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View Full Version : How to mostly win at Mononofu



Semaphore
07-23-2017, 03:55 PM
To explain where I'm coming from, I've spent exactly 4110 gold on the game thus far, or about $41. That's not nothing, and does give me a real advantage over people who spend nothing. But that's hardly whale territory. But it is enough to have made at least the round of 16 in the daimyo tournament four weeks in a row now.

You probably come in with some idea of how much money you're willing to spend on a game you like. Most players are determined to be completely free players. For those willing to pay a modest amount of money, the monthly pass ($5 for 3200 Koban over the course of the month) is the thing to look at and other special offers probably won't be tempting at all. For those few whales who have no problem pouring hundreds or even thousands of dollars into a game, sporadic events that give you a guaranteed UR general or UR or universal EVO cards are the key thing to buy. But also buy the monthly pass.

To state the obvious, you win battles by having a strong team. The components of this are:

1) get strong generals
2) level up your generals
3) switch your generals to strong classes
4) have your generals inherit strong skills
5) equip strong gear
6) level up your gear (at the blacksmith)
7) level up your lab and temple/church skills
8) equip strong artifacts

These are self-explanatory to some degree, but I'll fill in some points that you may have missed.



(1) Get strong generals

Generals come almost exclusively from summoning. If you're not a whale, the generals you deploy will mostly come from gold summoning tickets. There are six ranks of generals: C, UC, R, SR, SSR, and UR. SR generals are easy enough to get that you almost never want to deploy anything below SR.

The exceptions are your first few days of playing the game, the occasional quests (i.e., two or three star versions of a battle) that require low rank generals, and garrisoning a UC general with the famous bugyo I skill in your barracks. Most of the quests that require low rank generals only require the rank, but some require the UC Inaba Ittetsu in particular. Thus, you'll probably want to save off an Inaba Ittetsu for those quests, as well as one of Naoe Kanetsugu, Yamamoto Kansuke, or Hachisuka Masakatsu for the increased troops from your barracks. You can safely use fusion to get rid of any other C or UC generals you get, and sacrifice any R generals.

Because SR generals are far more plentiful than SSR generals, which are in turn far more common than UR generals, early on, you're going to want a party of SR generals. Eventually you move to SSR generals, but it will take a very long time to get to UR generals if you're not a whale. A four star version of a general of one rarity is usually stronger than a one star version of a general the next rarity up, so don't be in a hurry to deploy low star generals just because they're high rarity.

There are two exceptions to this: the UR Tiger of Kai and the SSR Takeda Shingen of Kai. The latter is not the plain SSR Takeda Shingen. Tiger of Kai and Takeda Shingen of Kai are the two strongest generals in the game due to their "Takeda Shingen" and "Koyo Gunkan" skills, respectively. You probably haven't heard anyone tell you that Takeda Shingen of Kai was stronger than UR generals, but +15% attack and defense and +10% speed for your entire team is a devastatingly powerful skill, and enough that you need to get the general onto the field for the buff even if she's weak herself.

Make sure that you do the daily skills to get six gold summoning tickets every day. If winning 10 ranked match battles seems too hard, the trick is to find someone you can beat and then beat him ten times in a row. You'll need to get above 491 in Ranked Match in order to have your nearby potential opponents be stable. Unranked players have to challenge someone in 491-500, so you'll take a lot of challenges if you're in that range. Rather, get your best generals on your offense team, challenge someone, use a fast battle ticket, and challenge someone again until you get up to rank 490 or better.

Once you're high enough in the rankings that you can readily challenge the same opponent ten times in a row, the next key is to pick a weak opponent to challenge. You may recognize some names as players who you know don't have a strong team. But it also helps to challenge players whose best generals are on their offense team, as you'll fight their defense team instead. You can see the leader of a potential opponent's defense team from the icon, and the level of the leader at Menu -> Ranking -> Ranked Match. A team leader below level 35 is a near lock that the player doesn't have his good generals on his defense team. A team leader who hasn't inherited a skill probably isn't that powerful, either.

Once you're strong enough, you can get another gold ticket from the final boss of the daily challenges. Monday and Tuesday are much weaker than the other days.



(2) Level up your generals

There are two parts to this. First, you have to evolve your generals to increase their star rating, eventually up to four stars. Each additional star increases a general's level cap by 5, up to a max of level 55 at four stars. Next, you have to give your general a lot of experience to level him up.

Experience comes from two main sources: the dojo and experience cards. Experience cards mostly come as rewards for winning particular PVE battles. The dojo lets you stash one general per slot in the dojo to slowly gain experience over the course of the next eight hours, at which point, it stops. If you pull out a general early, you keep the experience earned so far. But after eight hours in a dojo, the general stops gaining experience, so you'll need to pull her out and put her back in to get more.

If you use fusion to fuse two generals together, the promoted general gets to keep most of the experience that the consumed general had earned. Most is not all, however. This does mean that promoting a general who you later discover that you don't want is not a complete waste, as you can transfer most of that experience to a different general. But it does mean that there is some waste. If you want to level one general as fast as possible, you can have some random junk generals get experience from the dojo, then fuse them into the general you actually want. I don't recommend that, however, as you want multiple generals to be high level.

There are also evo cards that can be used to evolve any general of a given tier. SR evo cards aren't very valuable, but SSR and UR evo cards sure are. There are also universal evo cards, which display as SSR rarity, but say "universal" and can be used to evolve any rank of general. You should generally prioritize using the evo cards for the strongest generals that you really want. You get your choice of a UR general from finishing the achievements, and can take Tiger of Kai there, and then slowly evolve her as you get evo cards. The end boss of the Monday daily challenges also has a chance of dropping a universal evo card.



(3) Switch your generals to strong classes

There are four tiers of classes, which correspond to a character appearing as yellow, blue, red, or black. You want to get your generals to the black skills quickly. Promotion from yellow to blue is only 30k copper in the store. From blue to red is available in the chapter 1 hidden dungeon, at for trade at port levels 32-39, and from various opponents across chapters 1 and 2. Promotion from red to black is available in the chapter 2 hidden dungeon and at various opponents across chapters 3 and 4 of the campaign.

