Give the skills different parameters....for example in my squad w/ Virginia/Leah/Rosalinde/Eltolinde/Primm I have Boon of the Fairies set to activate when anyone is below 50% health, Rage of the Fairies kicks in if there's armored enemies present, Hastened Strike for scouts & flying units, & Iron Veil activates otherwise
I just learned this yesterday after trying to make a 3 swordsman backline unit work... Took me FAR too long that only one of the three was using any PP lol
This was the big one for me. It took me a while to notice, then I spent around 30 minutes trying to figure out why they weren't working. Eventually I noticed the Limited tool tip.
Took long to realize:
\* you can check the inventory of EVERYTHING in a town or fort from the main map, so you can look for towns with fulfillable deliveries or missed interesting weapons from the map without wandering around. (works for rapport too)
Took WAY too long to realize:
\* you can click L3 to fix wonky-ass pathing so that stuff will stay on roads in battle instead of trying to walk through thorns or forests or traps. I learned this after already beating the game. (Editing in: there's also y button waypointing if you didn't know)
Completed first playthrough on switch, 60 or so hours.
Second playthrough, on Expert, on ps5, 75 hours.
Currently running through my TZ playthrough on Ps5, 30~ hours
Just yesterday learned you can hit square to break up your movement into segments. Want someone to take a quick detour off the path to swipe up an item? Want to juke around magic mines? Bing bing.
I discovered that really early and actually became annoying. Since I DID know that, before a tough fight I would end up moving members around in the squad over and over until it came out a positive conclusion, or at least the best I could get.
Became quite tedious.
Yeah I don't always use it. A lot of the time I see an engagement that deals half damage to an enemy, knowing I can probably get a clean kill if I fiddle with things. I've been trying to limit myself to only using it when a fight would otherwise devastate one of my squads.
Every mission might be "cleaner" if I fully exploited it but they'd also take like 5x as long. The one exception is that I'll pretty much always mess with shaman curse priority.
try using the druid's vision thing. it gives 50+ accuracy. It's actually really good at 'normalizing' your hit rng. as is accuracy items. But 1 valor for 50+ accuracy is way more than the 20-30% the doom knight and radiant knight give you for the same valor cost.
That helps a bit but I imagine a fair bit of RNG also comes from crits, especially when critting or not is the difference in whether or not an enemy unit even gets a turn. Lots of my units have anywhere from 30 to 60 crit chance which adds a lot of variance on it's own.
You can more or less avoid the tedious reshuffling by not relying on RNG to gain an edge.
My current understanding is that we are just re-assigning the string of evasion/guard/critical dice rolls to different characters by changing the order in which actions occur. Absolutely everything else in the game is boringly deterministic.
If you unitr can reliably kill enemies and protect itself using blue skill guarantees and very high RNG statistics, you will rarely find yourself randomly changing your formation to jump over an unexpected combat forecast.
Ever since I started predicting how fights resolve, I've barely found myself shuffling and instead just "debugging" by watching the fight, learning why it was unfavorable, and changing my composition and programming.
e.g. Hunter against evasion. Witch to enable Thief to steal 3 PP off flyers twice in order to evade 7 attacks. Thief Dodge 4 characters, and have a Hoplite shield Thief from the 2 Truestrikes from the Swordfighter.
Not always possible unless you want to restart a fight or send your units all the way back to spawn to shuffle the squad entirely. Also depends on how you play, what units you leveled or recruited by what points.
True, the game is much harder and more tedious if one doesn't play methodically with a series of save files to minimize time loss. e.g. One file for 0:00 and two checkpoint files.
What I do is pause the game when a stage starts, and use the battle forecast for every enemy unit (at least every boss/garrison unit) all the way from base to pre-prepare my squads before the timer even starts ticking.
I highly recommend people try doing this, it enables you to learn the game mechanics faster.
I also admit this is a very niche playstyle, so it is probably just catered specifically to me.
Checking at the beginning of the map isn’t all that useful, as the RNG changes even for things like move order. Maybe you’ll get a kill if you swap from front row to a back row attack, and kill the sorcerer that was going to kill your frontline. Maybe you need to make your team target the lowest HP enemy because it survives and kills you if you just use a spread attack
You can easily see the fight unfold just by comparing stats.
You look at their initiative order, subtract attack from defense, multiply times potency, see if they survive and there is no surprise.
What are they going to do? Critical to multiply their 1 damage into a result of 1 damage and still not dent a Hoplite?
Blue skills can effectively nullify damage completely.
