Starter Guide

Starting a Game
When starting a new game, you will first choose the name, appearance, and starting equipment of a survivor that will represent your new settlement's leader.

After that, you will be able to choose several parameters for generating your new city. The default options are more than fine for your first game or two, so when you're ready, hit the Start tab and you're off!

You start the game with a small settlement consisting of:
 * Your starting survivor, plus 3 others (each with a skill different from yours)
 * 5 city blocks: a Police Station, a Farm, housing for 2 additional survivors, and a useless building (Office)
 * A handful of resources, the exact amount of which is determined by your game’s difficulty

Resources
The game has five main resources, but the two that will be most important to you starting out are Food and Materials. Food can be obtained in a variety of ways and is required to keep your survivors from starving to death. Materials are necessary for reclaiming additional city blocks, and building and upgrading them.

In order to obtain the resources to support your settlement, you will have to assign your survivors to various missions.

Missions
The game has a variety of different mission types, but some of the key ones include…


 * Scouting to see the contents of a city block and make future missions there safer
 * Scavenging to obtain Food, Materials and other goodies (such as weapons and tools) from buildings
 * Recruiting survivors to join your settlement
 * Killing zombies to make missions safer and also to allow your survivors to start...
 * Reclaiming city blocks to add their buildings to your fort

Carrying out a mission has an inherent risk to the survivors involved (except scouting), symbolized by a colored danger symbol on their portrait. As a good rule of thumb, you should try to only send your survivors on missions that have a green danger symbol: yellow, orange, or red symbols indicate a very high chance that your survivor could be injured or killed in the line of duty! You can make missions safer by sending higher skilled survivors on them, sending multiple survivors to do them together, equipping weapons, reclaiming area's so that the mission is not as far away or by killing zombies in that area. Mission type, number of zombies, defense skill, and distance from claimed territory factor into the danger. Keep in mind that killing zombies and reclaiming prevents accumulation of zombies. If it is safe, it is usually best to spread out defenders and builders to increase effectiveness (killing and preventing accumulation in 5 areas is better then just killing fast in one area while the other four areas have accumulating zombies). Use skilled survivors for what they are good at, and use the less skilled ones for scouting if you need to find survivors, goods, or food.

The first 50 days
A few useful tips when starting out:


 * Make sure you always have at least 3-5 days worth of food in your storage.
 * As you reclaim Houses and Farms, try to reclaim useful buildings along the way (Workshops, Schools, Hospitals, Labs, Warehouses, etc). You can convert the buildings, of course, but you won't have many builders at first.
 * Big grids (1x2, 2x2) are neat, as they give you access to many adjacent grids, and all of them are useful on their own right (e.g Big Farm, etc)
 * At first, you don't need much Ammo or Fuel. So feel free to trade them for as much Food as possible (be aware, though, that your Food storage capacity is 50, until you reclaim warehouses).

Day 1

 * Convert your "useless" grid as soon as possible with your first builder. You can pick Farm or Apartment, but it is best to build Farm, as you will be running out of food in the beginning.
 * Send the Leader on Recruiting missions.
 * Send the Scavenger to buildings with Food.
 * Send the soldiers to clear the way towards the nearest Farm or house (e.g Apartment)

Day 5+

 * Scout around and determine the shortest path to the farms and houses.
 * Recruit survivors, but keep your eye on Food reserves.

Day 10-15

 * Have at least one School. Train your new recruits (Level 1 Leader, Level 1 Soldier, etc) into Builders and Scavengers. Add more if you can. Eventually, you want to be able to complete scavenging / reclaiming average blocks within 1-2 days.

Day 20-30

 * Have at least one Laboratory. Use the School to train at least one Scientist, then start researching.

Day 50+

 * Your food supply should be stable at this point.

Victory
Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville has numerous victory conditions, but to win you must construct a City Hall, and then ally or defeat every faction on the map. To ally a faction, you must meet with them and raise the respect they have for you to 100. Then, you ask the faction for an alliance and solidify the alliance at the City Hall.