Advanced strategies

Below is a non-exhaustive list of advanced gameplay strategies, especially useful for Extreme or Survivor difficulty. Feel free to extend.

See also Advanced Tips. This list can be considered a condensed version of the most important of those tips, especially those which apply to higher difficulties also.

## 24/7 research

With Emergency shifts and two Workshops, you can maintain the research around the clock. Just alternate Emergency shifts between the two 'shops, and you're good. Even on Survivor, if it's the only Emergency Shift you'll use, the discontent penalty will be mostly negligible and constant.
Juggling just 5 engineers between those two Workshops is not that worthwhile - you still need someone to build during nights, you still time for them to eat etc. OTOH, having both fully staffed with not only give you base 130% research speed during the extended 14h shift, but also make you quite impervious to effectiveness drop due to misc. factors (people eating, healing, building etc.), since as long as at least 5 of those 10 are present, you'll research at ~100% speed (see Workshop#Notes for details). With just 5 Engineers, you're likely to have absolutely no research going on on higher difficulties if you're unlucky.
Having 3rd workshop gives an extra cushion of speed and protection - 150% base research speed for the main shift with full staff (so research time cut to 75% with 1 24/7 Emergency Shift or to just 2/3 with e.g. Engineer Automatons), extreme resilience against sickness etc., and no need to worry about the exact timers on Emergency Shift (otherwise you need to sync alternating them due to 2d cooldown vs 1d ability effect, which can be somewhat tricky on Survivor)

## Ultrafast scouts

Unless a scouting point is directly adjacent to your scouts' location, instead of going straight to it go to its nearest (from the scout's perspective) explored neighbor. Going to explored node is 2x faster, the time savings are substantial especially after early game (since the distances grow and locations are placed in a mostly linear fashion usually)

## Hope farming/Discontent juggling

If you trigger the "high discontent" event (you have a couple of days to reduce discontent, otherwise you lose) and manage to handle it, you'll get a hope boost and the discontent% will be ignored for some time completelly (24h probably); after then, you can do it again. It follows that by manually increasing discontent via things that can be switched on/off easily (14h shifts, heating, medical posts) and then immediately decreasing it, you gain both Hope and Discontent immunity for free. It's especially useful to use it before well-known negative events (e.g. Londoners arc, or if you have multiple Gravely Ill people). Obviously, this mechanic theoretically also allows to farm discontent reduction (via "Hope too low, increase it or lose" event), but there is no easy way to juggle Hope in the early game, and Discontent isn't really an issue most of the time here.

## In-flight building

Try building along the path your workers go to work if you want your building fast (e.g. first Workshop). Visually confirm where they are, place building near and remove the workers from their workplace. They'll start building almost immediately.

## Short Burn

At the very beginning of a scenario, if you're lacking both coal for normal heating and housing to fight homelessness (or, if you have housing but too little coal for normal heating, and have a problem with too high sick counts), you can enable the Generator just before midnight, overdrive it ASAP, and then turn it off immediately or after just a short while. It will use just a bit of Coal (a couple dozens at most), but the benefit of having heating for the night for the homeless and the tents directly around will persist; no deaths, less sick. It won't work with 0 Coal, though.

## Steam Hubs

Steam Hubs are more efficient and easier to use than Generator Range upgrades. Steam Hubs can be set to be on only for work hours, they scale without limit and you'll have to research them anyway. You should skip GRU until your researchers have nothing better to do. Steam Hub Range Upgrade II (Technology) is mostly neutral w.r.t. Coal consumption (225% heated area vs 200% consumption), but it makes managing the heating districts easier (or harder, depending on your exact layout - but you can always turn it down to base at no cost).

## Expert Starver

For a given hunger level (not hungry/hungry/starving), the amount of food eaten by a person is constant. Basically, you'll be using less food if you keep your people hungry, as long as they don't eat Raw Food. People won't eat Raw Food as long as there's a kitchen operational. In short, keep your kitchen operational at all times if you're waiting for Raw Food to come and have Hungry/Starving people. Normally, deaths from hunger are quite rare, but eating Raw Food might result in a quick downward spiral. It's worth noting that, arguably, it's a lot easier to have people dying from sickness than from hunger. Plan accordingly. Worst case scenario, there's always Alternative Food Source (Arc) etc.

## Worker/Engineer juggling

If you lack people, you can re-assign workers that worked for entire day to be Hunters (won't work the other way around, Workers need to rest after the hunt). You can also keep skeleton staff in medical facilities during the work day and fully staff them with Engineers again at night, after the end of the work shift, and move them out again in the morning.

## Small City

Since all the bad effects (related to sickness, hunger, homelessness etc.) scale their effect with amount of people, if you want your run to be easy, you will want to limit the amount of people in your city to a reasonable minimum, probably 250-300, or even possibly less with automatons. Higher amounts require substantially more effort and should be best left for when you feel more comfortable with it.

## Fast Resource Depot Upgrade

Resource Depot Upgrade (Technology) is a somewhat weak tech, but it only takes 8h on Extreme/Survivor (instead of regular 14h for T1 tech on this diff), which is about twice as fast as others from T1, and it makes it a great way to save resources and a great filler tech.

## 100% automatons

To get 100% Automatons tech, it requires you to rush research of Medical Automaton Integration (Technology) as soon as you research Factory. See The Automaton Project (Arc). On Survivor, it's usually better to just ignore this and have 95%(+40% with Foreman) effectiveness on them, as the 5% difference won't be a problem anyway.