Mech Engineer – How to Finish the Game and Tips

I have finished the game and now I want to share some insight on what you need for that, some secrets and exploits you can use to make it easier and my understanding of parts, mechs and weapons. This guide assumes you are already somewhat familiar with the UI and so would only help with confusing/hard to find parts of it.

How to Beat the Game

Сrеdit gоеs to Holuden !

Basic Engines

For engines, you can either have inner(weapons) or outer (terrain temperature) resistance. Mixing them is geting neither. For max effect put 2 multipliers on bottom 2 slots and 4 either outer or inner on top 4.

Melee

Remove melee weapon. On starter mechs weight(melee is 6) is a premium and later its unneded anyway. You can probably do a melee+evasion build but I didnt try it.

Cables/overclocking

When engineering a mech by pressing lightning button to the right of energy display and then a switch under the engine you can shift+right click on motors to get extra weight for extra energy use. ICE motors you start with only give 1 weight per cable(3 max), electric ones you get later can be supercharged much more efficiently if you have energy to spare. Fusion reactors have aux that let you put more cables on. Once you get beter motors put armor on, including ablative, it resists missiles.

Ammo

Ammo ratio, weapons are slpit into kinetic(grey) explosive(red) and thermal(yellow). If you have one type all ammo will be the same. if you have multiple it will split. All weapons with ammo tend to have litle or no heat when they shoot(not all of them) but give a lot of heat when they reload. Energy weapons dont reload but give heat when they shoot. C-RAM module(anti missile aux) uses kinetic ammo. There is a bug that sometimes makes your mech reload ammo types it doesnt use, heating mech a lot. Ammo capacity shows how many seconds your mech can shoot non stop before reloading. Ammo aux gives +1 second of ammo capacity and +5 control stat that affects your reload speed, and several other things your pilot does to mech.

Game Start Weapons

For weapons at the start of the game. In the early game dont use explosive weapons(red, missile launchers). At the start you have few resources and missiles are very expensive in terms of ammo cost. Use gatling guns instead. Put flame upgrade on them, make them weigh 15 then slam 3-4 into accuracy and everything else into attack speed.

Ammo capacity gives you seconds of shooting time. I tested most weapon configurations and in most cases more attack speed is more efficient, test it out(Screen that appears above weapon in engineering) yourself for optimal/interesting/fun builds. Swap fire for slowdown on 2 of them(still 15 weight) with a bit more attack speed. Then just dont attack tiles that have anything but basic bugs(changes every day) and you can breeze through the early game and half the middle game with just fire gatlings. Note that fire upgrade lets you deal damage to anything that has less then 20 armor, and only bosses have 20.

Starting Mech Composition

In the end your squad should have 2 mechs with 2 fire gatlings and 2 mechs with 1 fire and 1 slowing gatling, ICE engines with external resist(gatlings dont do much heat, in low temp it wont matter and in hot deserts without external you will overheat just from ambient heat. Swap to internal when using energy weapons with fission/fusion)

4 ammo and 2 energy augments and 1 cable to motor. This will let you blast through the early game.

Pilot Perks

For pilot perks, pick overheat resist first for squad members and reload for squad leader. Get only leader perks for leader, just put him on mech that cant overheat later(if mech has max outside temp of 500 or more it is very hard to make it overheat). In the late game you will use a lot of energy weapons that constantly overheat your mechs unless you spend aux modules on temp controll instead of other stuff so this perk will be usefull in the early game to push through deserts and if you are desperate volcanoes without too much damage and in the late game energy weapons wont melt your mechs with damage/defence greedy builds.

All 3 commander perks are awesome. For pilot perks pick overheat resist, drone repair and accuracy. All other are mediocre if you are not going for some whacky build, you are free to explore that, I shure didnt do everything this game has to offer.

