Mech Engineer – Early Game Tips

Here are a few tips for the early game.

Tips to Early Game

Сrеdit gоеs to Nyamses!

• For the first 15-20 days, avoid tiles that have anything other than the basic enemies. 20mm gatling guns with the Incendiary augment and a focus on rate-of-fire will be your friends.
• A weapon with the Stasis augment can quickly “freeze” the rotating “boss” of the stage, allowing you to move inside its shield without getting pummeled. Have at least 1 mech with a Stasis weapon, preferably a 20mm gatling gun early on
• You start with 6 mechs, so you can eventually create 2 squads of 3 mechs each. For that, immediately build 4 extra 20mm gatling guns right from the get-go, so you can fully equip the 3 other reserve mechs. (2 mechs with 2 incendiary gatling guns, 1 mech with 1 incendiary and 1 stasis gatling worked for me)
• Avoid underwater maps that don’t provide line-of-sight into the “boss” worm area until you’ve researched the Underwater Battle tech, since your mechs won’t be fast enough to run into the shield before the worm circles around and fires at you.
• Cities are your friends. Every City map you clear, you’ll get some equipment and more importantly, 10 Engineers and 10 Scientists. The more Scientists you have, the more concurrent research projects you can do, which is important for progression. The middle line of research will eventually lead to Energy Weapons and the Nuclear Reactor, which are necessary to transition out of the Early Game phase.

So to summarize, avoid anything other than the basic Operarius enemies early on and have your 2nd squad up by day 4, so you can clear areas faster and amass more materials, and yes, don’t be afraid to save scum in order to try out new things and figure out what works for you.

Bonus tips

If you pause your game and HOLD right-click, you can draw a path for your squad to follow, which is important to guide them along while providing a clear line-of-sight to the swarms that are coming your way. The default AI pathing loves to hug walls and corners, so they’ll often run face-first into a line of enemies waiting right around the corner.

Do mind that your units will follow your path without avoiding enemies, so it can be useful to force your way into the shielded area without having your units stopping to fire at the incoming swarms.