/v/ - Video Games

Not getting anything then. Let's fucking go then, we're doing this.

Basic tutorial fight done. Here's a screenshot of our roster - we fire all of Akechi's troops for extra money because he's a really shitty unit and we only keep him for scouting and negotiations value. Scouts in this game are extremely important because they allow you to see the enemy formation, which allows you to manage deployments better - sometimes deploying less units is better because you get more units in reserve, and thus you get to defend against more attacks. Akechi is one of our initial scouts - we'll be getting rid of him somewhere around mid-game when his base cost of 2 will start being a problem.

We recruit all the units from the starting province and raise NP by 2 in the first couple of turns before declaring war on Hara. It's impossible to do anything but defend if we don't have enough groups to go into combat with, so it might as well be mandatory because we want to attack.

NP stands for National Power and it's a number on the bottom of the screen under the label Power. Every unit that we have has Cost associated for it that represents it's upkeep - every time it's troopcount goes above 500, 1000, 1500 etc, it gains 1 NP in upkeep value. You can only recruit units if your upkeep is lower than NP and if your upkeep is higher than NP, you get half as much income.

>>15994782

fuck off m8

We declare on Hara and enable our prison through an event. It gets unlocked automatically upon conquering a house or a province, don't really remember, but it is worth unlocking it early because it's going to be very, very long while until we conquer another province.

Right now, our goal is to get all events that we can while pushing Hara to it's last territory. A house's last territory is always occupied with a static and (usually) very powerful formation - in Hara's case they usually have three archers in the back, one of them being Hara Shouji. He has Volley - it's an AoE attack and our troops are made of fucking paper. Combine that with Castle's 20% bonus to attack/defense and it's unreasonable to expect to win - we just don't have good ranged units with decent defense yet.

On the plus side, Hara is really weak, so we just storm through them. They usually do 1-2 attacks per turn if you conquer a territory inside their province and we want to weaken them right now before declaring war on Ashikaga.

Three territories inside Hara captured and our token catgirl ninja joins the team. She's listed as an essential character, meaning she can't die no matter what. It's plot armor. She gives decent SAT too. Best gril.

We discover the dungeon and head down there because it's the first turn that we can use Suzume in. Every dungeon drops a random item that you don't have. We don't have any items, so it's time for R N G.

Dungeon's done and we get this - one of the most useful things that we could have gotten from it. Amazing. Also, Suzume procced Assassinate 2 - a ninja skill that costs all action points and has a chance to instakill enemy unit - and captured us a Foot Trooper. From this point on, when Ashikaga comes to jew shekels from us, we tell them to fuck off. We're ready.

>>15994846

Here's the map and unit list. I always try to conquer because there are significant bonuses associated with that - SAT, extra events and more. However, there are some jank strategies with Tokugawa that require vassaling them first, getting a specific item from them and then warring Takeda, which makes Tokugawa declare war on you out of vassaled state. And yeah, there's the end of a Kenshin route where you have the ability to vassal everything once you get the headband.

And now, for some really spicy memes. From now on, we're going to spend one flag of every turn visiting Miso Katsu dungeon. Normally, doing an already completed dungeon would be a waste of time, however, we don't really have anything else to do - raising NP from now on will require two flags instead of one and make a lot of units that are necessary for defense unavailable for us. At that, we have a chance of getting the following items from redoing a dungeon - full heal a unit, 50% heal a unit, +1, +2, +3 and +4 happiness respectively. We absolutely NEED happiness items to raise important skills on our commanders to make things less of a pain in the long run - Enhanced Initial Guard in particular being our first pick because of how good it is. Long way to go for that, though.

What we're trying to do here is this - after turn 20 and when the first gourd breaks, if we didn't conquer any provinces before that time, a low-priority start of turn event occurs that gives us a Popularity Staff. It's essentially free money. We need that to not die because I don't plan to use permits. So we'll be here for a while and we're gonna grind down Ashikaga and Hara during that time.

>>15994707

>>15994866

>spoiler

>mfw

What route will you do anon?

>>15994874

I want to do True Route, but at this point in the game we could do anything, including Demon King Route. We can blitz DA before Sill ever gets frozen and then LP never meets Xavier because that event happens on DA phase. This turns the game into a sandbox.

We piss off Ashikaga just in time. Meanwhile, Suzume memes another foot trooper capture. Those are really good during earlygame because of how disposable they are and because of how low you are on units - put one of those fuckers on a backrow on a defensive battle and if they hold against ranged units, you win. The only downside is NP cost - we're limited to 17 until we get the staff. This makes it hard to recruit anyone useful.

More defense and Isoroku gets introduced. She's an archer unit and she's the only one that's decent at it because of her upgrades. In this run, it's important to capture her before taking the Ashikaga castle because, as mentioned before, all of our units are trash. Before doing that, though, we need to rout her unit. We also get Enhanced Initial Guard - this starts foot trooper units at 120% guard percentage instead of 50%. This makes foot soldiers way more reliable because they get a significant lead on guard percentage.

However, we can't attack because we're just barely managing to defend ourselves - there's only two EIG units. This means that we only have two squads most of the time and while we CAN improvise with something like putting Suzume in the front and hoping that enemy units are too weak to kill her, it's unreliable. What's more, this will only work against Hara because only they have units this shit. We have foot troopers in prison, but we can only get one, and since we don't plan to keep it, putting EIG on it is not an option because we need the happiness. This makes it hard to defend against 3 attacks in one turn.

In short: RNG please don't fucking kill me.

Isoroku tries to invade us, then gets deleted. We rout her unit and watch a cutscene. She can now be captured. However, before she can invade our territories again, AI will need to heal her and that'll probably take some time. We get Ranmaru Attack 7 because attack bonuses are hard to come by.

There's one more important detail. While Isoroku is with Ashikaga, if you deploy Rance in any battle with them, it will count as an automatic loss. We can't suffer even one loss like this because AI sometimes attacks 3 times per turn, as mentioned earlier. Can't spare troops nor flags for that.

We do some off-screen battles and dungeon farming. There's just enough happiness items to get Suzume a skill - Chun-Chun shuriken interrupts diviners regardless of whether they're behind a foot trooper guard. Only she can do that. Her events also give us a big chunk of SAT.

Satisfaction is used to unlock new characters, improving Rance, improving the number of actions per turn at certain thresholds and to increase happiness of all commanders by 3. There are other uses such as improving the amount of battle preparation that you get by doing an event, increasing all troops's troopcount by 50 and so on, but those aren't as important, though there are exceptions. We need to get to 50 SAT as soon as we can to get three actions per turn.

>>15994977

Just download a save from somewhere or run through normal mode. I would recommend the latter.

Rance gets Charge because of how many actions he can potentially get. With that and Full Power Attack 2, he can turn into a monstrous unit capable of doing retarded amounts of damage to a formation that doesn't have a guard unit up front. This role is traditionally occupied by musket units, but one - we get them way too late, and two - the only musket unit that we DO get serves a different purpose. Spoiler, it's not the RNG meme that you probably think it is.

Everything is slow because farming and AI doesn't attack very often. One thing I forgot to mention is that dungeon farming also drops Motivation Papers, which can be used to refresh units to make them take two actions in a row. This could be useful in a pinch to avoid losing a territory at this point in the game.

We attack Ashikaga because we run out of things to do. This proves to be not a very smart move.

In short: fuck.

We repeat the process and succeed. Hara gave up on attacking us, so we're going to push closer to their castle. It's a problem that Isoroku's still there, but right now, there's nothing we can do but wait for her unit to attack us. We have Shibata, Suzume and two ranged units in reserve waiting for her.

Also, still no staff in sight. Guess we're gonna attack into Ashikaga provinces some more while farming. It's beginning to be a waste of action fans - we can't really attack into Ashikaga's castle because we need our backrow not to die, but because it will die to a single hit from Isoroku we can't just put a guard unit there and have it succeed, so we need to capture her first. We need to do Miko Institute SAT events real soon or we're in trouble.

>>15995049

Yeah, that was the plan, they'd kill us if we didn't do that.

A bunch of things happen all at once. We invade Ashikaga's town section of a province and get a speedbook from a battle. Isoroku shows up with a guard unit. After reactivating Suzume and putting her on the field, she manages to kill the guard unit and capture both that and Isoroku herself, meaning that she gets replaced with another generic in Ashikaga's castle battle.

