Kichikuou Rance:Tips

Beginner Tips
Since not many things are explained in the game, some are often overlooked by players. Sometimes some things are not clear whether what you are doing is correct or not. This section is meant to explain to beginners that just started or will start to play in order to know the basics.

Dungeons
You can explore dungeons by clicking in the small areas that can be seen in the world map. Obviously you need to have a city adyacent to the dungeon to be able to explore it. It's usually easy to overlook since it's not really clear that you can interact with those places. Usually caves, towers and things like that that seem like decoration in the world map are dungeons.

In the dungeons you pick a character and start descending floors. Some characters that are good for dungeons are Leila or Patton. You usually start descending and fight monsters until you run out of troops and you are forced to retreat. When you got to a certain floor you do not need to go through those floors again in order to keep exploring. So if you got to the floor 28 next time you explore the dungeon you will start from that same floor.

There are some places that aren't real dungeons, like Ho Raga's tower, and serve as events for other purposes.

Remember to explore dungeons often, even though the optimal play walkthrough doesn't mention them at each turn.

Special Skills
Some characters have special unique skills that only they can use. This can be seen in the commander menu in the description.

To use the special skill in battle you have to select the Wait option and in the next turn a new attack option will appear allowing you to use the special skill. Many players don't realise about this function since they think the wait option is entirely useless (it would have been better if it was named something like "Charge"). Most of the skills are focused on dealing damage to the main commander. A good use of this is to take down commanders with huge amounts of troops. For example if you face an enemy with 2000 troops but only 5 Hp the best strategy is to use Rance's and Rick's special attack and kill him in two turns, rather than try to take down all his troops first.

Size of the Battlefield - Fighting inside the Cities or outside
This is pretty simple. The size determines the amount of troops that can be deployed. That means that if you are in a location with a space of 500 units and deploy a commander with 1000 troops like Rick, only 500 hundred of his troops will actually attack. He will still have 1000 troops but his attacks and counter-attacks damage will be calculated as if it was 500 instead. The same applies to the enemies obviously.

The cities usually gives you an advantage in combat but are smaller areas that the outskirts, making it better for commanders with lower troops than your opponents.

Also, it's a common problem the fact that many try to attack a Demon with Rance or Kentarou with normal attacks and notice that they won't deal any damage, despite the fact that they have equipped the Demon killing blades that should theorically work against demons. When this happens the problem is that if the amount of troops the character has surpasses that of the battlefield, all his troops will attack the demon but not the commander, making the attack deal 0 damage.

To leave this more clear. If you are using Rance with 1000 troops and you are aiming to kill a demon, you need to fight in an area bigger in size to 1000 so Rance is able to hit him directly. Otherwise you will need to wait until you lose some troops if the location is smaller.

Mars can be useful
Mars is a pretty special unit. If you conquer Mars by force he will attack the Leazas Castle with a bunch of zombies, if you take it via negotiation he will be recruited. However he randomly takes away female units and are never seen again so it's better to get rid of him as soon as possible. Mars can be used in many way:
 * When Mars assaults you with his zombies, a quick way to beat him is sending miki and one general, if miki uses her nuke, all zombies are kill and the other general can kill mars with ease.
 * Mars' assault to the castle is very useful to farm exp and level up characters due to the high number of zombies he brings with him. It's also an easy way to clear and get Haurien's good ending if placed with Barres.
 * The attack to the leazas castle can be used to recruit Ex, since it's very unlikely to get many attacks to the castle and is the only way to recruit him.
 * You can recruit Mars right before the Flash nuke in Zeth. Since the nuke forces you to sacrifice at least one character(or two if you don't have Miki) it's a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and get rid of Mars quickly before he abducts any character.

Get Chaos
Rance can harm demons with Nikkou but it's highly recommended to get chaos since he's needed for a few events and gives you Miki and Kentarou, who are very useful units(Miki is broken and Kentarou can only harm demons with Nikkou).

To get Chaos you need to kill Ray the lightning demon that attacks Leazas. After fighting Ray once there's a scene in which he visits his human lover in Rich. After that scene you can impose a levy once in Rich to get an event and you will get an option to go to her house. You will be given four choices that lead to pretty obvious outcomes. After killing Rei in one way or another(unless you run away) Kayblis will send Dark Lord Sieg to replace him. Visit Cell's church and Sieg will later transform into Rance and obtain Chaos himself. Visit Cell's church again and using Rance to defend against Sieg's attack next time he attacks will get you Chaos instantly.

No Kalar-Crystals for Minerva
When at war with Helman it's recommended to take over the western part first and visit the Kalar forest before taking over Micrograd, the city right next to the capital. If you don't Minerva will get Kalar crystals in an event and she will become much stronger.

However, if Minerva does get the crystals swords you can levy there after you conquer Helman to get the crystals yourself.

Ho-Laga's wisdom, use it
There's a tower at the top of the map where Ho-Laga lives. You can visit his tower to ask him about many different things and also serve to unlock a few events.

There's many points in which visiting Ho-Laga gets you the answer of what you are supposed to do. Getting a way to pierce the field that protects the tower fields in Zeth, how to cancel Devil contracts, about Kesselrink's weakness, long etc. Ho Laga is almost your ingame walktrough in many points of the game.

About releasing Housenurse
After conquering Shangri-la ,after talking with Shariela, you will be able to visit a hidden dungeon and meet Housenurse. After an event you will be given the option to release Housenurse or not:
 * In a first playthrough it's highly recommended not to release Housenurse. If you do, the game's pretty much set in hard mode. You are forced to attack Helman trough the mountains, which is a very hard feat to achieve and should only be tried by people who are already experienced with the game's mechanics and want a challenge. Which is most likely not the case for someone in his first playthrough. If you are a masochist though, releasing her does give good rewards. The bad sides are that you are forced to attack Helman trough the mountains, an entire month was lost with nothing return and Sill and Soul are much harder to save since there's a time limit. The good side is that if you release housenurse you get a random chance to get a beginning of turn event where a unit called the Kaijuu Prince joins you. The Kaijuu Prince is one of the best units in the game but the event where he joins is so random that it could take from a few months, an entire year or even never join in the entire playtrough.
 * Not releasing Housenurse is the sensible choice. You are given much easier paths to attack both Helman and Zeth and you are in a much closer city to the place where Sill and Soul are locked up, so saving them is very easy. You can choose to release Housenurse after you conquer Zeth and Helman but the Kaijuu Prince won't join.