My checklist before I start a settlement

Maybe you want to start a new settlement, but you're not sure if you're ready. Maybe you've already started a settlement, but you feel like you're getting crushed by all the raids. When do you start on a settlement?

Honestly, it's a matter of comfort zone, and different people approach settlements differently. Some people like the heavy challenge of immediately jumping into building it, while others like to play it very safe by doing it late-game when they have a combat-capable squad or two. Then there's the wide range of comfort levels in between these two extremes, and each person falls on a unique point along the spectrum.

Personally, I never have a combat-capable force when I start a settlement (I tried it once, got bored as soon as settlement was done, and quit the game). However, I do engage in a bit of prep work before I start on my own settlement, and get some basic necessities out of the way, though I try to do less and less on each playthrough. In this guide, I just explain how I go about things, but it's by no means the "correct" way to play the game, because there simply isn't one. Still, if you're struggling, maybe you can take a couple of tips from here and apply it to your game to lighten the load.

Mindset needed when building a settlement

Intro

Mindset is important. More important than anything else, because it might result in the most common cause of a wipe: you give up and quit.

This section is a bit of a foreword, and it's not the actual start of the guide. Skip to the next section if you want the actual content, but I do recommend you read this.

You've started building, and it's overwhelming

No matter what your preparations are, whether you followed the below advice or did your own thing, eventually it'll be time to start your settlement (i mean, isn't that why you're reading this?). You're building it, and It's difficult. It feels impossible.

Why is it difficult?

The biggest and only real challenge that you'll face when you start building a settlement are the raids. You're probably reading this guide because you know this to be true. You will always have a massive force of faction X or outlaws Y invading your settlement, sometimes twice in the same day. The general despair that I hear is "the enemies are too tough, my guys keep getting wiped out". This comes from a certain incorrect mindset that new players have - one that needs to be kicked to the curb the moment you launch a new game, and replaced with the correct mindset of "it's ok to run".

As you build up your settlement, you will be forced to flee it dozens (even hundreds) of times before it becomes even remotely defensible. Yeah, the bandits or ninjas have invaded it, but that's fine because they'll eventually leave.

Always remind yourself that "it's ok to run" no matter what you're doing in this game. You're free, and you are not obligated to prove anything to anyone.

You'll hear this advice from all players, but most of them have forgotten the feeling of the problems that come after. Which brings me to the next point:

Death by a thousand cuts

Every time you flee, you build up a certain... mental attrition. Food, money, resources, all seem to be slipping away, as injuries and other problems seem to pile up, and it feels like you're slowly regressing back to that moment when you first launched a new game with the solo naked level-1 scrub that can't fight a goat. Eventually it feels like you have to give up, close the game and never play it again. I've been there. We've all been there.

You have two options:
Option one, you fight this feeling. Fight it because it's false. It's untrue You are in fact making progress. Every time you come back to your settlement, you add a little bit more, and you get closer to having it become self-sufficient.

If you no longer have the money to afford food and bandages, you can fall back to option two. Leave your settlement alone for a while and go back to the basics - your settlement will be there when you come back. Go scavenging, go looting, go stealing, go mining, and when you've gotten some more funding, go back to your settlement and invest more time and resources into it.

First days

As I mentioned, this guide is just a set of steps that I go through to make myself feel stable in the world before I tackle the task of building a settlement (or doing anything really). However, no matter how/where you start the game, you will always face the same task: make money. You need money to get those initial few cats that you'll use to kick-start yourself. This is to get food, recruits, backpacks, construction materials, housing, research, etc.

Simply put, you'll need some amount of money to kick-start yourself before starting a settlement, no matter what your comfort zone may be. You probably already know the drill. Mine copper and/or scavenge loot from the corpses of hungry bandits that decided to attack the city guards.

Once you have some spending cash, buy food. Second, hire a few recruits. Third, go explore a bit and look for interesting things to do. Get a bit of bank before tackling the rest of what I have to say, say... 10-15k cats should do the job, but 20-40k if you want to start more comfortably. Then come back here and move onto the next section.

