Renowned Explorers: International Society
- Money is really important. If you're just starting, try to grab characters and abilities that give you extra money or treasure hunt tokens and focus on it as your main source of renown. You might want to postpone upgrading equpiment for when you really need it and save money, but the only way to tell the proper time for this is experience with the game, as there's a load of factors in play.
- Your selection of maps should be governed by what kind of attitude your team prefers - I generally find the Devious ones the easiest because there's a lot of debuffs available.
- The Anagogic Archipelago and Shangri-La maps are hard as balls, avoid until you've got more experience. The Lost Island, on the other hand, is perfect for a final adventure since it allows your choice of three boss fights (even if one of them is arguably the toughest in the game) and you can even tag out early if you have enough renown.
- All of the characters can be powerful but some require a lot of effort - and in some cases luck with story cards - to get there. Being more straightforward does not necessarily mean they are weaker.
- You can change the starting island once you've beaten all three - make sure to pick the one for the token you're looking for (encounter token teams can go anywhere).
- If you have the story card expansion, considering resetting if your opening hand doesn't have the personal cards you want - they are all extremely powerful (occasionally character defining for people like Ivan), and take multiple adventures to finish triggering, so you want to use them as soon as possible.
- Combat stats have diminishing returns - it's worth considering armor to boost a character's lower defense since their higher stat might soft cap more or less naturally, and to go for multiple lower-tier gear instead of one higher tier one. Anyone who can equip boots should since evade is extremely powerful.
- Generally speaking the first priority with equipment should be filling accessory slots and getting a non-broken weapon for the main damage dealer. A spread of Lv 1 skills can significantly boost your chances on rolls (and on the 2 star islands there are a lot of non-roll "do you have X skill Y/N" checks).
- Try and save insight for later in the game when you get more from them (improved tokens, better jobs, etc.). Only spend them if you're over the cap or it'll get you something specific (ie, you're a few research points away from completing another project).
- Pick expeditions based on what your party can do, rather than what you'd like to do. It doesn't matter if you're trying to focus on the Collect token, going to the desert with no Archaeology or Survival will not end well. If an expedition matches your skills, try and maximize those skills in the intermissions; if they're close, try and get what you're missing from accessories/entourages.
- The only failure state in the game is losing in combat - doing 1-2-2-2-3 star expeditions is a legitimate if low-scoring path to victory.
- In combat, emotional/mood buffs and debuffs are significantly powerful - try and keep synergies in mind when making teams (ie., a powerful speech attacker, someone who can grant Excited, and someone who give Impressed), and do everything you can to avoid negative moods. Remember that actions that align with the current mood subtract points from the other two, and that actions that kill an enemy increase the shift by a point per enemy killed.
- If all else fails: Picking someone with a "bonus on roll success" skill like Dolores or Wang as captain and just shoving every skill you can into them can very rapidly spiral out of control - skills do give small amounts of stats, and stats affect both combat and rolls, so someone with levels in everything can often be a beast in combat and get good odds on rolls just from all their raw stats before even taking the actual relevant skills into question.
- This tip is spoiled since it involves a later game event chain: There's a special event chain involving gargoyles in the Hungarian Fort and Transylvania expeditions that, once completed (involving getting a password from other events across multiple playthroughs), unlocks alternate secondary treasures for the starter islands. These generally give much larger benefits than the regular treasures, so they're worth trying to unlock and get.