REDCON Starter guide

Some tips for those struggling to win in REDCON

Miscellaneous gameplay tips

For the basics, you should read the official guide located in the steam guides section. This is the generic stuff that didn't fit under other headers

General gameplay, combat

• Mortars are the only weapon that can fire shredder shots, which are a big threat to your own crew. Watch for enemy mortar shots, see what rooms they are targeting and get your crew out of harms way.
  
• A single basilisk or hydra cannon is excellent for keeping a destroyed room dead
  
• The AI will usually stun shot and shredder any group of crew. Anytime you have crew bunched up move them if their room is targeted.
  
• The AI likes to prioritize destroyed rooms that are being repaired. Sometimes this can be to your advantage, keeping the AI focused on an already destroyed room can spare your other rooms from some fire.
  
• The AI will rush to put out fires, making it easy to bait AI crew into grouping up for stun shots.

Fort layouts, fort management

• When you have access to more layouts, I always go with extra power or extra crew. Since I run takeover setups I usually cannot spare any utility slots.
  
• Fort layouts are more flexible than you might realize; You can fit the 2 room heavy artillery into one utility slot and one weapon slot, it does not require two side by side weapon slots.
  
• When facing EMP weapons, turn off rooms you aren't using to conserve power. Armory and medical station are easy picks.
  
• When you get better at dodging fire and rotating injured crew to your safer rooms, you can run without a medical station
  
• An armory is not required to take over an enemy fortress, just take out the enemy armory to level the playing field. Or, using toxin and stuns you can kill off most of the enemy crew.
  
• You can quit any fight with no penalty before any shots are fired. You can see the enemy layout and then make changes to your fortress. After shots are fired, if you quit you give up any win streak you have going.

Money making/saving tips

This game does not give you enough money to try everything. With that in mind, here are some money saving and money earning tips

• Takeovers award the most money (+100-125 credits), so perform as many takeovers as you can. Even if the enemy has more crew, an armory, and tons of air defense; I assure you there is some way to perform a takeover. It's fun and satisfying!
  
• Save money by NOT buying missiles. They do not miss, but they are easily countered by air defense. They cannot switch between fire/poison/stun like some cannons can. They have too high a munitions cost, don't one shot any room, and take awhile to reload... too many drawbacks!
  
• Don't buy the CHARON troop invasion missile or the Clandestine Operations room. For their 2 room cost and really long charge times, they are not quite good enough. I have had great success with the fleet control room.
  
• Don't upgrade things you aren't using. I stopped using basilisk guns and small mortars, so I stopped upgrading them.
  
• Read about what upgrades do before purchasing them. Compare the power and munitions cost. Not every utility upgrade is worth it. The blast furnace costs more munitions with each upgrade. The medical room heals faster with each upgrade; I think it already heals fast enough.

Takeover strategy

A lot of my takeover strategy revolves around the following priority

• Kill the air defense control
  
• Kill any big threats or convenient targets like nuclear power
  
• Kill armory, or most of their crew
  
• Takeover

Killing the air defense
The key to making this easy has been bringing 2-3 ARCHON sniper cannons. These have greatly enhanced accuracy and can reliably hit even a deeply buried room. 2 hits leaves an air defense with less than 10% health, so you can often make this up with a beam weapon or the rest of your guns help to kill the AD in one volley.

Kill any big threats
Once the AD is down, I usually take out whatever feels most threatening. Tartarus mortars, sniper cannons, and any 2 room or larger gun is a good target. I often ignore missiles, fleet commands, CHARON troop missiles, and toxin ICBMs. My fleet command will have landed troops before these become a big threat.

Kill the armory or crew
This is pretty straightforward. Before your blimp deposits troops, you need to either severely outnumber the enemy crew or more simply have killed their armory (and keep your own alive). Troops with a supporting armory can kill at least 3x their number, and the AI usually comes at you single file upon landing so this is an even easier fight.

Takeover
Keep your fleet command alive until your blimp makes it to the enemy base. Keep the enemy air defense down. When your fleet command is down your blimp stops moving. If there's a danger of EMP hitting your fleet command, turn off some guns for extra power. Once your troops have boarded I usually set all my cannons to hold fire; friendly fire can kill your own troops, and you can still bring the enemy fort to zero hitpoints and win by annihilation on accident.

Defenses

Defense turrets

• Autocannon - Great against missiles and blimps. Weak against shells/mortars
  
• Beam - Great against smaller LEX shells from the hydra and basilisk, OK against missiles and blimps. Weak against mortars and heavy shells
  
• Flak - Great against mortars and heavy shells. Easily baited and overwhelmed, can be bad against missiles and blimps.

My preferred mix is 2-3 beams and 1 flak. The flak is positioned to take out mortars, usually in the leftmost position.

Defense rooms

• Scrambler room - Great defense measure, when activated all enemy shots for a few seconds will miss. You can use this to counter any devastating weapons like the capital killer or a big volley of fire. It's less useful against frequently firing weapons.
  
• Shield room - OK defense measure, less micromanagement required than the scrambler. Since the enemy frequently has an EMP cannon the shield is usually at a disadvantage.

I went through a lot of maps using neither room. I thought the scrambler was the better choice in most situations.

Overwhelming enemy defenses with volley fire

A lot of the game revolves around overwhelming enemy defenses. I found that the simplest tool for this was the hydra assault cannon. My layouts include two of them.

Prepare and launch a large volley (alternate fire mode) from each hydra. Fire your other weapons about 7-8 shells into the volley. That should discharge any enemy flak, break down any shield, and tie up any beam defense.

With the final fort I added a scorcher beam to the mix, targeted on a shield room if it was present or the air defense room.

Once defenses are down, the hydras can be switched to normal fire mode and used to help kill off rooms and prevent repairs in destroyed rooms.

Killing enemy crew; neurotoxin and stuns

I tried out shredder, flame, and neurotoxin shots to kill crew with assistance from stuns. I started out with some elaborate traps to kill multiple crew at once, but eventually reverted into much simpler tactics. I'll describe both;

The complicated setup to kill a lot of crew at once was satisfying, but is a real hassle to pull off. It became too difficult to use once the enemy started using shields or a lot of air defense; if one shell in this 3-4 gun combo is shot down or a miss the whole combo is a bust.

• Shoot a flame shot
  
• Wait 2 seconds for enemy crew to gather
  
• Shoot a stun shot
  
• Wait 2 seconds for stun shot to get a head start
  
• Shoot 2 shredders, or a single neurotoxin shot

It may not seem like much, but this is a pretty long window of time for something to go wrong; shields can catch a shot, or air defense to shoot down your shots, or enemy crew just do something unexpected. It also ties up more guns.

The simplest setup which I started using instead, was to just shoot a neurotoxin and stun shot at the same time. Any room that had two crew was a good target; that could be a repair crew or some of the heavier weapon rooms often have two crew in them. The downside here is that neurotoxin shots take a long time to load. The munitions cost of neurotoxin is offset by the fact that the setup is only using two special shot types.

I spent a lot of time killing crew in the early and mid game, but once the enemy started using shields this became more trouble than it was worth. I found more value in taking out enemy weapons and just letting my boarders do the killing. Using fewer specialty shots meant I needed less munitions overall as well.

[Moon Truther]

I need help, im stuck on a level that i cant get past, im useing fort rapter, mind sending some screen shots of the best layout?

[quackcrazycoco]

IRonicly the clandister operations is OP when you make a single OP super soldier and kill about 2 to 1 people before dying and plus your convert an enemy to your side, win win situation right their unless your don't have a enchanded or elite forces armor.