Issues with large robots

[Henry]

Hello,
I liked playing the game so far. I managed the starting area without much issues after reading some guides. Now I have entered the main area of the island and I am stumped. There are often 2 or 3 large robots in one spot. Attacking one draws attention of plenty more from the surrounding area. I often fight from within houses to avoid most of the rocket splash damage but I still can't manage them. Now I have the feeling that I'm playing the game completely wrong.
My main weapon is a one star AI76 and for precision shooting I have a 3 star Meusser. I know this is not the top equipment but how am I supposed to get there? Must I really avoid to fight in the mainland and sneak all the way there?

One large robot eats up all my bullets. Hundreds at least. I cannot build my required ammo yet but I head in the direction of the blueprint. Do I suck at aiming or is this intentional? Even with better weapons in the future I imagine that a huge issue. I know there is a perk/skill to loot more ammo but will this be enough?

What are proper strategies to avoid the rockets? I hide in a house/church but I need to shoot the target from time to time. Then it launches rockets and I loose much health or die right away. Is it even possible to fight them in the open?

Would it make the game easier if I purchase a certain DLC (better weapons)?

Do I miss something else? There is no armor in the game just clothing with low boni (+1%, really?).

I play solo and have difficulty scaling turned off. I want to stay solo but I'm willing to start a new game if fe skills should be distributed differently.

So I hope you can shed some light on these issues on me. As it stands now I don't see how I could progress against such strong foes. Many thanks in advance.

[Citizen10Bears]

I tried solo for a long time and struggled. Eventually I gave up and turned on the option to allow other players to join, and when they join (which they will) they will beat some of these trickier robots for you. Alternatively just sneak to places to get through the missions. Choose your battles - you can run away from pretty much everything.

I really feel that the game needs to be sold as multi-player, it just doesn't scale well down to single player.

TLDR
In a group - "let's get out there and ♥♥♥♥ it"; on your own - "run away!"

[Lexter]

(I am mainly a solo player,too.)

That's the way the game is meant to be. And for good reason.

Sweden got overrun by these robot. So they have to be allmost invincible for you, when you start to explore. Of course you cant go Rambo.

Pick your fights, and avoid the others. Your char is a beginner, you have weak weapon versions, are low skilled and miss the information about the weakspots of the enemy.
Be sneaky and explore.
You will get better and more powerful. You will get better EQ and you will learn better tactics just by doing so.

My advice is, dont read guides. It is much more satisfying to learn the things by yourself.
But if you cant find a collectable, check youtube. Because some, you can only find, if you own the DLC. Youtube will tell you this, the game not.

There has been a time, when this game was much harder than now. It was my starting phase, bad luck for me. Just keep on going, keep in mind, that a death is bad for your ego, but it is no big withdraw for you in the game.

Enjoy the game, you will get better and finally, you will be able to hunt all robots down, solo.

[SniperGirl]

I played all the way through, every mission and just as I finished almost all of them the 2nd DLC expansion came out, played all of it's missions and then the 3rd came out. All done solo.

By the time I got to the mainland I also had a hunting rifle and the AG4, both lower level. I had to go back track several times to find more ammo and health. The first tank on the mainland is a proto type, easiest to take down. My little hunting rifle took what seemed like 1,coo's of rounds along with the few 7.62 rounds I had. I started to bypass all battles I could till I found weapon upgrades and better weapons. Back then supplies were not as easy to find as they are now and no tank fallen across the fence to get in the south end of the air base.

Doing the missions solo was very hard at times, I didn't know how to use fields radios solo so didn't carry them. I did learn how to set up traps and lure as many bots to them as possible. I also used barns to fight the hunters and runners, but not to hide. They will come into barns to attack you. Trick is to run in and out of the doors and dart around the corners. Also use the OPV attachment so you can see where the bots are outside buildings.

Think yourself as prey and not the hunter till you get better weapons and more fire power. Any damage you do to a bot stays with that bot till you destroy it, so take a few shots and run/leave. Deploy a radio so you can shot, fast travel away before the bots go into combat mode and the fast travel back a few more times to weaken the bots. Rocket launch is a lot of fun here.

