NOTE: This is not a comprehensive "how to always win at combat" guide, it's just a bare bones set of NEO Scavenger 101 tips for "how to not die in 5 minutes flat".

First Rule of NEO Scavenger: This ain't Final Fantasy. Running away is both effective and smart.

Further tips:

1. Only fight if you have a clear advantage.

Advantages include: superior weapon, reach, health, traits (strong/tough vs feeble/fragile), or battle status.

Reach is incredibly important. Ranged weapons (even a simple sling) are wonderful, and I personally favor a good spear (reach 3!) over something like a meat cleaver any day. If you have good reach, you can keep running/falling back and maintain a range of 3 to your enemy and still have them in striking range, but still be out of theirs (provided they don't also have a spear).

Do NOT fight by attrition. Do NOT exchange blows. If you must fight, strike them and don't get hit back.

2. Understand vulnerabilities.

Read every action and pay special attention to "makes you lose your next turn" or "makes you vulnerable" or anything like that. You never want to take an action that gives the enemy an open shot at you unless the enemy is safely out of range, fallen, vulnerable, shocked, unconscious, or any other status that will make them lose their next turn too. IE, you probably shouldn't use "melee surge" except as a finishing move when you are standing over a fallen, bleeding, vulnerable enemy.

NEO Scavenger is all about "death spirals." If you're too close to an enemy and you foolishly waste a turn and expose yourself, you can get knocked down, hit again, fall unconscious, and then get beaten to death, all in the blink of an eye.

3. Use non-terrible weapons.

Do not pick up a piece of glass with your bare hands and fight with it. At the very least wrap it in something and make a shiv so you don't cut your hands and so that it doesn't immediately break into pieces. You can make a shiv on the first turn by wrapping your hospital bracelet around a glass shard, and you can do the same with rags or a piece of paper. (That said, remember to deconstruct that particular shiv later to get your hospital bracelet back as it can be a valuable item later in the game.)

Anyone can make a basic sharpened spear with just a glass shard and a big branch (use forest resources in a forest hex). To make a hardened spear you need a campfire and a combat skill (melee/ranged), and to make a broadhead spear you need a glass shard and string and a combat skill.

Also, anyone can make a sling out of medium string (craft from small string) + some cloth (rags, fur, etc). You can load this with pebbles or stones, and lets you attack enemies from a long way away. Often you can smack enemies a few times from distances of 10+ in combat and make them run away.

4. Don't pick stupid fights.

Don't attack large supernatural creatures you don't understand. Also, some humans are friendly. You can 'offer to talk' and avoid a fight entirely if they're nice, but that costs a turn AND skips your next one, so make sure you've got enough distance between you before trying it -- you don't want to extend your hand in peace only to get shivved by a Bad Motha. But you also don't want to immediately open fire on a heavily armored bad-ass who would've given you directions to the nearest safe haven if you had just asked politely. Don't try to fight groups of enemies unless you seriously know what you're doing, especially if you're fighting in the dark.

5. Use your special abilities

Certain traits give you awesome combat abilities that are available every few turns. Trapping lets you lure enemies into a trap that injures them and makes them fallen, I think strong lets you create an obstacle, an melee and ranged might provide some of their own. Be sure to use these as necessary, they can be quite powerful.

6. Unlearn "Final Fantasy" combat rules

In traditional RPG's, both of the JRPG and CRPG variety, you pick up on certain things. Special awesome abilities have a low chance of success, running away is for fools, mashing "fight/attack" is usually safe, don't use up your best items right away, etc.

Forget all that stuff. In NEO Scavenger death is right around the corner and once you know how to play you'll find abilities are actually pretty reliable. There's no strength stat, you're just strong or not. There's no melee stat, you're just good at melee or not. Etc. So although there's die rolls and RNG (and the ever present chance of getting RNG-screwed), the randomness doesn't have the extreme fiddly-ness you might be used to in an RPG where you never use that awesome InstaDeath spell because it has only a 1% chance of actually working.

This is all to say you should actually USE those dozen or so combat options you see. Figure out what they mean and pay attention to them and don't just rely on "Fight", "Fight", "Melee Surge", etc.

And don't be afraid to use your precious stuff! You're not saving it for the ultimate battle against Kefka or Sephiroth. Yes, bullets are rare but there's more than one of them in the game and you only have one life, which is always seconds away from being gone.

7. Don't get hurt, take care of yourself when you do

I mentioned Death Spiraling. There's no Hit Points in NEO Scavenger, just your precious bodily fluids, blood, muscle, organs, skin, nerves, and bones. It takes time to get back to an un-injured state, so the best medicine is prevention. Also, even if you recover you might have lasting effects depending on how bad you got hurt.

Learn how to use the medical screen. If you get injured (and you WILL get injured), bandage your wounds and rest when you can. Drink water to replenish your lost blood -- preferably sterilize it first, but just take the chance if you're dying of thirst anyways. Use only clean bandages (boil them in water in a pot or can) to avoid infection, make splints for broken bones (I think it's branch + rag + string), and replace bandages when they get dirty (check medical screen when you see this alert: "clean rags have fallen apart").

If you've got Botany, make Tannin tea -- pot, water, fire, and sticks. This gives you the caffeine-like boost that corn-a-cola does, but also improves your healing a little. It also diminishes the effects of pain. (EDIT: linibot corrects me below, Tannin tea doesn't actually give you a caffeine-boost, but it does do the rest.)

