How to enjoy the game if you are a somewhat new player:
-Do NOT play on difficulty above normal. This is the most important thing.
-Do not listen too much to guides. Most are made by half-crazy guys like me who have 2000+ hours in the game, and play in strange ways.
-Set your Constitution score to a decent level. Not 3. (Many guides tell you to do this.)
-To detect traps, have either:
A a decent perception score
B a decent traps skill
-For Depot A, craft or buy or find either a mutated dog or siphoner leather armor. They reist acid damage from the mutants. For robots/turrets, a tactical vest is good to use.
-Stealth is indeed great for exploring, if you use light armor. If you prefer heavy armor and tankiness, you can neglect stealth.
-You do NOT need to plan out your character in every detail!!
This is only true for maniacs like me who play on hard mode or worse. Have a rough idea of what you need and take it from there, and take advice with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Agree and disagree with the above:
-Do NOT play on difficulty above normal. This is the most important thing. <- absolutely correct, Underrail easy difficulty is what's usually considered Normal/Medium for other games.
-Do not listen too much to guides. Most are made by half-crazy guys like me who have 2000+ hours in the game, and play in strange ways. <- nothing wrong with playing blind. However the learning curve is actually pretty steep and could be overwhelming for a new player: no respec; need to understand how effective base abilities, skills and feats interact w/ each other; class specific good and bad feats (prime example: how would a new player even knows Perfect Scattering is garbage?); good (not even optimal) gear setup; armor penalty, resistance and damage reduction, etc, etc. A guide will point you in the right direction and and allow a newbie to ignore irrelevant aspects of the game related to a build. I will admit most guides are made by half-crazy guys, play in strange ways and yes, I'm one of them.
-Set your Constitution score to a decent level. Not 3. (Many guides tell you to do this.) <- strongly disagree, with the current most effective tactic available (META) being killing things as fast as possible generally the pro of having extra HP is not worth the reduction of damage output. Newbie with a high CON build will probably get CC to death and lacks the damage output to kill things as fast as possible.
-To detect traps, have either:
A a decent perception score
B a decent traps skill <- A good Motion Detection Goggles can allow you to have good detection score despite having low PER and zero traps skills.
-For Depot A, craft or buy or find either a mutated dog or siphoner leather armor. They reist acid damage from the mutants. For robots/turrets, a tactical vest is good to use. <- good advice
-Stealth is indeed great for exploring, if you use light armor. If you prefer heavy armor and tankiness, you can neglect stealth. <- even a tanky, low AGI char can be stealthy if you use a stealth armor set.
-You do NOT need to plan out your character in every detail!!
This is only true for maniacs like me who play on hard mode or worse. Have a rough idea of what you need and take it from there, and take advice with a healthy dose of scepticism. <- while true, a pre-made/recommended build will allow a newbie to ignore the char building part of the game while learning how Underrail plays - what works and what doesn't, general tactic, game mechanics, and gain foreknowledge for subsequent plays. The learning curve is significantly lower even when the player abandon the pre-made build half way throu the game and decided to play his/her own build. If you are starting everything blind it's very likely the player will be frustrated, overwhelmed by information overload, overly relying on cheese (caltrops, grenades, bear trap just to name a few) due to playing an unoptimized/bad build or even abandon the game.
<- Agree about taking advice with a healthy dose scepticism <- very true, please take my advices above w/ barrel of salt.
Some very general tips:
- Current Underrail meta strongly reward offense over defense. You want to kill everything as fast as possible. When presented w/ a choice between offense and defense, always go for offense. You want to hit as hard as possible while using minimal amount of resources, whether it's action point, movement point, ammo and what have you.
- The game is designed to have the odds stack against you. It's always a fight of many vs. you, all alone. To avoid dying, you want to scout any new area under stealth to learn enemies' type, positions, their patrol route and area layout. Most creatures cannot open door and you can attack rathound unmolested behind a closed fence. There's usually some sort of cover that will allow you to dodge enemies' line of sight, so use this to your advantage by ending your turn hiding behind walls/corner/rocks/etc. Running far, far way is another viable option - range enemies will now have decreased precision due to them being outside their weapons' optimal range; melee enemies can't hit you unless they are within melee range.
- Darkness range penalty: range precision takes a huge hit when attacking a target sitting in darkness. You can take advantage of this by ending your turn sitting in darkness. You can check yours and npc's darkness level by observing their portrait. If you are using range attack, make sure to use night vision goggles and/or have source of light such as fire near your targets.
- prep the battlefield, a few well-place bear traps and/or caltrops can significantly alter the flow of battle. There are three levels of fire burning on the ground, level 1 (incendiary grenade), level 2 (magnesium grenade) and level 3 (Napalm grenade). Enemies will usually attempt to go throu level 1 fire in order to attack you but are generally reluctant to walk pass level 2+ fire on the ground.
- learn how noise attracts enemies: use this to misdirect enemies to stealth pass them, or lead them into your traps/kill zone prep w/ caltrops, gas grenades and bear traps. You need to understand what weapons/attacks are silent, make low level of noise and stuff that are LOUD and act accordingly.
- Having a bad/unoptimized build can end up making combat a lot harder unnecessarily, make sure you are getting the most out of your class, try to maximize your damage output w/ your weapons, feats, skills, combat ulitities and traps. You can be soft-locked by playing a bad build.
- Split up your enemies and take them out in individual small groups. On maps with large amount of enemies, if possible, always try to take them out in small groups instead of fighting them all in one giant fight. Learning and understanding the noise system, NPC AI (how they will always try to disarm discovered traps and gas grenade within sight) behavior are viable assets.
- Understand NPC types: strengths and weaknesses will allow you to prioritized your attacks: your priorities are usually, in order starting from most dangerous to harmless: Psi > Sniper/Crossbow > Grenadier > Range > melee with exceptions here and there depending on your build and gear. You'll eventually learn this from experience and start hating on specific types of enemies ... *cough Death Stalker *cough
- Use crowd control: bear traps, caltrops (especially crawler caltrops), incendiary (fire on the ground area denial), toxic gas, flashbang, tasers, throwing nets, stun, acidic entanglement, etc. If you can CC an enemy standing right at the doorway and you are sitting inside a room you are completely safe. You can also use fire on the ground (fire everywhere except a one tile wide clear path) to control NPC behavior and make them take the long way around to you instead of a direct short path to attack you. Toxic gas grenade is worth a special mention as it's exceptionally effective in increasing your damage against organic targets
- Lastly, you don't need "cheese" to beat the game. sheepherder for example already posted lots of dominating viable build with the self imposed restrictions on not using grenades, traps, caltrops and any weapons that doesn't fit the theme of his build. However this is only possible when you completely understand how Underrail works, which, by definition, is out of reach for a new player. For me personally, I don't mind "cheese" as the odds are always stack against you and there's nothing wrong using tools available. However using too much cheese is a pretty unfun experience and I try to play by using damage grenade as an opener and than use class specific weapons/attacks to finish up fights while using flashbang, bear traps, caltrops sparingly, YMMV.
