A few handy tips and pointers for improving your squad’s combat power. Multi-classing is fun and you should try it.
Combat Classes – A Primer
Do you want to know how to make your flawed soldiers into an unstoppable force early on in the campaign? Then this guide will help you to get off the ground, starting at the 2nd chapter. These builds and strategies will carry you well into the mid-game. Do not concern yourselves with the 5th tier of class specific perks, because your soldiers can become unstoppable killing machines at low levels, if you know how to mix and match their combat abilities.
Firstly, let us talk about combat classes. Most of your soldiers start with one class, but you can quickly gain new promotion points by earning experience and raising through the ranks. You can then distribute the class points into unlocking a new class, be it combat or utility. Combat classes are: scout, rifleman, grenadier, machine gunner and medic. Utility classes, used onboard the train, are: worker, engineer, cook and doctor. Both kinds of classes gain you permanent stat bonuses if you level them up. You don’t need to “equip” a certain class to gain its stat bonus. It’s always applied.
To break down the upgrade point system in this game: you have class points, which allow you to pick up a new class (6 max for each soldier) and attribute points, which determine what classes are available to the soldier. Not all soldiers start out the same, but you can mold almost all of them into effective fighters.
Strangely, it would seem that spreading out your attribute points evenly can make for the best builds, as you will gain more bonus points by leveling up each and every combat or utility class that you have unlocked. Not enough base stat points and you can’t unlock them!
I would like to make a point of considering the combat experience that you gain on missions or during exploration events as a resource. Simply put, it allows your soldiers to develop their combat abilities and become more proficient, but, much like the other resources in this game, it is limited and hard to get. So, if you want to send out a scouting party to any even on the map, make sure to give them the correct class, so that they can gain experience in it. Don’t make them a medic, if you want them to gain experience in any other class that they might have unlocked. Let that soldier haul around a machine gun, if that is the combat class that you want to gain levels in.
When improving the attributes of your soldiers, make sure to first distribute attribute points according to your class unlock requirements. You can check the in-game character cards to see what stat points you need for which class. For example, any soldier hoping to become a combat medic needs to have at least 5 intelligence. Do you have a “slow witted” trait on one of your guys? Well, invest two points into intelligence and Forest Gump over here can suddenly treat penetration wounds and internal bleeding like any other certified horse-doctor this side of the Ural Mountains.
All of your soldiers have multiple classes to choose from and you absolutely can, and should, multi-class them to make gameplay much more rewarding and/or easy. Most soldiers that you will find along your journey will come with at least one combat class unlocked. Those that don’t have one, can be given a combat role once they have gained enough experience doing utility jobs onboard the train. My original train drivers have killed more commies than they have run over deer at this point. Oh, and my near-sighted, faint-hearted cook is currently driving the train. He likes to sound the whistle a lot, for some reason…
Indeed, there are only a few “pacifists” that you will not be able to turn into murder-machines and one medic that joins you in Moscow, which absolutely should not be taken allong on missions, due to her inability to shoot accurately (a negative combat perk). On the flipside, she will make a great doctor, once you get the appropriate train car. Study the perks. Some soldiers are better than others, so invest your limited exp wisely.
As far as I know, there are no combat role checks when doing missions or during an event out on the world map that require you to have a specific combat role with the party. Traits matter a lot on the map when scouting and scavenging, but combat classes impact nothing. This means that single class squads are viable, as long as you dip into some of the other abilities that they might have picked up by multi-classing. For example, you can give the ability to heal to any soldier who has at least one level in the medic class.
What Classes Should You Pick?
During my 50 hours of gameplay, I have ventured upon a few hybrid roles that seem to work best in and out of “loud” combat. While any soldier can stealth-kill, some are simply better at it. Any soldier can shoot, but two of the combat classes are MUCH better at killing from range.
For my aggressive play style, two multi-class builds in particular seem to be more efficient than the rest, with a support class tossed in for good measure. The three builds that I will be discussing in detail are:
[Scout+]
*will get close to your enemies quickly to do the stabby-stabby, with the option to execute a second dude in rapid succession;
[Machine Gunner/Medic]
*will absolutely dominate ambushes and open battles, while having the ability to pick up your wounded soldiers, once the bullets stop flying;
[Grenadier/Medic+]
*a support role that totally replaces the generic medic and vastly improves the grenadier.
I feel confident in saying that no one class benefits from being a “pure” build, since leveling a different class on the side will gain you valuable stat points. It’s just that some classes are much better at becoming support units with multiple useful skills. For example, if you absolutely want to keep the option to place down mines and throw smoke, you will find the vanilla grenadier useful. But if you only value his or her ability to throw an actual offensive grenade, there is no reason to leave the other ability slots filled with the two useless skills. You only have 4 (four) abilities and passives that you can equip on any soldier at any given time. Sacrifices must be made to specialize your soldiers, but it is only by experimenting with the tools you are given that you will find out what works best. You could start by removing the ability to revive a downed soldier from most of your troops. It might seem like a heavy price to pay at first, but it will benefit your squad in the long run.
My best builds, at the moment of writing this guide, are:
The Ultimate Assassin – Sniper
At the top of the food chain, we have the Scout.
