A Walkthrough of One Military Camp Campaign and Sandbox tactics.
This guide was written for version 1.1.0.26 (Feb 2024) and includes Christmas Season and Commander Goals free DLCs.
The purpose of the guide is to provide an overview of the game’s basic mechanics. provide a quick walkthrough of the main campaign and to provide a roadmap for 100% achievements. I will be discussing tactics that make the game VERY EASY. If you want a challenge then you don’t need a guide. With the tactics discussed in this guide you can easily 100% the game in less than 15 hours.
MAIN CAMPAIGN ACHIEVEMENT CHECKLIST
The goal of the main campaign is to recover all territory on the map and assault the final region. Each region of the map has a number of missions which must be completed before the region is considered captured. Capturing a region will unlock all adjacent regions. The overall design was to allow the player to choose their own path through the game so it is somewhat open. Some regions can be unlocked from different angles, for example.
The campaign is also separated out into 4 biomes; West Forest, Desert, East Forest, Snow.
The game only refers to West Forest as Forest. The East Forest is sometimes referred to as the Lowlands.
NOTE: It may be possible to speed run to the final region while not capturing all other regions (this was not tested, I will leave that as an exercise for someone else). The intended limiting factor was that the closer to the final region you get the higher the tier of soldiers you will need to unlock, thus making an early rush difficult despite allowing an open world feeling. So it made sense to capture additional regions for additional resources. However, there is a glaring discrepancy in this design; there is nothing stopping you from upgrading to the top tier before you take over your first region.
Enter the Cheese Factory.
Achievement Checklist for Campaign Mode:
The following achievements must be completed during the campaign.
Some of these are MISSABLE! As I said, it may be possible to speed run the campaign by going directly for the end mission, which would bypass some biomes and possibly boss missions. Just take all regions as you go, clear all biomes and it shouldn’t be an issue.
Reconquest – Defeat Dragan and complete Campaign mode.
Snowman – Recover all territories in the Snow Biome.
People’s Hero – Achieve 100% Popularity in every town on the map.
(This might be possible in sandbox as well)
Economist – Accumulate 2,500,000 money in Campaign mode.
*Vive le Resistance – Successfully complete all of Charlie’s missions in Campaign mode.
(This one may be missable, although they are super easy so you shouldn’t ever fail them)
*Crisis Committee – Successfully complete all of Julie’s missions in Campaign mode.
(This one is missable as these missions are all timed. If you are not ready for them they will expire and prevent the achievement).
No News is Good News – Defeat Helga in Campaign Mode.
Winter Soldier – Unlock the camp in the Snow Biome.
Tear Down The Wall – Defeat Berker in Campaign Mode.
Desert Power – Recover all the territories in the Desert Biome.
Desert Rat – Unlock the Camp in the Desert Biome.
There’s Something in those Trees – Recover all territories in the Forest Biome (West Forest only, East Forest is not needed).
Jantine, The Misfortunes of Evil – Defeat Jantine in Campaign Mode.
First Step – Complete your first mission successfully.
(There are also missions in sandbox so those might count as well)
The rest of the achievements can be obtained in sandbox. Sandbox has difficulty settings and none of them affect achievements (so you can play as easily as you like). Unless the achievement specifically says that it must be done on the same map, then all achievements are cumulative across all playthroughs (for example you don’t need to destroy 100 drones in one map). I am not going to list out all of them here. They are all self explanatory and easily achieved. None of them require any special tactics, although we will discuss battle mode at the end of the guide for a quick clean up on sandbox achievements.
THE CHEESE FACTORY
I call this the Cheese Factory because the following tactics trivialize the game to the point that it becomes tedious and boring. With that said, it almost feels as though the game was designed to be played like this. This doesn’t use any glitches or cheats, doesn’t require any fancy optimizations and it is arguable if it is even an exploit.
When you begin, skip the tutorial. The Tutorial will have you attack a region early on to show you how missions work, but, the exploit works best when you only have the starter regions. But, this is not required. Taking an third region at the start shouldn’t cause any issues.
The main point of the Cheese Factory is build up your camp to have an army of self sufficient super soldiers before you take over your first territory. In fact, you can get most of the non-sandbox achievements before your first super soldier deploys.
I am hesitant to even discuss base layouts or detailed tactics here because the game just lets you build and research to your hearts content and never attacks you. You can experiment with layouts, research, do whatever you want. But, it wouldn’t be much of a guide if I didn’t say something.