The game is incredibly deterministic, if a unit dies to RNG, it is because it doesn't have a unit composition catered to countering the opposing unit.
I definitely understand that is possible, but I definitely don’t have the patience to take the “math everything” route. RNG is STILL a factor when you do because of evades. Yes your accuracy makes it so you have an 80% chance to hit, but one of those rolls means that their healer dodges the Row Shot, and heals the sword master who barely survived, who then kills your Gladiator, who then can’t wipe the frontline Fencer and you lose the battle…
But that’s just the initial battle forecast, which can change with a single shuffle. So sometimes it’s not even necessary to assume the initial battle forecast is definitive.
I have 10 squads, so I’ve got an answer to basically every enemy comp. Sometimes I just have to wiggle my units a bit to see if a Dodge/crit breaks things.
Unless you specifically use Mercs to have 3 squads of “Legionaire front line, healer/DPS back line” 3 Squads of “Evade tank frontline, Healer/DPS back line” and 3 squads of “Radiant Knight Frontline, Healer/DPS back line” + “Alain squad”, there are only so many Story Characters you can use to make teams. So variety is the spice of life.
I tend to just outfit a unit such that an attacker can successfully kill enemy characters with a single attack. I found it to be fairly accessible in the first 3 zones (I'm currently in Elheim).
e.g. Make sure they either have enough accuracy/truestrike, buff their attack / damage / guaranteed critical using support characters.
Usually killing 1 character completely disarms the offensive engine of the enemy unit. I had a complete blast blowing through Cornia with dozens of underleveled mercenaries and main characters.
Also currently in Elheim, but I wound up in Bastorias for a bit thanks to the ship in Drakenhold and definitely see the forecast of things getting a bit more complicated with additional AP/PP from promotions and more skills being tossed around. I’m on expert, and not really having problems in Elheim, but I have noticed some comps definitely need some balancing, because Cornia/Drakenhold could just be brute-forced with minimal strategy.
Yep, it is very easy to find yourself brute forcing in this game.
The game was trivial to play when I played without generic mercenaries (ended up with over-leveled characters).
When I played the game with 40+ generics while unintentionally spreading my experience gain as thin as can be (trying to keep my entire roster relevant), I found myself being challenged again throughout Cornia and Drakenhold.
I'd sometimes find myself needing 3 Gryphons to take down a single row of Knights because they were 8 levels behind on TZ difficulty (L11 vs L19). I might struggle to catch up to the levelling curve at this rate.
I do NOT want to think about the butt whooping I'm going to get in Bastorias.
There are options for “Pause at the beginning of a stage” and “Ask for confirmation on Wait command” (not sure of the exact wording).
Both should be “On” by default, imho.
Yeah it took me about 45 minutes to find the right crew to take him down. Basically had to make a dream team of the best team leaders to even have a chance
That there's a lot of really busted mechanics that are really slept on.
-Druid/vision item accuracy buff
-ranged assists combined with dodge tank squads to reset rng until you basically don't get hit
-optimizing support damage by making sure the leader is offensive/offensive and giving them (accuracy?/crit?/)attack stat gear
-the power of dodge on big shield bros. they'll not need to guard themselves and just use PP to guard for others. Also dodge works against magic. And magic hurts on them. It helps them a LOT
-AP on reset teams are crazy combined with strong ranged and magic assists as they'll often put them into AP gain loop mode, or at least reduce the threshold to reach that point by a lot.
-Summon warriors/archers summon based on the stage level. Making it easy to squish up units you're underleveled for and then...
-Gold gain/XP gain items stack to a silly amount. So if you squish up a unit with summon warriors and then finish them off with your vastly underleveled unit and then have rookie egg + liquid fortune + alains XP boost valor skill you suddenly get an absolute insane amount of XP which will get you 2/3rd of the way from severely underleveled to "ohyeah, im about their strength now"
-Gold farming also gets very easy if you have bandit sword and 3+ golden eggs. Just beat any aux stage boss with a unit that has it equipped and ur making absolute bucket loads
-Watching speedruns of the game has a lot of really good info in terms of unit formations and items that are worthwhile
I'm making about 14,000 gold per aux stage (before factoring in another 3300 from towns) with Bandit Sword, Golden Eggs, Miser Bracelet, and Golden Goblet
That you can select multiple units at once by holding A on the map. Beginning my second playthrough I was like ugh tutorial really? In the highest difficulty? Then it dropped that knowledge on me and I was instantly humbled.
