DSS 2: War Industry Beginner's Guide: How Not to Starve By Day 3
Alright, listen up. You just loaded into DSS 2, saw a bunch of menus, and now you're panicking. Good. Panic is appropriate. This game will chew you up if you don't grasp the absolute basics immediately. Forget fancy armies; your first enemy is starvation, followed closely by bankruptcy.
This isn't a complex strategy guide, this is how you stop the bleeding in the first few cycles so you might actually see Day 10.
First Steps Before Unpausing (Seriously)
1. Pause. Immediately. Then Save.
The moment the map loads, hit spacebar to pause. Take a breath. Look around. See what godawful starting position the RNG gods blessed you with. Then, before you do anything else, save your game. Get in this habit. The game doesn't autosave constantly, and losing progress sucks.
2. Tweak Your Settings (Trust Me)
Go into settings. Enable 5x speed by default; you'll be using pause (spacebar) constantly anyway. Also, find the option for "low memory garbage collection" and turn it on. It apparently helps performance in longer games. Finally, maybe avoid "tiny" world sizes when starting out. You have a higher chance of spawning without essential mines, which is just pain.
The Unholy Trinity: Food, Money, Fuel
Forget everything else for now. These three things will kill you faster than any enemy army.
3. Food is Life (Priority #1)
Your people need cooked food, not just raw ingredients. If you run out, they starve, stop working, and everything collapses. Securing a stable food supply is your absolute first priority. Everything else is secondary.
4. Money Talks (Or Your Army Walks)
Money comes from taxing your workers. If you run out of cash, your servicemen and soldiers will desert. No money, no army. Keep an eye on your treasury.
5. Fuel Keeps the Lights On (and the Kitchens Cooking)
Fuel is needed for everything, especially cooking food. Your main source early on is wood. Build Charcoal Makers to convert wood to fuel; it's way more efficient than trying to use farms for biofuel or something stupid.
Essential Early Buildings & Priorities
6. Logistics First, Always
This is non-negotiable. Your very first move after pausing should be hitting the black market (find the button!). Buy just enough wood and stone (like 20 each) to immediately build the Logistics building in every single province you own. This unlocks crucial advanced buildings you desperately need. Do it. Now. While you're at the black market, buy 100 food for each province too; it jumpstarts your ability to build stuff that requires food upkeep.
7. Warehouses + Common Halls = Efficiency Magic
This is the single biggest brain move you can make early on. Workers waste tons of time walking back to your main castle to drop off resources and eat. Build Storehouses (for drop-offs) and Common Halls (for eating) together, right next to your logging camps, quarries, mines, and farm clusters. This creates local hubs and keeps your workers working instead of hiking.
8. Set Basic Work Priorities (So You Don't Have To Micromanage Constantly)
Go into the "Work" tab. Find "Craft Food" and "Craft Fuel." Set both to a high priority, like 4. Do the same for "Beer." Beer is surprisingly important; it's a more water-efficient ingredient for food recipes later. Then, go to the "Casting" (Mining/Smelting) tab. Just enable the mining and smelting for basic stuff like Tin and Copper. This tells your workers to automatically gather them when they have nothing better to do. It's a "set and forget" lifesaver.
That's the absolute minimum. Get your food stable, make sure you're not broke, keep the fuel coming, build Logistics ASAP, and use the warehouse trick. Do this, and you might survive long enough to worry about the actual "War Industry" part of the game. Good luck. You'll need it.