Some overall mechanics to keep in mind:
Everything in the game is aligned to a skill and color system; Speed/Blue, Intelligence/Yellow, Strength/Red, Accuracy/Purple. The intent is to have a worker who has a high skill match to the job they are working. For example, cooking is blue so wants an employee that has a high speed skill, while maintenance is red so wants a worker with high strength.
This all sounds reasonable, except that it doesn’t really matter. New Recruits are going to start with stats between 6 and 16 (or so) out of a possible 100. It doesn’t matter if your security guard has 6 accuracy or 16 accuracy they will still perform the job adequately. The amount of product or research generated by someone with 6 skill vs 16 skill is only a difference of a few points. Don’t get bent out of shape trying to find a cook with high speed stat, it just doesn’t matter overall. You can assign anyone to any job and you will be just fine.
If it bothers you though, you can always have someone train their stats then reassign them to the best job. I went through the whole game and never worried about it though.
Step 1: The Basics
You will want to build the following at first; Mess Hall, Maintenance Shack, Food Warehouse, Power, Fuel warehouse, Living Quarters. You have an unlimited amount of time to build at your own pace. You also have enough positive cash flow not to worry about money for the time being.
For power, you can start off building a power grid with poles. The poles actually sit at the vertex of the squares and don’t take up a space which is nice. Set up your grid now and never worry about it again. Don’t forget to connect your power station to the network and to each other or their power will only distribute locally. In the beginning you can localize all your power which is preferable. The starter power plant requires fuel which needs to be delivered from a warehouse; keeping those close together improves efficiency. Later on you will unlock wind and solar (which don’t use fuel) and can build a distributed network for better security.
For mess halls, start with one and make sure to have both shifts covered. Put a food warehouse next to it and buy enough food to fill it up. Food does not spoil in this game. At the end game you will want about three level 3 mess halls. A single level 3 mess hall can handle about 30 people give or take. Make sure these are centralized on the map.
For maintenance, start with 1 night and 1 day shift. Maintenance workers maintain buildings whose repair stat drops into the red. They also rebuild buildings destroyed by bombs and they also deliver goods from warehouses to the needed building. Improve efficiency by having warehouses as close to their associated building as possible. By the end of the game you will have three level 3 maintenance shacks with 6 day and 6 night shift workers running around. These can be distributed as needed to increase efficiency.
For Living Quarters, your soldiers (the ones that deploy on missions and ones that work in the factories) all need barracks. Barracks can house up to 7 soldiers each.
For other workers like cooks, doctors, security, etc, they need private housing.
Housing should be far away from buildings that make noise otherwise you will get complaints.
I liked to build a housing district on the left side of base near the boulder and I put all of my noisy things on the right side.
In the middle was the maintenance shack, mess hall and entertainment buildings.
Don’t worry about how far your people have to walk from house to work. For the most part, the game maintains the schedules well enough so that you don’t have a lot of down time between shifts. People tend to spend a lot of their free time in entertainment buildings anyway, so its more important for those to be centralized than the sleeping quarters.
For entertainment I suggest one of each building. That will be plenty. You do get income from entertainment but its not enough to worry about. you can even adjust the income from entertainment buildings to prioritize morale which is a good idea but not vital.
Step 2: Research
Now we have the long road of research ahead of us. Since the game lets us do whatever we want without any interference there is nothing stopping us from researching everything. If you want the achievement for research, we get it now.
Yes, I understand, this is a game about a military base and a military campaign and we don’t even have any soldiers yet. Just bare with me, we are getting there.
Before we get too far along we need to talk about medicine. At some point at random one of your people will get sick or injured. Build the appropriate hospital when it is needed. No point in building a hospital when everyone is fine. As for medicine itself, you can’t buy any yet, but hospital buildings come with 50 units when they are first built. If you run out, just delete the building and make a new one. When you unlock factories you can manufacture your own.
With the basics set up, start building up to a total of 10 research facilities. You heard me, 10.
Each facility will have 1 day and 1 night researcher (while you can upgrade the research facility to have 2 people per shift, it actually doesn’t give you more research points). Research is a yellow task, but, like I said earlier, there is not much difference between a researcher with 6 INT and 16 INT. just take anyone at this point and start churning out the research.
With endless amounts of research rolling in we have some priorities. Obviously if you are going the for the achievement then you want it all, but, the order we do it in will help speed things along (or at least keep you busy while you wait).
First, put all your research into warehouses. Get them to level 3 so you can unlock automatic selling of surplus. When you have this, build 3-5 farms and connect them to the food warehouse used by your mess hall. Make sure the warehouse is upgraded and set to sell. Then sit back and watch infinite money roll in. Trust me, you will need it later. don’t bother with more than 1 soldier per shift, extra soldiers don’t produce more goods (they just cover a shift when someone is injured or late to work).
