Any combat training tips

[wackywarrior07]

Can anyone recommend any tips how to better train my team for combat?

Background:
I have followers of about 13 to 15, 5 miners and 1 seller (also training on combat training dummy in between) and the rest travel to find new areas and artifacts. Issue I have my team is weak and I can't get into a battle without losing then I have to wait for ages to heal or worse load the game because they are all dead. I train for days with the whole team, in between travel, on training dummies but they don't improve. I want to start my own outpost but I'd have no chance right now if they got through attacks. Thanks

[bunny de fluff]

try this mod :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1616499705

[Raymond]

grind stealth and athletic. All your characters must run as fast as 20 mph when things get hairy, and one of them should have 50 stealth minimum.
Afterward, to begin their real training, send one or two of your guys, in heavy armor and loaded with food and ssome meds, to a nearby bandit camps like dust bandit. Have them get rekt right inside the camp and make them get up as soon as they awake from the beating and patched themselves. Once you have 80 toughness, send them to Bask and fight with holy nation and united cities, after two hours or so you should have a decent fighter with around 50 atk and 70 def. You can keep going until you can take on a whole holy nation squad yourself, or you can send the next patch of trainees. The final training take place inside fog island. Bring a katana and fight with fog men to train your dex. There, you now have an average warrior in kenshi.

[Bomb Bloke]

Originally posted by wackywarrior07:

I train for days with the whole team, in between travel, on training dummies but they don't improve.

Each combat dummy has an upper limit on how high it can raise your melee attack, which you'll see if you click on it. The best dummies in vanilla allow up to about 15 skill. Practically speaking, you'll only get about 13 points from them before they become too slow to bother with.

After that, you want your team members to participate in fights against the strongest enemies you can walk away from. Make your weak battle alongside your strong.

Originally posted by wackywarrior07:

I want to start my own outpost but I'd have no chance right now if they got through attacks.

Depends who's attacking. Especially around the Border Zone, most enemies will just walk in, try to beat up your guys, and then just walk out again. Some may steal food, but you can always buy or make more. The main difference to losing a fight "in your base" and most anywhere else in the world is that you don't need to carry people far to get them into beds.

You also still have the option of running back to an NPC town, same as you do in the wilds, if you'd like the guards to help you. In my view, base building is a "sooner the better" type of thing.

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

grind stealth and athletic. All your characters must run as fast as 20 mph when things get hairy, and one of them should have 50 stealth minimum.
Afterward, to begin their real training, send one or two of your guys, in heavy armor and loaded with food and ssome meds, to a nearby bandit camps like dust bandit. Have them get rekt right inside the camp and make them get up as soon as they awake from the beating and patched themselves. Once you have 80 toughness, send them to Bask and fight with holy nation and united cities, after two hours or so you should have a decent fighter with around 50 atk and 70 def. You can keep going until you can take on a whole holy nation squad yourself, or you can send the next patch of trainees. The final training take place inside fog island. Bring a katana and fight with fog men to train your dex. There, you now have an average warrior in kenshi.

Imo you should train dex from the start if you want to reach any useable point.
Its affected by SoL, means cutting down lots of weak enemies isn't really a good form of training.

[Justin Sellers]

If it is a training fight, that you know you are going to lose, I like to keep my scout in stealth, on passive until the fight is over, then run him in to patch them up. If everyone gets knocked out or has their legs knocked into negatives, then you can lose people before you get someone to them.

[Bomb Bloke]

Speaking of stealth / passive, another big thing that really should be included in the game tutorial is that activating these on unconscious team members will prevent them from getting back up when they awake. This makes it rather less likely that they'll end up pushing themselves too far and taking an actual life threatening wound.

Assigning the medic job as well will furthermore allow them to heal without attracting any enemy attention. They'll literally lie there, sprawled out and apparently unmoving, while fixing up their cuts.

[Raymond]

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Imo you should train dex from the start if you want to reach any useable point.
Its affected by SoL, means cutting down lots of weak enemies isn't really a good form of training.

I don't know what SoL is, but from what I am seeing, dex training isn't affected by the lvl of enemies your characters fighting against, nor was it that hard to raise. I have had characters getting to 60-70 dex naturally just from a trip to fog island, shrieking forest and cannibal plain.
Not to mention, you don't really need dex to train other stat nor do you need it for a functional fighter. My main character whom I trained the first time only had 30 dex when he reached 60 atk and 77 def from his trip to Bask. He carried my team for a while, taking on a whole holy nation squads with couple of insquisitors with only a nodachi before we started getting other characters to around his lvl. For some reason, his dex somehow got to lvl 80 without any real training putting into it, while his atk lvl wasn't even anywhere near lvl 70 then.

