The first few sections are written primarily for newer players who would like to know more without spoiling matters. More experienced players may find it useful to skim through, but I expect there will not be as much new to you. I've included an F.A.Q. to compile questions and answers gleaned from the forums whenever I catach them.

For experienced players, there will eventually be a reasonable Core Mechanics section, which may explain some of the lesser analyzed sections of the game. However, I'm not going to do a breakdown on specific enemies, strategies, weapons, or items. I will leave that to other guides.

In the meantime, this is very much a work in progress. If there is something you want to see in here, or something that is unclear, email me at michaelullom@gmail.com with the subject name Enemy Guide.

When you start a new game, you have two choices to make, after your character's name and appearance. The first choice is your background. Your background will determine the land you start in, but has no other substantive effect.

Action Characters start out in the Tropics, with enemies from Modern Action tropes.

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Adventure Characters start up in the Forest, filled with enemies from Medieval Fantasy tropes.

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Horror Characters Start out in the Swamp, filled with enemies from classic Horror tropes.

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Platformer Characters start out in the Plains, with enemies from the days of 80's 8-bit gaming.

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Next up are your skills. The character you create has one advantage-it's the character you build from scratch, rather than one with predetermined skill levels. After that,she or he is but one member of a squad, as expendable as the next one. You'll also be given equipment suitable to a character with your starting skills-a knife for a melee type, bombs for a bomb user, and so forth.

There are 8 primary skills in Enemy, with scores ranging from 0 to 10. You start with 5 points to allocate, and with each level up, you will be able to add one more.

The skills are broken down broadly into 2 groups; those one the left side that directly focus on one method of attack, and those on the right side that focus on more general aspects of the character.

The left skills are broken down into the following:

Melee: Ranks in the Melee Skill allows you to use melee weapons and shields of that rank or lower. Ranks also slightly enhance the effectiveness of your melee weapon damage and shield strength. While melee weapons are limited in range, they allow for much quicker attacks than ranged weapons or bombs.

Shields also serve as your primary passive defense in the game. They protect the wielder from attacks made in front of the shield, reducing damage substantially. Shields also have the benefit of not costing time units every turn and encumbering the user, unlike suits of armor.

Bombs: The term Bombs is slightly misleading; the Bombs skill refers to the use of nearly any area attack weapon. This includes hand held explosives, area affecting staves, and a few other options.

With that in mind, every rank in Bombs allows you to use area affecting weapons of that rank or less (note that staves will also require a level of Mental skill). In addition, they enhance the range and accuracy of area affecting attacks.

Ranged:

The Ranged Skill covers the use of any single target ranged attack weapon. This includes bows, guns, and magic staves. Every rank in Ranged allows you to use ranged weapons of that rank or less (note that staves will also require a use of Mental Skill). In addition, points in the skill enhance the range and accuracy of ranged weapon attacks.

Throwing:

One point in the throwing skill allows the character to pick up chunks of the environment around them and carry it about, eventually bashing an enemy from a distance with whatever they've found to toss.

Additional points will increase the range, damage, and accuracy of any objects thrown.

It is important to note that unlike any other character, a character with Throwing who is holding an object subject to the Throwing skill is unable to access their inventory.

It is also important to note that the quantity of damage is affected by the material of the object thrown. Bushes will hurt less than stone chunks of a bridge.

The skills on the right are broken down as follows:

Health: Each level in Health gives you 30 extra hit points. As a result, you will also gain more benefit from med kits and healing potions. Characters die for good at 0 hit points,and there is no way to recover health other than through the use of med kits and healing potions.

Endurance: Each point in Endurance will add 5 to your endurance score. Endurance in practice gives you the ability to sprint farther. jump higher, and do more damage while landing on someone. Sprinting and jumping also allow you to go farther in exchange for less time units. As such, increasing this stat is the main method to move faster in a given round. In addition, there are several items, such as heavy melee weapons or shields, that cost Endurance to use.

Unlike hit points, endurance does regenerate every turn, by an amount equal to the number of Endurance Ranks you have, +1.

