6. THINGS YOU CAN AND CAN'T SELL: LOOT
Nearly everything you loot you can sell, including any hostages you find, including the "critical" ones. You'll just get more or can buy more. As the months roll on you'll generally want to horde things or process them in different ways as they're better off saved than bought from contacts at a higher price. You can figure out most of this on your own and making mistakes is not so dire.
Notable major exceptions (do not sell these):
-Apples
-Sectoweed
-Corpses (yep, just let those rotting bodies lie in that corner over there)
-The Hull you get from tiny drill
-Ka-something-or-other vodka (until you research it)
-Guild Staplers (until you research it)
-Castaway gals (better brainered or recruited)
-$1000 credit chips (better gambled)
-HE grenades (until researched)
-Money purses/bags of cash/ treasure chests (But highly sellable very early game. Might be cheaper to research altar boys than to research them)
-Medical supplies: make sure to save 10 for a surgery room
Starting around May-ish start hording just about anything that doesn't take up too much space
7. RESEARCH
A major note on research: Putting all of your brainers on a task will cause "over research" when a research is cmplete. So generally only put a few brainers on any given tech, except for researching some early game critical things, like "gals are superior"
Second note: This research path is just an example, there are many viable ones. "male touch" is a much harder but also viable alternative to gals for instance
Lastly: you can use q on geoscape to open the tech viewer in game, or open the xpedia.html file for some spoilery (if essential really) knowledge.
Three asterisks means "put all brainers on this one research".
-> means use q to find out the research needed and then research everything in order.
Recruit Peasants
Local village
Call a meeting
***->?Gals are superior?
(*requires apples and vodka)->Chateuax de la mort
***-> bounty hunting
-> acquire dogs
-> mess hall
-> Scale mail OR Warrior armor (Warrior is 10x cheaper but substantially worse. Your choice. You also need to cavern hunt a LOT for the chitin for research and building scale mail)
-> Contacts: car thieves
Contacts: merchants
-> HE Grenades or Flintlocks and bombs. You want explosives of some kind
-> Any standard issue weapons you might want to mass purchase. I recommend some kind of carbine.
Some examples of useful weapons
*HE Grenades
*tommy guns
*heavy shotguns
*Combat shotguns (if found gambling, very good)
*ol' carbines
*Scoped carbines (if found gambling, very good)
*UAC Carbines
Note: If you find a weapon you like, research in the html bootypedia that comes with the game, and check if "contacts: merchants" is needed for the weapon. If it is, you can buy it after researching this.
(requires interrogating pretty much any hostage. requires built mess hall)
-> warehouse wars
-> contacts: builders hall. (Whenever you want to build barracks)
->gambling
->tiny drill
-> build tiny drill (not a research, use it with your runts requires 80 workshop space, so either an extractor and a vault or 2 extractors in addition to what you already have. * requires a castaway gal)
-> your codex that came out
-> Recruit: Lokknars
-> Underground Missions
-> Undersea Treasures
-> Smugglers (see note)
-> Shadowmasters (see note)
-> Overcharged Radars
-> Pimpcraft
-> Contacts: Krazy Hanna/ Contacts Rogue Fields (see note)
-> workshop (requires stapler and wrench)
-> personal labs
-> chain mail
And finally in no particular order and between researches that you want
mutant alliance
library
Interceptor Assembly
Mansion Invasion
Armored car/ tanks
Manufactured special ammo/guns/etc
There might be some stuff missing, but that is the general "early game research" path.
Notes on above: Smugglers, shadow masters, krazy hanna or rogue fields come from various research paths, mainly from hostages.
Smugglers: leads to contact: smugglers. Most "thug" citizens either have smugglers, or knock out research common to thugs making it easier to get smugglers. Note smugglers not smuggling.
Shadowmasters: aggressively research dem hoes and ninja gals. Lokknar scriptures are a slower path to this since they're pretty rare loot. Even slower: you can randomly get it from a few other non-hoe non-ninja citizens.
Rogue fields: Can be gotten randomly from interrogations or from expedition reports. Not 100% necessary, but nice early game access to a heavy weapon
Krazy Hanna: Lots of bottlenecks. Might take a whole year or by April, who knows. The big bottleneck is the very specific light machine gun research. Ruffians and to some degree other low-lifes are the fastest way to get this. If you're suicidal, you can also try your luck with pogroms or prepper camps.
