Class: Medic
Stats: Intelligence
Talents: Roll for Intelligence and heal effect without negatives
Hobby: Music or Board Games
Height/Weight: 165cm - 174cm, 55kg - 64kg (No Stat changes)


Class

When starting your first game, you will only be offered a limited choice of classes for your main character. While all of them have merit, the Medic would be my recomendation. They tend to be rarer during the first few missions of the game, and are therefore harder to recruit. Plus, having a healer early on, makes the start of the game a bit easier.

Stats

At the start, just focus on Intelligence, mainly to buff your ability to heal. As a bonus, this will give you better odds when looting, and more supplies/better weapons are always welcome. During the game, a mixture of intelligence and resolve in a 2/1-ratio allows you to spam your group heal during battle, which should be more than enough for every standard battle.

Talents

Intelligence and heal effect are a good way to buff your Medic, but Resolve, Moral and Speed (speeds up the cooldown of secondary abilities) are also welcome. Try not to get too many negatives. While a malus on fortitude or block chance is neglegible for a medic, they can only be removed after unlocking training in your Command Center, which will happen near the middle of the game. Since you start the game for the first time, stats can get a bonus of -2/+2 at best, so +2 Intelligence is a great outcome, as long as there are not to many negatives.

Hobby

Music offers resolve, Board Games offer intelligence. Both will be useful, so pick what you currently have less of (most likely resolve). If you don't mind a minor penalty to get the most out of your medic, both Meditation (Intelligence, but a small decrease in damage) and Hacker (Intelligence, but a small decrease in Fitness) give you that option.

Height/Weight

Both height and weight of your character are not cosmetic stats, but will in fact alter the stats you start with. Light, small characters are more nimble, tall, heavy characters are stronger and can take a beating. For a medic the neutral option of 165cm - 174cm, 55kg - 64kg is a good pick, but getting a few points of fitness that way is a possibility.

First Slot: Slave (Alternative: Shielded soldier)
Second Slot: Tribal Warrior (Alternative: wildcard slot, pick whatever you like)
Third Slot: Medic (Alternative: Order Pastor)
Fourth Slot: Serial Killer (Alternative: Magister)


First Slot

The first slot often has a high chance of enemy abilities hitting and is targeted by submachine guns and, especially nasty, shotguns. Therefore someone sturdy should hold the line here.

Slave: Gets a malus on defense, and the first slot gives a malus on dodge, so a Slave may not be the obvious pick here. But when skilled with fitness (more HP), some resolve (using the ultimate more often) and some agility (more speed and accuracy), they are surprisingly capable. This is a result from the ultimate skill, that allows self healing, combined with a submachine gun for the high fire rate. The hard labor ability is also very useful to prevent injuries. Blind swipe isn't useful for a tank, but another way to deal damage is always welcome. When it comes to armor, I would recommend medium, one without a malus on speed. Light armor with a +0.1 speed bonus is also useable, but relies even more on the ultimate ability.

Shielded Soldier: Prevents damage by using blocks, and with the ultimate can get a 100% block chance. Heavy armor and some extra defense is also a good investment. The only downside is, that they tend to collect injuries rather quick. A strength/fitness build should make them a real nuisance for your enemy. The debuff ability is very useful in boss fights to prevent the special enemies (Jackal, Viper, Alef) from wrecking too muck havoc.

Second Slot

This slot allows a wide variety of classes, as long as they are able to take a few extra hits. Good ideas would be the Tribal warrior, Commando or Religious Warrior.

Tribal Warrior: With a strength/fitness build very tough, and able to deal nasty single target damage. Due to the way the damage is calculated, a shotgun would be the recommendation for this class, and since they are only a second row fighter, a medium armor without a malus on speed is enough to keep them save. The self heal ability works over time, which makes it not very useful during short encounters, but during longer ones, it can save your healer some work. If you want to use Haroun for this slot, be aware that he will die during a story event. So make sure to have a replacement.

