Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Ending a Turn

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

Ending turns in the game is the only way you can progress forward. Each turn will represent a day in the life of your camp. As the camp's leader you must use whatever population and resources you have to move your camp forward and increase its rank among the rival camps around. You will set up all of the exploring trips, recruiting missions, research focus, construction queues, nukes and missile workers, launch queues, trade runs, and anything else that you need to do before you can just sit back and let it all happen.

At about 6 AM each morning you will set up each of these tasks at a morning meeting. You will receive the results from the day before and give all of the orders that you need to give. At this point you will send everyone out to do the tasks they are assigned by hitting one of the End-Turn buttons. At this point, the game will take all of the commands you have entered and run them through the appropriate calculations generating your daily report. In a matter of seconds, you will be given your daily report and will be back at the next 6 AM meeting.

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How it Works:

Once you have set up all of the commands you want to for the day you will hit one of the two End Turn buttons. One End Turn button can be found on the top of the right-hand column, just under the Logout button. The other End Turn button can be found on the very right of the bottom bar. All you have to do to end the turn is click the button that says "now".

Once you have clicked this button the game will run all of the commands you set through the end-turn calculations and return your results, updating all appropriate numbers. All of your daily costs are calculated and subtracted before any trades are performed or wagons picked up, so you should make any necessary trades a day before you will actually need them.

When you begin the game, you will have 100 to 400 stored turns that you can utilize to the best of your ability (depending on how long after the beginning of the round you start). Every ten minutes, whether you are logged on or not, a new turn could possibly be added to your useable turns. You can only store a maximum of 400 turns at a time, so if you are logged out or otherwise not using the turns you have available, any extra earned turns over 400 will be wasted. You can increase this amount by researching Time Management.

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Ending Multiple Turns:

Once you begin to research Time Management, you will begin to open the ability to end more than one turn at a time. With each level of increase you achieve on this topic, you will be able to end another turn. In the end you will be able to end up to 5 turns at one time. You will not be able to end more than 5 turns at once, no matter how much research you do.

Note: Once you have the ability to end multiple turns and a large enough population base that you can send out enough explorers at one time to find enough land to knock you over your current comm facility coverage, you should be careful when setting up an exploration mission for multiple days. You will not be penalized (lose explorers) if you send out a group for multiple days and end all of those days at once (sent for 5 days, end 5 days). You will be penalized if you end only part of the time they will be out if they bump you over your coverage (send for 5 days, end less than 5). This goes for any mission, whether your people are exploring specifically for land or not.

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Results:

After you have ended a turn, the results will be displayed at the top of your main page above the top bar. If you sent out an attack and it occurred that day, the results of the battle will be displayed above the other results.

In the end-turn results, you will see all the production, exploration, recruiting, training, and other results from the previous day, helping you to keep track of what happened so that you can plan and prepare appropriately. There is a basic color scheme for easy recognition at a glance of good vs. bad results. The text in gray are just general explanations of what the results are pertaining to. The bright green results display exploration returns as well as weapons production. Yellow results pertain to positive production, recruiting results, construction, and CEP minting results. Red results pertain to negative production and other negative or dangerous results. White and light gray explain certain other values, like production vs. construction or completed searches. Your end turn results may contain all of these parts, some, or even some parts that are not shown in this screenshot depending on what was calculated once you ended the turn.

The first results you will see in the end turn display are the results from any exploration missions that you sent out. The results will always be displayed in the order of land, food, disposables, building supplies, and CEP. By clicking the Show/Hide link under the exploration results, you can find out other interesting information about the results such as an old store that your group stumbled across, giving them an increased return for disposables, or just general information about the day and search criteria. Just under your exploration returns, you will find your production results for the day. This gives you a comparison of how much you produced and found as compared to how much you used. Deficits will be shown in red, while surpluses will be shown in yellow. Gasoline use is shown farther down and building supplies do not have the parenthetical results.

Your results from recruiting missions will be displayed in yellow and orange below the production results. As with the exploration results, you can get more details about what your recruiters found on their search including things like the number of apocalypse casualties that were found besides the survivors they were able to bring back, as well as the basic weather and search criteria details.

After this you will get a message displaying any people lost due to communications shortages and the announcement that the recruiters and explorers are back from their search if applicable.

Your trade results will be shown next. This will include Auto-Trade and wagons that you pick up from the Trade Market. These results are not added into the initial consumption calculations since the consumption would have to take place before your messenger(s) got back with the trade good that night. Beneath this there will be a last few announcements. Your gasoline consumption by generators will be shown here followed by your minting results. Construction results will be next followed by any other announcements, in this case a storm update.

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Special Announcements to Note:

Occasionally when you end a turn, you will get a special announcement letting you know about something important that does not happen often. Some of these notices will be inside the normal end-turn results display. Others will have their own display above or below the main results. These displays will follow the usual red for bad, green for good, gray for neutral results that the rest of the end-turn display uses. These results will be things like the storms announcement seen above, an announcement about nukes or missiles constructed, or even a new research field/building that was opened. These results will not be placed in the mid-page "Yesterday's Results" display.

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