You can get your characters to the fourth tier of classes relatively early on. And you should, as it makes an enormous difference in character power. You can see the class attack and defense ratings. How these apply is that you take you character's base attack (from skills, gear, etc.), divide by 100, and multiply by your class attack rating to get your final attack. These promotions are thus enormous boosts to attack and defense.

To promote a character class to one tier, the general must be of the corresponding class one tier weaker. For example, to change a general's class to elite marksman, she must already be marksman. The exception is that you can promote any general to any first tier class at any time. If you want to switch from, say, elite crimson rider to elite black rider, you have to go all the way back to cavalry, then light cavalry, then black rider, then elite black rider.

In all four pages of classes corresponding to one of the four base classes (archer, cavalry, infantry, and ronin), the classes on the left half are for a temple and the right half are for a church. Once you get a temple or church, you have to pick one or the other, and can get skills for large buffs to the classes that correspond to that building. Thus, you want your characters to be either almost exclusively of temple classes or almost exclusively of church classes. Some generals get bonuses from skills for being of a particular class, but generals that get bonuses from classes that correspond to the other building likely won't be very useful to you.

Most players seem to go with a temple rather than a church. If you go that route, Elite Guard is your tank class, and Elite Marksman and Elite Black Rider your damage dealers. The other temple classes don't get used much. If you go church, then Heavy Knight is your tank, Heavy Artillery your biggest damage dealer, and Corsair is popular in PVP for the reflect damage. But while most players go temple, church is also viable. For example, Temp has twice won the Daimyo tournament as a church player.



(4) Have your generals inherit strong skills

If you get an SR or higher general to level 55, another general can inherit a skill from that max level general. You get to pick one skill from the feed general to add to the inheriting general. The latter will then add that skill to have four skills in total rather than three. The feed general is destroyed, however.

It takes quite a while to not only get your main generals up to level 55, but other generals up to 55 to inherit skills from. You will want to do this eventually, however, so plan ahead. Have the SR generals that you choose to level up be ones with a strong skill that you'll eventually want other (probably SSR) generals to inherit later. That way, you get the benefit of having a relatively strong SR general on your team in the near term, and eventually get to inherit the skill without having wasted the experience to level up your SR general.

Not all SR generals have a worthwhile skill to inherit. I'm personally rather fond of the +15% attack and defense skills. Do realize that a given percentage of +attack is much stronger than the same percentage of +damage. Likewise, +defense is stronger than the same percentage of -damage. Troops refill skills (e.g., Naoe Kagetsuna, Honganji Kennyo, or Ashikaga Yoshiaki) are also popular skills to inherit. Skills that give fixed amounts of +attack or +defense (e.g., +7 attack per general level) might seem nice when you're low level, but they're pretty worthless later on.

SSR generals tend to have stronger skills than SR generals. Even if you've already got a four star version of an SSR general and get another card for that general, I'd recommend keeping it and trying to eventually get another four star version of the general. Then you can use your second, redundant copy (you can only deploy one of a given general in a team at a time) for a skill for another general to inherit. The only real exception is if you think that not only is the general too weak to be useful, but none of her skills are worth inheriting.

Having multiple four star copies of a UR general would take an enormous amount of time, so it's really only the domain of whales. Speaking of which, if you fight someone who has inherited skills from UR generals, that's a sure sign you're looking at a whale. Be thankful that they pay to keep the game running.



(5) Equip strong gear

Gear comes mostly as rewards for winning PVE battles. The endgame gear that you really want generally comes from either late (e.g., chapter 5 or late chapter 4) campaign battles or temporary events. Check the Japanese wiki for a list of all that is offered and plan accordingly. If you don't speak Japanese, the use Google translate. Some of the descriptions come out fairly garbled, but that's true of the English translation of the game, anyway. Drop rates on chapter 5 gear are around 1% or 2% or so, so be prepared to challenge a level many times to get the drop. You can get pretty good stopgap gear as the Original Bearhead Helmet for defense from daily world bosses and Original Jintai Drum or Original Zhuo Zhuan for accessories from the daimyo world bosses.

Don't wait until you get your endgame gear before bothering with any gear. You'll need lower level gear in the interim just to be able to get to chapter 5. If you sell gear, you get back any money used in successful upgrades of it, but not the money you spent on failed upgrade attempts. Another very important property of gear is that leveling it up at the blacksmith should give large bonuses. For example, if one weapon gives you +20 attack per level and another +40 attack per level, the latter is much stronger than the former.



(6) Level up your gear

You can level up your gear at the blacksmith. Leveling up weapons gives +attack, armors give +defense, and accessories give +max troops. Increasing your maximum troops also increases your attack and defense, so leveling up accessories is actually quite powerful.

Leveling up your gear is a huge copper sink. The cost to attempt to level a piece of gear up to level n is n times:

200 (gray, required level 0-10)
800 (blue, required level 15-25)
2400 (red, required level 30-40)
6400 (purple, required level 41+)

Furthermore, your chance of success at leveling up gear from level n is:

.9(100-n)% (gray)
.8(100-n)% (blue)
.7(100-n)% (red)
.6(100-n)% (purple)
.5(100-n)% (yellow)

Yellow gear can have any level requirement, so it could be on any of the cost schedules. This is the huge copper sink, and you can easily spend over 10 million copper leveling up a single piece of gear. The cost to level a piece of gear n times is proportional to n squared if you count only successful forging attempts. Because the success rate goes down as the level goes up, the cost to level a piece of gear to n grows faster than quadratically in n.

Because the cost schedules are discrete, you probably want to go for gear with level requirements of 10, 25, or 40 when leveling up. For example, a piece of gear that requires level 30 isn't that much stronger than one that requires 25, but it costs three times as much to level it. For the same cost, you could have leveled a piece of gear that requires level 40 and had something much stronger.



