Darkwind
Effy's guide to solo scouting from scratch!

Effy


Posted May 28, 2020, 7:27 am
Welcome to Effy's guide to DW!

(If you are not desperately bored this wall of text may be too much, i deeply apologize)

*****************************************************************************
* GANGERS are your blood, anything you do to keep them alive is worth it *
*****************************************************************************

That said, my 5 cents of what I missed when starting.

*****************************************************************************
GANG MANAGEMENT GUIDE
*****************************************************************************

Recruitment
============================================================
From old, new guides and "vets" advice: Low dex chars (under 50) have worse accuracy, and the more skill they gain the more it shows. Speed (60+) is also your friend, if you fire first, enemies are less likely to hit you back. So when hiring gangers be picky, look for good base abilities that will help you all the way. Gangers are your more precious asset and VERY slow to build them up, so take extra care from the recruitment. Addictions are generally bad in the long term and may help other gangers get also addicted, just don't recruit that scum. Removing an addiction will take real time months, and he is prone to get addicted again as soon as he gets out of rehab.
Characters with starting skill 20- use to cap earlier, free characters (if you time your recruits) use to cap later. Cap means maximum achievable skill level (is "random" the higher the better). Characters that cannot reach skill level 100 are just town event fodder and a "bad" time investment.
When trying to recruit gunners is good to look for handgun skill gangers.
Gang fame is also important while recruiting, keep it at 200. The higher it is the better your recruits "may" be. Killing your own bad recruits to free slots for more recruits is not the way to go, it drops your fame and unless you recover it fast, new recruits won't be statistically better.
When you got a new recruit that doesn't cut the mustard it's not that bad! You now have someone to experiment with (yes is as bad as it sounds)***

Ganger development - skills / specialisms
============================================================
Again from old guides and vet advice. Gunners are your bread and butter, drivers come next. Scouts are good in the short term and for travels, in the long term you will stop caring for them too much.
·······················································
Gunners: Specialisms will make them deadliest. So cross training is the way to up their lethality. Cross training means training them in gunnery, large guns, handguns and ballistics just to get shooting specs. Every 50 skill in a weapon family will get you a specialism that will help with "any" weapon. So what do "vets" do?:
- Gunnery for sniper mostly (level 3 minimum recommended)
- Large guns / ballistics for rapid reload (minimum level 2 so weapons reload in 2-3 turns)
- Handguns for (rapid fire extra snipers levels)
From here you can just branch and get something more specific.
Of course you can train flame specialist, or lazors or.... but those guys NEED support from gangers and lots of cash... and the best way to earn that cash is shooting and looting as safely as you can.
What about weapon specific specialisms?
They are not much better than sniper at the moment (or so "vets" say in global channel), sniper seems to give you better chances at long range, and that sums up with sustained fire accuracy bonus. Moving targets, Heavy weapons... start to be relevant once you already have sniper 2-3.
Moving targets seems to help when firing targets crossing your line of fire.
No specialism (other than sniper) applies to gatling guns.
You will say wtf! That's going to take 2 years of real time played.
Yes, training gangers is HARD, and impossible if your casualty rate is over 5% <- math that if you think that's too low.
The hardest of those skills to train is handguns, most vets start over with handgun recruits and build up from there.
Start training "Gunnery" and "Large guns", leave the other weapons for later, BE PATIENT!.
·······················································
* Drivers: Flipping your car upside down is one of the commonest ways to die in the wilds. A good driver will help you to avoid that as much as possible. A good defensive driver will also make some bullets go astray. Anything that gives you survivability is GOLD. So defensive is the way to go for a start. Vets send low cappers as drivers to town events (more about this later), deathracer/jumpstart are good there. Some vets don't recruit drivers at all, just use low capper gunners as drivers.
·······················································
* Scouts: Not having enough scout level for the area will get you ambushed or heavily outnumbered/out-CRed. So when you want to survive (ALWAYS) you should bring a scout. A 50+ scout level is recommended for SS area, a 100+ scout for Gateway truckstop. Training scouts is a must for beginners, the easiest way to train a scout is making him travel between towns. Get a 4L pho, sunrise or 3.2 voyager and send him around, you will see the world and you will get used to the maps and some spawns. Once your gunners start hitting double specs can reload fast, fire and hit from afar with rear weapons, then you can take out as many opponents as your spare ammo can handle, at that point vets stop using scouts to maximize the loot. You can also reach this point without specced gangers in a SS map with good map knowledge (more about that later). Pathfinder will help with travel speed / fewer encounters and less chance for the extra gates encounter in a return* (saw it somewhere no one actually confirmed it)
·······················································
* Leadership: As you can guess, recruiter goes first, you WANT the best gangers you can find, Motivator goes next (you WANT them to train ASAP). Training leadership is just a matter of time and scouting, higher capper will be your gang leader. Leadership cap is unrelated to the rest of skills cap.
·······················································
* Mechanics: Training goes auto as leadership. Jury Rigging will make you get more loot, Salvager will help to scrap loot with destroyed engines. Scraping vehicles for parts in loot screen (after event ends) will increase the gains on mech skill. Camp owners are vampires bloodthristy of mech blood, you can hire them to camps in exchange for cash or camp produced items.
·······················································

