Just about to fire this up for the first time after it sat on my shelf for a year. Never played anything like this before - well, I've played advance wars but that's different in that each battle is self contained and you don't level up characters. Can anyone give some good tips for a newbie without spoiling too much? Probably going to play it in the casual mode (?) where people don't die permanently as I'm too OCD for that and I don't have time to be endlessly replaying battles. Besides that I know nothing outside of the demo I played when it first came out so any tips would be appreciated
Let's start with some basic stuff about you should to know to play
- In this game, stats are not tied to levels, so two units of the same class at the same levels will have different stats for sure. Not only that, but the same unit will end up with different stats in different savefiles for sure.
- When units level up, they have a chance to upgrading each stat, you read that right, a chance. Units like Mages have better chance at getting Mag while Armored units will get Def more often. The chance also varies form character to character, so certain characters will have better chance at some stats even compared to other characters of the same class.
- About classes, units can upgrade from a base clase to a advanced class. When upgrading, the level displayed is reduced to 1 again (so you go from level 20 base class to level 1 advanced class), but the stats are upgraded and the unit is considered at least level 21 for exp calculations.
Now, about the game itself
- Frederick, a unit you get at the start of the game is a early game monster but only because he is in a advanced class already. Be sure to level up your other units and not rely on him too much, he wont get many level ups early in the game as the exp he gets is minimal.
- Weapons break after some use, and there are no reliable ways to repair them. Be sure to use your good weapons on key targets only on the early game, later you will get access to good weapons more often so it wont be a problem.
- You may want to consider the weapon triangle vs some enemies. Swords > Axes > Lances > Swords. The unit with the winning weapon gets a bonus to attack, accuracy and avoidability while the unit with the losing weapon gets a penalty to the same stats.
Edit: also, will I be fine on Hard difficulty the first time through as a competent gamer of 26 years? Worried that Normal will be "Nintendo easy" (if that's a thing) and overly simplified for kids
I'm not too sure. The gap between normal and hard is pretty big imo, it feels like there should be a difficulty right in between. You will have to plan carefully, consider the enemy turns and range, sometimes pray to the rng.
