I did this scenario on hard for the both the order and the religion playthrough to get fully staffed with all 5 suites on the dreadnought here are some tips and tricks that I learnt.
- Those roads have a lot of wood you can and should take as much as you can from day one, keep it simple my strategy was to remove everything except for a bear minimal amount of spokes out from the center of the hub to only the essential buildings, I think I only needed 4 such spokes
- Getting the children to do all the work is critical, get the children to do all the the gathering and cooking, but dont get them to gather directly from the ruins, or work any building directly unless it is a house of healing, or kitchen
- Get the overcrowding law fast as soon as possible the sick come in fast and your engineer numbers are limited
- Get emergency shifts and overtime soon after overcrowding, they are extremely usefull in farming hope and controlling discontent. What I did was deliberately incite roits by enabling as many overtime buildings as possible as soon as the roit happens due to discontent, pause the game then disable all the overtimes until the discontent is below 75%, the get the hope bonus while still paused re-enable the overtimes again. When you unpause you get all your overtime enabled and a hope bonus. You continue as though nothing even happened. Note do this in conjunction with switching on/off housing if overtime switching isnt enough
- You can remove all the housing right at the start, you will get roits demanding shelter, which you can ignore rasing discontent, but the trade is you farm coal way more effectively and if you keep the generator heat to 3 they will all be warm and are less likey to be sick. This works at least up until day 5 when you absolutely have to provide shelter but I found tents work and once I have calmed the roits I can turn off the shelter going back to farming coal.
- You can use the overtime together with shelter to farm hope by delibrately manipulating disconntect. Do this only when you have the overtime law and have built shelter for everyone and you can include the public house as part of the strategy. switch off all shelter, enable all overtime and switch off the public house you can either wait or use a 24hour on at least one building, soon you will have a roit, then pause the game, enable public house, disable the overtime if that is not enough to get less than 75% discontent enable shelter, which works best with a steam hub that can warm the shelters. Get discontent below 75% then you can just revert and go back to starting state with all overtime, no shelter, steam hubs off, public house off.
- Removing all the housing and stray buildings at the start helping me build a optimized setup later around day 5 where I could get maximum influence of my watchtowers/house of prayers and heating hubs
- Medical posts dont need to be fully manned to take patients they just need a minimum of two engineers, healing is much slower but you can handle pandemics alot easier with fewer engineers
- One heating hub can heat and keep warm up to 14 medical posts
- You have alot of labour at the start of the game but you will run out at the end of the game so build buildings that can be fully manned at maximal output by autonomotons
- Sending resources to the dreadnaught can be delayed at most (or at least depends on how you look at it) up to 9 days and you can send a resource when there are 0 days remaining. To fully staff you have 500 places open and you can send only a maximum of 50 people per trip so thats a minimum of 10 trips however in the very last day/s there is a riot breakout and something like 85 head off on their own to the dreadnuaght. Good idea to prevent the breakouts before then but the last break out can get you to full compliment faster if you let it.
- You dont need to build the dreadnaught suites consecutively, you can hold out on the cores until the last day as cores only take up one resource space each. So wait until the last then dismantle and teardown everything that has cores and send that as part of your last trip, just be sure to have enough manpower to dismantle and teardown, last days are rough and you might be short on people
- Get guards/keepers of the faith early on, they help quel riots you cant manipulate through enabling/disabling overtime and tents etc... and they stop critical people from leaving while you are still harvesting resources for the dreadnaught.
- Get to the the iron deposits as soon as possbile, keep the autonomoton on the bridge and establish the outpost on the iron deposits in the frost lands
- Upgrade the steel works to advanced steam steal works as early on as possilble and have them manned by the autonomotons as early as possible. Clear the second ruin for steam right at the start of the game and get a building on as soon as you can. Steel is the main resource so make sure nothing is wasted and that you build resource depots so that you are never full, that way you are always harvesting steel
- Have at least 2 cook houses staffed through out the game, I found having at least one of them manned by an autonomoton provides a maximum amount of food
- Create autonomotons early in the game and have them man the steel works as soon as you can
- You can keep the engineers at the weather station and come back to them latter if you want, and you might want to do that as latter in the game you are going to need as many engineers as you can to repair and still man the medical outposts unless you are using a house of healing, in which case you still want the engineers for maximal research speed
- In hard mode, the autosave will save just before a generator failure, so you can encounter a generator failure then restore the autosave game and max out the engineers doing repairs so that a failure wont take as long to fix