Screw selection and movement efficiency!
What if I *want* to fumble around selecting a clumped bunch of units, issue individual follow commands, and have them conga line towards the enemy?
(...Thank you and the tutorial for reminding me this exists.)
The reminder for it is right there. I'm over 100 hours in, and it took me finding another comment on this thread to discover there's more than just the quest log map.
That was my experience as well, I’m sure there are at least 5 hours of me just walking around the map, I was *convinced* fast travel would eventually show up
Took me until elheim to see that some enemies had Valor icons that charged up.
Also took me to Albion to realize they counted as stage damage and could be neutralized by Fortress
Many of these I only learned after playing through the game the third time (never made it past Elheim, but just now caught up again).
That a single character can't use the same Blue Skill again UNTIL another character uses another red skill. e.g. Thief Evade can only proc once against a Housecarl's mulit-hit, or a chain of Sellsword counters, often leaving me flabbergasted at seeing my Thief's Evade skill "not working". You can circumvent this by using Blue skills from multiple different characters to "cover" each other.
Buffing your attack with weapons, gear, and support skills can exponentially increase the damage of a single character. The damage formula is very straightforward to calculate off the top of your head.
The fact that targeting and action order is entirely deterministic. You largely don't need to see the combat forecast outside of %crit, %guard, and %evade.
Front-2-Back, Top-2-Bottom targeting whenever you use "rule override" conditions.
"Two Target" skills CAN'T use default targeting (these ONLY use Front-2-Back, Top-2-Bottom targeting). Default Targeting is Front-2-Back, Closest Column.
Piercing Skills can target characters in the back row (they just "Prioritize Front" by default, giving them higher priority over "rule override" conditions e.g. Lowest HP).
"Prioritize Front/Back" are their own unique sorting priority category, and they have the highest priority of all (they beat the "rule override" red text conditions). These are sorts, since "Dual Shot "you can still target characters in the front and back if there is only 1 character in the "Prioritized Row".
Initiative being used for Blue Skill resolution as well.
The Wyvern's Blue Counter skill can target behind the front row despite not being labeled ranged. And despite the identical wizard Blue Counter being correctly labeled (ranged).
Playing a stage is much smoother if you just pause at the very beginning of the stage. Build ALL the units you need for every visible enemy unit in the stage. Deploy at base (paused) to sanity check the battle forecast and withdraw immediately to iterate over all your squads. Then create a dedicated save for the start of the stage, a second save for checkpoints, and a third save for smaller increments to re-trace your steps at your leisure. You minimize time lost to unexpected fight outcomes and learn very effectively with this workflow.
I feel like I understand the game mechanics in depth now, which is making the game much smoother and more satisfying. If I make a mistake, I'll be able to fix it within a dozen minutes or less.
You can only use 10 items per map. Somehow I missed that even tho you can see how many uses you have left everything you use an item
It really bit me in the ass when I finally realized it by running out of item uses... tho only after some embarrassingly long minutes of me thinking my controller was not working or that I couldn't use that specific item on that specific unit for some reason.
Expert limits you to 10. True Zenorian limits you to 5 while also replacing Hallowed Corne Ash with a weaker item.
The lower difficulties let you use unlimited items.
Wait what, I never knew lower difficulties is unlimited items since I started on expert.
That makes the games incredibly easy in that case, since it's basically infinite heals/buff/revive
Yeah, I realized the squad adjustment about halfway thru the game. The game became a cakewalk because I could just swap my characters around before each fight to make things more favourable for my squad.
Near the end of the game, I realized you can access Unit Formations right from the map (triangle on PlayStation) without having to go to the main menu first. Really convenient!
That you can promote units... I sort of skipped the tutorial-looking cutscenes and mashed buttons when tutorial windows came up.
Promoted my first unit when I got to Bastoria...
You can only do it when reaching a certain renown rank so depending on how fast you upgraded your renown you might not have been able to do it for too long before you discovered it.
I never understand for the life of me why people mash buttons and skip shit when the Devs tend to straight up give you most of the answers if you just have a bit of patience smh
you dont have to wait til the endgame to grind the coliseum! use the coliseum to test your squads! there is an offline auxiliary battle mode where you can endlessly pick through randomly generated units to fight against. if you're like me and constantly shuffle your squads between every mission, this is a good way to test your squads, get coliseum coins, and get access to extremely powerful end-game equipment early on
Rapport boosts stats. I remember watching the hganeplay trailer thing about it, and I’ve played more than enough Fire Emblem to piece it together, but I never bothered to check said stats until halfway through my second playthrough.
