Darkwind - Viewing Topic: Discussing Strategy - V of V

KingEridani
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Training and Personnel

The following is part V of V on my series of posts on ‘Discussing Strategy’. I hope for the following guidelines and jargon to be adopted by players both veteran and new alike to foster better communication about the game. I will update these posts as corrections arise from discussion in attempt to create a referable resource should this catch on.

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The following turned out to be a lengthier than expected explanation of the wonderful world of Gangers. Your gangers are the only invaluable possession of your gang. They cannot be traded away to players or even sold to NPCs. You cannot purchase high end gangers nor loot them in the wild. The only way to get highly skilled gangers is to make them yourself. Unlike your average RPG, perma-death means you can actually be set-back by failure.

Due to the large number of factors in a scout/travel‡--any of which going wrong will result in a dangerous situation--it is impossible to completely eliminate risk of death from active training. The only safe alternative to active training is passive training, however this either requires that you be paying real-world currency or exposing a portion of your gang to risk to safely train the others. The major drawback of the current system is the extremely slow growth rates of passive training. Despite this it is recommended that, even as a non-subscriber, to engage in both active and passive training (via purchasing chrome with DW$).

The fine balance of safety vs. profit and training is where the art of the Darkwinder lives.

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Specialists

The specialists strategy is about dedicating your gangers to one skill. Often but not always this is accompanied by being assigned to a specific vehicle in one or more squads.

This strategy is highly recommended for beginners but encounters some problems scaling in comparison to your garage and geo-location later on. You are also less protected against losses as you must stretch further to cover all the skills and use all the tools. However you end up training faster both in that particular skill but also overall due to a particular mechanic.

When your ganger uses a skill which is lower than half of another skill in the same group, they are as effective has half the greater skill. Active experience is greater with success, thus leading to more effective training of skills below half of the ‘Specialist’ skill. Because this mechanic does not benefit skills which are weaker but not lower than half, it is not at all at play for characters who are strictly crosstraining.

The two weaknesses of this strategy differ in potency and are both alleviated by toggling back and forth between it and the cross-training strategy. The minor and more ameliorated weakness is the comparative (and ironic) lack of Specs. The major weakness is the diminishing returns on active training set to certain levels in each town. To train specialists into the hundreds you must move further and further South where the comparative lack of specs to cross-trainees becomes enormous.

Cross-Training

Train each ganger within either related skill group (Driving and Gunning) each skill, in increments of 50. So a ‘Gunner’ might start training Ballistics to his first perk, then switches to Hand Guns**, etc. Then repeat to raise each skill to 100. You will end up with 4 specialities for each cycle that if chosen savily are applicable to each or the desired skill they will end up using once capped. This will result in three specs for Drivers (if they hit the gym’s Bicycle Machine pretty hard). More on Dual-Roles with cross-training First Aid, Scouting and Mechanic later.

The major weakness of this strategy is that the skill cap is universally equal among all skills. With gunners this means you’re dumping 200 skill points worth of time and investment to discover the same cap it takes a player using the Specialists strategy 50 to find.

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Ganger Roles

If Drivers, Gunners, Medics, Scouts and Mechanics are the five ‘roles’ to cover, you can split Driving and Gunning into the ‘Vehicle Operation’ and Medic, Scout and Mech into ‘Squad Operation’. When deciding what a ganger should be in life, its best to identify what their primary role will be, then establishing any additional roles. The one exception is that Mechanic does not make a great primary role, unless that character is known to be bound for the camp pits. As vehicles are the lifeblood of Darkwind it is recommended that each ganger have at least one role (primary or secondary) from the ‘Vehicle Operation’ roles: gunning and driving.

The ‘Squad Operation’ skills while unable to benefit from skills from the same group (as there are none) are nonetheless essential to running a scout safely or profitably or both (FA, Mech, Sct respectively). However none of the three skills are essential to the operation of a vehicle. Unless you are rocking loads of unused bulk (read wasted space) your medics, mechanics and scouts should be cross-trained in one of the ‘Vehicle Operation’ roles, gunner or driver. Scouts make excellent drivers as both may be trained simultaneously via travel. Mechanics make good gunners, so they can always be where the loot is. Medics do well at either role and is by far the hardest regular skill to level up.

The only thing to say about courage is train it up as much as is safe on everyone you can. For Leadership I highly recommend keeping 1-3 back-up leaders and always having one member of the ‘cabinet’ present to soak up leadership xp. I try to diversify cabinet by role.

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Long-Term Strategy

Recruiter

Although the base attributes of your character (Strength, speed and dexterity) may never increase, the true limiter to an individual ganger’s potential is the hidden skill cap. While 50 dexterity difference might cause a tangible gap early on, that same difference in skill cap can mean several specialities and ends up making a much larger difference.†

If you haven’t been playing for long enough to see your gangers hit skill caps you’re probably wondering to yourself, ‘Whats he going on about recruiter for? There's no noticeable difference when using that spec!’ You would be right; the effects of recruiter will go unnoticed for hundreds of skill points. However using the ‘free hire’ mechanic and Recruiter will give you gangers with higher skill caps and thusly more late-game power than players who do not.

Spike Mining

This is another late game strategy developed around the idea of training under an unknown limit. The strategy is a specific take on the Specialist strategy. Instead of aiming to utilize the sub-50% skill bonus, the entire gang is trained in one skill until they hit their skill cap. Once you know how many specs each ganger can achieve, you can more intentionally and comfortably cross-train. Generally this is done with either the Scouting or Mechanic skill.

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*As the ‘play it safe’ type I highly recommend cross-training gunners in Hand Guns. Passively train it with your subscription or fork out about $7500-$15000 in chrome-for-money trade per guy. The only way to -safely- train Hand Guns actively; hunt traders, red the guards and -without harming them- chase the runners. Park your fighters and unleash your legion of Paint Rifle armed gunners to muck about and generally make a mess. Come back with huge gains (At my best I managed about 2-4 points per gunner in 2 hours of this routine but I play kinda slow).

†Of course the maximum potential for a ganger would be achieved by rolling high on stats and the hidden skill cap upon creation. Unfortunately there is no way to check for the second so, rank up your recruiter and set a 5 day timer gents.

‡And I guess getting sideswiped by an NPC that was going head first into a barrier causing you to end up hitting a completely different barrier at 120mph during a race counts as well...

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TL;DR: Give every ganger a driving or gunning skill; train one skill up within a group, use it to train skills sub50% for additional specs. Cry about hidden Skill Caps.

......................... vet wv
Posted Jun 30, 2016, 11:46 pm