Greased Palms is one of those Ready or Not missions that punishes complacency and rewards methodical clearing. On paper, it looks like a simple criminal stronghold, but the moment boots hit concrete, the map’s layered geometry and unpredictable suspect behavior start testing your fundamentals. This is a mission where sloppy angles, rushed door kicks, or ignored side rooms can instantly nuke an S-rank run.
What makes Greased Palms especially dangerous is how tightly its combat spaces are stitched together. Sightlines overlap, sound travels aggressively, and suspects are positioned to capitalize on hesitation. If you’re treating this like a standard warehouse clear, you’re already behind the curve.
Map Layout and Environmental Flow
The Greased Palms map is built around a compact but dense commercial structure with multiple interior zones branching off a central operational spine. Expect narrow corridors feeding into cramped offices, storage areas, and utility rooms that frequently hide suspects just outside your immediate FOV. The map loves right-angle turns and partial cover, forcing you to clear deep and check vertical space constantly.
External entry points matter more here than most missions. Several doors funnel you straight into fatal crossfire zones if breached without prior intel or wedge control. Windows offer limited value due to clutter and poor sightlines, making interior navigation and room-to-room discipline the dominant strategy.
Threat Profile and Suspect Behavior
Suspects in Greased Palms are aggressive, erratic, and far less likely to comply than average street-level criminals. They favor ambush tactics, using desks, machinery, and doorframes as improvised cover while baiting you into overextending. Expect sudden pushes, blind firing, and last-second peeks that punish slow reaction time and bad spacing.
Morale swings hard in this mission. Some suspects will surrender instantly under pressure, while others will tank verbal commands and force lethal engagement. This unpredictability means your team’s use of flashbangs, gas, and synchronized entry timing directly impacts survival and score.
Why Soft Objectives Matter for S-Rank
Greased Palms doesn’t just test your gunplay; it demands full environmental awareness. Soft objectives are scattered across the map in ways that naturally pull you into high-risk zones you might otherwise skip. Ignoring them guarantees missed rooms, unreported evidence, and a failed perfection run.
Each soft objective is deliberately placed to disrupt safe routing. They often sit near suspect patrol paths or inside rooms with poor cover, forcing smart utility usage and controlled clears. Treat these objectives as checkpoints that validate your clearing order rather than optional busywork, because hitting all of them cleanly is the backbone of a true 100 percent completion.
Mastering Greased Palms starts with understanding that every room has a purpose and every objective exists to test discipline. Once you respect the layout, read the threat patterns, and prioritize soft objectives correctly, the mission shifts from chaotic to controllable. That’s where consistent S-rank performance becomes achievable rather than aspirational.
Pre-Raid Preparation: Optimal Loadouts, Team Roles, and ROE for S-Rank Runs
Before you ever step onto the Greased Palms loading dock, your run is already won or lost in the briefing room. This mission punishes generic builds and sloppy rules of engagement harder than almost any other map. Because soft objectives deliberately drag you into contested interiors, your gear and team structure must be tuned for control, not speed.
This is where you build the safety net that lets you hunt objectives without bleeding score.
Primary Weapons: Control Beats Raw DPS
Greased Palms favors rifles and SMGs with manageable recoil and fast target reacquisition. You’re fighting inside cluttered offices, workshops, and storage rooms where overpenetration and missed follow-up shots will wreck compliance opportunities. The goal is consistent center-mass hits that force morale checks, not twitch-flick lethality.
5.56 rifles with short barrels or controllable SMGs like the MPX dominate here. Avoid high-caliber battle rifles unless you trust your trigger discipline, as wallbang accidents can cost civilians and score. Suppressors are mandatory for morale pressure and reducing chain aggro through thin walls.
Sidearms and Ammo Choices That Protect Your Score
Your pistol is a compliance tool, not a backup slayer. Choose a sidearm with quick draw time and predictable recoil so you can threaten without panicking into lethal follow-ups. This matters when suspects fake surrender or slow-walk toward cover.