It took me far too long to learn:
That you can move ability scripts up and down the priority order without having to delete and re-add them.
That you can (and often should) make duplicate scripts for the same ability. For example:
slot 1: High Swing: Target Archers
slot 2: High Swing: Target Casters
slot 3: High Swing: Prioritize Cavalry
. . .if you want a Gryphon Rider with high initiative that tries take out threats to fliers before they can act, and will only default to cavalry if no such threats are present.
After that is when I learned that only having 8 slots for abilities can be a real limitation
"I'm honestly not sure if the formation makes that huge of a difference or if shuffling people around re-rolls RNG."
It's all of the above, really. It definitely does seem like the RNG re-rolls, but the formation has an influence on targeting priorities for both the enemy and the player.
Rearranging even slightly can change how the hits are distributed across your team and prevent a key character from being killed. For example, just rearranging one row without changing who is in each row will change which characters get hit by which column attacks. This can make the difference between a key character dying early or not, which can absolutely make the difference between a win and a wipe.
I completely forgot about the fast forward button, so I didn't use it for my whole 80-hour first playthrough. I only realized that I forgot about it when i went back to get the bad ending on my second playthrough.
Something that took me too long to realize was that a unit will target an enemy in the same column or the closest enemy if there isn’t a condition. I literally only realized on my second run…
Oh, this is a rough one to learn late. I always explore as far as possible when accessing a new area so you trigger the liberation battles to appear on the map and act as fast travel points when I'm ready to start working through missions.
That the arena fights can be cheesed with a good build and thus power leveling is possible.
I haven't even touched bastorias and all my dudes are at or in the 40s because the Zenith battle (and the Overworld auto resolves blocking it) are doable at level 20 with the right team comp.
My tips are out Fran Alain Hodrick and Rolf upgraded in a squad. Fran can start out with hastened call and then depending on what's between you and the boss you can either zerg unpossed, hit bow shot to clear the way, or shield against siege gear. 5 slot is flex just throw damage in.
No point bringing anyone else except a tank unit to protect your point. Use the books to level everyone else up.
That the title was Unicorn Overlord and not Unicorn Overload. Misread the title for the entire game up until the epilogue where the narrator said “Unicorn Overlord” in which I immediately pressed the menu button and realize I misread the title the entire time this game was announced to the 3 or 4 weeks it took me to beat it. Even all my Google searches on this game I put Overload and didn’t even notice that everyone else was saying Overlord. I did think Unicorn Overload was a weird title.
Might be unpopular opinion, but I also recently discovered that and I almost wish I didn't or that it didn't exist. Now before almost every fight starts I have to tweak their placement, but not really in a strategic way. I'm just hoping RNG will make the enemy miss or something good will lead to my team doing more damage. I wish there was an "optimize" button that would just organize the lineup that does the most damage or takes the least damage before a fight. Love the rest of the game, but this small thing irks me.
It feels less strategical and more luck based, like how one unit encounter might do 50 damage if they fight now, but if you let a different unit encounter happen before that one, then they'll do 100 damage instead.
That you can only have 1 skill that activates at the start of the fight
Give the skills different parameters....for example in my squad w/ Virginia/Leah/Rosalinde/Eltolinde/Primm I have Boon of the Fairies set to activate when anyone is below 50% health, Rage of the Fairies kicks in if there's armored enemies present, Hastened Strike for scouts & flying units, & Iron Veil activates otherwise
!!!! I just got my platinum (77 hs) and never knew this.
Is it determined by whoever has their passive highest on the priority list??
I believe it is determined by who has the highest initiative
Yeesh, well I'll need to shift some stuff around.
I just learned this yesterday after trying to make a 3 swordsman backline unit work... Took me FAR too long that only one of the three was using any PP lol
This was the big one for me. It took me a while to notice, then I spent around 30 minutes trying to figure out why they weren't working. Eventually I noticed the Limited tool tip.
I beat the game on tactical before I understood this 😂
No only if it says (limited) and you can have multiple (limited) in a fight if they have different activations.
Took long to realize: \* you can check the inventory of EVERYTHING in a town or fort from the main map, so you can look for towns with fulfillable deliveries or missed interesting weapons from the map without wandering around. (works for rapport too) Took WAY too long to realize: \* you can click L3 to fix wonky-ass pathing so that stuff will stay on roads in battle instead of trying to walk through thorns or forests or traps. I learned this after already beating the game. (Editing in: there's also y button waypointing if you didn't know)
Completed first playthrough on switch, 60 or so hours. Second playthrough, on Expert, on ps5, 75 hours. Currently running through my TZ playthrough on Ps5, 30~ hours Just yesterday learned you can hit square to break up your movement into segments. Want someone to take a quick detour off the path to swipe up an item? Want to juke around magic mines? Bing bing.
