Combat

Combat basics:

One of the most common questions I see is "How do I do more damage?" or "How do I keep these wolves from tearing me apart?". We will start with the basics and then move on to the finer points.

• Gear up: As an individual, you can equip any melee weapon, ranged weapon and armor to increase your ability to survive a fight. We will go into more detail on Weapons and Armor below.
• Level up: As you level, you will also get combat skill points to make you stronger. Important information on this available at Combat Skills.
• Hire some help: Traveling companions are available all over the place. Gear them up so they can help you in a fight. More on this in Building a Team and further down under Advanced Combat.

First thing to do is figure out how to fight.

Look at the bottom left of the screen to see your team combat scores broken out by range. One of these will be higher than the others. Lets use Very Far for the purposes of this discussion. They are ordered from Very Close, Close, Medium, Far to Very Far.



As you explore the wasteland, you will see red target icons (or Bosses or other Players) on the map. When you get within 1 square you will see these targets appear in the bottom display window.



When you click on the enemy crosshair icon, it will open the combat interface like in the video below. The important parts are the combat power of the enemy on the far left (says ~?? in the video since my alt's Scout ability is poor), my combat power on the far right, the slider bar below those values and then the ATTACK button.



You will want to move the slider (default is Medium) left or right so that the range matches your best combat range and then Attack.

It is important to note, you won't always get your favorite range.

• The terrain you are standing in is the primary decider of what range you attack at. If you are standing in open desert, it will try to force combat to happen at Very Far. If you are in ruins, it will try for Very Close, Close or Medium depending on the type of building you are standing on.
• The next is your Scout. If your Scout skill is higher than the enemy, you will ambush them and get a favorable attack range.
• Last is your Speed skill. If everything else is fairly even, the team with the higher speed takes damage last.

Now that you know how to fight, we move on to fighting well.

1. Proper guns are only a part of the equation. A good 357 or Double-Barrel Shotgun are enough for a solo player to keep feral dogs and wolves from killing you. All of the guns and melee weapons are listed under Weapons. If you want to do real damage, you will have to check out Building_a_Team and the information on Teamwork below.
2. Armor is just as important. Leather armor can keep the feral dogs off, but you will need Quality Bulletproof Vests if you hope to survive the big fights.
3. Wearing gear like Binoculars or Thermal Goggles will make it more likely that you Ambush your opponent and fight at your prefered range. See more at Tools.
4. Another issue that can get you killed is fighting while you are injured. If you are injured, your combat damage drops by the same percent. If you are at 50% health, you only do 50% damage.
5. Keep your guns loaded! If a gun runs out of ammo, your combat scores drop off and can get you killed. You can reload your clips using the Craft interface.

Winning a fight

So you've probably killed a feral dog or two before finding this wiki, but winning comes in a variety of flavors.

1. Full victory with full drops: Overkill in this game is good.
2. Victory with some drops: Full XP, mid level drops, mid level ammo use.
3. Slim victory with no drops: Full xp, no drops, a lot of wasted ammo. This usually happens with close fights you barely win. A keen eye will notice that the harder the victory, the more bullets you use. If you find yourself barely winning a lot, get a better merc or a better gun and save yourself on ammo long term.

Losing a fight

At some point you will lose. Chances are you already have, but haven't seen the consequences because there are different levels of losing.

1. DRAW: Usually this will pop when you technically lose the attack damage comparison, but you had more armor and health. No xp or drops for you and you burned a bunch of ammo. Probably lost a small amount of health too. You probably won't notice, but your gear took a little damage too.
2. DEFEAT: This is where you lose both the damage contest and the health + armor contest. You lose ammo, a big pile of health and of course no xp or drops. Do this a couple times and you will definitely see gear damage.
3. DEFEATED: Worst case scenario. Not only did you lose, you died. Respawn back in the last town you were in. You probably also lost a merc. You will also notice if you got really hammered that all of your gear took noticeable damage too.

Advanced Combat:

Teamwork

1. Teamwork is the key to doing top damage. In the combat video at the top of this page, you will see my teamwork (49%) below my profile picture in the combat interface after I click Attack. The best you can get is 51%. This % is directly added to your combat damage during the fight. You will see that my combat score says 1210, but when I actually hit the enemy I do 1871 damage.
2. You will note that the math above isn't exactly what you would expect (1210 + 592.9 = 1803). That is because there is some random variance in both your attacks and your target. This can be as much as +/- 10%.
3. Train up your Teamwork score by running around killing enemies. Even if you get the perfect mercs with the perfect guns, your teamwork starts at 0%. If your merc/gun mix says you should be able to get to 50%, you have to keep killing targets until you train up your teamwork until it says you are getting 50%.
4. Next up is your mercs. Getting mercs is discussed in Building_a_Team, but we will discuss WHICH mercs to get for combat purposes in more detail here. Top damage kill teams have 5 total people, your main and 4 mercs. For best results you need a diverse team for a high Teamwork score. A typical team will have 3 members of your primary range and then 1 from each of 2 other ranges. (eg: 3 riflemen, 1 heavy and 1 sniper OR 3 CQB, 1 Rifleman, 1 Heavy ETC). Once you have your kill team together, you can go into gun choices.
5. Your kill team will have 5 guns. 3 from one range, 1 for 2 other ranges. If you throw random guns on the team, it will probably give you a Teamwork score around 35% unless you get lucky. Mix and match guns to get better results. The Teamwork bar that you can see in the Stats interface video above shows your current TW score and which way you need to get it to move to get to 50%. If you need the bar to move right, you need guns that do more Damage. If you need it to move left, you need guns with higher Suppression.
6. Each gun has different values for Accuracy, Suppression, Damage and Handling. If you need to improve your Teamwork score by 10-15%, you need to pick a different mix of guns. If you are at 45%, you can get Weapon Kits to customize the guns you have to get a few more % to get to 50% TW. You can see a full list of all guns and their values at Weapons.

