Welcome to the Tribal region.
In the beginning...[]
- Consider your player's stats. Some people consider strength and intelligence the only worthwhile stats, as AP and accuracy can be increased with battle experience. However it takes an ENORMOUS amount of time to do so, so choose wisely.
- When you arrive at Your Bunker, take the items in your bedroom. Equip the knife in the "equipment" screen. It's a pretty terrible weapon but it's better than your bare hands!
- ALWAYS check in the navigation screen how much food/water/(later)forage is needed between trips. You'll die very quickly if you don't!
- Your water capacity is very low at the beginning, but taking bottles from Rovers will increase that. Do so ASAP! You'll be grateful for the extra capacity once you've got animals.
- Be nice to Emilia! She will give you extra bullets.
- Don't waste your ammo on Rovers. Use your melee weapons instead. Use your bullets on Drekar Raiders.
- As soon as you can, buy a hatchet from the Lintu market. It's the best melee weapon available in this region.
Making money[]
- The standard trade run is this:
(Naturally you should have enough food (e.g., insects) water, and forage before purchasing your trade goods.)- Bunker: take food/water.
- Silos: Sell food/excess water. Buy insects.
- Lintu: Sell excess insects. Buy wool.
- Pullid: Sell wool. Buy yarn.
- Kivi: Sell yarn. Buy jackets (Don't buy more than 1–4 as the price drops dramatically for each item sold).
- Return to bunker, heal if necessary, and then repeat. Sell your jackets at Lintu or Pullid. If you do this long enough the prices will drop until it's no longer profitable, but by then you will have made a fortune. Then you can continue onto the storyline in the next region. Come back into the Tribal region a few months later and the prices will have returned to normal.
- Don't be in too much of a rush to complete the story missions. There's a lot of money to be made from trade in the Tribal region which will help later on!
- Make sure you defeat a couple Drekar Raider groups before completing the Tribal storyline. They carry a valuable and effective armor, the leather jacket, which isn't surpassed until much later in the game. Store extra leather jackets in your bedroom in the bunker to give to your mercenaries/volunteers later. They also carry small metal canisters which are more efficient than bottles for carrying water as well as quality food. Sell or discard other items.
- Note that only Lintu has a general goods market. Use this for selling weapons, clothing. Use the market in Lintu and all other towns to sell other goods. The price difference is huge!
- As soon as you can afford it, buy donkeys from Lintu. They increase your carrying load substantively, especially with a cart bought from New Serino (see below). Four or so donkeys with a carrying capacity above 50 is a good goal at this stage. *However purchasing donkeys before you travel to Araten or New Serino may cause a problem to even get there, since every cart-less donkey can carry just enough weight to cover their own consumption for ~5 days. You'll need extra personnel as well as extra containers to carry water (and forage) for every donkey purchased.*
- Think hard about taking slaves: it will effectively close off the "good" storyline to you without high effort and expense to lower your slaver reputation. Slaves are nowhere near as efficient as donkeys for carrying goods, but can be sold at a good price in certain markets (e.g., Drekar).
Combat[]
- A staple part of early Caravaneer 2 tactics is "hit and run". Your character will (hopefully) have much higher agility than the enemies at this stage, so approach them at a safe distance, wait for them to walk to you, hit them once or twice, then run away. Repeat until victory.
- Take out knife-wielding Rovers first as they can cause the most damage due to bleeding. You can tell which rovers hold knives due to their stance, with their arms down to their sides.
- You can hire mercenaries at Lintu or Pullid. Check regularly as you might get lucky and stumble upon a good one. Especially useful if your main character is a highly intelligent wimp who's not combat savvy...
- If you're confident, consider attacking some travellers. These are by far the hardest adversaries in the tribal region, but give you rifles, which are useful in the next region and dominating in the tribal region. Totally optional and often risky.
Once you've got the mission to locate Spencer Rice from Sigurd in Kivi Camp...
- Don't feel you have to go straight to Araten. There's a detour you can take: 554 km at 228° from Kivi Camp takes you to a (hitherto) unrevealed town, New Serino, where you can stock up on supplies before going to Araten. NOTE: This is an excellent time to buy carts from the general goods store! If none are available, stock up on supplies and "leave" the town. Wait a couple days without moving and check back again. Do this until you have carts for all your donkeys.
If you do all this right, by the time you're ready to confront Calvin in New Serino (i.e., the end of the Tribal storyline) you will be very rich (thanks to the trading routes), be well-equipped with leather jackets and (maybe) rifles, and have a caravan with a large cargo capacity. Hopefully you also have Spencer Rice on board, who's a rubbish fighter but a fantastic addition to your caravan due to his intelligence, which is especially valuable if your main character's intelligence is low (intelligence = better healing for your humans, animals, carts; better smuggling [later on], etc.).
Now it's time to go to New Serino and start buying up lubricant and selling it at crazy profits around the region, where you can start getting REALLY rich...but that's no longer starting out...you're already on your way.