Curious Expedition – General Strategy Guide for Players

General advice for the game.

Specificity of Hard Mode and General Advice

Note: Credit goes to Romain672

There is two (main) difference between medium and hard mode:

• First one is the cost for moving who cost 10 more. This mean you will need more food, and having some item for seeing far have more value.
• Second one is when you arrive to the pyramid, you need to find a way back. On normal mode, you should nearly always check any event you see. On hard mode, you can plan your road. Per example if you can get a mommy at the start of your run, and you plan to rest (because you have few food), you should keep this event for the way back.

Your sanity when resting is very important. If it’s below 30, you will have very bad event. If it’s above 70, you will generally get good ones.

General Strategy for the Expeditions

At the start of each expedition between 2 and 5, if I want some money (=most of the time), I start by buying 10 Machete and 10 Snowshoe. They cost 2 each, but can be sell for 8 at the village. Cost of 40, Gain of 160.

So you just sell of them and buy totally random things you can hold, and then, change them again on usefull item along the run. Some specific items who stack and which are expensive are great for that (Animal Tooth, Mini Puppets, Native Trinket, Whisky, Coston Flare, Torch, Climbing Gear, etc…).

Then, at the start of the expedition, I try to find the village and go there fastly, for three reasons:

1. Selling my different object. The problem to buy 10 Machete and 10 Snowshoe is the fact it will take many place on your inventory, so I want to change them fastly.
2. Recruiting someone. If you already have 5 crew members, you will on general not need to recruit someone for the whole expedition. If you haven’t 5 crew member, you want to recruit some crew.
3. For recruiting someone, you need at least 2 on reputation. So if you go to a village early on, it will be cheaper to reach this 2 on reputation.

Once you finished with this village, you can sleep there because you doesn’t care anymore about your reputation. If it reach -10, they will begin to attack you, but it’s generally some easy fight, so it isn’t much a problem.

At the middle of the expedition, going to a Polar Station or a Mission can be great since it let you put 3 items you want to keep until the end of expedition. Which sometimes can have a value of ~150 Fame per event.

If you have some tomb, you can plan your road for going to a Mission just after you get a Mummy.

Near the end of your expedition, you can remove the mount of your animal, for having 2 extra place. Then, if you still lack of place, trying to survive the end by taking some ‘sanity check’. That way, you will keep some extra food for the next expedition, you take the risk to lost 1 or 2 persons, but if your crew is full, it will not be too bad. And generally you will just loose 1 or 0 person.

Expedition 1 – Holding Management

You start with a mission you should always accept, and you should always goes straigth to the village (or doing one event and then go on it). Then you recruit, and you trade for usefull food.

The goal then is to find the pyramid who will (generally?) be around the forest. And then, to find one or two temples on the way back, for gaining some artifcats.

And when you goes back to the civilisation, you sell all the items you got which have a value inferior or close to their found (even for the 70 fame, 40 founds one)(the mummy could be a close call though).

Why doing that? Because you really want to get your economy working. With the 40 found you get with your 70 fame artifact, you will perhaps be able to buy 8 more torches (or 1 more holding place), who will let you do another event safely. Who will not make you lost one crew. Who will let you hold some trading object. Who will have value of 100 found. Who will let you gain more artefacts…

And then, you try to use all the found you got. Even on few usefull item like a 13th torch. You will be able to trade them.

Expedition 2 & 3

Your economy start to grow.

If the first expedition didn’t go well, you want to have 3/4/5 crew member at the end of expedition 3, and have some food on reserve.

You can begin to buy some item which are just a bonus like Tome pages, Green Mushroom, etc… Or increase the loyality of your crew.

Expedition 4 & 5

Your number of Moon stone is very important.

Because you arrive on a pyramid who aren’t buried, you haven’t need them. Else, you need 2 of them.

So if you already have 2 of them, and arrive to an arctic mission. It’s totally possible to finish this mission really fast (you don’t always want that though. but if you only have 1/2/3 crew member at the start, it could be a good strategic).