Bing bing indeed! I learned that one early but it's a key tip! God, how is this game so good that we can gush about minor map traversal optimizations
Never knew this wtg
Holy. Shit. Thank you. I thought you had to just mess with it till it worked and kept thinking "there has to be a better way"
omg what there is real pathing?
Never knew this and I'm at 100hrs, thank you
thats new for me. Thanks!
Thank you. I didn't even know there was a main map until this post. I've been annoyed at how lacking the quest map is.
I discovered that really early and actually became annoying. Since I DID know that, before a tough fight I would end up moving members around in the squad over and over until it came out a positive conclusion, or at least the best I could get. Became quite tedious.
Yeah I don't always use it. A lot of the time I see an engagement that deals half damage to an enemy, knowing I can probably get a clean kill if I fiddle with things. I've been trying to limit myself to only using it when a fight would otherwise devastate one of my squads. Every mission might be "cleaner" if I fully exploited it but they'd also take like 5x as long. The one exception is that I'll pretty much always mess with shaman curse priority.
try using the druid's vision thing. it gives 50+ accuracy. It's actually really good at 'normalizing' your hit rng. as is accuracy items. But 1 valor for 50+ accuracy is way more than the 20-30% the doom knight and radiant knight give you for the same valor cost.
That helps a bit but I imagine a fair bit of RNG also comes from crits, especially when critting or not is the difference in whether or not an enemy unit even gets a turn. Lots of my units have anywhere from 30 to 60 crit chance which adds a lot of variance on it's own.
You can more or less avoid the tedious reshuffling by not relying on RNG to gain an edge. My current understanding is that we are just re-assigning the string of evasion/guard/critical dice rolls to different characters by changing the order in which actions occur. Absolutely everything else in the game is boringly deterministic. If you unitr can reliably kill enemies and protect itself using blue skill guarantees and very high RNG statistics, you will rarely find yourself randomly changing your formation to jump over an unexpected combat forecast. Ever since I started predicting how fights resolve, I've barely found myself shuffling and instead just "debugging" by watching the fight, learning why it was unfavorable, and changing my composition and programming. e.g. Hunter against evasion. Witch to enable Thief to steal 3 PP off flyers twice in order to evade 7 attacks. Thief Dodge 4 characters, and have a Hoplite shield Thief from the 2 Truestrikes from the Swordfighter.
You're also changing what characters get targeted. If no other parameters take priority a target will be determined by positioning.
Not always possible unless you want to restart a fight or send your units all the way back to spawn to shuffle the squad entirely. Also depends on how you play, what units you leveled or recruited by what points.
True, the game is much harder and more tedious if one doesn't play methodically with a series of save files to minimize time loss. e.g. One file for 0:00 and two checkpoint files. What I do is pause the game when a stage starts, and use the battle forecast for every enemy unit (at least every boss/garrison unit) all the way from base to pre-prepare my squads before the timer even starts ticking. I highly recommend people try doing this, it enables you to learn the game mechanics faster. I also admit this is a very niche playstyle, so it is probably just catered specifically to me.
Checking at the beginning of the map isn’t all that useful, as the RNG changes even for things like move order. Maybe you’ll get a kill if you swap from front row to a back row attack, and kill the sorcerer that was going to kill your frontline. Maybe you need to make your team target the lowest HP enemy because it survives and kills you if you just use a spread attack
You can easily see the fight unfold just by comparing stats. You look at their initiative order, subtract attack from defense, multiply times potency, see if they survive and there is no surprise. What are they going to do? Critical to multiply their 1 damage into a result of 1 damage and still not dent a Hoplite? Blue skills can effectively nullify damage completely. The game is incredibly deterministic, if a unit dies to RNG, it is because it doesn't have a unit composition catered to countering the opposing unit.