8. Don't get too attached to your material possessions.

This last one is counter-intuitive and kind of spiritual to boot.

In NEO Scavenger you really, really need material possessions to live. Like, not having a stupid little piece of glass at the right time can kill you. All for the want of a Nail, and all that. That said, my #1 cause of death is not being willing to leave my stuff behind!

It usually goes like this:

1. I get overloaded so I move slowly.
2. I won't leave my loot behind, so I camp out for days, leave tons of tracks, and create an attractive stash.
3. Enemies challenge me for my stuff, so of course I fight them to the death for it.
4. Even if I win I'm bleeding, which attracts more enemies.
5. Eventually (or immediately) my luck runs out.

Remember, you started out with nothing and somehow managed to get this far. Even if you lose most of your stuff you still have something. Also, don't forget your most valuable possessions are your skills. If you have botany, you don't really need all that food, do you? Any forest hex has berries and mushrooms for the taking. If you have trapping, you don't need to obsess about fire-starters and you can nab squirrels from forests whenever you want (snare = trapping + string + branch, use while scavenging forest).

And if you've got a sled/cart loaded down with goodies, and a Bad Motha with a scary weapon is challenging you for it, for Pete's sake at the very least don't immediately engage at melee range. Drop your cart, run away, and pelt him with stones or arrows first. You can always go back and get your cart later once you've got an advantage, perhaps even during that same combat sequence.

Or ditch it and move on. Traveling light is more viable than it seems at first, it just takes a little courage. There ARE areas of relative civilization and safety in the game, so it's better to try getting there than to hole up in that little shack 4 hexes away from the Cryo Facility for weeks on end.

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Stay frosty, my friends.

As someone who's been both playing and preaching these strategies for close to a year now, you hit so many nails on the head! Also, a strategy guide written by my favourite indie dev for the game of my other favourite indie dev somehow just made my head explode. XD

Tiny, ultra tiny factual correction: Tannin tea doesn't exactly give you the caffeine effect Cola does. Tannin tea is great for sterilizing wounds, sterilizing dirty rags to use as bandages and improving your healing rate. Cola on the other hand is a tricky, risky thing, that may warm you up a bit (use it as a last ditch attempt when dying of hypothermia) or feed you a bit (use it as a last ditch attempt when dying of hunger), but that also causes a potentially dangerous caffeine crash shortly afterwards. Cola does however work effectively as an energy drink when in battle (battle rounds are significantly shorter than regular rounds), where tannin tea does not. :)

Jezus. So to me, pretty much, it amounts to "Do the exact opposite of everything I've done before, as hard as I possibly can."

Thanks. :D

With Strong + Melee + Tough + some luck, it's actually possible to kill a dogman leader with your bare fists. Like Lars said, it's about timing your attacks, watching for distance and checking for statuses. On top of that, you need to make sure every hit counts, since a drawn out battle can leave both parties fatigued. Charging forwards and trading blows is likely to get yourself killed in battle, even if you're armed with a decent melee weapon. In this way, where every landed hit matters, I think NEO Scavenger simulates real world scuffles better than most RPGs out there.

I once had this hilarious fight involving me, a Blue Frog cultist and a Bad Mutha. The two were offing each other until I stepped in. The cultist charged towards me, but the Bad Mutha seized this opportunity to attack him from behind. I continued to remain a distance away while the cultist turned his attention back to the Bad Mutha again, but the Bad Mutha freaked out and ran. This time, I seized the opportunity to charge forwards, then smashed my wrench into the cultist's head, concussing him and killing him on the next turn.

Do note that "take cover" will make you less likely to be hit by powerful ranged weapons. You might still be screwed if you're outmatched, but if you're dead the moment you get out in the open, it's better to hunker down and force them to come into melee range where you can even the odds.

But in any case, sometimes you find yourself in unwinnable battles you can't even run from. In that case your new survival plan depends on taking your strategy out one more meta-level -- doing more to avoid combat in the first place, and detecting heavily-armed enemies before they're able to engage you.

Some tips:

- Consider hiding the tracks in and around your hex before sleeping.
- Bandage your wounds if you are bleeding so you don't leave even more tracks.
- Never go to sleep without setting up at least one noise trap, preferably 2-3. You can make them from water bottles, not just cans. (Recipe: container + small parts + string)
- Campfires will attract enemies, so be careful about going to sleep next to one if you don't have noise traps (resting next to a fire while awake still increases your warmth and is an alternative that lets you keep watch)
- If you don't have eagle eye, try to get some binoculars, add a strap, put it around your neck. A detached rifle scope works, too.
- Be cautious about causing lots of noise when scavenging. Note the bar for that.
- If a powerful enemy approaches, you can RUN on the overworld map too to save your life. This gives you more moves but causes exhaustion in the long run, and needs to recharge next turn.
- Use the SPY command on the overworld to scope out nearby enemies to determine if you need to run like hell or not.

In my experience, it is very rare to find Bad Muthas with loaded rifles. Most will attack with the rifle butt, in which case all you need to do is find a weapon with at least range 3, or have Strong/Melee/Tough and a Crowbar/Meat Cleaver.

I got my first set of tactical equipment when I killed a lone DMC guard out there with my crowbar (though a meat cleaver would probably have worked better). I only had to keep at 15 units away, stay in cover and dodge until he ran out of ammo, then his fate was sealed. Only thing I had to worry about was him calling in support drones before I could finish him.