Finally, we get Popularity Staff, which we can place on our foot trooper units. In order to not die, they NEED troop size and stats. Sometimes we won't be able to have stats even with tactician buffs - in this case, troop size will compensate for that weakness.

More battles. We're starting to do SAT events from Miko Institute instead of farming the dungeon. Third fan soon.

We're also wiping out Ashikaga in a couple of turns. Tenshi Sect is going to try to kill us with Guard Cancels really soon and we should get ready for that.

One thing that completely slipped by mind is that you get +1 affection point if you deploy a cleared unit with Rance together. This should make Suzume really strong if I spam her with Rance and pick Battleground Construction 1/2/3. This way she could go from a nice character to a really strong unit.

Meanwhile, Ashikaga attacks into my home province. They're going to die really soon and when they do, all provinces where they've attacked will have their enemy-held territories reset. That includes territories other houses conquered. We send for reinforcements, and Takeda gourd breaks.

Meanwhile, we get Ganko. He's going to become our quick-and-dirty solution to taking hard-to-get territories until we get Tourin from Takeda. This is how we're going to get castle territories from Tenshi sect and this will helps take the final territory from Ashikaga. He's going to stay on our team until the end of the game because of how useful tacticians are in this game.

We're really behind schedule. It seems we're going to ignore Dokuganryuu until the DA hits, and even then I actually think they'll eat Mouri, Takuga or both.

We finally bring Ashikaga to an end and get an extra action fan in the process. It only took 32 turns to do so. Damn it.

Going to stop here for today. There's many things coming up that I'll need a clear head for and it's getting late. Gonna continue tomorrow around the same time I started, so please shitpost in the meantime to bump the thread.

And if by chance some of you know how to play this, please rate the progress so far. Did I fuck up somewhere? Lemme know.

>>15995162

see you tomorrow then, rapeman. i only finished the game once so it's interesting to see it from a perspective of someone who actually knows how to play it.

>>15994838

The entire package is on par with HoMM3.

>>15994866

You should do dungeons by going down to the second to last level each time. Each time you do this will have the dungeon start you on one floor lower. The advantage of this is that you can way more items, including a LOT of Ogre Bones, which is insanely good if you get enough of them early on.

>>15994874

Not using permits makes the game way more enjoyable IMO.

>>15994977

The game's hard enough that you'll get your ass kicked on your first playthrough. Hell, you'll probably struggle a fair bit even if you follow a step by step guide.

>>15995010

>Charge

>Full Power Attack 2

Mah nigga.

>>15995111

For those who don't know, Battleground Construction changes the Battle Effect in your favor, is considered a very fast action, and that Ninjas have an innate speed advantage. A 9 speed Ninja can can cast multiple Battleground Constructions without anyone else acting and then Assassinate a target.

We're back. Here's what our situation looks like right now. Tenshi Sect is going to attack us very soon and we're getting ready for them. Here's a small list of our short-term goals that we need to accomplish while doing all that.

Minor tasks:

Get more Foot Soldier Units (for 4 squads)

Recruit Yamamoto Isoroku (for SAT/Sweeping Fire)

Build NP every turn

Request reinforcements as often as we're able

Get Murasame

Complete a Dungeon (Turn 31 SAT)

Recruit Andou Kyuri

Recruit Aburako Dousan

Do levies

Upgrade Maeda when available

Recruit Okita Nozomi when available

Major goals:

Defend against Hara

Kill Tenshi Sect

Kill Asai-Asakura afterwards

With that in mind, let's proceed.

Suzume gets BC1 because she had full happiness. We finally get declared on by Tenshi Sect as a story event and take their castle on the first turn of our war. We do two levies - each levy event from a conquered province nets us some gold and a book that we can use to improve one commander's given stat up to a limit of 6. Books dropped cycle like so - ATK -> DEF -> INT, so we're guaranteed to get two defense books for Maeda if we levy five of our conquered provinces. Extra stats are a really nice incentive.

Because everyone on japan is so religious, we lose a certain percentage of troops as a result of a start-of-turn event. Tenshi Sect was a mistake. Meanwhile, we just spam attack on Tenshi Sect's castle territories. Just barely succeeded taking those territories thanks to Ganko's contribution, too. It was worth putting 14 happiness's worth of items on him.

Because of the war right now, we're really low on negotiation troops, so Isoroku will have to wait.

We get Rizna. She's a mage and mages use INT as an attack stat, which also serves as a magic defense stat in this game. Her problem is, she only has 4 INT by default and mages are terrible units because of how slow Fire Blast is. She'll serve us as a scout for now.

Tenshi sect also dies, which means no riots. We really need better commanders.

Some more in-between wars stuff. Training area for foot soldiers get constructed, meaning all foot soldiers get +5 to troopcount every turn at the expense of 5 NP. Considering that at this stage in the game one foot soldier costs 44 gold, you can see why it's so good income-wise.

We also recruit Kuge Kiyoko from Kyo. She has a skill called Asset Tech that gives you money every turn that scales from the amount that you currently have and from amount of people possessing the skill. Usually you get 60 times your NP as income every turn - in our case, 38*60 = 2280, but with Asset Tech at maximum - assuming we have 50000 gold in reserve, we get 2000 more gold per turn. That's almost double our income.

>>15998391

Yeah, that. Next turn. Gotta have dosh first.

Next turn, we're presented with two options and Rance, like a true hero of justice chooses correctly. We're about to head into zooland, but Isoroku comes before that. Gonna need Uruza soon, though we're really strapped on NP.

Akashi get ready to declare war on us. We don't want that - they have a gourd that we don't want to break and getting into war with them would slow us down significantly. Isoroku gets Sweeping Fire because it's still somewhat useful at this point in the game and we're off to attack Asai-Asakura.

>>15998452

She's an Archer unit. They have the same damage scaling as Ninja units and because there we have no tacticians yet, things are hurting - no defense buffs on foot troopers, no attack buffs on attacking units. I don't want to quit this early, but sorry, gotta take a break. Be back relatively soon.

imb4: kou-chan's rape pics

>>15999262

>hueg troop stacks

Yuzumi best Yuzumi. 4eyes can get fucked.

We're back again, more or less. We have to recruit some units from our prison to make up for our deficiency in non-combat stats. Isoroku gets an attack boost and we use 6 happiness items getting EIG on a generic unit. Reliable backrow guard units are really important right now because our backline dies very easily if exposed to big stacks of archers, ninjas or tacticians.

There's going to be very many opportunities to recruit useful units in the near future. However, even with improving NP every turn, we're still almost in the red and we can't even afford to fire Niwa or Akechi yet. What a shame.

We attack Asai-Asakura for the first time. At this point in the game, our foot troopers start dropping in effectiveness really hard because of a lack of stats and troops. Nevertheless, we make it. Asai-Asakura, however, has a gimmick.

Once you conquer a single territory of their home province, there will be a certain story cutscene. After that, they will send endless waves of pandas at you. The only way to win this game is not to play, so we lose that territory that we've just gained.

Oh, and we stop defending for a turn against Asai-Asakura. We can comfortably lose two field territories in a province against them because we can block their attacks reliably once we're defending a territory with a castle and because we don't have a territory in their borders yet, that can function as a buffer of sorts. So we do exactly that.

More attacking and defending. This turn, however, it's time for something curious. For up to one turn after the earthquake event hits, you have a chance to do an event called "Dirty plan (Send fake relief supplies)". This effectively kills almost all troops that Asai-Asakura has for a single turn and when an AI has no troops to defend a province with, they put three commanders with ~150 troops named Gathered Foot Soldiers. Because we have three action fans, we're able to attack twice in a turn after doing that.

Kenshin appears in an attempt to conquer a second territory. She randomly appears whenever you attack or defend a province starting from Uesugi clan introduction event. If you're attacking a territory in an enemy province, AI can deploy her. If you're defending a territory in your own province, she can show up as YOUR reinforcements instead. All of this happens only once per turn, but this is a really big deal because she has really good stats and at 5-star, she usually has a big stack of troops.

And yeah, we kill Asai-Asakura. They had a musket and a tactician in the backline. It would have been a big deal if they also had a foot trooper unit there, but it seems the event prevented that from happening.

