Been on 5 survivors for ages. Any tips?

[Ghostlight]

Current playthough (only my second) I seem to be stuck on 5 Survivors. I am doing every mission I can but none of them are turning out to be the kind where you get new people (e.g you take them home and all their friends are killed). Any tips? Not even getting recruit options from my friendly enclaves either.

[Sh1ki]

call new people through radio

[SpunkyJones]

Just keep answering the survivor missions.

[Eddie Latium]

After you befriend an Enclave you'll be able to recruit one of their own, you can actually choose which one so it might be worth it if you're not in hurry, but they will leave the map afterwards. Otherwise follow the other suggestions above me.

[Shift]

Well, I can tell I haven't been able to get new people that way after 5 survivors. At 5 I once had a girl who called for help to get her home and had her friends killed. But when talked to, only the option to say good luck presented out. Only got past that by manually asking people to join (get npc enclave to friendly, pick one of the three and ask him/her to join you... This is erase the other 2 from the map). Other than that, only red talon ever joined my base.

[NicoMakiOTP]

You can recruit survivors away from existing enclaves but you have to get them to allied status first. Make sure you help any new group that you see pop up to get them to friendly status and then help them again when they ask and they will change to allied. You can then recruit one of the members but the group will disband.

Note that some groups do seem to require more than two missions to get them to friendly status.

Also, you can recruit daybreak operators if you have enough prestige points from playing Day Break.

[BastardSword]

Good advice in this topic. I do however find that sometimes the game just won't give me any new missions, so nobody becomes recruitable. There's probably some kind of RNG thing going on in the background that determines whether you get contacted by an enclave or survivor asking for help, and there's a small chance that this RNG just keeps coming up with zero and you get no quests. Before Juggernaut Edition I would often finish playthroughs with only 3 or 4 survivors because nobody would ever contact me. Now I get them very regularly, but sometimes not as much.

This is what usually happens now:

- kill the first plague heart, deliver the 2 plague samples to the enclave that requests them
- 4th survivor contacts me, asking for help. I recruit them.
- I move to a 4 person base
- after a short while a 5th survivor contacts me, asking for help. I recruit them.
- I move to a 5 person base.

At this point the game gets really random. Either I get a steady stream of random survivors asking for help who can be recruited, or I get several help requests from enclaves who ally with me and can be recruited from. Or a mix of both. I usually end games with between 6 and 8 survivors. I recently got 9 in a playthrough which I didn't even think was possible.

However I did recently do a Providence Ridge playthrough where I really wanted to move to an 8 person base, but the game took forever to give me a 4th survivor, and I ended up killing all the plague hearts while waiting for the 5th one to appear. Then in other games I get constantly bombarded with help requests that lead to recruitment.

Also contacting enclaves on the radio is not a useful way to recruit people. Usually when I do this I never get contacted again by that enclave, so I can't ally with them and recruit them. If an enclave wants to ask for help they'll appear on the map without having to be called on the radio.

Anyway I really wish there was a way to spend influence to "buy" new survivors instead of having to wait and hope the RNG gods smile on you.

[BastardSword]

Also the game clearly doesn't want you to recruit people constantly. If you do the "scattered survivor" type missions where you go help a solo survivor, the reason they don't ask to be recruited is because you recruited someone too recently, and the game wants you to wait longer to expand your crew. But if you are allied to an enclave you should be able to go to them and recruit them no matter what and the game can't say no.

[Ghostlight]

Thanks for all the replies. I'm up to 8 people now. Seems pure RNG.

[TheRandomGuy]

If you want a guaranteed survivor without relying on RNG to give you one, you could play a few rounds of Daybreak. Each full run of Daybreak nets you around 800 prestige or so, and the Daybreak survivors cost about 2700, so after roughly 3-4 full matches of Daybreak you could afford one.

Also, Daybreak Operators / Soldiers are very overpowered survivors with excellent traits if you can get them. Many of them give you resources per day, although some have a "balanced" negative trait that makes them waste resources sometimes. I have several that give +2 Ammo, Materials, and Fuel but they all have a chance (although not common in my experience) to waste 1 of their respective resources. Also, you can get the hacker one to give you an extra outpost slot.

They take a while to get but they can potentially make or break a base setup in terms of sustainability. Also the combat traits they get are hybrids of all other traits, so they basically become the best survivors for combat, as they get things like Blunt + Bladed + Unarmed Skills, Weapons Handling + Snap Aim, and so forth.

The only downside is it takes a lot of grinding to get one, 3-4 daybreak matches for one, provided you go all 7 rounds of Daybreak and don't lose beforehand.

On the bright side, if you finish a game (leader legacy and all), they get added to your survivor pool so you can use them again in future games without the grind.