Mech Defences

Energy shield protects from energy attacks(there are plenty, the worm that is your target in most missions uses one, always use shields), armor protects from physical attacks(including bullets) and ablative protects from missiles(fill up your spare weight with it, especialy if you expect missile attacks as they ignore armor and shields). C-RAM aux module uses kinetic ammo to shoot down missiles.

City

For city upgrades. You can see city interface by opening calendar in the hangar, there is a switch at bottom right of the screen. At start rush upper factory base upgrade to massively increase manufacturing speed. After first 2 upgrades are in upper factory never allow your components to go below 100, keep it at 120-140 ish as it drains daily. If they run out city stats start to deteriorate much faster. After that get 1-2 main reactor upgrade for a ton of energy and 2 or so medbay 1 upgrades. Then max out upper factory(would need to upgrade districts below first).

After that get waste resycling maxed(free resources every day) and start working on other upgrades you feel like with heavy emphasis on medbays and those that have efficient wounded human and life systems with couple upgrades that give the most consumer goods and food supply(hydroponics). Dont forget to max out main reactor to never have problems with enrgy stat. The city will keep deteriorating slower and slower the more upgrades you get but it will only start reparing when you have no wounded humans left(there is a bunker that has survivors, their wounded dont count)

Strategy Framework

Try to get a second squad running in paralel(you can do it by day 10 or so), late game is insane (starts at around day 45 when biohasard tiles start producing new red bosses) you would need all the resources, parts and pilots you can get. Try to produce as little early/middle game parts as possible and as much late game ones as you can. You can research rapid fire lasers and tier 3 ICE motors relatively early in the engine tree so start making them. Dont produce armor untill you upgrade a district that lets you make 20 units instead of 5 per batch. Once you start the game from the start, restart the game untill red sword(boss monster) starts on the edge of the map, preferably south or north pole, perfectly in the corner of the map. And gold sword not in the middle of the map eigher. This will make middle game a bit longer as you would have more area to run around as red bosses that contaminate the tiles tend to move sideways somewheat more for some reason.

Transition to late game(When you start to have to fight red bosses non stop) without 2 fully kitted late game squads just doesnt work, you will be overwhelmed. You will need to kill at least one boss per tern, and that doesnt let you clear the path to move your city and you get stuck in a death spiral where boss fights drain your resources(If you get second squad asap, at around day 10 it can be done, you will have a ton of resources by the time late game knocks the door)/pilot stamina(This can be solved by turning them into borgs, they take way less damage). As you make new and beter mechs you can start fielding a third squad filled with basic mechs you replaced in main squad, it would only work untill midgame starts at around day 30, you can see it on the calendar, monster images start appearing on the dates, that means on that date that monster is guaranteed to appear and so pure basic mech squad doesnt work anymore. Before the start of the game turn tutorials off and popups on with switches below save slots.

If you pushed through this wall of text the congrats! You will have a much easier time geting beating the game!

Engines

Explaining Engines

Before explaining each engine indibvidualy got to mention resistances again, you can only get ONE type or resistance, mixing them doesnt work, eirher inner for weapons or outer for ambient temperature. Put 2 multiplier aux on bottom slots and 4 inner on top 4 slots and that works for everything exept basic gatling where external is beter. The only reason you would need external resist is if you need to go to volcano region and dont have other way to prepare.

ICE

• Internal Combustion Engines are the basic type of the 3 engines available in the game. It uses least parts, you get so many of them by just playing you never need or want to waste time producing more but it still can pull its weight.
• With basic injector and piston you get 38 power output.
• Beter piston gives you higher max engine temp but less power, dont know why you would need that.
• Beter injector will lower max temp but increase your engine output to 62, which is pretty respectable and would let you install some energy weapons on your mech without wasting aux slots leting you use the mech as repair drone/C-RAM carrier with 2 fire rapid fire lasers to make them good at clearing basic bugs. Exelent support mech even in late game as it takes a ton of time to produce beter 3 gun military mech with same 6 aux slots.
• Installing both beter injector and piston is useless as they cancell each other out.

