![Sengoku Sengoku](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125846406/115833566.jpg)
Re: Sengoku Rance I guess it's been long enough. Hacked Save Game (Infinite Gold, All Items, Secret Characters, Max Satisfaction, and Max National Power) Credits to oronus of Nihonomaru As for the Takeda, When you fight them I suggest always taking a tac with high remove status.
- 'I always feel like there's some sort of secret that I'm just not getting when I play this game.'
- If you harbour similar feelings, are new to the game or just generally confused by the onslaught of numbers and options, be my guest.
- Details can be gotten from reading the wiki http://alicesoft.wikia.com/wiki/Sengoku_Rance
- What this document does: Providing a short, spoiler-free, guide to make the gaming experience less frustrating, allowing you to experiment and stray from any 'optimal' path.
- What it does not: Telling you how to play or giving specific turn-guides. This involves too much savescumming and should be reserved for seasoned players.
- Though it may sound simple, the best place to look for directions and hints is inside the game: There are many dialogues which indirectly tell you what you should work on, it's never wrong to just go 'What would Rance do in this situation? (Hint: Satisfy his Hyper Weapon) -
- Incidentally, steadily growing the satisfaction meter is quite helpful.
- You may assume that all gameplay elements are there for a reason, so don't be afraid to try them (or the game will force you to, when you are unprepared)
- Make some backup saves every few turns, it may save you a lot of headaches, savescumming isn't necessary though.
- Don't dilly-dally, it makes Rance grow impatient and lead to bad results -
- when the princess is in danger, wasting time to farm XP is not the correct solution, despite what JRPG may have taught you over the years.
- You may also want to check out the Game Info (F5) sometimes, the 'Current Status' pretty much tells you what you should be doing right now.
- Commander Battles
- To get it over with:
- Commander Battles only take the level and commander-type into account (so Ninjas still do bad damage, sadly), stats don't matter at all, buffs do.
- As Suzume mentions, Dungeon Scout is a great skill to save action flags, it's a Ninja skill.
- !!You are able to switch out characters by using a different character to do it, when everyone runs out of turns, you lose.!!
- - Most monks can convert actions, this may give your strongest commanders additional flags to use for their strongest attacks.
- - If you use Tacticians, you'll start with buffs (they may be helpful or not) on every floor.
- - Most attacks either use 1 Flag, or all (so 1 is enough...)
- - Generics are pretty weak in the Ranceverse level-wise, that's where the uniques shine.
- The meat of the game (along with a different kind of meat), it may look simple and simply smashing bigger troops head-on will solve quite a few problems on the normal difficulty - keep in mind though that this won't work when the enemies become bigger and have better stats themselves.
- For mechanics and calculations, go look at the next section, this will rather give you a general idea of do-s and don't-s. (Though there will always be exceptions)
- Seriously, if you don't have at least 2 dedicated commanders with high 'Search' to scout the enemy composition, you're just asking for trouble.
- Try to use counters, though there are always alternatives to deal with something.
- Let's take the most problematic case as an example:
- Archer: Footman snipe (3.0x damage multiplier). High ATK stat may help you out here, refer to section 3.
- Mage/Diviner: (Be wary of ninjas and monks, employ footmen in the backrow if necessary and try to kill their counters) Ally guard doesn't protect against magic attacks, so this is an easy way for a lot of damage
- Monks: Guard cancel on a fast monk outright removes all guard on every enemy footman, making you deal double the amount of physical damage.
- Warrior: High attack stat, Tactician ATK buff, big stack: use a skill with high multiplier (Shouting charge, for example) and go to town.
- That's just one approach to the battle though, you must have a clear goal even when picking your commanders whether you want to annihilate the enemies or go for a battle gauge win.
