In the first DLC for Turmoil, you get a fresh start with familiar faces. Some nice improvements have been made. Along with a new map that has some changes once again to how gas and magma end up working out.
I rather like in this one you start with $200k. This rather ramps up how quickly you can get set up. Allowing you to cut out the first couple of plots of land you mine for oil where you could not extract it all.
I right away went for some large improvements from increased herd size, silos, and pipes. You also know I went big on being able to scan underground to find the oil and gas fields. Getting that upgrade right away at least tier one of it just makes sense.
Like the base game, you end up mining for oil in three different regions. With a little bonus reward if you end up buying enough shares of the town. I’m also rather pleased to say the whole bidding process was changed as well.
I’m no longer feeling like I'm overbidding. As the shares of the town are now how most bid systems work. Where people go back and forth trying to outbid each other. For the most part, I outbid everyone with how much money I was making from oil. Only sometimes if one of the NPCs tried to spike the price on me dumping it on them costing them a huge chunk of their cash reserves and teaching them to try to pull a fast one on me.
How bidding works is not the only thing that changed. Instead of sending moles after diamonds that you could exchange for information on the next best land to mine oil on. You need to collect a series of artifacts that then let you know on the next area one plot of land that is the best to mine oil on.
I feel like this new system balanced out those like myself who were always using scans to find the diamond on every map. Allowing me to always get the best location of the next spot to bid for and mine oil at. I kind of wish I could get multiple uses out of it for each region.
At the very least you can buy or sell the artifacts you find once you get a duplicate or are missing one. The amount of cash is however not much compared to how much you get mining oil.
At the very least they did add in a new system as a way to possibly get a little bit of extra cash. There is now a high-low game you can play Once between every map. While I've made maybe an extra $10k off it in the long run. It’s also not something that I feel is game-breaking powerful in any way if you choose to partake in the high-low card game or not.
There are also some newer upgrades along with most of the old ones that you can buy in town as well. You at least don’t need to buy an upgrade to unlock gas on the left and right. You just start with it.
Early on you are back to the old gameplay loop. Finding all the oil, gas, and magma pockets. Then hoard up as much oil as you can till you can offload the gas to skyrocket prices and dump at high prices onto the market.
They did add in the ability to have an exclusivity agreement with the left or right incorporation for selling you oil. The closer you are to the end of the year the lower that deal will give you. I found this perfect when I already had a decent price fix, I paid for one of them. Making it a great early start to get some quick cash and get a huge underground scan done.
In the first two regions of the map, I was killing it with racking in the oil. The biggest twist with gas could be expanded using magma. While also putting in smaller pockets of it.
This caused me for a couple of maps needing to give finding and growing my gas pockets a higher priority. You can see when I can get a decent jump on them early enough the gas pockets that are remaining can become quite massive.
Like before it’s all about timing. Can you start pumping gas at an already increasing price. While doing it early enough that you don’t run out of time? It feels like you can’t just sit around as casually as you could in the base game if you want to rack in large bundles of cash.
I do prefer this method over having to circle gas pockets with pipes and using the heat that way like you did midgame in the base game. That method of growing gas pockets I was not a huge fan of.
They then toss you quite a huge twist on the last map. No more gas pockets starting. Instead, you have to turn oil pockets with magma into gas pockets. This also requires some thinking about how much oil to mine and trying to start the conversation process of oil into gas quickly enough to remain useful.
This resulted in me having some of my worst profits on a map since the early base game. I would struggle with not mining enough oil or not starting the extraction process soon enough. Not to mention sometimes I'd get oil feeding in instead of gas when it was time to skyrocket the price and dump my oil. Leaving me with tanks full of oil and a price so low I did not even sell.
Overall, I rather like many of the quality-of-life changes that were brought with the DLC. It added a little more fun and required changing my tactics a little bit to adapt to the changing times.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Turmoil.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game and DLCs was received for free.
