All Will Fall Economy Breakdown: Why Advanced Tech Is Almost A Trap
Spending hours researching massive electric grids just to realize you were feeding your colony perfectly fine with damp wood and mushrooms is a tough pill to swallow.
Survival city builders program you to climb the tech tree as fast as humanly possible. You see a rusted out wood boiler, and your immediate instinct is to replace it with a shiny electric greenhouse. You assume that tier five machinery will automatically solve your starvation problem. In All Will Fall, that assumption will completely ruin your run. The economy here is meticulously balanced around manual labor and logistical efficiency, not just raw technological power.
I spent days analyzing the resource loops, and the reality is both frustrating and brilliant. The basic, low tech production methods are shockingly competitive with the high end industrial setups. Before you tear down your entire starting infrastructure, you need to understand exactly how your citizens manipulate the numbers behind the scenes.
The Citizen Efficiency Hierarchy
You cannot optimize a production chain if you do not understand the people running it. Your colony is split into three distinct factions, and they do not just have different housing needs. They fundamentally alter how a building operates.
If you look at those modifiers, a clear hierarchy emerges. When you are starving and desperate, lowering the cost of a recipe is vastly superior to speeding up a recipe you cannot afford. Your absolute priority for staffing important buildings should almost always be Sailors, followed by Engineers, leaving standard Workers for very specific situations.
The Input Ratio Rule
There is a catch to assigning your best people. Citizens consume food and water to stay alive. If a production recipe requires six or more inputs, assigning a Sailor to reduce that cost by a single unit is terrible math. The resources that Sailor consumes will cancel out the savings.
You want to assign Sailors and Engineers to buildings with a low resource count, ideally anything requiring fewer than four inputs. A Sailor cutting a two wood requirement down to a one wood requirement is a massive 50% efficiency boost. If you are struggling to manage their demands or dealing with sudden strikes, you might need to use Influence and policies to force them back to work, but ideally, you keep them happy enough to leverage these exact bonuses.
Workers are essentially the bottom tier. Increasing production speed by 25% means nothing if you do not have the raw materials to feed the machine. I only use Workers on buildings that have massive outputs with little to no input cost, or in situations where I just desperately need raw carrying capacity. Even in warehouses, Sailors are often better because their 50% movement speed bonus outpaces the Worker carrying an extra two items.
The Basic Survival Method
This is the low tech approach, completely ignoring the energy grid. It is dirty, it is simple, and it absolutely works.
The Math Behind The Fungi
To create a minimum viable production loop without electricity, you only need to focus on wood, water, and mushrooms. You set up a single Wood Catcher manned by one Worker, yielding eight wood. You feed that into a Wood Boiler manned by a Worker and a Sailor to generate ten water. Finally, you route those resources into two Mushroom Farms, fully staffed by four Sailors.
The final output for a standard four hour cycle looks like this: you invest the labor of two Workers and five Sailors. In return, you generate a surplus of six water and twenty food.
Why This Is Not A Joke
You are keeping seven citizens permanently employed, and they are generating enough surplus to sustain themselves and a healthy chunk of your remaining colony. This entire loop requires exactly one tier upgrade on the research tree. You are producing reliable sustenance almost immediately, allowing you to focus your attention on reinforcing your horizontal foundations against the next storm.
The Advanced Tech Trap
Now look at the fully industrialized energy route. This is where most people ruin their colonies by expecting a miracle.
The Heavy Industrial Loop
To pull this off, you are abandoning wood and relying on scavenged junk and heavy machinery. You need three Electric Junk Catchers, two Junk Boilers to refine that into water and fuel, a facility to convert fuel into energy, three more facilities turning fuel into water, and finally, a massive array of ten Electric Greenhouses.
You have to staff this monolithic setup with three Workers, four Engineers, and thirty two Sailors. At the end of a four hour cycle, this massive industrial complex yields a surplus of thirty two water and one hundred food.
The Brutal Reality
Compare those two setups. The basic method gives you about 2.8 food per employed citizen. The advanced method gives you about 2.5 food per employed citizen. The overall efficiency is practically identical.
This is exactly why chasing advanced technology purely to solve a food crisis is one of the biggest beginner traps in the game. It takes twelve tier upgrades to unlock the advanced energy grid. You have to harvest a mountain of refined materials to build the structures, and you have to manually assign nearly forty citizens just to keep the lights on.
The advanced path is not designed to be a magical solution for starvation. It exists to provide flexibility. When your colony is stable, you can scale down the Electric Greenhouses and use that massive energy and fuel surplus to manufacture luxury building materials like steel, sand, and tools. But if you are just trying to keep your people from dying, damp mushrooms are entirely sufficient.
Logistics Dictate Everything
Since unlocking a massive electric grid will not actually multiply your food output, your survival relies entirely on basic pathing and layout.
Chasing The Three Shift Goal
A standard working day in the game runs from 6:00 to 23:00. That gives you exactly fifteen hours of functional time. A complete production cycle takes four hours. If your logistics are perfect, your citizens can complete three full production shifts per day.
If they are only completing two shifts, you are bleeding resources, and the culprit is always travel time.
Eliminate The Commute
Your workers do not instantly teleport to their jobs. They have to walk from their housing, grab inputs from a warehouse, carry them to the factory, and walk the finished product to a storage bin. If your storage is on the opposite side of your colony, you will never hit three production cycles.
You must integrate your storage and housing directly into your industrial sectors. Keep the food stockpiles immediately adjacent to the Mushroom Farms. Build Sailor housing right next to the water catchers. Every single second a citizen spends walking across a bridge is a second they are not producing the resources you need to survive. Stop worrying about tier five electricity and start worrying about your walking paths.