So ok, i guess i know what/how to recruit my guys. Now what!?

*****************************************************************************
* NEWB SOLO SCOUTING GUIDE *
*****************************************************************************

Are you ready to get your gangers redded?, i mean killed?, i mean disemboweled?
Then CLEAR AND MAKE UP YOUR MIND, your gangers ARE GOING TO DIE!, you are sending them to DIE, and ... they will also DIE when you don't send them to die!.

Good side is... you are not a vet, your recruiter is... wait do i have that?. Most of your current gangers will be low cappers scum and you have invested little time in them. Cringe a little when they die, but hey, life is hard in DW.
If you like AT guns/Lazors/Flamers and want to start using them from start... you are just seriously handicapping yourself. This game has its mechanics and there are things plain better than others, you can try "not standard" things, but you will mostly get yourself killed. Most weapons need trained specced gangers to be of real use.

Keep reading if you want to go in another direction of most other guides -that tell you to look for a babysitter-!
Otherwise go scout with a vet to get used to the game, know the basic principles, but you will feel that you won't be doing much most of the time, as they will open the can most of the time and all you will do is eating the leftovers and you will be buying someone else words as "faith".

*******************************************************************

SIDE NOTE: Some people say, go do some town events!. I tell you one thing. Town events represent 80% on my dead gangers. Town events may seem a "safe" environment. Until you get pushed to a wall at 150kmh, side rammed and driver sent to coma, NPC friendly fired you to death after resigning a combat..., it's NOT a safe environment, it's NOT A SAFE environment, IT'S NOT A SAFE ENVIRONMENT, that's why "vets" send low cappers or new recruits to town events.
Use gangers you just recruited and want to get rid of them, you can't fire them in the first 24h, send them to a race, DR or combat to learn the basics, don't lie to yourself, you are sending her/him to die, if you happen to like the guy because she survived for long enough... don't let her keep racing, or she will eventually die.

*******************************************************************

Are you ready to learn for yourself?
You want to go solo scout from start, you can! Don't let anyone tell otherwise. I did it, anyone can do it.
You will learn by yourself, you will die by your mistakes. You will leave lots of corpses behind, and not just your enemies.

*******************************************************************

BEFORE YOU START

THINGS TO KNOW: "Enemies" never spawn less than 250-300 CR. So always bring as much CR AND more than 1 car. Bad #### happens, turtling, bloody melees... having some other car to nudge you and bring you back to your wheels, or to cover an exposed side is a must.

ADVICE
: Start with small 2 car scouts. Easier to get used to controls, faster scouts, faster learning of map spawns*. And when you lose, your loses will be as small as possible. AND a 50+ scout, yes sadly you have to spend 4 real time days training a scout traveling around, use this time to do some town events to get some cash and build 4 good cars.

