Wasteland 3

Supreme difficulty is the hardest difficulty to choose from. Below are some things you should know.

- Changing difficulty at the end will not allow you to unlock this achievement. You must choose it from the start and never change it.

- Abuse creating characters. Make a guy specifically for bartering. Max those stats and only sell junk at the HQ when you can manage squad. I finished the game with 140k doing this. Also do this for modding. No sense in wasting skill points on things you can utilize at the HQ.

- Conserve ammo by having characters use different weapons. Remember weird science weapons all use expensive ammo and do 30 percent less damage to humans, animals, and mutants. Use it as a secondary for when other types of enemies appear.

- Drugs can help, but have horrible side effects. These can be removed with the pills. Use for harder fights.

- Random attacks can occur and sometimes be tough or use a lot of ammo. I avoided all but a few and managed to reach level 26.

- The last battle in the game can be avoided. Have hard ass and kiss ass maxed to 10. Pick to go against Angela Deth. Put these skills on your created characters or on Marshal Kwon for Hard Ass because I believe he started with some points already in it. Be wary because certain characters will leave when choosing to go against Deth.

- Beating the game once on easier setting really helps you know what to bring to battles. I recommend doing this first, but you can always make multiple saves to make sure you aren't set back too far.

I think the toughest part about this difficulty is the intro. I had to do it three separate times because my starting weapons would run out of ammo or I was too weak. This is what I did to pass the intro:

Both my starting characters had shotguns because accuracy is pretty high with them and you can attack multiple enemies. During the first dialogue, I suggest you let the female hostage die so she does not alert the other enemies further out. A great technique to defeat large groups of enemies is to attack once and then retreat. This forces them to use AP to catch up to you instead of attacking you twice which will result in killing your team in one turn. Its a lot of trial and error but it worked for me.

As for what builds to focus on I chose to focus almost all my points on intelligence because it gives you +1 point in skill to spend for every 2 levels. I made a majority of my teammates use shotguns because they are incredibly useful and powerful. Revolvers and pistols are as well so investing someone in small arms is very handy. Have designated teammates progress with dual/triple roles. My squad had the following:

1st character: Lockpicking, Hardass and leadership (Shotgun/Revolver)
2nd character: Explosives, First Aid and small arms (Shotgun/Rocket)
3rd character: Mechanics, modding, and big guns (Machine guns on both slots)
4th character: Nerd Stuff, Weird science and barter (Shotgun/Revolver)
5th(I used Kwon): Kiss Ass, Automatic weapons, and sneaky shit (Rifles and AR's)
6th(I used Lucia) She was sort of a mix for anything remaining. Survival (good for avoiding combat on road) toaster repair(not really super essential), and small arms (Shotgun/revolver combo)

I am halfway into the game and after learning about how the game works this difficulty has been surprisingly easier because of the better-invested characters. Additional things to note is that this difficulty has your teammates do less damage to them and them doing more damage to you often one/two shotting them. Your best bet is to finish off the enemy quickly or dwindle their forces so less guns can shoot at you. Its important to also use drones and turrets as bullet sponges so your forces don't take the hits.

Additional tips: Coordination, Speed, and Intelligence attributes are a must. Upgrade in this order:
Intelligence to level 10 and then upgrade coordination and speed about the same. Speed allows you to run more efficiently. So instead of taking 2 AP to run 2 boxes, you run past 2 boxes in 1 AP. Coordination gives you more action points so its very handy. Shotguns also use only 3 AP to shoot as well as pistoles so it allows you to get an extra shot in before ending your turn.

Make sure to save often and if your characters are killed just reload the save or autosave. I turned on my autosave for every 10 minutes just in case. Its also really important that you do as many quests as possible as it makes you a lot stronger. Do all that you can so that harder main story quests turn green in the mission log(green means you are above the recommended level).

One last tip to follow. In this difficulty, you will be using a lot more bullets to put down enemies so also stack up. Shotgun/Pistol combos is great if half your team is using them because you can always make sure you're stocked in shells and 38/9mm ammo. Also, try to manage your money and always make a profit. Buying new guns/gadgets/and vehicle upgrades will only make it easier for you.

User "Krushner20" also mentioned that buying turrets help a lot. They act as bullet sponges especially when put in front of your units so they don't get shot first.

This difficulty will not be easy but its not impossible. Its definitely do-able following these tips will definitely make it easier.
I hope this helps.

My main concern, when beginning the game, was to be able tο get all achievements with only one complete playthrough. So, this is not a detailed solution only for the specific achievement but I think this was the most appropriate place to post it...

