WARNING: As of 2024, this guide is outdated! There are still good idea and advice in it, but the meta vs early game has SIGNIFICANTLY changed.
This is an average activity graph on Jack Sparrow difficulty. It is full of obvious information, not least of which the amount of score one has to pull every month to stay above 0 infamy. The lower difficulties are obviously easier, but also not a walk in the park, the big activity spikes starting in Apr instead of Feb. The other information is which continent the enemy bases are located. see if you can figure that on your own.
There are a few proactive and reactive ways one can handle these scores. I will focus on the proactive ways, because those are the most difficult to deal with, and ignoring them leads to structural problems later on.
1) Brainers are 50% of the effort.
Brainers do not break even most of the time, but they subsidize the score heavily. Estimates show that brainers are about 50% of monthly score, so you should, within reason, always strive to be at max brainer capacity. Remember that in the month they're hired, brainers cost 300k (200k hire+100k maintenance), but you should do the hiring at the start of the month, and push hire as much as possible.
If you're on Gals are Superior path, remember that you can buy hands for 50k, and you can transform Castaways you rescue into brainers, which, quite frankly, is a great way to keep hiring costs down, if you can handle the lower stats of hands vs castaways. The ?Reject the Power? path also provides 7 gnomes, another way to get your brainer count up fast.
2) Missions are 49% of the effort.
Many people avoid researching new missions. Reasons vary from being afraid they cannot handle harder missions, to being afraid they will lose access to older, easier missions, to being afraid enemies will escalate their difficulty based on what you research, or plain cravenness of getting out of comfort zone. Let me put this clearly.
YOU SHOULD ALWAYS RESEARCH NEW MISSIONS.
You can handle harder missions than you think you are capable of, skipping most of the new missions does not usually penalize you, and enemy difficulty progress is often on a timetable independent of whether or not you keep up, so you do not want to remain left behind, and most importantly NEW MISSIONS (usually) DO NOT LOCK YOU OUT OF OLDER ONES. this is a big one, this is important, and is counter the design philosophy of most modern games. Progress of the player is NOT a penalty, so you do not have to be afraid of your fun being taken away from you just for playing the game.
That said, I have a list here of missions that I will rank in the order of importance to unlock, and a few tips for each. This is, obviously, not an exhaustive list, but stuff that you, more or less, want to have done within the first 6 months.
*!!BOUNTY HUNTING!!
Only the most important goal you have to do in January, no big deal. You should do the Violence pillar of Pirate philosophy as soon as possible, and grab this. It gives you bounty tokens, it gives you huge score, missions are easier than the starting ones even, and the score gotten for doing them is absurd.
NOTE: Since 16th Sept 2024, this section above comes with a HUGE caveat. It is impossible to do it before month 3 anymore, due to rank requirement. Still worth doing, of course, but it wil not be a crutch worth leaning on. Instead, the early interception game was extended, and now shooting down stuff early is much easier. If I have the time and get the experience in metagaming, maybe a section on abusing the bird for fun and profit will be written.
*!Warehouse Wars!
Another important goal, if possible, get it in Jan. This will, of course, require you to build a Mess Hall over one of your starting security corridors, interrogate an airbus nurse, and doing Who is Who? The benefits are many enslaveable mooks, the opportunity to score a wrench and a stapler (gateblocks to Workshop), and the opportunity to get easy durathread, some non-sucky firearms (RCF carbines), and even some durable body armor (Tac Vest). Also, the opportunity to learn about the Guild, the easiest way to !Toppling Towers!
*Slavery
It might be odd seeing this in the missions list, but it provides a very important benefit, which is the ability to enslave mooks. Apart from the slaves themselves, one of the MOST important products of slavery is glamour. Why Is glamour important? Well...
*Bounty Badge C
It requires a very hefty investment, you need 200 glamour(!!), and one of each reward from your first bounty hunting clients. I advise NOT gabling at all until you get the Silver Snake reward from Jack. The benefits for Bounty C is another batch of easy missions, that are very profitable, short, and absurd in points granted. Also the Bounty Challenge that is beyond the scope of the current guide
(although if you want an short answer, start in Thebes and do the Mutant Alliance bounty is the easiest and safest.)
*!Undersea Treasures!
Many people are scared of underwater. You should not be. In general, a strong team of topless gals with javelins and O2 tanks can pretty much run roughshod over most opponents underwater.
The two exceptions are: Hallucinoids (Abort mission) and Sharkmen (pikewall/spearwall). Scout the first turn by depleting unit movement to 50%. If you see any of those, either bail, or take appropriate-advanced tactics into account. If you DON'T see anyone, it's almost certainly hallucinoids. Use the other 50% to run.
*Undersea Operations
Is an upgrade to the above, which means just more of the same.
*!Monster Hunts!
Easy missions that require you to bully some defenseless monsters. Easiest done in multi-level craft like Snake, Shadowbat, Dutchman, Hawk, Scarab...you get the idea. Single level craft will have a lot more trouble due to the monsters dogpiling the craft, so you better have Armors with Shield and good melee master guarding dem doors. Another curveball is another crew of hunters fighting you instead of monsters later in the game. Ratmen are no big deal, Ninjas and PCMs are trouble, Nomads are... well, better just go to your craft and leave.
*!Toppling Towers!
One of the first true mid-game missions, it is still not very hard, while providing good guns and engineers for your research. Do it with care, but the opportunities are worth it.
*!Bandit Camps!
One of the more fun but exhausting missions. You can go at night, and depending on spawns, you can do it with relative safety. The main benefit is the absurd score this mission grants.