Fission Engine

• Your mainstray engine type. You can find enough of them on the map to never need to produce them, only their parts would need to be produced but they only take 1 day each so it is still convinient. There is only one type of safety and aux was explained above so the only question is the Kernel. You only realy need 2 builds for that.
• First build needs 3 grey rods, 3(or 2) red rods and 2(or 3) blue rods. This build produces 77(or 74) power, which is very decent and is enough to power all but most power hungry guilds on your mechs, if it is not enough add a couple energy aux on your mech and it should fit. This setup has 2 advantages, first it uses balanced rod setup so when you salvage parts from the map you wont end up with dead weight of blue/red rods and use both types. Second and much more powerfull advantage is that it is VERY hard to overheat this setup even on volcano tiles your mech with this just wont care.
• Second build needs 2 grey rods, 6(or 1) red rod and 0(or 5) blue rods. This build produces 123(or 121) power which let you use more power hungry setups then the other one but is way worse at heat management so you would need 1-2 heat sinks to keep it stable(if your mech got more then 300 max temp it is ok but would still overheat in desert/volcano tiles, 500 and it is hard to overheat in either).

Fusion Engine

• Endgame engine. Hella expensive, takes 5 slots and 6 days to produce, more then most mechs, needs another ton of parts to assemble. In return gives a LOT of power and heatsinks are very strong on this one. Power depends on “distance” stat, the higher it is, the less power you get. At higher distance engine is harder to overheat but not by much so just use a couple heatsinks on top of the right config.
• Use blue solenoid. Magnet setup needs x=8 y=9 and z=7. To get this use 1 corner part, 2 vertical parts and 3 horisontal parts. This would give you distance stat of 0 and power output of 520. You can swap your resistance aux for aux that lets you put more cables to supercharge your energy weapons/electric motors or overchargers(needs research) for even more power output. Beware that you WOULD need radiator aux modules on your mech for that setup or face non-stop overheats, more if you replace resistance.

Weapons

Kinetic

This is an easy one. Only has 2 types, both are good. Treat railguns like they dont exist. I dont understand why they are in the game.

• Gatling gun. Very simple, very cheap, very usefull in early to mid game. You get 8 from the start of the game, use them at once. You can make a bunch of builds with it, some beter some worse. My most favourite are 2. For both the final form is max attack speed and the rest to accuracy. Remove all points above 3 for accuracy and some from attack speed untill you can fit it in your mech.
• First is Slowdown mod. It is essential one, I use it even in late game. It hardcounters several enemiens, the one who rams you cant ram if it cant move and more importantly it can penetrate the shield around the rotating worm you need to kill in most missions and make it stop rotating making it completely helpless. Very usefull from beginning to the end of the game as it takes litle space and energy.
• Second is Flame mod. It makes so that each bullet, when it doesnt penetrate, releases a bit of fire around it. Each one is not much, but its a gatling. Fire damage from this mod can deal damage for everything that has less then 20 armor(even if at 19 armor it barely deals any), meaning it can kill anything that is not a boss. It struggles against stronger creeps but it is hillariously effective against basic bugs. When bullet fails to penetrate it moves a litle bit away from the enemy and then turns in to flames meaning it is significantly less efficient against static targets or those that move away from you(resourse worms) but it still deals decent damage to them too.
• Cannon. A bit less simple, a bit more expensive, this is your choise if you want to make a sniper mech and dont want to use missiles. With penetration mod can penetrate anything and deal a respectable amount of damage even through worm shields meaning you dont even need to go under it to kill it with mech holding these. Same as before max attack speed with some accuracy and weight saving as needed.