Commando: Very similar to the Tribal warrior, but more focused on group damage and using a stun ability to take enemies out of the fight for a short moment. Strength/fitness serves them well, and their ability to heal themselves is a boon during every fight. The only downside is, that group damage tends to be less useful that focused attacks on a single enemy.

Jackal: Only useable after unlocking it on hard mode during the first boss encounter. But the abilities are both nasty and overpowered. Especially the ability to buff yourself until the end of battle, can ramp up during longer fights, since it stacks indefinitely. On top of that a nice self heal and an ultimate that heals on kill and prevents enemies from using skills. Only an option for your second or third playthrough, but definitely a fun one.

Third Slot

A good slot for supporters and healers, with my personal preferrence being a healer like the medic.

Medic: My personal favorite regarding the healers, not because they heal the best, but because they have little downsides you have to compensate for. Intelligence and resolve helps you to spam your ultimate ability, while the hypodermic needle can give small boosts inbetween the bigger heals. Armor should be light and focus on speed gain, the weapon is mainly picked for the ability bonusses. The anesthetic ability sounds great on paper, but the chance to silence the enemy is too low and the duration too short to make an impact in most situations. During the final battle it can be useful, however.

Surgeon: The by numbers best healer in the game, with one very unfortunate downside, they can't heal themselves. With three abilities focused on healing, two with the ability to recover injuries, they can keep a whole team alive under heavy fire, without problems. But due to their unfortunate lack of self heal, they either require a secondary healer in the team or a bodyguard to soak up damage for them. Personally, I avoid them, since they force you to micromanage the team too much.

Order Pastor: Not a traditional healer, since the Pastor uses shields to keep others alive. This also causes him to use mostly resolve, and with a light, speed focused armor, they tend to be pretty reliable when it comes to keeping your fighters alive. The obvious downside is, that once the damage is done, it is not easy to recover from. But since shields seem to prevent injuries from happening, they can be very useful in every encounter.

Fourth Slot

A perfect slot for a damage dealer, despite the accuracy malus it gives you. With some extra dodge, and only two types of weapons targeting it, you can put some real glass cannons here, without them dying constantly.

Serial Killer: Those guys are wild. With a strength/agility build, they can reach DPS-values far exceeding the 200 mark. Since two of their abilities cause damage with pretty high multipliers, they can wreck a whole team on their own, if kept alive. Especially their ultimate ability is dangerous, because it restores morale on kill, which allows to slaughter one enemy after the next. On top of that, the abilties also cause a lot of injuries, boosted by the seeing red skill, which can be used to weaken bosses and tougher enemies permanently.

Magister: Can also deal pretty nasty damage, but relies heavily on resolve to do so.On top of that, they can steal the enemies morale, which can prevent the activation of their ultimate abilities. While not as devastating as the Serial Killer, they can turn the tide, by keeping the enemy team from utilizing their full strength.

Other combination
Of course a lot of other combinations can work for your team, even extreme ones like a team of four medics, which will make sure you heal at an alarming rate only stopped by the battle timer, or four tribal warriors, equipped with high damage weapons like shotguns or sniper rifles, to do explosive damage every time moral/timers allow it. I would reccomend to use a combination of the above mentioned characters to start out, and once you know what to do switch one or two out at a time to find a combination you can work best with.

Rarity Levels

Rarity Levels: Red (Damaged), White (Common), Green (Uncommon), Blue (Rare), Purple (Epic), Orange (Legendary)

Fighter Rarity

Every fighter in Home Behind 2 has, equal to equipment, a rarity level. The main difference between a common fighter and a legendary fighter are the amount of stat points and talent points available to them, roughly four points each per level. Therefore the difference between common and legendary amounts to roughly two extra accessory slots, assuming the points are properly used. So it will pay off to look for rare fighters while exploring areas, but even common fighters can win the game, if properly used.

Aquiring new Fighters

Since you only get three fighters during the tutorial, filling up your team and getting some fighters as backup should be a priority to you. There are several ways to let new people join your team.

