Caustic Sarcasm's Advanced Guide to Unfair Difficulty (0.8)

The purpose of this guide is to educate players attempting to play the new "Unfair" difficulty. Strategies that work in normal difficulty will struggle to find success here, given that enemies have more AP, vision and damage. In addition to covering basic strategies, we will also touch on more nuanced strategies, so beginners will probably not find this guide helpful because I'm going to assume you already know all of the game's systems.

The .8 Update

The .8 update reworked many systems in the game but the most notable are the following:

Unfair Difficulty

• The reason you clicked on this guide, Unfair gives all enemies 1 additional action, additional vision range and deal 20% more damage.
  

• You start with 2 random classes and a few random mercs. Francis is always given to you if you choose to do the tutorial mission and he is always a Scout of Hades.
  

• If a merc dies, you cannot reprint them for free, you will need to secure another mind chip, which is a pain considering the trading changes. Effectively, this adds a true "game over" to Quasimorph
  

• You're starting equipment is also randomized, and yes, this means you will start the game without a welder, which means you cannot craft things. Prioritize getting this ASAP. Trading changes made them easier to come by.
  

• You are given the AnCom Data in addition to your starting gear, which you can trade to any faction.
  

• Unfair also gives factions a bigger power budget, particularly at the beginning of the game. Missions will instantly spawn in mid tier units and it will spawn a lot of them, I've seen 30 enemies per floor on my first mission of my new save after I skipped the tutorial. You can make the early game smoother by selecting the "difficulty curve" option when customizing your difficulty settings.
  

• You cannot evacuate from any mission early, you must complete the mission objective.

Armor Rework

• In the previous patch, armor applied a flat reduction to all damage taken. This meant that as long as you geared properly for the mission, the player was very unlikely to die because attacks would only deal like 2 damage tops. That is still semi achievable this patch but not without some class modification.
  

• Armor now provides percent resistance on what appears to be a logarithmic curve where the x-axis is the amount of armor you have and the y-axis is the amount of resistance it provides. Below is a generic logarithmic curve.
  
  

• This means that the first couple dozen points armor are the most impactful. You can a solid 50% damage reduction at around 28 armor points.
  

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• On Paper, 50% seems fantastic but I can assure you that it isn't as strong as it seems.

Trading

• As of right now, we can no longer trade for item chips or merc USBs. In fact, you can't get any faction specific items from trading anymore. The only source for these items are mission rewards. Highly recommend that when you start your save, you increase mission rewards to the max the slider allows.
  

• Instead, we can now trade for other barter items, or some select guns/armor. Obviously, what a station has to offer depends on what it is producing.
  

• Prioritize trading at stations that have resources for ship upgrades. Conveyors, phones, research stations. I'd prioritize getting the recycling upgrades and capsule upgrades.

New Fundamentals

Quasimorphs normal gameplay loop involves breaching into rooms by opening doors, but because enemies have so many action points and deal so much damage we need to rethink our strategy. Sprint peaking still works very well, but opening a door against an enemy with four AP almost guarantees massive damage. Against an enemy with an assault rifle, it nearly certain death due to their armor penetrating qualities. One thing that remains the same, is that the world burns. You can keep using your fire strategies to clear floors.

Avoid Opening Doors

• As I stated before, walking up to doors is virtually a death sentence. Even if you don't open it, someone with 4 AP on the other side might. Get far away from it, then just blast it down. Make sure you have a corner to sprint peak around or be behind cover.
  

• We can expand upon this strategy by also blasting down walls even if they are out of vision. If you can aggro enemies in other rooms that gives you a huge advantage because you can easily funnel them.

Always Get Behind Cover

• Get behind big boxes or barricades that you can fire over the top of. Both provide massive benefits to dodge. This strategy is so good I'll often dig into the wall next to boxes to improve my firing arc. In fact, I'd rather be behind one of these than sprint peaking corners, because enemies won't actually walk towards you, they just shoot and miss.

Vision is a Luxury

• Following up on my previous point, you should be shooting at enemies even if you can't see them. Make educated guesses on whether or not you think there are enemies down a hallway you can't see the end of. Spoiler, it's almost all the time. Hold shift and shoot, combine this with cover or sprint peaking to ensure your safety. You don't want some prick with a rifle to blast you just as he runs on screen.
  

• We can also expand this point to clone vision. Some clones only have vision range 7 which means that most enemies will actually shoot you from out of your sight range, prioritize getting vision range on your clones to 8 or 9.
  

