Resource Economy
Introduction
Section titled “Introduction”Is IS all about beating stages? The answer is no. Given a bad squad, it doesn’t matter how skilled the player is, a hard stage will cause a run to lose. Likewise, with a good squad and relics, the chances to clear a hard stage improves massively. So the question then becomes how do we avoid being in a situation with a bad squad. The solution is to have a good economy. The term “economy” is quoted amongst most IS players often. We define economy as the decisions to accumulate resources and bolster your run outside a combat stage.
Voucher Environment
Section titled “Voucher Environment”When playing IS, you might notice a pattern where every time you clear a stage, sometimes there is only one voucher to choose from. In other stages, you may get to pick one voucher from two options. In fact, the number of vouchers that a stage allows you to choose from after beating a stage is not random. The IS community generally coins these different subsets of floors that give the same number of voucher choices as voucher environments.
Below is a table of the number of voucher choices for each floor for each IS for combats
| Floor | IS2 | IS3 | IS4 | IS5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Floor 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Floor 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Floor 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1-2 |
| Floor 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Floor 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2-3 |
| Floor 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2-3 |
| Floor 7 | - | - | 2 | - |
A general trend is that early floors have fewer voucher choices than later floors. The threshold point between having one choice versus having more choices occurs mostly on floor 3
Having more voucher choices is great because there is a greater chance to find vouchers that you need. Maybe you are looking for a vanguard to fund your expensive units that are inflated by Commerce epoch, or you are looking for your medics especially if you start with a starting composition without a low rarity medic, or you are looking for your premium solution to Sentinel (aka degenbrecher).
Consider the hypothetical scenario where you have a bunch of hope and need to spend it to bolster squad power. Rather than spending it on the fly on early floors for suboptimal choices, it would seem reasonable based on the above conclusions to spend it on later floors for the increased chance of getting vouchers to flesh out your composition. More on how to design and draft a composition will be discussed later on.
Of course the actual circumstances may vary, one of the scenarios being if you are in desperate need of squad power and need something, maybe just anybody, to carry you through the next floor. We will discuss this scenario more later in the Tempo Picks section.
Shields/Life Points
Section titled “Shields/Life Points”Are we perfect players? Hell no. Every player is prone to mistakes. If you are aiming for a perfect clear of a story stage outside of IS, there is minimal cost to resetting and attempting the stage again. However, in most cases, quitting an IS stage means losing the run. Unless you are playing relicless, most of the conditions that you experience when doing a stage differs every run. Given that we are not perfect players, a safety net would be appreciated, maybe just some room for error. In some maps, the ability to choose to leak certain problematic enemies will make the map half as hard. That’s where shields and lifepoints come in. A known IS pro once said this quote that the writer agrees thoroughly: “Lifepoints are the most useless resource, until you need it the most.”
What is the difference between shields and lifepoints? When a stage is entered, the sum of shields and lifepoints become your total lifepoints that can be lost on a map. However, there are distinctions between the two. The distinctions differ for each IS so we will dive deeper into each IS individually.
One of the major distinctions between IS2 and the other IS themes is that there is no max lifepoints. Max lifepoints is defined as the maximum number of lifepoints that can be accumulated. Meanwhile, shields are a renewable resource of free lifepoints that refresh every stage. In other words, if you have one shield, you can leak one enemy for free per stage.
IS3 and IS4
Section titled “IS3 and IS4”IS3 and IS4 begin to introduce the concept of max lifepoints and shields that we are more familiar with today, as well as the concept of “shield-stacking”. Above a certain threshold of lifepoints, every perfect clear naturally leveling up your command level does not get to this threshold early on. This is why many would grant one shield as a reward. Getting to this threshold is not easy. Good IS players value max lifepoint collectibles so they can reach this threshold on earlier floors to allow them more combats to streak their shield bonus. This can mean the difference between getting to the boss with few shields versus having enough shields and lifepoints combined to leak not only one, but two bosses. The feeling of safety that abundant shields can give is unfathomable.
IS5 removed the shield-stacking mechanic unfortunately and players start their run with less lifepoints. However, the main non-collectible reliant method of obtaining shields is through fusing inspires. This mechanic will be elaborated more on specific IS pages later. Nonetheless, IS5 further emphasizes the point that lifepoints and shields are a resource which are valuable only when you need them the most, which is usually when you encounter a hard stage or make a mistake.