We recruit Yoshikage as soon as we're able. He's a monk with 5 speed, 8 negotiation and 5 construction. You can get a better unit from the satisfaction bonus, but that's not why he's here. He's going to be our situational Guard Break unit after the NP building will go out of style and his character clear effect is really, really strong.

After conquering Asai-Asakura, Uesugi house is scripted to declare war on you. Trying to defeat Uesugi house after Asai-Asakura is good for a variety of reasons. First is, you no longer need to worry about Kenshin reinforcing AI defense. Second is, Naoe Ai is a REALLY good unit because tacticians are really great in this game. And finally, Kenshin herself is a good unit, though her effectiveness as a warrior will soon be largely diminished because of how good giant Foot Trooper stacks are.

Hannies arrive on Kyo and we'll be able to recruit Nozomi soon enough. We're going to be needing more SAT soon enough for Maeda's upgrade and more reinforcements. There's also Uruza, thank god for that.

The very next turn, it's important to raise Yoshikage to Normal by doing two events, one at below 7 happiness, one at 7 happiness. By spending 6 happiness worth of items and two events, he takes speed 6 as a bonus. Because we get Yoshikage, there's no more need to have Akechi waste 2 NP's worth of upkeep, so he gets deleted.

Now, as for why that was so important. After Yoshikage's at normal, there is an option to look for Yukihime in Texas. If you don't look for her, she gets pissed and has random houses declare war on you. It's inconvenient to say the least. As a unit herself, she's really bad, but she ever reaches 7 happiness, you can do an event with her that has her leave the army that also gives you SAT. That part is crucial and we're lacking commanders anyway, so we're doing that.

We ask Zeth for more reinforcements. It's important to do that sooner rather than later because of the delays involved. Going through the entire continent and at least five provinces owned by hostile houses is hard, after all. How do they manage to do that, even.

Kenshin's gimmick is this - if you deploy Rance into ANY battle with Kenshin before a certain event happens, you get this cutscene and win the battle automatically. It's one of the great things about this game. You can't even call Rance a harem protagonist after that.

We defend some more and put AG+ on Maeda. Assuming monks aren't involved, this makes it so that he can take even more attacks than usual. It means that if there are no monks and we get either a speedbook or another levelup on him soon, his row is essentially absolutely protected - nothing there will be hit no matter how many generics the AI deploys. Ninjas could fuck with that, but AI doesn't deploy that many of them in the first place.

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that once you have territory bordering with Akashi, they'll start getting ready to declare war on you. You can delay that declaration with an option that costs 15 negotiation score for 2 turns. We'll be doing that option for a while with Yoshikage and Uruza along with NP building, so we'll effectively have one action fan every turn. It's rough, but necessary. Because of that, it's debatable whether stalling Hara or Tenshi Sect is better at this point in the game because you don't have to spend fans delaying the war declaration. Overall, I'd say it would be harder to stall Tenshi Sect though, simply because spam monk units and at this point in the game, we don't have high-speed guard units, tacticians or any frontline units that can take a hit to compensate.

Meanwhile, Uesugi attacks us three times per turn. AI in this game has a limit on an amount of attacks it can do depending on the game's difficulty level. On normal it's one attack per turn, on 5-star it happens to be three. There are some cases that break the cap in AI's case - such as owning Edo province in Houjou or getting blitzed by Takeda or DA, but we'll be avoiding those as much as we can.

Because we have one action per turn, the best thing to do now happens to be attacking and forcing the province acquisition. We want to kill Kenshin quickly because without having a good tactician it's impossible to have a good squad and right now, our Uruza has ~300 troops. Usually, you can put her on the backrow unprotected, but without her special skill and with troopcount this low, she's near-useless in combat. What a shame.

There is one more thing to mention - right now, we've climbed over the 50000 gold threshold, meaning we're free to spend money to raise troopcounts and repair units without lowering our total income for the turn. It's really nice to be able to do so.

>>16001573

Honestly, meidos aren't even that good compared to what you can get in the north.

There is a start-of-turn event that leveled Fuuka. We give her Miko Dance+ for better single-target heals. Those are important. We also bring Uruza to 500 troops which makes her kinda-sorta usable on the backlines, depending on how much troopcount enemy units have.

There is a really nice trick that you can do with Uesugi. Once you attack them down to their last territory, if Kenshin's troops are uninjured, she'll almost always be there, so you can just deploy Rance alone and auto-win a castle battle. So instead of using a fan to delay Akashi, we did just that right now.

>>16001654

If I recall correctly, Rance just kills everyone in that scene. There's also alternate routes in which that doesn't happen. But yeah, I won't defend this.

It's a bit of a short notice, but I gotta take a break. Be back soon, hopefully not tomorrow. If there's something that I've missed or something that you want to add, please give a (you) about it.

I hope we can have another comfy Scribblenauts thread some time soon, as well.

Godspeed, OP.

>>16001683

I think you may have picked the wrong game, though. Don't get me wrong, rance is amazing it's just that it's not a game really suited to the whole /v/ plays format. Mainly because it's supposed to be played in a certain order so it doesn't really leave all that room for people to pitch in

>>16002095

There should be a law ordaining a public whipping for those that misuse the words streamlined and literally. If anything the game's significantly more primitive with minimal tactical options or realm management. Not that it's not my favorite game in the series or anything.

>>16003589

>>16003791

>Akihime is the best Miko

Barbarians.

Alright, we're back. Sorry for the wait, it wasn't nice to play for 3-4 hours per day and fuck off like that, let's see if we can do more today.

>>16003519

Depends on the run. War as much as possible if possible, get as much opportunities for SAT if possible, get as much opportunities for good commanders if possible, improve NP every turn if it's too low. Though that's just a bunch of general directions.

>>16003589

>>16003791

>Akihime

>4/5/5/4 with base cost 4

You shittin me. If I give Yukihime 7 happiness right now and get her Miko Dance/Wind, she'll be a better healer. This will proc her first event, but not the one where she'll leave.

Anyway, we attack into Uesugi. Kenshin came back from the mountain training about two turns prior, which, to my knowledge, at least, means that Rance autowin events won't work on her again. After attacking their last territory once, they take it back via event.

Why we did that was, all those events lead up to an event where Kenshin's uncle takes over her house. We're given an option to vassal them, but if we do, we lose both Kenshin and Ai, which are the main reasons to get this house in the first place.

Anyway, we begin crushing Uesugi completely. We only have a couple of turns until Kenshin dies, so being slow is verboten. Those units are really good, after all.

While doing that, we also do Shinsengumi events. It took two flags and one auto-event to recruit Nozomi. Why is she so important that we need to waste this much time getting her? Because she has excellent events and her niche says that in order to get 5 SAT from her, she needs a 7 affection levelup, which is perfect because we'll need somebody with Light Attack later on.

Anyway, we double-attack into Uesugi territory. They're incompetent and they need to get killed ASAP for their incompetence. Just look at this formation. Anyway, they die. Kenshin and Ai will join us with auto-events shortly and in the meantime, we'll need to think about just what it is that we're gonna do now. Our troops are way overdue for an upgrade - there's at least three units with full happiness, including Rance. We'll get Ai really soon, which will help our main squad, but even though we've climbed out of the red NP-wise, our everything's still weak and we need better troops. Because of that, our next target will be the Miko Institute.

When we did Miko Institute events earlier, we didn't do them all completely. What that means is, Miko Institute has three events - one has you learn about the place, the second gives you +5 SAT, third gives you +1 SAT and unlocks Miko Institute as a faction on the map. The last one is important - the more turns they take while not being at war, the better their troopcount becomes. So when we set ourselves up for a war soon, this will help. But for now, we'll need to take care of some stuff first.

>Anyway

>Anyway

God, it feels like I'm retarded.

>>16005209

Just glad that somebody enjoys this.

We recruit some commanders out of prison for their scouting value. We're nearing the cap on how many commanders we can have. This will become a major problem later on, especially since AI doesn't have that limit. Also, because our prison's overcrowded, we release some of them. After 15 people are in your prison, capturing odds go down and when you have 20, they go even lower. If that's the case, then skills like Light Attack are not guaranteed to work. That's a problem that needs to fixed sooner rather than later. Also, for every five commanders that we release at once, we get an item that increases any commander's level by one. We must put all of them on Rance because he's required in so many fights.

