Civil and Management buildings
Basics
Constructing Civil and Management buildings brings a nascent government to your Whiskers and allows you the ability to implement and abolish policies impacting your Whiskers. These can be powerful and necessary tools to achieving success in running your colony.
Policies
Policies are powerful edicts that generally grant you bonuses in exchange for expending your approval. There are a number of policies available to you and they are grouped by the factions that inspire them. Currently, the available policies come from the Weasels, Whiskers and The Claws.
In order to activate policies, you must first build the Town Hall. This will grant you the ability to adopt up to 2 policies at once and abolish them at your discretion. Later, you can research the Civic Office which will grant you access to activate more policies. Each Civic Office unlocks one additional policy slot.
Most policies will need to be purchased with a large number of approval points prior to their first use. After that, each activation of the policy while it is adopted and active will cost the stated amount if approval (if any). For example, if you're using the "Stump Pulling" policy, every time a Whisker pulls a stump for extra wood, you will be charged approval points until you run out. Each time a policy costs approval points, an animation will show at the bottom left of the screen where active policies and weather are listed.
A list of the current available policies is below.
| Policy | Faction | Cost Per Use | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lift with your Back | Weasels | 1 | Whiskers can carry 2 more resources |
| Rapid Construction | Weasels | 3 | Construction speed doubled. Builders gain 50% speed. |
| Night Construction | Weasels | 2 | Building constructions continues by candlelight. |
| Strip Mining | Weasels | 2 | Mining speed doubled. 20% chance to lose mined resources. |
| Stump Collection | Weasels | 4 | Pulling tree stumps provides a chance to provide extra wood when woodcutting. |
| Sawdust Seasoning | Whiskers | 10 | 25% chance for food industries to produce double output. |
| Trash Burning | Whiskers | N/A | Fuel lasts longer in heaters, but produced double pollution. |
| Stone Eyes | Claws | 1 | Speed boosts from passing statutes are increased and last twice as long. |
| Eureka Moments | Claws | 6 | Research labs occasionally produce an extra free science. |
| Piecework Trinkets | Claws | 6 | Whiskers use their spare time after work to make sellable trinkets. |
Approval
Approval or Approval points is a currency that can be freely expended on policies and recruiting Whiskers. It is replenished daily based on the difference between the total positive thoughts of your Whiskers versus the total negative thoughts.
While Approval is tied to your successful leadership, it can be expended to zero daily without consequence. Do not be afraid to use it.
Expending Approval to zero well before the end of the work day may impact your policy strategy. With no available approval points to spend, policies can no longer activate. Policies like "Piecework Trinkets" can cause these issues.
Having more Whiskers will increase the amount of Approval you can earn daily and the maximum you can store because each additional Whisker will add to your total positive and negative thought count. It is not unusual to have thousands of of Approval points as your colony grows into a Whisker nation.
Production Management
Constructing the Management Office will allow you to control production limits of any resource in your colony. Setting limits at this building will automatically pause further production at any building making that resource when its limit is hit. This may initially sound crazy as you are trying to stockpile food for winter and scrape together resources to pay the next tax bill. Why on earth would you want to limit yourself?
There are a few key reasons to set production limits. The first is the limitation on storage. Buildings left to produce uncontrolled can often make more goods than your supply chains or Whiskers can consume. This can lead to a warehouse full of low-value Berries or a Mining Camp going idle as it complains about nowhere to store materials.
A key strategy is to make sure your production limits reflect what you want to store and what you can store. Try setting up a warehouse to just accept Berries and simultaneously set a production limit to the maximum storage of that warehouse. Now, when your warehouse space for Berries is full, your Whiskers will go take a government-mandated break until enough are sold or consumed.
The other reason to set production limits is resource consumption rates. As your industry churns through supplies, it is not aware that you're running low on something or that you were planning to use it in another way. For example, you likely don't want all of your Copper Bars inadvertently consumed making Scissors for your Weavers. By setting a production limit, you can ensure your Weavers have enough Scissors but that your Copper Bars are also still around for other projects.
Not everything may need a production limit, but it is helpful to revisit your production limit screen periodically to adjust as needed.