REMEMBER: Your gangers are your blood, you have to ALWAYS keep them alive ! If that means running away from a not very scary minuscule ant, DO IT. Cars are replaceable, pride is useless. PRIDE will only kill you, you will have to step down from time to time and surrender/give up. Some matchups & randomness are just there to teach you that. Be ready to lose, surrender all your cars and try to go home walking. What brings another important topic, buy your gangers 2 rifles + 2 reloads or 3 rifles, you need those to be able to survive your walk back home. Later on you can get some smgs in between for extra variety.

WARNING
: Surrendering a vehicle means nothing to the ai, they will most probably keep shooting it until everyone inside is unconscious or dead, so sometimes think about surrendering all your cars to save someone's life, failing to make this choice will get your gangers dead or badly hurt decreasing its lifespan or limbs count. At the end of the day, a car is worth just 2-3 successful scouts, and you will have plenty of that, don't be afraid to surrender, the walk back home will train handguns, so that's something pretty good!.

ANOTHER WARNING: Don't invest heavily on cars, use the cheapest thing you can afford to lose (loot from other scouts). BUT don't use just anything.
You know what's a car? It's a coffin waiting for you to die inside anytime.
You know what's a fast car?. It's a coffin that will carry your ass away and wait you die tomorrow.

ANOTHER ADVICE
: Check the enemy cars, check its weapons and strengths (wiki->NPC builds). If you see a nicknamed enemy guy you should #### your pants and should not even care for it. Go to the NPC gang page and check it's stats for the lulz while pushing the pedal to the metal.

***********************************************************

SCOUTING TIPS FROM A SOLO SCOUTER

If you want to start alone, gather all your patience! and RUN away like crazy. You trying to get a "faster" training than going with vets?? You trying to cheat the common sense??. Are you ready to learn for yourself?? You have to pay a price, and the price is... time, patience and a cool head to analyze your own pitfalls.

It's the old DW scout called MUSCLE SCOUT. Follow this guide and make yourself a MASTER MUSCLER, or die trying that's it.
Start with muscle cars or "light" sedans. Look at chassis wiki to know what's a muscle car. Cars that allow for big engines and got weak armor. If you play "well"* muscle scouts you shouldn't get shot at more than once or twice.

*"Well" means, accept it, you are a low gang scoundrel, you may (and will) miss all your shots on an stopped enemy car just at 10m.
Going muscle means you are faster than the enemy, you can outrun them and choose where do you want to fight (if you want to fight at all).

Start by scouting as far from the city as you can. So your encounters are easier. It will take more time for them to come back, but the extra safety is worth it when your guys doesn't know how to shoot. Just try to fill up to 3 squads with 2 cars each so you can more or less cycle scout them.

So you start the event and ... RUN LIKE HELL. No matter where!, no matter why!, no matter who! You are a scoundrel and you MUST be scared to face on even stakes anyone, you are the weakest link of evolution just now, and game is trying hard to teach it to you.
After a while (20 turns?) steady yourself, are you at least 150m from them?, are they still together? are you scared of their guns or skill?, are you on a good ambush spot?, if you answer no to any of these questions, RUN MORE!!!!

KNOW WHERE YOU SPAWN
: After enough scouts, you will know where the enemy will be when you span in the map. Remember those spots, as it will save your life when the odds go bad. The 2 example scouts posted at the end of the guide are a good example, as i knew where were they spawning i chose the best spot to run away without taking any heat.

KNOW WHERE YOU STEP: A slope too steep? You die, A pass to tight? You die, A turn too tight? You turtle your car, you die, A bump in the road? You turtle, you die.
- How do i learn then, master?
- Ah sorry i meant your dam green useless gangers die, just hire another one, they are like ####roaches, doesn't matter how many you kill they keep coming.
Focus on this, now your gangers are easy to replace, even if you think they are not. The day you have a 200+ skill guys that you have been training for 2 real time years, then you will have a ganger hard to replace.
Send them to odd places to test the limits, don't be worried to lose them. This knowledge SHOULD be there for when your trained guys need it, and you don't want them to die. You SHOULD try those slopes, you should know what your cars can handle and what not. Not all chassis are the same and behave the same, maybe a Phoenix can go up the slope... maybe it get stuck at the top, so learn what a car can do, if you know you cannot do it.... that means the enemies also can't. You need this knowledge to trick your enemies.
(*** Remember your ahem not-good-enough recruits? You can put them to good use just running around a map to find their secrets, but now that DW TAC has bots you can just do it there without even needing to expose that beat up sonic).

