Heatstamps allow you to build stuff. You can ask every faction to fund you, and they will give you a crazy number of heatstamps, especially early game. It will lower relations a little but it is minimal as long as you get everything else stablized.

then there is a cooldown before you can do it again. You need to keep them at least neutral so that you can do it on cooldown. 'grant agenda' and ' promote' can be used to bump it up and I also reccomend using promote on cooldown.

Use those heatstamps on research and frostbreaking to clear the sheltered areas in the crevices of the map, and use those for housing because you get double bonuses and use less coal/oil.

First thing you need is a few Teaching Hospitals which will prevent disease, whenever you see disease increasing, just simply build an additional one.

Next, standard heathouses have a quite broken ability as long as you have a few teaching hospitals where they can ramp up food production. this should stabalize food.

As soon as you stablize food. get a Logistics bay, and frostbreak to as many as you can. use logistics to the east to get to the Old Dreadnaught as early as possible.

You're going to need a lot of prefabs for when you set up the old dreadnaught so invest your workers in building Industrial zones producing prefabs. (remember to also pick up the piles of prefabs just laying around New London) to really ramp it up get untreated saw mills.

Old Dreadnaught is the most important thing. you'll want to build on 2 until the nomads show up, and after they do, build on 3. They do not react to this. you should expand both of these districts. again with using raise funds, you should be able to afford oil pumps and the better oil pumps which require a steam core.

all of your steam cores should be going towards oil pumps. you'll not have much, which is why you need to go deeper into Logisitcs. (in late game even 3 fully upgraded/expanded oil districts is not enough)

The first thing you need is skyways so you can send all this oil to new london.

Heating should no longer be an issue and you should be able to ramp up on buildings and infrastructure. Investing heavily into Logistics to get automated reloading bays, scout headquarters etc are very beneficial.

During this time get youth laws and worker laws going. youth laws allow you to rapidly increase production and workers. (which you can send to old dreadnaught) and worker laws increase productivity.

you can get like 100 scout teams with all 3 bays set up with improvements.

Explore most of the frostland. I chose to live with the frost, and so I gained the ability to set up permanent settlements. If I had extra cores, all of the extra cores I couldn't spend on oil production were invested to improve settlements.

the important ones are Great Kiln to the north east which makes oil, Tesla City just south of Old dreadnaught which increases research speed. and north of New London is the barons cave which produces heatstamps.

If you follow that, you should be really well set up for the rest of the story.

spoilers below:

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for winterhome, it's pretty easy if you have a lot of heatstamps coming in, which you should if you invested into youth.there's 3 skull locations, you should safe frostbreak to each of them (don't build anything else) and harvest cores from the safe area (the cliff above winterhome is safe) and use those to build the ventilation districts. In the housing districts simply build teaching hospitals after expanding. to stablize winterhome, you need to use the geothermal vents dotted around winterhome, with 2 geothermal extraction plants on each you can actually begin producing more than you require.

for the civil war, just build like 5 housing districts and build two patrol towers in each. this should give you the guards to shut down the conflict pretty fast. you don't even need to pre-prepare for it.