Stick to standard ball ammo across the team. Armor-piercing rounds increase the risk of collateral through office partitions and machinery. The slight DPS loss is irrelevant compared to the score stability gained from controlled engagements.
Armor, Helmets, and Mobility Tradeoffs
Heavy armor looks tempting, but Greased Palms is a marathon of micro-clears, not a single kill corridor. Medium armor with full coverage is the sweet spot, giving protection against surprise peeks without tanking your movement speed. Mobility matters when reacting to flank pushes during soft objective detours.
Helmets with face protection are non-negotiable. Suspects love head-height blind fire from behind desks and forklifts. One lucky round ending an S-rank run is far more common than getting chipped down through body armor.
Utility Loadouts: Every Slot Has a Job
Flashbangs are the backbone of this mission. Bring more than you think you need, especially for office clusters tied to soft objectives. These rooms often have bad angles and multiple doorways, making raw entry riskier than normal.
CS gas shines in larger rooms like sorting areas and workshops where suspects retreat behind cover. Pair gas with wedges to trap morale-broken suspects inside objective rooms. Door wedges are critical here, not optional, because soft objectives often sit adjacent to uncleared branches.
Less-Lethal Tools for Compliance Farming
At least one officer should run a dedicated less-lethal option like a beanbag shotgun or pepperball launcher. Greased Palms’ erratic morale means some suspects will only comply after a non-lethal hit, even under perfect verbal commands.
This role becomes essential during soft objective cleanup. Evidence rooms and offices frequently spawn lone suspects who are high-risk to kill but easy to capture with the right pressure. Arrests stabilize your score and give breathing room for the rest of the clear.
Team Roles: Structured Chaos Management
Assign clear roles before deployment. One pointman handles door interaction and wedge placement. A second officer focuses purely on utility throws and less-lethal follow-ups. The remaining teammates anchor rear security and manage arrests.
This structure prevents tunnel vision when chasing soft objectives. You want one brain tracking map progress while the others execute, not four players independently chasing pings and audio cues.
ROE Settings: Winning the Compliance Game
Your rules of engagement should bias toward verbal dominance and delayed lethal force. Set your mindset to command first, shoot second, unless a suspect is actively raising or firing. Greased Palms rewards patience because many suspects are scripted to hesitate before committing.
Avoid pre-firing corners or wallbanging suspicious audio. Those shortcuts feel efficient but destroy S-rank potential. Every clean arrest offsets the time spent securing risky soft objective rooms.
Pre-Planned Clearing Order and Objective Awareness
Before insertion, mentally mark which soft objectives will pull you off the main route. Plan wedge usage and fallback angles for those detours so you’re never clearing them blind. This preparation prevents the classic mistake of grabbing an objective and getting flanked by a room you skipped earlier.
When your loadouts, roles, and ROE all align, Greased Palms stops feeling random. The mission becomes a controlled sequence of pressure, compliance, and methodical progress, setting the stage for flawless execution once the first door comes off its hinges.
Soft Objective 1 – Securing the Illicit Cash Stashes: All Known Spawn Locations and Visual Cues
With your ROE locked in and team roles established, Greased Palms immediately tests your discipline through its most easily missed soft objective: illicit cash stashes. These are not placed along the critical path by accident. They are deliberately tucked into side rooms that punish sloppy clearing and reward teams that respect angles, wedges, and sound cues.
Cash spawns are semi-RNG but constrained to very specific room types. Once you understand the visual language the map uses, you can identify stash rooms at a glance without wasting time combing every desk and locker.
Main Administrative Offices: Desks, Safes, and False Security
The most common cash spawns appear inside the administrative office cluster near the public-facing side of the building. Look for small offices with executive desks, filing cabinets pushed against walls, or wall-mounted safes that are cracke
Soft Objective 2 – Identifying and Seizing Contraband Containers: Warehouse Zones and Hidden Areas
Once cash stashes teach you the map’s visual language, contraband containers push that knowledge into higher-risk territory. These spawns live deeper in Greased Palms, almost always overlapping with suspect patrol routes, vertical sightlines, and unpredictable aggro triggers. This is where teams that rush objectives start hemorrhaging S-rank potential.