- The game is not extremely difficult even in the highest difficulty level but rather presents a nice challenge. So, it is totally possible to begin directly in Supreme Jerk difficulty AND win all achievements with only one complete playthrough (and generally limited save-load manipulation when making major game choices). Obviously, to be successful in this, you have to suffer some spoilers by knowing beforehand the outcome of the major game choices before selecting them.


- Character creation is, in my opinion, not so much of an issue, even at the maximum difficulty level, as long as you stick to the following principles: each character should have only three (or maximum four) skills and also the entire team should use all different weapon types (because of the general scarcity of the ammo). As an example, my team of six had one shotgun, one rifle, one assault, one heavy and two pistol-specialized characters (so no close combat for me). One skill for each character was dedicated to their corresponding weapon and the other 2-3 skills did not seem to matter much, as long as they were different in each character. All skills were important in my opinion, so do not leave any skill out of your team. If only one character has a skill, the team can take advantage of it, no need to have it on multiple characters.

- As written in above solutions, barter, weapon modding and armor modding skills can be assigned to characters that are not part of your team of six and remain in the HQ to be used at specific times.

- What worked for me as an update path for my characters (confirming Jagd Gray Wolf's solution) was to first increase only the Intelligence attribute so that I could gain the maximum number of skill points every time I leveled up. After reaching maximum Intelligence, I mainly increased the Awareness (for ranged damage) and Coordination (for AP) skills and, to a lesser extent, the Speed and Strength skills. With the above, you will have characters that hit hard and have high-level non-combat skills early on (meaning that you have access to almost all conversation options and to special skills such as pick-locking, disarm traps, hack computers, etc. that provide alternative ways to complete missions early on), the disadvantage being that they will have little strength, so they die quickly and are not able to wear very heavy armor. This is not game-breaking because Health Aid and Injury healing kits can be found (or purchased) in abundance, even in Supreme Jerk or you can always run to a doctor (there are a lot) for complete healing. I am not saying the above is the only upgrade path, I am just saying that this worked for me until the end in my Supreme Jerk difficulty run.

- As companions, I started with Darius Kwon and Lucia Wesson and stuck with them until the end.

This is a great game, an RPG from old times and I totally enjoyed my time with it.

I found this solution on the Xbox side for the game, but it works on Windows version just the same. Unlocked it today, 27th of June 2023 using this method.

Start on Supreme Jerk. After the first battle lower the difficulty to Tourist, leave friendly fire on just in case. Play the game normally. In the final mission, raise the difficulty back to Supreme Jerk before opening the final door

I was going for the Dead Red ending, resolved the situation without fighting (needs Hard Ass 10 and Kiss Ass 10) and all the difficulty achievements popped during the ending cutscenes. So you don't even have to fight on Supreme Jerk after the first battle of the game.

Disclaimer before I start - I played on the Windows Game Pass version, which is why I'm posting this guide here. I believe the Xbox version is up to date with Windows, but I have not tried it yet and if not, some of the notes in this guide might not apply there.
The majority of the tips from the other guides still apply but there were some major and minor changes made to the game since that made me adjust my approach a bit, so I wanted to go through them.

RETRAINING RANGERS

You can now retrain rangers for a fee. Retraining rangers resets all spent attributes, skill points, and perk points, but does not let you change their quirk or background. The fee for retraining is also shared for creating new Rangers (the two new rangers you get after getting the base are still free). I forget the math on the cost, but it does increase from 200 for the first ranger to 350 for the second and I think it eventually maxes out at 3000. You can also retrain COMPANIONS. This means a few things.

- Most guides you see stick with Kwon and Lucia for their companions, I think mostly because they are the first two you get and won't find another one until at least after garden of the gods. This also means that most party set-ups revolve somewhat around these two's skill sets. Now that you can retrain them, however, you are not bound to any companion's preset build. At the minimum of $550, you can build your entire party almost exactly the way you want. Just remember that you can't change their quirk or background, so keep your quirk reliant builds (like fire builds) on your normal rangers and do some research on builds that might work with the companion you want (I used this list to see all of their backgrounds and quirks - https://wasteland.fandom.com/wiki/Wasteland_3_companions#:~:...,%20%205%20%204%20more%20rows%20). I also highly recommend you drop Kwon as soon as possible (no quirk and his background gives +30% initiative, absolutely worthless).

- If you plan on using the combat shooting skill book, be careful as retraining the ranger that has this skill will make him lose it, so do some planning with your builds before you start retraining your rangers left and right.