Mental: The Mental skill adds 20 points to your mental health for each point you put into it.
Mental health is crucial for those who wish to excel in the use of magic staves, and useful for anybody who does not wish to panic or go berserk in battle. You lose control of your character when they are reduced to 0 or less mental health points. This can lead to your character running around like mad and drawing fire or perhaps a heroic and crazed charge. Fortunately, unlike hit points, mental health recovers in steps every turn, in an amount equal to the (1+the number of ranks) times two.

The mental stat also increases your character's vision. If you want eagle-eyed scouts or sharp-eyed shooters, you will need points in Mental.

Reactions: The Reaction skill allows your character to act out of turn and interrupt an enemy's attempt to act during your turn.

Enemy has more back and forth in a given turn than many squad based tactics games. You will often see enemies acting during 'your' turn, firing a shot at you or throwing a bomb at you. This is because they have a higher reaction and/or more time units remaining than your character.

If you don't want enemies taking pot shots at you during your turn or want protection from surprise assaults, you'll likely want a character or two with high reactions to take them out.

During the introduction of the game and after you exit a combat zone you'll see the world map. The land is divided into four colors. Blue land refers to Swamps. Purple land to Plains, Red Land to the Tropics, and Green land to the Forest. In addition, you will see towns, castles, and boss monsters on the map.

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Initially, you can only travel to the highlighted section adjacent to your starting square; determined by the direction you left the battle map. As you progress, you will have more and more lightened sections of the map. When selecting a new zone to travel to, you may 'warp' to any one of these highlighted sections without needing to travel through the zones in between by simply clicking on the zone you want to go to.

Please note that generally speaking, the further away you travel from your starting zone the harder the enemies become. If you're attempting to travel to a zone that's substantially more dangerous than your squad, the selected zone will be highlighted in red instead of white.

As a final note, the zone will determine both the enemies you fight and what items may be found there, subject to the level of the zone.

Towns: Towns offer crucial supplies in the form of weapons and gear to buy, mercenaries to hire, and healing kits to purchase from the local grocer. Unfortunately for adventurers, there is not much of a market in used arms and armor. As such, you are unable to sell any items. Still, they are the only location you can use gold in, and most importantly, the healthy supply of med kits and potions will serve as your ownly source of healing in the game.

Towns are also often terrorized by minions of the Four Kings. In such events know that the townsfolk will pay well to be saved and that dead merchants sell no wares. While foes aim to harry only the general townsfolk (dead merchants also pay no taxes), merchants can and do get caught in the crossfire.

Castles: Particularly dangerous minions of the Warlords may have their own castles and servents to boot. While you will face a plethora of foes, the cautious warrior may find useful supplies or another ally in the fight.

Boss Castles: Boss castles will contain the most dangerous enemies of the land, along with one of the four Warlords. Defeating all four will end the game.

Cover

There is no bonus for standing behind cover in Enemy. Instead, any attack must first penetrate the obstacles between the foe and you prior to damaging you. If the attack is unable to do so (say, a low level bow arrow hits a tree chunk), you're safe!

On the other hand, if the tree gets knocked over, you may be taking extra damage. Cover is by no means an absolute defense in Enemy.

Noise

Every attack you make has a noise level attached. While the following is at best a guess, I believe that the noise level of a weapon indicates how many squares away from the square the attack landed on can potentially attract enemies. Naturally, melee attacks and primitive ranged weapons make less noise than bombs and rifles.

Fluid Turn Concept

Conceptually, many tactical squad games have a more chess-like feel. You move, you shot, your opponents move and then shoot. Sometimes you can save a shot for the opponent's turn. Eventually, somebody gets checkmated with bullets.

Enemy is a bit more fluid than most I've experienced in the genre, and adjusting to that will be one of the bigger learning curves of the game.

As a turn based squad combat game, combat is divided into alternating turn between you and your opponent. Each squaddie will have 75 time units. These time units (TUs) refresh at the start if your turn. While I don't have concrete data on the foes, they seem to have about the same mobility and rate of attacks. a basic move cost 4, an attack might cost 25, and so forth.

