After inc Settlement Leader Tier List
Some notes before explanation:
1) The ranking is based on Mega Brutal 1. I’m not that good at the game yet, so I’m not ranking based on Mega Brutal 5. The ranking also assumes you have the extra starting stamina from the three chosen settlement leaders at the start of each stage.
2) I rank settlement leaders on a Generalist–Specialist spectrum because I believe all of them have cases where they are strongest in. Those closer to "Generalist" are not automatically "better;" they're just more flexible overall, and vice versa for those closer to "Specialist."
3) Lastly, this is just my opinion. If you disagree on something, feel free to share your thoughts, especially from those who play on Mega Brutal 5.
With that cleared, let's get to each settlement leader.
Generalist
Personal Trainer: Being able to go into deficit means you can technically avoid the stamina cap (if you don’t know, letting your stamina capped out slows down stamina production) by going into the negative. But sometimes, the deficit you would have got is too large to tank all the morale drop, so you might have to run into the cap still in some cases. But overall, Personal Trainer is one of, if not the most forgiving leader you can play. If you want to win stages, Personal Trainer is usually your best option. If you want to hone your skills though, I don’t recommend her; she gives a lot of room for error compared to other leaders.
Economist: Starting with double the stamina is a huge advantage, as you can roll buildings, scavenges, exploration, etc way earlier. However, her quarterly stamina is a problem you should consider even if you’re used to it. Because it takes you so long to earn stamina (3 months) and how much you typically have to spend to complete goals, you have to know the stages pretty well to fully take advantage of said starting stamina and work around the quarterly stamina production. Despite all of that, Economist has one major advantage over most other leaders: stamina cap. Economist’s stamina cap is scaled to match with her quarterly stamina production. This means you will almost never hit the cap and will produce stamina at maximum rate throughout the whole game, effectively producing more.
Just like in Rebel Inc, you actually have to plan ahead when playing as her, otherwise you’d always run out of stamina and have none to respond to events or work towards later goals. If you’re new or looking to hone your skills for Mega Brutal, you should avoid Economist for some time first unless you’re already used to her quarterly stamina production.
Tyrant: Being able to suppress settlers and preventing abandonment using fighters is… alright. It can be handy during winter or if you scale population too fast, but it also means you have one less fighter to defend against zombies. If you don’t use fighters to prevent abandonment though, you lose more authority.
If morale is not a problem though, he plays identically to Survivor but slightly better thanks to less authority loss due to impatience and longer goal patience. They’re not much, but there’s no other downside, so just enjoy it. He’s best used in maps without much fighting because you won’t have to juggle between fighting zombies and abandoning settlers as much. However, he doesn’t play very differently from Survivor to begin with, so you can often get away with choosing Tyrant over Survivor in most maps. He’s also a pretty good leader to play if you’re looking to hone your skills.
Survivor: Having no downside to screw you over is the biggest strength of Survivor. However, he also doesn’t have anything to save him if the game does go bad. But if you reach that point as Survivor, to say bluntly, your fundamental is probably not good enough yet. Assuming you get the extra starting stamina, Survivor is the perfect leader for honing skills. If not, there’s not much reason to choose him over other leaders, especially when some of them outperform Survivor in almost every case.
Hoarder: The very fact she builds storage automatically is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you build storage for less stamina and you can focus on other things. On the other hand, overproducing becomes a genuine problem because she’ll spend all your stamina and wood (and stone too if it’s available) on building storage, leaving you with little resources to do anything else.
Hoarder is another discipline-based leader; produce too much and you, paradoxically, have less resource to work with. Yet, you still have mouths to feed and services to provide. Playing as Hoarder is all about balancing the production and consumption. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t produce a lot at all; you still have winter (and drought in some stages) to deal with and that’s where Hoarder shines the most, but you have to know how much production is just enough to sustain the current economy and survive winter (and drought).
If you can find that balance though, winter (and drought) becomes a non-issue, and you can just focus on completing goals. She’s more of a QoL leader than a purely flexible one if compared to Survivor.
Semi-Generalist
Slumlord: Because Pravus said Slumlord was horrible and I think a lot of people agree with him, this one probably needs a lot of explanation.
