Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Mastery

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

Mastering a skill usually means that you have some special advantage/ability over those that do not. Masteries in this game are no different. You can master any of the first or second level research topics on your Learn page (those in green or gray). It takes a great deal of work, but the benefits are enormous, especially when teamed up in a good alliance.

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How to Achieve:

Masteries can be difficult to achieve. They take a great deal of concentrated research on a specific topic, but achieving a mastery is not impossible. You can research any of the first or second level basic topics to 70 to achieve a mastery in that topic. Generally, you are not going to be able to get more than 2 masteries that you will get any extensive/lengthy benefit from during any given round, especially if your masteries are different than certain other research topics that you must get to 30 for certain advanced abilities. This means that you must consider carefully when selecting the topic(s) you want to master to make sure that you get the topics you really want. You will also have to keep in mind the basic research limiters that will still affect you as you work towards a mastery. You may want to wait before deciding what topic to master until you are in an alliance and can split the load.

Once you have achieved a mastery for yourself, you can easily get rid of all or almost all of the buildings that may be associated with that mastery. (Ex: getting rid of all landfills and incinerators when you master Waste Management.) Some masteries, obviously, still require that you have some of the needed buildings, just not as many for the current results (e.g. Domestication, Power Generation, or Recycler Prospecting). Before you take the step to demolish the buildings associated with a mastery that you have via alliance, be sure to see the warning below.

Whenever you want to check to see which masteries you or an alliance member has, visit your mastery page to see a couple of charts explaining both. The chart on the left will list research topics and will place a green check mark beside each mastery that you achieve. The chart on the right will show a similar chart, but instead will only put a check beside topics that alliance members earned masteries in. Use this to compare and keep a check on which masteries are yours and which are only there because of an ally.

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Mastery Layout:

Mastering different topics will give you different benefits, the following list will give you the specifics about the benefits provided by each one.

Recreation: This automatically sets your recreation facility coverage to a permanent 100%. You can check your Peoples page to see the change and to check for any morale benefits.

Gardening: The extra food costs for your army, special ops, and militia will automatically be covered once your research for this topic hits 70. This means that you will never have to worry about the extra food costs related to trained military.

Coercion: As soon as you achieve a mastery in this subject, your army's competency will be upped (if lower) to Competent and will remain at a minimum of Competent, no matter what your hiring/firing habits are or your losses are like. To get higher, of course, you will still have to keep them together for a good period of time without hiring or firing too many.

Ingenuity: As long as you send out the maximum number of people for the circumference of your camp, you will always return with the maximum possible return on an exploration mission. Obviously, if you send out 100 people vs. 1000 you are not going to get the same return. You will also see differences because of weather and season, just as you normally would. This mastery will not counteract any decreases in returns or how many stay due to terrain or class modifiers. It will only halt the randomness that occurred before the mastery.

Tracking: You will get the maximum possible return for the number of people that you send out recruiting. Once again, weather and season will still play an effect, but your returns will be maxed out. Of course, you will still not be able to bring back everyone you find if you do not have enough shelter for them. This mastery will not counteract any decreases in returns or how many stay due to terrain or class modifiers. It will only halt the randomness that occurred before the mastery.

Architecture: By mastering architecture, you will have reached a point that storm defenses are no longer necessary. You will have done enough research to make them invulnerable to even the most severe winds, rain, and flying debris.

Housing: Once you achieve mastery in housing, your current shelter space will be doubled because of the underground expansions that will be added to all of your shelters. These expansions also give your population an added defense in battle, since they will now have a much more secure place to hide when your walls are breached.

Recycling: A mastery in Recycling will negate all disposables costs for your population. Your buildings will still use the disposables they would normally use, but your population will use absolutely none.

Marketing: If you never want to have to worry about taxes during aid and reduce them for merchant accounts, then becoming a Marketing master will be perfect for you. The taxes for aid will automatically drop to zero, and the taxes for your merchant account will only be 2% at most..

Wall Strength: Tired of having special ops just climb over the nice strong wall you built? Want to make your wall more formidable to the army looking to bust through? Mastering this topic will open and apply laser fencing to your wall. This means that the special ops climbing over and the army busting through will suffer a severe drop in ability when trying to get into your camp, providing you an extra defense boost. These fences will slow the invading ops down enough to give you a guaranteed victory, though you might suffer some losses. You don't have to worry about providing power for the fencing, though. The fencing has its own power supply that will be added to and adjusted as you build more wall so that your generators are not drained.

Time Management: This is probably one of the most interesting masteries available. By learning how to really organize your camp's time, you will be able to store up to 500 turns max. instead of the 400 that you start with. You will also be awarded an immediate 100 turns to take your stored turns closer to that 500 max.