Contraband containers are larger, more obvious than cash, but deliberately positioned to punish tunnel vision. You are not just searching for an object; you are clearing an ecosystem built to ambush you while you interact with it.
Primary Warehouse Floor: Pallet Rows and Industrial Blind Spots
The most consistent contraband spawns appear on the main warehouse floor, tucked between pallet stacks, forklifts, and shipping crates. Look for waist-high metal containers or sealed crates with warning labels, usually placed where your peripheral vision gets swallowed by cover. These zones are designed to break your angles if you advance too far without a wedge or rear security.
Clear these rows laterally, not linearly. Move parallel to pallet stacks so your team maintains overlapping fields of fire, minimizing exposure to long DPS lanes that suspects love to exploit. One officer should hard-cover the container while another secures it; never stack everyone on the objective itself.
Secondary Storage Rooms: Side Warehouses and Loading Bays
Contraband frequently spawns in smaller side warehouses branching off the main floor, especially near loading bays and roll-up doors. These rooms often look low-threat at first glance but are prime locations for suspects scripted to hesitate, baiting you into dropping your guard.
Treat every loading bay like a potential crossfire. Clear high first, then deep corners, then behind vehicles or crates before interacting with the container. Sound discipline matters here, as metal floors and open bays amplify footsteps and can pull roaming suspects straight onto your position.
Upper Catwalks and Overlook Positions
Less common but extremely dangerous spawns can appear near upper-level catwalk storage or adjacent rooms overlooking the warehouse. These areas combine verticality with limited cover, making them lethal if cleared out of sequence.
Always clear above before touching a container below. Suspects on catwalks have exaggerated hitbox exposure advantages and can punish your team mid-animation while you’re seizing evidence. Assign a dedicated overwatch officer to hold the vertical angle until the container is secured and called out.
Hidden Utility Rooms and Back-of-House Spaces
The most missed contraband containers live in utility rooms, maintenance closets, or back-of-house spaces connected to the warehouse by narrow hallways. These rooms often have poor lighting, cluttered props, and doors that open inward, limiting your initial slice.
Use wedges aggressively here. Clear the hallway, wedge adjacent doors, then breach with a tight two-man entry to control the room quickly. These spaces are small, but suspects inside are more likely to resist arrest, especially if startled by fast movement or unsecured flanks.
Best Practices for S-Rank While Securing Contraband
Never secure a container immediately after clearing a room unless every angle is hard-checked. The interaction animation locks you in place just long enough for a delayed suspect push to ruin a clean run. Slow is smooth here, and smooth keeps your score intact.
Call out every container location verbally, even in solo play. That habit reinforces map memory and prevents missed spawns during post-engagement adrenaline spikes. When done correctly, Soft Objective 2 stops being a scavenger hunt and becomes a controlled sweep that naturally fits into your clearing order, not a detour that compromises it.
High-Risk Areas and Ambush Points: Environmental Hazards, Suspect Behavior, and Civilian Density
Once container control becomes second nature, the real threat shifts from what you’re looking for to what’s actively hunting you. Greased Palms punishes complacency by layering environmental noise, unpredictable suspect AI, and civilian clusters directly on top of soft objective routes. Every high-risk area overlaps with at least one container spawn, which means your objective path and your danger zones are the same thing.
Understanding where the map wants to ambush you is the difference between a clean S-rank sweep and a run-ending reaction shot.
Forklift Lanes and Active Loading Zones
Wide forklift lanes look safe on first entry, but they’re one of the most lethal spaces in the map. Long sightlines give suspects room to kite backward while maintaining aggro, forcing you to push into open ground with minimal hard cover. Containers frequently spawn along pallet stacks here, baiting players into standing still in the most exposed lanes possible.