WHEN TO FIGHT: And when they are spread at least 3-4 movements from each other, you can take them 1 after 1. Go hide after that corner, find that place where to reach you in the more or less most straight path they will have to cut a narrow corner (and their speed, a slope, a bump anything that will make them expose their side to you ) and you will not be more than 50m from them so your abysmal accuracy will be somewhat effective.

HINT: Accuracy bonus for sustained fire is BIG. Open fire 1 or 2 turns before you actually have LOS. So when they reach the corner, you got sustained fire bonus and "most" of your shots should hit. (NOTE: As GG shoots twice it's harder to stay away from hitting average rate).

The less open the terrain the better. Somerset(SS) maps are awful to start to me as they are mostly open desert with little place to hide. BUT there's a great map in SS called Northern Farm Lands. Try HARD to get access to a camp north of SS and you will be able to train your guys to the moon with little troubles, this guide is born from scouting there. There are some narrow passes where you can trap superior enemies and beat them to pulp, so narrow that you can even trap your ass and leave it there for the slavers to take it off from you.

Try to look for far away an ambush spot, where you have to ride a few turns make distance, so you have time to set up, and wait for the enemy to come. And that they will show his side because of a corner with a wall at a side or something like that, stay a few (FEW, you will otherwise miss too many shots, your gangers are so bad that can't hit a hole under their feet with their piss) meters behind the corner so you have place to maneuver without moving to the other side of the corner and getting caught by more arriving enemies, if you get 2-3 cars shooting on a side, the opponent will be unable to turn due to the side impacts. If you get 2 rounds of fire from 2 cars that guy will be almost done for good, you can turn one car to the next opponent and let another one finish it off (beat them until their combat rating gets to 0 - hover over enemy car). And get ready for the next, repeat and loot, repeat and loot, repeat and loot until your guys are good enough to be a bit bolder.

Start putting you highest speed guys on MG/MMG as those are the weapons causing more stress (aka making them shot worse - see wiki -&gt; Stress ). Once you open fire first and start hitting those shots, enemy shots will most likely miss. So make sure when you start a fight you will land those first shots and the enemy will not (get on their side!!!). If you just line against them and random gods decide they start hitting their shots and you miss at point-blank, get ready to run if you can or just give up, resign yourself and try to walk back home.

WARNING: There are some silly NPC slaver gangs, take 0 changes against those guys, if you surrender to them you can say bye to your gangers as they will be captured and sent to FL to a most probable death. You better fire them and free up the slot for new hires. Read event loading screen opposing gang to check they are not slaves.

Enemies auto-dissapear when at 500m, you can also use that to remove the excess enemies you are not confident you can take. Needs tons of patience but you will be training your driving (and maybe courage too), when there are too "few" enemies left they may try to run and escape, but better be safe than sorry, at least you trained your driver, a thing you won't be doing in fast easy going scouts, and if they don't flee, this is the fight you pick.

*********************************************************************


CAR BUILDING NOTES
: When your guys are green, reloading takes a lot of time. So it's not a very good option counting on reloading to take more enemies out, fill your cars with guns and gangers. Start bringing as much firepower as you can for the less CR, H/M/MG are the bread and butter, easy to come and good enough for anything you can find in SS. But really use whatever you like as long as you keep your car "fast enough", having 2 gunners will make you lose punch... but your punches hit (and you need that), using the driver as gunner may be done "for training purposes" (if you can spare a gun not hitting more than 2-3 shots in the whole event), otherwise is a waste. I don't want to point you which car or weapons are best, i know, and you should also know now that your gangers are going to die. If your car got caught running away it means it wasn't fast enough.

WARNING: Using heavy hitter slow-moving cars is VERY tempting, and will work VERY well but when the DW gods roll the dice and choose worst spawn possible you will be outgunned and outrunned, just cross your fingers and hope they are not slavers (they use to come for the worst scenario possible).