The currency of hope was already introduced early in the tutorial for IS. It is an expendable resource combined with vouchers to recruit and promote operators. Hope is surprisingly a scarce resource and should be managed wisely. While there are external sources of hope such as collectibles, the main method to obtain hope is to accumulate command experience and level up. Below is a quick non-inclusive ranking of hope gain sources from highest to lowest
- Command level up (more in the later sections)
- Collectibles
- Scouting operators in IS5 (passive way to save hope)
- Gambling in downtime recreation
Leveling up
Section titled “Leveling up”Successfully clearing a combat rewards combat experience, which can be used to level up. Excess combat experience will contribute towards the next level. Levelling up rewards hope, squad size and squad size. Below is a tabulated summary of the hope gained after reaching a specific command level.
| Level \ IS theme | IS2 | IS3 | IS4 | IS5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 4 (4) | 4 (4) | 4 (4) | 4 (4) |
| 3 | 4 (8) | 4 (8) | 4 (8) | 4 (8) |
| 4 | 5 (13) | 5 (13) | 5 (13) | 5 (13) |
| 5 | 6 (19) | 6 (19) | 6 (19) | 5 (18) |
| 6 | 6 (25) | 6 (25) | 6 (25) | 6 (24) |
| 7 | 6 (31) | 6 (31) | 6 (31) | 6 (30) |
| 8 | 7 (38) | 7 (38) | 7 (38) | 6 (36) |
| 9 | 8 (46) | 8 (46) | 8 (46) | 6 (42) |
| 10 | 8 (54) | 8 (54) | 8 (54) | 8 (50) |
| 11 (PO squad) | 15 (69) |
Note: PO squad is short for People-Oriented Squad in IS3
A quick glance would show that the amount of hope gained after reaching a new command level increases with higher command level. In conjunction, the command experience required to reach a new level also increases as well.
Below is a table compiled by Die Alive on the command experience yield on each floor in IS5 as an example.
| Stage (IS5) | Experience yield |
|---|---|
| F1 NM stage | 13 |
| F1 EM stage | 15 |
| F2 NM stage | 15 |
| F2 EM stage | 23 |
| F3 NM stage | 17 |
| F3 EM stage | 33 |
| F4 NM stage | 19 |
| F4 EM stage | 39 |
| F5 NM stage | 26 |
| F5 EM stage | 47 |
| F6 NM stage | 26 |
| F6 EM stage | 47 |
One can observe that the combat experience increases the higher the floor the stage normally appears on. A floor 5 stage showing up on floor 4 would yield the experience of a floor 5 stage. Emergency versions of the stage generally yield more command experience than their normal counterparts, which is aligned to the general principle of “greater risk, greater reward”. Later floor emergencies tend to give disproportionately more command experience than their normal counterparts (in comparison to earlier floor emergencies.) Given a choice to do a normal stage versus an emergency stage, if there is no certain risk of losing the run or other circumstances, it is generally a good idea to tackle an emergency stage for the better rewards.
Some collectibles give increased or decreased command experience yield for clearing combat stages. These modifiers stack multiplicatively. Having increased command experience yield is great for early game progression as you would be able to benefit from the resource yield from levelling up command level at an earlier point in the game
Hope planning
Section titled “Hope planning”From the previous section we established that levelling up is a very significant source of hope gain. However, this source is non-renewable. Once you reach level 10, the level cap is reached and no more hope can be obtained by accumulating command experience. While there is an abundance of hope relics that exist in the game, it is not wise to rely on them given the fact that encountering these hope relics are RNG-dependent and have opportunity cost such as ingots. From a conservative standpoint, the total hope of your full team composition should not vastly exceed the maximum hope gained corresponding to the command level reached at the ending.
To illustrate this point, consider the hypothetical scenario where you are going for an ending 3 clear at IS3 or IS4. Assuming you are not avoiding combat nodes, reaching level 10 should be possible before the boss node. Hence your planned team composition ideally should not vastly exceed 54 hope, which is the total hope you would accumulate at level 10.
The exact circumstances change based on other factors such as obtaining free promotions through safe houses or scouts, or obtaining hope relics etc. Hope planning is a tricky topic and with more in-game experience and practice it should come intuitively.
