An overly detailed guide to victory

S-Ranking Battles For Maximum EXP

In order to S-Rank a battle, you need at least one category at S-Rank and two categories at A-Rank or two categories at S-Rank and one category at B-Rank to get the maximum experience multiplier of +50%

While you are extremely unlikely to be able to get an S-Rank on every single fight of the game, its more then reasonable to get an overall A-Rank minimum fairly consistently, with only the occasional kerfuffle elite that you just had a bad match-up against.

Turns is fairly self explanatory, keep your turn count as low as possible to secure an S-Rank

Damage taken is also fairly self explanatory, keep your damage taken through a battle as low as possible, the number itself is read as a percentage of your maximum health.

Technique is scored based on the following actions

3000 Link Attack

2000 Inflict status ailment

1000 Attack enemy weakness

1000 Use a skill

100 Use the basic attack

Turns

A rule of thumb for S-Ranking turns is 2 turns +1 turn per enemy for single wave battles, 3 turns +1 turn per enemy for two wave battles and 4 turns +1 turn per enemy for three wave battles but never exceeding ten turns, this wont actually get you S-Rank on literally every battle but it will come close enough that more often then not you will S-Rank and should always A-Rank otherwise

Elite Battles follow largely the same outcome but add an additional 5 turns, the final wave of elite enemies is usually significantly harder then earlier waves if any were present, enough that some battles can still S-Rank at the twenty turn mark.

Boss battles should usually follow the basic idea of 15 turns +1 or 2 turns per chapter, most bosses will S-Rank turns with this amount.

Cannons are better and getting S-Rank turn counts as they on average do more damage per turn then Grenade Launchers which are better on average then Machine Guns, but you still need to be able to hit air units in the first place otherwise you are just wasting turns.

Damage

The damage number displayed at the end of battle is a % value, seeing 105 at the end of a battle for example means you took 105% of the Taranis' maximum health in damage over the course of that battle, healing does not reverse this value as all damage is tracked so its best to avoid and mitigate damage then it is to heal damage taken.

For non elite battles 10% to 15% of the Taranis' maximum HP is the limit you can take, elite battles can up this to around 15% to 25%

Unfortunately i have little to share on bosses, ive either taken extremely little damage or more then the Taranis' maximum health pool in every boss battle ive been in, a good guess is probably 40% but its honestly an unknown for me.

Id suggest keeping damage to a minimum as a larger priority against elites and bosses over turn counts, losing too much HP will cause the Taranis to dip under 50% which can lead to fear and depression, these greatly impact your ability to keep your turn count, damage and technique scores in S-Rank range, however you will also build hero mode faster once you get below 50% HP and it builds faster and faster the lower it goes so if you can prevent damage in the first place remaining at very low HP can in fact be the best way to prevent damage in the first place.

Weakness reduces damage by roughly 50%, Smoke inflicts an accuracy penalty against foes and Shock prevents foes from advancing on the timeline, these three statuses should be used liberally to help not only your technique score but your damage score as well.

If a character isnt going to defeat an opponent before an enemy gets to attack then its probably better to defend, defend will reduce the damage of the next enemy attack by 50%, this multiplies in effect with weakness bringing it to just 25% of the damage it would have otherwise inflicted, you can only block one enemy however so a chain of enemy turns is not very efficiently blocked, in that case its probably better to deal damage and attempt to get an S-Rank turn count and hope for no lower then a B-Rank in damage.

Technique

Normal attacks are very undesirable for high technique scores for obvious reasons, we want to avoid using these exclusively, but we dont have unlimited SP either so we cant just spam skills relentlessly either, the cost of a skill and the amount of targets it hits however has no impact, a skill simply grants 1000 score if used so if you think you still need to boost your score, spam the cheapest skills like Piercing Shot 1.

Enemy weakness refers to successfully delaying a target, all watch icons must be destroyed before an enemy is considered delayed thus granting you the bonus, kill shots still destroy watches and will grant the delay bonus so make sure to keep matching the correct weapons when possible.

Status effects grant 2000 points per successful application, these will be our real bread and butter method for boosting technique scores past the early game and most of them make it easier to get a higher damage score as well, status effects that trigger on kill shots still count towards technique score.

Link attacks give 3000 points on use, but more often then not in smaller battles just end up destroying all the weaker foes before you can delay them successfully, but its a powerful option in longer battles with multiple waves to clear a single wave out rapidly to save on turn count and damage.

Special mention to Sock's Link attack, it attempts to apply three different status effects on every target on the field, listing a 70% success rate for each status effect assuming no enemy resist any status, on a screen with the maximum enemy count of 6 this leads to potentially netting 39,000 technique from a single link attack. More realistically assuming only two thirds of them succeed still leads to 27,000 total score.

A good target thumb to maintain S-Rank for technique is a base of 4,000 + 1,000 per enemy + 2,000 per wave, add an additional 500 per chapter on top of that and if they are elite enemies add a further 5,000 too.

Unfortunately i cant say anything specific for bosses, ive yet to not get an S-Rank on technique for bosses so i cant really give proper advice. All i can say is that the first boss i got over 15,000 technique and that gave me an S-Rank and on average i increased by 2,500 to 3,500 score for each boss as the game progressed, matching this at the very least that will assure you an S-Rank for technique but is likely overkill for the later game bosses.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2571943239					

More Fuga: Melodies of Steel guilds