Thermal

• All 3 thermal weapons were underused by me due to their low range and singular damage type. Some enemies have resistances to sertain damage types, all other weapons can do thermal damage with fire mod so I didnt see the need to use them. Both flame and toxin throwers are probably very good against enemies close to them and can deny areas but because of beter thermal alternative I never realy used them.
• Plasmagun looks interesting because its shots fly right through many enemies and damage all of them dealing decent damage making it quite good against anything that is not a boss, but it is completely useless against bosses dealing no damage to opponents with 20 armor and dealing no damage to armor itself(author should probably fix it since I dont see why super hot plasma cant melt armor). This is a problem because it is at the very tippity end of the research tree and taking 20 days to research, meaning you cant start producing it early enough when its viable, and when you finaly can you need to start preparing for boss fights and your production slots are beter used for something more viable.
• Overall I think thermal weapons need buff/rework although im biased because I like to make specialised mechs with single weapon type and you can probably make them work for you.

Energy

• My favourite weapon type! All 3 of its weapons are very strong, although in different ways. All 3 have no armor penetration but they deal damage to armor itself. This makes it very good for thermal mod as it doesnt bounce and fire is delivered to target instantly making energy weapons the best against basic bugs period. Also the more powerfull the shot the bigger the are fire covers making overclocked lasers even beter. Energy weapons work worse under water. Also, they dont use ammo meaning that by making energy only builds you save a lot of materials!
• High power laser. Its downsides are low attack speed and high energy consumption, but it is quite light and its damage output is very high. Overall decent weapon. Crit mod gives it a lot of armor damage, fire mod gives it decent area fire explosions making it very good against grouped up enemies.
• Rapid fire laser. My most used weapon. The only weapon to take 5 days to build, only one other takes longer. With crit mod deals same armor damage as high power one but with more shots and half the energy cost, but with fire mod it is the best and the most universal map cleaner weapon you can get. It deletes low health creeps the moment mech with turns to them, if you fill 6-7 weapon slots on quad mech with these(for the other 1-2 put slowdown gatlings, my pretty’s) then anything that is not a boss will be deleted the same way. Try it out you would love it too. Since its main damage type is fire it works awesomely above and below sea level.
• Tesla gun. Somehow the best and the worst weapon in the game. It takes less time to make then rapid fire laser, though a bit more expensive. If you pute fire mod it is just as good at clearing the creeps, and unlike any other in the game it cannot miss so you dont need to put any stats into accuracy. Sounds nice? Weeeell it deals with creeps exactly the same as the above buuut it takes 2 times more power to do it. That is not as nice. Ok but fire mod is not the only one! This is the only weapon for which shrapnel mod is actualy amasing! When on land it lets you get the highest armor damage in the game at around 73! And scatter mod creates a ton of arcs that hit a lot of creeps making it good against crowds too! A castle full of teslas can melt bosses and crowds super fast because it first deletes their armor and then can deal an awesome amount of damage….ON LAND. Most of the map is ocean tiles. Underwater energy weapons are debuffed and none feels it more then tesla gun dropping its armor damage from 73 to 18 which promptly makes it so bad at dealing with armor that there are plenty of beter options.

Explosive

• This is an interesting one. These weapons have a boon and a bane in that they make explosions. A boon is that it hits hard and can break terrain, a bane is that it can damage your own mechs. Also their ammo is more expensive so in the beginning they are not very usefull when you are low on materials. Later in the game it becomes negligeble but by that time you can start transitioning to energy weapons that dont use ammo at all but can deal with creeps just as well. Basicly both rapid fire and heavy are not very usable as main weapons because you need to save your materials in the early game and there are beter options in both mid and late game. You can still use heavy missile launcher with crit mod that makes enormous explosions to clear terrain, especialy in caves and oceans which makes navigating these maps way easier, you just need to be carefull not to blow yourself up.
• This last weapon is a secret so if you dont want spoilers dont read this. It is not that hard to find it as is and it is so good that you might want to find it yourself and keep it a surprise.
• First is how to find it:On the mission map there are 4 pinging signals with different color. You need to clear the Golden one. This mission has a mini boss that is very hard to kill in the early/first part of mid game but likely you dont need to. The map has 4 small and 1 big turrets in the middle of the map. First rush and clear all nests. Be carefull not to capture any of the turrets as that would make the boss/creeps attack them. Once nests are dealt with capture only the big turret and put your mechs around it(not capturing the small ones) and in a bit you should win.
• The weapon:Im just gona say that it is an unholy son of tesla and heavy missile launcher with insane damage, weight and energy consumption. It is absolutely GLORIOUS

