A comprehensive guide explaining the confidence and attractiveness system in the post-apocalyptic city builder game known as Endzone: A World Apart.
Endzone is a city builder game where the player has to build a prosperous society in a radioactive wasteland. Food, protective clothing, shelter, electricity—all are things the player needs to keep in mind when they build their post-apocalyptic city.
Endzone recently received A New Civilization update, which overhauled the confidence system and added decorations to the game. Confidence affects how well settlers work, their reproduction rate, and how fast they move in general. This encourages players to keep a medium to high confidence level is important for overall colony production.
The most basic thing to understand is that confidence is majorly influenced by settler health and the health of those close to them. So keeping a colony well stocked with food, water and shelter is a must. Basics to survival and all that.
But if the player really wants to keep confidence high, then they need to have a decent variety of food in their colony. Settlers won’t be all that happy if they are forced to eat nothing but a certain type of crop for the rest of their life. It doesn’t matter how healthy they are how many people they feed, people want different types of food from time to time.
Thankfully, having a healthy food variety is fairly simple. Just don’t overly rely on one food source. Have at least one of each food building type so settlers can get a healthy mix of meat, nuts, crops, fish, etc. The gatherer’s cabin in particular can be very useful in finding different types of food if they are in a densely wooded area. Although it should be noted they do not produce a lot of food in terms of quantity.
Players can check how much food variety they have by checking the food variety indicator near the top of the screen. Try to keep it around 4 or 5 at a bare minimum. If the player has a decent amount of food buildings but still want higher food variety, then they can try to get additional seeds by exploring greenhouses with the exploration station. These seeds will give the colony an additional plant to choose from when using an orchard or field.
Another way to increase confidence is to construct buildings from the community tab. It includes buildings like pubs and cemeteries. Some of them, like the pub and campfire, raise confidence in the colony simply by being used. Others, like the school, will help raise or maintain the colony’s confidence level indirectly by improving living standards.
Take the cemetery, for instance. Its function is to provide the colony a place to deposit their recently deceased. If dead settlers are allowed to simply remain where they died, the living settlers will become depressed and have their confidence level lowered. After all, settlers are not exactly going to like their future prospects if the dead are literally left to rot.
Out of all of the community buildings, it can be argued that the medical facility is among the most important. Few things can plummet a colony’s confidence level like a rampantly spreading disease. Not only can it potentially kill settlers which will impart a negative confidence factor on other settlers, but simply having the disease will decrease the colony’s overall production since it will slow down infected settlers. This will, in turn, decrease how effectively a colony can sustain a settler’s needs and wants. Which will lower the colony’s confidence even further. Keeping a well-stocked medical facility around will help prevent diseases from becoming a serious problem for settlers.
To raise a settler’s confidence even further, a player can ensure their entire colony is supplied with electricity. Not only does this help raise confidence for settlers, but it will also increase the production of certain buildings.
If setting up an electric grid is too costly, the player can instead begin setting up decorations all over the colony. These structures are cheap and are exclusively used to raise the attractiveness of areas around the colony. Like access to electricity and a decent supply of food, attractiveness can also affect a settler’s confidence. Settlers want to live in attractive areas, so players will want to decorate any place that receives a lot of foot traffic.
Players can also view the attractiveness rating of areas around their colony by accessing the appropriate heatmap. But the biggest thing to keep in mind are buildings that have a negative effect on attractiveness. Resource buildings such as recyclers and scrapyards have negative attractive rating, meaning they can reduce the attractiveness of any nearby buildings. This means in order to counteract these effects, players will either want to build their resource buildings away from the colony’s community areas or build an excessive amount of decorations in order to combat the attractiveness reduction.
Building confidence boosters all around the colony is all well and good, but sometimes players just don’t know what they can do to increase their confidence level. In such cases, the player will want to begin clicking on individual settlers and access their confidence tab. This helpful little tool will detail what is boosting their confidence and what is lowering it.
The things that affect settler confidence can range from the death of a loved one, a newborn child, to the lack of electricity in their home. But by looking at a settler’s confidence tab the player should identify what specific factors are affecting their settler.
If the player continued to look at the confidence tab of several settlers, and notice they are all being affected by the same negative confidence factor, then the player should be able to adjust their city-building plans accordingly. Or, if settlers are barely affected by negative confidence factors at all, the player can determine what else they can do to make their confidence rating go up even further.
Endzone is available as an early access game for PCs on Steam and GOG
