Earth Defense Force 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair

• One weird thing they changed in 4.1 compared to 2025 is that the first level is probably the hardest level until around level 10-12, so you're probably best off turning the difficulty down to easy just to get it out of the way, then back up to normal or hard so you can start collecting decent weapons again.

- An easy way to grind for weapons early on (at least for Rangers) is to first play through levels on hard difficulty until you can get a decent rifle and rocket launcher. Then head back to level 2 and 3 and play through on very hard until you upgrade your rifle and RL again once or twice, then repeat on Inferno. You can get some really good-to-game breaking stuff pretty early this way.

- Ranger's Rocket Launchers have basically unlimited range, so as soon as you see a crowd of ants on the horizon start shooting into it at random while advancing. If you're lucky enough/have a crazy enough Launcher, you can take out the entire mob before you even get close enough to use a rifle. (By the way, there's absolutely no penalty for leveling an entire city just to kill one ant, so have fun demolishing skyscrapers with all the shots you'll be missing.)

- A decent easy strat for Fencers is to find a gun that reloads in the same time it takes to dump all of it's ammo (spread guns work best) and equip it on both hands. Then you can hold down one or the other trigger non-stop, for the whole level, if you want, without stopping to reload.