My Technique For Quick Wins

[Andrew1990M]

Hopefully this is helpful for people going for the Platinum, I've found bits and pieces and various ideas on how to get quick wins in this game, so here's what I've been doing. I feel like it's a pretty low luck, low grind and low stress way to complete the game around April 2021 consistently. As you can see from my profile, I've done it this way 4-5 times already and find it to be pretty reliable.

 

This is adapted from several tips sections I've seen from other achievement hunting sites and Reddit.

 

1. Start a game on Associate with 7 neighbourhoods and 7 gangsters. Skip the tutorial.
2. Run around the map alone and uncover every grey precinct. When you find a minor faction (light blue with the three generic looking guys as the icon), go to Diplomacy and offer them Protection if you can
3. Once the map is filled out you should be earning up to $1,000 a week in protection. Use this to recruit three gangsters from the black book and buy the Golden Tommy Gun from the Black Market
4. I would recruit Vincenzo, Norah and one other person of your choice, but not Claude as he has too many useful enemies
5. Clear out Thugs from your starting area to start the sub quests but don't bother with your story quest (though some of these involve taking over the buildings in your starting area anyway)
6. Next, you should be able to take over about three precincts from thugs. With the GT Gun equipped to Vincenzo (who starts every battle with Overwatch), you should be able to just go straight for Depots. 
7. This much quick movement will piss off your neighbours, pay them off if you can but it's not a huge deal if you can't afford the hush money
8. Keep an eye on your sub quests, you'll want to be doing things like appointing Advisors, upgrading your safehouse and building supplementary buildings when the game says to
9. Build up your empire just in the 4-5 areas you can take without pissing anyone off or going to War (a lucky spawn area might mean you can stretch yourself across neighbourhoods, this is fine).
10. Try to keep your surplus of booze down to a minimum, there's not a lot of point storing more than 100 barrels, don't build Casinos either. Focus on filling your Precincts with Speakeasy's or Brothels, depending on your character's perks
11. Half the times I've tried this I've ended up in a War with someone in my starting neighbourhood. If this happens, hire ONE more person (so five total including your Boss) to help find the Safehouse and look through the Trade menus of the other bosses for good weapons. Someone always has a 70 damage sniper rifle and a 60 damage shotgun. Trade using Protection money, what little stored Swill you have from the start of the game and guns/melee weapons/non-health kit medicines you picked up during Takeovers. I tend to have 100 Swill and $5,000 dollars to buy guns with at this point
12.  Attack your opponent's rackets until the Safehouse appears. During the Safehouse fight you can kill the Boss and leave through the Escape option when you're stood at the door. This ends the war but Thugs get the dead Boss's rackets instead of you. This is fine early game. Remember the boss must be dead, not bleeding out 
13. Build your empire until bosses want Business Arrangements with you (most of the time they approached me, but check your Diplomacy tab often). Ideally, you want an Arrangement with one of the two bosses in your starting neighbourhood
14. Once in an Arrangement, use the Kill Someone command and send an assassin after every other boss. If they don't like you enough to Kill Someone, trade them all the spare guns you have from take overs etc. but have the trade be in their favour by however much it needs to be to get them on your side
15. Half the time I can get in two Arrangements. When this happens I send assassins from both against everyone, including each other. If one of my partners is already bordering my territory, I don't send the other partner to kill them
16. Once the assassins are ordered, let time pass and your money build up. By now some of the people paying you protection will wuss out of the deals, this is fine as you've probably supplemented your income from them with stolen rackets. You should be making 2-3,000 a week. Keep checking Diplomacy to see who changes their mind
17. When the message comes in that the assassin is going for the 6 bosses you ordered hits on, save. Usually, if the assassin hasn't killed at least 3 of the first 6, I reload. Once you're happy with the number of successes, immediately re-order hits on the remaining bosses
18. Take over any new spaces you can get to now the bosses are dead, if you want. Not necessary to maximise the speedrun but I get bored just waiting for time to pass. If your Business Partner is not nearby, start taking over precincts in their direction until you have a border with them, reordering hits as you go
19. Eventually you're either going to get lucky and have one boss left, or you're going to get rich and bored. To take out the last 1-2 bosses, hire as many Gangsters as you can afford. Depending on how long the game has gone for, you might have made friends with Norah and can hire Harry Adams. He's expensive, but good
20. Usually I can easily topple the last boss with a team of 8, getting 70-80% win odds in the auto battles until the Safehouse appears
21. Again, once the boss is dead (not bleeding out), you can retreat from the battle and win the game, still earning the trophy

Edited September 17, 2022 by Andrew1990M

[Andrew1990M]

Update for this. I used the same basic ideas when going for Lone Wolf, but with a few additional considerations;

 