How to plan hope around command level
Section titled “How to plan hope around command level”Spending hope should be determined based on the current state of your command level. An easy way to plan hope on the fly is also to note how much hope you can gain in the short term. Let’s consider two hypothetical scenarios:
Scenario 1:
For example, let’s say I’m playing IS4 and I already command level 9, it would be not wise to draft many 6* operators at this point because I only have 8 more hope to gain after reaching level 10. Otherwise, a newly drafted 6* in this scenario would have a chance to not be promoted. Moreover, chances are that you might already are at floor 6 which means that there are very few combats to get more vouchers to promote your newly drafted 6*
Scenario 2:
For example, let’s say I’m playing IS4 with the Eternal Hunt squad. I have 2 hope, an E1 Myrtle, and I’m 1 combat away from command level 4. I complete a combat and receive a vanguard voucher.
If I am desperately looking for another 6 star, I should not promote Myrtle here as tempting as it might be, because after this combat I’d be at 2-1+5=6 hope, which is not enough for a 6 star, meaning that most vouchers I could receive would be dead vouchers.
On the other hand, if I had 3 E1 6 stars that really want promotion to E2, then I would be more likely to take the Myrtle upgrade, since right now even if I go to 6 hope after the next combat, there’s a good chance that I’ll get a relevant voucher, such as one that lets me promote an E1 6 star etc..
Drafts
Section titled “Drafts”The strategy for planning a team composition and drafting the composition is complex. There are at least two schools of thought that are not mutually exclusive to achieve this. However, the first step always starts with having a plan before going in. Starting an IS run willy-nilly and drafting operators just because they look pretty would most likely crash and burn really quickly, and ideally we want to avoid that.
Core Composition
Due to limited hope constraints from what we mentioned previously in the hope section, your composition must be affordable. The first school of thought is to design what is known as a core composition. A core composition is a group of 3-4 operators which fulfill the following criteria:
They should be able to solve most non-boss stages together
They should play some role in boss stages
They do not have to be synergistic, but they should cover the weaknesses of each other
Most meta compositions fulfill these criteria, and hence they are meta. However, these core compositions differ in each IS theme due to the nature of the stages. Hence directly copying a core that works in one IS theme into another often does not work.
Here is a composition that works in IS3 and how they fulfill the criteria
| Operator | How do they solve non-boss stages | What role do they play in boss stages | How do they cover each other weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kroos alter | - Stun on talent to ground drifters - Decent single target damage when buffed by Skadi alter | - Shuts down highmore boss fight when paired with Skadi alter S3 | - Drifters are troublesome to Mlynar due to them being able to use ranged attacks if left unstunned |
| Skadi alter | - Improves Kroos alter’s damage to medium defence enemies - Provide small amounts of sustain - Large amounts of sustain on S1 to heal all units from stages with Pompeii | - Shuts down highmore boss fight when paired with Kroos alter S2 | - Kroos has very low attack and has no attack multipliers on her most commonly used S2 |
| Mlynar | - Provide high damage per hit multi-target output to solve large waves of enemies | - Clear jellyfish in Izumik fight, which have high defence | - Kroos alter’s single target is not effective against mob waves or stages that have high defence enemies such as Ember Phalanx |
| Yato alter | - Clear up trash mobs - Flexible option to solo high treat enemies that are hard to reach | - Block jellyfish and kill revealed mobs in Izumik fight when doing no-feed | - Clears up spike chests that can kill Mlynar due to her invincibility |
Working backwards
Section titled “Working backwards”The second school of thought is to work backwards from the boss stage. The boss stages are typically the hardest fights in the gamemode so we first want to find out what are the minimum operators/relics we need to clear the stage so that if we meet these conditions, the stage is doable consistently.
Notice that it was mentioned that the core composition is designed to clear most normal stages. While ideally the set of core operators can play some role in boss fights, boss stages are often mechanically heavy and much more complex than normal stages. Moreover, the core composition is limited to 3-4 operators. Drafting the core composition still leaves some hope left for other operators, which we could invest into operators who work specifically for boss stages. Some operators who may not perform exceptionally in normal stages can play pivotal roles in troublesome boss stages and hence warrant the hope cost and vouchers to draft them.