Rescue Hostages: In some areas you can find hostages sitting on the ground. If you free them, there is a chance that they can be recruited (if not, they usually offer ressources, a blessing or a corpse to be searched). Be careful if it is an army soldier, they sometimes blow themselves up, when you try to recruit them. Use the Investigate option to see if they are dangerous.

Bars: Instead of getting your team hammered at the bar, you can buy new members for your team, and while they tend to come at a high price, the barkeep usually has several rare or epic fighters an offer. If you have enough money in your pocket, it can be worth a shot.

Help Mercenaries: Sometimes a lone mercenary will ask you to defend him from the army, bandits or rioters. Accepting the plea, they will join you, bringing all their equipment with them. The difficulty of the following fight is equal to the area danger level, so it should be nothing you aren't prepared for.

Wandering Groups: Wandering revolutionaries or mercenaries can sometimes be convinced to join your cause for a large sum of money. Similar to the bar, it can be worth a shot, as long as you are rich enough, but especially the revolutionaries have mostly common or uncommon fighters to offer.

Capture Enemies: A cheap method to get new fighters is to simply capture enemies during battle. During every fight, the chance to capture an enemy is shown in the center of the screen, next to the phase timer. The percentage will slowly rise during longer fights, or pretty quickly if one or more of your fighters are in capture mode (can be activated by the drop down over their portrait) up to a maximum. Both the chance and the maximum can be increased by using the tactic "Concentrated Ether". Afterwards, two intelligence checks need to be passed, one repeatable (using supplies) and one that can fail. The upside here is that you can get new fighters for free, and what you see (on the battlefield) is what you get, so you can inspect your recruits beforehand. Plus, this is an easy way to get fighters over level 30 (the normal maximum without special training). On the downside, there is a level of randomness, both in if you can capture and who you get in the end. Also, any new fighter will need some medicine or time in the infirmary before being useful.

Equipment Rarity and Level
All equipment comes in rarities (see above), but only weapons and armor are available in red (damaged) variants. In general rarer equipment has higher attribute bonuses, damaged equipment only comes with demetrial effects. On top of that, weapons split in different types, like pistol or shotgun and levels of quality from zero to ten. Armor splits in light (gives dodge and speed but little armor), medium (adds or removes some dodge and speed but offers more armor), and heavy (trades dodge and speed for a lot of armor), and only has levels from zero to five. Both level and rarity and influenced by the wealth level of the area you explore in. Acessoires don't have a level, only rarity and type. Only acessoires of different types can be worn together.

Types of Weapon and armor

Shotgun: Best used in the front two positions, a shotgun will always aim for the first enemy in the group. While this may limit which enemy you can hit, having two of them in the team will hurt the enemy in the first slot quite badly. They usually have high accuracy and low speed.

Pistol: Placed in the last two rows, pistolstend to have quite low damage, compared to other weapons of the same level, and therefore mostly for healers or supporters. Unfortunately, there is little incentive to use them, so giving them an assault rifle or similar instead may be the better choice.

Machine Gun: Despite the poor accuracy and average speed, the amount of bullets it fires makes the machine gun a painful surprise. It fires from the last two rows to the same spots in the enemy team, and if backed with a good amount of agility, they can shred a whole team within seconds.

Submachine Gun: A gun with high speed and average accuracy, meant for the first two slots. Most of the tank classes will use either this or a shotgun. With some extra accuracy on the equipment, or high agility, they turn out to be quite deadly.

Sniper Rifle: With massive damage per shot and high accuracy, the only thing holding these guns back is the low speed stat on them. To help them fulfill their full potential, make sure to use light armor (between +0.05 to +0.2 speed) and gather extra speed from your equipment. Make sure to get absolute numbers (like +0.1 speed) instead of percentage (+20% speed), due to to low initial value.

Light Armor: The most interesting value the light armor has will usually be the speed increase it offers to its wearer. Therefore most damage dealers will profit from it, especially if they have slow firing weapons like the sniper rifle.

