Well, there’s only one vote, but it’s the one that counts. We’re going with Roland, Batu, and Tani… right after this update, that is. It won’t matter for this update, and you’ll understand why pretty soon.
Update 12: Pointless Side Mechanics
We’re back outside the pirate fortress again. This time, instead of going to the right (which leads us down to where the wyvern boss was) we’re going to head to the left.
This is largely uneventful… except for this chest here. These blue chests are special - we can’t unlock them until we have a spell that we probably won’t have for another… well, let’s just say several hours of grinding several updates from now. In any case, even once we have that spell we don’t necessarily want to go hunting these down right away because there is a MUCH easier way to do it later on.
From here on out, we’ve unlocked “skirmish battles”. If you’ve played any of the Suikoden games, you probably remember the “strategy battles” that used your party members as units in a turn-based strategy mode. Skirmish battles are to those what Tetra Master in Final Fantasy 9 was to Triple Triad in Final Fantasy 8. By that, I mean it’s a side mechanic that has absolutely no effect on the main game whatsoever.
Skirmish battles look like this on the map - they’re a raised battle flag that glows as you get close. They’ll always have a name and a recommended level that are shown before you go in… but ultimately, that doesn’t matter for reasons I’ll explain as we go through this horribly thought out side mode.
Each skirmish starts out like this, with an overview of the map (all skirmishes take place on the world map with minor alterations) and a count of your units versus theirs. This is not accurate at all: most skirmishes have more than one stage, and this only shows the enemies in the first stage. The numbers next to the crossed swords are “military might” - basically your army’s HP.
Our opponents are some dipshit bandits in masks.
Skirmishes work a little differently than a normal RTS. Evan (and it will always be Evan leading the army even if he’s not in the party) can have up to four units orbiting him. We start with two: a unit of swordsmen and a unit of archers. In addition, there are hammer and spear units as well as gun and wand ranged units.
In battle, Evan has no direct control over his army, other than that we can rotate their positions. On paper, this is because of unit type matchups. In the top-right, you can see the matchups for melee: swords beat hammers, hammers beat spears, spears beat swords. I don’t know what the matchup chart is for ranged weapons because they’re all weak to melee and at high levels skirmishes tend to devolve into you getting surrounded by clusterfucks of units and the whole type thing goes out the window.
There’s also a fourth melee unit type that isn’t officially named but that I’ve termed “crap” - it’s a weapon type only NPCs have that is weak to everything. These guys we’re fighting here are all crap units.
I’ll post the tutorial for this mechanic because it’s something that’s hard to see if it’s not on video: the “might gauge”. This bar automatically refills over time and can be used to either make your units sprint or to make your units attack harder. Most of the time, we want them to be attacking harder. This also helps ignore the whole type matchup thing: if you’re using the might gauge, type matchups go out the window.
So, one of the main problems with this mode is that the AI is absolutely godawful, especially on the ranged units. See these palisades? Palisades register as enemy units: the enemy won’t attack them even if they’re in the way, but at the same time, your ranged units will lock onto them and will keep going until all those walls are down.
I should also mention that the number of soldiers in each unit is kind of like an HP gauge: as they take damage, you’ll lose soldiers and need to spend military might to replace them. The soldiers do not, however, stay near their unit leaders. When I went through this part, I had a single archer stick to the fences and just keep shooting them while the rest of his unit was halfway across the map.
At the top of the hill is more crap and two gun units. Typically, we want to engage ranged units first, since they’re a lot more effective for the AI than they are for us: when the AI uses them, they typically run off on their own while you’re busy fighting off the melee units.
Behind all of the crap units, we run into Stage 2, where this asshole comes in. Apart from being named after a character from NieR, this asshole shows up for his own line of uh… probably six skirmish battles.
We also get the final weapon in our arsenal: special tactics. These absolutely suck, as they cost military might that is better spent on replenishing our ranks and don’t do a whole lot of damage even when they hit.
Chingis (the sword unit leader) can call in the weird Nausicaa planes to do a bombing run. Wait, didn’t these assholes say that the planes don’t work outside Cloudcoil Canyon? Anyway, the bombing run isn’t that big and doesn’t do a whole lot of damage. Khunbish (the archer leader) has a stun that works in a small AOE that would be decent if he was a melee unit, but he isn’t.
You might be asking what’s stopping us from just pulling a Resident Evil and running past everything until we get to the boss. The answer is these gates, which won’t open until all the enemies nearby are dead.
Next up, we have siege towers. Siege towers do (as far as I can tell) a fraction of the damage an archer unit does but have a bit more HP. They’re usually pretty harmless - most of the time, we can just kite the melee units away from it and then deal with it later (or run past it.)
We did lose a bit of military might killing off all the cannon fodder, but there’s usually pickups hidden around the map. Destroying the tower dropped a “medium” boost that more or less restored all of the might we lost getting to it. You might notice the white flag in the middle: enemy structures can be rebuilt for military might, though this isn’t something we typically want to do because of how useless towers are.
Here, we run into the second type of enemy structure: the command post. Command posts will spawn units as long as they are up: though they won’t start spawning until at least one unit is dead - in other words they’re limited to how many they can have out at once. In this tutorial battle we can’t rebuild them, but in regular skirmishes we can. They add a small amount of military might every few seconds and are usually not worth it because it takes a while just to pay off what you spent to rebuild them.
Before we move on to the final stage of this battle, we get a tutorial about shock tactics. This is a bar that builds up as Evan’s army kills things, and once full causes your units to always be effective against all enemy unit types and slows down how fast the might gauge goes down. If you combine this with the “all-out attack” feature of the might gauge, you can do a lot of damage very quickly. So clearly, we need to activate this and…
Actually, there’s no real reason to activate shock tactics here, as all of Tyran’s units are hammers and thus already weak to swords. In addition to that, there’s a tiny little oversight that will allow us to win this fight without taking damage. Not that we need to - I just found this amusing.
So, remember how I said that the palisades count as enemy units, and thus the enemy will not attack them? They won’t attack them… but they’ll still try to attack you if they can see you, even if they do not have a clear path to actually reach you.
Naturally, we just stand on the raised ground just to the right of the palisades - keeping our archers outside of the range where they can attack them. They CAN, however, still attack the units on the ground, and due to an exploit in the way the projectiles work, they can reach Tyran while the wand units on the ground cannot reach them because arrows can arc and fireballs cannot. I went and got a drink and the fight was over when I got back, with no soldiers lost.
Easy money. Our units both level up to 3, which is great because this is the last time we’ll be using them. This is, as far as I remember, the only required skirmish battle in the game… and even if there wind up being one or two more, we’ll have units with better abilities later on.
One final note on these by the way: skirmishes are scattered all over the world map and vary wildly in level: there’s one that spawns not far from where this one ends that is level 20. The trick is that if you’re underlevelled for a skirmish battle, you can simply go in, let your units kill a few things to level up, and then lose. Your units keep any levels they gained even if you game over… so you can just keep grinding those for like half an hour and you’ll be at level 20.
We do get some small crafting material rewards, but nothing too unique. I also went ahead and changed the party over. We’ll stop here, since next update is going to start with a cutscene.