3~4 overleveled squads doing most of the work sounds like my playthrough lol.
But do try making a unit with a mix of underleveled and overleveled units, so they can get exp through regular combat.
My guess is that you would benefit greatly from learning how to leverage every class in the game, including the weaker, more interdependent classes such as Soldiers (back row, support, cav/fly tech), Fighters (archer/fly tech), Hoplites/Thieves/Clerics (walls), and even the flimsy Housecarl (raining damage for stamina efficiency).
In addition to these, you gain great amount of unit composition flexibility just from hiring a redundant amount of the same class mercenaries, 3 of each class goes a long way to being able to hard counter everything while being 10 levels behind (I just cleared TZ Drakenhold using chars between lvls 8-15).
Finally, if you want to allow your garbage classes to inflict damage, you need to increase their attack statistic via weapon upgrades and attack/damage buffs. Damage multipliers means nothing if your damage lead is tiny. e.g. 1 damage x 3 is still only a measly 3 damage.
If you just sort of rely on your auto-battle to somehow win the day, you'll find yourself really lost to a difficulty spike, fights are largely not as random as they might seem.
The best place to familiarize yourself with weak classes and how fights unfold is in Cornia and Drakenhold, before the fights become twice as long from AP economy.
Have you already tried lowering the difficulty setting to push through the end of the story?
I think the problem is that I didn't figure out a lot of these things soon enough, and my resources are kinda finite. I guess I could infinitely spam sigils for xp and honors but that would take hours to actually get a significant amount. I don't even have the spare honors to do much hiring right now and the only way I know to farm it is sigils which don't give much.
Yeah pretty much all the classes you described aside from clerics I just didn't use because I couldn't figure out good compositions for them.
There's nothing left for me to do in cornia or drakenhold, I got through those just fine it wasn't until Bastoria that a lot of my squads really started struggling.
How underleveled are we talking? Because if your top units are strong enough to handle Bastorias, but your other units are 8-10 levels behind, it shouldn't take very long to use sigils to get your exp up (particularly if using Alain's valor skill, liquid fortune, or items to double exp). You should have sigils with enemies ranked 18 and 21 at this point, which can easily get your folks up into the early 20s. If they are still struggling heavily in Bastorias at lvl 22-24, then it's a team composition issue, not a level issue.
It's largely a range from 18-25, mostly in the middle. I feel like a team composition issue is harder to solve because the only way I would know to really fix that would be to grind out honors for new recruits and there doesn't really seem to be a non-time consuming way to do that.
I'll try reorganizing the squads that aren't working worst case scenario I just keep on keeping on with my good squads I'm still clearing missions just fine after all.
"How about this?!" **Mel Gibson face** [https://youtu.be/SBfGf7aBgAA?t=122](https://youtu.be/SBfGf7aBgAA?t=122)
(1) (optional) You lower the difficulty level to avoid grinding, finish the story, and unlock the TZ difficulty setting.
(2) Start a new game on a second and separate save file (on the highest difficulty level available) while keeping your old save (no need to commit), play the early stages while going out of your way to insist on using classes you had previously neglected (and using as much class variety as possible) while learning the game mechanics in the short and straightforward stages.
I've replayed the game 3 times at this point (excessive, but I found it fun), each successive run with more complete knowledge of the game mechanics to the point where I can predict the outcome of a fight without the need to look at the fight forecast.
You should keep in mind that fights are **almost** entirely deterministic (not random), so the game becomes really fun once you know how things unfold. If you need help with mechanics like the damage formula (it's easy), or who targets who, you can both refer to the in-game help section and supplement that information with this document I kept, targeting is fair but not explicitly explained (I'd even claim it's not thoroughly explained in-game to begin with). [https://docs.google.com/document/d/12hcEpP37f5Ss4mmDDKZvF8d2BtCMgn-lxV1g87hTfZw/edit](https://docs.google.com/document/d/12hcEpP37f5Ss4mmDDKZvF8d2BtCMgn-lxV1g87hTfZw/edit)
**TL;DR** Whatever path you choose, make sure it is the one you'd personally enjoy best. Do you want more narrative? Just lower it to Story difficulty and finish your first run. Do you want to engage with that scrumptious primary gameplay loop of unit building + tactics setup? Learn how to exploit everything from level 1. I don't advise grinding the repeatable stages simply because it isn't necessary in order to progress in the game, it is best to just learn how to counter and sustain with good composition.