Medium Armor: While the medium armor seems to be a nice middle ground, it will most likely be the go to for a lot of tank classes, who don't want to lose most of their dodge value or slow their skill cooldown. A SpecOps or slave will profit from this.

Heavy Armor: Usually causing a hefty drop in speed and dodge, only some tank classes can really profit from those massive armors. One of them would be the shielded soldier, since as a block tank, will get hit quite frequently. What makes those armors also viable, is the malus on dodge in the first two slot of your team (40% reduction in the first, 20% reduction in the second), reducing the stats usefullness there.

Command Center: Necessary for all other upgrades, therefore a must have, but pretty expensive.

Truck: Make sure to keep this up to level, or you will suffer during vehicle battles

Infirmary: At least level three is recommended, to get to the good medicine. The rest is optional, but can help

Kitchen: The buffs are relatively small and have a level of randomness (which can blow up in your face), but one of the upgrades helps, so not a priority, but not useless

Drone: Helps with firefighting, surveillance is not really necessary, so only if you have ressources to spare

Vending Machine: More slots to buy more medicine every week, not top priority but not useless either

Warehouse: One upgrade is useful, but everything else can be avoided by cleaning the inventory after every mission (which should be done anyway to get cash)

Metalworks: The upgrades are useful during late game, crafting is nice for the higher level armor. A good investment before the final missions to squeeze out every drop of firepower

Satellite Phone: Useful, especially the upgrades, so make sure to upgrade it


Command Center
The heart of your base and the limiting factor for every other building. Therefore you will have to upgrade it regularly, despite the rather high costs. It allows for more people in your army (even more with upgrades), but except a reserve to replace dead fighters, you can push on with only one team, as long as you keep feeding them energy pills and coffee. The dispatch missions are moderately useful to keep your stay-at-home people busy, but except those which add new daily rewards or stat points, the ressource and experience gain is rather small. Training, after getting unlocked during the main story, can be used to optimise fighters, or salvage one after a bad trait sneaks in, but is most useful to allow them reaching levels beyond 30. Still not game breaking, except you invest a lot of time in it. The best feature here are the tactic slots, which allow you to use a variety of emergency abilities during battle.

Truck
The upgrades are nearly a must have if you want to stay competitive during vehicle battles, since the enemies will grow from a single motorcycle to a fully equipped main battle tank. The upgrades are not too useful, except maybe driving speed, but this can, as all vehicle stats, raised through new parts bolted on it. The turbo can be fun, but it isn't really necessary to invest into.

Infirmary
The first screen in the infirmary is the most important it has, crafting new and better medicine from the base items you gather while exploring. Antiseptic bandages, herbal powder and painkillers are already a big step up, later options are often overkill if you are careful. The treatment bay can be used to save medicine by paying supplies, but you will probably never use more than one bay. The upgrades are forgetable, the reduced chance of injury suonds great, but the bonus is so small it barely matters.

Kitchen
The kitchen sounds pretty good.A temporary buff to up to two stats, but it has several problems. The good buffs are only reachable in a level 4 or 5 kitchen, and you need to craft them several times and have the upgrade to have a proper chance of success. Failure cuts the buff to a middling amount or even gives you a debuff, biting you in the rear. It can be used before missions, but be ready to fall back in case of bad luck. The most useful upgrade is the reduction of supply costs when upgrading your fighters skills. Since you will do this a lot, it will save a substancial amount. Be aware that unlocking it requires you to do the side mission, in which you check the smoking village.

Drone
The drone gives you the ability to scout your surroundings on the world map with a long cooldown, but also helps to spy on enemies or fight fires. The last ability is the only one thats regularly useful, everything else is pretty much an extra. It will be unlocked after you buy 200 bucks worth of good at the vending machine.

Vending Machine
The small shop in your base offers a pretty nice selection of goods, at least if you upgrade it to the highest level and buy the upgrades for quality and price reduction. This way you can buy high quality medicine and legendary weapons and armor for a price much lower than any trader in Scaria. The gambling is a good way to lower the amount of funds you have available, but you get one free pull per week and the lucky tickets for more free pulls, so you can still get something here for free. It will be unlocked after a side mission early in the game.

