Tips (2)

Discover essential tips for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, covering combat, character building, inventory management, and space exploration to help you conquer the Expanse.

Tap the touchpad to highlight all nearby interactable objects and tap it again to clear this effect. If you hold the touchpad, you will bring up the area map. However, do not try to bring up the map during combat. During the tactical phase, you will start combat prematurely and during combat, you will skip your turn.

You have two weapon sets, allowing you to switch between different weapon types, such as rifles for fighting at range and pistols for fighting close up or a burst weapon and a powerful single-shot weapon. It's not initially obvious how to switch between them; the answer is to hold down the ▢ button.

When you grow out of gear, you can add it to cargo using its context menu (▢ button) so that you can trade it with the game's factions. However, if an item gives you a skill or characteristic bonus, you may want to keep hold of it. If you know when a check is coming up (and you do if you're using a guide), you can dress for the occasion.

While exploring, you will find lots of vendor trash. Fortunately, picking this up is mostly painless and you can trade it for useful stuff like force swords and heavy bolters. You can use your map to find loot containers that your characters have "seen" and you'll be pretty much at the end of the game before this stuff stops being useful. If you're a real loot goblin, you should be able to max out your reputation with all the game's factions just before the endgame.

Putting equipable gear into cargo is a toggle. When you pick up a laspistol, for example, and move it from your inventory to cargo, every laspistol that you subsequently find will be added to cargo automatically, making the process of picking up trash mobs' trash loot fairly painless. If you add an item to cargo accidentally, you can move it back into your inventory. However, once you transfer a box of cargo to a vendor, the contents are permanently gone so make sure that you're never going to use something when moving unique items to cargo.

When exploring the Koronus expanse and visiting a star system for the first time, always remember to scan for new warp routes (▢ button). You may not unlock any new routes but you will gain +1 Navigator's Insight which you can use to make routes safer. Basically, if you use an orange or red route, you are likely (or certain in the case of a red route) to have a "warp encounter", which are this game's equivalent of random encounters. A warp encounter is typically a fight against a large, spread-out trash mob and these get really old, really quickly. Therefore, you will want to spend your Navigator's Insight on turning red and orange routes into yellow routes which you can mostly use without issue.

Make a hard save prior to optional space combat sections. On higher difficulties space combat is more punishing than the main game and some encounters are anomalously challenging. The game doesn't help by autosaving at the start of space combat which means that an unwinnable fight can cost you hours of progress.

Combat Tips

Although success or failure of an individual attack is down to a die roll, the underlying combat mechanic is a success-breeds-success system called "momentum" so that the side with the best action economy wins (or, at least, wins easily rather than Abelard being the last man standing and defeating the final enemy with two wounds remaining). This makes talents and gear which reduce action cost almost always worthwhile. For example, the _Bring It Down!_ ability costs 2 AP and gives another party member 2 AP. The Medal of Alacrity amulet makes the first use of this ability give the target 3 AP. The _Decisive Response_ talent makes the first use of this ability cost 1 AP. Now you have a net benefit of +2 AP in the first round which, depending on the capabilities of the party member targeted by the ability, can be enough to kill the boss or half the enemies before they get their first turn.

In a similar vein, don't reject gear and talents on the grounds that they only work in the first round and offer no benefit in subsequent rounds. The first round is when most fights are won or lost. So long as you build your party members effectively, you will find that a lot of fights are _over_ in one round, particularly as you progress through the game. What was a battle of attrition against a cultist mob in Chapter 1 becomes a kerb stomp against Drukhari elites in Chapter 3.

When you build up sufficient momentum, your party members can take heroic actions which should have a massive impact or even be an "I win" button. The best heroic actions are the ones which are like a full extra turn but better, namely _Finest Hour!_ (Officer) and _Daring Breach_ (Warrior). Not all heroic actions are equal, however. You _might_ use _Dismantling Attack_ (Operative) against the first couple of bosses but you will probably never use _Take and Hold_ (Grand Strategist) which might or might not do something useful next turn but which does nothing at all right now.

In a system where action economy is key, going first is a superpower which is why I build two companions (Cassia and Jae) as Grand Strategists (even better: Officer / Grand Strategists). As a _class_, Grand Strategist is middling but going first is golden, particularly when the person going first is one-woman murder-machine Cassia.

Character Building

When building your character, do not create a build which overlaps with one of your companions. For example, unless you want two Soldiers whose basic job is to shoot things, Argenta is likely to be a better soldier than you. This is because companions get free feats and/or unique origins which give them a massive head start.

Certain weapon types - bolt weapons, flamers, melta weapons and plasma weapons - come with a "feat tax" where you have to use one of your level-ups to take the necessary proficiency talent. In most cases this is not the worth the cost. In the case of melta weapons, this is because they are plain not