- Annihilation
- - As long as every opponent is annihilated, you win the battle
- - More turns for you = more time to kill troops
- ->Either reduce enemy turns by killing their fast / multiple-flag units or improve the number of turns you get (Extended battle, fast characters, buffs)
- ->Let's extend this thought: It's better if your 'best' Damage-dealers have more turns! You may want to put some all-flag attacks on your characters (i.e. Footman with Fellow Troops' Revenge is great for that) to allow more turns at the end for others.
- - Time-efficient attacks: It's not as important to hit early (for reduced stack sizes when they attack) but rather to hit as hard as you can with the limited turn-count: Charge/AoE attacks are very good for that
- Contrary to that, the Battle Gauge approach needs different skills and a different focus, at least partly:
- Battle Gauge:
- - Minimize the damage you take while maximizing your own output
- - Battles may end up with most (or all) commanders being alive on both sides, get used to it and don't freak out
- - Turnorder becomes extremely important, a good rule of thumb is to hit the enemy that can hit you the earliest (look at the turn order in the middle of the screen)
- - You're probably going to have to divert all damage to guarding footmen, if you want to go for this type of win in castles, so keep protecting
- - Tacticians have a skill solely to manipulate the battle gauge.
- - While previously, hitting the weakest link was sometimes the best solution to remove turns, here it may be better to hit the strongest, reducing his damage
- - You know, Shikigami guard on a Footman can save you with the correct timing
- - Don't overkill, you're going to need that damage elsewhere.
- - If you use AoE attacks (Shikigamis, mostly), think about spreading your previous damage on every enemy commander so they all stay alive, doing the most overall damage possible
- - Some skills don't get caught by Footman guard (all penetration attacks, for example), so you may want to just target accordingly and let the footmen alive.
- - Look for big stacks with bad defense stats, they're worth a lot of Battle Gauge
- - There's a passive ability called Initial battle rating. You may want to use it.
- - When some units are stuck in the back, unable to do anything (especially warriors): Don't kill the front row but rather take shots at the back.
- Figure out how you can make enemy units do 'nothing to change the gauge', i.e. Monks cancelling guard, Tacticians using buffs/debuffs etc.
- Always take counterattack damage into account, if you attack the wrong person it'll hurt you more (on the gauge) than them, depending on your overall strategy this can be bad
- Battle-preparation, especially buffed by Satisfaction bonuses, can pretty much level Castle bonuses.
- They remain up to the next fight, if you want to savescum.
- Castle Siege Expert? (either the item _or_ the passive skill) - Straight 40% Damage bonus, stacking with everything other than itself.
- Assassination is stacksize-related, bigger is better.
- When using charge characters, always look for ninjas and protect them with all you got!
- You can wear some Houses out till they run out of money to replenish their units, or just capture some of their captains beforehand (let them attack you) if the final battle is too hard.
- Where do I start?
- As battles are the most frequent thing in Sengoku Rance, a quick note:
- Every troop type (i.e. Warriors, Footman etc.) has its own, specific Attack/Defense/Intelligence/Speed, not linked to the _Commander's_ stats.
- Every commander also has an associated 'cost' in National Power (last column), if you max out your NP budget, new commanders can't be hired, some events are disabled and you're going to get less money at the end of a turn.
- This cost will rise at specific stacksizes, you may sometimes want to dismiss troops to get some free up NP.
- Combat calculations:
- Gotten from http://alice.xfu.jp/wiki.cgi/sengoku?page=%B7%D7%BB%BB%BC%B0 (beware, moonspeak)
- Most importantly, Attack (made up of the troops' and the commander's ATK) is hitting against the Defender's (again, both parts are important) DEF.
- Intelligence-based attacks (Magic) hit against the INT stats of the _Commander_, this makes results a lot more predictable and less varied.
- !!Big 'stacks' (over 499 units) start scaling.!!
- This means that Rance, at Troopsize 1000, _may_ do less damage than if you split him in half with both attacking (not considering counterattacks etc.)
- Hint: High ATK stats or attacking someone with low DEF will lessen the scaling.