You can also set up ammo and fuel, but, don’t go crazy with them right now. Just one factory for each is enough. For Medicine, if you skipped the tutorial, you can’t buy or sell medicine just yet, so hold off on that.
Your next research priority will be solar and wind power so you can get rid of your reliance on fuel and start building your distributed power grid.
Next I would focus on a housing upgrade to save space, then mess hall and maintenance to level 3. Finally, start working on soldier training and security buildings as you see fit.
Step 3: Security
Once you get some security buildings unlocked you will want to start designing your security grid. Security has 2 parts; towers that detect spies and anti-drone hubs that…well…shoot down drones.
Spies start to harrass you mid way through the forest biome and drones come in near the end of or after the desert.
You will want to ensure that there is adequate coverage of towers throughout your base. The game actually includes some overlays at the bottom left of the screen so you can check on coverage easily.
Each tower uses 1 day and 1 night shift security and they will each require private housing. If you need to move things around for better coverage remember that every building has a move button which is free.
For anti-drone defense you will need a security hub which is staffed by more security guards. The hub has a control radius. In that control radius you will build the anti-drone turret, anti-shield emitter and anti-camouflage emitter. These things have a larger radius at higher upgrade levels so it might be wise to plan the network after you get all the upgrades.
Drones will have shields later on in the campaign and spies will eventually use cloaking fields so its important to have it all eventually.
Step 4: Super Soldiers
FINALLY! Some action!
The game actually has a decent selection of soldier types which are separated into tiers and specialize in different combinations of attributes. The idea is to train your soldiers in an attribute then have them specialize and build your army. Each soldier has a battle power which is a combination of their experience level and their associated attribute. Higher tier soldiers have higher potential for more battle power. Each mission will require different kinds of soldiers of different specializations and a total battle power that must be overcome to ensure success.
This all sounds like a really good game right?
At this point you are probably expecting me to list out all the soldier types, and their associate stat, maybe even have an in depth discussion and a tier list…Except that its all made pointless by the super soldier, so, I will not waste our time.
The super soldier has all 4 stats at 95 or higher out of 100 and has the highest potential battle power in the game (over 210). Also, super soldiers can do any job in any mission, making specializations pointless. There are two downsides to a super soldier; they take a long time to train and they cost 5000 each in salary. Both of these downsides are already dealt with however.
The training time is irrelevant as we have as much time as we want.
The cost is taken care of by the fact that we can print money with factories.
Start your super soldier program with the 4 training grounds; Speed, Strength, Accuracy, Intelligence. Start recruiting soldiers. When you recruit a soldier, assign them to one of those training grounds and then remember to Set Goal to Super Soldier. Setting the goal will let you know when they are maxed on an attribute and can switch their training as well as letting you know when they are done training and ready to graduate.
You could try to automate super soldiers training with an instructor, but, instructors take almost as much training as a super soldier so you might as well just make them into super soldiers as well and skip instructors all together.
In order to graduate you will need a Super Soldier building. This is basically where they hang out during the day and juice up on Super Soldier serum (seriously, watch the animations, its hilarious). Each building can accommodate 2 super soldiers, so you will need multiple buildings for your army.
You may be tempted to make a huge army of Super Soldiers, but, they are rather expensive. You can get through the game at a decent pace with 14 Super Soldiers (2 barracks worth) which is also 7 day shift and 7 night shift. At some point in the campaign you will be forced to lose 2 soldiers. As far as I know this is scripted and not avoidable so keep that in mind. Also, missions are mostly 3-4 soldiers at a time with some “boss fights” needing 6. Having 14 soldiers will allow you to do multiple missions simultaneously and save you time later. I think I had 24 super soldiers by the end and it was very much overkill.
While you are training your super soldiers you can finish out your research. When your research is done you can destroy the research buildings (saving power and maintenance) and tell your researchers to switch jobs into soldiers and train them up as well. Just make sure you have enough barracks to accommodate them.
Step 5: Win the game!
The last thing you need to build before deploying is a helipad. Build multiple so you can do multiple missions at the same time.
Now go out and dominate!
Seriously, you will have so much battle power as to guarantee success on all missions up to the very end. In the end game, there will actually be some missions that require high enough battle power that your success rate drops to 80-90%…Oh No! Whatever will you do?!
Some things to note.
