A Brief Guide to the Strategic Layer

A short guide to managing anarchy and unrest on the strategic layer, and getting tons of intel.

The Two Things the Strategy Layer Does

The strategic layer helps you do two things:

• It makes you not lose when you manage unrest and anarchy correctly, by using field team abilities, field team passives, and do spec ops with your agents.
  
• Help you win on the tactical layer when you train your agents, buy new gear via the Supply screen, and
  
• It also gets resources for you, but resources only matter insofar as they accomplish the two above points.

The Uses and Importance of Resources

The three resources are credits, intel, and elerium. Each has distinct uses and these uses allow you to easily order them in priority.

Intel
Intel is used first and foremost to build and upgrade field teams, which directly contribute to your resource income. They also provide other benefits that will be expanded on later. Secondly, they are the currency used to shop in the scavenger market, your most reliable source of epic weapons and high tier mods.

Elerium
Elerium has exactly one use, and that's funding research in the Assembly.

Credits
Credits have only one use: buying things in the Supply.

This kind of trivially means that intel is the best resource to prioritize. Not only is it the resource that makes you more resources, it's also the resource that can buy the best guns and mods, and it's also the resource the helps most directly in managing unrest/anarchy. Security field teams both generate intel, reduce unrest, let you research a 2nd Spec Ops slot (if you have a spare agent, free resources), and field teams in general unlock the field team abilities. Intel is so ridiculously number one you almost don't even need to think about it.

Credits are a very distant second place. They directly buy items for your agents. As long as you have a single empty slot, or a single slot without the best item you can have in the slot, or a single unpurchased passive upgrade, you need more credits. A tier 3 Finance field team gives you access to 2 training slot. This might be my own personal playstyle speaking, but I don't see a point in it. I would never want to bench two members of my A-Team for the same mission.

Elerium is the unwanted stepchild of resources. You need just exactly enough to keep your Assembly researching the things you want to research. Once you hit mastercraft armor, guns, and the items you want, you can shut down elerium production. Technology field teams also subtract days on story missions, so they actually take away the amount of time you can tech up before the endgame. A tier 3 Tech field team lets you research a 2nd slot on the assembler, which is basically a joke*. I got mastercrafted armor without it and without a single Tech team at the end of the first investigation. Get your Elerium from Situations, Missions, and Spec Ops wherever possible.

*You'll generally be bottlenecked on resources, not research time, and somewhat counterinuitively, you want to AVOID progressing investigations as much as possible. If you do so, you'll have plenty of time to research.

Tech Tree

Here's the tech tree via reddit

In case the links dies or you don't want to click it, there are 5 basic branches of the tree, in rough order of importance.
1. Armor and breaching tools.
2. Guns and gun mods.
3. Field teams.
4. Faction gear.
5. Androids.

Armor is super important because the first tech, Modular Armor, gives Mach Weave with a ridiculous +50 Dodge. It's your endgame armor mod. It also leads you to your two passive armor upgrades (+2 health/+1 utility slot, and +3 hp/+1 utility slot/+1 armor) which are universal. They affect your entire team, including your benchwarmers, as soon as they're upgraded. Gun upgrades, on the other hand, affect 3 squad members for rifles and shotguns, or 2 squad members for SMG and pistols, since each gun type upgrades separately. Armor also contains the breaching tools and medkits for some reason, which can be clutch.

Guns are just straight +1 damage and +1 damage/+1 shred upgrades for each type with the first and second upgrades. If you want to keep killing/capturing enemies, you need these.

Field team research techs let you upgrade your teams higher, and once you've built a tier 3 team, you can research an extra slot for the strategic assignment slots. As mentioned, spec ops is great, the rest suck.

Androids only matter if someone goes down on a multi-encounter mission. Don't let that happen.

Research Order

Android Personnel > Modular Armor > Enhanced Armor > Breach Explosives > Enhanced (Guns) > Mastercrafted Armor > Mastercrafted (Guns).

