Starting a Game
When starting a new game, you'll first choose the name, appearance and starting perks/equipment of a survivor that will represent your new settlement's leader.
After that, you'll 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). Leader is arguably the easiest class to start with (1 extra survivor, can reliably recruit new survivors).
- 5 city blocks: a Police Station, a Farm, housing for 2 additional survivors, and a useless building (like an 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 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, 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, or by killing zombies in that area.
The first 50 days
A few useful tips when starting out.
General tips
- 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 it waste your time, and you don'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.
- Send the Leader to 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 will eventually have numerous victory conditions, but for the purposes of the beta, if you reclaim enough of the city to be given the option to construct a City Hall, successfully build one, and seal every factions fate as an ally or as history, give yourself a pat on the back: you’re a winner in our book!