8. Finances/ Base building
A good way to generally build out your base is something like:
-Spam burrows as needed for population until your run out of room, then build barracks over them. Notably: you need 10 free crew space to build over the burrow, so start building barracks before you really need them
-Mess hall soonish
-all 3 extractors for the tiny drill
Brainers vs runts
Brainers are critically important. They cost money. They cost money because they save money. Well make money anyways. Missions/pimping, gambling, etc etc. You want a lot of these. My personal recommendation is to immediately in january buy a 4th brainer on day one by selling some stuff as this criritcally will let you get both recruitment and bounty hunting in january usually. I personally buy TWO brainers starting out but that is a bit hardcore financing and requires selling your armored vault, which you may not want to do.
Runts, however, are also important to build things you want and mostly processing apples. They're also decent at making money through mining helleriium and making x-grog, but brainers braining on properly brainy tasks are a better path to money than grog generally. So sitting on 3 brainers while amassing runts and using your runts to eventually buy brainers is not as genius as it sounds.
A general path is "reach 4/5 brainers, get chateau de la mort, get 90 runts, reach 10 brainers, get a second base, reach 13 brainers". Because brainers are so maintenance expensive and the extra money through unlocks is earned the month after you research those things usually, if you're new to the game you may want to take those brainer lumps fairly slow. So something like...
January: 4th brainer
April: 5th brainer
May: 7th brainer
June: 10th brainer
But with more experience you'll want to go faster than this.
A final financial note: The game's missions are highly randomized, so until you've unlocked a wide variety, this may be extremely uneven. I personally just restart a game if january sucks because it's even theoretically possible to never get any missions so you want to start off on a good foot.
9. TOOLS OF THE TRADE:
The battlescape is a lot more intuitive, so I'll let you figure out how to do missions. However, there's a few very useful items starting out that should be gone over.
Special note: Only (mostly?) one handed melee weapons below 12 TU train reactions.
A) NON-LETHAL PRIMARY WEAPONS
-Shepherd's staff. I think this was meant for peasants, but it's actually a phenomenal tool for knocking foes out when your melee skill is below about 70. It's so accurate you can knock foes out from the front. That said, you may want other tools for the 50-70 melee skill range anyways, since you will train faster, and it's also two handed. But for total clutzes it's great, and the damage is almost all stun damage.
-Handle. The handle requires decent bravery/melee skill but is great when you have it. 50-80 bravery, 70 ish melee is ideal.
-Ball bat. Basically a middle ground between shepherds staff and handle. Surprising for it's size: it is one handed.
-Fisty cuffs. Fistycuffs are great for gals with over 95 melee and over 40 strength. But you will want to keep a water jug in case you hit enemies so hard they "ghost"
-Fists. For super gals, you may need to actually punch some enemies like altar boys to avoid killing them. Although, why are you bringing such super gals to such easy missions?
-Cattle prod: Stick with the prod. Prod with the Prod. This tool is used for knocking out armored enemies. The first ones you will run into are the Academy medic in "Scientific Experiments" and the guards in "warehouse wars"
-Rubber bullets: Not very useful, but if you just can't stand getting in people's faces it's an option. Can be used in some edge cases like the watchtower mission for some amusing ambushes
-Harpoon stun bolts: Also not so effective, but much better than rubbers. However, it's still surprisingly short ranged.
-Rope: The high TU cost makes this mostly useless. If you're babysitting downed hostages this will ensure any that get up stay down, though. Smoke may be a better option, though.
-Manacles. Theoretically optimal. Extremely tedious, though. They are useful to help keep foes down that can be highly dangerous even when unarmed, though.
-Explosives: What you say? Actually, these are quite good at knocking out armored enemies due to concussive packing a lot of stun. Just make sure to heal them afterwards, and quickly. Anything stronger than an HE grenade or Black Powder bomb will kill, though, and a second explosive will basically always kill.
B) LETHAL PRIMARY WEAPONS
-Shotguns: Shotguns are the best weapon against unarmored foes. When you need to kill things at night, shotguns are what you do it with.