Learn what you can blow up in the game and then use mines and gas cans to trigger bigger explosions and chain reaction explosions. Hunters and runners love to chase you, lead them to your traps! Trap setting is one of the really fun parts of playing solo.

Good luck and think outside the box!
SG

[Henry]

Thanks for the great feedback so far.

Originally posted by Snipergirl:

lead them to your traps! Trap setting is one of the really fun parts of playing solo.

It's hard for me to use those traps as it seems indirect. I prefer the "just shoot em" approach. But I guess I need to adapt and don't take every fighting "opportunity" until I'm better prepared.

Originally posted by Lexter:

My advice is, dont read guides. It is much more satisfying to learn the things by yourself.

I guess without guides I would have been too frustrated to play further. The game is just too large and complex to discover everything. I could even loot a house and miss a good weapon or something. And since blueprints seem essential to me It would be just "stumbling around" without some directions of where to find what I need. Especially where to hit robots and how to disarm them is important. So for me guides don't spoil a game but help me get better at it faster and avoid frustration.

[reynraptor76]

I'm strictly solo play and I like how the game forces you to pick and choose your battles. Yes the early parts are very challenging until you can find top tier weapons. I often had to use environmental explosives to put a dent in enemies before using up my ammo. The fact is this game doesn't present the character as a super soldier that can steamroll their way through enemies, even with top tier weapons you can die very easily. That's why the devs made it so dying doesn't impose penalties.

Salvage skill does make a huge difference in how you can play, especially if you make it a habit to loot as much as possible. You'll eventually have to start throwing ammo away when your weapons can kill a bot without as much ammo consumption, but until then it'll balance out. Also, you'll learn how to target enemy components and weapons to inflict more damage and kill them quicker.

Use sticky flares to make bots fire on each other. Drop landmines as you run from hunters and runners to make them run into them and blow up. Lead them into parking lots or by large gas tanks then throw a grenade for massive explosions. I even make hunters Lunge attack each other by running circles around and through groups of them. Tease enemies to fire at you then move so another bot is in-between so the rounds or explosives hit it and not you.

There are many subtleties of combat in GZ. Adapt your style if you want the most out of it.

[Ailes]

Rockets should always be avoidable if you sprint into any direction the moment they are being fired and keep doing so until they hit the ground (don't stop early, some rocket variants have a rather huge AOE).

They should actually be a lesser concern. Even the rockets that some smaller machines have are easily dodgeable. I'm not sure how much the perk that increases your sprint and running speed plays into it, but I'm fairly certain I did dodge most of these even before I had that one.

Fighting multiple bigger machines at a time can be tricky, even later in the game. I usually have enough flares or fireworks with me to keep a large amount of them busy while I attack a specific one.

When there are hunters (the small-ish bipedal ones), runners ("dogs") and one or more harvesters (the big four-legged ones) or tanks (the big bipedal ones) around I usually do this:
- (0) Set up a trap with explosive tanks, fuel cells etc.
- (1) Confuse one of the tanks with binoculars and the hacking skill (Important: I think you shouldn't be having the specialization active that makes that machine attack others, because I think this will pull you into the aggro and prevent the next step.)
- (2) Throw a radio, boombox etc. near the traps
- (3) Blow up as many of the small ones with the traps as possible
- (4) Kill the remaining runners
- (5) Kill the MGs on the remaining or any newly spawned hunters
- (6) Kill the MGs on the tanks
- (7) Kill the harvesters (usually I EMP them too; they go down faster than tanks and I don't want them to call in hunter reinforcements)
- (8) Kill the remaining hunters
- (9) Kill the tanks

In smaller battles some steps can simply be ignored/left out. Confusing one of the big machines with the binoculars before entering battle is always a good thing to do. If there is just one big one around this effectively allows you to kill it or at least deal huge damage to it before it even starts "noticing" you. When there are many smaller machines around setting up a trap is never wrong. Clipping the MGs on hunters before finishing them off is something I always do (their rockets and their melee attacks can easily be dodged). The runners in a group should be killed one by one with single shots to the tanks on their backs - if done right none of them will ever actively enter battle with you.