Slumlord grows population passively, whether you have sufficient housing or not. The main argument for Slumlord being bad is that population usually grows way faster than how fast you can scale services, housing, and resource production, causing you to spiral into negative morale and rapid authority loss. Here’s the thing; population level only increases if you pop the population bubble. If you never do, your population level will never increase, meaning you won’t have to scale your services, housing, and resource production. Yes, the pop-up will disappear, but they’ll come back later. You don’t lose housing or anything. The trick is to restrain yourself from clicking the population bubble and only do so once you’re ready to expand or otherwise able fix the morale or negative resource balance quickly. It’s a bit unintuitive, but I swear Slumlord is way more powerful than he seemed once you know this. The extra starting stamina also helps with early game a bit, not as much as what Economist started with, but it’s better than nothing.
Once you understand how to play Slumlord this way, the real biggest weakness of Slumlord is the player’s own greed, misplay, and forgetting to scale housing. It’s very tempting to get the immediate stamina by clicking population bubble, thinking you could scale services later. It works but not every time. You can often get away with it on lower population levels, but the higher you go, the riskier this quick stamina grab becomes. Also, don’t forget to scale housing. It’s surprisingly easy to forget that you don’t have sufficient housing and end up losing a massive amount of morale. That alone kills more runs than you’d expect.
Slumlord has a massive potential for outright steamrolling stages because you can rush population faster and you earn way more stamina from popping population bubbles, effectively progressing through goals faster. There’s a lot of restraint involved and a bit of relearning of how you’d play the game, but once mastered, he’s just straight up Survivor with extra stamina throughout the game. The only reason he’s not considered a Generalist is because in maps where you don’t have or want to scale population a lot, you won’t get as much extra stamina to play with, and you’d be managing population expansion more than you would have with any of the Generalist leaders for little advantages that don’t quite justify the hurdle. I highly recommend trying to play Slumlord this way though; he’s better than what Pravus framed him to be.
Soldier: Very good for fighting, but needs barracks to sustain fighters and avoid morale loss. In most maps, he’s either a fine or excellent pick, but there are maps where he’s genuinely bad or pointless to use. Maps without or with few zombies are obvious places, but in maps like Forgotten Shadow (last map of Shadows of The Past) where you need all 4 fighters, building all the barracks to sustain them would utterly cripple your economy. I don’t have much to say for him. He’s solid in most maps, but some are just not suitable. That’s pretty much the only reason he’s not considered a Generalist.
Middle Ground
Cub Scout: Free exploration means your mid and late game won’t cost you as much stamina if you don’t forget to click the exploration bubbles — that happens surprisingly often to me. However, more expensive specific exploration makes your early game worse. In stages where early exploration can be minimal, this isn’t a problem, and they are where Cub Scout is strongest at. But in stages where it is, the free exploration won’t kick in fast enough to pay off all the extra stamina you spend exploring to progress through goals, and your mid game will be pretty awkward if you manage to survive early game. She would have been in Semi-Generalist tier if it weren’t for the fact there are quite a number of maps with early exploration. Otherwise, she can save you a lot of stamina and sometimes directly help you progress through goals if the stage involves late game exploration.
Semi-Specialist
Arctic Explorer: His mechanic is very simple, yet it changes how you play the game quite a lot. In maps where you start in winter, he’s often pretty strong as cheaper exploration and claiming cost during winter directly translates to better early game. However, over half of the game’s maps don’t start in winter. In those maps, Arctic Explorer is almost like Cub Scout but less passive, decent if early game exploration is minimal, but weak if it is a part of the goals or otherwise mandatory. It’s also quite easy to forget exploring and claiming zones during winter.
Compared to Cub Scout, Arctic Explorer is more dependent on the stage but has more immediate payoffs while Cub Scout is less dependent on the stage but the payoffs come later. He’s nowhere near a bad leader, but he also doesn’t work well in every stage.
Specialist
Hermit: Very heavily dependent on the stage, even more than Arctic Explorer. In a lot of maps, especially those later in the game, you don’t want to leave any zone near your settlement unexplored to prevent surprise attacks. But if you’re playing as Hermit, that’s also a bad thing because you’ll suffer from production penalty. But just like Arctic Explorer, he’s not a bad leader in himself; he’s just very dependent on the stage. Give him a stage where surprise attack is unlikely, and he’d be very powerful. However, you could argue that the production penalty isn’t strong enough to hurt you badly, and the extra production in early game could help you stabilize your economy. But because of the production boost, your economy is likely dependent on it, and you probably have to overproduce to some extent before giving up your production boost if you need to explore all zones around your settlement. Often times, it’s not worth playing as Hermit, but there are stages where he is better than many other leaders.