If you don't care about spoilers, and want to earn your initial cats in a more exciting manner than described above, here's some suggestions from comments:

Originally posted by boop:

For anyone looking for a bit of a bump to their initial money, there's a few spots that are fairly easy to go and loot right at the start. My personal one is a ruined village almost directly west of Squin, has some slightly randomized loot but always has a couple of rusty chainmail pieces. Chainmail sells for a couple/few thousand cats, depending on quality. if you're starting in the great desert, uh...try stealing Tengu's nodachi. He won't mind. Promise.

Originally posted by boomclear:

At worlds end the science HQ is super easy to steal from at night. I got 10k cats at lvl 1 thief. Just wait for night time, all the workers will be asleep with a few on the machines, simply sneak in and steal the food on lvl1 and the chain sheets and all other goodies on the next two floors. You can train lockingpicking easily also. With the items labled as "stolen from finch" you get a 100% chance of selling to the bars who have no problems with stolen goods. However you MUST steal from finch!! (science HQ building's stuff) for the 100% chance.

Securing a revenue stream

Money? Yeah, I know I need it

Cats. So useful. You can use it to bail you out of almost any situation. Most of your squad is down? Buy some bandages to patch them up. Rent some beds to help them heal. Buy some food to keep them full.

You get it - money is good, money is great, money is key.

What's your point?

Money also one of the absolute requirements that you need in order to actually build a settlement. Not just money, but a constant revenue stream that's low-maintenance to keep the money flowing in and supplying your settlers with food, bandages, and other resources needed to keep them going. I'll explain in more detail later, but your settlers will be running away from dangers, getting hungry and hurt while building your settlement. You will rely on having decent savings to keep them supplied, and if those savings aren't getting replenished, you run the risk of starving your settlers, or being unable to stabilize their injuries, and that can result in deaths.

If you can free yourself from that worry, you'll have a much easier and happier time working on your settlement.

What's a good way to do that?

There's loads of ways to set up revenue streams that are almost completely hands-off. My favorite is the following, and you just need a few things to get it going:
- Two characters. One of these should ideally be a scorchlander, which will be your crafter. The other one can be anything, and he'll serve as the errand boy. Keep in mind that these two will be spending the rest of their natural lives in this city, so it's best to pick non-combatants for these roles.
- A small bank of cats to get you started, preferably about 10-40k depending on a couple of factors (mostly depending on how big of a house you'll want to start with - more on that later).

Ok, now what?

Here's what you do:

1) Identify a city to buy property in - this city doesn't have to be near your settlement, but there are a couple of requirements that you do need to look for.
- It needs to have a trade goods shop and a construction shop.
- Ideally, it should have a population that won't attack your people (i.e. non-humans and prosthetic-equipped humans get attacked in the holy nation cities, hivers can get harassed/attacked in united cities, and humans can get harassed/attacked in shek cities)
- Good security and a locale that has an absence of cannibalistic humanoids. You'll be relying on supplies offered by shop owners, but towns like Mongrel can result in shop keepers getting eaten, so it's best to avoid them.
- It's a good idea to familiarize yourself with this wiki page[kenshi.fandom.com], specifically the "Wind Speeds" and "Town Overrides" sections, as they might end up being relevant eventually.

2) Buy a house, preferably close to the shops mentioned above and preferably one that costs 16k or more so that you can expand your revenue stream later if needed. You can start with a small shack (4k) as it'll be enough to get this basic workshop started, but if you end up needing more revenue down the line, you'll need to expand into a bigger place anyways.

3) Set up a research station, and start researching clothing, fabrics, and gear storage (food storage is very useful too).

4) Set up a clothing bench, along with fabrics storage and several boxes of clothing storage (research whatever is needed to get to this point), and one food storage. You'll also want to set up a light source beside or above the clothing bench, as it'll negate the negative impact of night-time crafting.

5) Start crafting bandanas on repeat in your clothing bench, and set it as your crafter's job. With your errand boy, go to the trade goods shop and construction shop, and buy out their entire stock of fabric (or as much as you can afford), then have him haul it back for your crafter to use.

note: When you first start crafting at level 1 crafting, you'll get the worst (prototype) quality bandanas, so you'll be initially crafting at a loss. As your crafter's armor crafting level approaches 20, you'll start getting the second-worst quality which will quickly get your workshop to operate at-cost. Once your crafter is about level 40, you will see decent profits - it doesn't take long to get there, just a few days of non-stop crafting.

