I keep reading about players struggling to find resources. Resources can be easy to acquire and plentiful. Here are some methods:
(As a minor point, time is the most valuable resource as it can’t be replaced.)
Haven defence missions give resources as rewards. They will also give your soldiers valuable training. Hopefully, you will also be able to learn the location of a Pandoran base (nests are quick and easy at the beginning).
Research will provide resources on many topics. Ignore the research that does not give resources at the beginning, unless it’s more important. Examples are like to provide weapon technology or story development of the Phoenix project.
Question marks (?) on the earth globe map. These typically always give resources unless it’s just another haven at the beginning of the game. So to preserve time, it’s vital that a 25%+ plus relationship with the three factions is achieved. Which means defending havens (other factions won’t give you negative ratings at beginning of the game) = more resources, and more political favour with different factions.
Once that you have favour of 25%+ with all three factions everything becomes much easier. Havens with little blue '?'s are waiting to be visited as well as the other ? locations. The blue ?s are a new feature and incredibly useful. They will give you more ? locations or a dilemma question which usually results in more resources or favour if the question is answered appropriately. Be empathic to the locals.
So the regular ?s occasionally they are ambushes (useful for levelling up novice soldiers), but also resources collection missions, soldier/vehicle rescue missions or just search an abandoned area for more free resources. There are the bonus resource missions with the additional green leaf. Don’t go loaded up to these missions because you need plenty of space to collect everything up including ammo and weapons.
After collecting weapons and ammo from various source, depending on your research and gaming style there are plenty of items that you don’t need. Scrap them and get the resources. They really do add up!
Food production is available once you have 50%+ favour with the Cult of Anu. These are really worth it. With plenty of spare food, trading of other resources becomes very easy.
Synedrions give a better exchange for tech and New Jericho with materials.
Steal your first additional aircraft. This will save resources and time which will allow you to create a second squad of soldiers. Remember at the beginning of the game, the Pandorans are easy to kill, so even armour is not essential. But each soldier will get experience. Use the second ship to discover more blue ?s and the bigger white ones.
Do Not waste resources in the early game with lots of explosive weapons. Bullets are much cheaper! Medkits are expensive, use a hospital if you can.
Only spend on what is essential. The world has been ravaged, so don’t invest in expensive toys until you can afford them.
Open up bases slowly in the correct places. Where you need access to other parts of the world or near red mist patches on the planet.
Don’t waste resources and time at the beginning trying to go after the new DLC LoA. It costs too much until your soldiers have experience and a comfortable amount of spare resources.
Bionic technology is very expensive. Don’t rush out to spend resources on it. It’s not that special and shiny toys in this game are expensive. Wait until it’s all going spare.
Towards the middle of the game after keeping the havens safe and building a few food production plants, resources are easy to acquire. If your still short, start defending havens from other factions.
Three ships full of soldiers is a minimum recommendation to allow the defence of havens, bases and moving the story forward. I’ve been playing on Hero level and find that I have plenty of resources to do what I like towards the end of the game. But protect the Havens!
Thanks for reading this far and I welcome any comments.
Resources are very thin. I could not make armor and weapons to my new soldiers. Even late game, you got always something to take your resources. There are tons of missions which gives you nothing and if you use explosive, you just get broke very fast.
Nice guide, OP, really. I have to explain why it’s not always easy though. I do everything you say in my campaigns normally, the only checkbox I usually don’t tick early on is salvaging equipment before I kit out my first 2 teams. Oh, and I don’t steal aircraft. This one makes a big difference. This needs to be a valid option, though. Currently it is, but the game gets way harder than the other way around, and that’s why I think attacking havens should have worse consequences (but let’s not get into this topic).