We also get Magic from reinforcements. She's a mage unit with 6 in INT. Sounds decent, right? According to the wiki, however, mages have almost the same base attack value as ninjas and archers, they're slower than both and their attack skill, Fire Blast, as mentioned earlier is really slow, twice as slow as a Warrior Attack in comparison. This means that she'll be lucky to do more than one action in a 5v5 fight. She DOES have an unlockable skill that makes less worthless and we will be getting that, but she's going to be cut eventually.

Oh, and naturally, all mages are as durable as wet paper.

Right now, what we really need is battles and new units. Miko Institute can provide both of those - we want Himiko and Goemon in particular. In order to capture them, however, we need a unit with Light Attack, so we have to spend 2 NP on Okita. We also score Working Bee from Texas and put it on Okita - she joins at 200 troops flat, so losing 100 troops isn't a big deal for her. It allows her to use Light Attack twice in a single battle.

For those that don't know, Light Attack is a special move that only warriors can have. It does x0.2 damage and if you hit someone with it and the target unit is annihilated at the end of the battle, they get captured with a 100% chance. There is no limit on how many units you can capture in this manner. However, as mentioned earlier, if you have more than 20 units in your prison, this has a significant chance of failure.

Kenshin joins with an auto-event this turn. It's a really nice event. Ai will join us via auto-event soon.

>>16005317

In second games, that event doesn't happen. In first games, to avoid that you have to war Takeda before warring the other two. It's near-mandatory because all of Uegusi, Takeda and Houjou have good units. It's not all that bad because cavalry units that you get out of the war are excellent and will win you the game.

We need to use downtime as much as possible. Mikos are going to be pain thanks to their strong commanders that we need to capture. To remedy that, we start improving Rance. Attack goes to 7 from happiness bonus, to 8 from satisfaction bonus - along with the rest of his stats and to 9 from an attack book 2 that we got from the very first dungeon. He's still at speed 5, which is not great, but it is okay.

Naoe Ai joins us as a tactician. You're practically required to deploy at least one tactician in almost every fight starting from mid-game and generic tacticians are all trash. It's a much-needed addition to our team.

One event that happens around this time is Takeda taking Saitama. It's curious in that you don't NEED to take over Saitama to conquer Takeda when you do war it - the only thing that you need to take are their two home provinces. This will make things less painful later on. We're going to declare on Mikos next turn because from this point on, we'll need tacticians.

One more thing to mention. We've lost enough territory to Hara that we don't have any territories inside their borders. As a consequence of this, they practically don't attack us anymore. That's really bad and we should war someone ASAP to make sure that there are battles almost every turn.

Uruza finally get Accurate Shots. Combined with Kenshin's innate ability that does 1 action points's worth of damage to all enemy troops, it's a flat -2 action points decrease to all enemy troops. It allows really slow troops like Magic to do damage that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do because of the speed difference. We also pick up Charm of the Fox deity that allows an annihilated troop to always survive, much like Suzume. There's also a levy that we forgot to do earlier that drops a def book, which Maeda gets. With Naoe Ai available, we're off to war the mikos.

We attack into Mikos to get them to try to retake their territory more. Our goal is to capture Himiko and Goemon, two very powerful units. Unfortunately, one has Assassinate and the other has a massive, giant troop stack that's capable of healing itself at twice the Miko Dance+ rate. We're way overdue on our turn count, there's almost no more happiness items and we're out of SAT events. On the plus side, we have the bare minimum that we need to keep on going - tacticians, Accurate Shots + Kenshin cheese combo and a lot of commanders with useful out-of-combat stat scores.

We also pick up Rance's action 4 because he probably needs it to kill things. He'll need FPA1 soon, but it'll be a while before that happens.

We swap Kuge's Asset Tech skill for Enhanced Initial Guard. The reason for that is Ai already has that same skill and we're not going to move from the 50000 gold threshold anytime soon. Kanami comes out of reinforcements - she's a 4/4/4/7 ninja with a high troopcount and nice scouting. Those combat stats are trash and we'll be getting rid of her eventually. To kill Himiko 100% we raise Rance's troopcount to 1000 and then add a draft paper to that from an earlier event, which brings him to 1100 troops.

Now, here's something regarding how the damage works in this game. This is autism, so feel free to skip that. Wiki states that the formula for damage is the following -

Damage (Without Item Modifier) = { [Adjusted Troop Size * (Attack - Defense)%] * Skill Modifier} * (1 + Battlefield Effect)

Let's break it down so that it's easier to understand. Adjusted Troop Size is a unit's power that scales with it's size. From 0 to 500 troops it's a one-to-one ratio - 454 troops is 454 ATS. From 500 to 2000 troops it's Troop Size/2 + 250, meaning that for every troop that you recruit when the unit is between 500 and 2000 troops, every troop counts as half in terms of ATS. From 2000 on it's Troop Size/4 + 750, meaning that every troop that you recruit counts as a quarter of itself in terms of ATS. In Rance's case, it's 1100/2 + 250 = 550 + 250 = 800.

Attack is Base Attack + ATK * (1 + Buff Modifier) * 10. Rance's Charge buff gives him 70% attack which translates to 0.7 buff modifier and he has 9 attack. Warriors have 60 base ATK. In total, 9 ATK Rance with a Charge buff has 40 + 9 * (1 + 0.7) * 10 = 40 + 90 * 1.7 = 40 + 153 = 193 attack. For defense, let's take Himiko at 1500 troops.

Defense = Base Defense + DEF * (1 + Buff Modifier) * 8. Monk's base defense is 30, Himiko's defense is 7 and we'll assume that she has no buffs. 30 + 7 * 1 * 8 = 30 + 56 = 86.

Rance has no skill modifier, so that's 1. We'll assume that there is no battlefield effect either because all battles are going to be on fields. Rance has 20% more damage from Chaos, that's item multiplier, so we'll multiply the result by further 1.2. The result is -

{ [800 * (193 - 86)%] * 1} * (1) = 800 * 1.07 * 1.2 = 1027.2

That's his damage with his basic skill Warrior Attack. Full Power Attack 2 does double damage and it stacks with all other modifiers, meaning that he would do over two thousand damage if he had that.

We only have 30 turns left to conquer everything, so we need to rush things. We're killing Hara with what we have right now and waiting for Mikos to deploy Goemon/Himiko while that happens.

Meanwhile, permits get introduced. If a commander with at least 1000 troops equips those, he'll be able to attack an enemy province and win by himself. That effect cannot capture the last territory of a province. That's as broken as it sounds, so we won't be using those during this run.

>>16005478

Right now we're getting useful troops that'll help with dealing with bullshit that lies beyond the 30 turns that we've got left for the first phase of the game. Troop stacks will just get even bigger, but it won't be a big deal if we get enough good troops of our own.

We push on Hara steadily, careful to keep troops that we need to capture Himiko/Goemon in reserve.

Sorry, but I gotta go. Be back soon.

So this is my first playthrough and I wanted to know if I am doing alright. I just got finished killing Akashi and Tanegashima and am probably going to hit Tokugawa next.

>>15994707

Did I fuck up somewhere? I feel like I was supposed to attack Takeda but instead of them getting off screened by the demon army.

>>16006895

Either free for all or kill the monkey route iirc

We're back, more or less. Our goal for now is to kill Hara and war Tokugawa as soon as we can while accumulating SAT. I've made a little bit of a blunder there by deploying unprotected backrow units against a giant stack of archers and tacticians. This is why you use foot troopers - to avoid precisely that.

>>16005796

It's important to keep at least one war going at all times. Some AI's declare war on you if you're not at war with any houses, case in point being Iga, and they have a gourd that we don't want to break.

>>16006215

You've taken over too many houses with gourds.

>>16007995

>Hannies FFA

You'll die.

Ranmaru gets cleared. From now on, every time we deploy her with Katsuie, they both get a guaranteed 50% boost to attack and defense. Having an innate 50% defense boost for a foot soldier is really great, as it allows us to underdeploy more often. It's very useful.

Hara turns into a shooting star. Because troopstacks values climb higher as the game goes on, Hara's Volley gets the short end of the stick because of how damage scaling works. What a shame. Right after that, we declare on Tokugawa to keep on the pressure. They'll bring out their best commanders once we conquer two of their territories and we probably won't be able to deal with them if we're going to have a war active on the side. This is broblem :DDDD

First castle taken. It's gonna hurt if we delay killing Tokugawa for any longer, so even though we've just said that it's going to be really hard if we take two territories, there's no choice but to do so - there's simply no time.

