How to go past an earlygame?

[Ollanius Pius]

i tried quite a few runs and my most sucsessfull lasted 10 days after that i had almost no options locations that i was interested in were either in locations that would require me changing my build far beyond what i could afford in terms of mechanics that i had or there would be entering enemy base promt to a side and tentacle + ram bugs that i for a love of god could't defeat with starting mechs and weapons even with few round and rounds of safescumming and trying different weapon builds and different priority targets.

[Vaughnilla]

Originally posted by Ollanius Pius:

tentacle + ram bugs that i for a love of god could't defeat with starting mechs and weapons

Don't fight them early. Mobs shifts per day to there will be days when there will be only operarius (swarm mob). Go there. Avoid other mobs.

Labyrinths/bases will always spawn tentacle and ram bugs even if it says it only has swarm mobs. Retreat if you go on this tile. It can only be captured by nuking it. Resources inside are usually not worth the hassle.

[Lantantan]

You'll want to create a secondary heat proof squad with no overheat damage skill pilots as soon as possible. After try to get an okay aquatic squad up. Built these 3 squads are for killing swarm enemies only. As said above, do not take fights with any non-swarm type, wait for them to migrate. First months you want to get as many easy fights as you can before the special monsters start showing up guaranteed.

[Janekk]

IMO you don't need multiple squads, all you really need is one powerful squad to clean way forward for the city + some extra mechs for scouting out bases. Basically enter map with one mech, while paused see if there is a snake tower or labirynth entrance and immediately retreat. That way your good squad won't waste a turn in labirynth. Personally I found overheating perk to be completely useless, just build your mechs to not overheat. With starting combustion engine you'd need to research better pistons/injectors and cooling aux modules. The easiest way to achive that however is getting nuclear reactors with 3 gray, 3 white, 2 red rods. No matter what you do with it, it is impossible to overheat that thing. It will hover around 0 degrees in a volcano. For fusion reactor again you'll need (depending on build) around 2 cooling aux modules to not overheat in volcano. Changing aux module only needs 8 engineers so swaping those in/out is perfectly doable depending on mission terrain. Personally I didn't bother and just kept them in even if they weren't needed.

I didn't bother with specialized underwater squad, I planned to have one at first but it simply wasn't needed. Even absolute worst underwater mech - Plate does just fine, you just gotta watch out for the water current effects since those will sweep them along. Castle is best uw mech anyway so your ideal best squad is underwater specialized anyway.

Anyway in my opinion 80% of success in this game is properly setting up your mechs and weapons. You'll see vastly different performance depending on what weapons you use and with what mods.

My personal recommendations:

For chaff clearing:

Minigun with armor pen mod, maxed out firerate + whatever is left into accuracy. Early game you will need to take some points from firerate and put them into weight saving. This will shred through entire lines of swarm enemies and even hit the spawner behind it. Only downside is it's useless against anything it can't penetrate. Which is everything but swarms, spawners, snake tower and slugs?/caterpillars? that drop turrets. Best weapon by far for early game.

Pulse laser with incendiary mod, maxed out firerate + accuracy. Wire it up 3 times too. Incredibly strong, incendiary effect will clear out swarms in entire area around shot, as added bonus it's good at killing everything else too. One downside is limited range (do not forget to setup max range or they will fire it even if beam won't reach target). Highly recommended to have one of those on every mech.

For big boys:

Rocket pods you start with. Very good at shredding armor so they combo well with minigun. Early game to save on ammo deployment cost run them without mod. Later on when that isn't an issue you can add multishot which is in my opinion best mod for this weapon. 2 points in accuracy, 3 in damage and maxed out firerate (again on your first mechs you'll need to move some of those points for weight saving). One big dowside is that they are very ammo inefficient. Your mechs will be reloading a lot which is why you'll mostly replace this with the bigger variant later. Oh you may want to set some tiny minimal range since it says they can damage your mechs in description. Might not be best idea to fire them at point blank range.

Big missile, now that's a fun weapon. I run them with critical strike, maxed out firerate and 5 points in damage. You'll need rather large minimal range, around 300-400 meters because that thing fires tactical nukes now. Every cave/city map quickly becomes open terrain with these flying around. Now I'm not sure if that's the absolute best way to run these but I do guarantee it's the most fun. Great thing about it especially compared to smaller missiles is that it is very ammo efficient. Oh yeah with that kind of aoe you could also say it clears chaff real good.