Expect suspects to fake retreats, then re-peek once you commit to the interaction animation. Smoke grenades are extremely effective in these zones, not for entry, but to obscure lateral angles while a teammate secures the container. If you hear machinery ambience or distant shouting, assume you’re already being tracked.
Office Clusters Overlooking the Warehouse Floor
Office blocks with glass partitions and interior windows are silent killers. Suspects inside have visibility onto multiple container spawn zones below, and the glass provides just enough concealment to delay threat recognition without stopping incoming rounds. This is a classic Ready or Not AI behavior trap where suspects hold fire until your attention is locked elsewhere.
Clear these offices before committing to any nearby soft objective. A single armed suspect above can land torso shots while you’re animation-locked, instantly tanking your score. Civilians are also more common here, often frozen near desks or doorways, so less-lethal options need to be ready before breaching.
Break Rooms, Locker Areas, and Civilian Choke Points
Some of the most dangerous container spawns are tied to high civilian density rooms. Break rooms and locker areas near loading bays often contain unarmed NPCs clustered tightly together, which complicates suspect engagement rules. Suspects in these spaces are more likely to blend, delay compliance, or use civilians as accidental human shields due to pathing RNG.
Use door wedges to isolate these rooms early, then return once the surrounding combat spaces are cold. When clearing, lead with verbal commands and visual dominance rather than immediate muzzle coverage. A single unjustified shot here can instantly void an S-rank, even if the suspect was technically armed but not presenting.
Exterior-Adjacent Bays and Roll-Up Door Entrances
Bays connected to exterior roll-up doors are ambush factories. Audio leaks heavily through these openings, and suspects outside or in adjacent structures can path in dynamically once combat noise spikes. Containers placed near these doors are deliberate traps, forcing you to turn your back on an unsecured entrance.
Always assign rear security before interacting with anything in these bays. If the door is open, treat it like an uncleared room and control it first, even if it costs time. The mission timer is generous; your score buffer is not.
Suspect Behavior Patterns During Soft Objective Interaction
Greased Palms suspects are tuned to punish interaction downtime. Many will hold position until you’re locked into securing a container, then push aggressively with zero hesitation. This behavior is especially common on higher difficulties and late-mission morale states.
Counter this by baiting reactions before committing. Fake the interaction, back off, and watch for movement or audio cues. Once the push is baited and neutralized, the container becomes safe to secure without risking a mid-animation ambush.
Environmental Noise and Sound-Based Aggro Triggers
Metal flooring, loose props, and open bay acoustics amplify every step you take. Sprinting, kicking doors, or rapid movement near container clusters can pull suspects from two rooms away. This is why slow clears outperform aggressive pushes in Greased Palms.
Crouch-walk when approaching known spawn zones and pause before interacting to listen for footfalls or vocal barks. Sound discipline here isn’t immersion fluff; it directly controls how many enemies you fight at once. Master that, and the map starts playing by your rules instead of its own.
Recommended Clearing Order: Optimal Entry Routes and Flow to Avoid Missed Objectives
With sound discipline and suspect behavior now accounted for, the final piece is route control. Greased Palms punishes teams that clear emotionally instead of methodically, especially when soft objectives are scattered across high-traffic zones. The goal here isn’t speed; it’s flow, making sure every container and interaction point is swept exactly once, under security, with zero backtracking.
Step One: Primary Office Ingress Before Warehouse Commitment
Start with the main office block or administrative wing closest to your spawn. These rooms are low-density but high-value, often hiding early soft objectives like documentation or unsecured containers that are easy to miss later once the warehouse heats up. Clearing them first locks down a safe fallback zone and prevents suspects from flanking you once gunfire starts echoing through the bays.
Use slow pie clears and verbal compliance here. Office suspects are more likely to surrender, and unnecessary force early can spike global aggression. Once cleared, wedge connecting doors to the warehouse to control flow and prevent random pathing into your rear.
Step Two: Interior Warehouse Spine, Not Exterior Bays
From the offices, push into the central warehouse lanes rather than hugging the exterior walls. The interior spine gives you cleaner sightlines, fewer audio leaks, and better cross-coverage between aisles. Most Greased Palms soft objectives are positioned to punish players who drift outward too early.
