Rookie's Rules of the Road

Also known as "Lessons learned the hard way"

1. Avoid head-on collisions, especially if you don't have a ram on your vehicle. You can break your front weapons and engine even if you still have full armor left.

2. Know your enemy. Take the time to look up their vehicle (NPC Vehicles) and see what weapons they will be using against you at the start of a fight.

3. Know yourself. Get practice in the arenas or on the race tracks, learn what the real range of your weapons is and learn what your vehicles can do.

4. Be prepared. Get your crew loaded in, check your equipment to make sure nothing is broken, make sure your guns are loaded and bring more ammo than you think you'll need. Then start asking around for a scout.

5. Stick with the group. This gives the bad guys more targets other than yourself. This also means if you get in trouble help is nearby.

6. Keep your distance. Keep two car lengths between you and everyone else. It gives you both room to maneuver and keeps the enemy weapons from damaging both of you with splash damage.

7. The more speed you have the more options you have. Still, there is such a thing as too much speed.

8. Listen up and stick to the plan. Unless ten turns in everyone decides the plan sucked. Then improvise! If your squad has no plan you may be trouble.

9. Friendly fire isn't very friendly. Use Control-G to see everyone's ghosts and when in doubt call a timeout and ask.

10. Concentrate fire and communicate. Let people know what you're shooting at so you can work together to bring down high threat vehicles faster. I.E. "I'm on the Mutant Marauder."

11. Just because it says "Demoralized" doesn't mean it's dead. If you want to be 100% sure they're out of the fight, keep firing until you see Heavy, Major or Massive concussion. Or they explode.

The game seems to list an NPC vehicle as "Demoralized" if even one ganger in the car gives up. However, any other gangers in the car are still able to drive and/or shoot. If you see "All Occupants Demoralized" you're usually in good shape. Unfortunately only the damage information box says it, not the tooltip, and the damage information is only listed for 2-3 turns.

12. Keep in mind you're shooting at the money. If you win, you get their cars. If you shoot them up too much all you take home is scrap metal. It's a balance between survival and profitability.

13. Learn when to run, and when to surrender. Your most valuable resource is well trained personnel.