*!Neophyte Camp!
Much like Bandit Camps, it is a mission full of squishies that gives you score, but the problem is the fact that some of them carry panzerfausts, which CAN ruin your day and craft if you're not paying attention.
*!Bandit Business!
This is bandit camps, but on steroids. Normally I avoid this until getting at least Metal Armor, if not Tac Armor. It is long and dangerous, while not providing that great rewards at the level you are at the time.
*Logistics
This one gates the spawn of Dark Ones missions starting from August. Dark ones are relatively easy to handle so you should of course do Logistics research (though it also gates some useful contacts, so not sure why someone wouldn't do it by then anyway).
*!Underground Missions! AKA the Newb Lokk Darwinian Gauntlet
I hate these missions seemingly because I always lose about half of the lokks I send there. If you want to improve your survival chances, Slayer(S) and somewhat trained lokks are a must. Bring fast shotguns, or suppressed pistols.
*
!Socializing! Party Dress
This is an odd one. You can only bring gals to it. The mission is under a heavy morale and freshness draining aura, and you are limited to zero weapons. You will face, in the order of difficulty: bandits, osiron lads, raider scouts, ninjas, bogeys or ghosts. You cannot retreat. Despite it being non-lethal, this mission is QUITE hard. Bring your gals naked, this way they will get assigned random outfits, possibly even overpowered ones. If you go in party dresses, this advantage will be lost. The gals have to have good scores in bravery, excelent melee scores, and zero levels of Shellshocked and possibly Traditional and Radical. Do not bring warm bodies pointlessly! If you have only one or two available melee gals, hard pass. You need about 6 to be effective. There is a quarterstaff in the basement, and the ground floor has easily defensible bathroom doors, which you will have to heavily lean on. If you get ghosts, even if they faint, keep attacking their downed bodies with the quarterstaff (or martial arts) until the ZZZzs dissapear.
*!Highway House!
This mission is a two-trick pony. You will face a serious contingent of Highwaymen (no big deal), Stormrats (fucking resilient goddamned bastards - need high powered guns, melee, or non-traditional damage sources like flamethrowers or big bows). The second snag is the field gun who appears in fromt if a L-shaped house. It will not move, but has sniper behaviour and will ALSO react on you if you cross its facing or end your turn in its LOS. The first way to deal with it is to carefully sneak a melee gal through the building to the gun's back and ax him a question. The second, easier way is to use poison gas grenades to kill the gun, one or two should be enough. The third way would be to throw any explosive. Note that this will destroy the 25mm ammo in the gun which is presumably what you're there for in the first place. (Dr. Vahlen told me to inform you of this.)
**Stop targetting civilian traffic!*/Precint under siege
An easy mission that has you fend off waves of bandits that try to assault a police station. There are a few gotchas in the mission. First, you cannot use weapons of mass destruction (though the bandits OR the police have no such qualms, expect a few LASS or flamethrowers). Most of the enemies are squishy, so some kind of fast shotguns like the Assault Shotgun work, and work well, as do various SMGs. I advise bringing one or two laspistols too. Second gotcha is that most enemies are easy to morale break, except the couple of ogres in the top left of the map. They should be killed or downed fast so the rest can surrender. Do NOT engage in melee with then, you do not want to be on the receiving end of an iron rod. Third, the police will help, but they might get underfoot so try and not get caught in tight corridors in front of a window or smth. Fourth, the mission will spawn reinforcements every 5 turns, and the last reinforcement wave is bandits on quads which are tough and fast. Try to not get to that point.
*Mansions
*Organ Grinder
*UAC Vaults
These missions I would rate relatively dangerous. They are worth doing, no question about it, but they are really firmly set in the early midgame, and your issues by then are not surviving the score. There are multiple ways to survive them easily, but you're better off asking on Discord about them, the tactics for them cannot be condensed as easy.
3) Abusing ninjas for
fun profit.
If the ninjas are next door to you, or if you have a reasonably durable ship with some guns, you can abuse ninja Outposts to recoup some of the points they steal from you. The principle is to grind the infinite jetbikes or jetfighters to convince the government you are not resting on your laurels. You can bully Airfields, Outposts and HQ lv1 and 2. AVOID Fortresses and HQ lv3, those require realllly specialized equipment.
Tactic A) Convoy with 3 14mm chainguns and 4 decent pilots + a puller(ship with 2450+ speed: Hawk, Pachyderm, Hunter-Killer). Park your convoy next to your base, fly your puller to your oupost of choice, gather a bunch of jetbikes, and carefully maneouver yourself back to base. The jetbikes will target the convoy, and will happily be ground to a paste by the triple 14mm. Can use 25mmx2, 30mm, oscillators, charger lasers. Avoid rattlesnakes, 50mm, singlet 25mm. If you have GOOD pilots you can even use LMG or HMG.
You can do this about 3 times per month, and the convoy is cheap enough to sell damaged ones and buy pristine ones to avoid hefty repair times.
Tactic B) If you have acces to shielded ships, or ships that repair fast (Fortuna, Bonaventura, Metallo, Snake), you can forsake the convoy/puller combo, and use the ship of your choice to bully them directly. Careful though! All those this are expensive and/or irreplaceable, so for the love of all that is holy, use GOOD pilots. (+35/+35% at least). Weapon choice is expanded to include Quadcannon as a hvy mount, and spikes as missile mounts). If you lose your menace to this, do not come crying to me. You've been warned!
Anyway, if I missed anything, or needs expanding, post here, and I'll revise and refine the guide as much as possible.