120mm cannon. I didn't like it at first but I ended up using it up to the last battle in game. I run it with armor piercing, max fire rate + accuracy. It's not the most powerful weapon but it has some nice features that kept it useful for me. As a kinetic weapon (along with minigun) it can fire into and damage things inside snake tower shield unlike every other weapon type which is big deal in lategame scenario since the whole area under shield is most likely completely filled with spawners and there is no way to safely sneak inside. Having long range weapon that can eventually wear those down is useful. Again like minigun its shots will go through enemies and since they will conga line at you straight from the spawner odds are it will also pass through the spawner itself. It's also incredibly ammo efficient. If it's your only kinetic weapon it will very rarely run out (which also makes it very heat efficient since reloading generates a lot of heat, weapons like rocket pods which need to reload often might not give reactor enough time to cool down between reloads). Which also makes it best weapon to run with C-Ram anti missile mod since it needs kinetic ammo in first place anyway.

Particle emmiter. Special weapon you unlock in the big cannon map special mission. Multishot, max firerate, 3 points in damage and since nothing else was giving me anything at all 2 points in weight. Wire it up 3 times. Gotta wear sunglasses for this one. Very important !!! Minimal range at 500 meters or just under. It will pull enemies towards you and if the firing range is too close anything it won't outright kill will slam right into your mechs. TBH I'm not super sure there isn't a better way to run this but again this is pretty spectacular.

Special use.
Tesla with slowing shots max fire rate, 4 in damage 1 in weight. Unlike laser it does full damage underwater. Useful to have a couple but not exactly high priority. Probably best thing about it is how light it is compared to most weapons so it's also pretty nice for filling out slots on Castle. Another option for that is regular laser with incendiary, it's also super light. For that purpose basically you trade points between firerate and energy saving depending on how much juice you have left in reactor.

Every other weapon I just found no use for or they simply were doing the same thing weapons I mentioned were doing, except worse. My subjective opinion of course. I'd be interested if someone found other useful weapon combinations.

As for mechs, don't rush to unlock them, you can reasonably upgrade your starter mechs and Plate - first mech you'll unlock is frankly most efficient mech in the game. It has best ratio for reload time to ammo amount in the game, with highest control cabin and 4 ammo mods it will reload in like a second or two. Hardly any down time at all even with very ammo inefficient weapons. It has 6 aux mod slots, most in the game and 6 motor slots also most in the game (letting you max out your armor and weapons without top tier motors, which is also why rushing to unlock higher slot mechs is bad idea, you'll need top shelf components to even make use of all those slots anyway).

For research you IMO should go tank cannon and first gen engine on first day. Then munilon->atom bomb->reactor + pulse laser should be top,top priority. Getting needle bullets when you can is also important, otherwise you won't be able to fight undewater at all. Then cabin/frame->armor->heat drain and plate mech since it's very good and you can make great use of it early game. From there and when you have spare researchers depending on what you feel would be most useful for you at the moment you can do improved cabins since control stat speeds up reload times so it's very useful tech and doesn't take long or many researchers to unlock those. Also improved ice and third gen engine are useful for respectively making volcano proof mechs and further increasing weight limits on your mech, all very useful upgrades. Another useful option is rocket launch->torpedo for underwater combat and big missile launcher is rather inexpensive, quick to build and just very good weapon overall. Then repair drone->processor programs is also nice. You can get some extra completely free buffs for your mechs and it takes only 15 researchers (though it takes long time so you might want to start it early). Do not research electric engines and mechs beyond plate. IMO if you feel you really need it in mid game building second plate should be all you need. What you should do instead is skip straight to Castle and top electric engine after upgrading to maximum (17) new technologies center which lets you research any technology on the tree straight away. Oh yeah you'll need fusion reactor too. That way you'll skip a lot of research that frankly wouldn't help you that much and instead arrive at the endgame equipment that much earlier.

Though yeah fixing 56 Upper factory, 16 academic corpus, 62 ammo factory, 23 recycling center, 59 repair bay (in that order) should take priority. Also make sure to not run out of components, yes game will bank those upgrade opportunities for you but the sooner you do those the sooner you will reap benefits. Notable mentions: 26 western factory lowers component cost of city upgrades, not that important IMO but you might as well. 11 eastern factory, do not build any armor plates before you max that out, important but not a priority since you do start with generous stash of armor plates that will last you for a while.

Oh yeah, for pilots just make sure that for every squad you run you have dedicated leader with all leader perks starting with reload. Best perks in the game so make sure to use them.