Some missions have timers. The timers are 33 minutes of real time so you have plenty of time to let your soldiers rest and redeploy. If the timer runs out the mission fails and you lose your shot at it. This can cause you to miss one achievement. There 10 such missions distributed throughout the game. Below I have listed all the missions so you can prepare accordingly.
In addition there are special missions for Charlie. These missions have you PERMANENTLY transfer soldiers to Charlie’s rebel forces, meaning you lose them and won’t get them back. Do not give him super soldiers. Either train up other soldiers yourself to satisfy his requirements or buy mercenaries and send those.
As for Villages and Suppliers, well, they are pretty much pointless. For most of the game, the starter suppliers are going to give you the best deal to sell your surplus. Villages give you some money, but, not enough to matter. They also give you more recruits, but, you already have your army. just set their taxes to the lowest possible and get the achievement for 100% village happiness.
MISSION LIST
Below is a list of all the missions, what region they are in and what requirements they have. Some missions have a decision that needs to be made. I did not document these decision points as it would have forced me to save scum and take even longer to document. Mostly the outcomes of these decisions are not really important. Sometimes nothing happens, you gain research (which is pointless now), you gain gold (which is pointless), you gain or lose favor with villages, or your soldiers come back with injuries. None of this stuff really matters and is easily overcome.
Rarely a decision will end up causing you to lose soldiers. Sgt. Hawkins says that they might have been captured by the enemy, but, you will never get them back, they are just gone. If this happens to a super soldier then either eat it and move on, or save scum. Your choice. There is one mission in the desert which is a “boss fight” mission and losing two soldiers is scripted, so eat the loss and move on.
Also, the game does not let you select a region nor are the regions themselves named. I had to invent a numbering/naming convention in order to refer to the missions easier. I included some pictures with labels to help in that regard.
SANDBOX
In order to clean up some achievements you will eventually need to play in sandbox mode.
There are two modes of play and 10 different maps. Each sandbox game also lets you change around some sliders which alter the game difficulty. You can make the game as easy as you want and still get achievements.
Some achievements you can hunt for here are the Drone and Spy achievements. Set those to HIGH and it shouldn’t take too long (I suggest doing one at a time in reconquest mode). Once you have those achievements, just turn them off for later and don’t bother with security buildings.
Reconquest is basically the exact same as the campaign except that the missions are all generic. You must retake all the areas to win (I suggest close quarters and corridor which are two smallest maps). You have an infinite amount of time to build your cheese factory and then dominate with super soldiers…easy peasy. Don’t bother with all the research if you already got that achievement, just get enough for self sustainment and training efficiency. You can finish off the achievement for 200 missions in this mode. The campaign should have gotten you about 80 or so.
Battle mode is different. As soon as you start playing the enemy starts taking land. The winner is the first one to surround the enemy base with troops (meaning they can’t deploy new troops). In this mode the Cheese Factory is much simpler and faster (you can win any map in less than one game day).
Unlike Reconquest, you do not need to retake all areas to win so you can rush the enemy for a quick victory. The enemy AI does not play with the same rules you do, they have a set amount of troops they can deploy in a given amount of time. When you get near their base they will deploy faster, but they will eventually run out. Just keep at it. Also, I encountered a glitch where the enemy would not die and would not fight back. If this happens, just save and reload and it should fix the issue.
The build order for a one-day-win is simple: maintenance shack with 1 worker with 1 house (this might not even be needed), 2 barracks, 3 power plants, 1 fuel warehouse (might not be needed), 1 training facility (your choice of type) and one tier 1 specialization building (matching the training facility). If you choose intelligence and coms specialization then you don’t need to worry about ammo. Finally 1-3 helipads.
That is all you need. You don’t need entertainment or food since you will be done by nightfall.
After you hire one worker for maintenance (to keep the power on), start making every new recruit into a soldier, set their goal and when they are ready, specialize them. As soon as they are specialized, deploy them. As new soldiers come off the assembly line leapfrog your way to the enemy’s front door. You do not need to keep the territory you take, just keep moving forward. Prioritize getting a village.
With a village you can start a recruitment campaign and get 3 recruits at the same time which increases your soldier count quickly. You can stack 6 soldiers together and each region can have 3 stacks. The battle power is added up and compared to the enemy.
Eventually, you will meet the enemy. Combat is very simple. If enemy soldiers are in an adjacent region they check total battle power and the one who has the lowest loses. It’s really easy, and you will get the hang of it. Keep pumping out soldiers and overwhelm the AI with numbers. With a well oiled build order and fancy mouse clicking you will have the map finished before night shift.
