Watch Dogs: Legion (Check out our review!) is out and if you’ve been playing it, you’ll want to build your citizen army with every person you meet off the street. Will Bob the Butcher and Thomas the Train Engine That Could contribute to your dream team? Probably not, because while anyone can be recruited, not everyone will be a solid addition to your dream army. You gotta be selective and this Newbie Guide will help you with the groundwork.

Choose A Fighter Not A Lover For Your First Operative

It’s really great that you could choose anyone as your first operative, but I’d choose Sid over by the pub who can throw haymakers like no other and deals extra damage when drunk. Physicality over mentality is a good bet as your first operative. Because with a starter set, you still don’t have your tech infrastructure built and there is a big chance that you will be taking more damage than dealing it. 

For best results, choose an operative that can take more punishment. You never know if you will need to take on a survival mission right away when recruiting your dream team from the pub. Also when recruiting, check out their stats first. If you’re gonna choose a glass cannon, make sure they can knock a bloke out with one punch before they get you.

Recruitment missions are full-on radiant quests given at random. It can be as easy as blowing up a weapons cache remotely two blocks away or it can be fending off an army of Clan Kelleys while you protect Mandi from Camden who’s skimming ETOs from her Mini Cooper. Hopefully Mandi comes with Uniformed Access because that extra ETO signing bonus isn’t worth a mouthful of lead.

Complete The First Mission ‘Reporting For Duty’

If you’re thinking of going around recruiting every possible person to join your cause, I suggest you finish the First Mission right away. It is easy enough to complete given that your operative probably has one good skill, you’ll need a lot more than that to take on the system.

Completing the first mission nets you a Hacker and a Construction Worker in the end. Not only are they useful, they also come with a full set of skills and load outs. This is the exact reason why I deterred you from getting a hacker from the start because the game will give you a stacked Black Hat when you complete this quest. While your hacker may differ in each game, the hacker that I got had a shock special that could shock an Albion soldier a block away. They also came with unlimited key downloads even if the surveillance camera is in the other room. The Construction Worker gives you access to a Cargo Drone, which allows you to reach higher buildings. It’s great when you have no drones to summon at a mission, they bring their own.

All you have to do is complete several Borough Challenges and complete the Borough Mission. It requires you to survive an Albion ambush in the end. That’s why I recommended a beefed up musclehead to start off with. Chances are your hacker would not be able to withstand a swarm of special ops with assault rifles.

Complete the Westminster Borough Mission for the Spymaster

You can pat your starting op on the back for surviving their first mission, but right now, you have two specialists that clearly outclass them in ability and in functionality. You could scour London for another burly fighter, but I suggest you complete the Westminster’s Borough Mission. You only have to finish two challenges and the mission involves moving your spider-bot to the top of the Westminster Tower. It’s pretty much a platformer and you get a Spymaster as your reward.

Spies are great fighters and they come with their own spy watch and spy car that can cloak and a silenced P9. With your hacker, construction worker, and your spy, you pretty much have a starter set of soldiers to take on the evil army, until well someone gets hurt and you need a replacement. 

Optional: Join the Underground Fist Fighting Match

You still have your beefy first operative, right? Take the first mission across from the pub and you can have access to the Bare Knuckle Challenge street fighting match. You go through four rounds each time and once you complete it (if you chose an actual fist fighter as your first operative like I told you, the matches will be easy), you have access to some mean machines. Save their profiles for later use and you have a backup just in case your Spy or your first operative end up shot and left in a gutter somewhere.

Get A Shotgun and Drone Protection From Your Tech Points

As you move up the food chain, you notice that your Tech Points are starting to build up. I suggest getting some easy to use protection for your guys. A Shock Shotgun has better firepower than your shock pistol and could easily headshot your adversaries. Drone Protection is a must and if you could find a way to permanently deactivate them or hijack them, it would be even better because they can get quite annoying when they start to swarm. 

Spend On Deep Profile and Recruit an Albion Double Agent

If you have another extra 25 points, I suggest allocating them into Deep Profile as soon as you can. If you haven’t noticed yet, a lot of recruit-able operatives are regular chumps who can do one or two cool things, but most of them don’t really add any value to the team. Plus the favors they ask from you are too detrimental and time consuming. You wonder why Clan Kelley and Albion have better guys besides the fact that they pay too much. How do you get one on your team?

Deep Profile allows you to access their personal lives and schedules and find ways to get them more sympathetic to your cause. It involves doing an extra step before starting their recruitment mission. It’s worth it considering that a lot of them have Uniformed Access to restricted areas and they probably come with two extra perks and an additional unique weapon load out. They are worth your while. 

So the next time you trespass into a Clan Kelley stronghold, an Albion base, or a SIRS facility, shop around for good candidates. Save them into your Team archive and please, try to avoid knocking them out, or you gotta do them three favors instead of just two.

There you have it, a starter guide to getting your own army for Watch Dogs: Legion. Of course, we won’t spoil everything for you, but this will definitely get you the manpower you need to bring DedSec back on the map.

Let us know who your favorite operative is in the game!