from the devs!
This is "spinning plates the game". very tense, yyou'll have several "plates" spinning at once and its great.
Just got done with my lab report, have warm cake and fresh bread, AND there's a new video from Clayton?! HELL YES!!!
Against the storm is Probably the best new game I played in 2023. The devs really pulled through on this one. Hats off to Eremite
Yup. One of the best games out there. I have sunk an unspeakable amount of time into it.
I think i'll play some more today.
One of the rare occasions I wrote a Steam review for a game I really, really loved.
I love builder games, but I always build for an evening or two, then completely lose oversight and control, and never return.
Regards to Cities Skylines, Sins of a Solar Empire, some Civs, Endless Space, Endless Space 2, Oxygen not Included, even Don't Starve, the list goes on.
Againt the Storm lets me build, and be done with it. Then build again.
It's great
I haven't had such a focused, zen-like experience from a game since something like Factorio or Rimworld
Would it be possible to add what platforms the game is available on on the end/credit screen of the single game focused videos by chance? As always a fantastic video 🖤
I find some difficulty in riding out city builders to 'completion', so something that expects you to move on after a couple of hours might help someone like me.
I honestly think you've sold me on this game 😅 I don't play city builders because I get overwhelmed by optimization and long term planning, but I really love this concept! I'm a huge fan of roguelikes, not just because they're challenging, but because you always get IMMEDIATE feedback when you screw up so that you can learn by doing, whereas with so many city builders (or civ games), you'll screw up without noticing for the next ten or so hours, when your empire crumbles before your eyes and all you learn from your failure is that you suck? Dying over and over again SOUNDS hellish, but it really is a great way to learn and experiment :P
I don't think any review of Against the Storm is complete without mentioning the seasonal mechanics. That feeling of just having survived a stormy season and the hope that the next two calm seasons will give you enough time to prepare yourself better for the next storm is a big part of the experience.
"cooperage" is pronounced Coop-er-age and refers to a place to create barrels, coopers make barrels, cooperage is also a general noun for place to store beer.
most addictive and diverse city builder. The combination of cornerstone, orders, glades events and race spec makes every settlement different
Seems like a great way to introduce “tutorials” in the city building genre. Often when I pick up a new title, it feels better to start over after a few trial runs to get familiar with the mechanics
i hadn't heard of this game but it sounds right up my alley! thanks for the video : )
clayton i love your videos, i've been playing satisfactory for weeks at your recommendation
been playing this gem of a game nonstop, so excited to see more!!
Wait are you telling me that I'M the harpy that gets tea and scones? HECK yeah
Meanwhile I'm the lizard happily tending the hearth you're being warmed by.
Wasn't there an entire mechanic of the forests anger that you missed?
If I had my eyes closed this could just as easily have been a boardgame review. The sentence about mushrooms in glades maybe containing extra insects and the tone with which it was said is the most boardgames thing I've ever heard.
This game seems absolutely amazing! Thanks for the video!
I feel like i'm early enough to offer this friendly fun fact/pronunciation tip without (hopefully) repeating anyone else: a cooperage is a place where coopers, aka barrel-makers, work. It's pronounced like a chicken coop: coop-er-age, and not co-op-er-age. Absolutely understandable mispronunciation, especially for someone who works within the video game industry!
One of my current favourite games.
Facepalming so hard after realizing i could move my woodcutters instead of demolishing and rebuilding...
Clayton is so good at selling me on games, both those I would never consider to be my jam but rule and ones that are already up my alley but I needed a push to actually give a try!
I also get very cool insight into games that are still Not For Me but now I have a deeper understanding of what makes them neat and fun for other players
This sounds really cool! Thank you.
the demo of the game is in my steam libary for ages but i didnt touch until now. and wow. I played 4.5 hours straight. thanks for you video
This is the only city builder I can actually play because I either get overwhelmed and/or bored
100%. I'm a compulsive restarter. I'll usually hit a level of complexity in city-builder or 4x games where the opening rush of city planning feels more interesting than trying to gut and rebuild the existing infrastructure for redevelopment, or hit the slog where it's just a matter of time before I hit the victory condition. Trying to figure out how to most efficiently meet the needs of my villagers in different biomes, and working around the starting positions feels great. It would be nice to have something of a sandbox mode to save or play with decor could be a fun addition though.
God this game is so good. I'm glad to see it getting some coverage.
Against the storm is definitely my favorite game released in the last decade. It's so good.
After trying to play Frostpunk and quitting quite fast I looked on steam for city builder games and this one was one of them. It looked cool with the art style and had good reviews so I tried it out basically completely blind. So far only completed 1 settlement and game looks fun. Only right now decided to look videos about the game.
Major correction! The impatience drops whenever you get a single point of reputation. The dots on the reputation bar represent the thresholds for getting new blueprints
While I'm not sure I agree with the "first hour" idea (my My Life as a King files are all treasured for their final town layouts) this does look like a gameplay loop I could really settle into.
As a hardcore ADHDhead type (goldfish memory person) THIS IS THE GAME THAT GOT ME TO UNDERSTAND CITY BUILDERS, and this is the video that showed it to me. Ty for a new genre!
Hehehe, I saw this on steam some time ago and was so certain the conept would work excellently for me that I wishlisted it straight away. Glad to have that judgement reaffirmed.
actually the best part of the city builder is not the first hour, but the 100th hour you log at 3am after completely abandoning all of your responsibilities, social interactions and, frankly, basic hygiene, while thinking "what am i doing with my life" and then "well i guess i'll go to sleep when i finish this trade route"
This sounds like what I loved about the first couple of Warcraft games. Build a town, move on to the next town.