[Bomb Bloke]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

I don't know what SoL is

Had to look it up myself.

https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Stronger_Opponent_Logic

Despite what the game says, apparently your dex gains are indeed modified by your opponent's abilities.

[rat bastard]

If you are playing or training greenlanders a cool thing to do is to camp in any of the holy farms and "kite" raptors eating the crops using a katana, nodachi or topper, any other katana class is too small to reliably multi-hit, and only use toppers/nodachi for max gains. Hitting more than one enemy at once counts towards your overal stat gain, so if you hit 5 of the 7 - 10 raptors it will give you some insane dex and melee attack gains, you can probably get to 30 - 40 in less than an in-game week just by doing this. (You could also use the weakling exp mod to get even higher gains but that's up to you.)

For melee defense same thing applies with being hit by multiple people instead of hitting em, but I don't recommend using animals since they deal a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of damage regardless of stats, kidnap a bunch of starving bandits or any other weak enemy and give them rusted junk blunt weapons so that your bois don't bleed to death, then have them get beaten up. You can set them to fight or to just block, but fighting is better for that ever so precious trickle of attack and dex exp as a bonus at least until they consistently manage to block most of their attacks, then it's better to just leave them blocking so they don't murder the starvers.

To capture the starvers hire a bunch of mercs with a character you intend to upgrade last, since they'll bodyguard that character you don't want to start training with them still under contract, so get said character and the mercs as far as possible. Also I recommend building a shack somewhere out of the main roads, where pathing big groups becomes difficult so you don't get unexpected raids, most of them should give up half-ways.

[Derek Withers]

Kang is the answer. He is Shek you can recruit in Squinn. He has 25 toughness so he will generally be able to get up after a fight and revive the rest of your guys. Get him and start getting into fights, you will lose the first few but very quickly your stats will start to increase. Its so satisfying when you can beat the starving bandits and dust bandits.

[wackywarrior07]

Hi guys thanks for the feedback seems my dummies no longer work with my level. But when my team go in for an attack they just get beat up or worse end up dieing they stay unconscious for to long and they end up dieing. How can i stop this?

[Bomb Bloke]

There are two types of damage you can take - blunt (grey) and bladed (red). Getting cut is what's dangerous, as red damage is the type that tends to keep degrading, eventually sending you down far enough into the negatives that you die. So when picking armour, make sure you prioritise cut resist!

Among hungry bandits, you'll notice that only the leaders carry bladed weapons. The rest all use blunt poles. These are the safest enemies to practise on, since they seldom inflict serious cut wounds. Using bladed weapons yourself helps prevent enemies from getting back up and prolonging fights. Pausing whenever they fall in order to steal their weapons pretty much ensures they'll no longer be a threat.

As mentioned before, if you do get downed then you may want to enable sneak + passive so your characters don't get up again before your enemies have left the area. If you're sure you can win, then fine, get up and keep fighting - but by overdoing it, you're much more likely to end up with a degrading wound that'll keep you unconscious until death.

It also doesn't hurt to have some or all of your characters flee from fights, if you think there's a chance that you'll lose. They can run back in to help your unconscious members when it's safe.

[Raymond]

Originally posted by wackywarrior07:

Hi guys thanks for the feedback seems my dummies no longer work with my level. But when my team go in for an attack they just get beat up or worse end up dieing they stay unconscious for to long and they end up dieing. How can i stop this?

train yourself a ninja doctor

[wackywarrior07]

Thank you...so in a nutshell. Carry on travelling with my travellers and get into battles with bandits wondering, take off passive and activate sneak when taken out... Heal and repeat?

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Imo you should train dex from the start if you want to reach any useable point.
Its affected by SoL, means cutting down lots of weak enemies isn't really a good form of training.

I don't know what SoL is, but from what I am seeing, dex training isn't affected by the lvl of enemies your characters fighting against, nor was it that hard to raise. I have had characters getting to 60-70 dex naturally just from a trip to fog island, shrieking forest and cannibal plain.
Not to mention, you don't really need dex to train other stat nor do you need it for a functional fighter. My main character whom I trained the first time only had 30 dex when he reached 60 atk and 77 def from his trip to Bask. He carried my team for a while, taking on a whole holy nation squads with couple of insquisitors with only a nodachi before we started getting other characters to around his lvl. For some reason, his dex somehow got to lvl 80 without any real training putting into it, while his atk lvl wasn't even anywhere near lvl 70 then.

As bomb bloke wirtes one below, dex is affected by the enemies stats. You get xp on the number of hits and their cut ratio, means fogmen with their low hp, low attack and no armor yield little xp.
Yes, dex is a rather important stat as it affects block and attack speed as well as cut dmg.
Unlike strenght, you need serious effort to train it, but it doesn't almost hard lock you out from using higher wepons.