- On the topic of skill books, I haven't tried it, but I read that if you respec a character that has used a skill book, you get the equivalent points from the skill book usage back (source - https://wasteland.fandom.com/wiki/Retraining). For example, if you do the above and respec a character that used combat shooting, you'll get an extra skill point back. If instead you respec a character that used a skill book to go from lvl 9 to 10, you'll get 6 skill points back. This means that for those skill books you don't use, you can potentially get up to 6 bonus skill points per skill book on a character to reinvest in your main skills if you build them properly up and retrain them at the cost of whatever the fee is at that time.

- Less important, but because the fee is shared between retraining and recruiting, it'll be harder to get base utility rangers, especially early on. I did one extra ranger with barter, weapon and armor smithing, and that seemed viable to me, but also consider relegating Fishlips and Lucia or even other unused companions to these tasks to help keep costs down.

This is probably the biggest change for supreme jerk because of how much it can potentially rework party build plans. You could theoretically even have a set of builds for the early game and respec everybody for the late game (definitely worth considering if you're bringing a melee guy, early game brawlers might make okay support, but they're not good at fighting at all). I realized after writing that this was possible and arguably easier in the old system as while you couldn't respec your original rangers, you could always make brand new ones. It's been a while since I first played, so I forgot about that. The other points I made are still valid, though. Not having too worry about wasted skill, perk, or attribute points on companions still provides a lot of flexibility when making your party, plus replacing your highest level ranger could potentially cost you a level or two, particularly if you're not using the assign/dismiss rangers exploit to bring your party levels up.

CRAFTING

The second major change, you can now craft most of the items in the game as well as some unique ones. This has several implications.

- Some previously labeled junk items are now classified as crafting components. The most notable is probably scrap, which is the basic ingredient in 95% of recipes. I don't think it's necessarily harder to get a ton of money (antique appraiser is still your friend), but you might need to get a little creative and explore your inventory a bit instead of just pressing "sell junk" and watching the cash roll in.

- On the flip side, you probably won't need as much money because you can just make most of the things you need. Running low on ammo? 3 scrap per bullet. Need a grenade? Make it on the scene. As long as you're not in combat, you have the recipe and ingredients, and at least one person in your party has the skill level needed, you can craft it. No need to run back to a merchant for bullets.

- You can also create weapon mods. Basic weapon mods will still need to be bought, but you can use scrap to upgrade them to the next level, and then the one after that. I.e., you can take a reflex and upgrade it to a red dot, and then upgrade the red dot to a holographic. This is particularly great for elemental based builds. No need to worry about wasting your incendiary linkage on a low level SMG, find the recipe and you can just make another one for later. Damage conversion mods are particularly expensive on crafting, though (2000-3000 scrap and usually one or two somewhat-rare components), so definitely buy them when you can (side note, I think merchants do an automatic restock at some point in the game, but I'm not sure exactly when). Also, there are some unique weapon mods that cannot be crafted, like the deadeye experimental scope, so still plan a bit on when you want to use those.

- On the topic of scrap cost, don't automatically sell off all your guns. Even higher tier weapons provide more base scrap than lower tier weapons, and if you're looking to give everybody a damage conversion mod, you're gonna need that scrap. And honestly, even just crafting ammo took more out of me than I thought it would. Do some planning and decide when you want to buy and when you want to craft.

- As I said earlier, there are unique items you can only get from crafting. I only did some of the unique weapons and to be honest, not impressed. The only one I really liked was the freeze ray sniper, but even that you don't get to use precision strikes with. Would definitely bring a backup sniper (or just use the regular sniper). The foam finger is interesting if I ever remembered to use it's special ability. The crossfire was especially disappointing, it uses a ripper and I built it the same way I did the ripper, but it 99% of the time took at least 2 bursts to kill anything (it didn't use any ammo though, I think that's a bug). I also made the blaster master, orb cannon, heartstopper, and spike driver, and they ranged from meh to bad, definitely not better than the original weapons they're made from. I didn't make the hoser HMG (didn't have a big guns guy in my team), but I read that it's the best HMG in the game, and honestly just the fact that it's a 4 AP HMG makes it very enticing (source - https://wasteland.fandom.com/wiki/Hoser). I don't know about the others, but they don't seem too interesting. Your mileage may vary, but personally, other than maybe the hoser, would not recommend. Save the scrap for ammo.

Now for the more minor changes (Minor spoilers for ending past this point)

- There's a soft(?) point of no return at Yuma County. If you go there without Cordite, he'll call you on the radio and tell you he's leaving your party, locking out his version of the endgame quests and preventing bugs that can happen when you try to do them both. You can still go back to Ranger HQ to buy and craft stuff or anywhere else to clean up side quests, but if you plan on doing Cordite's storyline instead of the mechanic's (I highly recommend you do, mechanic's quests has a lot of fighting and the Godfishers are STUPIDLY tanky in this area), then make sure you have him in your party when you first go to Yuma County.

