Daiteikoku:Game mechanics

Daiteikoku is a game in which the player leads the Japanese Imperial Army, suppresses the other countries, and unites the world factions. The player directs the organization and combat of the fleet as Secretary of the Navy, Tsuyoshi Togo. A single turn in Daiteikoku is divided into the following phases:
 * Beginning of Turn Event
 * Player Strategy Phase
 * Tactics Phase (only if attacking an enemy territory)
 * Event Phase
 * Enemy Strategy Phase

Beginning-of-Turn Event
Much like in Sengoku Rance, one of the pending ADV events may randomly happen at the beginning of a turn before strategy phase begins.

Player Strategy Phase
The Strategy Phase is when the positioning of your armies and all other logistics are decided. In this phase you will mainly be planning your course of action for the future, constructing and researching new ships, and moving your fleets.

Situation Report
At the beginning of each turn you will receive a basic balance sheet with your empire's current total income. You will also be notified of all impending invasions, natural disasters and prevailing weather conditions.

Star Region Menu
Each region is represented by a blip that has a progress bar representing Public Peace. When full, the blip will flash purple. There will also be a number of stars based on how many admirals you have stationed in that Region, up to a maximum of 10. There is no limit to the number of admirals you may have stationed in any region. You can click on any blip to bring up an information screen for that region.

The Star Region Menu displays the following:
 * Resources Income (on the left)
 * Technology Income (on the right)
 * Weather Conditions
 * Admirals stationed in the Star Region.
 * Public Peace: If public peace is too low you will receive no Resource or Technology Income. When you first conquer a territory the public peace will be low so you need to station admirals in there to increase it. Note that certain characters, like Yamamoto, have an ability that further increases the rate of improvement of public peace, while certain characters, when present in that region, will completely stall it.

Fun fact: If the map is seen carefully, there will be a vertical scanline going from left to right momentarily drawing an outline of the real world map based on which the fictional intergalactical map of the Daiteikoku world has been created on which star regions, based on locations in real world, have been placed.

Fleet Organization Menu
The first button from the left, on the bottom of the screen. Opening this menu will display a comprehensive list of all your admirals and their relevant stats. You may also assign ships to your admirals' fleets from this menu. Ships will be organised from the largest to the smallest class. For more information on the meaning of the relevant stats of each ship, please refer to the Ships article and the Combat section further down.

An admiral's character card will be arranged as follows:

Each admiral can be assigned a maximum of four ships, within the limits of their command points. A the cost of each ship doubles with its size class so a frigate costs 45 while a cruiser costs 90 and a battlecruiser costs 180, generally speaking. Each slot may or may not have a bonus associated with it, which will give a bonus or penalty to a specific stat of the ship that is assigned to that command slot, or to everything at once. If the bonus does not apply to the ship assigned (for instance, a missile cruiser in a slot with a laser penalty) then the bonus has no effect. Any unique special abilities that each admiral may have will be noted in their character card.

Shipbuilding and Research Menus
From the left, the second button on the bottom bar is your ship construction menu while the third is your research menu. These will allow you to spend Resource and Technology points to expand your fleets. These menus are arranged in largely the same way as the Fleet Organization Menu, simply click the ship you wish to build.

Constructing ships costs Resources only. Research costs Technology only. Depending on certain conditions within the game it is possible to get a discount or indeed a markup on the costs of both and production and research. When selecting a ship to construct, the game will display four values. Clockwise from the top left, they are the amount of the selected ship you have active, the cost to produce, the resale value, and the amount you have inactive. From the left, the buttons are build, scuttle and cancel.

Movement
Movement is done by opening the Star Region Map in a Region where admirals are stationed. Click the button at the bottom right corner of the screen, then select the region you wish to move to. From here select any number of admirals to move between the two regions. Admirals may be transferred both ways. Admirals may be moved up to two star regions per turn. Moving an admiral into enemy territory will initiate combat. You may not move an admiral into enemy territory if they have sustained any damage at all, but any admiral may take part in the defence of a region no matter how much damage they have sustained. All admirals regenerate health at a slow pace, the speed of which can be increased by building repair docks.

Disasters
Once you click End Turn any disasters are resolved. The most common of these are uprisings and attacks by space monsters. These battles are same as defence battles (see "Enemy Phase" and "Tactics Phase" for description) Uprisings are fairly simple battles that can be quelled by an admiral with a sufficient amount of frigates while space monsters are virtually impossible to defeat (see the disasters' section of the wiki). When the public peace of the area is reduced to 0 the monster will retreat and you will lose considerable amout of resources (need to confirm whether the loss is random). Space monsters cannot hold territory.