Keep the observation (binoculars) skill for scouting ahead. Remove the revive ability and add Critical Shot (the execution skill that you get once your scout reaches level 3). Now give your sniper the quick feet and camouflage passives and you will have the perfect sneaky killer.
The scout class is the only combat role that can get you two birds with one stone! And no, the grenadier does not count for this analogy, since the birds need to be grouped up for the grenade to work. Meanwhile, the scout can kill two commies anywhere within his or her rifle range within 3 seconds flat.
Here is how that works:
Using this build and only a single soldier, if you see an isolated enemy patrol of two people walking side-by side, you can easily kill them both, all for the price of a single bullet. What you do, is that you stealth-kill the first soldier and immediately follow up by shooting the other one with your Critical Shot ability, executing him on the spot. If there was no one else around to see this happen, then no alarm will be raised. Enemies that are out of view of their murdered comrades, even if they are close enough to react to a gun being fired, will only go into “search mode”. Kill the two soldiers, run away or jump into bushes and your golden! Must have been the wind…
This tactic, as any wonderful pyramid scheme, scales with every new member you bring to the team. Two snipers can take out patrols of 4 people. Three can wipe entire camps of 6. If you bring out a full roster of them, and time it right, up to 20 enemies can go down within 3 seconds, leaving them no time to fire off their guns. But, to be honest, it would be hard to find that many soldiers to kill all at once in this game.
Do you see what I mean? This class is ridiculously great at killing everything. In or out of cover, you are guaranteed to get a one-shot-kill with the scout’ s class ability. And, unlike any other combat class, you can chain executions. You get one easy kill by using stealth and the other by following up with a gunshot execution.
Yes, you just try to chain stealth-kills, but it is not always that easy. What about those times when two enemies are a little too close together to be stealth-killed by your single soldier? The scout can absolutely do it. Stab one bad guy and by the time the second enemy will have turned around to see what the commotion was all about, he will find your scout looking down the sniper scope, ready to pull the trigger.
The best part is that the scout is the only class that can consistently deal with heavy machine gun nests and armored cars at a distance. Two scouts using the Critical Shot ability will kill a heavy machine gun outright. Three shots will destroy an armored car. It can even whittle down tanks, since the vision range of those lumbering beasts is shorter than that of most other enemies.
You can even multi-class by giving one of your snipers a class in medic and removing the binoculars. If you bring along more than two snipers, you don’t really need to keep them observing more than two distant locations at time. Give the third sniper the ability to revive and heal. And if you don’t need 3 sets of binoculars, you certainly won’t need 4, right? Give the fourth sniper a rock to throw for distractions! You definitely don’t need 4 guys with backpacks full of rocks, now do you?
What I am trying to convey here, is that the scout class is the single most versatile and powerful build to make. Both, in terms of killing proficiency and bullet economy (1 shot, 1 kill), it will dominate your playthroughs. All-scout squads are a very exciting and rewarding way of playing aggressively. Any combat encounter that you initiate will play out like an ambush. A slaughter, if you will. If running into an enemy patrol was a disaster before, now it’s a fun shooting gallery. They won’t even have the time to react to you presence, before the scouts will have 360 no-scoped them, before running off into the distance.
Scout seems to be the optimal class, but that does not mean that there are no more classes to pick. In fact, if you want to have more options, or simply wish to balance out your squad, then look no further than…
The Grim Reaper – Machine Gunner
For those times when you absolutely, positively have to spray some hot lead, accept no substitutes. The main purpose of this class is to lay down heavy firepower in gunfights. The ability to set up a firing cone is the single most important ability of this class. Everything else can be swapped out in accordance with your needs and preferences. For example, you can have your machine gunner spec into medic, to provide revival and healing, if you find yourself constantly loosing health in your missions. It is much better to tend to your wounds once you have killed the enemy, rather than having a dedicated medic wasting pistol ammo on targets he or she can’t hit, because pistols are objectively worse than the other guns. And if the medic is running around the battlefield to revive a fallen soldier, you have already failed at setting up the encounter. If you leave cover, you will get shot. It’s best to win first, heal second.
Have your machine gunner be the ultimate support unit for when the fighting breaks out. Leave the stealth kills for the sniper. This chonker needs to be in good cover and set up to shoot any poor sod who wanders into his cone of death. Simple, but effective. Everything before the machine gun belongs to the machine gun and I dare you to try and step into its field of view.
Up next is…
Your Friendly Neighborhood Deliveryman – Grenadier
Grenades. This class is all about having them. The grenadier can take out cannon crews, heavy machine gun nests and any unfortunate social gatherings two city blocks away. Mines and smoke bombs are optional, but you can definitely make do without them. What you should focus on instead is having your designated grenade-thrower serve a secondary support function. Just give your grenadier the ability to heal and revive your soldiers to double his or her utility. Enough said.
Spec 1 level into scout and give that grenadier a backpack full of rocks, so he as something to throw, other than the precious grenades. It’s for practice – it’s lore friendly! Have the grenadier fulfill 3 important tasks for his or her team so that they would never feel useless again!