Else, just focus the Fame. You already have lots of money, so it’s the only thing you want.

If you have many animal tooth and lack of crew members, you can choose your expedition for an Altar location.

Expedition 6

Welcome to the hell.

If your crew can’t hold all these fight, and you have nothing for calm the ennemy, you will be forced to run away a lot.

Having some specific Tome page for moving fastly help a lot for this mission : Effortless Movement, Homebound, Random Teleportation (after the first Golden Seal or the pyramid), Targeted Teleportation.

Fighting Strategy

First of all, defending is not great on this game cause you take risk to bleed which can lead to the death of the character or to force you to use a medkit on him.

Your priority for all fights are in order:

• Kill all the remaining enemy.
• Stun all the remaining enemy while doing some damage/or because your first launch was bad.
• Kill one specific enemy (while mitigating damage if there is 3+ ennemy).
• Stun all the remaining enemy if the fight is won.
• Doing some damage.
• Mitigate the damage.

So here is my best (commun) combinaisons (but again, the goal of a fight is to get the objective more up):

• Headbutt : stun 1 dice.
• Feint : stun 1 dice on all enemy.
• Ripper Leap : deal 6 damage, and 2 other next turn. And it’s on dice which are difficult to use efficiency.
• Flank : because headbutt is generally really good, you can easily try to have some red dice with an ‘agile maneuvering’. Which make Flank not hard to have.
• Punctuation : deal 7 damage, and 3 other next turn.
• Riposte : deal 2, block for 2. Not the best move, but if you have no blue dice left, it’s a good use for the green dice.

Now, something is really important.

You have two differences dice with the side:

• Dice 1 : AAABBB
• Dice 2 : AABBCC

A is the side you want the most. C is the worst side: nothing.

First launch: Dice 1 did B. Dice 2 did B.

Of course, you will want to launch again dice 1, even two times.

Now for dice 2, it’s more complicated. I suggest you to launch him again and stop if you do B or better, you will then have : 44%A – 44%B – 11%C. It’s a 4 for 1.

If after 2 launch, you still launch it again, you take risk to lost everything on this dice. Which is fine if your goal is to stunlock/kill your enemy, but it’s bad if not.

Having an item like Extra Bullets is really good cause it let you kill ennemy who have less than 3 hp left, and it does lots of damage if your first turns goes really badly.

Priority of Items

1) Excellent items:

• All artefacts except Jewels : just many funds early on, and many fame later on.
• Animal tooth : good trading item and take no place. Can be used to resurect crew members.
• Whisky : food, and excellent trading item.
• Binoculars (first one) : help a lot for knowing where to go.
• Obsidian mirror : clone one crew member.

2) Very good items:

• Hunting trophies : have generally a good value on fame and/or on funds. Good trading value with trading caravan.
• Weapons : depend of the goal of your team though.
• Chocolate Rations/Muktuk : can be stacked a lot. And never bad.
• First aid kit : way better when you can use it immediately, else, it take one place. But on a good looking run, it’s a really good item.
• Machete/snowshoe : good trading value on village.
• Extra bullets : good for holding money, and can be live saver in combat.
• Effortless movement/homebound/targeted teleportation : excellent scroll which have very usefull if expedition 6 is hard or for specific moment before. Being able to finish first when you took lot of time to find the pyramid and not doing the way back is great.
• Drums : take one place, but give lots of sanity over the run.
• Binoculars (second and third one) : minor positive effect, but can still be used for holding money.
• Moon stone.

3) Good items:

• Jewels : good trading value, unfortunately, the item is pretty rare so it’s hard to have a lot of them, so it generally take one place for 2/3 jewels. And the fame value is low.
• Coca leaves, food cans, mangos, red berries : food, can’t be bad. Some of them should be used immediately.
• Rope : cheap, and can be usefull for some event.
• Eagle scout/extended vision/random teleportation/waterfall creation/springs creation : cheap, and give some good bonuses.
• Mushroom (x5) : can generally be used immediately, and sometime can give some sanity.

The rest of item are pretty situationnal or just is good for holding money.