- (This means that, depending on the enemy, either higher troop count or Attack stat may be better)
- Experiment and try to remember combat situations, this'll help you out tremendously in the future in predicting combat results.
- (For simplicity, just for ATK, INT works accordingly), more details in the Wiki
- 1. Commander ATK / Troops ATK vs Commander DEF / Troops DEF
- As the stat is used early in calculations, going from 6 to 8 ATK may do everything inbetween not improving your damage at all to making you hit 10 times as hard.
- Hint: A Tactician may, in that respect, allow you to plow through the enemy lines, try it out.!!
- There's a specific cap on that part of the damage: You won't ever do more than the actual troop count, so 1000 Warriors won't do more than 1000 Damage up to this point - of course, this may be further multiplied, but it's the reason some buffs may seem worthless.
- 2. Battlefield Bonus / Percentage-based Items / Skill Multiplier / Passive skills
- Battlefield Bonus (around 20% in most castle-fights), same as Percentage-based Items as the '+20% Damage' are just that: a straight multiplier.
- Hint: There is one specific item (and one passive skill which does the same thing, sadly not stacking with each other) which gives a straight 40% buff to the unit's damage when in a castle.
- It does stack (though the display may confuse you here) with Tactician buffs, so you're looking at a lot of possible damage.
- Try to get one such unit, at least, along with a skill to hit extra hard - protect it at all costs and watch the rampage.
- 3. Damage Additions
- !!These don't apply to Magic attacks!!
- !!On the Defender's side, the prominent skill, 'Ally guard' will reduce all _physical_ damage by 50%.!!
- Counterattack damage calculations run similar to 1., it'll then get multiplied only by things stating 'Counterattack-damage up, nothing else'
- In general, you may want to pile bonuses on a specific attacking commander till you get a feeling of 'yeesh, that hurt', because that's what you're going to need to take down castle.
- Q: Event X isn't shown/working/etc.
- A: When in doubt, you don't have enough NP (national power), some other events have priority, check every country for purple events.
- If your reinforcements still haven't arrived, check Owari for 'Accept reinforcements'.
- Q: Why do assassinations work so much better for the AI?
- A: Relative troop counts play a big role in the success calculations, other than that there are skills and items to help you out.
- 'I always feel like there's some sort of secret that I'm just not getting when I play this game.'
- If you harbour similar feelings, are new to the game or just generally confused by the onslaught of numbers and options, be my guest.
- Details can be gotten from reading the wiki http://alicesoft.wikia.com/wiki/Sengoku_Rance
- What this document does: Providing a short, spoiler-free, guide to make the gaming experience less frustrating, allowing you to experiment and stray from any 'optimal' path.
- What it does not: Telling you how to play or giving specific turn-guides. This involves too much savescumming and should be reserved for seasoned players.
- Though it may sound simple, the best place to look for directions and hints is inside the game: There are many dialogues which indirectly tell you what you should work on, it's never wrong to just go 'What would Rance do in this situation? (Hint: Satisfy his Hyper Weapon) -
- Incidentally, steadily growing the satisfaction meter is quite helpful.
- You may assume that all gameplay elements are there for a reason, so don't be afraid to try them (or the game will force you to, when you are unprepared)
- Make some backup saves every few turns, it may save you a lot of headaches, savescumming isn't necessary though.
- Don't dilly-dally, it makes Rance grow impatient and lead to bad results -
- when the princess is in danger, wasting time to farm XP is not the correct solution, despite what JRPG may have taught you over the years.
- You may also want to check out the Game Info (F5) sometimes, the 'Current Status' pretty much tells you what you should be doing right now.
- Commander Battles
- To get it over with:
- Commander Battles only take the level and commander-type into account (so Ninjas still do bad damage, sadly), stats don't matter at all, buffs do.
- As Suzume mentions, Dungeon Scout is a great skill to save action flags, it's a Ninja skill.
- !!You are able to switch out characters by using a different character to do it, when everyone runs out of turns, you lose.!!