However, there is a big pitfall that is associated with this school of thought. The pitfall is that in order to reach the boss, you must be able to survive the entirety of early, mid and late game. It would be ridiculous to draft a whole bunch of ending responses that do absolutely nothing in a normal stage. Hence, a good ending response should at least be not entirely useless in normal stages such that the overall squad doesn’t feel too clunky to play.
To flesh out this concept, here is a procedure that can be considered:
- Look at the boss stages that you plan to tackle and consider the different working parts that make the stage hard.
- Disassemble the working parts individually and think how certain operators can help solve each part, fulfilling a role.
- Optimize the list of operators such that as few operators are needed and extend the scope to normal stages or other boss stages.
Let’s go through an example of how this process works:
- Suppose we are planning to do ending 2 in IS4. Eikthynir, which is the boss on ending 2, has a number of tricky mechanics. Not only does he have the ability to freeze nearby targets, he enters an unblockable dashing state when damaged below a certain threshold.
- One of the popular solutions for Eikthynir is to use a tank and a medic combination to stall the boss until all the enemies are cleared. This prevents Eikthynir from dashing prematurely,making the situation much easier. Focusing on the tank role, most ground operators with decent defence can fulfill that role.
- The higher the defensive capabilities of the tank, the lower the investment into the healing role is required. This can be in the form of having either higher defence, or having passive sustain, or other sources of damage reduction. In this aspect, protector, duelist, some guardian and sentinel defenders can fulfill that role.
- Comparing between defender options, Shu has the application to heal with her skills, which is valuable in the case where medic vouchers are scarce mid game. Her teleport skill also has a variety of applications. She renders Eikthynir’s dash useless, requiring less setup or investment into a levitator/crowd control option. Moreover, she has the ability to teleport Crazelyseon, the boss on ending 3, on the Sentinel fight. This extends the damage window possible for the fight. Hence Shu is one possible, if not the best, solution for Eikthynir.
Overdrafting
Section titled “Overdrafting”
Overdrafting is a common mistake made by both beginner and semi-experienced players. Overdrafting occurs when a new operator is drafted but the role that the new operator is meant to fulfill is already fulfilled by operators already in the squad. This is a sign of hope mismanagement and can be fatal.
One may argue: “But this new operator can do this job better than the original one!” While this statement is justifiable, one must consider the marginal improvement that the new operator can bring as opposed to the original one. An example would be a Nightingale draft to replace Ansel versus the same draft to replace Eyjafjalla the Hvit Aska. The former is justified as Ansel is a zero hope cost medic, hence having zero sunken cost, that is unlikely to function as an endgame medic, while the same cannot be said for the latter.
Overdrafting is very dangerous because drafting the new operator is essentially a hope sink. A command level up gives 5-8 hope in mid to end game, roughly equivalent to a 6* recruitment. Accumulating the amount of command experience to reach the next level requires several combats. Hence overdrafting could imply that for the next several combats any vouchers, especially the ones that you are looking to recruit core operators, are mostly voided because there is no hope to work with. Moreover, the hope cost of recruiting a new operator, especially a 6, is typically several times higher than to promote an existing 6 operator. You could be forced into a situation where several important operators are locked out of their promotions or recruitment.
Voucher Efficiency
Section titled “Voucher Efficiency”Once you’ve planned out your drafts, you will want to look at the total number of vouchers you will need to get to complete your draft. For example, in IS3 your final planned draft might be something like Chen Alter, Kroos Alter, Skadi Alter, Shamare, Angelina, Kal’tsit, Mylnar, Yato Alter, Weedy. This is a fairly standard draft for someone planning to do Knight + Izumik in the same run. If we count the total number of vouchers per class we’d need, we’d have:
| Sniper | Supporter | Medic | Guard | Specialist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 4 |
What immediately jumps out is that 6 supporter vouchers in total are needed to complete the squad! Over the course of an entire run it is not unreasonable to see 6 supporter vouchers, but what this means is that every opportunity you see one, you should almost always prioritize it. This also means that if you get a chance at a free promotion from a scout or relic, you should almost always use it on supporters. Now we can also see that Guard vouchers are also relatively low priority, since there’s only one guard that was planned to draft (Mylnar). As such you might put him lower on your priority list, in particular if you see a choice between a guard voucher and a voucher that you need more operators from.