Warehouse
Basically a normal inventory, except that only weapons and armor count towards your maximum, as long as they are not equipped. Only after getting the vending machine you can sell stuff from here, before you just toss it out. Leveling it up gives you more space, and a higher sell price, the former is not relevant if you keep everything tidy, the latter will be useful, so if you have material to spare, go for it.

Metalworks
Your crafting and upgrading workbench will most likely not be used much until the late game. Before, the high prices and chance of failure make crafting and upgrading a waste of material. But if you already own high level gear (level 9-10 weapons, level 4-5 armor), it helps to get even more out of it. The upgrades help with that, and the soft matresses upgrade gets much more useful during late game (since your truck is faster, your people have less time to rest between locations). Watch out for area effects on the world map that help with upgrading chance and give objects better stats while crafting.

Satellite Phone
The contact with foreign powers will give you a nice amount of daily ressources if you give them gifts, trade via mail or do missions for them. The mission rewards are unfortunately not very big (even if the description states otherwise). The upgrade to get more reputation makes things faster ans easier, but the star of the show is the one that gives more movement speed. Spending less time exploring means you can do more stuff in one week, which will very useful in the end.

Vehicle battles

• Use long range weapons with a range of 300m or more
  
• Start the fight already moving away from the enemy, and keep your distance at 300 - 350m
  
• Weapons aiming at a destroyed part will no longer fire, so switch targets
  
• Get rid of enemy fighters, since they are less influenced by distance between vehicles

Preparing the vehicle
The basic truck will accommodate two fighters and one vehicle weapon, which can later go up to four fighters and four weapons. Unfortunately, since the enemy vehicle will get stronger over time, starting with motorcycles, later trucks, ATVs up to a fully equipped main battle tank before the final boss , you need to stay up to date with your equipment. In addition to the loadout, the truck can also get vehicle parts like wheels or armor fitted on it.

During battles, it is noticeable, that most enemy vehicles either use a mixture of guns with different ranges, or focus more on close combat, so staying a far away as possible will give you an edge, since you are far more likely to hit. This makes it possible to simply turn most fights into a damage check, with the winner being whoever dies last. Fun weapons to use for this are howitzers, anti-material-rifles and sniper rifles, all boasting a long range, and at least two of them also offering an EM-variant, making it possible to stun enemy weapons for a short time.

Unfortunately, the enemy will usually try to get back into range by driving closer to you, which you should prevent by picking the right vehicle parts. Things like the military armor, civilian engine and offroad wheels give you enough health points without sacrificing the speed you need.

When it comes to fighters, i would personally opt for fast firing damage dealers to go on the truck. As long as there accuracy is not too low, they should be able to stand up to the enemy quite well.

Vehicle battle tactics

With the preparations above, the best tactic to win basically every vehicle battle is to stay at roughly 300 - 350m distance from the enemy during the whole fight, simply do prevent their shorter range guns from hitting you, since their accuracy will drop quite a bit when going over the maximum range.

When it comes to targeting, every gun that has at least 100% damage for enemy fighters should aim for them first. This will not only prevent them from putting out fires and repairing the vehicle, but will also reduce the damage you take, since the fighters accuracy is less impacted by distance.

After the fighters are down, aim for whatever the gun does the most damage to. Destroying vehicle parts doesn't cause negative effects, so only total damage matters here. If any part is down to zero or on low health while on fire, switch targets to make sure no attacks are wasted.

In the end, vehicle battles are mostly a damage race, so the outcome will be mostly decided beforehand. So make sure it gets upgraded regularly.