6) Once per day, check on the city, and have the designated errand boy go and sell the bandanas, buy more fabric, and buy more food to sustain himself and the crafter.

Just for reference, with this method, at level 40 armor crafting you should be getting over 400 cats profit per one piece of bought fabric, and it takes about an hour per fabric in crafting time. This profit doubles as you get to level 60, and then again at 80. Your real bottleneck will be the amount of fabric that shops will sell you.

You can scale the operation up by getting a larger house (if you haven't already) and researching weapon smithing. You can then buy armor plates, and have another crafter start smithing weapons to sell. Some of them aren't profitable, while others are. The best one I found thus far is the desert sabre, and it's the cheapest option for training weapon smithing, but that recipe can be a bit difficult to locate. For a list of profitable vs non-profitable items, check out this other guide that I made: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1708834081

Training people

Ok... What skills do I focus on training?

Before starting a settlement, I strongly urge you to train up your settlers. Combat training takes a long time and/or preparation. Also, combat is usually not what you want to do when building a settlement anyways, because it can result in your entire group getting wiped out and dying unless the defenses are impeccable.

No, what you need to train are the three skills that are easiest to train. You need Strength, Athletics, and a couple of your colonists should probably have sneak. The goal is to help your colonists easily escape any incoming raiders without taking any damage.

Why those skills?

Athletics allows them to run faster, so they can escape raiders and other dangers with more ease. Strength allows them to carry more before they become encumbered (and slowed down), so you can have your settlers carry all the important stuff on them instead of it getting looted by raiders when they invade your under-construction settlement.
One or two of your settlers should have sneak, so they can be more effective as logistics runners, carrying supplies from a city to your settlement.

In case you're not aware, here's how you train those skills:
- Athletics by having your colonists simply run around. As they run, their athletics will train.
- Strength can be trained by over-encumbering them with heavy loot. The more you encumber them, the faster strength is trained, but the slower the Athletics is trained. I recommend equipping traders backpacks on all your lemmings, and filling those up with iron ore, which is extremely heavy, and will keep their strength training multiplier high for a long time.
- Sneak is trained by having your guys run around while in sneak mode.

As you can tell, all 3 of these can be trained at the same time. Even if they are encumbered, Athletics is still trained, just at a decreased rate, and that's just fine.

What's the training regimen

Now, onto the methods of actually getting your guys to run around. You have several options:
- You can send them across the map, but they are encumbered and slow. Very easy pickings for anything that wants them dead (i.e. 95% of all living and unliving things). If they run into trouble, you have to catch it in time, have them drop everything so they can have a chance to run away. Not ideal.
- You can have them follow patrols of city guards and such. It's safer, but it's not great. The patrols are slow, so your guys might not be moving 100% of the time, and they're still in danger of getting attacked if a fight breaks out. Also, you need to ferry food out to them or they'll starve. Once again, not ideal.
- You can select them all, and manually right click around the city so that they're always on the move. It's safe, food is readily available at a nearby bar, but it's very tedious, so also not ideal.

Get to the point

Spoilers ahead

Before you pick your poison, there is an easier way, but it can be considered a bit of an exploit. If your moral code is too clean to use this method, then carry on with your righteous path and skip the rest of this section, mr. justice man!

As per the rest of you scumbags, here we go:

As it turns out, you can exploit the AI pathfinding to get your guys to run back and forth inside the relative safety of one of the cities. I'm referring to one of the empire's cities called Sho-Battai. It's in the desert on the north-east section of the map.

Once you get your colonists there, get them inside the city (see circle 1 in screenshot). Then get familiarized with the city's layout. It's a long city, with a single gate along its walls (see circle 2 in screenshot), at one end of it. On the opposite end, you'll see that there's a gap in the wall which is filled in with a building (see circle 3 in screenshot):


If you pan the view to the right according to the screenshot (i.e. north), past the building marked 3, you'll see a copper resource (see circle 4 in screenshot):


When you select your colonist, and shift-right-click this resource node, it'll add a job to the colonist's job section - they'll now be tasked with continuously mining it. What happens next is magical. The colonists will run all the way to the gate on the left, then change his mind and run back into the city towards the building labeled 3. Once they get 2/3 of the way to the building they'll realize "oh, there's a building there", turn around, and run back to the gate. This will keep repeating, and they'll keep running:


note: if you choose to train this way, you'll need to have the screen looking at the area to keep it loaded, or your characters will stop running around due to lack of managerial oversight.

