Prison Architect - tips and getting started

[FatherJack]

I know others have been playing a lot longer than me, but here are the things I learned quickly which helped me get to the meat of the game, no screenshots or videos I'm afraid as it's still in Alpha.

Do the tutorial.

Start new game. You have three options:
- Size: Small, Medium, Big - greatly affects game running speed. A small on fast-forward whips around at about five minutes a second, on a large that's down to one minute a second on my machine. That matters a lot when you're out of cash and waiting for the next day's earnings.
- Continuous Intake. Leave it on for the Dwarf-Fortress-style inevitability of certain failure. If turned off you have to open/close security levels in the Prisoner menu - by default Medium risk prisoners will still pile in every day.
- Fog of War. Once the crims are in it only shows patrolled areas, a bit buggy though and it fogs up even without this selected.

Before prisoners arrive.
You have £10k, which is just enough to build the basics if you're very clever with placement - but that's a trial and error game that takes a lot of learning. Pause the game and select the Reports menu in the bottom right, then choose the Grants tab. Accept them all by clicking and you should have 90k - which should be enough for fully fitting out all the requirements of those grants and room for 3-4 days of prisoners.

To save money, try and keep everything close to begin with.
Start by drawing walls in a rectangle in the middle a short way into where the prison interior will be, allowing at least 5x5 squares inside - this is for the Yard, so the prisoners get to exercise in the sun. Add a door somewhere. The walls won't get built until you unpause, but the next bit takes longer to build, so don't unpause yet.

Then using the foundations, draw blocks above and below the yard, and some blocks joining those to the left. The important thing about foundations is that where they intersect existing buildings they automatically join up - that's important to remember when expanding an occupied area into an empty area - if prisoners can get there you might be accidentally giving them an escape route unless you have door(s) already placed all along the intersecting wall.

I do a sort of big square C-shape. The blocks on the top side for prisoner facilities, like holding cells, canteen, etc should be a decent size at least five or six blocks wide. The bottom ones I use for staff offices so only need to be four blocks wide. The ones which complete the C are five blocks square and used to house the Utilities. I then close off the entrance with walls, add a few entry doors and unpause to start the building.

Hire at least two guards.
If you've used security doors, only they can open them to allow workers between areas.

When it's ready for rooms I leave it unpaused, designate the rooms, add internal walls and extra doors in roughly this order:
- Holding cell. Decent size over five square, requires a bench and a toilet.
- Office. Needs a filing cabinet, desk and chair. Hire a Warden when built, then in the Bureaucracy panel start learning Accountancy, Medicine and Mental Health
- Shower. Needs shower heads and lots of drains.
- Canteen. Requires only a serving table, but leave enough room for more. Tables and chairs or benches are a nice idea, too.
- Kitchen. Needs at least a Cooker, Fridge and Sink, but will quickly require more. Hire two Cooks.

That's all that's required for prisoners, but none of the stuff will work without Utilities.
- Build a Pumping Station, Electrical Generator and one Capacitor next to the generator (these are pricey so only add them when you need them - the Generator will show how much power it is using, if it reaches the top it will shut down.
- Connect the Generator to the Pumping Station.
- Pretty much all rooms require power for the lights, so expand the Electricity cables so they at least touch the wall of every room. Once it's running you should see it connect to the green dots automatically. The cooker and fridge require a dedicated power connection - you should see the power icon to show where to connect them.
- The sink, showers and toilets need a water supply. Use large pipes to go in the general direction, but save money by using short runs of small pipes going to each individual item.

By the time's that's all built the prisoners should start arriving. Place a Storage Room somewhere to clean up the clutter.
Build two more offices for the Accountant and Psychologist as you hire them, then work towards finishing off the remaining objectives - an Infirmary with a few Medical Beds and two Doctors, then you can get started on the individual cells to increase your capacity to 15. Regular Cells need a bed and toilet, Solitary Cells need nothing, both are a minimum of 2x3 squares.