Enhanced Battle Rifle

Star Aug

Grenade Launcher

The spreadsheet below is a quick experiment with some guns I had lying around. The first set up has a Teamwork score of 35% using basic guns and Tier 3 mercs. The Teamwork bar was left of center which means I need more Damage. I switch out the Hunters Rifle (Damage 70) to a 50c Sniper Rifle (Damage 95) and not only do I see a bump because it is a better gun, but it gives a bigger bump in Teamwork (up to 43%). This increased total damage by over 300 points at Medium and over 400 points at F and VF!

Stack Attacks

With towns that have walls with defenders and bosses running around that can do over 7000 damage, how do we players stand a chance? The answer is Stack Attacking.

The basic idea is you get a large group of people to help you. You get your gang together, they get geared up, each of them get their mercs together, all stand in the same square. A lead shooter then targets what you need blown up and fires. You will all fire at once and do more damage than any one player can do solo.

As you can see in the screenshot, the lead shooter will see the members of the stack and see their merc icons.


All the normal combat rules apply. You will want to pick range, etc before firing.





Hitting stationary targets like towns is fairly simple. Chasing down bosses is a different subject...

Boss Fights

Bosses are a great way to get top gear, good xp and entertain your gangmates... but also an easy way to end up dead if people aren't serious about getting ready, staying ready and following directions. Most bosses do way more damage than any one character can handle. Even if you are level 50 with top gear, top mercs, 51% Teamwork and ideal range, most bosses will kill a solo player in one hit. A list of the bosses can be found at the bottom of NPCs.

To kill them you have to find a boss, organize a stack and then talk some poor sucker into luring the boss to the stack. Once the rabbit brings the boss to the stack, the lead shooter takes the shot.

Find a boss:

Two common ways to find a target:

• Somewhat random search: Most bosses spawn in high Anarchy areas and will cause the Theme in any sector they are in to gain Anarchy. It makes sense therefor if you want to find a boss, look in high Anarchy areas.
• The other (better) source of information is Rumor Radio. Occasionally you will see weird messages in Global chat that tell of bosses like Wasteland Raiders, Jumper, Omega etc lurking in certain sectors. If you can get a party together fast and get there, you will find the boss there. You may have to search a few sectors around the sector named by Rumor Radio, but I have never seen him lie. If the boss isn't in the sector Rumor Radio shouted out, it just means the boss has walked off.

Organize a stack:

Getting 4 or 5 people to hire mercs, collect guns, train up TW, etc AFTER a boss is found will take waaaaay too long. If you want to be in the boss hunting business, you and your kill team need to always be ready. You don't have to have top mercs, top guns, etc if you have a lot of people who have done everything I covered in the Advanced Combat section. If you have a small group, you will want them decked out in the best gear available.

Luring:

Not all bosses move the same. Some have to obey the same rules we do, some can fly over mountains and water, some can jump 4 squares at a time. The general rule is that they will move 1 square every X seconds same as us. They can see us the same as we see them. All of them are aggressive and will chase players they see. Trying to avoid getting swatted while luring is a fine art. It will not work out for you every time.

Shooter

You can only shoot at bosses that are 1 square away. You have to be 100% ready long before the boss gets there. As soon as the boss is in range, you follow the combat rules above and fire with the rest of the stack to back you up.

Soloing a boss

It is possible in a couple special cases for a lone player to kill a boss. The easiest boss (Wasteland Raiders) can be killed by a single player with top gear and mercs. There are other special cases where a solo player can cause the death of a boss.

Town Attacks

Mostly the same as killing a boss except towns don't move.

Important differences:

1. Town attacks use 20% stamina per shot. Pack a big picnic.
2. Town attacks eat a ton of bullets. I have gone thru a Heavy Truck worth of ammo and food taking down a level 5 town.
3. Town Defense levels exponentially add to the amount of damage you will have to do to take the town. You need a big crew with good gear to even think about going after a level 4 or 5 town.

PvP

There will come a time where you will come in conflict with another player/gang and have to get your hands dirty. When someone is raiding your favorite salvage spots, attacking your camps, killed a friend, messing up all your hard work at a Goal, you need to know what to do.

The most basic thing is targeting. If you click on your targets names in the target window, it will open a screen to chat or send items. Instead you have to click the target icon next to their name. This will open the combat window just as if they were any other NPC. You will need to move quick as your target might not be keen on standing still while you are lining up your shot.

PvP is the final level of complexity in Combat. Up to now, we have only discussed Teamwork as being a way to boost combat damage against NPCs but we have not discussed Tactics. In PvP, Tactic is a critically important subject.

Long story short, Tactics are a rock-paper-scissors game between you and your opponent.

• Close wins against Scattered
• Flanking wins against Close
• Scattered wins against Flanking

If you are using Flanking and your enemy uses Close, you will do your normal Combat Power damage and your Teamwork bonus damage. He will NOT get his bonus TW damage during the fight.

If you are using Scattered and your enemy is using Close, you will do your normal combat power damage but none of your TW bonus. Your enemy however will do his normal combat power AND his TW bonus against you.

If you are both Close, neither of you get the TW bonus.

You CAN train up your Teamwork on all 3 tactics, but you will be splitting your total possible TW bonus by 1/3. Example: If you have guns and mercs that get you to 45% Teamwork and train all 3 Tactics, you will have a 15% bonus on all 3. When you attack NPCs you will only get 15% extra damage instead of the 45%.