We're starting to get SAT from Magic auto-events. More reinforcements from Leazus are called and we've recruited Dousan-chan from a SAT event - it only appears if you have all three recruitable Mino brothers from Oil Field on your roster. It's a 7/5/4/7 monk with Convert Action and Youkai Ward. The latter skill is more or less irrelevant because using Convert Action in army battles is really broken. Combine that with Uruza and Kenshin and enemies don't get to act even more.

Andou Kyuri and the other Mino brother get fired because of their base costs and really low usefulness. Guard Shikigamis are beginning to go out of style and there aren't a lot of formations that can tolerate putting a 250 troop unit in anymore.

It took an attack book, a succcessful Suzume assassinate and Charm of the Immortal Fox Deity to successfully capture him. Unbelievable. Picrelated are all the defense battles that I could do this turn. At least I can kill Mikos now.

Also, get a load of this, they've almost killed us.

>>16009038

>without the rape

>>16009038

If you've read through the thread already, then you should already know if it's your cup of tea or not. Battles are fun, managing commanders is fun and it's a real challenge to excel at the game despite it being terribly RNG at times.

Thanks to Dousan we kill Mikos. Under ordinary circumstances, the sheer might of -50% combat effectiveness of Miko Institute's last territory and Natori's Miko Storm 2 would have stonewalled us. However, with Uruza/Kenshin combo and Dousan refilling Ganko's flags, troop damage's effect on battle rating becomes irrelevant. When Rance conquers Mikos, he gets a free powerup, which nets him Full Power Attack 1 that deals x1.5 damage.

Our current goals right now are DON'T DIE OH GOD and KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL US.

>>16009057

It's off-screen because it would take half a thread to upload all relevant CGs. Either try playing the game normally or look for them on sadpanda if you want that.

We do a dungeon and give Suzume BC3. It's a really powerful skill that buffs all allies's battle effectiveness, which makes Chun-Chun Shuriken more or less a waste to use outside it's niche, which happens to be not dying to giant diviner stacks. How effective. We're also desperate for AI to stop attacking, which is why we start doing Covert Action events. They have random effects ranging from killing enemy commanders, troops or stopping them from attacking for a turn. It's a useful option.

While waiting on our troops, we clear Magic. This gets us an item that gives a commander +2 happiness every turn. Unfortunately, it can't be unequipped, so we're saving it.

More defense against Tokugawa. It's REALLY troublesome to kill them without capturing Sakai Tadatsugu because he has Assassinate. It's more RNG hell and there are two giant warrior stacks on top of that. We need 9 defense on Maeda to not die there. To that end, we do a dungeon for a SAT event and an item - Exclusive Nurse heals 50 troops of a unit per turn.

Maria joins. She's a special cannon unit sent from Leazus. You can think of it like a weaker musket unit that can be used from the backline. Because it joined at 458 troops, it'll be a while before it will be good, but she can serve as an NP builder with her 8 construction at least. We also capture that fucking ninja unit with Assassinate from an attempt to retake our territory.

Takeda is going to declare on us soon. It is convenient, because it saves us the need to waste an action fan for that. To get more SAT, we do a dungeon that gives us that sword thing that gives constant +100 to damage with an unpronounceable name.

We get Maeda Keiji by spending two satisfaction bonuses on him. This is Maeda Toshiie, but he gets +3 to attack and defense. The bonus doesn't cap other than by a game's hard cap of 9 in any given stat, so by spending two defense books on Maeda and two satisfaction bonuses we get a foot trooper with 9 defense. We needed that in order to take Tokugawa.

Sorry, but I'm gonna call it for today. Hannies declare war on us and are going to take over all of our land if we don't kill them. Thanks to Mouri declaring war at us from beyond our borders, hopefully we don't have to worry about Iga declaring on us anymore, which means that once we're done with potteries, we're gonna be free to concentrate our full might on Takeda. I also reloaded after recruiting Goemon that one time because of some stupid shit. I don't like savescumming, so please don't fucking kill me for it.

>>16009315

Yeah, that's what just happened.

>>16011138

>it doesn't make any sense

Yes, yes it does.

>>16011138

On 5-star, enemy troopsize scales with the number of your provinces owned, thus before we're ready, we would need to minimize those, that's one reason. Easy battles are the second reason and making Tenshi Sect's final province into two field battles is the last reason. Do note that it was possible and likely better to kill Hara instead of Tenshi Sect by that point and stall them instead. This blocks Akashi from declaring a war on us because we don't have shared borders. The problem with that is that Tenshi Sect loves to spam monks and sometimes deploys Seigan, so even though you can make them attack a castle consistently by taking over one territory in their last province, it's a lot of unit repair money down the drain, not to mention riot events becoming a bitch. The plus side of that is that you can vassal them after the gourds break which trades +5 SAT for Seigan.

>>16011762

There's a hidden parameter within the game that skyrockets AI powerlevel against other AI's and makes them win almost every time. You can know if it has that if the AI has a prompt "Enjoying Ludo's blessing" during it's turn.

Continuing on, it's time to fuck up Hannies. They're pretty much a joke that fold when we deploy guard units with high percentage. Our goal after this is to get the fourth fan from 160 SAT before Takeda declare on us.

The hannies die without ceremony. The weak should fear the strong, after all. We get SAT from conquering them, but there is an option to conquer them without getting a SAT event by doing two events on their territory and choosing the lower option. However, it is worth it to conquer them because SAT goes a long way.

The next couple of turns, we're not going to be at war with anybody - we NEED to prepare for a war with Takeda. To that end, we recruit every captured commander that's going to be needed in the war - that is, useful-looking foot troopers and all those great units that we've captured over the course of the game. We also release a couple of useless commanders - there's almost no space left.

We do Yukihime's event. It's amazing on multiple levels. She leaves Oda as a result, but we don't care because's she's a terrible commander anyway - miko units don't contribute to battle rating at all and she'd need a lot of troops and a Miko Plus/Wind upgrade to be good, nevermind the potential loss of SAT.

We finally get 4 actions per turn. This allows us to do more things per turn - it's really nice to be able to do so, considering the amount of stuff the game throws at you. We also visit the item shop and pick up the money statue that gives +10% to gold income and World's Tactics, an item that gives +2 to INT. We also search for another +10% income statue from the Hannies's land. Takeda is going to declare war on us next turn.

Takeda war us. After taking Tulip Rapid-Fire and bringing some troops on Maria, we rush their first province. After 3 turns of war, their NG+ commanders join the army battles - those are really broken, so it's in our best interests to kill them as quickly as possible.

We invade their last province twice. None of those formations contained the absence of Foot Troopers and Tebasaki on the front lines, which is essential for our secondary goal of warring Takeda - good Tebasaki units. Out of desperation because of a three-turn limit, we retake a territory that happens to have both the Tebasaki units that we desperately need, which promptly get captured. Takeda invades us once on their turn, taking back one territory - so even though we lost one flag, we gained what we really needed.

And just like that, Takeda is dead - they surrender completely if their two home provinces are both occupied. Houjou is going to declare on us next turn and we'll need to kill them in approximately 18 turns to take the most out of the turns that we have right now. Honorable mention goes to Maria that tanked a hit from a ~2k stack of tebasaki units and then managed to finish off a wounded unit with Rapid-Fire Tulip.

We've mentioned NG+ commanders, but we never really described what they were. If we did an event after tanking a blitz from Takeda, we could have gotten them and they're really, really powerful, but tanking the blitz itself is extremely RNG because your units WILL get routed if they try to do that - there's just no way around it and I hate the concept of RNG deciding whether you win or not. Here's a list of those Takeda commanders.

Baba Shouen - 6/6/6/6 cavalry unit with 5 actions, has Battle Rating Up 1, Cavalry Charge and Commander Charge. His level is at 50, caps at 68.

Yamagata Masakage - 8/8/8/8 cavalry unit with 4 actions, has Battle Rating Up 2, Cavalry Charge and Onrush. His level is at 25, caps at 34.

Kousaka Yoshikage - 7/7/7/7 ninja unit with 5 actions, has Shuriken attack and Assassination 2. His level is 45, caps at 55.