Tips.
- Fences are free and better than escapees if you accidentally leave a hole in a wall.
- Place fast-walking tiles in oft-used areas.
- The routine can be changed through the Regime Report. The existing one seems designed to fuck you over by not feeding them breakfast and sending them all to the shower at once, meaning there are usually tears before lunchtime.
- The food quality can also be varied and of course generally making everything nicer cheers them up.
- Use metal detectors at oft-travelled points to detect contraband. They need to be somewhere a guard can react to them. Outside the canteen door is good place. They need dedicated power and a new capacitor for every three placed.
- You get paid at 12am. Workmen will automatically spend what they need for repairs very soon after, so be sure to pause and spend it first if you have other ideas.
- Install drains in cell block corridors for when they smash their toilets.
- Rioting prisoners will attack guards, the Warden, Security Chief, Foreman, Psychologist and Accountant. They will chase Cooks, but not hurt them and leave Doctors and Workmen alone. To that end ensure that a lockdown actually separates the vulnerable office staff from the prisoners - you can even fit (expensive) Solitary doors on their offices, as they never actually leave them.

[Dog Pants]

Cheers FJ. There's a pretty steep learning curve, although I'm enjoying making my own mistakes too (like last game where I accidentally put a hole in my fence while building a cell block and the resulting escapees caused a violence spiral). I've actually found I can get by quite comfortably on the starting 10k - you can get by for a few days with only two buildings; a canteen/kitchen and a holding cell. The utilities can live outdoors. A warden's office is probably essential for surviving past that if you ever want to see any more money, but not for getting things running. I also had a cleaning cupboard, bin store and storage yard when I tried it. That left me with about 5k for staff - 4 guards (1 for two prisoners, arbitrarily), a cook and a warden. Experiments continue.

[FatherJack]

The costs go up with the better stuff of course and training for and hiring staff eats up the budget. The Accountant is the most crucial for managing the money situation, as having one displays your midnight profit/loss figure. Every staff member gets paid £100 a day, so sacking a few Workmen once the major building work is complete saves you a few quid for more Guards.

I too, like the iterative learning process through failure, Groundhog Day-style and went through many cycles before I discovered the Grants - each time barely scraping enough together to build what was mentioned in the CEO's Letter. I love having to balance how nice to make the place without running out of cash while juggling how secure to make it and how many prisoners to cram in, and as I mentioned in another post how a massive riot which destroys the prison and kills everyone can actually still be recovered from.

[FatherJack]

I keep getting myself in quite a pickle with this and would welcome more sage advice.

I found regular and big cell doors could be smashed by prisoners pretty easily during riots, but have yet to see them bust a Solitary Door. With that in mind I started using them a lot. Unfortunately putting one on each cell requires a Guard to actually go and open each one, making inmates very late for mealtimes and subsequently rather angry at missing out on food.

Staff-only Doors were equally a problem. Confronted with the Solitary Doors being a bit of a bottleneck for Cooks and Workers having to wait for a Guard, I put in some between the Kitchen and the Canteen. However the lazy prisoners refused to go the long way around to the regular Door, and sulked at the Staff-only Door before giving up and going away fuming.

I want to provide a quick way for the Cooks and Builders to get at the Deliveries without opening up a potential escape route. I guess I need to completely redesign and segregate completely my staff from my criminals - but that still leaves the weaker Staff-only Doors getting easily kicked-in during a riot, resulting in an easy exit for those on the lam.

When I moved the Deliveries and Garbage around the back of the gaol, away from the road, it broke them. I'm beginning to see the reasoning behind the premise of Escape From New York - just find a way to incrementally increase the cashflow from more and more prisoners and let them sort themselves out inside. Oh God, I think that's just basically made me the architect of another Guantanamo Bay.

[buzzmong]

Chain link fencing is free if no-one had spotted it, so you can be quite liberal.

[FatherJack]

Found out they can break Solitary Doors if pushed.

Pretty damn quickly if they're raging hard enough - ie: five days of only high-risks in a holding cell with a non-functioning toilet, one of them bust through five SDs before being stopped.

Time for a rethink, maybe just brick them up? This game is bringing out the absolute worst in me.

[Grimmie]

Super mega tip

After exhausting all my grant money I had to find ways to make more money fast. The obvious winner is having more prisoners in my facility, as it increases the prisoner grant you get every day at midnight. The problem is that I didn't want to have my Holding Cell swamped with prisoners and have to wait countless days before I could afford to build a block of 8 new cells. So what to do?

