Collection of all player-made tips and tricks meant to help you throughout the game.
Economic Tips[]
- Always, always buy up water, food and forage for your next trip BEFORE stocking up. To prevent awkward situations.
- When running tight, you can skip about 5–10% of that (after accounting for foraging/hunting) if the road is not too long.
- Small but militant caravans can also hope to loot some water and food from dumb bandits on the way.
- Forage can be looted from bandits that have animals. (e.g., Mad Dog and Bydlo Horde)
- To calculate how much water you are getting from your food: Go the "Supplies" tab in your Caravan Menu. Next to each food source is a number for how much is eaten per day. Multiply each number by the percent water content of the food, and add them together. Multiply that by the length of your trip in days. This final result is how much of your water need will be satisfied by food.
- Formula: Σ([Consu. per day]*[Water %])*Days
- Your caravan will not eat extra food when out of water. Finding your total water will not help.
- (This is assuming your current ratio of food stock stays the same. It might be best to get a rough estimate by looking only at your main food sources, ignoring sources from negligible amounts.)
- Keep in mind that hunting and foraging slow you down 5% each, thus increasing water/food/forage consumption on the road. Unless trained extensively, it will do more harm than good to any sizeable caravan.
- Escorting people, releasing prisoners, and release slaves to or in a town will create more unemployed people.
- All additional people in your crew will consume food and water and may slow you down if they have low health or agility.
- Carts are useful to load injured, slow people inside of.
- Using melee weapons to injure enemies will get them to bleed, causing them to surrender easily.
- Alternatively, single, powerful shots can be sufficient in disabling enemies if you have a rough idea of their total HP and calculations of bleeding damage (doubled in Hard Mode).
- When selling stuff, pay attention to prices!
- Selling too large of a bulk may drive the price way down. For things like clothing, weapons and armor "bulk" might start as early as 2 copies. Consider carrying stuff along to other town when local prices drop too low.
- It worth splitting selling usual battle loot (primarily weapons) 50/50 between weapon and general store. Always check which store gives better price. Again, when both prices drop too far, carry to another town — weapons are relatively light compared to what price drop they could suffer sold in multiples.
- When shops are out of cash, you could still dispose of your goods by direct bartering with the stuff you want to buy.
- Ironically, big "trade hubs" cities run out of cash in the Market quite often, especially if they are more of buyers than producers.
- Often a bankrupt city can make back its cash in a few days. If they can't afford your goods, stock up on food/water/forage, "leave" the town, sit there for a couple days and check back.
- Small manufacturing towns which constantly pump up a trade good (like farm produce or fuel) often have large cash.
- Buying an industry or expanding the storage also increase the city cash by the amount spent, allowing you to sell more stuff.
- Having one of every type of trade good and visiting every city will get you the buy and sell prices written down in your log. You must manually hover your mouse over each good you want to know the price of in the market interface in order for the log to record the price.
- Trade log can be found in Caravan menu > Log (Under Overview).
- To see the prices of a single item that you have in your inventory check under Caravan menu > Cargo > *item* > see prices.
- You can write it down if you can't handle the long, tedious navigation of the trade log.
- Always keep your people at 100% ideal weight
- Ideal weight can be checked in Caravan > Crew and then scrolling down the scroll bar to the bottom
- Fasting in order to lower a mercenary's weight by more than 1–7% of their ideal weight (so they can ride donkeys) has bigger costs than benefits.
- If ideal weight is too unbalanced then that person will slowly lose health and will lose stats until they recover.
- 100% ideal weight can be obtained by keeping your food and water rations at 100% and waiting.
- Having it past or below 100% can help speed up ideal weight recovery but it will affect everyone in the category. (e.g., Volunteers, Mercenaries)
- You can store away volunteers and mercenaries by placing them in schools.
- This will keep the from vanishing and becoming difficult to find again.
- Mercenaries still have to be paid for the time they are in school. (Done after they are back in your caravan.)
- Can be overridden by firing and then rehiring a mercenary. (Results in a higher minimum salary.)
- Put anyone who is slower than the slowest animal in as passengers (starting with the slowest) when you are not transporting too many goods. This will increase your speed without sacrificing anything.
- If a single person's agility (e.g. speed) is lower than your crew's average and you don't have a riding place, then dismiss them. Such people will be more of a hindrance than a benefit to your caravan.
- Water on long trips can be obtained by defeating roaming enemies. They also often have bits of food, but if it's not a merchant caravan, don't count on forage there.
- Clicking an icon in the market/shop lets you unselect/select this type of item from display. Double-clicking unselect everything else. Good for isolating some items when you have many stuff.
Battle Tips[]
- Having more people in your caravan can help scare off enemies.
- More powerful enemies require more numbers to deter.