Warcraft is a great comparison.
Great review
I love Against the Storm!!! I get so lost when I play 😅 I so happy to see Clayton talking about it!
😭 am I the only person who enjoys the late game of city builders? I'm so happy when i get out of early game. And i can just watch my city thrive without input for a few days. Resources i used to scrounge for, now filling my storehouses. Into the storm is good though. I just wish it had a late game!
The best part of any city builder is usually the first hour? I don't think so.
The first hour is usually the part where you do the obligatory setup to try and actually get to the good content of the city builder game that's locked behind progress markers you have to reach in order to get them.
The best part of a city builder is once you've unlocked everything and you can actually get on with the process of building and expanding the city that you actually envisioned in your head once you have all the tools to do so.
Bravo Vince
Does anyone know the name of the game with that high-tech city right at the beginning?
same question!
Cliff Empire
Aww, thanks for the snack, Clayton!
I get horrible FOMO when playing normal RPGs and city builders, and I end up not having much fun just googling all day. And just like normal roguelikes solve the FOMO problem on the RPG front, Against The Storm solves it on the city builder front
(I found this game like a year ago in early access from a streamer, it was before they added foxes, and I’ve gotten back into it now that the full release is out)
My second against the storm map I got meat specialization corner stone twice followed by the trees that give you meat I ended that map on 600 people. I needed like 8 of each cooking building just to keep up with demand since I had no rain punk I spent about 8 hours on that map
Against the storm is the only city builder i've found that i like
I JUST bought Against The Storm on a rec from a friend, the battery on my steam deck just died after playing for a bit, and I come to CZcams to find this?? (Also despite said friend playing it on steam deck I am not so sure it is a good choice for steam deck)
I legitimately put this game up there with Slay the Spire as far as personal replayability goes.
I put in 200 hours over 3 weeks. I willingly lost sleep to play more Against the Storm. This game is truly fantastic if you love city builders. Honestly, it sort of reminds me of the old Majesty games in some ways, but it is an experience all it's own.
Got this game during the sale for my Steam Deck, and it's probably the most addicting game I've ever played. I almost refunded it after my first playthrough, because I thought I was out of my depth. But, I'm seriously glad I stuck with it. I've got about 20 hours in. but I'm still such a noob, barely getting pass the Pioneer level. Definitely recommend this game.
if you close your eyes it just sounds like greg from succession is telling you about a game he likes
Me, having played thias game for 10+ hours: "YOU CAN MOVE HARVESTING BUILDINGS FOR FREE??"
I swear i find a new mechanic in this game every time i play, and even when i don't.
Interesting. I'm not really a fan of traditional city builders, just because I tend to fall into a rut and get bored after a while. This sounds like it might remedy that somewhat, maybe I'll check it out.
Very interested! Just curious about the setting: do all the population in the city die each time the storm wipes out a city? Seems just a bit cruel tbh if that’s the case
No, the settlements are designed to collect resources for the capital. Everyone abandons all the settlements and returns to the capital when the superstorm comes
It's very clear that you're not a good guy, especially in the earlier versions of the game. You can sacrifice villagers on a blood altar to give yourself bonuses, you have to kill villagers to succeed at some events. You're here to do an imperialism until nature gets tired of you and kicks you out.
No, as far as I remember the population moves back to the citadel.
You as the village are collecting ressources for the citadel. The villages are more or less exploitation camps, but more longterm and more "humane".
What happens if the Queen gets too impatient? Do you just abandon that city, or does the season change completely?
The session ends, you get less (but still some) progression rewards, you can't start your next city from the failed city location, and don't get that city as a trading partner for the rest of the cycle. Win or lose, the number of years spent on the settlement will be subtracted from the available years until the next map reset cycle. The biggest downside is that it makes reaching the next seal harder for that cycle, if not impossible.
I bought this on an impulse but the thousands of tiny colored icons and general resemblance to Warcraft 3 freaked me right out. Now you tell me it's out of early access and the stress and guilt mount even further
common based Clayton W
The game has wonderful art. I just love how the foxes look.
I really like the Warcraft like art style.
I played a lot of Oxygen not included, but always just the early game. Always loved the start but would get bored and overwhelmed later.
Then i discovered against the storm. It was made for me.
I love this game and I love this video
To me, this game seems like an excercise in pointlessness. But I am glad there are people who like it. It certainly is a unique concept.
against the storm is so awesome that I needed to delete it because I was becoming somewhat addicted to it. It's the best city builder imho
A city builder roguelike? 😯❤️🔥
nerd clayton is the best it's so much fun how passionate he is
Awesome!!!Big Like 💖😗
Other city builders usually lose my attention pretty quick...ATS has held me for 200 hours!
I'm hooked on against the storm when it was first accessable in early access. I've more than 500 hours in the game and it was already in a good shape when it came out. They made frequent updates and worked close with the comunity. It is one of the gems that reminds you why indy games are worth supporting. Regarding rogue lites it is up on the throne with Slay the Spire and Battle Brothers.
Normally I'm a 4x player but after you become really good at a game (which can easily take a 1000hours) the mid and late game becomes really boring. Stellaris tried to fix it with the late game crisis and other mechanics but rogue lite is so much more fun since you simply win at the point where it starts to get boring.
There is massive room for improvement on the meta progression (a simple unlock system) But if this would be done right (skill three progression, like they started to try it with the queens hand mode) it could even create an own subgenre.
What happens when the queens impatience meter is full?
You lose that settlement, the storm happens, And you begin another run.
@@virgil.alonso I see! Makes sense I guess :0c ty!
You lose that city, but a full run consists of multiple cities, so it might not be too punishing! this game RULES.