*********************************************************************

This scout style works VERY well in NFL map, otherwise this will bring a bit too much "running" patience.
Probably keep chasing traders as other guides say, or move to ELMs town where maps are not so open and enemies are not harder and SS.

*********************************************************************

Most encounters are more or less even if you bring a scout good enough BUT DW gods will call from time to time to drink some blood. That's when you will have to run out of the ambush and don't look back, or try to show up when you know what are you doing. You own gangers death will teach you what's the wisest choice, be critical and analytical of the reasons you died.

*********************************************************************

You did it!!! WOOOOHOOO!! Your gangers are surviving and you reach skill levels around 40. At this point you will start hitting most/all of your hits after 1-2 rounds of fire. NOW you can start buying better cars that you will be able to keep. Get yourself a 4L Apache, put 2 HMGs a few reloads and you can start taking out tougher opponents 3-4 normal NPCs.

*********************************************************************

Woooot!??? You even reached 80+????
You are a dam vet! well maybe not, but now you know how not to die!. Your gangers can start hitting easily at 100m from afar and you can start putting weapons at the rear and start "travel fighting". Shooting in the opposite direction you are moving decreases accuracy so WAIT and do it when your guys can handle it.

From my own experience, first travel i tried (following some other guide) i put my 40+ gunners on hmg mercs and a small van i was VERY lucky to have a gate encounter with "free" ride to the city gates to flee. 2 sunrises with rocket launchers started hitting me at 100m before i could land any shot... and i barely survived running away with 2 side completely destroyed and a few wounds. DW gods punish hard "boldness", you have to go for the overkill or you ... will ... die. Had that been a wilderness event i would had had to surrender everything and go back walking or die trying and ending losing everything the same.

*********************************************************************

You can watch this replay as example S1030251, outmanned 2v4, my gangers were around 80 skill lvl and the enemy slavers had 4+specs and 150+skills. Or this one S1032336 (more slavers as almost always when you are "ambushed").

*********************************************************************

But how do i start if i have no cars?????
Go play some town events, they pay good enough to buy a decent loot car if you win. Your ganger may die in the process, just don't care, its a new recruit, it's worth less than the car that you need.

*********************************************************************

*******************************************************************

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Following this path got my gang (15-20 guys aprox) wiped completely the first 2 weeks... twice. It's not a cake walk. After that I started having random survivors that will start growing and carrying the new recruits.

*******************************************************************

For more details about how to successfully muscle in a map check this guide!
Barbat


Posted May 28, 2020, 7:52 pm
nice write up Effy. Lots of good information there.
For myself i favor mercs with a 3.2 and dual mmg for starters anyways.

I don't like recommanding hanggunners to new players. IMHO they need to be cared for by already higher skilled gangers. Get a bunch of guys with gunnery and max it out asap. For your scouts recurit first aid guys and have them drive around learning driving and scouting until they get an * by their scouting skill. Or recurit a scout and have them train first aid

There are many different thoughts to the game there is no right or wrong.

I was taught 3 mercs = scouting squad until max gunnery stick them in hmg ape/landy until maxed large guns then move them out of ss. (not saying i completely agree/disagree with that but it is my general guide)
Effy


Posted May 28, 2020, 8:16 pm
Thank you for taking the time to read it.

That's one of the strong points of DW, even when the game has a more or less clear path, everyone can find it's own way.

I tried hard not to put my preferred car composition or weaponry. I like to discover things by myself even if its the wheel everybody knows.

My experience with mercs/chompers/PUs is that when i get ambushed with gangers under 40 skills im just a sitting duck asking to get roasted.

To me, game changes a lot when your skills are under 40 and are unable to reliably hit anyone at close or medium range.

No one sends new players to scout alone, i tried to write a guide so new players that want to go alone have something to chew on.
Effy


Posted Apr 9, 2021, 9:59 pm
Half bump half request...

Could we somehow put this guide (and my other guide) in a pinned post?

(like this one "Information Links For New Players" )

So it don't get lost in the threads of time? (I don't tink it can't hurt anyone)

Thank you!
Grimm Sykes


Posted May 6, 2021, 4:13 am
You should post it to the wiki page

Back