Sneak in Improved Field Teams, Expert Field Teams, and Improved Spec Ops when it makes sense. Imp Spec Ops I wouldn't take until I'm really close to having someone permanently on the bench. After that, take what you like. Improved Medkits is good if you don't run Terminal or a lot of crowd control. Personally, I wouldn't take Weapon Optics since it's not needed to get advanced mods and the regular scopes/sights aren't worth it when they'll just get replaced, given how small their bonuses are. Faction gear is fun and effective, but AP/bluescreen will still end up being the best ammo, with tranq as a decent utility choice. Alternate grenades are nice.

Be smart and focus on the gun type that at least 2 of your agents use, but also be aware that some agents use their guns and some agents USE their guns. Blueblood will get a zillion times more use out of pistols that Cherub will, for example. If your team looks something like Verge, Shelter, Godmother, Claymore, you should realize that Verge hardly ever shoots, Shelter isn't that good a shooter, Claymore would really rather be tossing bombs, but Godmother LOVES introducing hostiles to plasma buckshot, so in this case pick enhanced shotguns. On the other hand, all of them would get good mileage out of enhanced armor, which is why we go for that first.

The core path to Mastercrafted Armor will cost you 26 days (with no agent assigned) and 220 Elerium. Tack on 4 extra days if you take my advice and grab breach explosives. Assuming you've already done Android Personnel, the path to your first Mastercrafted guns will take you 20 days and either 170 or 180 Elerium. Each additional mastercrafted weapon costs you 18 days and 145 or 155 Elerium, so don't feel compelled to upgrade all the guns in your squad to Mastercrafted, only the ones belonging to gun-focused characters.

I'm not here to tell you how to play the tactical layer, but since it affects budgeting, I'm going to straight up tell you that in addition to the credits needed for the armor and gun upgrades, you really want 240 credits for mach weave x4 and 50 credits for one tranq round, if not double that for two, so you want roughly 300 credits worth of crap after you've spent only 25 Elerium. On the flipside, immediately after spending 25 Elerium for modular armor, you spend 70 Elerium on enhanced armor, so I don't know what to tell you, the early game is just scraping for resources constantly.

Finally, I recommend training your guys before prioritizing stationing an agent in the Assembly. If you're bottlenecked on resources (and if you aren't, you're not tryharding intel enough), researching more dubious value 0 Elerium projects that cost more credits to buy gear from isn't going to help you. Training, on the other hand, is like getting enhanced armor early minus the extra utility slot.

Managing Unrest

Each sector has 5 levels of unrest. If they're filled up at the start of the turn, and they remain full at the end of the turn, you'll gain +1 anarchy. The city can contain up to 13 anarchy. When you earn your 14th anarchy, you lose. What causes unrest depends on which investigation you're on:

First investigation - the mission you don't pick gives +2 unrest, hidden purple missions give +1 unrest.
Second investigation - the mission you don't pick gives +3 unrest, hidden purple missions give +1 unrest, the situation you don't pick gives +1 unrest.
Third investigation - the mission you don't pick gives +3 unrest, hidden purple missions give +1 unrest, the situation you don't pick gives +2 unrest.

You can reduce unrest and anarchy through field teams, spec ops, and missions.

MISSIONS
I have observed experimentally that unrest is reduced when you do a mission in that sector that would otherwise overflow the unrest meter. Let's say that you're on investigation 2, so each unresolved mission gives +3 unrest. You have missions in a 0 unrest sector and a 4 unrest sector. If you do the 0 unrest mission, you cancel all 3 of that unrest successfully, so all is good. Also, you have no unrest to reduce anyway. If you pick the 4 unrest sector, you'll prevent the 1 unrest from upping you to 5, but since overflowing the bar has no effect as you're capped at 5 unrest. As a result, the game will refund you some unrest. In this case, I would expect unrest to decrease to by 2 on completion (2 is the amount of overflow).

This seems weird, but consider that if you have this scenario and you do the 4 unrest place, you cancel all that unrest but the 0 sector goes to 3. If you do the 0 unrest place, it stays at zero and the 4 only goes to 5. You can now use a field team ability on the 5 and buy yourself a whole extra mission worth of increase again, even if you only reduce it back to 4. The difference of 4 to 5 would be worth exactly the same as 0 to 3 unless they gave you an unrest rebate when doing missions in high unrest areas. So yeah, that makes sense.

Additionally, doing a final investigation mission where you kill/capture a faction leader gives -3 Anarchy.