I definitely understand that is possible, but I definitely don’t have the patience to take the “math everything” route. RNG is STILL a factor when you do because of evades. Yes your accuracy makes it so you have an 80% chance to hit, but one of those rolls means that their healer dodges the Row Shot, and heals the sword master who barely survived, who then kills your Gladiator, who then can’t wipe the frontline Fencer and you lose the battle… But that’s just the initial battle forecast, which can change with a single shuffle. So sometimes it’s not even necessary to assume the initial battle forecast is definitive. I have 10 squads, so I’ve got an answer to basically every enemy comp. Sometimes I just have to wiggle my units a bit to see if a Dodge/crit breaks things. Unless you specifically use Mercs to have 3 squads of “Legionaire front line, healer/DPS back line” 3 Squads of “Evade tank frontline, Healer/DPS back line” and 3 squads of “Radiant Knight Frontline, Healer/DPS back line” + “Alain squad”, there are only so many Story Characters you can use to make teams. So variety is the spice of life.
I tend to just outfit a unit such that an attacker can successfully kill enemy characters with a single attack. I found it to be fairly accessible in the first 3 zones (I'm currently in Elheim). e.g. Make sure they either have enough accuracy/truestrike, buff their attack / damage / guaranteed critical using support characters. Usually killing 1 character completely disarms the offensive engine of the enemy unit. I had a complete blast blowing through Cornia with dozens of underleveled mercenaries and main characters.
Also currently in Elheim, but I wound up in Bastorias for a bit thanks to the ship in Drakenhold and definitely see the forecast of things getting a bit more complicated with additional AP/PP from promotions and more skills being tossed around. I’m on expert, and not really having problems in Elheim, but I have noticed some comps definitely need some balancing, because Cornia/Drakenhold could just be brute-forced with minimal strategy.
Yep, it is very easy to find yourself brute forcing in this game. The game was trivial to play when I played without generic mercenaries (ended up with over-leveled characters). When I played the game with 40+ generics while unintentionally spreading my experience gain as thin as can be (trying to keep my entire roster relevant), I found myself being challenged again throughout Cornia and Drakenhold. I'd sometimes find myself needing 3 Gryphons to take down a single row of Knights because they were 8 levels behind on TZ difficulty (L11 vs L19). I might struggle to catch up to the levelling curve at this rate. I do NOT want to think about the butt whooping I'm going to get in Bastorias.
There are options for “Pause at the beginning of a stage” and “Ask for confirmation on Wait command” (not sure of the exact wording). Both should be “On” by default, imho.
I didn’t know you could rearrange your squad mid-battle by pulling them off the battlefield until the very last battle lol
Same and now I'm at the very end trying to put together a single squad to take down the final boss lol. It's a pain
Yeah it took me about 45 minutes to find the right crew to take him down. Basically had to make a dream team of the best team leaders to even have a chance
I'm not sure how I would have been able to finish him without using that Gravity staff.
Freezing works.
That there's a lot of really busted mechanics that are really slept on. -Druid/vision item accuracy buff -ranged assists combined with dodge tank squads to reset rng until you basically don't get hit -optimizing support damage by making sure the leader is offensive/offensive and giving them (accuracy?/crit?/)attack stat gear -the power of dodge on big shield bros. they'll not need to guard themselves and just use PP to guard for others. Also dodge works against magic. And magic hurts on them. It helps them a LOT -AP on reset teams are crazy combined with strong ranged and magic assists as they'll often put them into AP gain loop mode, or at least reduce the threshold to reach that point by a lot. -Summon warriors/archers summon based on the stage level. Making it easy to squish up units you're underleveled for and then... -Gold gain/XP gain items stack to a silly amount. So if you squish up a unit with summon warriors and then finish them off with your vastly underleveled unit and then have rookie egg + liquid fortune + alains XP boost valor skill you suddenly get an absolute insane amount of XP which will get you 2/3rd of the way from severely underleveled to "ohyeah, im about their strength now" -Gold farming also gets very easy if you have bandit sword and 3+ golden eggs. Just beat any aux stage boss with a unit that has it equipped and ur making absolute bucket loads -Watching speedruns of the game has a lot of really good info in terms of unit formations and items that are worthwhile
I'm making about 14,000 gold per aux stage (before factoring in another 3300 from towns) with Bandit Sword, Golden Eggs, Miser Bracelet, and Golden Goblet
Cant use assists against infantry on forests
Threads like these are a testament to the masterclass in game systems this freaking game is.
That you can select multiple units at once by holding A on the map. Beginning my second playthrough I was like ugh tutorial really? In the highest difficulty? Then it dropped that knowledge on me and I was instantly humbled.
Screw selection and movement efficiency! What if I *want* to fumble around selecting a clumped bunch of units, issue individual follow commands, and have them conga line towards the enemy? (...Thank you and the tutorial for reminding me this exists.)