- Various melee weapons: In general, match the weapon to the skills of the user. As a general rule, Lower TU = less skill needed, works better against unarmored. With the exception of the fuso sword, anything against unarmored foes should be single digit TUs, though. For armored enemies, the heavier the better. For "stupidly" armored, there is only the barbaric sword in the early game.
-Carbines: the best early game sniping tool
-Pistols: Pistols should generally be avoided unless you only have one hand (have a shield) or on infiltration. Blackmarch is good for night missions, manstopper is excellent all around, and rusty niner is a decent cheap weapon. Notably, pocket laschargers are garbage, but laspistols are okay.
-muskets/fintlock: Mostly useless outside of very early game. However, a musket can be better at piercing academy drones than some carbines. Throw the pistols away.
-explosives: Great for general killing. Lobbing HE grenades from behind cover is generally the best early game solution to masses of armored enemies if they're so deadly you need to kill them and so far away you cannot melee them. Ninja gals, landed UFOs, reapers, werewolves, etc Buy these buy the truckload.
Honestly shotguns/grenades/carbines/melee are the main killin tools
C) CLOTHES
-CASTAWAY: Meh. It can be nice for longer missions before you get sailor suits (e.g. scientific experiments), or dangerous missions, where you need to pack molotovs/bombs (.. also scientific experiments). Notably useless in your first mission, so start everyone off topless.
-RAGS: Also mostly useless. The -TU counteracts the camouflage, and BIO enemies will kill you anyways.
-NUDE: Hot stuff in the buff. Great early game option for a scout on a high reaction gal before you have grenades or armor. One handed melee in one hand, some consumable (probably a morale booster or booze) in the other. Having more than one is ill-advised, though. Major Weakness: Can't stuff a pocket computer inventory. Reason: No inventory.
-TOPLESS: A great general early game outfit.
-GANGER: A good piece of cheap clothing for when you want more inventory but ran out of rare earth elements. Useful for cold missions.
-TRIBAL:FUR is great for cold missions. The heat version, however, is mostly unnecessary.
-SAILOR: Mostly replaces topless/nude except if you really want the extra reactions for a scout. Or if you like titties. Save some rare earth elements.
-PIRATE: Mostly replaces sailor on experienced gals. All variations have a use, but pirate is generally best for "handl"ing civilians.
-BIKINI: Completely replaces topless/nude and an alternative to sailor. Various swimwear is also good for underwater missions.
D)ARMOR
Armor is generally preferred to clothing, at least early game against citizens. But some cases armor is not allowed or you just wanted clothing for some reason.
-BARBARIAN: The best of these is BARBARIAN (S), as it is your only real defense against Dogs or Monster hunt early game. Just make sure you cannot be attacked by the back. A good way early game way of handling ratmen is to embark with two of these guarding a blowfish craft facing front and carrying melee and peeking shots with the rest. It;s also the way to handle infested cellar. BARBARIAN is mostly useless and SAVAGE is.. well.. unique. I'm sure it has some use I just have a hard time effectively using it. Maybe a decent scout if you carry have an x-grogger clearing you up a bit and personally kill some enemies for morale.
-WARRIOR: The earliest you can get full 30 armor, and it costs basically nothing. 30 armor is sufficient to tank civilians pretty hardcore. It's the difference from "dying to shotgun" to "taking a small amount of damage". If you want to knock out enemies rather than killing them, you'll feel a lot safer with this on. That said, it is incredibly TU intensive, so much better is...
-SCALE MAIL: Extremely expensive, though. The average "cost in runt time" is something like 60k per piece. In short, it costs more than a gal to make one. But you'll feel like a tank while moving fast. A full set of scale mail and you can do a ratmen mission with bare fists. If you want to save a certain cat on a certain mission this might help
-CHAIN MAIL: You're now pretty much invulnerable to citizens, so you can go for 100% hostages quite easily. You're also quite armored against some more dangerous stuff too, though only so much.
E) GRENADES:
-Molotovs: Moltoves ignore armor and can cause heavy morale damage. The typical use it will usually one shot an Academy Drone. Altertively, it can also hurt some otherwise incredibly dangerous units or cause some enemies to panic. For instance, if you're having a hard time capturing an Academy Medic, setting one on fire can sometimes cause it to drop it's weapon without killing it.