• Lastly, take advantage of the ship's scanner upgrade. You can watch the fog of war for opening doors and spreading blood stains. You can also use it to confirm whether or not you hit something out of sight range by looking for new bloodstains, amputations or corpses.

Pain is the Game

• Losing an action on your turn due to painshock is absolutely devastating, especially if you have some sort of bleeding wound. You must find a way to mitigate this. The most obvious solution is getting Max's "Feel No Pain" character perk, but you can also increase your pain threshold (not very resource efficient) or stack loads of dodge.

The Most Dangerous Weapon Class and Damage Type

• The award for most deadly weapon this patch goes to the assault rifle. All assault rifles have innate 20% armor piercing so long as the weapon is not out of range. This calculates before damage is done, so if you have 60 armor you will be getting your armor reduced by 12 to 48. And because you are taking more damage you are taking more wounds (3.5% chance to take a wound per point of damage) and weapons that build status effects will stack them faster (Radiation Poisoning, Shock, etc). Most assault rifles also have a 4 or 5 round burst. The damage adds up quick.
  

• The award for most deadly damage type goes to shock, and it's not even close. An AnCom AEV assault rifle will shred you, even if you have 80% shock resistance, and then it will stun you if you somehow survive. If that happens, prepare to eat another 3 four-round burst, which will probably shock you again.

Class Perks Strategies

Because we are playing on a harder difficulty, some class perks that already shined in normal will shine brighter here. We are going to be prioritizing defensive options. We can get kill power by upgrading our guns. First I'll be listing 4 perks I think are "meta" then I'll give some options for your flex slots.

Meta Perks/Required

• Combat Focus is the pinnacle defensive perk. Provides 100% dodge at max rank allowing you to survive scenarios that would be unsurvivable otherwise. It's a "get out of jail" free card that comes in clutch when you've overestimated your safety. If you are unconviced, the following video will prove its effectiveness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1npmue9Tiw
  

• Hardened is probably a controversial pick in most people eyes, but I believe that it is the best-in-slot defensive perk after Combat Focus. At max rank it provides 40% increased resistances which, considering how deadly armor penetrating weapons like rifles are, makes the perk almost necessary. In late game gear, this will make you very tanky. Hardened plus Combat focus and Warlord Armor makes you incredibly hard to kill.
  
  *** Why hardened is good:
  With full Warlord + Veteran chest + hardened, the player has 109 piercing resistance. Factoring in rifle penetration (20%), this gives 109 * .8 = 87 piercing resistance which is 89% damage reduction.
  With only full Warlord + Veteran chest, the player has 78 piercing resistance. Factoring in rifle penetration (20%), this gives 78 * .8 = 62 piercing resistance which gives 79% damage reduction.
  
  You are taking 11% damage in the first example, and 21% in the second, that means having hardened halves your intake if you are in Warlord + Veteran chest.
  Assuming a rifle deals 300 damage flat to the player:
  300 * .11 = 33 damage with hardened
  vs.
  300 * .21 = 66 damage without hardened***
  
  Not only are you reducing damage, you are also reducing your chance to get wounded. Wounds have a 3.5% chance to generate per point of damage taken in a single attack, but this percent is additive. For example, if you take 14 damage from a single attack, you will have a 14 * 3.5% = 49% total chance to be wounded by that one attack.
  
  

• Athletics improves survivabilty by making you more reliable. The penalty from sprinting is nasty and with how much you are going to be sprint peaking Athletics becomes the best way to "increase" accuracy. Spending points clone modification points on accuracy is very expensive considering the clone modification is the best place we can get survivability (dodge, health, pain threshold) but do consider it if you have the resources.

Flex slots

• Personal choice leads me to selecting Achilies' Heel as my next perk. 25% additional penetrations on assault rifles goes hard. And giving penetration to LMGs and Snipers is also crazy strong. Additionally, it doesn't appear to be affected by weapon range. So no matter the distance you will always have armor pen, which is great for our "killing enemies out of sight" strategy. I'd slot this into meta perks if it didn't limit the types of weapon you would want to use.
  

• Caution gives a crazy amount of kill power for taking up only 1 perk slot. You will shred high HP enemies via wounds or raw damage. This is my personal choice for my final perk slot.
  

