Combat basics

This page covers basic combat mechanics of the game which are applicable to nearly every mode.

=Teams= Typical team consists of at least one Tank role character, one Healer, along with several Attackers and Supports. While very early missions can be cleared by any random combination of characters, difficulty will quickly ramp up to a stage where assembling specialized teams becomes essential, along with having to deploy several teams mission. The most important basic concepts to be aware of when selecting your teams are described below.

Attack and Armor types
One of the primary ways to insure good combat performance is matching attack type of your team versus the enemy armor (i.e. you should use Explosive attacks against Lightly -armored enemies). Advantaged attack typing results in a 200% damage modifier, disadvantaged typing means resistant target only takes 50% damage.

Attack typing is extremely important for damage dealers throughout the game, but is of lower importance to tanks, healers, and other support role students who can't be expected to output a lot of damage either way.

Note that most of the common enemies deal Neutral damage, so you do not need to be overly concerned with your own students' armor types early on.

Environment Affinity
Each character has a separate "Affinity" stat for each of the three environments in the game (Urban, Outdoor and Indoor).

A character's affinity for a particular environment affects both the amount of damage they deal and the effectiveness of hiding behind cover in that environment. This means that certain characters are more suited to combat in certain environments, and vice versa.

The table below details the damage modifier and effectiveness of cover for each possible affinity value. Note that SS isn't normally present from the beginning, and can only be reached through Unique weapons offsets.

Rank
All students start out at a rank of 1 to 3 stars and all can be upgraded to a 5-star rank, at which stage further strengthening options (Unique weapons, Unique gear) become available.

Starting out at 3*, as most gacha students do, is a significant stats headstart and will give them advantage early on, but lower-rarity students should not be discounted as inferior. See Recruitment (Gacha) and Shop for an explanation of character rankup mechanics.

Level
Student levels can not exceed overall account level, which will be growing quite rapidly early on, so make sure to regularly level up your core team.

Note that by mid-game EXP reports can become a limiting factor in leveling up your students, so you want to strike a balance between having enough resources and leveling up a varied enough roster to tackle missions. Try to plan for being able to field a competent team for every one of the three attack types, and being able to field two different teams simultaneously.

=Equipment= Every student has three equipment slots, this provides a straightforward way of improving their stats over time. Progression is linear and predetermined (i.e. if a student has a Hat slot, you will have to equip a Tier 1 hat, max out its level, then replace it with a Tier 2 hat at level 1, and so on).

Equipment provides very significant stat bonuses and should not be overlooked, especially on Striker students. T4 is particularly known as an item that dramatically improves Tsubaki survivability.

See Equipment for detailed effects of every equipment piece.

=Strategy map= Many of the missions will have players navigate a hex-based map while battling several enemy squads.

Tile types
TODO

Movement
Typically, every team can travel one tile per turn, however several more advanced techniques are commonly used to travel further or to manipulate the battlefield. Mastery of these techniques is key to clearing challenge objectives.

Team swap
When two player teams stand on adjacent tiles and at least of them still hasn't taken actions this turn, they can swap positions with each other. This is not considered an action for either team.

Leapfrog
A variant of team swap that allows one of your teams to effectively travel two tiles within a turn.

Broken tile
While enemy teams caught standing standing on a tile when it breaks are simply removed from the map, player teams get teleported to the closest 'Start' tile. Intentionally utilizing this mechanic can often save several turns' worth of movement.

=Tactical combat= Tactical combat happens with an isometric perspective overview of your team that usually progresses from bottom left to top-right corner of the screen. This combat is realtime, speedup options up to 3x and Auto skill use become available shortly after starting the game. Using Auto mode is generally not advisable and leads to worse-than-expected team performance.

Japanese version of the game has introduced tactical combat autoresolve feature that can be switched on at the strategic map level. This functionality is not yet available in the Global version.

Cost
Cost points are required to activate EX skills of characters, which is players' primary way of directly affecting the battle. Manipulating Cost and timing skills grows in importance for late-game content.

Cost Recovery is provided by every student on the team (as a rule of thumb, full team of 6 characters will have a much faster cost recovery that a team of fewer students), with some students, like Cherino and Himari, boosting recovery speed and others (Ui) discounting the cost of using skills.

Status effects and crowd control
TODO

Tsubaki is a reliable source of Taunt effect, which not only forces all enemies in range to target the tank, but also interrupts any skills that were being activated at the moment character got taunted.

=Mission objectives= Most missions have a set of three extra objectives, displayed as a list of golden stars. Each objective completion is saved independently, meaning that if you can't clear all three objectives within a single run, you can clear whatever was left subsequently. Once all three objectives are cleared, Sweep (skipping the gameplay and just getting mission rewards for its cost) is enabled.

Event drops bonuses
Most events have a list of students that provide extra bonuses to event currency rewards. Remember that the best achieved drop bonus is also saved per-currency and across multiple runs of the same mission. If you are planning to sweep it later, it's very common to do several runs of a given mission, maximizing bonus for each currency in turns. Sweeping will then provide rewards with all accumulated bonuses accounted for.