I fired my doctors and my psychiatrist first - they're unnecessary expenses. I built a cleaning cupboard and fired my two janitors - I'd rather have five of my prisoners give the place a quick clean for six hours than have two expensive guys clean up all day. I fired a cook and expanded my kitchen to have another fridge and cooker so that I could offer more prisoner jobs there too. Moneysaving!

The biggest money-making exercise though?

Get a workshop.

Foundations. A door. A worksaw and a workpress. Assign a few jobs to the room (three at least to begin with) and you have a source of free money when you've set your prisoners to work in their regime. Your workmen buy sheet metal periodically (so make sure you have £200-£400 free at the start of each work shift) and deliver it to the workshop. Your prisoners then machine the sheets into rectangles using the saw, transfer the rectangles to the press, and stamp them in to license plates. At midnight, when the rest of your expenses are worked out, the plates are sold off at an enormous profit margin.

I've got three saws and three presses, and room for six jobs so far. I'm making about £2000 - £3000 profit a night, which gives me the funds to expand the number of cells I have in the prison, maximise the number of prisoners to get a bigger grant each day, and fire workers in favour of prisoner labour. Maaaaagnificent.

[TheJockGit]

So what is the difference between this and Prison Tycoon, which is cheaper?

[FatherJack]

So what is the difference between this and Prison Tycoon, which is cheaper?

About the only thing in common is the idea.

Prison Tycoon uses the Gamebryo engine, so is 3D. Prison Architect is a top down 2D game.

While Gambryo has been used in some quality high-profile titles, its ease of use has allowed some rather poor-quality games to be put together quite quickly and shipped, which is what many say has happened with Prison Tycoon and its three sequels - they have nothing to with the classic Tycoon games and the makers have produced a string of similar titles, most of which received poor review scores. Prison Architect is still in alpha, but showing a lot of promise - it's from the makers of Darwinia.

[Mr. Johnson]

Is anyone else's game extremely slow after a while? I built a pretty sizeable prison and after a few minutes the game slows down to a crawl. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem, but now clear answer has been found.

[FatherJack]

Is anyone else's game extremely slow after a while? I built a pretty sizeable prison and after a few minutes the game slows down to a crawl. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem, but now clear answer has been found.

I found it really slow on anything but a small starting prison. There were some speed optimisations mentioned in one of the patches, but the slowdown on bigger gaols is still prevalant and one of the reasons I haven't been back to this in a while.

[buzzmong]

Introversion have said big maps will cause slow down at the moment.

The small map is certainly big enough to get a good feel of the game though.

[Mr. Johnson]

But I wanted to build my superjail!

[Dog Pants]

Yeah, locking people up is a Belgian national pastime.

[Mr. Johnson]

Maybe they could put in cellars in a future update? The Austrian version has upgradable ones.

[fabyak]

Maybe they could put in cellars in a future update? The Austrian version has upgradable ones.

[buzzmong]

I've spent a bit of time playing Alpha 18 over Friday night and yesterday.

This game is heading good places.

The additions of K9 units (Alpha 16) and armed guards (Alpha 17) are fun, the latter are a doubled edged sword as if they get mobbed, they can quite easily lose their shotguns, resulting in armed prisoners and a rising toll of dead guards (one riot last night involved me losing 16 guards + 6 riot units, I was only saved by 18 riot police arriving the next day). The addition of tazers to them in 18 however make them very handy at dealing with single troublesome individuals as part of normal daily life.

The new reform system is interesting albeit a bit unbalanced at the mo.

You now need to train people up to use workshops or cook, which has made it much more difficult to make money. There's no guarantee a prisoner will pass the course, and it costs money per session (the number of prisoners in sessions depends on the equipment in room, a problem as workshop saws and cookers are expensive) to train them up.

There's also psychologist programmes aimed at reducing the violence and making prisoners happier, and there's also a couple of educational programmes as well. This is all better explained in the Alpha 18 video.

Good news is you can set up forestry area tended to by gardeners and lags, so you can grow and then cut down trees, selling the logs to make you some money (you're meant to use the logs for carpentry, which is an advanced workshop reform programme, I've not yet managed to even get someone on that course).

All in all, it's definitely worth downloading and checking out if you've not played for a few months.