Fighting on foot

During exploration you will meet quite a few groups of enemies, so fighting will be a central part of your game. To win those encounters, three things are essential to watch out for:

Battle Timer: The battle timer occupies the upper center of your screen, and will largely go unnoticed for most of the game. Why? Because standard encounter will, providing you have enough damage, never make it a problem. Unfortunately longer encounters will make it count up, simply to prevent one site (mostly you) from stalling indefinitely by healing all incoming damage. So, no matter how good your medic(s) are, finish a fight quickly or the damage will increase to crush both sides.

Stances: Every character in your lineup can take (shown above their portrait) one stance during battle. Those can be changed during battle and again after a short cooldown, so regularly changing your stance is possible. While the first four of the six are only degrees of automation, the latter two are "Capture" (essential to capture enemies, but will cause you to take a lot of damage), and "Defence" (less Damage for your character) are situational very useful. But remember they prevent you from using skills, so don't use them on healers or your tank.

Skills: Every character can use three skills, one ultimate and two standard skills. The ultimate runs on your morale bar, and can be triggered when it is full (be aware that some enemies can empty the bar). The morale can be carried over from encounter to encounter, so if your current fight is nearly done, don't force yourself to use it and simply take it with you to the next. Normal skills run on a timer that can be sped up with the characters speed value. It is a good idea to use damage skills a soon as they are available, while utility and healing can be saved for an appropriate moment. Just make sure not to hoard them, since it is not worth to wait 15 seconds for the right moment, since the timers are pretty short.

Danger Levels

A zones danger level represents the average level of enemy fighters in the area. This is usually (danger level * 3) + 1, with the actual levels ranging from two below the average up to two above. So a danger level of 4 will cause an average enemy level of 13, with the actual level being between 11 and 15. Be aware that your fighters experience gain is only determined by the average level, so even when fighting a level 14 enemy with a level 14 fighter in a Danger level 4 zone, the 60% experience malus for being a higher level will still apply.

The danger level can get a temporary increase by either an enemy army moving in the area, with a supply convoi only increasing it by one, while a main army will increase it by 3. During exploration, the danger level can also change, either upwards by triggering alarms or protecting fleeing rebel fighters or downwards by hiring mercenaries or scouting for an easier route with a watchtower or roadsign for example.

Every 14 days you spend playing the campain, the global danger level increases permanently by one point in every area. This shouldn't be a problem, since leveling up your fighters is relatively quick, as long as you attack areas in your level range,but losing a lot of fighters while the global danger level is high can get you in a difficult positions or even softlock you from progressing.

A higher danger level also increases the attribute requirements during decisions, so while 20 fitness will be more than enough to get favorable results in a danger level 1 area, a danger level 10 area will see you fail most of your rolls and greatly increases your chance for a critical failure.

In theory, the danger level of an area can be increased indefinitely, so meeting enemies with levels far above the soft cap of 30 is possible. While this can be dangerous, it is also a chance to capture those enemies and fill your ranks with extremely high level fighters.

Revolutionary Moral

On the upper left is the meter for your revolutionaries moral, that acts mostly as a reminder that hitting zero will lose your game, but will give out boni if it is high enough (especially a big one if you hit 100% for the first time). It will be increased mostly by taking prisoners after fight and sending them to the revolutionaries or sending your fighters to the revolutionary frontline (where they will die in a few days). Some actions while exploring and random events can also give increases, but will usually not be your main source of increases. Unfortunately, the meter controls to a degree what kind of random events you encounter, with a high meter giving you positive events that tend to increase the moral, while a low meter (below 50%) will give negative events, that make the situation worse. So going to low can cause a death spiral, that has to be broken quickly.

Areas on the world map

Every area you can see on the world map, is defined by several properties: Wealth, danger level, road connections, special property, loot, holding, and enemy present.

Wealth: The level of wealth an area has changes both the amount of ressources you will get from picking up things or making decisions, but will also allow you to find weapons and armor of higher level. While a high level of wealth is always favourable, it has in most cases a danger level to match.