Getting Food

When do I farm food?

When you start building your settlement, you'll likely be inclined to set up a food farm of some sort so that you can feed your settlers. Logic is sound - you no longer have to waste cats on buying overpriced food at the bar, you no longer need to transport the food from the city to your settlers, and you'd be one step closer to self-sufficiency, right?

Well, usually no. Not if your chosen settlement location has herbivore wildlife roaming around.

Herbivores seem harmless enough

One of the problems that you'll likely encounter when you start your first settlement is wildlife. Along with the humanoid raids, wildlife will make your settlement-building process a nightmare. Depending on your biome, wildlife will potentially get attracted to your crops, walk right into your settlement like they own the place and start going ham on your crops. If you set up walls and a gate, they'll break through that gate to get at those crops, forcing you to repair it. Sometimes aggression can occur if your settlers get too close to them while they eat or while they're breaking down the gate, and injuries will occur, which puts your settler out of commission, and leaves them vulnerable if they have to run away from a subsequent raid.

You can leave the gate open and ignore the wildlife as it noms on your crops, but then what's the point of having them to begin with? Might as well just leave farming alone until you have enough defenses in place to fight the wildlife off.

So what do I do?

Instead, dedicate one of your settlers to the role of logistics. Use the revenue stream in the "Securing a revenue stream" section to buy food at the bar, and have your dedicated logistics runner run that food back to your settlement. When there's enough food, you can have the runner go to town and get building materials or iron sheets to help expedite the settlement's construction.

Once you've fully built your settlement and you feel like you can defend it against wildlife, then you can transition to farming and cooking food.

What food do I buy?

Cooked meat is the most cost-efficient, but it also gets depleted very quickly and bars have a limited supply that restocks daily. After a certain head count, you simply won't have enough of it despite depleting all of the bar's stocks. However, that's what that revenue stream is for - by the time that you've got enough recruits to deplete your cooked meat, your bandana crafter should be churning out some serious profits. At this point you should be able to afford some of the more expensive foods.

It might seem inefficient to buy the more expensive foods, but you have to keep in mind that 15 nutrition lasts for 30 ticks of hunger (15 to get digested, and 15 to get back to the original point on the hunger meter), while 50 nutrition lasts for 100 ticks.

Start off by buying dried meat, but once the money starts rolling in, don't hesitate to switch to something like Gohan, Ration Packs, or food cubes (my descending order of preference) as it's more hands-off and you will notice a definitive reduction in micro-management that you have to do, at a cost that won't even detect.

Choosing a location for settlement

Prep is done, I'm ready to settle down. Either I've already found a spot where I want to settle, or I'll start looking for one after the prep work. In either case, how do I decide?

Originally posted by Safehold:

Each zone basically has its own economy and flavor.

I'm not going to cover specific spots, because that's worth its own guide and there are plenty out there. Instead, I'll cover my basic thought process when I'm hunting for a new spot that I haven't tried before:

1) NPC life. Are there cannibalistic factions roaming around (fogmen, cannibals, skin bandits, fishmen, etc)? Is there carnivorous and hostile wildlife? Are there herbivores that will get attracted to your farms? Are the region's NPC factions going to harass you (holy nation preachers, shek warrior parties, or empire noblemen)? Are there natural hazards that require you to wear special clothes?

Each area will have a combination of these factors, and you'll have to live with usually two or more of these. Choose the evils that you prefer to live with.

2) Flat ground. I haven't built many settlements thus far, but I can tell you that trying to build defenses on bumpy terrain is an utter nightmare. You'll find weird quirks like NPCs can't move between two sections of the walls, NPCs clipping through sections that look solid, hideous aesthetics, and so on. Having to deal with all this (i.e. re-building and re-designing the base multiple times) while also worrying about the survival of your group can get overwhelming fairly quickly. In the end you'll settle for uncomfortable defenses, and broken automations (characters get stuck on geometry while doing their jobs).

If you're fine with dealing with these problems, then there are some really good locations that you can find which are very resource-friendly, but in my opinion it's just not worth it. Still, personal experience will always be more valuable than some rando's opinion on the internet, so try it if you're curious.