There is however a notable exception. If an operator is critical to maintain consistency and survive the run, then obviously you should take them. For example, if you are at f3 and your squad is E2 kroos, E2 Shamare and E1 Kal’tsit and you are offered a Supporter and Medic voucher, taking the medic voucher to promote Kal’tsit is more important to improve your lacking squad power over taking Angelina or Skadi Alter. It is also important to note that being flexible in IS is extremely important. Sometimes vouchers simply won’t go your way, and as such it is important to recognize when it is time to plan for an alternate strat or take a tempo pick.
Tempo and niche picks
Section titled “Tempo and niche picks”Let us return to the scenario we addressed earlier where you desperately need a certain operator to fill a specific role in your squad, but the voucher drops are not ideal. In such a scenario, one should not only be flexible in terms of using these suboptimal vouchers, but to also be cognisant beforehand and reserve hope to combat this situation. Otherwise, there is no point in discussing drafting operators in an out of the box fashion when no hope is available.
Here are a number of scenarios to illustrate this point:
- Suppose you are about to transition to floor 3 and your starter operator is not promoted. After evaluation of your current squad power, you determined that it is unlikely that your squad can survive a significant number of floor 3 normal stages due to a lack of damage. Rather than choosing to die on the next floor, you can consider what is known as a tempo pick. A tempo pick is an operator draft to bolster your damage output in order to lower the risk of dying in the short term and essentially not lose the run. This operator differs from a core composition pick in the aspect that they may not contribute to the late game or play a pivotal role to the boss fight.
- Suppose you are on floor 4 at IS4 Defense versus Offense and your medic vouchers don’t exist. It is already somewhat of a miracle that you made it past floor 3 with no medics. One of the operators that you happened to raise is Quercus. Quercus is an abjurer supporter who has a healing skill that has infinite duration, essentially working as a medic but using supporter vouchers. Drafting Quercus would be a good idea to supplement your healing needs until you encounter a medic voucher for your end-game needs. This is a reason why a lot of IS players raise Quercus, just to combat scenarios like this.
There are many more scenarios that I would not list, but the above two are some common ones. It is imperative to diversify not only your raised roster of operators, but also to learn the kits of these operators, because they could save your run.
Ingots
Section titled “Ingots”Ingots is another currency resource in IS. It can mainly be obtained by beating stages and the ingot chests within. Ingots are usually useless by themselves unless spent. One of the nodes where ingots can be spent is the rogue trader node (also known colloquially as a shop node). In the previous section on nodes, it was highlighted that the rogue trader node is a very high-value node. However, its value is directly tied to the number of ingots available. Typically the number of ingots that most pro players recommend to have to justify pathing into a rogue trader is at least 12 ingots.
What should I spend in the shop?
Section titled “What should I spend in the shop?”One interesting fact about the shop is that in all IS themes before IS5, the first floor shop is different from shops on other floors in the aspect that the voucher options on the first floor shop is always one of three possible options even upon refreshing: medic, vanguard and caster.
The shop offers several types of items for sale. The typical non-floor 1 shop has two voucher options. Depending on the theme of the IS played, foldartals and thoughts are available for sale in IS4 and IS5 respectively. The rest are occupied by tactical equipment and collectibles. Upon entering the shop, it is a good idea to plan which items are worth buying and mentally calculate how much ingots are required to purchase them all. If a shop refresh is possible, some ingots should be saved for any high quality items that can show up in the second page of the shop post-refresh.
There are no concrete guidelines to determine which items ingots should be spent on.
Vouchers: Vouchers are the most valuable resource available from the shop. Each shop provides a total of four vouchers (except F1 shop), making shops the most efficient node in terms of voucher acquisition. Typically, if you are lacking in squad power or need important roles fulfilled, such as a vanguard or a medic, these vouchers take high priority.