- It's a while since the last time I played, so I don't remember what the AP cost for reloading a rocket is back then (I followed this guide which says 2 AP - https://www.neoseeker.com/wasteland-3/guides/Builds#Rocket-M...), but it's currently 4 AP. Probably nerfing this exact build. This means instead of shooting 3 or more rockets a turn you'll probably be shooting 2 at the maximum. Still viable for alpha striking an encounter, but not quite the enemy deletion tool it once was. Consider dropping the rocket-focused build and instead keep the rocket as a secondary and build for explosive damage with another gun similar to the fire build (I used automatic weapons with the PDW and got pretty similar, maybe only slightly worse mileage to the fire ripper, tore through my .45 using them together though).

- There's an animal pen now (YAY!). Any animals you dismiss will be stored here (including Major Tomcat). This should also be the case with animals that get "unequipped" because of you dismissing Rangers from your party (I lost my honey badger somehow though and I'm 50% sure it wasn't because it died). So if you accidentally lose an animal this way, just go back to Ranger HQ and re-equip them. Also, there's an exploit where if you dismiss Major Tomcat, as long as you have either smokes or animal whisperer 1, you can get him to rejoin your party. So you can equip Major Tomcat, unequip him, equip another animal, then talk to Major Tomcat and get him to rejoin your party. Use this to either get him on another companion who needs the strike rate buff or just to have two animal companions on the same character. I haven't met other animal companions who can be recruited by talking to them (Polly will tell you to fuck off after you dismiss them), but if they exist, this trick should work on them too. Side note, I think the same patch made companions in general follow you better, so you should be losing people by changing maps less often (theoretically not at all, but I also lost Poultron by the endgame somehow). Of course, none of this matters if they're dead.

- Probably the least important but still good to know is that intelligence got reworked to provide 1 skill point every level, at a maximum of 10 skill points with 10 int. This was at the cost of some crit re-workings that I don't remember off the top of my head. I wouldn't call this a game changer when planning builds, but it's nice to have regardless. Having a couple characters with maxed int at the start can help hit even difficulty 7 or higher skill checks early on.

If you want my party build, I'll put a link down below, though to be honest I don't fully recommend these ones. I'll explain why and throw out some ideas of how I would modify them in the doc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-_0YZTS2Lwhndq04D_o0kgOu...

I beat the game on SJ with only unarmed characters and I wanted to share how busted it became. I had two of them focus on intelligence and skill hoarding and the rest balanced between coordination, intelligence, and charisma, and had 1 utility skill that I maxed before leveling their weapon skill past 3-5.

The main points that made beating it possible was.
On the two utility heavy characters, save their points for when you need them. Don’t just max out lock picking right away or you won’t have enough points for something else and meanwhile you’ll be picking level 5 locks with you skill level of 10. The game slowly levels skill checks so you should try to match the pace it sets.

ALL characters (or at least just the combat heavy ones you create) should have Varangian blood. It super boosts the ranger when another ranger goes down, and they will FREQUENTLY go down. It is absolutely absurd how much your damage output increases and if the whole squad is rocking this trait combat will almost always end before the detrimental effect kicks in. Additionally each character should have one point into first aid and the the first perk (I believe it’s called emergency response) which will also give the ranger a speed boost each time another ranger goes down. Using these two things will make it’s fairly easy to get through the whole game mindlessly punching your way through combat.

The most troublesome enemies were some of the more powerful robots and animals. I suggest one of your own rangers taking nerd stuff so later when pizepi becomes available you can double down on in combat enemy hacking. And try to have one person do the same for animals.

PS. Polly is a good pet to have because it will demoralize enemies and shaolin punch does massive damage to demoralized enemies.

Hope this helps or just gives you a new fun way to play!

l have covered all achievements in 1 playtrough. You can turn off friendly fire and getting the achievement on highest difficulty. If you are not following the builds,please put leadership level 2 on one of your characters,the first time you speak with the Patriarch choose that option,then when you in downtown Colorado Springs talk to the judge he will give you the note,and after you collected Kwon go to med bay and look around carefully in the pile of bodies for the other missable note. You have to kill Brygo in Little Vegas to pick a tape,so for that l picked up an end game weapon early,then get radiation level 2 on your kodiak,and l picked up end game weapons for the rest of my team,so supreme jerk wont be that difficult. Good luck Rangers :

Start a new game on supreme jerk after the opening battle change difficulty to tourist. Keep friendly fire on.

Play the game and at the final battle change difficulty back to supreme jerk.

Unlocked tonight using this method 👍🏽 👍🏽