3) Resources. It's important to consider what you have available to you. Take the character with the highest science stat and have them prospect areas for you to see what's around. Ultimately you need to have at least one source of each (copper, iron, stone and water), and if any one of them is lacking, you can compensate for that down the tech tree.

Stone - you want a good source of this at the beginning stages, as it will be used to make building materials, which you need to build stuff without running into town. It's pointless to compensate for a lack of this with late-game tech because by that time you'll have already built everything that you need to.

One tip I can give here, is that if you find a settlement location that you like, but it doesn't have a good source of stone, prospect the surrounding areas. You can set up a stone mine outside of your settlement's walls. It isn't ideal, but you really won't be needing stone for anything other than construction. Once you've finished building everything you need, you can just demolish the mine or leave it unmanned.

Iron/Copper - Iron is very important throughout all stages of the game, and copper becomes important in mid-late tech. I recommend having a good source of iron in your base. I usually look for two nodes of high quality iron (which usually isn't that hard to find), and at least one node of high-quality copper or two nodes of low-quality. My reasoning for deprioritizing copper is because it's slightly lighter, and by the time you start to heavily rely on it, you're closer to auto-mining tech. This means that you can set up external mines without risking as much, and it's easier to carry it back to your base than iron would be.

Farming - you might want to look for a location where two biomes connect. This will enable you to work on swamp-arid or green-arid resources - each type of climate offers different plants, and thus different production options. Water takes a bit of time to collect, but you won't really need all that much of it. Having 50% is fine for a basic farm, but if your source is less than that then you might need to build another well and get another character to collect water from it.

Again, these can be addressed later in tech tree - "Wells III" will automatically collect water from the ground, so even a 10% water location can be done (just set up more wells), and any lack of fertility or specific climate can be addressed with hydroponics. It's just that your early-game might be more difficult.

Loot Depending on the factions or wildlife in the region, you can use them to your benefit. For example, if there is a lot of wildlife, you can use the leather that comes from killing them for crafting - that's a resource. If that wildlife is edible, you also now have access to meat - that's a resource. If there's a lot of human factions, you can research weapon smelting to slightly augment your iron - that's another resource.

Originally posted by Safehold:

Desert is pretty easy if you have animals, hivers, or scorchers as they can get free food from the constantly dying skimmers vs samurai battles

Protecting your settlement

Walls, gate, and turrets. With enough of these, most attacks will collapse before they become a melee. Those that do breach, will be bleeding and hurt, and easy to clean up (most of the time).

However, as you may have noticed, researching all of the above and building it takes a decent chunk of time. Time during which you will be attacked by wildlife and humanlife of varying degrees of danger. During this start-up period, you have 3 options:

1) Level up your settlers in combat skills, attribute, and equip them for battle. Basically have your settlers defend themselves. This will take time, and you'd honestly be near end-game for this approach to actually work. Even if you do so, chances are that you'll be overrun anyways, because your people need time to heal, and you may experience 3 attacks in a single day from varying factions/wildlife. That being said, there is another option:

2) Run away. As soon as you see a raid coming your way, have everyone run away to the safety of a city. Eventually the raiders will go away, and you can come back and resume your building.

3) Lastly, as someone suggested in the comments, you can hire mercenaries, and I'm a dummy for not suggesting it before now. Remember how I mentioned that money is important? Well it opens opportunities such as being able to hire mercenaries at a bar that will follow and protect you. They seem expensive, but if you have a steady profit stream via the approach I outlined earlier, it's a worthwhile way to spend your cats:

Originally posted by PKPenguin:

Shocked that mercenaries aren't way more prominent in this guide. I didn't have much issue at all with my first settlement precisely because I kept mercenaries on retainer, thinking of them as a necessary cost to keep my guys alive (and they were). They often pay for themselves, too, given how much money you can make off of selling the loot from the raiders they kill (mercs say that they have looting rights, but if you get to the bodies first then it's fair game).

You can't get cocky though, since mercs aren't invincible. I thought I would be fine to deny the Shek their tribute, then got my ♥♥♥♥ pushed in the next day when all the mercs went down immediately without downing any of the Shek warriors. You will definitely still lose fights with mercs, but you'll win quite a few too which makes a huge difference. Once you have walls with turrets on them you probably don't need mercs anymore, but until then they're a huge help.

