Overview
This basic guide will walk your through how fighting works in The Escapists, and how to improve on your fighting skills.
Introduction
The Escapists has a basic combat system, which doesn’t require you to do much in the actual fight. Instead, you need to prepare for combat and learn when to back off. Or stock up on as many Medikits as you can, but that’s for the pansies amongst us. Real men learn how to fight!
This guide will walk you through how fighting works, and how to overcome any enemy.
Starting fights
In order to activate “combat mode”, press the Spacebar (or whatever button you have combat mode assigned to, but the default is Spacebar) and you’ll see your cursor go red. Click on someone to target them, and once you’re near them you’ll start hitting them. I recommend you never target someone who is near to you already – you might misclick and hit someone else!
Other inmates will start fights with each other randomly, but will never start a fight with you even if their Opinion is low-ish. Only when it really drops does it tempt them to attack you. Beating somebody up will cause them to start a fight with you the next time they see you, but escaping them will cause them to give up.
If your heat exceeds 90%, Guards will always attack without fail if they’re near. Tower Guards will attack if you’re seen doing illegal things (i.e. cutting fences) or if your heat exceeds 90%. If Lockdown occurs, you will not be shot.
Improving fights
At the start of your prison days, your Strength and Speed will be at 30, which is…not enough, to be honest. It’s passable in Center Perks if you have a good weapon, as most inmates don’t have anything better than that. Be aware that they might carry weapons, though, which will be the different in winning or losing at that point.
First off, a simple but effective tip: at the start of every prison, always go to your desk and grab your Comb, turning it into a Comb Shiv by selecting it and clicking on a nearby wall. Once you’ve equipped that, you’ll be good to go, but if (for some reason) you want another weapon, you can use the pillow on your bed.
Basically, winning a fight is down to several key steps:
- Raising your Strength (primarily) and Speed stats, and keeping them high
- Grabbing a good weapon, such as a Whip, Nunchucks, etc
- Knowing when to back off
This last point is important, because if you get KO’d, you’ll lose anything contraband and your current equipped weapon. If you forget that, your next fight will be unpleasant. It’s often best to keep your Strength stat up, as it increases your HP and how hard you hit. Speed isn’t as important – it only controls how fast you hit an opponent (and giving them less time to recover).
Tougher inmates
As you advance through the prisons, your fellow inmates get tougher and tougher (despite all their training in the Exercise Period. Weaklings!). As a result, you’ll want to have the following to max out your fighting skills:
Note: this applies more to harder prisons than earlier ones. However, they’re still useful to know…
- A Strength stat of at least 60. This brings your health up to 30, which is enough to survive several hits. It also gives you enough time to decide when it’s good to back out of a fight. However, this is probably the least you can get away with.
- Chocolate, Lighters and Cups. For the later prisons (despite the detectors) there’ll be people who are instantly not fond of you and will run at you, weapons out. As it’s basically impossible to fend them off, a Cup o’ Molten Chocolate can sort them out. The opinion drop doesn’t even matter!
- A Whip or Nunchucks. Only the 4 / 5 weapons or 5 / 5 weapons will do, and even then, 4 / 5 is a risk you might not want to take.
- Behaviour. You don’t want to piss off the guards, and if you do it’s likely you’ll lose your weapon. Unless you have a gargantuan Strength stat or you’re the TF2 Heavy, fists won’t do.
As the prisoners get tougher and tougher, you’ll want to avoid picking fights with them. As a last resort, wait until you’re in sight of a guard, and deliberately get hit. The guard(s) will sort your attacker out for you.