Mechs, Map, Secrets and Exploits

Mechs

• There are 7 mechs in this game. You can roughly put them into 4 categories by their uses.
• First is Specialist(Useless) mechs. These are the Underwater and the Tentacle mechs. Both look interesting until you realise that while both of them have a bunch of weapon slots and are good underwater both of them only have 2 aux slots. If you use 2 aux slots on turbines on any other mech it would make them just as good underwater, but you dont realy need more then one to make them not too slow and aux slots are super usefull for any kind of build. If they had more aux slots they could be interesting, but as is I dont see any use for them. Even the basic mech is beter.
• Second is Aux mechs. These are 2 first mechs you get your hands on, the basic one and the military with 3 guns one. Both of them have 6 aux slots, military one is plain beter in all respects, has 3 guns, more ammo, faster reload, 6 motors but takes a ton of time to make em so you can keep using basic ones for your C-RAMs and repair drones. With few guns they dont need much power so fission engine that cant overheat is sufficient, maby put 1 turbine on it for speed and you can crap 5-6 modules usefull for the whole team. 2 flame rapid fire lasers make them good against small creeps. Must have at least one in each team.
• Third is assault mechs, main damage dealers. Quad(8 guns) and Castle (12 guns). Both only have 4 aux slots that are mostly used to boost themselves(heat tolerance, energy, ammo). Castle is the best mech, doesnt need turbine for full speed underwater, 12 guns, extra 4 armor, 14 seconds of ammo, its only downside is its insane cost 5 times the quad with no less insane repair costs and its heat tolerance that in most builds you need to boost heavily with aux slots or have your mech constantly be on the edge of melting.
• Fourth is mixed mech, the syndicate mech has 4 guns, cheap and fast to make, has decent resists, extra 4 armor and 5 aux slots(doesnt sound like much untill you realise that most of the time you need to spend 2-3 on power/heat tolerance instead of usefull stuff like ammo or C-RAMs). Overall you can make a balanced and stable platform for your commander who cant repair others with repair drones and cant overheat cus he cant pick overheat damage resist perk.

Map and Missions

• Collection of tidbits about map. Hidden ones contain spoilers/exploits
• The numbers on tiles show the amount of nests near them and the multiplier of mobs on that tile.
• Nests can form entire damn magino lines and trenches so be prepared for massive detours
• Exploit: When you clear a city tile you get some low level loot and some engineers/scientists. You also reveal a tile with one of 3 parts you need to beat the game. It is random so if you reload the day before you cleared it you can “reroll” it untill you like its position.
• Spoiler: If you beat the game, you can reveal new part locations by clearing more cities! For more game finishes!
• Exploit: If you restart the game untill red and gold bosses are near each other at the very start the gold boss would start chasing the red boss and eat it very early, making midgame last a bit longer because initial contamination zone would be smaller
• Spoiler: The pings on the map have goodies! The green one gives you bunch of survivors(including engineers and scientists) and golden one gives you THE BEST weapon in the game and its production tech. All of them give you other advanced loot like good guns, motors , engines ect. 2 of them have bosses aka the one with the gun and the one with fallen satelite. The one with the gun you need to clear the nests, capture only the big gun not touching the small ones around it then surround it with your mechs so boss doesnt kill that big turret and let it kill the boss. For the fallen satelite you just let boss(that is a thicc frog) lick one of your mechs onto one of the walls(it doesnt deal much damage most of the time so just let it whale away at your mech) and send other 3 get the black box from the crash site. Use artillery fire to open a road to avoid detour.