- Cheap mercenaries are the best way to have a large caravan.
- Value/Power of Primary Weapons can help deter enemies.
- Hit and run tactics in the early beginning against melee enemies.
- Lets you slowly hit your enemy without any chance of them hitting you
- Only usable if you have enough AP to hit your enemy once plus the fastest enemy's AP.
- When enemies are very far away, try to aim for an enemy in the middle of a pack. If you miss them, you may end up hitting nearby enemies instead.
- Explosive weapons (rockets and grenades) can soften enemy forces.
- Best used in large groups.
- Walk and Shoot tactic
- Lets you slowly advance on your enemy and then shoot.
- Done by calculating how much AP is used to shoot once, then using the rest to move as close as possible to the enemy each turn.
- Enemies prioritize targets based on
- The weapon a character is holding — Rockets > Grenades > Machine Guns > Rifles > Submachine Guns > Shotguns > Pistol > Crossbows > Melee > Unarmed
- How close a character is to them.
- People without a weapon should be moved to safety.
- Melee users should be careful against gun users as they will have 100% accuracy at point blank range
- Melee attacks can be dodged.
- Shotguns are excellent to make multiple targets start bleeding.
- Make your enemy expend more AP walking, so they don't have a chance to attack you.
- Power hits are for more damage, less accuracy while Quick hits are for more accuracy, less damage.
- As you progress through the game, slowly change from melee weapons and crossbows to using guns as they will become obsolete.
- Rifles are more deadly than submachine guns from a distance as they have more accuracy.
- Do not buy guns you cannot afford to maintain or you cannot replenish easily. Some ammo may cost more than you make or come in small numbers to be purchased, causing the gun to be unusable.
- Rockets are great for high damage (direct hit) and high bleeding (blast radius).
- Watch for obstacles between you and the target or you may hit it instead.
- You can hit animals and vehicles to cause your target to get hit by the blast radius.
- Rockets in the enemies' hands are just as dangerous as they are in yours.
- First aid should only be needed to stop heavy bleeding.
- Heavily injured people will become overburdened.
- Drop their equipment and move them to safety in the battlefield or they may die.
- Injuries can only be healed in towns with a doctor or clinic.
- Leg injuries make you use twice as much AP per tile.
- Arm injuries make you use twice as much AP each shot.
- Eye injuries makes you less accurate with all weapons.
- Shortcut Keys
- WASD to Move Around the Map.
- "R" to Reload Weapon.
- "F" to Switch Primary and Secondary Weapons.
- "G" to Switch Attacking Mode.
- "N" to End Turn.
- "M" to Center Camera on Active Character.
- "E" to Center Camera on Closest Enemy.
Morale Tips[]
- Morale is affected by the taste of food.
- Starving will cause your caravan's morale to drop.
- Your main character's morale is always high.
- The morale of mercenaries can be increased by raising their salary.
- Everybody has their morale affected by anyone with higher intelligence.
- Having a highly paid mercenary with 10 intelligence will greatly raise the morale of your caravan.
- In battle, your characters' morale will raise when they kill an enemy.
- A morale of over 80% will provide extra AP.
Other Tips[]
- The upkeep of a mercenary will be lower if this faction favors you.
- Extremely cheap mercenaries could be found in Tribal region, occasionally with moderate stats.
- Helping the liberation army will allow you to hire cheap, powerful mercs in Ozbet and Toowoomba.
- Powerful mercenaries can be obtained by capturing the following:
- Cosca Syndicate (High Accuracy, Mixed Stats)
- Shinobi Pillagers (High Agility, but Low Intelligence)
- Bonus in Having High Sword and Sometimes High Crossbow Skills
- Boryokudan (Perfect Physical, Medium to High Stats)
- Arguably the Best Mercenaries. Common to Find Multiple Perfect Stats
- Action points can be easily obtained by repeatedly loading and unloading your weapon.
- The best setup for this is to have 1 or 2 enemies with no weapons attack you while wearing heavy armor. The enemies won't do any damage against the armor and because they aren't panicking, you avoid having to click every 5 (or 3 or so) turns to keep killing them. An easy way to find enemies without weapons is to attack a group of enemies, have 1 or 2 panic (kill the rest), end the fight, loot all their weapons and attack them again.
- The process will take an extremely long time to gain AP, taking hours.
- Injuries (upper limb) will increase action point reloading cost to double which decreases the amounts of clicks needed to expend your action point bar. Any upper body action will require double the action point cost; may that be hitting, reloading or shooting.
- Requires a script to continuously repeat the steps.
- Giving bandits to a faction's police station will increase your reputation with them.
- This can be done to stop factions from being hostile to you.
- Bounties depend on hostility and total stats of the prisoner.