(7) Level up your lab and temple/church skills

Initially, lab and temple skills require only copper to level up. To level a skill up to anything in the 8-30 range takes kizuna in addition to copper. Above 30 takes both copper and souls, but no more kizuna. This can make kizuna seem scarce for a while, but once you've leveled your skills all up to 30, you end up with a ton of kizuna and nothing to do with it. Souls are valuable, but you need high levels, and this is the primary use for them.

You want to level most or all of your lab and temple/church skills, and the effects of such skills are tremendously powerful. High rankings in these skills are the primary reason why a strong player's spare parts on his defense team that mostly don't even have gear equipped sometimes fend off weaker attackers in ranked match and port artifact raids.

The other big cost to leveling lab skills is time. Leveling a skill once starts with a cooldown of minutes, but that progresses to hours and eventually days. You want both your lab and temple or church skills on cooldown most of the time to get your levels high. Plan ahead and make sure that you've got the copper and kizuna or souls to level another skill as soon as one comes off cooldown, or perhaps rather, the next time you're online after a skill finishes.



(8) Equip strong artifacts

There are artifacts that are equipped at your port and buff your entire team. There are also artifacts that are equipped by individual generals and buff only that general. The latter tend to be fairly weak, but still better than equipping nothing. Each artifact is either equipped at port or by an individual general. They get mixed together, so that it's not always immediately obvious which is which, which is obnoxious.

You can equip up to three artifacts at your port, but they require temple/church levels 30, 40, and 50, respectively. You want to get your temple or church to level 50 to equip all three artifacts.

There are five rankings of artifacts: gray, blue, red, purple, and yellow. Yellow is very rare, so purple or even red can often be worth equipping. As with fusing generals to rank them up, you can also fuse artifacts. If you level up one artifact then decide that you don't want it anymore, you can fuse it into another and get the points back. I'm not sure if you get 100% back of what you put into it, but if not, it's close. So don't be afraid to level up red artifacts early on until you can get something better.

The key artifact that pretty much everyone should equip is a thunder crystal. This does a small amount of reflect damage when attacked. The reason it is so important is that some generals such as Takenaka Hanbei and Konishi Yukinaga have skills to make it so that what would sometimes have been a killing blow instead leaves them with 1 HP. There are also certain pieces of gear that do this. With a thunder crystal, once you get that enemy general down to 1 HP, the next time she attacks, she dies. Without a thunder crystal, a lucky general can sometimes survive much longer.

The other key artifact is a convoy carriage, which increases your speed. Getting to attack before your opponent in each round is a big advantage. Especially in PVP when battles commonly only last two or three rounds, getting an extra round of attacks in is huge. But even in PVE, you'll want either a convoy carriage or to use crane formation in most battles so that you attack before your enemy.

An enemy thunder crystal makes it especially important to get first attack for your tanks. For example, suppose that you have Takenaka Hanbei as one of your generals and your opponent has a thunder crystal. Suppose also that your Takenaka Hanbei has some sort of healing, such as an Original Zhuo Zhuan equipped or an inherited skill that heals. If your opponent attacks first, then once he brings you down to 1 HP, your next attack kills her due to reflect damage. If you attack first, then when your opponent brings her down to 1 HP, she'll get the healing between rounds before her next attack, and then the minor reflect damage of a thunder crystal won't finish her off.



Resources

In order to level up everything you need, there are a number of resources in the game: copper, kizuna, souls, koban, troops, experience, rations, and fast battle tickets. Let's cover how to get them and what you should use them on.



(1) Copper

You'll quickly learn that copper is scarce, and it ends up remaining scarce all the way into the endgame. There are two main sources of copper: your residence and battle rewards. There are also other minor sources of copper such as daily world bosses or daily login rewards, but most copper comes from either your residence or battle rewards.

For your residence, you can collect copper periodically, and then there's a timer before you can collect it again. As you level up your residence, both the amount of copper and the delay before you can recollect rise. Eventually the timer tops out at about 6 hours, 36 minutes, while the amount per harvest continues to rise. You should generally collect the copper from your residence whenever you can. If you generally play the game in the evening, but can also log on for a few minutes in the morning to collect copper and put some other things on cooldown, that makes a huge difference as compared to only playing in the evening.

You can also garrison a general in your residence to increase the copper collection. Higher level means more copper, and rarity doesn't matter. Which general does matter, however, as SR Shibata Katsuie and UC Rokkaku Yoshikata both have a skill to greatly increase copper collection. A level 55 Shibata Katsuie means +70% copper collection as compared to no general garrisoned. Once you get your residence high level, that can get you about 1 million copper per collection. Depending on your schedule, that can be 3 million copper per day from your residence alone.

Like other buildings, your residence cannot be higher level than your castle. But if you level up your castle, you should always level up your residence to keep pace with it. The copper you pay to level it up will pay for itself in greater collection soon enough.

Some battles offer far more copper as rewards than others. Some events offer a lot of copper. Daily challenges are pretty good copper, as are hidden dungeon opponents and the convoy at the end of most campaign zones. Other campaign opponents usually don't give much copper and typically shouldn't be fought for the sake of copper.

Copper is used for many things, including leveling up buildings, leveling up lab and temple/church skills, leveling up gear at the blacksmith, the first tier of artifact hunting at a port, buying additional inventory slots, and buying upgrades from a yellow class to blue at the store. Leveling up buildings is your top priority early on, and this later shifts to leveling up lab and temple/church skills. For things like the class changes that require only small amounts of copper, you can generally just pay it when it shows up and not worry much about it.

You'll eventually want all of the inventory slots that can be unlocked with copper. That costs somewhat over 5 million copper before any additional slots must be purchased with koban instead. You can buy extra slots as you need them, but do be aware that you'll eventually want them.

Leveling up your gear at the blacksmith is an enormous money sink that can consume arbitrarily large amounts of copper. It's generally the last priority of what to spend your copper on after you've bought everything else that you really need.