As others said avoid special enemies until you have let's say nicely upgraded Plate with nuclear reactor and wired up pulse laser + some missiles and high control cabin and decently upgraded starter mechs to go with it too. Basically they all should be at the level where you don't have to waste a single weapon mod point on weight saving. Since you have limited weapon slots on those you need to make sure to max their performance out. Also avoid areas with temperature higher than your mechs can handle (when in doubt there is testing tool button near deploy button in engineering screen, there you can set temperature and see how your mech works in the environment), don't go underwater without techs like needle bullets and NEVER EVER go into labirynths, you spot one you might try to grab any crates that are easy to reach but otherwise turn around and walk away, I haven't seen any benefit to exploring these even with end game equipment. If it's in the way and you can spare one, nuke it, otherwise ignore them/go around them. Go after your objectives. Explore at least 3 cities to find shuttle parts. If it's on the way you can explore the various special missions marked with colored pings, those can have really great rewards but your priority is cities->shuttle parts. That's how you win the game. The longer you take the bigger the chance you will run into city eating giant monsters and you do not have to mess with those at all to win the game. Also pick your starting spot carefully, you want low temperature environment and few cities in general area, europe is good spot for that.

Hope that helps.

[Lantantan]

Janekk is giving a lot of great advice for mid-late game. which is probably more what you've been looking for. But with multiple really crappy basic squads allowed me to rush win the game with EU start, just as forced special enemies showed. Not to mention you'll be swimming in scientists and resources. Europa start with its many nearby cities is the way to go. Still it's more fun to play around in the late game, I'll write my late game advice later.

[Lantantan]

Janekk has been pretty exhaustive in his weapon advice and I agree with all of it! But allow me to say a few more words about how and why.

Weapon effectiveness is all about armour, and dealing with it. The most important break points are 3 and 12, less important are 4, 6, 14, 20. The armour of the swarm spider is 3, the armour of hammerhead ram bugs and many others is 12. In theory you have two approaches, penetrating or shredding, but penetrating is king.

So miniguns and cannons are excellent, late-game viable weapons, but only if you can actually penetrate. They destroy armour too slowly. Annoyingly for kinetic weapons, pen is lower further away. So you'll need to test and set the max range, you don't want to waste ammo on shots that wont penetrate at that distance. So when you transition to bigger monsters you'll have to retool most of your miniguns from pen 3+, to pen 12+, and start bringing pen 12+ cannons.


Now for some of the more obscure weapon mods not explained yet:
Slowing Modded weapons are very important for late game enemies. Fortunately they don't need to pen to slow so any rapid fire weapon will work.

Fire Modded weapons deal splash fire damage, which always pens at least a little bit! This is why the fire mod is so important on the no-pen laser type weapons, who's dps looks amazing on paper, but without fire mod don't actually kill anything. Fire mod is not so useful for kinetics because when they pen, they already multi-hit targets.

Multiple Mod is great for making last line of defence weapons. I felt like a shotguned-minigun was more effective when dealing with any swarm out in the open, or in those drops. You can also design a shotguned-cannon with short max range to one shot those ram bugs.

So OP, did all of that answer your original question? If not, we're happy to elaborate further!

[Ollanius Pius]

mostly i have also a question about artillery and nukes. i didn't use artillery at all and i don't know where i can get or if i have any nukes to clear out base i m currently on day 15 but the path that i wanted to push through is blocked by base so i though maybe there is an easy way to clear it out cause my current squad can only clean out a roof but folds inside(i might need more missiles)

[Lantantan]

Originally posted by Ollanius Pius:

mostly i have also a question about artillery and nukes. i didn't use artillery at all and i don't know where i can get or if i have any nukes to clear out base i m currently on day 15 but the path that i wanted to push through is blocked by base so i though maybe there is an easy way to clear it out cause my current squad can only clean out a roof but folds inside(i might need more missiles)

Easy enough questions! Nukes are the only way to destroy bases, but at day 15, they'll be quite a bit further down the tech tree. I'm afraid you'll have to go around through some desert or ocean instead. Though heatproofing mechs isn't too difficult.

Artillery is only used in mech battles (except for caves or underwater). You get a stacking number of volleys every day depending on how upgraded your city is. In battle, the artillery button should trigger a big targeting circle, great one of your flanks safe.

[Vaughnilla]

Originally posted by Lantantan:

Easy enough questions! Nukes are the only way to destroy bases, but at day 15, they'll be quite a bit further down the tech tree.

I'd like to say you can get the nuke by day 13 on update 59 and day 15 by beta build (to be update 60). You can get it by doing these in order on day 1: 2x upper factory upgrade (district 56) > 3x component craft (production) > Day 5 > Max New tech dev center (district 17) > research nuke