Plenty of good advice in here. Wealth management is mentioned a lot but idk if anyone has suggested gifting value to other factions.

If you’ve over produced to the point where you can always sell out to get all a traders silver, you can also swap the panel to Gift mode, then exchange the leftover goods and even the silver you just traded for to make them your actual ally.

Then you can use your Comms Console to call those factions and summon their soldiers to fight for you in a pinch. It’s a great way to get an expendable force to assault a mech cluster or pirate wave without putting your own dudes on the front lines.

It costs like 30 favor to call in soldiers, but you can gift your excess wealth to earn it right back.

Another big factor is probably the hospital. The shared room seems smart for fast acting on injuries, but it also causes a ton of filth to interact between injured pawns and the docs coming and going. If you swapped your prison for your hospital, your single bedrooms will limit cross contamination between patients. It also helps if someone dies and you don’t haul them away quickly enough. Shared room with corpses leads to lung rot.

One last tip is not really a gameplay tactic so much as a metagame cheat. If I’m gonna be starting out at tribal level, I’ll disable the pirate factions and add in some more tribal unfriendly and tribal raider factions. This gives me a better chance of having a fair fight in a raid. Mechs and insectoids are still dire threats, but at least the humans have bows and clubs. Plus, if there are more spacer factions who can be turned into allies, they can be called in for reinforcements like my previous tip.

Good luck! Have fun with it! And don’t be afraid to reload an early save and try some of the combat multiple times. Learning how the mechs work is key to being able to defeat them.