When to stop leveling up buildings and instead spend the copper at the blacksmith is a judgment call. You'll eventually want your church/temple to be at least level 50 for the artifacts. Make sure that your blacksmith, lab, and church/temple are always high enough to not block you from leveling something else. You stop getting new trade options at the port at level 50.



(2) Kizuna

Kizuna is an early to mid game resource that eventually becomes abundant. Kizuna comes mainly from convoys, and the 600 per day from daily event quests. You can also get a lot of kizuna early on from ranking quests, that is, being ranked high in the arena. This is significant because you get the kizuna when it's scarce.

The main uses for kizuna are leveling lab and church/temple skills up to level 8-30, paying for an artifact run at the port, buying a base class change at the store, and silver summons for new general. Buy the class change when you need it, but otherwise, save your kizuna for lab and church/temple skills until you've leveled enough of them past the range where it takes kizuna that you're no longer short on it. Leveling those skills to level 31+ takes souls rather than kizuna.

Once kizuna is no longer needed for leveling skills, then it becomes plentiful. That makes the port artifact runs for the second and third boats from kizuna basically free. Silver summons have a pitiful rate of giving you a general that you'll want to use, but they do let you implicitly convert kizuna to souls (by sacrificing any R or higher general you get) at a ratio of about 200:1.

If you want to try your hand at getting kizuna from the ranked match quests, you'll basically have to accept that you're not going to get the gold tickets from the dailies for a while. Wait until late in the day, challenge the weakest opponents you can find 10 or slightly less than 10 ranks above you until you use up your challenges, and then switch your best generals to your defense team until the results are tallied at midnight. You'll want to switch your best generals to your defense team when you're not logged on to try to fend off some challenges. Whether it's worth doing this at all is debatable, as you'll forgo some valuable gold summon tickets.



(3) Souls

Souls are a major mid to late game resource with several uses. The critical use that you need to save up for is leveling lab and temple/church skills beyond level 30. Leveling such a skill to level (30 + n) requires 10n souls. Don't think that's too expensive so you'll stop. You have to if you want to be competitive, and that's the primary use for souls. Other uses for souls include top tier ships for artifact runs, certain high end exchanges at the port, and buying a soul ticket for a guaranteed SSR or better general.

That guaranteed SSR or better general is likely to look awfully tempting when you're new to the game. Don't do it. Just don't. Maybe once you get so many souls accumulated that you're not at real risk of running out of the ones you need for skills, it's okay. But if buying a soul ticket leaves you with under 1000 souls remaining, you're doing it wrong. SSR generals aren't really that rare. You get one about every other day or so from daily gold tickets alone.

Using souls for ships is more useful earlier on than later. Go ahead and pay the 30 souls for a top tier port artifact run early on. Once you've got purple or better versions of the key artifacts you want, you may wish to lay off of the soul ships for a while. Getting a purple artifact rather than red equipped at the port matters a lot more than upgrading your artifacts a little faster once you're just going to fuse whatever you get from a ship run into other artifacts anyway.

The major source of souls is by sacrificing R or better generals. You get 5 souls for an R general, 15 for SR, or 50 for SSR. This is where the R generals you summon go, as well as any SR generals that you don't want. Unwanted SR generals might seem like a luxury when you're new, but it eventually becomes all or nearly all SR generals. SSR is scarce enough that you probably don't want to sacrifice them unless you have no use for that particular general.

There are some other, lesser sources of souls, such as clearing certain levels (especially in events), daily login, and placing high on the world bosses on certain days. Souls are valuable, so get them where you can, but they mostly come from sacrificing generals. Or at least that was the case until the current temporary event.



(4) Koban

Koban is basically the cash shop currency. How you use your koban will depend tremendously on how much you have, which in turn depends on how much you're willing to use your credit card. But even if you're a completely free player, you can get some koban from various sources, especially temporary events. While I personally buy a monthly pass, that's probably not that far over half of the koban I get in total.

There are a lot of things that you can spend your koban on, most of which are too wasteful to even qualify as whale bait. Shortening cooldowns costs 1 koban per minute, for example, which comes out to 1440 per day. Buying copper or construction tickets with koban is likewise foolishly wasteful unless you're so extravagant as to make most whales shy away from your spending habits.

The primary use for koban is summoning generals, especially the platinum x11 summon. Some seasonal event summons are worthwhile and others aren't. Platinum summons are a better use of koban than gold summons, as by the time you're pouring koban into this, SR and lower generals are basically junk to sacrifice for souls.

Other notable uses for koban are buying more inventory slots and dojo slots. Once you've bought all of the inventory slots that can be purchased with copper, additional slots cost 100 koban each. You'll want several if you hope to equip both your offense and defense teams with gear.

Dojo slots let you level generals without burning experience cards. You can level one general per dojo slot at a time, and it can eventually be worth over 200k experience per slot per day. You get one dojo slot for free, then can buy a second for 300 koban and a third for 1000 koban. I haven't bought the 1000 koban slot, so I don't know what happens to prices after that, but I expect the price per slot to keep rising.

One other notable use of koban is fast battle tickets. You can get 50 tickets for 50 koban, which comes to only 1 koban per ticket. I'll discuss this more in the section on fast battle tickets, but buying some with koban isn't necessary crazy.



(5) Troops

Any battle you fight costs you troops unless all of your generals finish with full troops. You have some reserve amount of troops that can replace any losses so that your generals fight future battles starting with a full complement of troops. So long as you have plenty of troops in reserve, everything seems fine. But if you run out, your generals start battles with reduced troops, which makes it much harder to win.

Troops really aren't that scarce of a resource. The main sources of them are from your barracks and from winning certain battles, especially hidden dungeons and convoys at the end of campaign maps. You can increase your troops generated by barracks by leveling up the barracks and by garrisoning a general there. For the latter, pick a UC general with the "Famous Bugyo I" skill. If you run out of troops, you can also buy them from your barracks at a cost of 2 copper each. I've never had to do this.