Sanada Tourin - 7/7/6/7 tactician unit with 3 actions, has Battle Strategy 3, Bow attack and Battle Rating Down 2. His level is 45, caps at 55.

All of those commanders have a special skill that gives them guaranteed 50% buffs at start of combat. Combine that with the fact that AI armies have them at ~2000 troops when they get them and you can pretty much treat whatever battles they're in as autolosses whenever they get deployed against you. We've managed to kill Takeda in three turns, but it was possible to stall further if we didn't get the tebasaki units that we did - all we had to do is concede attacks towards them whenever they deployed their overpowered commanders. Next up - Houjou.

>>16013718

>~2k stack of tebasaki units

Oh, mixed that up, it seems. It's just 1k. Nevertheless, it's an achievement, especially since her class defense is 0.

Anyway, we got just 7 turns before the final gourd breaks and we need to use them quickly. As soon as Houjou wars us, we kill two of their territories. We just barely fail to take the castle and are forced to defend. It's a race against time.

After defending one territory, we fail to defend another and lose a foot trooper unit in the process. We have too many of those now, so it's not bad that we lost one - we were going to fire some eventually. Leila joins in place of the dead guy - a special Knight unit arriving from Leazus as reinforcements. She has 7/7/7/6 in stats, five actions and she can use Royal Guard Charge - attack that deal double damage if there are more enemy troops that her current unit size. It's pretty much Full Power Attack 2 but without getting two happiness levels on her. She's not bad, but because of her poor base attack and a crippling inability to self-buff attack, we won't rely too much on her.

We take Houjou's castle, and with this, their province. From now on, we need to stall them until a certain event comes up. During that time, we are going to need to try to do something very hard.

We make some preparations real quick. One of our cavalry units gets Pursuit Attack - a very powerful ability that deals three times the damage to one unit at the expense of all of our action flags. It's so good it's practically broken. Because of 4 speed on our foot trooper unit and one ninja, one warrior unit broke through the guard and almost killed Okita. Thankfully, she's okay.

We dismiss Rizna. We already have her first SAT event and her second requires us to H her in Rance's room once, which is RNG-dependent. It's important to keep at least one spot free in our unit list because there are two characters that join our commander list during auto-events later on. If that happens once your unit list is full, one random commander will die. We can't let that happen.

We attack Tanegashima while still at war with Houjou. We must kill them before the final gourd breaks in order to take advantage of Mouri's All-out Attack events during our downtime. It won't be terribly difficult to kill them, but we must keep in mind that we must hold off them as well as Houjou - and both of them will attack us for 1-3 times per turn. On top of that, within those five turns, it is preferable to capture Ran as well as take over Houjou itself - all within five turns. Though that might be too ambitious, now that I think of it - if those events don't happen soon enough, then it's going to be impossible to do so.

We give Rance another flag from satisfaction bonus. Now he can use Charge and Full Power Attack twice. It's good.

Anyway, we kill Tanegashima really quickly. They don't even put up a decent fight because muskets are really easy to defend against. Maeda Keiji had Charm of Immortal Fox Deity, so there's no need to worry. Now, however, we have shared borders with Mouri. From now on, they will attack us and it's going to be painful.

We recruit Yuzumi. She's a musket unit that wants to hit foot trooper units because her musket shot has an Assassinate effect. Her stats are decent, but she only has one action flag. This crippling deficiency alongside the fact that you normally only want to assassinate Monk and Foot Trooper units is why she's really bad. She does award +5 SAT if you keep investing in her though and converting affection items into SAT is a really good deal.

Mouri want an all-out battle with us. It's a pre-defined formation that has Mouri Teru, Mouri Motonari, Kikkawa Kiku, a musket unit, a diviner unit and a tactician. We have no choice but to put Maeda with an Immortal Fox Charm on the frontline and a guard unit in the backline and hope that Kiku doesn't go for the backline unit. It worked, at least.

Hannies from Okita's events have class changed into terrorists. They can't forgive Takuga for whatever reason and they want money to attack them. If you give them any amount, they'll continuously attack their territories as if with a single permit - they won't take over the final territory of a province, as usual in cases like these. It's a great deal because we have our hands full. trying to wrangle three AI's at once.

A three-thousand diviner troop stack, thankfully unprotected by guard units. To kill this much diviners, it was required to deploy Maria, a Rear Guard Smash tebasaki unit and a tactician. This is why Tebasaki units are so great - both Rear Guard Smash and Pursuit Attack skills are so great, they make a unit holding them insanely powerful. The last satisfaction bonus that we get is used towards weakening other countries - while we would like affection, war matters are more pressing at the moment. Souun goes to seal the story ogre and from this point fucks off from Houjou entirely. We have only one turn left to take Houjou - if we successfully defend here, it seems that we're going to make it, after all.

Also, it seems that Hanny terrorists don't do anything yet. I know for sure that on the last territory of Takuga, they take over first two of their territories for free, but it seems that they can't exactly take Takuga's castle.

>>16014088

Weird route, great girl

>>16013829

Also mind taking a moment to talk about your roster? I somewhat understand ditching Rizna since she does need a massive investment to become effective but you seem to be missing/avoided picking up several important characters. And frankly I'm curious what's your line of thought.

It seems that we've made a little bit of a blunder regarding Houjou. We could have taken them last turn, but chose not to because defending against an invasion of a last territory on the west took priority. However, now we have to deal with finding Kou and killing Houjou, Iga, Akashi and Takuga in the span of five turns after we go to an event in Honnouji. I'm stopping for today, but could still answer some questions for a bit. Oh, and hannies finally took over Takuga's castle. Terrorism works, wew.

>>16014112

She's okay right now, but she won't be soon.

>>16014131

No problem. Let's list them and talk about why they're there. Gonna use the order from a screenshot.

Rance: Self-explanatory. Has an unequippable Chaos that allows him to do 20% more damage, both in armies and in dungeons. No level cap, insanely strong when there are no foot soldiers around.

Ranmaru: After Turn 60, you can clear her. Doing so and deploying her with Shibata - a foot soldier grants both of them 50% buffs to ATK and DEF - it's HUGE because guaranteed defense buffs on foot soldiers are insanely good. If enemy doesn't have ninjas or I know that she can tank a hit, she gets deployed. I'll give her Shouting Charge later on because she can't be picky about getting deployed against foot troopers.

Kenshin: Self-explanatory. Drain one action point from all enemies and Commander Charge to get rid of her actions and get some battle bar. One of the two that can do action-draining, thus extremely valuable. Also has a SAT event.

Okita Nozomi: Required for Charm of Immortal Fox Deity, extremely low cost and extremely high level. Good for dungeons and you need to level her to get a SAT event, thus strong with Light Attack. Also required for Hannies fucking up Takuga. Joins at 200 troops independent of current troopcount, which makes her a great Working Bee bait.

Shibata: You begin with him and he has 7 defense. The longer you have him, the more affection he gets on average, the stronger he becomes. SAT event gives him a free speedbook and he can be good with Ranmaru.

Maeda Keiji: 6 defense foot trooper that becomes a 9 defense foot trooper. Self-explanatory.

Kuge Kiyoko: A recruitable foot trooper with Asset Tech early on. Shitty speed, but she's easy to get, has decent defense and doesn't give you a reason to delete her.

Three foot trooper units: Backrow foot troopers are extremely important as they support the backline by diverting fire to them. They can tank less hits reliably, but when deploying weak backline units against a medium-sized force, those are the luxury that you need on 5-star. Also, remember that replenishing foot soldiers costs 1 gold instead of 4 and that you get 5 foot soldiers for all foot troopers every turn.

Leila: She's good when there's no foot troopers on frontline, but Rance and Okita Nozomi are already on that niche. She's a scout with 6 search and we keep her for her satisfaction event. Do not deploy against DA.

Two cavalry units: Those are our ace in the hole against tricky formations that don't have foot troopers in the back. Do they have a tactician that threatens to delete all our buffs? Rear Guard Smash, now there isn't a tactician and we don't have to use our action points to frantically re-buff and hope that our foot trooper in the front gets a defense buff that allows him to get less damage. Because there's four actions, you get to do that twice. Pursuit Attack is the same thing, but you deal three times the damage instead of two and use all your action fans, but it's indiscriminate towards unit types. Latter is great with Dousan.

(1/2) Cont'd

Himiko: Guard Break. Later upgraded into Overtime and that niche occupied by Asakura. Natori's support that allows you to kill action-drained formations even harder.

