For the longest time, we always suspected that shelter survival games like Hustle Castle and Zero City had an art style reminiscent of a Seth McFarlane animated show. These games look like something straight out of Family Guy, especially the former, which is why we were pleasantly surprised when we first discovered American Dad! Apocalypse Soon a few days ago. “Finally!” we thought, “A game that looks like a Seth McFarlane show, that’s actually based on one, too!”

As a shelter building game, it’s your duty to take control of Stan Smith and remodel your home into a fortress from where you can take the fight back to the aliens, and rescue Langley Falls from their brainwashing schemes. However, building a fortress takes both time and resources. Luckily, while resources are hard to come by in this land, you have all the time in the world to get your act together.

With that being said, here are some beginner tips and tricks to expedite your progress in American Dad! Apocalypse Soon, and take back your beloved hometown from the alien invaders.

Check Your Clones’ Proficiencies and Assign Them to the Right Tasks

Right from the very beginning, you’ll start off with several clones roaming around your home, ready to work for the cause. While the tutorial shows how you can easily assign your clones to any room so they can start producing, it only briefly mentions how their proficiencies come into play when it comes to assigning them to the correct rooms.

Every clone has many proficiency levels, which dictate their effectiveness at specific tasks. In the beginning, your clones only have 3 proficiencies: Fighter, Cook, and Banker. These three are pretty self-explanatory. While the ones who have a higher proficiency as a fighter will evidently be stronger in combat, those who are more culinary or financially-inclined will be better off working in the Kitchen or the Mint, respectively.

In American Dad! Apocalypse Soon, these proficiencies are infinitely more important at the beginning, when you can only level up your fighter stat. Having the right clones for the right jobs will greatly improve your production of both money and food, allowing you to perform all those important base upgrades, as well as constantly go out to the field and engage in PvP or clear those crucial story missions. Later on, you’ll unlock certain rooms where you will be able to train other proficiencies, but this is far into the game.

Watch Your Happiness Levels

And speaking of production, a clone’s proficiency is not the only factor that affects their effectiveness when performing production tasks. Your shelter’s happiness levels also influence somewhat the amount of resources your clones produce every hour. Specifically, a good happiness level, if you’re a f2p player, can increase your production by up to 5%, which is a lot in the later stages of the game. Meanwhile, if you’re a premium player, this bonus can increase to a maximum of 20%.

Raising the happiness in your home is very simple; all you have to do is click on the thought and speech bubbles that pop up above your clones from time to time. For every bubble you click, happiness will increase by a small amount. However, these increases are quite small so, while raising happiness is easy, maintaining it is a different matter. Regardless, you have to do your best to click all those thought bubbles if you’re actively playing.

Play American Dad! Apocalypse Soon on BlueStacks

Another alternative for increasing happiness is by completing certain challenges and winning PvP battles. For every level in the campaign that you beat, you’ll receive a large happiness boost. This means that maintaining happiness is much easier at the beginning since you’ll be clearing levels back to back. This is great as you’ll need all the resources you can get in order to expedite the construction of your shelter.

Prioritize Completing Story Missions

Once your initial preparations are complete, you first order of business in American Dad! should be to complete as many story missions as you possibly can. While this is a shelter game, the only way to unlock certain features is by progressing through the story. Not to mention, beating story missions is a great way to score chests with loot and other useful objects.

Luckily, the first few chapters of the story are quite easy to beat, and don’t really require much in the way of gear and proficiency. For this reason, we suggest just challenging as many story missions as you can, until you hit a fight that you can’t beat, and then retreat back home to start upgrading your units and rooms.

Keep Your Rooms Upgraded

One of the most crucial tasks, aside from completing story missions, is to upgrade your rooms as soon as you can. These upgrades not only increase the effectiveness of the said room, but also grant bonus effects. For instance, upgrading production rooms like the Kitchen or the Mint increases their production per hour, while also enlarging their storage, increasing the maximum amount of resources you can carry at any given moment.

Every time you manage to upgrade your Situation Room, take several moments to go over all your other rooms and perform the necessary improvements. 

Save Up Golden Turds to Purchase an Extra Builder

One of the great things about American Dad! Apocalypse Soon, which we didn’t see in other similar games when we tried them, is the fact that you can hire additional builders for your home. By hiring more builders, you can effectively perform more than one upgrade at a time, significantly speeding up the development of your base.

Where in other games you always had to wait until a single upgrade finishes before issuing another, in American Dad, you can increase the number of building crews by spending Golden Turds, the game’s premium currency. The first additional builder costs 750 Golden Turds, which you can easily farm in a few moments. Feel free to check our farming and progression guide for American Dad! Apocalypse Soon if you want to learn more about this topic.

In short, your priorities in this shelter game should be to assign your clones to the right rooms, complete as many missions as you can, and then taking the time to upgrade your rooms and build additional facilities. As you progress and upgrade your Situation Room, you’ll unlock further upgrades to your home, which will change considerably the way you play American Dad.

Until then, however, feel free to use the tips listed here as guidelines to expedite your beginning in this game. Have you already downloaded and tried American Dad! Apocalypse soon on your PC using BlueStacks? We’d love to hear your opinions about this game, so leave us your comments in the section below.

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