It's also notable that troops gained by winning certain battles go to your mailbox if you're already full. This allows you to accumulate enormous numbers of troops over time. You can click the organize button to merge many troops into a single mailbox slot. A single slot caps at 9999999 troops, and organize will use multiple slots if you go above that.

Troop loss can notably be mitigated by the "healing" lab skill. If you would have lost 10000 troops in a battle, for example, but have healing level 30, then you only lose 7000 troops instead. The other important effect of this skill is that because your battle grade is based on troop loss as a percentage of your total troops, it makes it easier to get higher grades. For example, if you started with 20000 troops and lost 5000, that's normally a B. If you had healing level 30, that reduces your troop loss to 3500, which gets you an A for the battle. That makes it massively easier to get full evaluation on some maps that ask you to get a grade of A or better.



(6) Experience

As in many other games, you have to level up your generals. There are four reasons to level up a general:

1) Higher level generals are stronger in battle, with higher attack, defense, and max troops.
2) Higher level generals can equip better gear, which also makes them stronger in battle.
3) A general must be level 55 before her skill can be inherited by another general.
4) Higher level generals give more benefit when garrisoned in the residence (for copper) or barracks (for troops).

Ultimately, you'll want to level up your generals for all of those reasons. Unlike most games, generals do not level by fighting or otherwise being used. Rather, there are three ways to level up your generals:

1) Station her in the dojo.
2) Fuse experience cards into her.
3) Fuse other generals into her.

Option (2), fusing experience cards, will generally provide the bulk of your experience gain. Experience cards are gained mainly from seasonal dungeons, and not all events give much in the way of experience cards. Thus, experience gains vary wildly from one week to the next. Check all of the dungeons as they show up and see if they give experience cards. Play those that give prodigious experience cards as the way to level up the generals that need it.

A lesser but still important source of experience cards is convoys at the end of campaign maps. Those are always available rather than being event-dependent, though each convoy can only be defeated three times per day. They have a chance of giving you several experience cards. They start out with small experience cards, eventually getting up to 10 at once. At higher level campaigns, they transition to medium experience cards rather than small, and eventually give you 6 cards at once.

The dojo was covered earlier in this guide. Fusing one general into another is mainly a way to discard unwanted C and UC generals, as it gives very little experience. The exception is if the general to be eliminated has already leveled up herself, as was covered earlier.



(7) Rations

You can't just challenge PVE opponents whenever you like. Rather, each such attack consumes 1 march point. March points refill naturally at a rate of one per six minutes, up to a maximum of 15. Thus, it takes 90 minutes to completely refill your march points that you could, in some cases burn through in under 10 minutes.

In order to play a lot, most of the march points you consume will have to come from rations that refill them. There are two types of rations: small and standard. Small rations recover 2 march points, while standard rations recover 10. Either type can push your number of available march points above the cap of 15, but this is wasteful, as it will disable the refill timer until you drop back below 15.

Normal rations are the main ones, and come mainly from defeating convoys in world bosses. This includes both the 8 p.m. daily world bosses and also the daimyo world bosses that run whenever the daimyo decides to run them. The daimyo can leave a message on the cabinet building, and friendly daimyos use this to announce when they will launch the daimyo world boss. The daimyo world boss opens 30 minutes after the daimyo activates it, so you'll at minimum have a 30 minute warning if you happen to be online.

Beating all of the convoys that are accessed in a world boss three times each might give you 10 or so standard rations on average. The exact number depends both on your own luck in what you get and also on how many convoys are made accessible. The first three generally become accessible within a few minutes of the boss opening. Sometimes three is all you'll get, but depending on how many top players are willing to burn a ton of fast battle tickets that day, it's decently common to get access to a fourth, less common to get a fifth, and occasionally even a sixth convoy is accessible. This tends to go further on days when the rewards are good, especially offering koban to top rank finishers.

Small rations come from having people on your friends list assist you. Assisting a friend costs you 1000 copper and doesn't directly benefit you, but gives your friend a free small ration. You can assist up to 20 friends per day, and your friends list is capped at 50 players. One small ration is worth vastly more than 1000 copper, but that doesn't do you much good if you assist a bunch of friends who never assist you back. You can see who has assisted you recently in the All Records section of the mailbox, and be sure to assist him back if you want to keep getting small rations. Two march points might not seem like much, but multiply by 20 friends and 40 march points per day is significant.

Different people have wildly different approaches to this repeated prisoner's dilemma sort of game. Some sort of reciprocation is generally considered the optimal strategy, but a lot of people won't reciprocate. My personal strategy is that a new friend gets one free assist. After that, you assist me, I assist you back. If I'm occasionally forced not to reciprocate (e.g., more than 20 friends assist me in a day or you assist me after I've logged off for the night), I'll make up for it the next time you don't assist me. Meanwhile, people who quit the game or rarely to never assist me eventually get culled from my friends list to make room for others.



(8) Fast battle tickets

You might not think of fast battle tickets as an important resource to manage, but you should. A fast battle ticket instantly ends a battle in progress so that you can do something else or start another battle. There is a cooldown of about six seconds so no matter how fast you click, you can't start two battles within six seconds of each other. But that's vastly faster than the couple of minutes that a lot of battles will take. A fast battle ticket does not change the results of a battle, but only lets you move on to do something else sooner.

There are several reasons why fast battle tickets are important. One is that if you can't play for very long in a given day, burning through some fast battle tickets may allow you to still do the most important, highest reward values. One special case of this is for events just before the weekly maintenance. A week-long event can actually be played eight times, with the eighth only from midnight through 2 am on Thursday. Many people have a schedule that doesn't allow staying up until 2 am EDT, but burning some tickets to get the important event stuff in 10 minutes means you won't have to in order to get the extra day of event rewards.