FIELD TEAMS, PASSIVE
Level 3 Security Field Teams give -2 unrest every Friday.

FIELD TEAMS, ACTIVE
Vigilance - if you have at least 1 field team, you can reduce unrest in one district by N+1, where N is the level of the local field team. Cooldown of 4 turns. Needs 1 field team to unlock.
Quarantine - Freeze unrest for 1 turn in 1 district. Cooldown of 6 turns. Needs 4 field teams to unlock.
Dragnet - Resolve an extra Situation. Cooldown of 4 turns. Needs a level 3 field team to unlock. Note: this seems to only give half the rewards.
Major Crimes Task Force - Reduce Anarchy by 1, or 2 if you have a level 2 team in every district, or 3 if you have a level 3 team in every district. Needs a team in every district to unlock.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS
-Reduce all Unrest by 1 (5 days) (requires special agent or higher, a level 2 security team or higher)
-Reduce Anarchy by 3 (5 days) (requires senior agent or higher)

GENERAL STRATEGY
Basically always burn Vigilance, it's got the quickest cooldown and think about whether it's worth upgrading your Security field team for an extra reduction (i.e. does it have a hidden purple mission? Could you bump the reduction up to one higher than the missed-mission increase? Is there even enough unrest to take advantage of the extra reduction?).
Use Dragnet to resolve Situations as much as you can. It's free resources and avoids an unrest increase.
Save Quarantine for missions. By waiting out the situation day, you double or triple the amount of unrest avoidance you get.
Use Major Crimes as much as you can. If you have 0 anarchy, don't use it, but know that you're not playing aggressively enough with unrest.
You'll probably be able to start spamming Spec Ops around investigation 2 which is good, because that's when unrest starts becoming a semi-credible threat.
Don't be afraid of anarchy! Choose your missions based on what rewards you need, not on managing anarchy. The game gets easier as you go on, and many rewards become meaningless, so you'll find yourself naturally getting more conservative with unrest as the game progresses. If you have the choice between a good epic weapon and 1 anarchy, or 20 elerium and 2 unrest reduction, take the epic! Don't worry until anarchy hits 8 or so.

Building Field Teams

Security teams are the best, hands down. The only time I'd build another type is one or two finance teams to fill up the last empty slots and get Major Crimes Task Force going to manage anarchy. (every level field team costs 15 more intel than the last one of that type and level).

Generally, I would say go 4 security teams, level a team to 3, then continue to expand until every district has a security team. Then level them to 3 as quickly as you can, since level 2 sucks. Level 1 gives the best intel-on-intel returns, level 3 gives you the best unrest management, and level 2 only gives you extra intel during a situation if it's one of the two chosen. If both chosen locations have level 2 security teams, the second level 2 didn't actually get you anything.

WORK IN PROGRESS

This guide's a work in progress, I'm sure I have some bad info in here so just yell at me, just don't be too much of a jerk about it.

I actually just sat down to organize some thoughts and accidentally wrote a steam guide, so I don't care if you thumb up it or whatever, I don't have a youtube channel, or a long list of thanks to contributors. If you tell me to fix something and I do, your benefit is having a more accurate guide. This guide is my gift to you, and if you help to improve it, you've helped you, not me, so don't expect me to fall all over myself with profuse gratitude. Hopefully something in here helped you, now go have fun with Chimera Squad.

Zaphyr 4 lyfe!

[catobia427]

Interesting Thank You

[happyscrub]

For a new player, half of the info in this guide was all greek to me

[[FR] Medinoc]

Nice guide. I hadn't thought of the whole "dont bother with tech teams" thing, I always ventilated field team types (which helps keep costs down), naively.

However, I kind of disagree with "Verge hardly ever shoots". With a good scope, from turn 2 onwards he can 100% hit practically anything, so I had him shoot a lot... especially with the epic AR that grants Serial. Still, you're right in that Godmother definitely gets priority over him.

[Knight]

Nice writeup. I've been playing on Normal and I think it's been +2 unrest for ignored Missions, +1 for ignored situations after the first investigation. All the Missions I've seen also reduce unrest by 2 on completion in addition to preventing the would-be increase (down to a minimum of 0), which fits the values you observed in the first paragraph under MISSIONS.