Aburako Dousan: Do you like killing all enemy units by super moves such as Rapid-Fire Tulip, Miko Storm 2, Pursuit Attack or Assassinate 2? Now do it again. Limited only by timebar, with a character above breaking her limiter.

Magic: Megumeme. Gets cut eventually because of low base attack and replaced with a better megumeme. You get three SAT events and Rance's Love for recruiting her and one happiness level on completion that allows her to get explosion.

Ganko Ittetsu: Earlygame Battle Rating Down 2. Gets kept because having two units with BRD2 even during lategame is great and his 8 points in defense are stupid good.

Sanada Tourin: BRD2, 50% boosts in all stats, great base stats. Tactician.

Uruza: Tactician, Accurate Shots removes an action from all enemies. Can be cheezed with Dousan. God-tier in right formations. Has a SAT bonus.

Naoe Ai: Tactician with Remove Status 2 and Battle Strategy 2, both due for an upgrade because of a SAT bonus.

Yamamoto Isoroku: Yamamoto Sweeping Fire ignores foot soldier guard and gives double damage on right formations. Damaging weak troops gives you battle bar and killing them gives you even more. Whirlwind Shot for cheap Assassinate effect that eats only half her flags. Falls off towards endgame because of rapidly increasing troop stacks and small level, but still has a niche as an Assassinate unit that can also scout a little.

Suzume: MVP and best girl. Early clear and deployment with Rance allowed her to gain retarded amounts of happiness and ascend to Battleground Construction 3. +8 Battle Effect with 4 actions as well as shuriken that fucks up diviners regardless of foot soldier guard plus a free Assassinate at the end. Tons of earlygame SAT, too.

Goemon: As above, but two actions, no guard-piercing shuriken effect and stats that allow him to be deployed without a guard unit against medium-power formations. No SAT though.

Fuuka: Scout/Healing for when there's no chance of her getting hit. 4 defense is tough. Has an early SAT event and Miko Storm that hits all enemies for 10% total troops.

Maria: Musket, but on the backline. Can superfire with a skill that deals twice the damage to remove units that would have otherwise eaten action points during the battle. For unprotected frontlines and backlines alike. Use Dousan for maximum effect.

Natori: Is there nothing that can hit the backline? Is there a backline foot trooper while she's at 1000 troops and there's no ninjas? If you have Dousan, you win. If there's Himiko, you cripple AI a bit.

Asakura Yoshikage: 6 speed monk with 8 negotiations. Eventually gets 7 speed and a helpful character clear effect. Required to not die to random wars mid-game if you conquer his house. Remains useful in end-game due to Guard Break being a good effect.

Yuzumi: Assassinate unit. SAT event locked behind two happiness levels. Need to be cleared to get a useful item later. Disposable after that.

Kanami: Scout unit, good for SAT, but worthless afterwards.

>Senhime

All Guard is trash tier and only works in three in the back one in the front formation - you're not gonna do that a lot. Needs mandatory deployment every three turns, otherwise all investment in her is lost. Offers no SAT beyond what you get for killing Tokugawa. Unfit for self-ascribed "Attacking foot trooper" niche for two reasons - Spear Attack 2 costs three actions and Spear Attack costs two actions, thus if one would want that, then she would at least need four actions - she has three, however. Getting additional actions in this game by default is a pain and there are a lot of units that would want them more. Only use for waifu potential.

>>16014371

>but she won't be soon.

I swear that guy has cuck level 3 skill.

>Suzume: MVP and best girl

I really want to contest that but no arguments come to mind.

>magicmeme

I'd say you're being too rough on them. They're your best friend if you're not too versed in the game and demons decide to culturally enrich you. And it's not like you can't cheeze their super abilities with Dousan, either.

>>16014539

Different folks different strokes I suppose. Poor RiznaShe's probably being pimped out to hannies or ogres right now

>>16014650

I just want to protect that smile

And we're back. Last time: fifth gourd broke because we were incompetent and Kouhime went missing. Let's do this.

For now, we're upgrading our units and doing events that don't require us to deploy any extra troops. Finding Kouhime sends Oda into military chaos - that is, all our action fans are straight-up gone for the turn after she's found, meaning that we have to do other events first.

We soothe Kouhime's PTSD a bit and head out to kill Xavier. There's also another SAT bonus wasted, but it's for a good cause - we really don't want to lose any provinces while dealing with this.

Visiting Nobunaga from this point on triggers an event of invasion on Honnouji, a famous historical event. Here, however, it's a bit different. The first fight is against Xavier's apostle and the second is against Xavier himself. He can only be damaged while Rance is on the field, so deploying him against Xavier is required. Nevertheless, we beat him - this lifts the restriction on attacking enemy countries imposed on us after all five gourds broke.

From this turn on, there is a time limit of 7-10 turns until DA is formed on the west. Until then, we want to kill most of the minor countries to prevent Xavier from taking them over.

We dismiss Magic because there's no space on the roster. Kentarou will join soon-ish and we need Ran NOW. Houjou does a 3-attack blitz on Edo which we repel. It's not repelling attacks that's difficult, but rationing your troops so that you can defend crucial stuff.

>>16017963

I'm really bad at Kichikuou Rance and that's the only other Rance SRPG that I know of, so probably not. The only RPG that I know in enough detail to make another thread like this is FE10 and that matter is a separate trainwreck, not to mention that the game itself is mediocre, so people would probably hate it.

We end up losing the castle on Takuga's territory. It's still a better deal than we could have had, which is losing an entire province to Mouri.

We take Edo first thing. With two BRD2 commanders and Isoroku, it just folds. It's retarded how good that skill is when taking castles. Right after that, we do two events with Ran and do the dungeon for Souun's event. Spoiler - Ran gets killed by a gay firebird. This is done in order to have Souun join as soon as possible - he's a really good diviner unit. We want one, we'll get one and we must have one on time.

Kentarou joins up with us. It's a really weak warrior unit that's plot-important - he can't be killed or fired. Right now, he's trash, but we can't get rid of him. We kill Takuga's front territory and keep a lot of our troops in reserve. That marks the end of our second turn out of seven guaranteed turns without DA that we have.

>>16018013

Cripples. They're a nuisance, so we'll be relying on terrorism.

We get an item from an event called Power Golden Bear. It gives +2 attack. It's going to be helpful for that 3x damage cavalry unit.

We take over Takuga completely. Because they were the ones that conquered two fields territories near Mouri, we now don't have to worry about getting killed by the poison miko anymore. Good.

We get some events done to quicken Souun's arrival - sometimes regular events happen as auto-events. On that note, we also capture Kikkawa Kiku - a ninja with decent stats and Assassinate 2. She's okay.

Next, it's time to kill Akashi. They're not really a threat, but they have three auto-loss events and we have to trigger all of them to beat them properly. It's a waste of time, but we have to kill them somehow while keeping Mouri at bay.

After proccing all instant-loss events, we blitz Akashi. They don't stand a chance. and we still have half our troops left over. There's still Iga left, but we can kill them easily.

Mouri take over one of our provinces via an autoloss event - the first time they deploy Chinu, their Miko unit, they'll . This signals to us that it is indeed time to advance on Mouri. They have a hidden trait - when the Demon Army appear on the map, they conquer Senkan Nagato, the territory on the upper left of Mouri. However, if that's their last territory, the DA don't conquer it. By that time, however, we will need to take Mouri completely.

We dismiss Kanami off-screen and recruit a much better ninja - Kikkawa Kiku. She has five actions, a 70% defense self-buff on demand and Assassinate 2. This makes her a strong backline unit that doesn't require foot soldier protection. We also recruit Choushin for his Emperor Ring.

We attack one province of Mouri and get attacked five times while on defense. Please help, that's the power of a 5-star difficulty. Off-screen, Demon Army awakens. It's a powerful and mighty army that will take over houses if left unchecked.

Kikkawa Kiku gets an upgrade. It's Shuriken 2, which allows her to deal 10% more damage with those. It's good for her because her main goal is to deal damage and eat action flags. We can get a poison dagger later, but for now, this is good.

After defending against Mouri, we counterattack. Because Demon Army took their home province, we only have to take one of their provinces to get them to fall. Next turn, if they don't take over Iga, we are going to attack it.