But even if you have a lot of play time, they're still valuable. One major use of fast battle tickets is for world bosses, both of the daily and daimyo varieties. The people who top the leaderboards by killing 20 million or more enemy troops aren't doing so by initiating a battle and then waiting three minutes for it to end. They're burning fast battle tickets to make it possible to initiate dozens of battles in the half hour period. That's usually essential if you want rewards for finishing in the top 3, or sometimes even in the top 10. It also allows you to fight more battles against the weaker early world boss mobs with less health, so that you're more likely to be the one to finish them off.

Fast battle tickets also allow you to get several quick battles in when up against a deadline. This can be trying to beat the midnight reset or trying to finish off the convoys before a world boss ends. For example, if you realize that there's a world boss running with 1 minute left, burning several fast battle tickets could allow you to get 8 or 9 convoy battles in in that time, rather than only 3 or so before time expires.

Fast battle tickets come from a lot of sources, but probably the largest is the daily challenges. The next to last opponent gives 10 fast battle tickets as one of its rewards for star completion. Some other opponents also give 10 fast battle tickets for star completion. You can also buy 50 tickets for only 50 koban from the store.

Unregistered
07-23-2017, 09:32 PM
didnt know anyone played this game but seeing your dedication im inclined to try it out, thanks!

DarQman
07-25-2017, 03:12 PM
Thanks for your work on this guide, it's really interesting.

I have a few additional questions/remarks to it:



Do realize that a given percentage of +attack is much stronger than the same percentage of +damage. Likewise, +defense is stronger than the same percentage of -damage.


Do you have any formulas on how damage and damage prevention are calculated? Or what is your source for that?
Wouldn't that depend on the amount of ATK/DEF you have?



(8) Equip strong artifacts


Which artifact(s) do you prefer in your port besides convoy carriage and thunder crystal?

Which artifact(s) are best used on my generals?



Small rations come from having people on your friends list assist you. Assisting a friend costs you 1000 copper and doesn't directly benefit you, but gives your friend a free small ration.


Assisting friends grants you 10 Kizuna for each. So you can get 200 additional Kizuna a day, which is especially great for beginners.

Semaphore
07-25-2017, 05:50 PM
I don't know the exact damage formulas. There are so many different buffs that can interact in weird ways, and a lot that only sometimes trigger at random. I had long observed that +attack percentage seemed to be intuitively stronger than +damage percentage. I finally did a controlled test and found that in one particular situation, having Takeda Shingen of Kai in the party for the +15% attack for all allies buff increased the damage that one particular general did to one particular mob by about 27%. That's a lot more than 15%, and about in line with what I had intuitively expected. I repeated that several times to verify that it was repeatable, and intentionally didn't have any random boosts equipped for that test.

I personally use an emerald as my third port artifact, largely because I happened to get a perfect rarity one once. That's not an endorsement of emerald as being stronger than some alternatives.

I personally use a buddha sculpture as my generals' artifacts for the heal. It isn't necessarily that useful in PVP, where generals dying in a single round is common, but I think it's the best option in PVE. None of the general artifacts are all that powerful.

DarQman
07-26-2017, 09:25 AM
I don't know the exact damage formulas. There are so many different buffs that can interact in weird ways, and a lot that only sometimes trigger at random. I had long observed that +attack percentage seemed to be intuitively stronger than +damage percentage. I finally did a controlled test and found that in one particular situation, having Takeda Shingen of Kai in the party for the +15% attack for all allies buff increased the damage that one particular general did to one particular mob by about 27%. That's a lot more than 15%, and about in line with what I had intuitively expected. I repeated that several times to verify that it was repeatable, and intentionally didn't have any random boosts equipped for that test.

I personally use an emerald as my third port artifact, largely because I happened to get a perfect rarity one once. That's not an endorsement of emerald as being stronger than some alternatives.

I personally use a buddha sculpture as my generals' artifacts for the heal. It isn't necessarily that useful in PVP, where generals dying in a single round is common, but I think it's the best option in PVE. None of the general artifacts are all that powerful.

Thanks for your opinion on artifacts. I mostly use Buddha, too. Only on Artillery I use Armillary Sphere for that first round extra damage.

Regarding +% dmg vs. +% ATK: I did a quick comparison between a Lvl 3 Uchigatana (72 ATK, +5% ATK) and a Lvl 1 Hook Spear (72 ATK, +5% dmg) on the same generals and the Hook Spear always did more damage. This might change with larger numbers of ATK.
I guess we have the same situation at DEF vs. Dmg reduction.

The interesting question would be: at which ATK numbers starts +ATK% to outperform +DMG%.

Semaphore
07-26-2017, 04:55 PM
Thanks for your opinion on artifacts. I mostly use Buddha, too. Only on Artillery I use Armillary Sphere for that first round extra damage.

Regarding +% dmg vs. +% ATK: I did a quick comparison between a Lvl 3 Uchigatana (72 ATK, +5% ATK) and a Lvl 1 Hook Spear (72 ATK, +5% dmg) on the same generals and the Hook Spear always did more damage. This might change with larger numbers of ATK.
I guess we have the same situation at DEF vs. Dmg reduction.

The interesting question would be: at which ATK numbers starts +ATK% to outperform +DMG%.

How large of damage numbers are we talking about here? If you did the testing with some level 1 general and the damage from infantry suppression or whatever the relevant lab skill is is a large fraction of your damage, and that gets boosted by the +5% damage, then that could explain the discrepancy. I'm not sure if that lab skill gets boosted by percentage damage buffs, however.

DarQman
07-26-2017, 06:34 PM
How large of damage numbers are we talking about here? If you did the testing with some level 1 general and the damage from infantry suppression or whatever the relevant lab skill is is a large fraction of your damage, and that gets boosted by the +5% damage, then that could explain the discrepancy. I'm not sure if that lab skill gets boosted by percentage damage buffs, however.

It was with a Lvl 40 SSR Sword Master with about 2000 ATK and only flat increases, no RNG Procs. The Dmg was somewhere in the 2000s with only a small difference between the weapons. Infantry Supression might or might not interfere, I don't know.