• Insanity is a great offensive/defensive option. You no longer get regen from it and you'll only get like 10 resistances. Increased damage and health are good but forcing your Q meter to like 200 by using a pact to start benefiting from Insanity can cause your floor to spiral pretty quickly and if you haven't cleared that many enemies, things can get bad. Carry morphine or alcohol to control the Q meter. Note that below 100ish on the Q meter, you actually lose stats.
  

• Pain immunity is a great class perk if you aren't using Max's "Feel No Pain" character perk. NOTE: THE PAIN IMMUNITY CLASS PERK DOES NOT GRANT IMMUNITY TO PAIN. You can instantly staunch bleeding, which stops you from taking additional damage (from bleed) that might throw you over the pain threshold and cause you to get stunned.
  

• Pocket Artillery is a great perk if you find yourself using 7.97 a lot. It's even better if you are using a 7.97 sniper rifle with two round burst. Sniper rifles always inflict a wound if they pierce, and they have a bonus chance to pierce. This means that you pretty much deal 2 wounds every time you shoot someone, and both of those wounds have minimum 8 bleed on top of all their other negatives. Because enemies in Unfair have minimum 2 AP, they will take at least 32 damage per round that is unaffected by resistances. Unfortunately, this perk virtually locks you into using 7.97, otherwise it would definitely be meta.
  

• Immune Response provides a passive -20% chance to be wounded and is something I've been experimenting with recently. I need more time with it to solidify my position on it but I am enjoying it. I'm not sure exactly how this perk works but I assume it's additive with the wound calculation I discussed earlier. For example, 14 damage taken in a single attack is a 49% chance to be wounded. Immune response would just subtract 20% from that for a total of 29% chance.

Clone Modification

When we are modifying clones, we are mostly looking for ways to increase our survivabilty. This is because the value for the cost is insanely high, and its the only place you can upgrade some of these stats.

HP

• By far the most useful and most cost efficient stat you can upgrade. You get 10 HP every time you upgrade and you cant really increase HP outside of one or two perks.

Dodge

• There are arguments to be made for dodge stacking, particularly if the clone has high base dodge already, only problem is how much you need before you start feeling its effects, and also weight really ♥♥♥♥♥ dodge. If you are going to play a dodge build, consider siding with Sunlight Coven for their new backpack. It's a Helper backpack but it has another row.
  

• EDIT: After playing around with dodge, I found it reasonably effective even without stacking it to absurd numbers. I have around 10% dodge with full Warlord and gear, and I still dodge quite a few shots. After thinking about it, I believe this might be because the game is balanced around you having negative dodge. If that's the case, enemies might have between 60%-80% accuracy. Dodge is a flat modifier to accuracy(confirmed by devs), meaning a character with 10% dodge receiving an attack with 75% accuracy would have a 75 - 10 = 60% chance to be hit. But because we are carrying so much loot/ammo/armor, we would normally have around -30% dodge from our weight penalty. This would give the character a 75 - (-30) = 75 + 30 = 105% chance to be hit. Of course, I don't actually have the numbers for enemy accuracy, I'm just making an assumption. But my experiences with dodge tells me that we shouldn't neglect it completely. Even getting dodge to 0% with a full inventory would have quite the impact on survivability.

Accuracy

• Although I haven't personally added to this stat due to lack of resource, I can imagine that it can really alleviate the cost of upgrading weapons. I add accuracy to almost every single one of the guns I can craft on because I value reliability, but that eats into how much damage you can add to the gun. By the way, weapon and armor mods have a cap to them now, but I don't think that clone modding has one. So this is something to consider.

Vision

• 8 or 9 is good but get 10 if you lack the scanner upgrade.

Character Perks

• Outside of "Feel No Pain" and "Evasion Master" I struggle to see the value in most other perk options. I think that there is an argument to made for increased weapon range but all the other ones are pretty limp. The cost effectiveness of the former two outweigh pretty much any other option.
  
  Percy: Why is he good?
  
• Percy often gets thrown around as a good clone, but less experienced players tend to misunderstand his strengths. They come from his stat block, 150 HP and 18 pain threshold. Though he lacks in accuracy he makes up for in being an early game bruiser. He allows more room for error with his high HP, pain threshold and his character perk. What people don't understand is that his character perk does not scale well. Unlike hardened, which provides a percentage of our resistance as additional resistance, Percy's perk provides flat 10. Think back to our rifle example. With full Warlord + Veteran + hardened, we get 109 pierce resistance, which provides 93% damage reduction. Adding 14 more resistance (10 * 1.4, Percy's perk * Hardened) gives us 123 piercing resistance, which is 95% damage reduction. Even factoring in rifle penetration, its only a 2% difference; 123 *.8 = 98 total resistance which is about 91% damage reduction. Compare that to the 89% damage reduction we were already getting. 2% damage reduction is not worth the perk slot. There are far more cost effective perk options that exist in the mid-late game.
  