Domestication: This mastery will provide you a benefit both in resources used and a possible morale benefit. Your camp's food costs will be dropped to 1/4 the normal. This means that at a ration of 1, each person in your camp will eat only 1/4 unit of food. Your army, special ops, and militia will still have the extra food costs, but that extra will be dropped to 1/4 the usual as well. This means that for the same price of feeding your camp at 1 rations before mastery, you can now feed them at a rations of 4. Check your Peoples page for details.

Power Generation: Mastering power generation will provide you with infinite power. You will no longer have to have large numbers of generators to power your camp. The point of this mastery is that you learned how to power all of the buildings you will ever need. Your Infrastructure bar and page will show your power used at 0.

Mechanical Engineering: Once you have mastered this topic, you will no longer have to consider your supplies usage when building weapons. Rail guns and shock pistols will still cost CEP to produce, but you will not have to have the extra supplies to build weapons.

Vehicle Transport: At large camp sizes it can be difficult to afford the gas costs for even a single day trip with a single bus. You won't have to worry about this problem any more if you master Vehicle Transport. This topic will allow your camp to instantly swap over all of the busses to some other type of fuel that will automatically be provided by the garages with no costs to you. This means you won't have to fill up those busses with gas or any other resource before sending them with a group of explorers or recruiters. Ground vehicles will also be fuel free when sent into battle. Buses in alliance aid caravans will still require 40 gallons of gas per bus, but vehicles assigned to the alliance escort army will not

Medical Technology: A mastery in this subject will allow your camp to be fully covered in their medical needs. Your Peoples page will display a 100% coverage and you will never have any more deaths in your population due to radiation or injury. A mastery in this topic will not prevent deaths if global Sr-90 reaches lethal levels, though.

Spatial Logic: While you won't get an automatic doubling of the resources in your storage, you will get an immediate space increase for your storage. In fact it will be doubled. You will also never have to worry about your food rotting again, no matter how much food you have in storage.

Communications: One of the things that many people in the game find annoying is the need to have to continually build multiple comm relays, sometimes 80 or more at a time. If you decide to master this subject, you will never have to build another comm relay for the rest of the game. Your comm range will be increased to the point that it covers any land you could ever possibly have. It will be infinite, allowing you to grow without fear of losing population due to inadequate comm coverage.

Waste Management: In order to overcome the problem of constantly watching your waste buildup so that it doesn't get too high, you might want to master this topic. A mastery here will keep your waste buildup at 0% at all times, thus allowing you to build no new and even demolish all of the old landfills that you have.

Recycler Prospecting: The one resource that everyone really hates at the beginning of the game will become very easy to account for once you master this subject. All of your disposable costs for population and buildings will be dropped to 1/4 their original, once you hit 70. That means that all of those excess disposables you are now producing or the extra people that are producing them can be put to better use. Nukes, gold, or army, maybe?

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Masteries in Alliances:

A tremendous benefit of being in a good alliance is the fact that with proper planning and steady research you and everyone else in your alliance can share the benefits of all of the possible masteries. That means infinite power or comm range for you, even if you haven't mastered those subjects, as long as someone else in your alliance has. You will receive whatever benefit is normally given by that mastery, save for the 100 extra turns that comes with the Time Management mastery. You can only receive those and the extra benefits with having research in a given topic (such as increased production or construction capabilities) by getting the mastery yourself.

You will be able to see a display on the Mastery page showing you what subjects you have personally mastered, and thus would have the benefits for even outside of the alliance, as well as what masteries you "have" because of shared knowledge/resources. The main reason you gain the mastery skills that your other alliance members have is that either 1. they have something like infinite power which they can easily share or 2. they just share the research and methods with you since they are allied with you. Either way a major part of being in an alliance is sharing what you have, whether information, support, resources, etc. so masteries are merely one more thing that your alliance shares. If you have a shared mastery you will also see a small icon just above the main box in the middle of your game screen to remind you that you are sharing the benefits of a mastery that you did not necessarily achieve yourself.

WARNING: If a single camp with an especially important mastery leaves your alliance, you will immediately lose the benefits of those masteries. This means if you were depending on another camp's Domestication and Recycler Prospecting masteries to keep your food and disposable costs down, you will immediately have to rebuild, restaff, or add to your current production, or you could suffer severe set backs and losses, even to the point of your camp actually being considered DEAD. Keep an eye on your Mastery page and your end turn displays to make sure that you still have the shared masteries and that you are getting the results that you should. Also, think carefully before destroying all of the unneeded buildings covered by a shared mastery.

Please, if you are in an alliance and have even 1 mastery, have the courtesy to warn the rest of the members before you leave to give them at least the knowledge that they must now compensate that loss. It would be even better if you could warn them when you start making preparations to leave (during the time where you are rebuilding what you destroyed after gaining a shared mastery).

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