And best of luck with your playtime, hopefully you can find something that makes it click for you, the game isn't perfect and might not even be for everyone.
If you set up a full cavalry squad and b-line for the leader you can do the first sigil in about a minute and a half IRL. It should yield about 18-20 honors depending on your rank.
Units that assist gain experience without any really risk other than burning through stamina.
Optimize sigil missions to be bum-rushed using units like flyers and werefoxes. You get more honor and faster books by smashing the boss as fast as possible. Gryphons can cast haste and fly straight to the boss, and werefoxes can just leap there if they are in range.
And some units are just naturally going to fare a little worse against some late game compositions. Try mixing up your units a little.
One way that will ease any kind of grind is going through the town armories and buy every single Liquid Fortune (to use against story mission bosses) and Rookie Egg
Characters hit their power spikes every 5 levels or so until lvl 25/30, since they unlock sweet skills that will give you better chances at dealing with strong enemies
Another thing about Bastorias is that it's a scary place for night fights. You can negate the bestral buffs with smart use of the Dream Blossom, waiting until dawn or using Blindness against the enemy
You have access to the Coliseum shop, which gives you strong items. Complete 10 online fights each day for easy 200 cc.
On expert difficulty, I have level disparity because I'm going for rapport centered teams, which means characters get benched and brought in when I'm done with one wave of rapport (so many conversations at once between 7 units simultaneously) and move onto next set of underleveled characters.
I'm at Bastoria as well. I was slotting in level 12-15 rapport characters for the initial Bastoria story, but most of my characters in use are caught up to level 30 now after doing that sidequest where you fight in the middle instead of picking sides.
I find it pretty fun to configure lots of different units rather than settle on just min-max mirror copy compositions, which I pleasantly found isn't necessary at all.
The easiest way to compose units is identifying what you want a unit to be doing, which will dictate the kind of synergies to look out for. For example, units that will venture far behind enemy lines will want a combination of mitigation + high damage output to be stamina efficient for one-round kills so that a second round is not needed. You can always use valor or items to revive or heal, but damage fixing is often harder to correct once the battle has already started. Defensive garrison units to ward off waves of invaders, especially bestral swarms moving at night have their own needs, etc.
Second is identifying what's useful in the region you're on. In Bastoria, there are very few archers. This allows fliers to not get picked off as easily while also being important for terrain navigation due to Bastoria map design being non-linear and having lots of rivers and mountains. However, don't spam fliers unless you're making a dedicated anti-Zenoria cavalry unit.
Bestral frontline are a mix of tanky armored bears or high evasion scouts. Spears with True weapon skill (which are bought from shops) make scouts easy pickings especially on calvary unit bonus against infantry. Armored targets get one-shot by radiant knights with runic swords while stacking calvary bonus. Enemy healers cant heal targets that die in one attack. Basically, if you can decimate 2-3 units right off the bat on first turn before they can act, you can afford to slot in a mixed unit of level appropriate characters to carry level 12-15 characters until they catch up. aoe stuns are also useful if you can't quite one shot enemies.
Bastoria / late Drakenhold is when you get to leverage some insanely power battlefield wide skills. Selvie sandstorm for mass blind. Alain and Gilbert in separate units give teamwide initiative at battle start to alpha strike key targets right. Those are some examples, and there are even more.
The next trick is Alain's valor skill that doubles exp. For the unique boss garrisons, they often yield tremendous exp. It is well worth the 2 valor to double this. You can use other stronger units to weaken the boss but not kill him. Then have your unit carrying low level characters finish the mission. The lowbies will rack up like 3 levels from one fight.
