Kasz is quite right here. Ignore towns not occupied by the enemy - or even protect them, if you have to!

By nuetral, I meant the green ones.

BTW, that video at the top of the page is wack because battle animations are turned off.

sounds worth looking into

If I buy Ogre battle will you explain to me how the whole alignment system works?

Yes. Yes I will.

Alignment:
- Killing lawful units = chaotic alignment gain
- Killing Chaotic units = lawful alignment gain
- Killing lower level units = chaotic alignment gain
- Killing higher level units = lawful alignment gain

There may be other factors, but if there are, they aren't really necessary to pay attention to since paying attention to these 4 things will be enough.

The range is roughly 20-25 morale points on towns from your estimated alignment.


Chaos Frame:
Liberation = +2 points
Capture = -1 point
Enemy capturing = -3 points

So in a 10 Mission period, it is highly possible to get from 0 to 100 CF.

It's a really neat system, but needs more stats available to the player readily at will.

This is generally a good guide to look at, but I feel like I should add a couple of clarifying points.

Alignment

There is a "peer pressure" system in alignment so that groups will tend toward having equal alignment across an entire unit. If you put a chaotic character in a lawful unit, either they'll end up lawful or (under the right circiumstances) they can turn an entire unit chaotic, as an example.

There's also momentum of a sort - if you're more lawful than your enemy, you get more lawful, and the same goes for chaotic. So once you're in one of the extremes, it takes peer pressure to reliably move alignment in the other direction!

Chaos Frame

The thing here about Chaos Frame is that I've actually found that captures (even yours) cost you more points than liberations net you. This doesn't seem to be consistent from map to map, but people have examined the game's code and determined that it works something like this (going off memory):

Liberation: +0.5-1.5
Capture: -1.5-2.5

Enemy Captures, to the best of my knowledge, operate exactly like normal ones.

This isn't really a game that's been very well-documented, though, so it's possible that I'm off on the Chaos Frame thing, but I'm highly confident in what I've said regarding Alignment.

I have always wanted to play this game but for some reason I never had. I did not have money to buy it when it came out, then once I got a job back then you could not find it.

FFT is one of my favs, Is this one pretty much the same/ better/ not quite as good??

It's different from FFT in a lot of ways, hard to say how unless you play it.

I will say that FFT's story is basically a washed down Ogre Battle story.

I'm really getting into this game in a way I didn't before. I love the gameplay and that was the main draw for me my two times through back in 2000 and 2001. But the story is really resonating with me this time. I never paid much attention to it before and I generally had trouble following RPG storylines back in the day unless it was something a lot simpler like Zelda. Most of them were too convoluted and didn't make sense. But the themes being dealt with in this game is really making this enjoyable. It's like a whole new experience. This turned out to be my Chaos Frame run and my Pay-attention-to-the-story run!

@ Jumpin - thanks for posting that. Very helpful.