The best value on the Virtual Console has been released: Ogre Battle 64

[famousringo]

Khuutra said:

famousringo said:
I played through the prologue chapter last night. This is my first serious go at an Ogre Battle game, so here are a few things I've picked up so far. I'm looking for people to either throw some good tips at me or tell me how wrong these impressions are:

- Most of the strategy is in building, arranging, and outfitting your units before the battle. Once you're on the map, the game is mostly about exploring the map, keeping your bases covered and your units healthy, picking the right unit to attack a town, and selecting the best of a few tactics during combat.

- If you're in for a tough fight and you want to make sure you win the battle, Automatic is the best tactic. If you're in a strong position and you want to eliminate the enemy unit, Attack Weakest is the best tactic. If you're attacking the enemy HQ, or you just want to get an enemy unit out of your face, Attack Leader is the best tactic.

- I can't figure out what conditions shift alignment. It seems like killing enemy characters and wiping out units usually drives alignment down (and leads to fabulous rewards!), but sometimes it seems to drive alignment up.

First impression: right on!

Second impression: It's actually better to set yourself to Attack Leader when you want to take out a unit, at least at first, because a leaderless unit won't retreat to bases and will run from you until it collapses in exhaustion.

Third impression: Killing enemy units does not affect alignment. Kill every enemy unit you see, it's great! The way to raise unit alignment is by fighting enemies stronger than you, always attacing from the front, killing low-alignment enemies, and fighting alongside other high-alignment characters. To lower alignment, do all of that in reverse.

Your Chaos Frame is a measure of your reputation, and it's invisible. It's affected by some story decisions you make, but the most consistent way to raise your chaos frame is to liberate cities; to lower your Chaos Frame, you capture them. In order to liberate a city you take it with a unit whose leader has an alignment roughly in line with the city's (the spread is pretty generous, you'll get a feel for it as you go along). In order to capture, take them out with units whose leaders have alignments very different from the city's!

You will always, always capture neutral cities. It's better to stay away from them unless you want to come back to the map after a mission.

If you have any more questions, there are a few people (me included) who know quite a bit!

Aha, so my alignment kept dropping because I kept fighting units that had only three characters in them or because I was running down a retreating unit to execute them. The fact that I was killing them was beside the point.

That being the case, wouldn't killing the leader last be a good idea if you'd like to eliminate an enemy unit without suffering a drop in alignment? You'd still get penalized for the unit being weaker than you, but at least the leader will face you head-on, unlike his sniveling lackeys.

So you need to control all towns in order to return to a map? Because I found returning to the first map to be fairly rewarding, if a little tedious. I picked up a couple items that I missed the first go around and recruited a baby dragon and a golem which rounded out a couple of my units nicely.

Thanks for the tips!