-HE Grenade: General use weapon against anything armored that is killing you more than it should. Hide behind corner, lob, hide behind corner. Rinse repeat. Carry 50 on a craft, just in case.
-Black powder bomb. An alternative to HE grenades, can also cause smoke the turn it is used. Also great against shamblers.
F) PRIMARY THROWING
Non-grenade throwing weapons, like melee, grow quadratically in power with skill, as the skill affects both accuracy and power. Typically they're used to take out close by armored enemies when it's not advised to get into melee, but they have a wide variety of applications.
Nearly all of these require energy, so they tend to be better in clothing rather than armor and a grogger helps
-Leather Whip (stun): The basic throwing weapon, this requires getting so close to melee range that it practically is a melee weapon. Typically melee weapons will be more potent at this close range for knocking out enemies, but this can be useful either to train throwing or as a better knockout tool for someone with an already higher throwing skill. Can also be used to make sure knocked out foes stay down: Carry a whip and stop whipping the enemy when they ghost
-Bows: Regular ammunition with the hunting bow is terrible, and flame ammunition tends to only rarely set the enemy on fire. Poison ammunition is useful, but is gated behind several techs and tends to only be useful on trained throwers: grenades will be much more effective at lower skill levels.
-Javelins and throwing axes. These two look very similar damage wise but are quite different. They're very effective at hurting armored enemies, but are much more effective in skilled hands. Powder bombs generally are better until your accuracy improves, as
Notably, javelins are superior in water due to the stabbing damage and lack of heavily armored enemies (you shouldn't try to fight anything more heavily armored than deep ones), and throwing axes do not arc, making them better in base defense or forests. Axes also have shorter range and are much better at killing more heavily armored enemies. Outside of base defense and water missions you might want to carry both.
-Ninja stars/sickle: as with the fuso sword, ninja weapons tend to be superior when used on gals with maxed or near maxed skills and require no strength.
G) MISC
-Happy Pills: Great to carry on everyone if you're in a pickle. Stun, freshness, morale. It's got it all.
-X-Grog: It's a first aid kit, moonshine, and water jug all in one! Carry this one handed on a strong grenadier, as they can't carry any other useful weapons. Alteratively, stick it in someone's backpack.
-Moonshine/atombeer. since freshness, moonshine is mostly replaced with atom beer. Dedicated melee/grenadiers can carry one in one hand. or keep it in inventory. Since you can't dodge with no energy, it might be preferrable to take a sip before sprinting to an enemy. Also useful on cold missions, particularly if you're going without furs.
-Smoke Grenade: Makes most daytime missions easier, particularly when combined with a parrot or bugeye. Some advanced enemies (osiron security from landed smalls come to mind, most robots) can see right through it, though.
-Hammer: Sometimes necessary, so always bring one on the floor of your ship. So always carry one unshielded gal who can wield it if it is needed.
10. TACTICS
Some general tips for missions
1) Again, read the bootypedia when you start the game. Just read it.
2)While night missions are preferred, they can be suddenly dangerous due to unexpected lighting. Make sure to switch off nightvision at the start of the mission to check for streetlights, and every time you down an academy nurse, you'll need to turn it off to see if there was a pocket computer. This is kinda lame game design, but this is the way to deal with that. To deal with pocket computers: Have another guy pick it up and stuff it in their belt/panties. Molotovs/fire are extremely dangerous due to the light. Consider carrying around a fire extinguisher.
Some missions are also best done in daylight (see MISSIONS)
3) Enemies should be melee'd from the back, always. If you can't melee them in the back, consider not meleeing them. Exceptions: Warehouse guards have such low dodge you can usually cattle prod them from the front.
4) Non-lethal is preferred, but before you get armor it can be diffucult to knock everyone out. A safe mix is to kill everyone until you start hearing half the map screaming, and then mostly start knocking dudes out. Usually once you kill the leaders (highwaymen, church priests, church neophytes, etc) the rest will surrender. Alternatively, selectively knock out only a small set of foes (researchers, medics, altar boys, priests, ratman leaders, etc). Once you get scale mail, you can start trying to knock everyone out.
5) generally for non-lethal just creep towards enemies and if you dont think you have enough TUS to hit them from the back a few times, just move out of vision a few tiles. Citizens have terrible vision.
6) Srsly grenades OP