1. I used Goldie Garneau, her ability is essentially 3 guaranteed kills and more if you can get the enemies to stand in a line, which they often did as they were all running towards my single character. I'd suggest that other multi-kill characters like Frankie Donovan and Mabel Riley could be used to. I'd caution against using Stephanie St Clair (ability is based on having allies nearby), Maggie Dyer (only ever hits one target) and Frank Ragen (multi kills are too situational).
2. Goldie also learns heal. Guides also mention using characters that learn Multi kill, but your run should be done before this matters
3. I focused more on upgrading my starting precinct than spreading out
4. Keep an eye on neighbouring thug areas, if you can see other Gangs starting to ransack buildings, swoop in when just the Depot is left and take over the whole area with all the buildings empty for you to build rackets in
5. I was approached later than usual for the Business Arrangement, early August rather than mid June
6. I got some real good luck moments; my first arranged hits took out 5/6 of the enemies. I also found the bullet type that gives you +10 damage, so with the GTG I only had to ever hit 1/3 of my shots as I only ever fought Thug teams on my playthrough. The Black Market also had a Silk Vest I could buy right away (2 armour)
7. When the assassinations cleared the board, I took out 6 or so Depots and got a huge chunk of territory. I then sold all my guns etc. to the Boss I shared an Agreement with and bought a huge amount of rackets. Combined with my highly upgraded starting rackets and my Protections to minor factions I was making $17,000 a week
8. Once the last assassination finally worked, I offered Protection to the last Boss and let 3 months pass. By the time that was over, I had enough cash to make favourable (+100) trades with him to increase my rating and then buy him out for $238,000 by mid-April 1921

[TheHazard67]

This post helped me speed up the plat a lot. I just made a couple of adjustments that worked for me.

1. If you request a sitdown when you first meet a boss you can get a business arrangement right away.
2. With the early business arrangements I usually had at least 2 bosses that liked me enough to kill someone for me. So you can pretty much start eliminating other bosses right after you met all of them.
3. Assassinating bosses in your neighborhood is useful for quick expansion since their districts won't have any thug occupied rackets after they are out of the game, making it easier to expand.

With these adjustments, in 5 playthroughs no one ever declared war on me because I developed good relationships with them with the early business arrangements. I only had to hire one medic to speed things up, which meant I earned a lot of cash per week. I also managed to get the Lone Wolf trophy with Angelo Genna which isn't even that good for it. I never declared or got in any wars, I just assassinated and bought out other bosses.

[MrTacoNinja]

Not gonna lie, the platinum for this game sounds like an unbelievable hassle. 

[poetic_justice_]

On 11/7/2022 at 8:58 PM, MrTacoNinja said:

Not gonna lie, the platinum for this game sounds like an unbelievable hassle. 

I don't have the platinum, but I appreciate the depth of strategy listed here. Thank you both.

 

Taco, there are two primary ways to win the game: 'plata o plomo' (money or the morgue). You can either annihilate the competition or buy them out. Most inexperienced players such as myself struggle with both approaches. We aren't earning enough money to buy decent weapons & hire gangsters, and we also aren't making enough money to reinvest and upgrade rackets into a massive revenue-generating machine, literally the empire of sin. The financial strategy that Andrew1990m and TheHazard67 described has amazing synergy between diplomacy and finance, which is absolutely necessary for Lone Wolf.

 

Does Empire of Sin have a steep learning curve? Yes, but not as steep as many similar strategy titles. My guess would be Lone Wolf is the hardest trophy in the game, but the other trophies are a matter of time and patience with RNG. I am not certain, but I believe Lone Wolf can be save spammed. The game does multiple auto-saves, plus players can manually save whenever they wish. If the kingpin dies, I think reloading the last save prior to death does not void the trophy.

 

For other newbies like myself, the gunfire RNG in this game can be maddening. Like XCOM 2, you can be flanking an enemy, literally on an adjacent tile, with 95% probability + 55% Crit chance, yet still miss the shot. Another RNG factor is a weapon's range of damage, e.g., a shotgun blast can do between 29-40 damage. Don't pay attention to the higher number, pay attention to the lowest number in that range. There is nothing worse than believing you can down an enemy with one shot, only to have that enemy survive with +1 health, then kill your character the next turn.

 

With single-shot weapons (sniper rifle, rifle, shotgun, handgun), if a shot has 70% Hit probability, I wouldn't risk it. In my experience, with single-shot weapons (handguns, shotguns, rifles, sniper rifles) 70% Hit chance = 50% Hit chance. 7/10 of those 70% shots will not hit the target; perhaps 5/10 will. 80% Hit chance or higher seems to be the sweet spot that actually lands 8/10 times. For single shot weapons, anything less than 80% appears to be a bigger gamble than the displayed numbers indicate. However, this only applies to single-shot weapons.

 

However, 70% hit chance with multi-shot weapons (SMGs, machine guns) seems to be closer to 80%. For submachine guns, which fire three bullets per turn, the highest hit chance of my low-level hired gun was 64%. That percentage was accurate, and he routinely landed 1-2 bullets every turn. Machine guns shoot five bullets per turn (as you upgrade your skill, you can unlock the ability to fire six bullets per turn), and at 70%, 4/5 usually hit.

 

At present, I use melee attacks and shotguns more than anything. I also use doctors with sniper rifles & rifles on overwatch. Giving the doctors the trait where attacks have a 55% chance to inflict Bleed, even horrible grey sniper rifles can knock 80 Health (60 rifle damage + 20 Bleed) off an enemy before he is in range of my melee/shotgun gangsters. With a 93-100% hit chance, most shotgun and melee attacks finish the enemy off.

Edited May 20, 2023 by poetic_justice_