We've now discussed what you can build on your home island, but that's just support for the real star of the show: the kaiju itself. The core point of the game is to have the kaiju invade enemy cities and blast them to smithereens. Unfortunately, your kaiju starts the game fairly weak and the KDF defenses are only going to get stronger as the game goes on. If you want to stand a chance at your goal of world conquest, you have to upgrade your kaiju. I touched on this already in the Structure section when I described the training facilities, but it's important enough that it needs to be discussed at length.

There are five "Tiers" of ability, with Tier One abilities being the weakest and Tier Five abilities being the most powerful. In order to research a given ability, you'll need the research facility of the appropriate Tier (covered in the Facilities chapter). However, you'll also need the prerequisite ability. Each kaiju has its abilities divided into three distinct tech trees per kaiju, revolving around the themes of Attack, Defense and Metabolism. Each kaiju has one Tier One ability in each of these categories, and they each have to be researched individually. (Each kaiju also has a freebie Tier One attack ability that can be used at the start of the game, but that's not a prerequisite for anything.) Once a given Tier One ability is researched, it allows three new Tier Two abilities to be researched provided the appropriate training facility is built. Researching a Tier Two ability allows two new Tier Three research options, researching a Tier Three ability unlocks two Tier Four abilities, and researching a Tier Four ability unlocks one Tier Five research option.

The effect of this is that the tech trees are VERY top-heavy. In total, each kaiju has four Tier One abilities counting the freebie, nine Tier Two abilities, eighteen Tier Three abilities, and thirty six each of Tier Four and Tier Five. In other words, over two-thirds of your kaiju's abilities are the upper level ones in Tiers Four and Five, all of which are pretty expensive. That means you'll have to make very careful choices about what high-level abilities to purchase. You're simply not going to be able to afford all of them, and hard choices are going to be necessary.

There are a ton of options you have, and no one path is correct. But the most important step is to know the details of your kaiju's tech tree so you can make informed decisions about what to buy and what to skip. In the following three chapters of the guide, I'll be describing each ability possessed by each kaiju. For now, here's a cliffnotes version:

-Passive abilities are significantly more useful than active abilities, so go for those. You're limited in how many active abilities you can have equipped at a time, while passive abilities can accumulate endlessly.

-The most useful ability category in my opinion (and the one I'll cover at length in Chapter 3) is Defense. Gargantuan attack abilities are a lot of fun, but a dead kaiju is a non-attacking kaiju. Conversely, if you can't die it's hard to lose in combat. On a related note, my favorite abilities of all are armor-increasing ones. Each of the four kaiju have a series of passive abilities that gradually increase their armor--grab those. Enhanced durability may not be exciting, but it sure is practical.

-The second most useful ability category in my opinion, next to Defense, is Metabolism. Like Defense, Metabolism isn't flashy and it's not even intuitively obvious what it does, but it's extremely powerful when fully developed. It serves to change the "rules" of what you have, so Metabolism abilities tend to make the kaiju faster, allow more active abilities at once, that kind of thing. Again, not very exciting, but very useful. Metabolism gets covered in Chapter 4.

-As for Attack, you'll start the game with some offensive ability, including the freebie Tier One ability and the ability to crush stuff by stepping on it. But you absolutely will have to upgrade your offensive might if you want to survive the best of the KDF. There are a staggering array of Attack abilities in the game, the large majority of them active rather than passive (another reason I rated this category last), and so you'll need to know which ones your kaiju can make the most use of. Attack gets covered in Chapter 5.