Gameplay Mechanics

The main goal of Raiders! Forsaken Earth is to carve out a place for your raider band in the wasteland that can survive the oncoming regulator invasion. To this end players must terrorize the wasteland to secure resources, capture important areas, train and arm a legion of raiders, and resist the impositions of law and order.

# Gameplay Mechanics

## The Wasteland

The wasteland is procedurally generated on the start of a new game. The wasteland has a set number of locations every time, both marked and unmarked, with various functions and options for each.

### Exploring the Wasteland

The raider crew moves at a certain speed and this can be increased by putting leadership points into movement speed. Mounting every member of the party on a camel will greatly increase movement speed and even change the in-game raider party graphic to one with camels. Building the landsail will immensely speed up the raider party.

Parties will travel over roads the fastest and slow down considerably when off the road. Dunes and rocks will further slow down anybody crossing them.

### Locations

Important large scale areas in the map include towns, production areas, tribes, slavers, arms dealers, raiders, and the home of the local law enforcement known as the Citadel. Each one is labelled on the map and can be visited with a menu where you can interact with the settlement. As your vigilance rises the locals will be better armed with more defenses constructed.

There are also unique locations that are harder to find and see on the map. These look like scenery but have unique graphics, they can only be found by carefully looking at the wreckage dotting the map. These include toxic waste lakes, an oasis, caves, an abandoned mine, car stonehenge, bloody cliffs, downed planes, ancient ships, and others.

### Landscape Features

The land is dotted not only with rocky hills but also cracked earth, craters, dunes, and lots of trash. Some of these features will slow down the player, the big rocky hills slow down parties on the map considerably. Some can be scavenged which will remove the debris from the world, scavenging a lot of these features will make the wasteland look much cleaner and will actually bring up a message to that effect.

## Combat

Combat is turn based with each combatant's initiative determining the turn order. At the top of the combat screen is a black bar with the head of each combatant in the order they take their turns.

Each side has a maximum of 8 combatants at a time, four melee and four ranged, in two rows. All melee fighters are automatically in the front row and can only attack the fighters in the row in front of them (except with the attack) and when all melee fighters are defeated the back row of ranged fighters moves up and is vulnerable to the melee fighters. Ranged fighters are automatically put into the back row and can attack any target. Whether a raider is considered ranged or melee is determined wholly by their weapon.

## Managing Your Raiders

After recruiting new raiders or defectors their stats can be seen from the Roster menu. The Roster is a comprehensive list of every raider part of the organization, organized by the location they are in and the battle formation of that location. There is currently no way to manage just the members of the party or only the members of a certain garrison, to manage any raider one must go through the list of all raiders (which may lag on lower end machines on saves with lots of raiders).

## The Raider Organization

The player's raider team and all their resources are referred to as the organization.