We quickly take Iga out before DA can eat them. If the price to pay for that is western provinces, it's of no consequence - SAT event from Iga conquest is just better. With that, the map is clear of all factions but Demon Army and Dokuganryuu - the latter don't get taken over by Demon Army.

Demon Army did a Shimazu Blitz on us for a grand total of seven attacks per turn. We lost a province as a result - we'll take it back soon enough. The most important thing is though, we have completely recovered after the blunder of nearly failing to kill important houses on time - that's an accomplishment. We'll stop here for today - tomorrow will be dungeon diving, final troop adjustments and survival against demons. I'll be here for a while to answer any questions if there's any.

We're back again and it's time to do dungeons. From now on, we'll have to do them once per turn every turn - there is much to catch up on. While we could attack the Demon Army right now, once you push them past a certain point, something bad happens, so for now, we won't.

Miki event happens. She and Kentarou are basically isekai'd into Rance universe and she has an alternate Demon King personality. To supress it, she wants Hirami Lemons from a dungeon.

We recruit Tanegashima Shigehiko. He's going to be our better Megumin because of the great base attack musket units have - it's more than twice of a warrior unit. To compensate, they have long cooldowns between attacks. We do a story dungeon to advance the plot a bit and build a ninja mansion. It will allow all ninja units from this point on to gain 5 troops per turn. We have three of those, so it should be a great investment on top of what we already have with the foot troopers.

We defend against DA some more and do more dungeons. We also find Action Book 1 inside a dungeon - it can't be used on Ninjas, Warriors and Musketeers. Cavalry, however, aren't any of those classes and it's arguable that they're better.

Demon Army isn't attacking as much as I hoped, though it's of no consequence.

>>16022144

In True route, Kenshin route and Isoroku route, it's impossible to declare war on them even if you border their province. In Ran and Kill the Monkey routes, they declare on you after some time. They have events where they steal your female commanders that are not at at least trust and use them in battles against you.

>>16022154

Not to my knowledge. Minecraft was a mistake.

We get three +4 affection items from a dungeon. Shigehiko gets Penetration Shot 1, a very good skill that lets him hit both the frontline and the backline. He also gets the emperor ring, that brings his action count to 3 and his stats to 7/7/7/8. It's a really nice addition.

Right now, it's more dungeons, Demon Army and preparations for when Sill dies. We are going to invade Dokuganryuu as soon as dungeons end, but at this rate, it'll be a while.

Xavier releases a seal from the Soul Binder. It's a youkai that turns people into magical zombies. It's really troublesome because it will make up to two random units from our roster unavailable every turn.

Yuzumi gets more happiness items and events. She's a bad unit and we need the space that she currently occupies inside our roster to get Souun. The problem is, she needs a ton of affection items to get her events as well as two pre-battle deployments with Rance.

>>16022192

We need to be at a certain level to conquer Dokuganryuu. Dungeons level up all commanders on our roster.

As a side effect of releasing Soul Binder, DA now employs infected units. If they hit a unit, they reduce their maximum troop size. It's possible to migitate the damage significantly with defense buffs, action-point drainers and Assassinate units.

We're quite close to clearing Yuzumi and freeing up space for Souun. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like he'll arrive on time - Gigai, one of the DA apostles has arrived. The bottom option in the last cap is a game over.

We clear Yuzumi and get a mask from event. This allows us to put it on Suzume to prevent her from dying or on Kikkawa Kiku, which would make her a viable option against high-power backline formations. It was more than worth it to go through all that trouble of getting her.

>>16022411

oh fuck

We do a dungeon and get a +2 speed item. It's a very good item, so for now, Kuge Kiyoko takes it to remedy her crippling lack of speed. Gigai event will come in soon, so we fire Yuzumi to hopefully get Souun before that happens.

Defend more, do dungeons more, standard fare. Souun finally joins. He's an 8/8/8/8 diviner with Souun's Summoning as a skill. It's basically what Fire Blast should have been from the start - a quick INT-based nuke that deals tons of damage for one action point. We are going to use him for Shikigami utility a lot though, thanks to his excellent base 8 speed.

We spend two fans on two different turns finding an Akashita Dog. That item allows a unit to take two actions per turn. It does not allow you to defend twice with a unit, however.

We recruit Mouri Teru in place of our old foot trooper unit. We're going to spend all our money on her from now on to make sure that she won't die. That said, I won't expect much because she joins at 6 defense. We also find an Action Book 2 from a dungeon. It's really nice because Goemon or Tanegashima getting more actions is always welcome.

By default, Shimazu faction possesses a unit called Ootomo Sourin. It's an uncapturable musket unit with an ability Special Cannon. This hits all your troops for 1x damage. Musket unit damage multipliers usually make it a nightmare if it ever gets an action, so we kill it before it kills us. If you start an FFA game as Shimazu, you can use it yourself.

Shigehiko gets a fourth action fan. This allows him to make four attacks with his special ability Penetration Shot. We'll be leveling that up soon. Tourin gets 7 intelligence as well, which combined with World's Tactics pushes it to 9, a cap.

When you win a battle that you initiate against Demon Army and when you've seen Gigai arrive at DA, after winning an offensive battle, there will be a cutscene with him. This is what happens when Souun is deployed against him.

>>16022680

RIP Homoqueer birb. T105-T110. Never forget.

More attacks and defense. Our goal right now is to get a fifth fan through 260 SAT and take Akaheru back. Then we can push through to Dokuganryuu. It's just barely possible to do so without spamming Rance's room because there are just four SAT events left. We also pick up an item that gives guaranteed four 50% buffs to a unit in castle battles. This is great because guaranteed 50% buff to defense is really appreciated by foot troopers, as mentioned earlier.

It may be excessive preparation that we're doing right now, but it's going to be hell taking on Youkais without permits and we want to not die.

We'll probably take the DA province next turn. In the meantime, more preparations for Dokuganryuu. We're doing them right after the DA province. We're getting a consumable that fully heals our troops, speedbook 2 and a Takeda Cavalry Unit. It increases one cavalry unit's troop count by 1000, but all troops sold give zero gold as a consequence. It's also unequippable - the Pursuit Attack cavalry unit gets it.

Himiko finally gets Overtime at the end of the game. This converts three of her actions into 12 timebar. This combined with Dousan and Natori spells death to our opponents. Before rushing forward, however, we still need five fans from SAT and to do more dungeons. The reason for that is, we need more Ogre Bones. We're gonna need to buy defense books 2 from the item shop and to do that, we'll have to farm Ogre Bones when we run out of dungeons. Ideally, we'll want 8, but we can easily settle with 4.

I'm gonna take a small break for now. It may be getting tedious to watch, but DA is hard and it's been somewhat fun so far.

Current screens for reference.

>>16031780

Boot up one of your old saves, let the game play out AI turns and let it autosave. This should fix it.

From this point on the game flow becomes pretty slow, so instead of playing it out and posting as the game goes, I'm just gonna dump screenshots of latest progress in the game. It's self-explanatory for the most part. We're going for as much dungeons as we can handle, both because of the ogre bones and levels. We are going to buy Defense Books 2 with those Ogre bones from dungeons.

More dungeons and we finally got the fifth fan from the 260 SAT threshold. Kentarou demon event activates because we're in control of Senkan Nagato again - Miki runs away and we must search for her three times to avoid getting placed on a Demon King route. After we find her, our slave Sill gets frozen and Kentarou turns into a demon. This means that nothing can kill him with a few exceptions, in both army battles and dungeon battles. So now we have one more defense squad in our roster.

Shimazu brothers get mad that Xavier isn't giving them back Kurohime. They all love her. So Xavier tells them to kill Rance for her. They oblige. It's an event that activates after Rance participates in a battle against DA when one or more Shimazu brothers commanders are present. After the army battle, you fight all four Shimazu brothers at once. If you lose, you get a game over and if you win, you get a commander battle with those same commanders that you've deployed in an army battle. Afterwards, Shimazu brothers are flagged as killable - it's necessary to kill them all if you want to clear Agireda, one of capturable Shimazu commanders.

At this point in the game we have Demon Kentarou, which is pretty much an extra squad for defense, so we go ahead and invade Dokuganryuu. Before doing that, we're required to participate in an event and an army battle, so declaring the war on them costs three fans.

While invading Dokuganryuu, we manage to lose Senkan Nagato again because we're bad.