The thing is that you’re always tied to the gods of RNG, and also to changes to the game’s balance. As an example, in my current necro/LotA campaign I’m almost unable to progress my reputation with factions, and that makes all the guide fall apart. Why is that? I mostly am not getting haven defenses. This shows how much they’re the real backbone of your progress. Initially I got a few with Anu, progressed to 25%, but then I’m in february already and cannot reach 50%. I just reached 25% with Synedrion, and I’m at 1% with NJ because I never got a HD for them. I’ve explored the entirety of what was revealed to me of Africa, Europe and Asia, have started going into North America, and have 7 bases with radars in key locations so I can move around in the entire world. They also cover most mist points. I’ve had only 2 nest missions in the first mist near my first base, and none else. I guess pandorans where attacking mostly NJ and SYN (before I could reach 25% with them now) and so I didn’t get the memos.
In my previous playthrough on cthulhu, I was at 90% with SYN at this time, more than 50% with NJ, and more than 25% with Anu.
In a game before that one, I had a situation where I started in South America and there were almost no Anu havens. I couldn’t create a relation with them, and when I finally got to Europe and Asia where there were a lot, I could not hire berserkers anymore because all the havens had priests (I think this one has been fixed).
I’m not complaining about the RNG gods nor saying that these bad luck situations should be changed (though HD’s still need tweaking, they can’t be this random), I’m just trying to explain why some people don’t get invited to the resource fest.
So interestingly you have come across a problem that I was aware of and had initially started writing a solution for in my guide. Ultimately, I decided not to include it because my guide was about gaining resources and not other strategies.
So as @Yokes has previously explain very eloquently (and I hope that @Yokes can copy in the link of the explanation here), it is this.
When there is a mission on the other side of the world that you simply don’t how the resources to keep opening up bases to get to, you need to spend resources on opening up a base as close to the mission as possible. The next step is to steal or make an aircraft and send it to this new base. Typically, it’s your second aircraft in the early game and then send all new soldiers to this base too. It’s all about the magical teleport feature that exists in the game that doesn’t really make sense at the moment. For example, if you buy a soldier from a haven and you aircraft is full, one is given the option of where to send/relocate the soldier to. Send a few newly acquired soldiers to this location and then theoretically, one has a new force to fight in this location. It speeds up your search for resources at the same time. Try it. Although it may seem a big investment, it really (currently) does work. Good luck!
When you play at hero (worse at legend), it’s very hard to make a functional 2. group. For this reason, the world is like 2 big game ground, as America and Asia/Africa. I am nearly end game and I could not yet go to the america and whole America is nearly dead.
For a second squad, you need to get them from factions with expensive way or you will get your own recruits which looks cheaper but you need to manufacture gear to them. Trying to make 5 soldier like this would be expensive.
With 2 DLC, my only squad never stops… jumps from mission to mission and they became lvl 7 very later. If I have a second squad, I need to play much more and probably one group would be much weaker. I don’t count weapon/armor/gadget updates for that team.
Yeah, it’s hard getting a functional B-team. With my current campaign I just recruited an entire squad from scratch in the new continent. Started in India, then took the base in Central America and built Training Facilities there, then recruited new soldiers and sent them to that base instead. Finally I built a Manticore there as well.
Manufacturing gear is a pain, but you can give them the hand-me-downs from your A-team. My A-team got the New Jericho armour as I produced it, while the B-team got the Odin and Banshee armour and the Firebird rifles that I’d used in the early game.
(Oh, and re: the OP, never build Food Production Facilities. They’re terrible. It takes 53 days for them to break even, which is long enough to play an entire campaign from start to finish.)
Yes, I recognise this problem. What I would say to maximise your situation with the problem is this:
At the beginning try if possible to recruit from the Synedrions because they provide best armour which you are paying for in the price on Hero level. The weapons that they start with are not too important because the Pandorans are not very strong. So a sniper needs a sniper rifle and pistol etc, assault just a standard rifle.
2)But the sooner that you have second squad of soldiers, the better. This is because the early part of the game is the best opportunity to level soldier without the risk of them dying because the enemy are weak.
