• Always hold off on new races until you can afford one of the better cars for that event. You wouldn't think it would make a significant difference, but it will, especially when you've got a team like Ravenswest competing.
  
• Don't do driver events where you drive for another team, unless it's for the Le Mans because you can't afford a car to participate yourself. You'll acquire money and renown much faster driving for yourself.
  
• Speaking of the Le Mans, participate and do well. You get some extremely valuable sponsors from it. Remember, the race is very, very long, so you don't need to be in first place the whole way if you can regain it. You're racing by class, so the cars against which you must excel will not significantly exceed yours in performance.
  
• Conquer one region at a time, unless you absolutely can't stand a race you need to beat. Again, moving up in tiers opens up extremely well-paying races and sponsors.
  
• The AI is extraordinarily willing to knock you the gently caress out of the way, and in almost every race there's no penalty for their doing so. Do not get between an AI car and their chosen line, or they'll sweep right across and send you spinning. Speaking of collisions, in the Touge race, get ahead of the other car, then force them to ram you. They'll take a huge time penalty, which will allow you to take the rest of the race carefully and win on time. This is especially useful in the East-meets-West Viper vs. Honda or whatever challenge, because the Viper is heavy as poo poo.
  
• Test drive your cars to get a feel for how they'll respond to your chosen control settings. The cars may not be realistic, but they do tend to be consistent, so learning how to handle a car once- well- will usually set you for future races.
  

• Be the Romans. This is a no-brainer.
  
• Hire mercenary hoplites to bolster your forces. Let them do the dying. Roman infantry is generally too valuable to be sacrificed lightly.
  
• Heavy infantry in the center, light infantry on the flanks. Always fight on the defensive. Cavalry should be in the rear, and should sweep out to protect your flanks and attack theirs once the battle is joined. Don't throw away your general, because if he dies, your morale drops like a rock.
  
• Don't be afraid to maintain a second line of reserve infantry behind. You can order your first line to disengage, and while it won't be pretty, you can often save a tired unit by having them run through your second line. Just don't forget to order the reserve unit to fill the gap.
  
• Flanks are extremely vulnerable. Keep yours clear, always pummel your opponent's. This is especially true with hoplites. If you're charging the front of a hoplite, you're doing it wrong, and will die.
  
• Always have a unit or two of light cavalry to run down fleeing survivors and skirmishers. Don't let the enemy retreat with intact units. Try and kill them to the last man if you can- especially archers and other annoyances.
  
• The artillery you can bring with your units is next to useless against walls, but gently caress if it doesn't kill enemy soldiers like the dickens. Scorpions on a hill can fire over long distances, with fair accuracy, and skewer whole columns at a time. Once they get experienced- which they will quickly, if you don't let them die like a retard- they'll fire faster, further, and more accurately. You can have a battle half-over before the melee starts.
  
• When fighting Carthage, bring skirmishers- Velites, specifically. Use them against elephants. They're cheap, so it's worth losing a unit of them to cause to rampage a unit of elephants- especially when those elephants are still among enemy troops.
  
• You can try the manipular formation (line each of Velites, Hastati, Principes, Triarii, each falling back through the other when tired) if you're a masochist. I'd recommend Principes in the center, Hastati on the flanks, and Triarii in reserve, with Velites as skirmishers. Get archers if you can find them, because they'll outrange your Velites. Post-Marian, your units will homogenize- while simultaneously growing in effectiveness- meaning that you can pretty much just build big lines and crush the hell out of them.
  

• Distance is your friend. Get a rifle as soon as possible and use it. The first assault rifles you'll encounter are on the Military soldiers underneath the bridge in the area out in which you start. Using a suppressed pistol, you can kill their leader when the other soldiers look away and steal his rifle and gear.
  
• Once you get to the Duty camp, the first thing you should do is go through to the warehouses. A bunch of Duty soldiers will ambush a group of Freedom guys, who will drop the best weapons you'll find for a while. Steal their weapons and ammo, keep the best rifle in the best condition, and sell the rest to buy more supplies.
  
• Always fight from behind cover. Find cover over which you can shoot when crouched, but behind which you're hidden while low-crouched. Pop up, shoot a guy in the head, crouch, reload. Rinse and repeat. Grenade use is not a significant concern in this one, unlike in the prequel.
  

John Pastor fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Sep 29, 2008

• Your melee skills are insanely useful. You can disarm and knock unconscious any enemy by getting right up to them with empty hands and just clicking like a nutcase. Plus the headbutt looks awesome.
  
• You can throw any knife you can pick up. I think the button for throw is T or G or summat- check the options menu- and doing this will instantly kill any enemy, and will do so silently. Uh... if you hit them, anyway. The knife has a bit of an arc to it.
  
• Shoving anyone over anything will kill them. It doesn't matter if the fall is a foot or a mile, if they complete a full turn over the railing/low wall/whatever a script will kill them instantly before they even hit the ground.
  
• You should pretty much always be wearing a disguise. Especially outfits with low-cut tops, even if only to admire 47's incredible physique
  
• There are no missions in the game that require a gun, but almost all of them are a lot more fun with your .45. Combining magnum ammunition with a high-quality suppressor on any weapon will give you a quiet weapon that shoots easily through doors and sends corpses flying. Incidentally, your shotgun is completely pointless. Never waste money on it.
  
• If you've played the earlier Hitman games, this one is much more open-ended, so never be afraid to take your time and explore the area. There are only two missions that I remember where there's an absolute time limit for an event; for the others, events are on cycles. If you miss something that you thought gave you an opportunity, wait around for a while and see if it repeats.
  
• Hide corpses. You will never feel stupider than when you're six feet from a level exit and some adventuresome douchebag stumbles across the unconscious waiter you left in a bathroom surrounded by piles of clothes and six discarded revolvers.
  
• Pursue Lu Bu. Under all circumstances.
  

• Try to stay out of the way of the A.I., because they'll slam into your poo poo and send you hurtling off the course at a million miles per hour at a moment's notice. This also goes for your wingman/backup driver.
  
  
• The A.I. rubberbands a bit, but you can actually build up a strong enough lead that you can make some mistakes as the first-place driver and lose nothing but some buffer space.
  
  
• Incidentally, you need a good teammate, because there are a lot of races that are scored by team, and you're not winning that even if you get every first place if Ravenwest is consistently landing both second and third.
  
  
• Always do Le Mans. If you can't afford a car, drive another team's. The reputation and money you gain are exceptionally useful.
  
  
• Try to have the nicest car usable in a race. It really, really makes a difference.
  
  
• You can't have difference sponsors on your car and your teammate's car, so consider carefully whether it makes sense to have sponsors that demand, for example, a first-place finish, because only one of you is getting it.
  
  
• Be careful when you're using your Instant Replay that you back up far enough to allow you to avoid the crash. When you restart from a point in the past, I don't think you can rewind past that point with a subsequent use of Instant Replay- so if you get stuck, you're hosed.
  
  
• The physics are unrealistic, but largely consistent. The good thing is that you can learn how to drive the cars and do cool poo poo with them. The bad thing is that you don't get good with them by expecting them to behave like real cars.