Clear aisle by aisle, marking containers visually even if you don’t interact yet. This mental mapping prevents missed objectives later when stress levels are higher. If you see an exterior roll-up door from the inside, stop and treat it as a hard boundary, not an invitation.
Step Three: Soft Objective Sweep Under Full Security
Once the central warehouse is controlled, begin a deliberate soft objective sweep. This is where teams usually throw S-ranks by rushing interactions. Assign one officer to interact while at least two maintain opposing angles, preferably covering long lanes where suspects like to push during animations.
Use the bait-and-reset tactic discussed earlier. Fake the interaction, back off, and confirm no movement before committing. Containers near forklifts, stacked pallets, or shadowed corners are statistically more likely to trigger late pushes, so clear those last within each zone.
Step Four: Exterior Bays and Roll-Up Doors Last
Only after all interior soft objectives are confirmed should you touch exterior-adjacent bays. By this point, interior suspects are either detained or neutralized, reducing the risk of multi-directional pushes. This also limits RNG pathing from outside suspects entering mid-interaction.
Control the roll-up door first, even if it feels counterintuitive. Treat outside space as a separate room with its own threat profile. Once secured, sweep the bay systematically, checking behind containers and along walls where objective markers can be visually occluded.
Step Five: Final Verification Pass and Backtrack Control
Before calling the mission, perform a slow verification pass through your cleared route. Use the tablet or objective list, but don’t trust it blindly. Greased Palms is notorious for soft objectives blending into the environment, especially in low light or cluttered zones.
Move as a unit, weapons lowered but ready, and visually confirm every previously marked container or interaction point. If your clearing order was clean, this pass should be quiet and uneventful. If it isn’t, that’s a sign your flow broke earlier, and the map is making you pay for it.
Common Failure Points: Why Players Miss Soft Objectives and How to Prevent It
Even with a clean clear and perfect arrests, Greased Palms has a nasty habit of denying 100% completion. That’s not bad luck or broken scripting. It’s almost always a breakdown in flow, sequencing, or visual discipline during the soft objective phase.
Below are the most common failure points we see, why they happen, and how to hard-counter them using the exact sweep logic outlined in the previous steps.
Rushing Interactions While Security Is Incomplete
The number one mistake is treating soft objectives as downtime. Players see a quiet warehouse and assume aggro has dropped, then interact solo while the rest of the team drifts or reloads.
Greased Palms punishes animation lock hard. Suspects frequently path toward noise during interactions, especially from long lanes and forklift corridors. Prevention is simple: no interaction without two hard angles covered, and no angle coverage without confirmed depth clearance behind it.
Misreading Environmental Camouflage
Soft objectives in this map are deliberately disguised. Containers blend into pallet stacks, crates sit flush against walls, and low-light zones kill contrast, especially if you’re relying on ambient lighting.
Players miss objectives because they scan for icons instead of shapes. Force yourself to read the environment: repeated crate models, containers placed perpendicular to traffic lanes, and objects positioned where forklifts would logically stop are all red flags. If it looks placed instead of random, it deserves a closer look.
Breaking the Interior-First Rule
Touching exterior bays too early is a silent run-killer. Even cracking a roll-up door changes suspect pathing and can pull outside enemies into the interior during later interactions.
This creates the illusion of a missed objective when the real issue is pressure forcing you to abandon a sweep. Stick to the interior-first doctrine. If you can see daylight, you’re out of sequence.
Overtrusting the Objective List and Tablet
The UI lies by omission. The tablet confirms completion states, not visual confirmation, and Greased Palms has multiple soft objectives that are easy to misattribute mentally when sweeping similar zones.
Players assume “we got that one already” because the area feels familiar. The fix is physical verification. If you didn’t visually identify and interact with the object during this run, it doesn’t count, regardless of what your memory says.