Please follow all my tips above at the start of this thread and get your favour with the 3 different factions at 25% or over because after this point, it is much easier to find resources and level your soldier by simply visiting different locations around with the ?s. Especially for the havens with the blue ?s. They are a big help and either give you new locations for gains (mostly) or give you resources if you answer the dilemmas correctly. This is the major point of my guide. The blue ? were a new requested feature for the game and really help a lot.
This is a good example of how to recycle stuff until you do have a lot of spare resources. The beginning game is all about maximising what you have.
I personally, play a very slow game, so Food Production Facilities do pay off for me. However, I do have a wide control of the planet in terms of covering the planet and protecting havens with 3 teams. But different player play differently. I am always surprised how quickly others to get through the campaign. I am playing a slow steady approach and am always scaling up everything to ensure that I keep control of the events in the game. I’m very impressed that you can complete a whole campaign in around 53 days or so!
1 Food Production Facility produces 8 food per day and costs 200 materials and 40 tech.
Anu and NJ trades 6 materials for 4 food = 12 materials for 8 food, so I need 16,67 = 17 days to get a bit more of the materials.
Synedrion trades 2 tech for 8 food, so I need another 20 days to get the tech.
=> Break even after 37 days. (But even this is also pretty long in this game )
I never end this game after 37 days …
But alone to get the tech it is mostly somewhat end of January, maybe early February. Then I have to build these facilities and then another 37 days we are in mid March. This is a good time to end the game, I think.
Those numbers look better than they really are because you’re getting additional profit from trading. The ‘real’ exchange rate of food to materials is 1:1 - yes, you can get 4:5 or 4:6 if you trade, but the extra profit is from the trade, and you’re paying for that in aircraft flight time.
40 tech and 200 materials is equivalent to about 400 food/materials. Facility produces 8/day, so that takes 50 days. Add in 3 days build time, and that’s 53 days to break even.
I finished my last campaign on February 22nd. So 53 days start to finish. My current campaign’s at February 1st, and I’m already getting into endgame. If I’d built Food Production as soon as I got the Anu tech (around January 25) then I’d break even by March 20-ish. Campaign will have been over for a month by then.
Plus it’s actually worse than that because that’s only break-even! So after all that time all you’ve done is get to the point where you haven’t lost anything. If you’d spent those resources on more soldiers or better gear or put them towards an extra aircraft, they’d have been generating value for all that time.
Food Production Facilities are really terrible . . .
Honestly, I kind of assumed everyone played that way. I was really surprised when I found people were still playing the game after 5+ months of game time.
The whole game’s set up as a race against time – the Pandorans are evolving non-stop and the ODI/human population ‘death clock’ is ticking. So everything about the game pushes you to finish as soon as you can.
(Plus honestly after doing like 20+ Haven Defences and Pandoran Nests/Lairs I was bored out of my mind and just wanted to finish already!)
I think I’m just finishing faster than everyone else because I’ve been using time more efficiently . . . as other players figure out the same tricks they’ll speed up too.
I’d be very interested to know (@Valygar) if stats are available to inform us how quickly an average game is. So now I’m questioning if my resources guide is not very relevant. It’s based on the ideas of covering the whole planet. I keep noticing the trend that people don’t have enough resources, but perhaps they too are playing a much faster game!
Where did you get this? And as there is no heaven that trades 1:1, why should I take this? The worst are Synedrion heavens that trade 4:5, the other two always 4:6.
I’m trading almost when I already flight to a certain point and visit the heavens that are on the path, so no ‘extra cost’.
But all in all I know what you mean and to clarify, I also don’t build Food Plants (but maybe I will give it a try, maybe ).
Think about it this way - if you took the 40 tech and 200 materials that it would take to build a Food Production Facility and just went and traded them for food, how much would you get?
Well, if you go to Anu havens, tech trades for food at 2:12 and materials trade for food at 4:6. So 40x6 + 200x1.5 = 240 + 300 = 540 food.
It takes a Food Production Facility 67.5 days to generate 540 food.
You have to play very, very slowly for that to be a good deal . . .
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