So, I'm like a lot of people as in when i play stealth games, they often devolve into saving and reloading when things go awry, as the desire to remain uncompromised or even undetected entirely (and the resultant satisfaction of figuring the puzzle of where to go, when, to avoid enemies) is very nice.

It took Hitman's Freelancer Mode to remind me that Hitman isn't a stealth game; its an imsim puzzle game. By forcing you to play through your mistakes unless you do the "oops, an accident" method of alt-f4ing and making the game kindly assume a crash and allowing you to restart, I actually learned a lot of little things that made me believe HItman's stealth, while deep, is intentionally very forgiving and not meant to be a major hindrance to the more immersive sim elements.

Lets start with stuff you may already know but maybe not:

1. Compromised DOES NOT mean you're screwed. Look through 47's detective vision: any orange highlights are people who know what you look like in that outfit. You have two options: A, take them out before they can tell others what you look like; it actually takes a while for that to happen, as guards have to actually call in your appearance, and civilians have to find a guard to tell. Both can relay that information to those around them. B, you can also always just find another type of disguise but this might restrict your movements more.
   
2. Combat DOES NOT mean you're screwed. it DOES mean you'll have to wait a while AND find a new disguise. but all you have to do run away from people, round a corner or two and enter a hiding place and wait. Once again, only the orange guys know who you are until you get a new disguise and once everyone has calmed down, it becomes pretty much like normal.

i jumped into Freelancer without a great knowledge of the newer levels in WOA, but thanks to a lot of items just not being where they usually are, its not the worst. However, you really need a silenced gun and/or a rare knife.

to get a silent pistol and rare melee:
-do a mission on the Isle of Sgaol. 47 in a regular suit can make his way to a shovel pretty easily. work your way through and up the public part of the party to the old tree and one is behind the tree--work your way back through the party to the long tunnel between the bar area and the outdoor speech amphitheater (the hallway with a door you have to knock on). Go behind the curtains and enter the VIP party, but go through the first door to the right (kinda blends in with the wall) and down the ladder to the sewer, where one server is on the phone. knock her out and by her is a muddy wet area you can dig for a reliable silenced Hackl pistol.
-if you can access the helipad area, the warehouse there contains a bunch of crates you can break open with a crowbar and the right disguise. in them are a couple of good knives.
-theres a sabre you can shoot off the wall in the constant's building

SMG and Assault Rifle
-do a mission on Dubai, on the same floor as the server room, the maintenance workers, and the penthouse concierge is a security office with a sleeping guard and a safe containing a penthouse keycard. Just outside is a guard on his phone (who will blurt the safe code). knock out or kill the sleeping guard for a silenced one handed SMG and the guard on the phone carries a silenced AK.

-rare melees are actually pretty easy to find on almost every level, provided you look in less trafficked areas, or in heavily guarded areas.

-when opening crates, obviously prioritize stuff you can take back home (stuff with a rarity tag, from common to legendary). Explosives are WAY too risky unless you can remote detonate. Most mines and ♥♥♥♥ are also obvious and will be picked up by NPCs. Prioritize items that give you access, lockpicks are basically the best, but a crowbar is better than poison any day.

-dont bother buying Freelancer tools (except lockpicks or a crowbar). they are often the cheapest stuff you can get for a reason, you can probably just explore the level and either find it, or find a crate with it inside. Crowbars you find in the level tend to be rusted and one-use. Rusty nails are harder to find but are one use lockpicks.

-save for useful weapons; it can become really tempting to buy a new weapon to just fill out your wall, or buy something like a screwdriver to guarantee you're ability to set traps, but again, Freelancer tools are gone with any real failure and having a selection of actually useful weapons will reduce stress; the more silenced pistols you have, the less you will worry about actually losing one.

-I don't exactly when it does this, but when you start, opening level crates will generally net you either some money or a selection of melee, explosives, or poisons. At some point (i believe its related to beating a campaign), crates will start offering a single firearm to take--two handers will be visibly equipped so be careful. Once you start filling out your weapon wall, crates will start adding to it. However, when buying weapons, two-handed weapons are automatically given to you in a briefcase, meaning you can carry it around the level (or plant it somewhere for a guard to take to a security room for later). Around each level are a few empty briefcases that also allow you to conceal weapons or tools like jerry cans that otherwise take a hand to carry. You can leave a level with both hands full and you'll keep everything.

-Remember to explore your safehouse as you unlock it, there are a variety of useful stuff laying around--a banana from your kitchen will let you do slip and fall objectives, a car battery from the garage can be an electrocution trap, various knives and pointy stuff is around, as well as blunt weapons, and you can usually find a rusty nail on the pathway to the helipad for a free lockpick.

-Once you have the lake, 47 can fish, either getting him a blunt fish weapon, fishing line garrote or maybe he can catch something more poisonous, allowing you make your own sedative. Upon unlocking the shed, 47 can also make lethal poison with a chemistry set and a nearby mushroom.

-Basically, if you ever need to do a strangle objective, poison objective, knife, non-lethal, trap, etc and the item rarity doesn't matter, once you have the safehouse mostly unlocked, all your tools are there for free.

-There are no limits to equipment you can bring back so stuff your pockets with anything, the only stuff that disappears are the non-rare items like basic tools and melee items you can reasonably find in any level.

-money becomes less and less important as you go on but victory is "forever"--focus on actually winning first, side objectives are a convenience for more money, not something to strive toward. in the best of cases, fulfilling a side objective is like 5 more minutes of planning for pretty small reward, at worst, it has the potential to screw over hours of gameplay for a tiny reward. You will always get more money by just doing it than really risking more. The early game might seem less satisfying but the later game will be less frustrating.

