Viceroy Status

My obsession with Against the Storm is continuing.  This is a bit of a surprise to me because I figured that I would eventually hit some kind of wall--either a wall of getting bored or related to the need to continually ramp up the difficulty to progress to the next seal.  Luckily, neither of those things have happened and I was pleasantly surprised when I was successful on my first viceroy settlement.  I managed to win by the skin of my teeth and figured, "hey, I can actually do this!"

A game I'm about to lose.

So, what's the major difference between veteran and viceroy difficulties?  Viceroy bumps the number of negative events related to hostility level up to 4 and the severity of those events is described as "devastating."  Hostility is also multiplied even higher, so it generally doesn't take long before those events start kicking in.  You really have to pay attention because the level jump happens so quickly and you want to be prepared to offset any that have a condition (such as fulfilling the need for housing).

Winning on viceroy difficulty is also harder due to a few other factors.  There are fewer orders from the queen and those orders are often of the more time consuming variety (like using 180 of a certain kind of rainwater).  I've found that winning is much more reliant on a combination of fulfilling as many orders as you can and trying to build as much resolve as you can.  At the lower levels, I felt like resolve was less important and wouldn't have too much of an impact on your ability to win.

My best advice for viceroy success is to always be thinking about the bigger picture.  Finding a good fuel source (namely coal, largely for the fact that it can be sacrificed for -80 hostility per stack when needed--mostly during storm season) should be a priority because wood is precious and runs out quickly once you start using it for other purposes.  Having multiple "hubs" is also something that is almost a requirement on viceroy.  Try to plan for another hearth as soon as you've opened up your first dangerous glade.  When picking blueprints it's also important to be thinking about the many steps to satisfying the needs of as many of your villagers as possible.  It's virtually impossible to make everyone happy, so it's best to consider which needs overlap.  Then you have to consider the prerequisite needs to produce an item (like having the ability to make flour before unlocking cooking structures).  I would also highly recommend trying to get tool manufacturing rolling as soon as you can.  Tools are vital to sending caches to the citadel and can help give you reputation bumps when you really need them.  Using rainwater is basically required, so you also need to be prepared to deal with blightrot during storm season.  I like to try to find an alternate fuel source for manufacturing blight weapons (either sea marrow or oil) because if you do get one particularly nasty event that multiplies the number of blight cysts you get each storm season, it's very easy to burn through your fuel quickly.

I don't know exactly how long I will be able to keep up with the bump in difficulty in Against the Storm, but for now, I'm perfectly content with struggling through each little village.  I feel like my strategy could be better and I've had a lot of difficulty with managing hostility levels.  Hopefully, I can overcome the gold seal this week.