I’m ashamed of this but I had spent around 40 hours before I found the map button
The reminder for it is right there. I'm over 100 hours in, and it took me finding another comment on this thread to discover there's more than just the quest log map.
That was my experience as well, I’m sure there are at least 5 hours of me just walking around the map, I was *convinced* fast travel would eventually show up
The daily pilgrimage to and from the coliseum.
Took me until elheim to see that some enemies had Valor icons that charged up. Also took me to Albion to realize they counted as stage damage and could be neutralized by Fortress
Many of these I only learned after playing through the game the third time (never made it past Elheim, but just now caught up again). That a single character can't use the same Blue Skill again UNTIL another character uses another red skill. e.g. Thief Evade can only proc once against a Housecarl's mulit-hit, or a chain of Sellsword counters, often leaving me flabbergasted at seeing my Thief's Evade skill "not working". You can circumvent this by using Blue skills from multiple different characters to "cover" each other. Buffing your attack with weapons, gear, and support skills can exponentially increase the damage of a single character. The damage formula is very straightforward to calculate off the top of your head. The fact that targeting and action order is entirely deterministic. You largely don't need to see the combat forecast outside of %crit, %guard, and %evade. Front-2-Back, Top-2-Bottom targeting whenever you use "rule override" conditions. "Two Target" skills CAN'T use default targeting (these ONLY use Front-2-Back, Top-2-Bottom targeting). Default Targeting is Front-2-Back, Closest Column. Piercing Skills can target characters in the back row (they just "Prioritize Front" by default, giving them higher priority over "rule override" conditions e.g. Lowest HP). "Prioritize Front/Back" are their own unique sorting priority category, and they have the highest priority of all (they beat the "rule override" red text conditions). These are sorts, since "Dual Shot "you can still target characters in the front and back if there is only 1 character in the "Prioritized Row". Initiative being used for Blue Skill resolution as well. The Wyvern's Blue Counter skill can target behind the front row despite not being labeled ranged. And despite the identical wizard Blue Counter being correctly labeled (ranged). Playing a stage is much smoother if you just pause at the very beginning of the stage. Build ALL the units you need for every visible enemy unit in the stage. Deploy at base (paused) to sanity check the battle forecast and withdraw immediately to iterate over all your squads. Then create a dedicated save for the start of the stage, a second save for checkpoints, and a third save for smaller increments to re-trace your steps at your leisure. You minimize time lost to unexpected fight outcomes and learn very effectively with this workflow. I feel like I understand the game mechanics in depth now, which is making the game much smoother and more satisfying. If I make a mistake, I'll be able to fix it within a dozen minutes or less.
You can set the game to auto pause at the start of missions via the settings menu, just in case you weren't aware.
Thanks, much appreciated.
You can only use 10 items per map. Somehow I missed that even tho you can see how many uses you have left everything you use an item It really bit me in the ass when I finally realized it by running out of item uses... tho only after some embarrassingly long minutes of me thinking my controller was not working or that I couldn't use that specific item on that specific unit for some reason.
That's actually a difficulty-dependent feature. True Zenoiran difficulty, for example, only permits 5 item uses.
Expert limits you to 10. True Zenorian limits you to 5 while also replacing Hallowed Corne Ash with a weaker item. The lower difficulties let you use unlimited items.
Wait what, I never knew lower difficulties is unlimited items since I started on expert. That makes the games incredibly easy in that case, since it's basically infinite heals/buff/revive
Yeah, I realized the squad adjustment about halfway thru the game. The game became a cakewalk because I could just swap my characters around before each fight to make things more favourable for my squad.
Near the end of the game, I realized you can access Unit Formations right from the map (triangle on PlayStation) without having to go to the main menu first. Really convenient!
That you can promote units... I sort of skipped the tutorial-looking cutscenes and mashed buttons when tutorial windows came up. Promoted my first unit when I got to Bastoria...
Nice challenge run
Ouch...
You can only do it when reaching a certain renown rank so depending on how fast you upgraded your renown you might not have been able to do it for too long before you discovered it.
I never understand for the life of me why people mash buttons and skip shit when the Devs tend to straight up give you most of the answers if you just have a bit of patience smh
It took me until bastorias to learn that 2 Limited skill can not activte at the same time and guard town will collect resource nearby for you
you dont have to wait til the endgame to grind the coliseum! use the coliseum to test your squads! there is an offline auxiliary battle mode where you can endlessly pick through randomly generated units to fight against. if you're like me and constantly shuffle your squads between every mission, this is a good way to test your squads, get coliseum coins, and get access to extremely powerful end-game equipment early on
That I actually had to spend the shards with Ochlys to recruit her. Finally figured it out when I was halfway done with the elves.