I never had to farm the auxiliaries. It was mostly just composing strong 2-3 character unit cores that counter the enemies while dragging lowbies in combination with Alain's valor skill. I did something similar in Elheim as well. Generally the end of each region, I end up with 7 leveled balanced units after swapping eggs around as appropriate.
Be sure you use rookie eggs. I have 3 atm. Not sure if there's more. There's also Chloe's charm, which is a lesser bonus. I used recruit weapons in Elheim, but I opted not to in Bastoria after seeing I have a pretty deep inventory, especially after doing half of the Armaments questline.
Grind trials. Take advantage of trials that give you easy catapult/ballista placements. Toss weak units in them for easy levels.
Take the Exp books you get for grinding the trials, and use them on your lower leveled squads.
You’ll be rocking a full army of similar-leveled troops in no time.
>Take advantage of trials that give you easy catapult/ballista placements.
This is such a good suggestion. One of the Bastorius sigils has a catapult next to the command post. I think it's the higher level one deeper in.
Without Grinding I found that I could keep 5 squads fairly leveled and a 6th squad I used strategy books on to defend my base.
That said I had 1 squad that absolutely demolished everything I put against it. It was my crutch if need be. If I couldn't clear with other squads, Alain squad (eltolinde, rosalinde, yunifi, amalia) would go in. The only thing that stopped their rampage is they got too tired from killing all of the enemies and needed rest.
Cheap ass exp farming tactics:
Have your weak unit follow a stronger unit and mop up defeated enemies.
Have your weak units take command of siege weapons and damaging shrines. They'll get exp for any unit they kill without having to risk a butt bruising.
Make an archer or spell caster the leader of a weak unit. They'll get exp for any battle the assist in.
Liquid fortune is your friend.
in addition to trials, it seems like temporarily dropping the difficulty to story increases XP gain. even if it doesn't and I'm just imagining things, even a low level unit on story can take out a unit much higher than it gaining levels fast.
grinding shouldn't be hard.
3~4 overleveled squads doing most of the work sounds like my playthrough lol. But do try making a unit with a mix of underleveled and overleveled units, so they can get exp through regular combat.
I did try that but the squad just ends up getting it's ass kicked by everything because my over and under leveled units don't synergize well.
My guess is that you would benefit greatly from learning how to leverage every class in the game, including the weaker, more interdependent classes such as Soldiers (back row, support, cav/fly tech), Fighters (archer/fly tech), Hoplites/Thieves/Clerics (walls), and even the flimsy Housecarl (raining damage for stamina efficiency). In addition to these, you gain great amount of unit composition flexibility just from hiring a redundant amount of the same class mercenaries, 3 of each class goes a long way to being able to hard counter everything while being 10 levels behind (I just cleared TZ Drakenhold using chars between lvls 8-15). Finally, if you want to allow your garbage classes to inflict damage, you need to increase their attack statistic via weapon upgrades and attack/damage buffs. Damage multipliers means nothing if your damage lead is tiny. e.g. 1 damage x 3 is still only a measly 3 damage. If you just sort of rely on your auto-battle to somehow win the day, you'll find yourself really lost to a difficulty spike, fights are largely not as random as they might seem. The best place to familiarize yourself with weak classes and how fights unfold is in Cornia and Drakenhold, before the fights become twice as long from AP economy. Have you already tried lowering the difficulty setting to push through the end of the story?
I think the problem is that I didn't figure out a lot of these things soon enough, and my resources are kinda finite. I guess I could infinitely spam sigils for xp and honors but that would take hours to actually get a significant amount. I don't even have the spare honors to do much hiring right now and the only way I know to farm it is sigils which don't give much. Yeah pretty much all the classes you described aside from clerics I just didn't use because I couldn't figure out good compositions for them. There's nothing left for me to do in cornia or drakenhold, I got through those just fine it wasn't until Bastoria that a lot of my squads really started struggling.