Poor Backtrack Control During Verification Passes
Final verification is where discipline collapses. Teams loosen spacing, lower muzzles too far, and mentally clock out because the mission feels done.
This is when missed objectives hide in plain sight. Maintain the same movement order and lane responsibility you used during the initial clear. If your backtrack feels different from your entry, you’ve already lost control of your mental map.
Letting RNG Push You Off Your Planned Route
Late spawns, delayed pushes, or surrendered suspects in awkward locations can drag teams away from their sweep plan. Players resolve the threat but forget to reset their objective flow afterward.
Any unscheduled contact should trigger a mental checkpoint reset. Ask yourself what zone you were in, what objectives were pending, and whether any interactions were postponed. If you don’t consciously re-anchor, the map will exploit the gap.
Each of these failure points compounds the others. Greased Palms doesn’t fail you all at once; it bleeds you slowly through small lapses in structure. Lock your flow, respect the environment, and treat every soft objective like a potential ambush, because on this map, it usually is.
Verification Checklist: End-of-Mission Sweep Tactics to Guarantee 100% Completion
This is where everything you controlled earlier either pays off or collapses. The verification pass is not a victory lap; it’s a forensic sweep with live ammo. Treat it like a fresh clear, but with tighter intent and zero tolerance for assumptions.
Reset to Interior-First, Zone-by-Zone Logic
Before moving, stop and verbally reset your flow. Greased Palms punishes teams that free-roam during cleanup, especially after exterior contact drags attention outward. Re-anchor on interiors first, starting with storage rooms, offices, and dead-end utility spaces before touching loading bays or exterior catwalks.
Move in the same order you cleared initially. Same stack order, same sectors, same angles. If you reverse direction or shortcut through “safe” rooms, you’ll miss soft objectives tucked into environmental clutter that only reveal themselves from specific approach angles.
Soft Objective Visual Confirmation Protocol
Never rely on memory or the tablet during verification. For Greased Palms, soft objectives blend into industrial noise: clipboards on desks, packages near forklifts, laptops in cramped offices, or items half-hidden behind pallets and shelving.
Physically step into the room, pause movement, and scan at head height, waist height, and floor level in that order. Many players clear for threats at eye level and miss low-placed interactables near walls or under work surfaces. If you didn’t see the prompt during this pass, it’s not cleared.
Environmental Cue Cross-Check for Missed Locations
Use the map’s visual language to guide your sweep. Offices with powered monitors, break rooms with personal effects, and secured side rooms with single-door access are high-probability soft objective zones. In Greased Palms, any space that looks like a human lingered there is suspect until proven otherwise.
Loading areas are the biggest trap. Players assume they’re empty once suspects are neutralized, but objectives often sit near shipment staging points, leaning against containers, or tucked beside forklifts. Sweep these zones last, but sweep them slow, using deliberate left-to-right scans.
Threat Discipline During Verification Passes
Late RNG spawns and surrendered suspects still matter here. Keep muzzles up and spacing tight, because a sudden aggro pull can force you to move past an unchecked objective without realizing it. If contact occurs, resolve it, then immediately step back to the exact spot where the interruption happened.
Do not “continue forward” after contact. That’s how objectives get skipped. Treat every interruption like a save reload: reset positions, re-clear the room visually, then resume the checklist from the top.
Door, Desk, and Dead Space Rule
Every closed door gets opened. Every desk gets circled. Every dead space gets a flashlight sweep. This sounds obvious, but Greased Palms hides objectives in rooms that feel too small or too empty to matter.
Single-stall offices, security closets, and narrow side rooms are classic failure points. These spaces often sit off main paths and don’t register as “important,” which is exactly why they’re used. Clear them with the same patience you’d give a suspect-heavy hallway.
Exterior Transition Confirmation
Only after interiors are verified should you move outside. When you do, treat each exterior zone as its own micro-map. Fences, truck cabs, guard shacks, and loading ramps all count as objective-capable spaces.
Use hard cover and slow movement. Exterior lighting and sightlines can trick your brain into thinking everything is visible when it’s not. Hug structures, check behind vehicles, and sweep from cover to cover to avoid both missed objectives and surprise aggro.