Well, I guess we can't really solve this without more information on the formulas behind the system.
I'll just take your observations as a guideline, until I can maybe test this in a more "realistic" scenario.

Thanks again for your effort!

Semaphore
08-11-2017, 10:51 PM
And so of course just after I write this saying that you have to conserve souls for use in the lab and temple/church and before I even post it, an event starts that hands out lots of medium soul cards and makes them not scarce. Oh well; if you've got several thousand souls, you should be able to figure out that it's okay to use some of them on soul tickets. Just don't end up with basically 0 souls when the event ends.

I should probably also add Sanada Yukitaka (SSR version, not UC version) as one of the extremely powerful generals. Her attack boost skill is extremely powerful and puts her in the same category as Tiger of Kai. It looks like Master Strategist might belong in that discussion, too, though I don't have one myself and haven't seen one used to devastating effect, so I'm not sure.

Semaphore
08-18-2017, 06:55 PM
In case you were wondering, the final 35k point reward from the War Prime event is a universal EVO card. Getting that does entail burning through likely something north of 10 million troops, some of which could cost your 2 copper each if you don't have a ton saved up. But even if you call it paying something like 20 million copper for a universal EVO card, I'd say that's worth it, as UR generals are hard to evolve.

Of course, if you hadn't been doing the event at all and just found out now, it's probably too late.

Semaphore
08-18-2017, 09:01 PM
Alternate thread title: how to win Daimyo while spending under $50. The answer, of course, is Takeda Shingen of Kai, five water guns, and high rank lab and temple skills. I expected water guns to quickly become the universally used weapon in the tournament, as they're the strongest weapon in the game--even counting things on the Japanese wiki that aren't released here unless I'm misreading the awkward translations. They're also 2.4k cost tier for upgrades rather than 6.4k like most endgame weapons.

Just because I keep track of such things, I've spent exactly 4620 gold on the game thus far. That includes 3100 for koban before the monthly pass existed, three monthly passes, and 20 for the first round of the "step up summon" event that has run twice.

I've drawn 10 UR generals directly, as well as obtaining 7 UR EVO or universal EVO cards. I've also drawn 159 SSR generals, including SSR EVO cards but not universal EVO cards, as the latter really should be used to evolve UR generals even if the card is technically SSR. In all cases, the cards include event rewards, login rewards, and battle rewards, not just the gacha. Those counts are totals since the game went live about four months ago. That is, on average, about 1 UR per week and significantly over 1 SSR per day. If you disregard the recently concluded summer event that was technically two events but nearly identical to each other (about 20 soul tickets worth of medium soul cards and 12 SSR EVO cards), it's about one SSR general per day. SSR isn't really that rare in this game.

I don't have the exact numbers, but I'm guessing that about 20 of the SSR generals and I think only one of the UR came from summons paid for by koban, mostly but not entirely the platinum x11 summons--and that includes koban earned in-game. That's a small fraction of what I've gotten, and certainly less than I got from the recent summer events alone. The game does rely on being able to intermittently click to start another battle while doing something else for hours at a time, but it's not really pay to win. And it's certainly not as pay to win as some of the whale-bait events make it look to someone unfamiliar with the game, such as the current one of spend $250 to get 1 jade ticket, 9 soul tickets, 20 million copper, 3 UR EVO cards, 3 SSR EVO cards, and some other stuff. Thank you to the people who pay for that to keep the game running, but it won't help you as much as you think.

I had actually written off this tournament as a loss before being surprised to see that I won. Three of my five inherited generals on the winning team are only SR rarity, not even SSR. I have some others that I'm working on leveling, but got just after the summer event that was handing out so many experience cards ended. And then I can have the strongest possible general in the entire game: a Takeda Shingen of Kai, with an inherited Koyo Gunkan skill from another Takeda Shingen of Kai, plus a water gun. Stacking that sort of team-wide buffs is devastatingly powerful, even if that general won't actually kill much herself.

For those on my server who are wondering, I'm planning on daimyo world bosses at 1 pm EDT (server time) on Saturday and Sunday, and then 8:35 pm EDT for the weekdays. I'll edit the cabinet message to say so when I figure out how. I'm guessing that I won't have access until tomorrow, as Temp was the daimyo to pick the boss times this week.

Semaphore
08-28-2017, 07:53 PM
I've just done a quick test to confirm that, when you fuse a general who has leveled up quite a ways into another general, 70% of the experience put into the first general carries over. That's about in line with what I expected.

As for whether attack power or bonus damage is stronger, I think it varies some on the power and leadership ratings of the generals involved. I've got a Sanada Yukitaka (+150% attack power) and a Tiger of Kai (350% damage). Sanada Yukitaka tends to deal more damage against weak generals with low power and leadership, while Tiger of Kai tends to deal more damage against strong generals with high power and leadership. That's without changing my own generals, and seems to hold regardless of the defense rating of the opponent.

Semaphore
09-17-2017, 10:28 PM
I have now verified that the level cap is 65. Your castle cannot go above level 65, which means that no other buildings can go above level 65. That means that you cannot forge gear above level 65, nor can your lab or church/temple skills go above level 65. When buildings are at level 65, rather than saying the stats for the next level on the info screen, it just says ---

Lab and church/temple skills being capped at 65 is pretty much purely theoretical for now, as each level of each skill is going to take something like a week of cooldown. But not being able to forge gear to above level 65 is a considerable limitation. I've already got a lot of gear at level 65, and I'm probably not the only one. For what it's worth, the expected cost to forge a piece of purple gear from level 0 to 65 is about 42 million copper. For a yellow piece of high level gear, it's about 51 million copper.

On the rebellion event (previously the crusader event), I got 48 soul tickets in 6515 victories, which is about 0.74%. If we assume a 1% drop rate, then that is more than two standard deviations below the expected value, so my previous estimate of 1% was probably too high. I got about as many soul tickets from cashing in souls dropped during the event as getting soul tickets directly.