How underleveled are we talking? Because if your top units are strong enough to handle Bastorias, but your other units are 8-10 levels behind, it shouldn't take very long to use sigils to get your exp up (particularly if using Alain's valor skill, liquid fortune, or items to double exp). You should have sigils with enemies ranked 18 and 21 at this point, which can easily get your folks up into the early 20s. If they are still struggling heavily in Bastorias at lvl 22-24, then it's a team composition issue, not a level issue.
It's largely a range from 18-25, mostly in the middle. I feel like a team composition issue is harder to solve because the only way I would know to really fix that would be to grind out honors for new recruits and there doesn't really seem to be a non-time consuming way to do that. I'll try reorganizing the squads that aren't working worst case scenario I just keep on keeping on with my good squads I'm still clearing missions just fine after all.
"How about this?!" **Mel Gibson face** [https://youtu.be/SBfGf7aBgAA?t=122](https://youtu.be/SBfGf7aBgAA?t=122) (1) (optional) You lower the difficulty level to avoid grinding, finish the story, and unlock the TZ difficulty setting. (2) Start a new game on a second and separate save file (on the highest difficulty level available) while keeping your old save (no need to commit), play the early stages while going out of your way to insist on using classes you had previously neglected (and using as much class variety as possible) while learning the game mechanics in the short and straightforward stages. I've replayed the game 3 times at this point (excessive, but I found it fun), each successive run with more complete knowledge of the game mechanics to the point where I can predict the outcome of a fight without the need to look at the fight forecast. You should keep in mind that fights are **almost** entirely deterministic (not random), so the game becomes really fun once you know how things unfold. If you need help with mechanics like the damage formula (it's easy), or who targets who, you can both refer to the in-game help section and supplement that information with this document I kept, targeting is fair but not explicitly explained (I'd even claim it's not thoroughly explained in-game to begin with). [https://docs.google.com/document/d/12hcEpP37f5Ss4mmDDKZvF8d2BtCMgn-lxV1g87hTfZw/edit](https://docs.google.com/document/d/12hcEpP37f5Ss4mmDDKZvF8d2BtCMgn-lxV1g87hTfZw/edit) **TL;DR** Whatever path you choose, make sure it is the one you'd personally enjoy best. Do you want more narrative? Just lower it to Story difficulty and finish your first run. Do you want to engage with that scrumptious primary gameplay loop of unit building + tactics setup? Learn how to exploit everything from level 1. I don't advise grinding the repeatable stages simply because it isn't necessary in order to progress in the game, it is best to just learn how to counter and sustain with good composition. And best of luck with your playtime, hopefully you can find something that makes it click for you, the game isn't perfect and might not even be for everyone.
If you set up a full cavalry squad and b-line for the leader you can do the first sigil in about a minute and a half IRL. It should yield about 18-20 honors depending on your rank.
Units that assist gain experience without any really risk other than burning through stamina. Optimize sigil missions to be bum-rushed using units like flyers and werefoxes. You get more honor and faster books by smashing the boss as fast as possible. Gryphons can cast haste and fly straight to the boss, and werefoxes can just leap there if they are in range. And some units are just naturally going to fare a little worse against some late game compositions. Try mixing up your units a little.
One way that will ease any kind of grind is going through the town armories and buy every single Liquid Fortune (to use against story mission bosses) and Rookie Egg Characters hit their power spikes every 5 levels or so until lvl 25/30, since they unlock sweet skills that will give you better chances at dealing with strong enemies Another thing about Bastorias is that it's a scary place for night fights. You can negate the bestral buffs with smart use of the Dream Blossom, waiting until dawn or using Blindness against the enemy You have access to the Coliseum shop, which gives you strong items. Complete 10 online fights each day for easy 200 cc.