- - Most monks can convert actions, this may give your strongest commanders additional flags to use for their strongest attacks.
- - If you use Tacticians, you'll start with buffs (they may be helpful or not) on every floor.
- - Most attacks either use 1 Flag, or all (so 1 is enough...)
- - Generics are pretty weak in the Ranceverse level-wise, that's where the uniques shine.
- The meat of the game (along with a different kind of meat), it may look simple and simply smashing bigger troops head-on will solve quite a few problems on the normal difficulty - keep in mind though that this won't work when the enemies become bigger and have better stats themselves.
- For mechanics and calculations, go look at the next section, this will rather give you a general idea of do-s and don't-s. (Though there will always be exceptions)
- Seriously, if you don't have at least 2 dedicated commanders with high 'Search' to scout the enemy composition, you're just asking for trouble.
- Try to use counters, though there are always alternatives to deal with something.
- Let's take the most problematic case as an example:
- Archer: Footman snipe (3.0x damage multiplier). High ATK stat may help you out here, refer to section 3.
- Mage/Diviner: (Be wary of ninjas and monks, employ footmen in the backrow if necessary and try to kill their counters) Ally guard doesn't protect against magic attacks, so this is an easy way for a lot of damage
- Monks: Guard cancel on a fast monk outright removes all guard on every enemy footman, making you deal double the amount of physical damage.
- Warrior: High attack stat, Tactician ATK buff, big stack: use a skill with high multiplier (Shouting charge, for example) and go to town.
- That's just one approach to the battle though, you must have a clear goal even when picking your commanders whether you want to annihilate the enemies or go for a battle gauge win.
- Annihilation
- - As long as every opponent is annihilated, you win the battle
- - More turns for you = more time to kill troops
- ->Either reduce enemy turns by killing their fast / multiple-flag units or improve the number of turns you get (Extended battle, fast characters, buffs)
- ->Let's extend this thought: It's better if your 'best' Damage-dealers have more turns! You may want to put some all-flag attacks on your characters (i.e. Footman with Fellow Troops' Revenge is great for that) to allow more turns at the end for others.
- - Time-efficient attacks: It's not as important to hit early (for reduced stack sizes when they attack) but rather to hit as hard as you can with the limited turn-count: Charge/AoE attacks are very good for that
- Contrary to that, the Battle Gauge approach needs different skills and a different focus, at least partly:
- Battle Gauge:
- - Minimize the damage you take while maximizing your own output
- - Battles may end up with most (or all) commanders being alive on both sides, get used to it and don't freak out
- - Turnorder becomes extremely important, a good rule of thumb is to hit the enemy that can hit you the earliest (look at the turn order in the middle of the screen)
- - You're probably going to have to divert all damage to guarding footmen, if you want to go for this type of win in castles, so keep protecting
- - Tacticians have a skill solely to manipulate the battle gauge.
- - While previously, hitting the weakest link was sometimes the best solution to remove turns, here it may be better to hit the strongest, reducing his damage
- - You know, Shikigami guard on a Footman can save you with the correct timing
- - Don't overkill, you're going to need that damage elsewhere.
- - If you use AoE attacks (Shikigamis, mostly), think about spreading your previous damage on every enemy commander so they all stay alive, doing the most overall damage possible
- - Some skills don't get caught by Footman guard (all penetration attacks, for example), so you may want to just target accordingly and let the footmen alive.
- - Look for big stacks with bad defense stats, they're worth a lot of Battle Gauge
- - There's a passive ability called Initial battle rating. You may want to use it.
- - When some units are stuck in the back, unable to do anything (especially warriors): Don't kill the front row but rather take shots at the back.
- Figure out how you can make enemy units do 'nothing to change the gauge', i.e. Monks cancelling guard, Tacticians using buffs/debuffs etc.
- Always take counterattack damage into account, if you attack the wrong person it'll hurt you more (on the gauge) than them, depending on your overall strategy this can be bad
- Battle-preparation, especially buffed by Satisfaction bonuses, can pretty much level Castle bonuses.
