Fair warning: you should never try this difficulty first, I forgot if it's even possible to do so, but the difficulty comparison between this and the normal campaign is night and day. Learn the basics from the normal campaign, come here to master and cheese these mechanics to survive by the skin of your teeth.


This is just the tutorial, easy enough to complete. What you should do to start off here is checking each characters characteristics, in particular, without your 3rd squad-mate, you should only use heather for searching (except here) due to her trait that gives a chance for bonus loot to show up, and a 25% boost to searching. Andy should be given the best ranged and melee weapons due to the bonus damage he can do with all weapons, as well as the 50% chance to ignore durability loss on all weapons. Here is all their traits:


Nothing much more to say here, other then survive.

Here is where you will learn your bread and butter: defenses. Guiding the hive along the path you want is one of the easiest ways to victory you will ever get. Master it, and nothing will ever stop you from achieving victory. Fail it, and, more often then not, you die. The way you do it is that you build certain defenses up, strengthening their tendency to go down a specific route, your chosen route. This should always be lined up with

Cal-traps are the first traps you get and a reliable source of damage, if you can get the hive to go the route you want. Their fine for early waves, but in later levels, turrets outrank them in every way.

He comes in the end, don't forget to leave a weapon around for him at that time.

Here was my defenses that achieved victory, hardly perfect:

This will actually be the first place that seems to give any kind of real challenge in comparison to the first 2 levels. You will want to use Jimmy for searching as he has the master looter perk, guaranteeing bonus loot and giving him a 50% searching speed bonus. Do that, and build up your defenses like the previous wave.

Jimmy is your go to searcher, use him to search everything and you'll get plenty of extra loot. Just know his 50% bonus doesn't apply to weapons. Besides searching, he can also deal pretty good damage with the hammer, so long as he has something blocking the enemy's from hitting him, like a wall, as he has the coward trait that makes him flee whenever he get's hurt. Here's his traits listed:


In case it wasn't clear previously, any raider not searching should often be building/repairing. Repairs don't explicitly need to be done, as building a new building often trumps the cost, at least until the next party member comes around, but while that is the case, Heather can be used for repairing in order to get a small fraction of the cost back.

The turret is your love, your life. As long as you have turrets, enemy's will just walk by, passively taking all the shots the turrets are giving, rarely if ever actually targeting and destroying the turrets. They are the one thing you will want to repair when broken down (20-30%) whenever possible.

Here is an example of how I did the defenses for this. Again, hardly perfect.














Be prepared for the boss in the end. Some walls are the best thing to keep you from getting one shot by this long arm of a boss.

This chapter can be described as my personal hell on earth. It's the reason I started this guide, when I learned that all ordinary strategies don't work.

First off, you want a wall and a kill squad that looks something like this:
The walls block them from getting to you, and, more importantly, lead them to the den of turrets awaiting them. This can rather easily help you out in dealing with the vast majority of waves.

This:

Can help save you the trouble of dealing with enemies coming behind you. The enemies their are so few in the first place that a couple of turrets and some walls will be enough to stop the 2 waves that come from their. Don't bother after that though, although you might need to rebuild the walls, the resources spent their can be better spent elsewhere.


Now onto boss tactics. The best tactic I have found so far is to use the new invention of the thing-a-ma-jig in order to kite the boss into attacking that one thing, repairing it or otherwise kiting the raider between the boss while everyone else piles attacks into it. Now you must do this away from the killbox, otherwise your turrets may be attacked and destroyed, and if that happens, their goes any and all chances of survival on the higher rounds. (I accidentally destroyed the save by starting a round and quitting, so this will have different footage whenever I get back to it.)