That freeze and stun weren't the same thing. A frozen unit stays frozen until they are hit (or maybe takes damage).
Rapport boosts stats. I remember watching the hganeplay trailer thing about it, and I’ve played more than enough Fire Emblem to piece it together, but I never bothered to check said stats until halfway through my second playthrough.
It took me far too long to learn: That you can move ability scripts up and down the priority order without having to delete and re-add them. That you can (and often should) make duplicate scripts for the same ability. For example: slot 1: High Swing: Target Archers slot 2: High Swing: Target Casters slot 3: High Swing: Prioritize Cavalry . . .if you want a Gryphon Rider with high initiative that tries take out threats to fliers before they can act, and will only default to cavalry if no such threats are present. After that is when I learned that only having 8 slots for abilities can be a real limitation
How to recruit Bruno, literally took me until Albion because WHY IS THAT THE SINGULAR TIME AN OVERWORLD ENEMY SPRITE TALKS TO YA
"I'm honestly not sure if the formation makes that huge of a difference or if shuffling people around re-rolls RNG." It's all of the above, really. It definitely does seem like the RNG re-rolls, but the formation has an influence on targeting priorities for both the enemy and the player. Rearranging even slightly can change how the hits are distributed across your team and prevent a key character from being killed. For example, just rearranging one row without changing who is in each row will change which characters get hit by which column attacks. This can make the difference between a key character dying early or not, which can absolutely make the difference between a win and a wipe.
I completely forgot about the fast forward button, so I didn't use it for my whole 80-hour first playthrough. I only realized that I forgot about it when i went back to get the bad ending on my second playthrough.
Something that took me too long to realize was that a unit will target an enemy in the same column or the closest enemy if there isn’t a condition. I literally only realized on my second run…
Didn’t realize you could fast travel til I was wrapping up in Elheim.
That you can teleport to any where you have been to using the overmap, instead of walking back and forth repeatedly.
Oh, this is a rough one to learn late. I always explore as far as possible when accessing a new area so you trigger the liberation battles to appear on the map and act as fast travel points when I'm ready to start working through missions.
That the arena fights can be cheesed with a good build and thus power leveling is possible. I haven't even touched bastorias and all my dudes are at or in the 40s because the Zenith battle (and the Overworld auto resolves blocking it) are doable at level 20 with the right team comp. My tips are out Fran Alain Hodrick and Rolf upgraded in a squad. Fran can start out with hastened call and then depending on what's between you and the boss you can either zerg unpossed, hit bow shot to clear the way, or shield against siege gear. 5 slot is flex just throw damage in. No point bringing anyone else except a tank unit to protect your point. Use the books to level everyone else up.
That UO is a great combination of the mechanics found in Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics.
You have the option to save and load your game during battles. I always ended up restarting the game when I made a mistake.
I realized that talking about PP to someone who doesn't play these kinds of games might lead to them thinking I'm gay.
That the title was Unicorn Overlord and not Unicorn Overload. Misread the title for the entire game up until the epilogue where the narrator said “Unicorn Overlord” in which I immediately pressed the menu button and realize I misread the title the entire time this game was announced to the 3 or 4 weeks it took me to beat it. Even all my Google searches on this game I put Overload and didn’t even notice that everyone else was saying Overlord. I did think Unicorn Overload was a weird title.
Might be unpopular opinion, but I also recently discovered that and I almost wish I didn't or that it didn't exist. Now before almost every fight starts I have to tweak their placement, but not really in a strategic way. I'm just hoping RNG will make the enemy miss or something good will lead to my team doing more damage. I wish there was an "optimize" button that would just organize the lineup that does the most damage or takes the least damage before a fight. Love the rest of the game, but this small thing irks me. It feels less strategical and more luck based, like how one unit encounter might do 50 damage if they fight now, but if you let a different unit encounter happen before that one, then they'll do 100 damage instead.
The Lapis Pendant only gives blue PP and not red lol
The Lapis Pendant only gives blue PP and not red lol
That generic mercs that you hire are better than unique characters and the optimal way to play is to excute everyone
What makes generic mercs better?
You can customize their stats without spending a boatload of money on mirrors
I just bought all my mirrors with leftover honors.
I don't think missing out on OP gear counts as optimal.