I now think that my Sanada Yukitaka/Tiger of Kai comparison above was actually caused by Sanada Yukitaka's "24 Generals" skill, which increases damage to non-cavalry. I think that that was throwing off my comparison and I didn't realize it.

On the endgame farming drop rates, I've now done opponents 4 through 7 on map 6-4 several hundred times in total. I didn't keep exact counts, but I'm going to estimate that the curse fragment drop rate is around 1% or perhaps a little higher. The two gold ticket drop rate is around 3%. Thus, if you spend 100 koban to get 10 standard rations and burn them all on endgame non-convoy farming, you can expect to get on average about 6 gold tickets or so out of it, in addition to a curse fragment. That makes buying tickets more directly with koban look like a really bad idea unless you're either a whale or care only about the UR drop rate.

In case you're wondering, Temp and Semaphore are the only players who have cleared the campaigns entirely on my server. Nootaku, Aargaez, Vermillion, Arikromus, Nylem, and Rimuru have also cleared the seventh opponent on 6-4. TruelyNice and zantetsuken are the only other players to ever beat an opponent that can drop curse fragments. It is perhaps not a coincidence that I've just named 10 of the top 11 finishers in the rebellion event, with Aqua-chan as the exception.

thatoneguyfromwork
09-26-2017, 01:45 AM
Quick question since people in this topic seem pretty knowledgeable about the game. Is arena for veterans only?

I can only seem to select the top 500 to view/attack, I'm ranked 42000ish. I've only been playing for about a week so I'm nowhere near the strength of a top 500. It would be nice to do something beside campaign, espicially since I'm starting to hit a wall and I'm not having enough coins to level my castle everyday.

Semaphore
09-26-2017, 05:37 PM
Quick question since people in this topic seem pretty knowledgeable about the game. Is arena for veterans only?

I can only seem to select the top 500 to view/attack, I'm ranked 42000ish. I've only been playing for about a week so I'm nowhere near the strength of a top 500. It would be nice to do something beside campaign, espicially since I'm starting to hit a wall and I'm not having enough coins to level my castle everyday.

Arena has both the daily ladder and a weekly tournament. You should participate in both, for different reasons.

The reasons to participate in the weekly tournament are simple. It costs nothing to enter, but you get 50k copper for participating, plus 100k per match you win. The 50 koban team change fee is if you enter, then later that week decide to change your team. You can enter a completely independent team each week if so inclined. So if you enter, at worst, you get 50k copper for losing your first match. If you're lucky enough to draw an easy opponent or two, you might win more than that.

As for the daily ladder, you should participate in that, too. The goal of the daily ladder is to win ten matches in which you're the attacker, as this gets you two gold tickets. Winning matches where someone else attacks you don't count toward this total. You can only challenge people within ten ranks of your own, but you can challenge below you as well as above. If you challenge someone above you and win, you trade positions in the rankings.

The key to winning at ladder matches is to choose easy opponents. If you challenge someone, you get your offense team, while they get their defense team. For most players, their best generals and their best gear is on their offense team. People commonly don't have any gear equipped at all on their defense team, and sometimes only trot out a single general. The ladder screen will show you the icon of the leader of the defense team of possible opponents. The ranking that shows the full top 500 will show you the level of the leader of the defense team. A level below 35 is a sure sign of an easy opponent.

Ranks 491-500 are volatile, because everyone who isn't ranked can only challenge players in that range. So you'd really like to stay up the top 490 indefinitely. But if you're rank 370 and see that the player who is rank 372 has a level 1 leader on his defense team, you can challenge him ten times in a row, claim your ten wins, claim your two gold tickets, and be done with daily ladder matches for the day.

Orion Lady
09-28-2017, 10:02 PM
Is changing to a Musketeer unit to get a skill bonus of x2.5 DMG useful at all if one has Temple instead of Church, and is it worth to change units to archer to get one extra target but having DMG reduced by 10% ?

Semaphore
09-28-2017, 10:09 PM
Is changing to a Musketeer unit to get a skill bonus of x2.5 DMG useful at all if one has Temple instead of Church, and is it worth to change units to archer to get one extra target but having DMG reduced by 10% ?

I assume that you're talking about Demon King of the Six Heavens. If so, then the answer is that the general is pretty useless. A zero star UR will get destroyed by a four star SR. Using UR EVO or Universal EVO cards to get Demon King of the Six Heavens to four stars is a massive waste of very scarce resources that would be better used on just about any other UR general.

It's not a fixed 2.5x damage bonus. It's a small chance at it that relies on having high intelligence, which you won't because the general is zero stars. So the real answer is, it doesn't matter what class you set the general to, as you don't want her on your team.

Semaphore
09-29-2017, 10:45 PM
In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I no longer reciprocate with everyone on my friends list who assists me. It's capped at 20 per day, and I do assist 20 people pretty much every day, trying to reciprocate for as many as I can. But most likely as a result of this thread, I seem to be averaging getting assisted by a little over 20 people per day, and that means that I can't assist them all back.

I do prioritize assisting those who assist me every day or nearly so, such as the two people who have now assisted me for more than 80 consecutive days. (Yes, I keep track of that.) But I can no longer promise to assist back everyone who assists me, which for now means that the people who only assist once or twice per week don't necessarily get assisted back.

AnimeLuna
12-05-2017, 02:53 AM
Hi I'm new to the game and I'm a little confused. When you say the classes on the left are for temple and the ones on the right are church do you mean starting from the two blue classes? Or the left side of the red and black classes are temple and the right side of red and black are church?

Locutus
12-05-2017, 03:49 PM
Hi I'm new to the game and I'm a little confused. When you say the classes on the left are for temple and the ones on the right are church do you mean starting from the two blue classes? Or the left side of the red and black classes are temple and the right side of red and black are church?The classes that descend from the left side blue class are for temple, the classes descending from the right side class are for church. For example, Calvary: Light Cavalry and all the classes descending from it are for the temple - Heavy Cavalry and the all the classes descending from it are for the church.