Damage Collectibles: Determining how good collectibles can be is tricky. Generally speaking, collectibles which give hope are valuable and should be bought on early floors. For combat collectibles, a fundamental understanding of how operator and enemy stats are calculated, as well as specific breakpoints or kill thresholds is required. For example, a source of about +20% ATK (something like Bend Spears - Acuity would be sufficient) is necessary to let Degenbrecher 1 cycle Artillery Drones in F4 Emergency Restricted Zone. Due to the distribution of the pool of shop collectibles, it’s often a little hard to buy direct, generically applicable combat power in the form of combat-relevant collectibles. Many of the combat-relevant collectibles the shop sells are specifically class specific collectibles such as the books that only affect one class. When shops do sell generically combat-relevant collectibles (for example: Flashing Swords in IS3, Rock Horn in IS4) or class-specific ones that apply to your important damage classes (for example: Sniper books for Sniper-Medic Squads), pay specific attention to them when deciding what to buy.
Economy collectibles: Some collectibles provide economy, such as squad size, deploy limit and hope. Planning ahead is necessary because any of these items in excess provides no value and is therefore a waste of ingots. Some collectibles ramp up the more certain nodes are traversed and are good to pick up early game but terrible at late game. There are very few relics that are always a must-buy.
Investing
Section titled “Investing”Since the beginning of IS2, the shop node allows you to invest ingots into a deposit bank. The balance in the bank can be withdrawn later. However, this is not the only benefit to investing. After reaching certain thresholds for the first time, permanent rewards can be unlocked.
Cannot shop unlocks
Section titled “Cannot shop unlocks”| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| More slots in the shop | More chances to find collectibles |
| Refresh shop items | The contents of the shop after rerolling are always different More vouchers and choices for better collectibles |
| Shop rob | Turns the shop into a combat, gaining command experience Gaining more ingots for attack speed ingot relics (IS5 exclusive) After robbing, all items in the shop are free to pick up, giving a huge power boost |
| Ingot withdrawal | Able to buy pivotal collectibles or needed vouchers whilst not having enough ingots |
| Unlock exclusive collectibles | Cannot’s mark is a great economy relic, offering large amounts of hope for few ingot cost |
Spending & Withdrawing
Section titled “Spending & Withdrawing”What happens if you encounter a rogue trader node and the items offered are so good that you want to buy most, or even all of them. However, your current ingot count says otherwise. The shop node offers a withdrawal feature that allows you to withdraw ingots from an investment balance. The more ingots are withdrawn, the more it deducts from the balance. Withdrawing habits depend on the player. Some players are very liberal at withdrawing, especially in casual runs, while others are very stingy. Here the writer suggests to invoke a limit to how much balance can be withdrawn per run, both as a self-regulatory tactic to promote better ingot management habits and as a simulation to tournament rules. To elaborate on the latter, many tournaments have withdrawal rules to limit how many ingots can be withdrawn per run to prevent certain players having an unfair advantage.
Other resources
Section titled “Other resources”Squad size and deployment limit are also very important resources to keep in mind. While they do not directly improve the damage or defensive capabilities of your operators, they are still important factors to consider during a run.
Squad size lets you bring more squad power into a stage. Some collectibles also scale with the number of certain operators in a squad, such as certain coop class books and the famous Old fan. The maximum squad size available is 13. One method to accumulate squad size is by naturally levelling up your Command level. However, this method only lets you get up to 9 or 10 squad size. Some amount of squad size either through Safe Houses or squad size collectibles would be ideal.
Having more deployment limit is mostly a quality of life improvement but quickly becomes a huge detriment if you do not have enough of it. Unlike squad size, increasing your command level does not grant more deployment limit. On high difficulties, the default number of deployment limit available is 6 for IS4 and IS5. This number is pretty tight for late game. The scary part is both IS4 and IS5 have combat conditions which greatly reduce your deployment limit. For example, redeployment boskies reduce your deployment limit by 4, while Congestion epochs reduce your deployment by 3. Playing with 2-3 deployment limit is extremely difficult, especially on floor 5 or boss stages. Generally having at least 1 or 2 extra deploy limit makes your life so much easier.
Conclusion
Section titled “Conclusion”And that’s it for the guide. Hopefully you picked up some tips from here to improve your IS gameplay. After reading all the tips and guidelines from here, the next step would be to apply what you learned into gameplay through practice. There is still plenty of content that is not covered, the majority of which are interactions in specific IS themes. These will be found in specific IS guides posted later.
I would like to thank especially Oyana for suggesting the guide to be written and Bait for writing sections of the guide that I do not feel qualified to write about; and the moderators of IS-central as well as the volunteers for putting in the time and effort to proofread and give feedback on the content and readability of this work.