-Try and pick levels you know well for Leader missions. they will require you to be able to get around easier.

-Assassins have a silent pistol, if you can figure out who they are and take them out. They will always be following a target (not THE target, but one of them) and will have a bit of an extra highlight in detective vision. From this, you can pretty much guess and get it right and you'll get a nice silent HWK21 out of it.

-collect redundant weapon types to make losing a good less annoying.

-Collectors Weapons aren't the most useful, be wary. Their descriptions say they are persistent across campaigns, which IS true--with the major caveat of they are STILL lost on death if you were carrying them. if you fail a campaign by leaving a mission before finishing it, they are safe as they are on your wall rather than in the Freelancer boxes

-On death, you will always find roughly 1000-1500 Merces in front of your bed--if you died with only ~3k, you can essentially recoup your loss.

-at some point, you'll unlock the vault, which will allow you to test your luck on the stock market, getting you either lots of Merces or losing an amount whenever you interact with it.

-It's rather easy to rob the bank in New York and for doing so, you'll get roughly 5k-15k merces.

1. Get good security disguise (can go for the guard in the first floor bathroom if you start before the frisk area)
   
2. Get vault key--either in the third floor security room, or in the basement security room near the vault. Will be easiest to pacify any guards who will potentially see you.
   
3. You can either rob it outright and kill guards who respond (i do this when i have an optional "kill guards with smg" or "assault rifle" obj) or disable the security and do it quietly. Either way, as long as you remain pretty much uncompromised, the rest of the level plays like normal
   
4. Remember to get master security key as well and rob the safety deposit boxes. Grab the escape truck key from the guards chair in one of the box rooms for an extra easy way out.

I do this almost every time to get money and it usually gets you enough to buy another objective weapon from the vendor--be wary that if you did already own whatever weapon you needed and you didnt bring it along, the vendor only sells stuff you don't have so if you needed a baseball bat, and already had one, you'd only get the collectors version or whatever. Apparently, i havent done it yet, but if you rob the vault as disguised as the bank robbers, following their route and taking all the gold bars, you also get a gold shotgun.

-Colorado is your most sniper friendly level, with most people being out in the open and a good vantage point at the water tower, however, be wary you're also very exposed. dealing with the five guys nearby will help A LOT.

-Marrakesh and Mumbai are the biggest risks, i frankly never take missions in those levels because they likely put targets in the middle of a crowd and force finding a good sniping spot, or otherwise just being a crazed gunman. Isle of Sgail also presents this risk. My best advice is hope the side objectives are sniper related and bring one, preferably silenced.

-the English Manor level is just fantastic.

-Sapienza, Hokkaido, and Paris are my favorite leader levels for a very easy reason; i replayed those 3 levels a billion times when i first played Hitman 2016 on PS4. your favorite campaign levels, the ones you know like the back of your hand will ALWAYS be preferable for leaders, as i mentioned you NEED to be able to move around and follow targets, and execute plans.

-these are not very easy missions, as they have extra lookouts who will just see through any disguise, and when alerted, assassins that follow targets will kill you almost instantly. If you're like me and not very good at this game, you need to do your best to set up your leader missions in levels you know well and make sure they aren't alerted--later syndicates will start will alerted territory and you should do those first.

-you will need to be able to move freely in these levels so knowing their layouts and best outfits is key.

• Remember, wait staff or chefs/cooks can publicly poison any food/drink! Otherwise, the Seiker emetic dart gun is literally your best friend on more public levels
  
• Suspected Targets will scatter at basically the first sign of trouble so you really need to be able to avoid combat. Usually a found body is no big deal but open combat will always end in your targets running to the nearest exit (on some levels, you can pick em off one by one on a sniper perch or something, but usually its a fail)
  
• I heavily recommend taking basically any silent weapon or melee, especially a pistol, as sometimes the game will absolutely screw you over with a bad spawn and you'll need to be able to take care of the problem before it escalates.

-Each Leader mission is like that one Dishonored level in the Boyle Manor where you had to find out which sister was your target, only you don't have to search the level for clues--you already have them, you just need to align them with the right person. Tells aren't important until Difficulty 2, as D1 Leader missions will never have two targets that fully match the physical appearance. The only one that kinda screws you over is a tattoo, because its often really hard to make out and very suspicious to examine them from every angle in the wrong area.

-Once you hit D2 and on, start by going to any target you can get to and eliminate any who don't match physical description. Follow those who do and if they do any tell that isn't your target's, you can drop them too, as only one character will match all the clues.

-at the hardest level, you will also need to factor in their agenda, what they are on the level to do. All the suspects at any difficulty will sporadically meet and exchange casual words if they are in a position to do so, and each suspect has their own business to attend to with another suspect. Your target might be doing a business meeting, that means that at some point, they will meet with another suspect and physically shake hands after a dialogue.

• Business Meeting = Target and suspect will handshake
  
• Secret Meeting = Coded dialogue (ie, like code phrases that are just barely different from normal conversation)
  
• Handover Meeting = Target and suspect will exchange a package.

-a slightly riskier method of taking on your target involves something of a brute force approach. Pacify or eliminate a suspect quietly and--provided they weren't your target--you can pick up their phone and see when that suspect's agenda was. If it matches your target, you can set up a discreet location to call them from and arrange a meet with your target and take care of the mess. If the phone's agenda doesn't match, you can still opt to call the other suspect and pacify them and their assassin for one less purple target and a silent pistol.