Tactics Phase
This phase consists of battles in places you chose to attack. This phase takes place at the end of the Strategy Phase and before Event Phase after all disasters are resolved. The tactical view will show the distribution of enemy forces. The objective of a battle is to fill the gauge at the bottom of the screen enough to ensure that the ensuing planetary invasion is successful. A minimum of 8 stars or 80% is required to win the battle. It seems like the percentage of stars you claim from a battlefield is equal to the percentage of HP you slashed off the defenders (some of your fleets in the battlefield need to survive, naturally).

Stars are accumulated by fighting admirals in battlezones that have blank stars under their names. As you deal damage to hostile fleets, the stars fill up. Select a battlezone to view the character cards for the enemy admirals and assign your fleets to each zone, up to a maximum of 4. You may have a maximum of 8 admirals on the battlefield and since you cannot reassign any admirals after the initial deployment, so choose wisely. It might seem bringing more than 8 admirals to enemy territory is pointless, but you can always consider bringing more generals of diverse stats and looking at enemy groups and their stats you can decide which ones to deploy: Low HP/high attack enemies are better taken out by high speed units before they can even fire, while weaker but high HP ones should be handled by a high endurance admiral of your own who has a diverse array of weapons on him and so on. When you have finished your assignments click the button at the bottom right corner of the screen to close the menu.

At the top of the screen there will be a bar showing the number of phases. This is the battle's time limit. If each engagement is not resolved decisively the battle will go into its second or third phase, after which no one may take any more actions. Minimum number of phases for one battle is 2. If you have a neighbouring territory under full control (no unrest on it), you get additional third phase.

When you have completed deployments, the engagements will be resolved. There are four different weapon types: Starfighters, Lasers, Missiles and Cannons. Each one has priority over all the weapons that follow it, so starfighters will always strike first, followed by lasers, and so on. If more than one fleet has the same priority weapon then order of attacking will be decided in descending order of radar strength (the essence is that those with higher radar range can spot and lock on enemies from far away and thus start attacking earlier). The turns are then resolved in descending order, by weapons and then radar strength. If a ship has multiple damage types in its fleet these are still resolved according to the priority order, the admiral merely gets more actions but the weapons do not all fire at once.

Once every ship has fired its weapons the engagement ends and proceeds to the next. Once all engagements have been resolved the phase ends. If you have filled the victory gauge enough you can attempt a planetary invasion regardless of the actual state of your forces. Simply click the button on the top right corner of the screen. Trying to do this with less than 8 stars will result in game over. Otherwise click the button at the bottom right and the battle will proceed to phase 2, with the remaining ships fighting further engagements until one side is completely wiped out.

You cannot retreat from battles when you're the attacker, so if you do not win, you may as well reload.

Admirals that participated in an engagement will get experience even if their fleets were wiped out, and they will regain health as normal after the battle without losing any ships in the process. When the experience bar fills up to 1000 they will advance to the next rank, generally increasing their fleet bonuses or reducing the penalties from assigning certain ships to certain slots. If the invasion was successful you capture the region immediately and will be asked to select a building to construct (for free). You can build only one building in each territory. After last patch it became possible to change the building anytime during your tactical phase by spending additional resources (fish building is exception, if you build it, you can't remove it yourself).

Event Phase
Events are divided into character-specific events and generic events. In general, the menu is arranged so that events with major, empire-spanning consequences, such as asking Mikado to perform the banishment ceremony, will be placed at the top, followed by character-specific events and then small-scale generic events. Such events will yield benefits like extra resources or new admirals. Character-specific events allow you to deepen your relationship with your admirals. Pink-coloured boxes represent H-scenes. Some of both H and non-H events (often the final one involving that character) will confer a benefit upon the character in question, such as extra command points.

Enemy Strategy Phase
Impending attacks are marked on the world map with a red alert beacon around the source of the attack. If the adjacent territory is a chokepoint, good for you, but if there is more than one territory adjacent there is no way to tell which one the AI will attack until it actually happens. However, the target does change every time, so you may reload until the region of your choice is invaded. Defensive battles are resolved in the same way that invasions are, except that instead of invading you can click the button in the bottom left corner of the screen to retreat. Victory is decided in the same way as with an attacking battle, except that the battle ends automatically once enough stars have been accumulated. Moreover, if Japan is ever invaded, admirals (stationed in regions also invaded in the same turn) will be magically transported to Japan and will remain there.

Retreating or being defeated will result in a massive hit to the region's public peace. If it is less than fully secure, the region will fall under enemy control and your admirals will be returned to the nearest friendly region.