What makes Enemy interesting is that during your foe's turn, you still have the ability to react. When you have enough time units remaining and a decent Reaction score, you can not only fire off an interrupting shot, but you can move soldiers to cover, or spread out from each other. You in fact, have complete control of a squad mate for a short period of time during your foe's turn. If you have a squad mate who does not act at all during 'your turn', that member may be able to use all 75 time units during your opponent's turn given the appropriate opportunities.

As such, the turns in Enemy have the potential for more back and forth than many other tactical squad games. Utilizing this to your best effect is one of the key factors in a successful game of Enemy.

If you end your turn with every squad member having 0 TU's remaining, your enemy will have a full turn to move and strike with no ability for you to react. It would be like sending every squad member into a full charge instead of advancing cautiously and leaving people to provide supporting fire. While there are times charging is the best call, learning to conserve time units and relying on Reaction moments is an integral part of the campaign.

This section is currently a massive work in progress. However, I at least wanted to list the action below, along with a few pointers at the end.

Actions:

Walk: 4 for orthogonal squares, 5, for diagional squares. This is the default move action, allowing your character to move at a consistent pace without draining endurance.

Sprint: 3 TUs and 1 endurance for orthogonal squares, 4 TUs and 2 endurance for diagonal squares. Allows your character to move at a cost of one less TU per square, but costing you endurance in doing so. Less swift than jumping, but also less costly. Hold down shift to activate sprint mode.

Jump: 2 TUS and 2 endurance for orthoganal squares, 4 TUs and (4!) endurance for diagonal squares. Changing the height of the jump does not change the cost. This allows your character to jump, bypassing obstacles and potentially bouncing off foes. It is also potentially the swiftest movement, at the cost of the most endurance.

Aim: 25. This allows you to enhance your accuracy on the next shot of the weapon. Cancelled if you move before firing.

Attack: (Varies by method and weapon). There are a variety of icons for this depending on the weapon and method of attacking. I'm not going to list them all here.

the mouse will turn into a white selection box. For attacks that are able to reach more than one square away you will see a line drawn between your squaddie and the targeted square. If that line is white, it is theoretically an unobstructed attack. If it is a red line, there is an obstruction in the way.

Pick Up: (Varies slightly by distance). For characters with at least one rank in throw, you may pick up many things nearby the character.

Throw: 25: (requires something that has been picked up) A character who has picked something up may throw it, doing damage to anything it hits.

Drop: 5 (Requires something that has been picked up) Characters may drop whatever they are holding in an adjacent square without risking damaging any nearby allies.
Crouch: 8. By hitting control, your character will enter into a crouching stance. Your characters hit box will be half its normal size. As such, enemies will have a harder time hitting you. In addition, enemies can only see you from half their normal vision in squares, making it easier to sneak up on them.


Sneak: 5 for orthogonal square, 7 for diagonal squares. Must be crouching.

This allows you to move while retaining the benefits of crouching.

Standup: 8. Hit control again to end the crouch stance, allowing you to again move normally.


Interact: (Varies by distance to the object to be interacted with) you may inspect any items or enemy you've clicked on. Moving these items to either the group inventory or the party member's satchel is free.

The following options are available in the inventory screen.

Access Item from Inventory: 35 (Unavailable during combat). By clicking and dragging on any item from the group inventory you may place it on your squaddie's satchel. You may directly equip the item, but often the combined cost is more than is available in a turn.

Use (varies): any one use item intended to target the user can be used by dragging it directly onto the squaddie's icon in the inventory screen.

Unload: Free. By right clicking on any gun on the inventory screen you may unload the ammunition inside. Very useful for scavenging off of enemies, as you can take the ammunition but not redundent weaponry.

Equip: Varies. By dragging an item to the appropriate section of the character on the inventory screen. Note that for clothing there will be an unequip cost as well. This isn't recommended in combat most of the time, unless it is to switch weapons or grab another explosive.

Swap Ammunition: 50. By clicking and dragging a clip of ammunition to the weapon, the gun will take the new clip and eject the old one. As it doesn't just add ammo, I don't call it reload, though the game will refer to it as that.

