Planet Stronghold 2 – General Tips and Tricks

General tips & tricks (not a step by step walkthrough) about combat, items, leveling up, different builds, autocombat.

Useful Tips and Tricks

All credit goes to Winter Wolves!

Character Creation and Party Members

Character Creation

You can pick any class for Lisa/Joshua based on your preferences. The extra skills you can pick are very important and will define how you’ll play your game. They’re split in 4 categories: passive skill, buff skill, debuff skill and offensive skill.

Passive Skills

Soldier class gets to choose some slightly different extra skills: Dual Wield instead of Psionic Regen. Dual Wield is very good and only Michelle in the main party has that skill.

Otherwise, Hard to kill gives HP regeneration which is probably one of the most useful skill, maybe alongside Perfect Shape (bonus to speed).

Buff Skills

Psionic class has different skills: Invisibility and Cure. If you play as Psionic and get Cure, you’ll be the ultimate healing machine. By default the other Psionics (Rumi and Jacob) can heal but they cannot cure negative buffs. With Cure, you’ll be able to do it. For other classes either Quick Hands or Strike Back are good buffs to have.

Debuff Skills

For debuff, Psionic have Confusion instead of Finisher, and Soldiers have Barrage. Disarm debuff is definitely one of the most powerful ones, won’t do much damage but it’s good to gain time/crowd control.

Offensive Skills

Offensive skills again vary depending on chosen Class. For Psionics, all the choices are very good. Charm, Steal Life, Drain Power. You can’t go wrong with it, depend only on your tastes. With Charm and Rumi in the same team, if you fight enemies of same level, you can have fun charming them and seeing them killing each other (up to a certain point of course). For the other classes, both Time Bomb and Kill Them All are very useful. Time Bomb has some delay but is excellent at destroying armor, and Kill Them All if you level it up to the maximum will let you use even rifles or heavy weapon to hit all enemies!

Party Members

The other party members are split in the four main classes:

• Soldier: Michelle and Milo
• Guardian: Damien and Tom
• Scout: Rebecca and Philipp
• Psionic: Rumi and Jacob

• Michelle: is probably the deadliest character of the game. Taking advantage of the Dual Wield and other skills like Disarm, Critical Hit, etc she can bring down even the toughest enemy!
• Milo: is excellent at inflicting Damage Over Time with his Toxin skills, and debuffing with Soot Strike. Long delay attacks but very powerful
• Damien: the most useful skill is probably Time Bomb, but even Fear Tactics can be very useful in certain fight since it’s the only skill who can reduce enemies HP/PP regeneration
• Tom: it’s the true Guardian, having many party useful skills for Morale and also Psionic Link to heal other members. Barrage is also very useful to reducing enemies armors
• Rebecca: compensates the default long delays of the Sniper weapons with skills like Perfect Shape and Quick Hands. Chain Shot is also a good skill: use it to finish an enemy and be able to shoot again immediately!
• Philipp: the Drunk Shot skill is hilarious but also effective: even if you miss the target (as it likely) you’ll still deal good damage for the time/power invested. And when you’re facing a lone enemy, it will always hit it.
• Rumi: she’s the ultimate healing character, and with Psionic Regen and good equipment she’ll almost never run out of Psionic Points. Charm is fun to use and also useful in many fights, but don’t underestimate also Psionic Shield.
  Jacob is not as good as Rumi at keeping PP up but has interesting skills like Steal Life and ways to debuff/weaken the opponents like Weakness and Drain Power.

Gameplay and Combat Tips

There isn’t a single strategy to win fights, also because it greatly depends on the kind of enemies you’re facing. Here are some general useful tips:

• Save often! the game has an auto-save function, but remember to save regularly in case you want to go back and try different routes. Though personally I’d recommend to play the first time normally, and then use Visual Novel Mode to play again and see other routes/things you’ve missed.
• Keep your items updated! In this game more than all my past games, the items level is very important. Facing a level 5 enemy group with your characters same level, but with level 1-2 items will be tough
• Initially will be tough to get items of a good rarity (Rare/Epic). Most of the Legendary items are rewards for quests. So while you can fail the initial quests without consequences (game over) completing them can reward you powerful items
• Upgrading existing equipment becomes necessary, however sometimes it’s better to let it go: a Quality item 4-5 levels higher than a Rare items will be usually more powerful and sometimes it’s not worth investing all the resources to upgrade items. You’ll continuously find new items as you progress through the story
• Items can be used in battle even if paralyzed. The Medikits and Aqua Pura works well to restore HP/PP, while grenades are very useful to weaken enemies and to solve tough fights. Please note that grenades have a level, like the weapons/armors, and their damage changes according to the level. So it’s not worth saving them too long, otherwise they’ll do minimal damage if you use a grenade level 1 against a level 10 encounter. Don’t waste them, but don’t keep them with you too much!
• Attributes have a soft-cap: so even if you can put all your attribute points for example in Constitution, the benefits at higher level will be minimal (and you’ll be very slow/inaccurate). In general is better to distribute the point evenly, and maybe pick one or two areas depending on class. For Scouts speed is important, for Guardians / Soldiers HP, for Psionics PP and so on
• In chapter 2 you’ll unlock a very useful sector, Delta 7. In it, there’s a Dredan Merchant which can sell you many useful resources to upgrade your equipment, and the Kai Psionic Academy where you can stock up on medikits but most importantly, you can use Gharl Stones to get 2 new Attributes Points, useful in case you want to balance better some party members.
• Don’t rush to do all quest in a day. Unless you’re playing in Easy/Normal level. At higher levels you’ll build up the Fatigue meter. The in-game days you have is usually enough to finish all the quests without hurry
• Auto-combat is very useful, in particular for random encounters when you’re clearly superior to your enemies. My preferred way to use it is to enable it, watch a few rounds, then disable it maybe to heal or debuff some enemies (auto combat doesn’t use any skill except healing ones) and then turn it on again. This way even grinding will be much quicker!
• You can use different approaches to same battle. You can go all in offensive or on the opposite, try to defend and weaken/exhaust the enemies. Below it’s a video I made a while ago but still valid to show what I mean:

That said, in some battles the enemies will be quick and try to rush/kill you quickly, so the only way will be to kill them faster!