* Firstly RNG as usual. It can be of varying difference how much seed containing trees you get, how the map outlay is, as in how easy it is to find a suitable place for your starting houses. Where you place your starting house matters a lot because you need access to fertile land, clay and stone and seed containing trees.

* Your two most important tasks are food production and water production.

* You will need to get your wheat farm up with the stove asap else your folks will starve.

* On this difficulty the 2 vegetable farms cannot sustain 3 folks, so you need bread. Then you need to have water produced, else your folks get thirsty and lose hp, and starve.

* Once you got the basics down, comes the hard part to get weapons made asap. Composite bows are the way to go. If you layed out your basic buildings in a certain fashion you already have some place you can hunker down and defend. This might or might not prove problematic.

* With a few tries i came to the conclusion that a good setup is to have a scout who has hobo and nimble as traits, because this way you start with lower footprint and he will have 20% speed boost, which at level 1
(take scouting) increases to 30%.

* For second character i selected a mathematician, but it turned out i should have gone with an experimenter. So i suggest this, take an experimenter with preferably additional bonus to crafting and/or research. A clever experimenter for instance is a good choice.

* For your last person i would suggest a gatherer. I took an artisan as he was a labourer gatherer, meaning i did not have issues with water for quite a while. Even if the character has no bonus to farming he can maintain the farms, till you get your second farmer.(should be about at latest your 8th or 9th survivor.)

* Experimenter is a very powerful character because he has access to both tech weapons and tech armour. Tech weapons is a life saver at the start because they have good range and good accuracy. The coil gun can
save your survivors till you reach ghosts as incoming enemies, and even then it is quite useful.

* On this level many of the classes showed their utter and complete uselessness.

* On later stages when you encounter ranged enemies(especially morax and fallen angels, but belials are deadly too) you want to take out enemies before they are able to reach you. For that you need damage bonus,
accuracy, attack speed and RANGE.

* So any character that has marksmanship, damage, tech weapons, sniper weapons is a good choice. Scouts, Fighters and Academics are the best choice to have but to be able to mine, quarry, chop wood, farm you might
need some other characters, for these usually artisans are a good option and for occult research occultists. Occasionally you might find some rare survivors with 3-4 bonus traits that compliment each other, in that case
you should take them. (Like a crafter clever, hippie:D)

* What you are looking for here though is usually spotter scouts, with an additional bonus to increase their quarry, woodchopping, water gathering etc. abilities. (Your very first nimble hobo scout will be the kiter during the hunt for tech:P With 40% running speed he is able to outrun nearly everything. And i could have made him have 60%) Hobo is also good, but what you need to know is that they will be reducing your footprint and doing the jobs in the base. Also do not make them into archers, not worth it, later on all of them will be using guided
snipers. (Beside the kiter scout.)

* From fighters, you need two kinds, one is the spook with brute(if they have berserker that is also good!) these will be your snipers, and the other kind will be soldier brutes. These will be your assault rifle-rs. Buffy is a good addition as an assault rifle user. She is not good to be a sniper for the looting team, and sadly Sam is also
a bit worse than a Spook with Brute.

* Academics: Experimenters. Being able to equip tech armour and tech weapons from the start is a huge bonus. Not to mention that being able to outrange a morax helps a lot.( If they get brute as well even better!) Leonard the medical officer, is one of the best addition to your looting team as an academist, since he can heal twice, and gets both tech weapons and armour and boosts to those.

* Artisan: Later on in the game they will be running your economy. Since all of them can use snipers(if you take rifle 4) they can help a lot with defense. Elsewise you make them what is needed. Miners, gatherers whatever. Since i made all of them use guided snipers eventually, i took rifles till level 4, resilient to level 4 (dirty fighting) and something else, mineing, crafting …to level 4. This way they are specialists in one field and decent in base defense too.

* Farmers: Botanist academics, survivalists(SAMXD), are a decent choice. With 3-4 farmers you can maintain all your farms and produce enough food.

* The unique survivors sadly in this difficulty are mostly not as special and useful. Buffy, Inara and Leonard are the most useful ones in looting team, all the other lack the edge to be useful.edit: and forgot about John. Sadly did not aquire him yet.

* Samurai-s, defenders, priests and engineers are just not good enough even for defense.

* The most important thing here is range. So unless you have a very high armoured defender, or very high evasion samurai, melee is nearly non-existant.

* Since range is the most important, there are two items you should keep an eye out when a trader comes. The olympic bow and the laser rifle. Neither of these require ANY KIND OF TRAITS. And they have good range(8) and special shot, which can be a life saver till you can get your economy running. Also buy any vegetable and wheat(especially wheat) seeds you find at traders, you occasionally have to even save scum to get the seeds, as at the beginning you will have a hard time obtaining these.

* Also try to wall yourself in as soon as possible. Find the part of the map where therer is no fertile land and make the labyrinth entrance. I made it to have 6 long paths(about half the map vertically) and is more than enough.
 

Additional Tips

* To avoid resources spawning in between your barricades, make roads on them. That will prevent them to spawn between your barricades. Having a long killing field among your barricades can make it impossible for your quarry workers, lumberjacks to aquire the resource there. But if you put down a stone path there, they will not spawn there. Also stone path does not increase the speed of anyone using it. Not demons not your characters;)

* If you want you do not even need to go out to loot that much, allthough it is worth it xp wise. You can start growing pumpkins which sell for 5 scarps each, and you can mine…aluminium which sells for 20 and can be
researched fairly early. Aluminium can be located via the geological station. Having excess wheat and water means you can make alcohol. And alcohol and aluminium makes batteries. Batteries can be sold for 160
scraps. And you can produce quite a lot with a dedicated crafter between trader visits.

Author: David K.