As PKPenguin mentioned, you keep the loot from the enemies that the mercenaries kill, so you can sell it, and even make a profit depending where you are. As per the mercs not being invincible, just hire them and run away if the situation starts to look bad.

Final tips

What do I build first?

I've been asked if it's better to focus on resources or defenses first. Honestly, it's entirely up to you, but keep in mind that if you focus on building defenses first, there's no way that you'll have enough of them up in time for the first raiders that come to attack you (the same is true with the alternative)

The moment that you place the first building down, you'll trigger a new settlement, and the countdown to the first raid will begin. You will have to run away from the first group of raiders, and wait for them to leave your settlement alone before going back to it. You'll do this multiple times before you set up enough defensive firepower to defend yourself against them.

I really want to farm food

As I mentioned in the food section, be patient. Take it slow and easy, and don't hesitate to spend money on food, and don't rush farming unless you're sure that there won't be any herbivore presence around you. Your revenue stream is there to make the burden of hunger easier, so make use of it and put your mind at ease.

"Your money isn't worth anything if you don't spend it" - Marcus from Borderlands

My choice of outpost is making my life hell

Do you think that you can make it work if you train your guys up a bit or got some more research? If so, leave it alone and come back to it later - it'll still be there. If it's a challenge that you really don't want to keep dealing with, then salvage what you can, and relocate. You're still way better off than you were when you first started, and your guys are still alive.

I'm stuck in a specific city or area, can't get out without my guys dying

Can you sneak one or all of your guys into a city with a bar? If so, try looking around that bar for mercenaries that you can hire. They're expensive, sure, but you can use them for their combat skills to fight your battles for you. Even if they are weaker than the enemy, you can use them as a distraction and have your guys escape.

[Regalia]

also a note about the mercenaries and loot - like everyone in Kenshi, they have limited inventory space. Once their inventory fills up, they can't loot anymore. You see the same thing with police forces, and it's most easily seen in towns that have a lot of raids coming in from nearby bandit camps. The police/town guard/UC Samurai take weapons away from people they arrest before dumping them in a cell, but they never put them in storage. Eventually, their inventory fills up and they just start tossing the weapons on the ground when they disarm people.

[Regalia]

Great guide. One thing I would mention is that having a good size building (Stormhouse and longhouse are good balance between size and cost) in a nearby large town with a food supply and some beds/bedrolls in it is a great fallback strategy. It takes a little bit of setup, but if you have to run, you have a place to heal up in safety. This is extra important in towns where the bar doesn't have enough beds for your squads.

[Rusty]

once you get a martial artist with about 50 points in all relevant stats everything is free

[Tactical Goldfish]

Again, having both in a town simply makes the profits better, but having just one works too.

[Tactical Goldfish]

@Axefish kenshi.fandom.com lists them as General Shop and Mechanical shop. Here's the ones that match:
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Stack
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Drifter%27s_Last
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Catun
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Clownsteady
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Bark
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Sho-Battai
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Stoat
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Heft
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Heng

[Axefish]

i might just be dumb but could you list off which cities you meant in the securing a revenue stream section because i fell like ive benn through the whole major cities wiki looking for a match to the Trade store and Construction store criteria without a match

[PKPenguin]

@Tactical Goldfish
Feel free!

[Almasty]

I had mercenaries ask for more cats, then turn on me during a fight. Don't ever trust mercenaries

[Tactical Goldfish]

PK, you're right, I need to expand on mercenaries more, but at this point I'm kinda lazy.

May I just quote your comment in the guide? It's pretty covers your point perfectly.

[PKPenguin]

Shocked that mercenaries aren't way more prominent in this guide. I didn't have much issue at all with my first settlement precisely because I kept mercenaries on retainer, thinking of them as a necessary cost to keep my guys alive (and they were). They often pay for themselves, too, given how much money you can make off of selling the loot from the raiders they kill (mercs say that they have looting rights, but if you get to the bodies first then it's fair game).

You can't get cocky though, since mercs aren't invincible. I thought I would be fine to deny the Shek their tribute, then got my shit pushed in the next day when all the mercs went down immediately without downing any of the Shek warriors. You will definitely still lose fights with mercs, but you'll win quite a few too which makes a huge difference. Once you have walls with turrets on them you probably don't need mercs anymore, but until then they're a huge help.