Verdict: Not a stealth killer. Not a grim reaper. Just a really good throwing arm with a body attached. We gave the grenadier a rifle, just so that he would have something to lean on while waiting on the sniper to do all the work. But the class does have its moments. The Rico of the team. KABOOM? KABOOM-BOOM!
And now for the rest of the gang… Oh boy.
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
If you follow my advice and build your squads primarily with the above-mentioned classes, you will get to Vladovostok with the least amount of hardship. It might even begin to feel like a power fantasy, because the snipers can easily take out any carefully set up combat challenge.
For me, a small squad will end up with 4 snipers and one grenadier (who is also a medic). A small – but loud – squad might have 3 snipers, a machine gunner and a grenadier. An 8 soldier squad will consist mostly of snipers with a single grenadier added for utility. Again, if you want, you can use machine gunners, but they are much harder to set up properly. Snipers simply handle quick combat encounters better. You can bum-rush the enemy with them. And they help you spend as little ammo as is humanly possible!
Where does this leave the vanilla classes? Well, on the sidelines, mostly…
Rifleman – I wish I was the sniper, but at least they gave me a suicide charge.
A straight-up rifleman does little. Yes, you can use the bayonet charge ability to kill a single entrenched enemy, but it can fail, if the said enemy decides to move out of the designated charge area even a little. When using the charge ability you click on an area for the soldier to run towards and pray that the enemy does not move. The rifleman expects to find his target sitting inside the charge circle, when he arrives. If the soldier finds no enemy within the initial circle, he or she will simply stand there, like a dunce, while his original target will shoot him in the back from his new position. That’s right – the enemy units can maneuver. The charge ability is target-location specific.
Do you know who could have taken out that enemy soldier, even while he was repositioning? The scout. It costs you a single bullet to get a 100% guaranteed non-stealth kill. Charge is considered a loud action and leaves your rifleman exposed to any other enemies that might have witnessed him Naruto-running through their firing line. Might as well strap a bomb to the guy while we are at it. He could at least take out a few more enemies near him, when the machine gun mows him down.
Pure rifleman builds are not worth it. Yes, they are viable. Any build that includes a gun in their loadout is viable. But vanilla riflemen are totally subpar. Multiclass them.
Grenadier – Thank God I’m not the rifleman. At least I have grenades.
The grenadier is always a good utility pick, but you don’t really need more than one soldier with the ability to throw a grenade in your squad. Position the grenadier strategically to open a loud encounter with a bang, then run behind cover. The rest of the squad will do the heavy lifting. Give him 1 level in medic and 1 level in scout, equip the rock throw and heal abilities and rejoice at the homunculus you have just created. Behold, the ultimate support class.
In all honestly, wiping out a group of enemies with a grenade is an important ability to have. Just remember that the rifleman has a better weapon in terms of accuracy. Without his grenades, the grenadier is simply a worse rifleman. With them, however, this class is a force to be reckoned with.
Medic – I wish I had a gun.
A pure medic is a single-trick pony. Any soldier can revive a fallen comrade, but the medic can heal them. Keep in mind, though, that the healing done during a mission will not nullify the damage, only temporarily negate it. The wounded soldier will still need to recuperate afterwards.
The defensive and offensive auras are a little bonus that could be explored, but they depend on your soldiers sticking close to the medic. And if you are planning your battles wisely, you will not have the soldiers all stuck together behind a big boulder, but spread out instead, covering the flanks and, in turn, flanking the enemy that is trying to kamikaze your machine gunner.
As for the weapon the class carries, the pistol is not as effective as the rest of the guns in your arsenal. There is no reason not to multi-class the medic. Make your grenadier a medic. Make your rifleman a medic. Strap a medicine bag onto the machine gunner – he likes the extra attention. Just don’t have your medic be a medic. In summary: Go team medic!
Scout – I wish you would read the scout guide again.
Machine gunner – I am the heavy weapons guy. You can read about making me better in the machine gunner/medic section.
And that’s about as much as I have to say about the classes. The simple truth to the matter is that cover is crucial to all soldiers, so plan out your positioning for a battle. If you stay in cover, you will rarely get shot. If you take out your enemies using stealth, you won’t need cover at all.
Starting out at chapter 2, after the Moscow incident, build your squad depending on what soldiers you have available. Have all of your active combat soldiers do train upgrades as workers, since level 2 and above in that utility class begins to give bonus stat points that don’t matter all that much to a dedicated train passenger, but for a front-line soldier, the extra fitness (which increases your health stat) and dexterity will turn them into a highly efficient killing machine.
As a bonus tip, I would advise having all of your best soldiers train up their worker and cook classes back at the train, since you will get some heavy stat bonuses from that. You might have started off with a rag-tag crew of war veterans, but, brother, by the end of this journey you will have an elite crew of PTSD riddled demigods that can shovel tons of coal and cook goulash in-between 360 no-scoping your enemies, before proceeding to med-bagging them to the horror of their comrades.
Good luck out there, soldiers! If you need any other topics covered, let me know in the comments. This is just a general tips and tricks-esque guide, so I don’t expect to expand it.