Drop: Free or 35. Dropping items on the ground from the characters immediate possession is free. Dropping things straight from the group inventory costs 35 (mostly I suspect to prevent abuse from clever players).

Please note that once you have cleared the map, your characters are able to freely move without restriction of time units. It may still be helpful to jump in order to navigate past certain obstacles, or to hit the space bar so that flames die down over several turns.

What does ducking do?

Ducking both decreases your character's hit box in half and decreases the distance at which enemies will spot your character.

How do I kill ghosts?

While it's quite possible to kill zombies and vampires, apparently incorporal creatures are another story. If you hover over a ghost with the mouse, it will indicate that ghosts are invulnerable. You will have to find other solutions to deal with their presence, but they will disappear upon the destruction of all killable enemies.

How do I heal?

This is an interesting question with a quick answer and a longer explanation.

You heal by using healing potions and med kits. There is no natural means of healing or resting unless you're playing on a difficulty setting which allows hotel stays. If you want more healing, hit a town and buy up the local supplies.

The game design reason behind this is that healing as it exists now is the primary form of risk management outside of individual combats. Limiting access to healing is one of the mechanisms that prevents players from walking all over the map until they're powerful enough to just kill everything. It also keeps combat tense in that every mistake you make is one less mistake you have to make before you run out of supplies. It is clear that one of the genres behind Enemy is that of the Roguelike, which typically keep a tighter leash on acceptable mistakes than other games tend to do.

I can't see enemies inside buildings!

Hitting Page Up or Page Down will adjust the height level at which people and objects are visible. By default, several layers of the game are visible. You will need to hit page down until the Ceiling of the building is hidden. Just keep in mind you may want to adjust that down the road.

Do towns respawn their inventory?

They do not.

Can I dismiss squad mates?

Yes, this was patched in in a later version of the game. They will stand around where you left them. I usually ditch squad mates in one particular town, so that I can go back and choose from available candidates with ease.

Can I sell items to a town merchant?

The short answer is no, what established merchant would buy random crap from wandering scruffy ruffians such as yourself?

The longer answer is that by prohibiting the sales of goods, the game is able to be more generous in terms of giving you random weapons and equipment without threatening the balance of the game by selling it all for something awesome you can use.

The game won't let me buy goods from a town merchant?

Some merchants, noticeably book stores and inns, appear to be currently non-functional. In other cases, if the merchant's safe is destroyed, such as during a town attack or due to a player screwing around, their inventory becomes non-functional.

I seem to hit a bit more often than the percentages suggest. What's up with that?

The to hit percentage is the percent to hit that precise location. If you are shooting a rifle or throwing a brick and the attack 'misses' the target but is instead supposed to hit beyond the target, the end result will still end up mauling your foes just as well as a direct hit would have.

I've beaten the game but am not ready to stop playing. What next?

Fortunately, in addition to Enemy's several difficulty levels, it is abundently moddable. Why not try adding your own battlefield terrain, weapons, or opponents? For more information, see the Unofficial Modding Guide also available here on Steam.

There's much more to put in here, including how weapon stats work and what effect a character's stats have on weapon effectiveness. For now, however, this is woefully incomplete.


Dual Wielding: By equipping the same weapon in both hands the player may activate both weapons with only the cost of using one. This particular mechanic I refer to as Dual Wielding. For melee characters this will result in automatically damaging the enemy with both weapons. (though such character will be unable to rely on a shield). For ranged characters the weapons will both be fired but at a substantially reduced accuracy (it seems to be around 30-40% loss). Bombers do not have the option of dual wielding explosives.

Note that nothing prevents the character from using two different weapons other than ensuring they are both one handed weapons and that the character has the appropriate skill. However, only using the same weapon will enable both the bonuses and penalties of dual wielding.



Equipping a Shield: Equipping a shield will have no effect on the accuracy of any one handed, ranged, or bomb weapon the character is able to equip, though of course the character will need to meet both the requirements for the shield and whatever other weapons they are using.

Shield Protections: The Shield's protective effect only works 'from the front'. I'm not sure how precise this is, but there you go.

[Work in Progress].