When there are too many machines around that are using MGs, it's important to clip those because as said before you can reliably dodge rocket attacks - but not MG fire. Even if you sprint and dance around like crazy you will always eat some MG bullets. But at the same time, if rockets are being shot at you, you shouldn't stand still to seek cover from the MG fire behind a tree or something. So some of these gun emplacements must go. Out in the open you cannot avoid both being fired at you from multiple machines in various turns and intervals. (I did try to hide in buildings too at first, it's still a tactic when I don't have flares or fireworks with me, but some splash damage may get you indeed.)

This means you should always aim for components. Anything that isn't a large metal plate that simply covers "something" counts for a component. Most parts on the machines are components. All armor plates when removed reveal components. So component-related perks and ammo (FMJ over AP for example) is the way to go. There actually is a perk that will increase the damage dealt to components. (The perks that give detailed information about machines when using the binoculars and that allow you to hack them comes with a "tech view" that will also highlight components and armor plates if you are unsure what are what.)

Be aware that the big machines can provide cover to you, both dead and living ones. They will stop bullets and rockets fairly reliably. So if you for example try to focus a harvester because of its ability to spawn hunters, then try to put it between you and any tanks that are around. The MG fire of the tanks, and maybe their rockets too, will hit the harvester instead of you. I'm not sure about the damage this will deal to it, but at least you will be (somewhat) shielded from these attacks and can properly focus on taking down that harvester.

The DLCs don't really give better weapons. I haven't found any of them to be better than what you already have in the game, maybe except for that Soviet RPG launcher because it reloads a tiny itsy bitsy faster. But rockets/RPGs aren't really the most important weapons in the game. I haven't used the DLC assault rifles much, but a lot seems to be sidegrades. Even what may appear to be superior at first glance is soon made relative by the lack of possible attachments. The U.S. MG for example I think has the highest base damage of all MGs in the game, but on the other hand the lowest rate of fire (or the other way around, I don't know anymore), so in the end it may boil down to taste.

I usually fight with one of the vanilla MGs (with extended magazine, it holds 250 bullets) and either that high-powered semi-auto sniper rifle that you will hopefully find soon too (because it's more versatile to use than the bolt-action sniper rifles) or a shotgun.

Clothing dosen't seem to be super important. I always wear some with visibility reduction, in the hope that I don't draw too much aggro when simply trying to move from A to B. I play strictly solo too, and manage to win most battles unless I run out of stuff or happen to be in a really bad spot or something.

With the gear I have (yellow stars) I can kill a (default, non-rival) harvester at around the time when it recovers from me having it EMPed just once. I wasted so much ammo on these in the beginning too. So yes, in time with better weapons, the right perks and when you manage to identify the best components to hit things will most certainly become easier for you as well, as others have explained. Pretty sure we all struggled a bit when we started, and had to avoid some if not all major battles.

[Henry]

Thanks for the encouraging words. I think I passed the sanity check on this ;). I headed directly towards the 3 star Pvg90, but when I moved onwards toward the 0.50 ammo blueprint I got surrounded by a huge group again. Hacking did not much damage and the robots constantly spawned inside the house I hid in, albeit the doors were closed. Then I ran out of medkits. The problem is, that aggroing one robot (by accident) draws in a huge crowd of them from the surrounding area. This certainly feels a bit "unfair" to me. But who said games should be fair? ;).
Anyway. I consider this a training run and probably purchase the DLC's in the next sale. See what they offer.
I have rarely felt so in "danger" and stressed out in a game. The constant threat adds alot to the immersion.

So thanks for the helpfull comments. I apreciate that.

[SniperGirl]

Key to this game is do not stand still or in one spot for long. Don't waste health staying alive. deploy a field radio and spawn a ways away from the battle at a safehouse. Wait for the "in combat" to close and fast travel back to the battle. You come back with 100% free health.

[treintuchi]

Yes