- They remain up to the next fight, if you want to savescum.
- Castle Siege Expert? (either the item _or_ the passive skill) - Straight 40% Damage bonus, stacking with everything other than itself.
- Assassination is stacksize-related, bigger is better.
- When using charge characters, always look for ninjas and protect them with all you got!
- You can wear some Houses out till they run out of money to replenish their units, or just capture some of their captains beforehand (let them attack you) if the final battle is too hard.
- Where do I start?
- As battles are the most frequent thing in Sengoku Rance, a quick note:
- Every troop type (i.e. Warriors, Footman etc.) has its own, specific Attack/Defense/Intelligence/Speed, not linked to the _Commander's_ stats.
- Every commander also has an associated 'cost' in National Power (last column), if you max out your NP budget, new commanders can't be hired, some events are disabled and you're going to get less money at the end of a turn.
- This cost will rise at specific stacksizes, you may sometimes want to dismiss troops to get some free up NP.
- Combat calculations:
- Gotten from http://alice.xfu.jp/wiki.cgi/sengoku?page=%B7%D7%BB%BB%BC%B0 (beware, moonspeak)
- Most importantly, Attack (made up of the troops' and the commander's ATK) is hitting against the Defender's (again, both parts are important) DEF.
- Intelligence-based attacks (Magic) hit against the INT stats of the _Commander_, this makes results a lot more predictable and less varied.
- !!Big 'stacks' (over 499 units) start scaling.!!
- This means that Rance, at Troopsize 1000, _may_ do less damage than if you split him in half with both attacking (not considering counterattacks etc.)
- Hint: High ATK stats or attacking someone with low DEF will lessen the scaling.
- (This means that, depending on the enemy, either higher troop count or Attack stat may be better)
- Experiment and try to remember combat situations, this'll help you out tremendously in the future in predicting combat results.
- (For simplicity, just for ATK, INT works accordingly), more details in the Wiki
- 1. Commander ATK / Troops ATK vs Commander DEF / Troops DEF
- As the stat is used early in calculations, going from 6 to 8 ATK may do everything inbetween not improving your damage at all to making you hit 10 times as hard.
- Hint: A Tactician may, in that respect, allow you to plow through the enemy lines, try it out.!!
- There's a specific cap on that part of the damage: You won't ever do more than the actual troop count, so 1000 Warriors won't do more than 1000 Damage up to this point - of course, this may be further multiplied, but it's the reason some buffs may seem worthless.
- 2. Battlefield Bonus / Percentage-based Items / Skill Multiplier / Passive skills
- Battlefield Bonus (around 20% in most castle-fights), same as Percentage-based Items as the '+20% Damage' are just that: a straight multiplier.
- Hint: There is one specific item (and one passive skill which does the same thing, sadly not stacking with each other) which gives a straight 40% buff to the unit's damage when in a castle.
- It does stack (though the display may confuse you here) with Tactician buffs, so you're looking at a lot of possible damage.
- Try to get one such unit, at least, along with a skill to hit extra hard - protect it at all costs and watch the rampage.
- 3. Damage Additions
- !!These don't apply to Magic attacks!!
- !!On the Defender's side, the prominent skill, 'Ally guard' will reduce all _physical_ damage by 50%.!!
- Counterattack damage calculations run similar to 1., it'll then get multiplied only by things stating 'Counterattack-damage up, nothing else'
- In general, you may want to pile bonuses on a specific attacking commander till you get a feeling of 'yeesh, that hurt', because that's what you're going to need to take down castle.
- Q: Event X isn't shown/working/etc.
- A: When in doubt, you don't have enough NP (national power), some other events have priority, check every country for purple events.
- If your reinforcements still haven't arrived, check Owari for 'Accept reinforcements'.
- Q: Why do assassinations work so much better for the AI?
- A: Relative troop counts play a big role in the success calculations, other than that there are skills and items to help you out.