• It has been brought to my attention that Percy's perk is more valuable than I originally thought. Instead of looking at raw percentages, we need to look at effective HP(eHP) values. The formula for this is total health / (1 - x) = eHP, where x is our total damage reduction. What this formula is doing is seeing how many times we can take our total HP as raw damage and survive. Let's assume we have 150 HP and 75% resistances to a damage type. Think about this logically, if we take 150 raw damage, we resist 75% of it leaving us with 37.5 damage taken out of our 150 HP, which obviously is 1/4 of our total health. So we can survive 37.5 damage, reduced from 150 raw damage, 4 times. Multiply the raw damage by four and you get 600, which is the number of raw HP that is needed to survive 150 damage 4 times, which becomes our effective HP against that damage type. It's simply a ratio.
  
  So instead of having to think real hard about that again, just use the formula total health / (1 - damage resistance) = eHP, and as you can see, 150 / (1-.75) = 150 / .25 = 600 eHP.
  
  So, what about this made me wrong? Let's revisit the old rifle pen calculation with Percy's perk and without. With full Warlord + Veteran + hardened, we get 109 pierce resistance, which provides 93% damage reduction. Adding 14 more resistance (10 * 1.4, Percy's perk * Hardened) gives us 123 piercing resistance, which is 95% damage reduction. Factoring in rifle penetration,we get 123 *.8 = 98 total resistance which is about 91% damage reduction. 91% resistance gives us 150 / (1-.91) =1,667 eHP. Compare that to the 89% damage reduction we were getting without Percy's extra resistance. 150 / (1-.89) = 1364 eHP. Big difference, even from that 2%. It could be argued that it with enough raw hp it would be overkill, increasing your HP to 250 increases your eHP to 2778 and 2273 respectively, but that's not the point. The main thing I want to get across is that I was wrong. Thank you to those in the discord who reviewed my work, I greatly appreciate it.
  
  ***EDIT: Also note that these calculation don't factor in dodge or enemy accuracy, it assumes you are getting hit every time. Effective HP is actually much higher.

Early Game Strategies

Early Missions

• At the very beginning of the game, it's very hard to execute a few of our fundamentals due to lack of ammo. Busting down a door or two can eat into our ammo reserves and there won't be enough enemies with enough guns to replenish our supply. Hell at tech 1, Church of Revelation missions don't even spawn guys with guns.
  

• To avoid scenarios like this, I actually like to pass time before I take any missions, allowing factions to increase their take and power budget. I typically skip around 90 days before taking on a martian mission.
  

• Try to search out infiltration missions and control missions. Infiltration missions often spawn in enemies that are from higher tech levels than the factions current tech, so you can get access to mid/late game gear pretty quickly. Control missions are relatively safe given that the enemies have to funnel towards you. Also, some control missions have crates that have a good chance at spawning welding machines for the conveyor upgrade, which is the main reason to do them in my opinion.

Early Barons

• It should come as no surprise that barons are much more deadly on Unfair, and early game can be kind of miserable against them.
  

• For the melee barons, I try to create a circuit on the map by digging through walls. Then the only thing I need to do is land a bleeding wound on him, then run like a little ♥♥♥♥♥ for a hundred turns or so.
  

• For the Venus Baron, I don't think our strategy changes that much. We are just sitting behind cover and man fighting him. I'd suggest you drop your loot somewhere safe on the map before summoning him to get some extra dodge chance. Oh, and fight him away from blood tiles, you don't want to get nuked by the "Thirst of Tezctlan" pact. Though later, you can tank it if you have enough piercing resistance.

Additional Content

Uncut Late Game Unfair Mission

WORK IN PROGRESS

More stuff to be added

[TURNING JAPANESE]

Peak

[Fatass]

Unfair truly is THE quasimorph experience of all time lmao

[Caustic Sarcasm]

@E altar I personally haven't run into a scenario where my gun completely broke. Make sure when you are using electronic weapons you only repair them with microchips or capacitors cause they lower max condition by 5 instead of 15.

[E altar]

i mean ... less weapon degrade is a life saver considering just how many enemies there are