Final Tablet Check as Validation, Not Guidance
The tablet comes last. At this point, it should confirm what you already know, not tell you what to do next. If something is still missing, don’t panic-sweep the map.
Think about which zone felt rushed, interrupted, or visually noisy. That’s where Greased Palms hides its last objective. Return there, slow down, and let the environment reveal what you missed.
Advanced Tips for S-Rank Mastery: Timing, Evidence Discipline, and AI Control Techniques
At this stage, Greased Palms stops being about finding objectives and starts being about not bleeding points. You already know where soft objectives hide and how the map flows. S-rank comes down to how cleanly you move, how disciplined you are with evidence, and how well you manage AI behavior under pressure.
Tempo Control: Slow Is Fast, Fast Is Fatal
Greased Palms punishes impatience harder than almost any mid-game map. Sprinting between known objective zones feels efficient, but it increases the chance of triggering delayed aggro spawns that pull you off-task and wreck your rhythm.
Move at a deliberate walking pace once primary threats are down. This keeps audio cues readable and prevents suspects from chain-aggroing across zones. The goal is consistency, not speed; S-rank timing is about avoiding mistakes, not shaving seconds.
Evidence Discipline: Every Weapon, Every Time
Evidence handling is one of the most common silent S-rank killers. In Greased Palms, suspects often drop weapons near desks, shelves, or behind partial cover, which makes them easy to miss during post-contact scans.
After every engagement, force a micro-reset. Holster the urge to move forward, scan the floor deliberately, then bag evidence before issuing any new movement orders. If a suspect surrendered earlier in the mission, revisit that spot during verification passes; dropped pistols can clip into clutter and only reveal themselves from specific angles.
Arrest Flow Optimization: Avoiding AI Overreach
AI teammates are efficient, but they are not subtle. In Greased Palms, letting AI auto-clear ahead of you increases the risk of skipped evidence and poorly positioned arrests that block line-of-sight on soft objective spaces.
Use AI to hold angles and cover long sightlines, not to push unknown rooms during cleanup. Issue move-and-hold commands at thresholds, then personally enter and scan desks, shelves, and corners where objectives spawn. This keeps control in your hands and prevents AI from dragging the team forward prematurely.
Command Timing: Stack Orders Between Actions
One of the most advanced habits you can build is stacking AI commands between interactions. While bagging evidence or restraining a suspect, queue your next order so the team transitions smoothly without idle moments.
For example, restrain first, then immediately order a teammate to cover the next door while you finish evidence collection. This minimizes downtime without accelerating the overall pace, keeping the mission clean and controlled.
Suspect Compliance Management: Don’t Rush the Surrender
Greased Palms features suspects with delayed compliance and fake-outs. Rushing a surrender often leads to sudden weapon pulls, costing health, morale, or worse.
Maintain distance, keep weapons trained, and let the compliance animation fully resolve before moving in. If a suspect is prone near an objective-heavy area like an office cluster, secure them but delay movement until the room is fully scanned. Arresting too early can pull your focus away from critical soft objective zones.
Damage Avoidance Is Score Preservation
S-rank is not just about completion; it’s about cleanliness. Even minor damage hits morale and score, and Greased Palms has multiple long sightlines that invite chip damage if you get sloppy.
Use lean peeks and pie corners even during late-game cleanup. Treat every doorway like it could still be hot, because RNG says sometimes it is. Zero damage runs are less about perfect aim and more about never exposing your hitbox unnecessarily.
Final S-Rank Mindset: Play the Map, Not the Checklist
By the time you’re pushing for S-rank, Greased Palms should feel familiar. That familiarity is dangerous. The map wins when you assume instead of verify.
Play every run like the map is trying to trick you, because it is. Stay slow, stay disciplined, and let your process carry you to completion. When everything clicks, Greased Palms stops feeling punishing and starts feeling precise, and that’s when the S-rank finally sticks.