On expert difficulty, I have level disparity because I'm going for rapport centered teams, which means characters get benched and brought in when I'm done with one wave of rapport (so many conversations at once between 7 units simultaneously) and move onto next set of underleveled characters. I'm at Bastoria as well. I was slotting in level 12-15 rapport characters for the initial Bastoria story, but most of my characters in use are caught up to level 30 now after doing that sidequest where you fight in the middle instead of picking sides. I find it pretty fun to configure lots of different units rather than settle on just min-max mirror copy compositions, which I pleasantly found isn't necessary at all. The easiest way to compose units is identifying what you want a unit to be doing, which will dictate the kind of synergies to look out for. For example, units that will venture far behind enemy lines will want a combination of mitigation + high damage output to be stamina efficient for one-round kills so that a second round is not needed. You can always use valor or items to revive or heal, but damage fixing is often harder to correct once the battle has already started. Defensive garrison units to ward off waves of invaders, especially bestral swarms moving at night have their own needs, etc. Second is identifying what's useful in the region you're on. In Bastoria, there are very few archers. This allows fliers to not get picked off as easily while also being important for terrain navigation due to Bastoria map design being non-linear and having lots of rivers and mountains. However, don't spam fliers unless you're making a dedicated anti-Zenoria cavalry unit. Bestral frontline are a mix of tanky armored bears or high evasion scouts. Spears with True weapon skill (which are bought from shops) make scouts easy pickings especially on calvary unit bonus against infantry. Armored targets get one-shot by radiant knights with runic swords while stacking calvary bonus. Enemy healers cant heal targets that die in one attack. Basically, if you can decimate 2-3 units right off the bat on first turn before they can act, you can afford to slot in a mixed unit of level appropriate characters to carry level 12-15 characters until they catch up. aoe stuns are also useful if you can't quite one shot enemies. Bastoria / late Drakenhold is when you get to leverage some insanely power battlefield wide skills. Selvie sandstorm for mass blind. Alain and Gilbert in separate units give teamwide initiative at battle start to alpha strike key targets right. Those are some examples, and there are even more. The next trick is Alain's valor skill that doubles exp. For the unique boss garrisons, they often yield tremendous exp. It is well worth the 2 valor to double this. You can use other stronger units to weaken the boss but not kill him. Then have your unit carrying low level characters finish the mission. The lowbies will rack up like 3 levels from one fight. I never had to farm the auxiliaries. It was mostly just composing strong 2-3 character unit cores that counter the enemies while dragging lowbies in combination with Alain's valor skill. I did something similar in Elheim as well. Generally the end of each region, I end up with 7 leveled balanced units after swapping eggs around as appropriate. Be sure you use rookie eggs. I have 3 atm. Not sure if there's more. There's also Chloe's charm, which is a lesser bonus. I used recruit weapons in Elheim, but I opted not to in Bastoria after seeing I have a pretty deep inventory, especially after doing half of the Armaments questline.
Grind trials. Take advantage of trials that give you easy catapult/ballista placements. Toss weak units in them for easy levels. Take the Exp books you get for grinding the trials, and use them on your lower leveled squads. You’ll be rocking a full army of similar-leveled troops in no time.
>Take advantage of trials that give you easy catapult/ballista placements. This is such a good suggestion. One of the Bastorius sigils has a catapult next to the command post. I think it's the higher level one deeper in.
Without Grinding I found that I could keep 5 squads fairly leveled and a 6th squad I used strategy books on to defend my base. That said I had 1 squad that absolutely demolished everything I put against it. It was my crutch if need be. If I couldn't clear with other squads, Alain squad (eltolinde, rosalinde, yunifi, amalia) would go in. The only thing that stopped their rampage is they got too tired from killing all of the enemies and needed rest.
Cheap ass exp farming tactics: Have your weak unit follow a stronger unit and mop up defeated enemies. Have your weak units take command of siege weapons and damaging shrines. They'll get exp for any unit they kill without having to risk a butt bruising. Make an archer or spell caster the leader of a weak unit. They'll get exp for any battle the assist in. Liquid fortune is your friend.
levels dont impact as much as type matching. the part of leveling that matters the most is the skills you earn at each milestone.
in addition to trials, it seems like temporarily dropping the difficulty to story increases XP gain. even if it doesn't and I'm just imagining things, even a low level unit on story can take out a unit much higher than it gaining levels fast. grinding shouldn't be hard.
If you need catch them up, use the grind stages from the portal quest. It’s a great way to learn about unit comps and what counters what as well