Danger Level: See above

Road Connections: Every area has road connections to nearby other areas, varying in length and quality, with the quality ranging from highway to mountain road. This will influence the time you need to the next area, and can range (depending on your trucks speed) from 3 hours to 48 hours. Therefore it can sometimes be faster to take the long way instead of wasting precious time driving through the mountains. Be aware that your fighters will rest and recover energy during the drive.

Special Property: Every week, areas get assigned new special properties, which can range from none, to annoying time wasters like muddy (-50% exploration speed), dangerous effects like chemical cloud (drains your health constantly), things without much effect like early ressources (you can pick up more stuff at the start of the area), to generally helpful stuff like rebel operations (several groups of rebel fighters milling around the area). They can make a huge difference in how rewarding or dangerous an area is, so check them before you move or attack.

Loot: Every area gives you a one-time bonus for capturing it for the first time. This will usually be a small amount of any ressource, and most of the time not enough to choose a specific area to attack next. Still, keep it in mind, when something in your warehouse is running extremely low.

Holding: Some areas have holding like towns, oil pumps or grain silos, that can be captured and will give a daily amount of ressources or a passive bonus. They can be upgraded in the lower left window on the world map, but also have to be protected from roaming army deployments, either by destroying them before they can attack or by hiring guards for a fee.Generally, as long as you can guarantee their protection, upgrading them can be very rewarding in the long run.

Enemy Present: Areas can have an enemy army detachment present, ranging from supply convois which are rewarding to rob but will try to flee from you, to hunting teams who will try to follow your group around, to main army teams who spike the danger level af the area by three and cause dozens of enemy groups to spawn.

Exploring

Exploring an area will use up a fixed amount of energy, depending on the areas size, from each fighter in your team. So make sure to either switch fighters from time to time, give them time to rest or pump them full of caffein/adrenaline/dubious energy pills to keep them going. Being over 90% energy when starting the exploration will give you a small bonus, but letting drop too far will give a penalty, so keep an eye on it.

The time you use while exploring depends on the actual time spend in the zone, so make sure to keep walking and don't dawdle around too much, since you will use up supplies with every passing day, the next army movement/danger level increase will draw closer and energy regeneration for your team is stopped. Watching your teams movement speed, avoiding negative modifiers for it and purchasing the upgrade the satellite phone will help you save time during exploration.

Picking up things

Your main reason to wander around the map is to pick up various goodies to fill your ressource stockpiles. While, in general, you should just grab everything you see, there are a few thing you should be very careful about.
The first one would be wooden crates. Around half of them show a red blinking light in the upper right corner, which indicates that they will damage you instead of giving ressources.
Another problem are items that give you the prompt to "Investigate" (usually an intelligence check). If the check indicates they are unusually heavy, that footprints are all around them or that the people look nervous, it will most likely be a trap or an ambush, even though there is a little possibility to get extra stuff (but the distinction is only made on a critical success with the check). This spans from cars, to corpes to left behind luggage, so a decently smart character is a good investment.
The last would be hollow trees, that you can investigate via sound, smell or other clues, telling you stuff like "there is movement", "it smells rotten" or "you hear buzzing". From food caches to hidden guns to bees or unstable chemical weapons a lot of fun or "fun" can be had here. While a set of three clues is unique to an outcome, most clues an indicate more than on item, some share even two clues (like cheese and chemical weapons)

Warning: Exploit for the game ahead, read/use at your own risk

Giving up on the revolution to collect your heritage, can be used for save scumming, by simply making a copy of your savegame in the Steam library (common/Home Behind 2/saves), before you do it. Afterwards, drop the save back in to repeat the process as much as you want. You have to restart the game between every try. This will make it easy for you to get a lot of heritage in a few minutes, but can also ruin your enjoyment of the game and makes the first two difficulties pretty trivial.

In some cases the achievements not directly related to the story don't unlock properly in Steam (for example the "Find all factions" one). If this happened to you, simply go to your base camp and click the small leather bound book in the upper right corner of the screen. This will sync your progress with the steam client and should give you all achievements you've unlocked so far. It also contains a list of weapons and armor, making it a good resource for the collect all X achievements.