Sengoku Rance:Game mechanics

Game Objectives
Sengoku Rance is plot based, so you are not required to conquer all other factions to win the game. However, fighting and defeating enemy factions is almost always the way to progress the main plot.
 * The game encourages you to be in a permanent state of war. There are events designed to force you into war with other houses if you remain at peace for far too long.

To attack another house, you will need to declare war on another house before attacking. Story events can also cause enemy countries declare war on you.

The speed of your conquest doesn't matter so much. You can also focus on character events and upgrades or on increasing your national power and income, but you can find yourself without the characters you need to defeat the game if you wait around too long without conquering other factions.

Gourds and routes
Gourds are one of the key elements to the story progression. After breaking 5 gourds, you will be forced to enter a route and in First Games, this will always be the True route. See more on Gourdes and routes.

Action fans
Almost all actions, with exception a few (recruiting prisoners, using funds to heals troops, etc.), require the use of 1 'Action Fan', and other actions will use up all Action Fans (for example, finding Kouhime when she goes missing).

You can end your turn at any time, but you will only want to do so after using all your Action Fans. Action Fans will be replenished whenever you start a turn

One of the main objectives of the early game is to increase your Action Fans. See the requirements to do so in Satisfaction Bonuses.

Phases in a turn
A typical turn in Sengoku Rance includes the following phases:

1. Information overview phase: Before your actual turn begins, you will have several notes scrolling along the bottom of the screen, such as your income for this turn. Units that did not participate in battles in the previous turn will also recover some of their units.

2. Start of turn event phase: At the beginning of your turn, an event will play. These events have priorities that are usually based on plot importance. Some important events, such as recruiting key characters, can be low priority.

3. Player action phase: The player has a certain number of actions represented by Action Fans at the top left of the screen. These can be used to trigger character events, attack enemy countries or for some other territory/character development options.
 * At any time during this phase, the player can also recruit from the dungeon or open the troop recruitment and item distribution menus with no fan cost.

4. Ending your phase: To end your turn, press the red button (or the ESC key) and select yes.

5. Enemy phase: Each active enemy force then gets an information overview phase with possible attacks and effects. Their turn order is random:



Commanders refresh at the start of their faction's turn
Like the player, when an enemy faction deploys a commander to a battle, they are marked as exhausted, making them unable to participate in any other battles during that turn. They will become usable again after the beginning of that faction's turn.

For example, if the Mouri faction attacks with Motonari during their turn, then he will be exhausted afterwards. This makes him unable to appear in the player's turn that follows (e.g. when you attack them). He will only be able to appear again when Mouri's next turn begins.

This is the same for any other commander, with the following exceptions:
 * Event battles, such as the All Out Battle with Mouri or the Shimazu Ambush fight do not reflect damage or exhaustion back on the commander, allowing them to appear again.
 * Scripted appearances, such as Hara Shouji's appearance in the final castle battle in Ise, will ignore exhaustion, so they will be able to appear a second time in that same turn.

Starting position
The player starts off with only 1 province, Owari (see the player controlled province in the screenshot below. Conquering or vassaling neighbouring territories allows the player to progress the game.

Province color codes:
 * Blue - Player control
 * Green - Vassaled (not shown in screenshot)
 * Yellow - Neighbouring player
 * Red - At war with you

In this screenshot, the player's territory only neighbours the provinces of Ashikaga, Hara, Tokugawa and Iga factions. Moreover, as some factions require certain events to occur, for the first few turns at the beginning of the game, the player will only be able to declare war on Hara, and later Ashikaga. Other factions will start to interact with the player based on neighbouring provinces as well as other conditions.

Province and menu overview
Each province will open up another part of the map, by exposing the player to more neighbouring provinces and the factions that occupy them.

To take over a province (or for an enemy to take one of your provinces), you have to completely take over all the 'territories' within it.

Territory type and owner: Each province has up to 8 territories. Each of the territories has a type (field, town, castle), which has an effect on the advantage of the defender in battles over that territory. See Parameters & Formulae and here for more details.
 * For example, in the screenshot below, the Oda House (the player) has control over 1 of the 4 territories in the Ise province, while the Hara House still has three territories under its control. Successfully capturing those three territories will switch control to the Oda House.
 * Note how the types of territories also change. Fields, the smaller type on the left, give weaker battle bonuses than castles, the larger type on the right.





↓ Show/Hide explanation of the main screen options ↓ 


 * 1) Territory commands - see below
 * 2) Score (得点) - The base score for the first game is 60 points. Every turn you lose one point. For every objective you achieve, you gain a certain number of points. Don't worry about the score on your first time playing through it; you are expected to get a score of 0. On subsequent playthroughs you can set the game to a higher difficulty, and you'll start off with more points depending on the difficulty. These points are used for buying bonuses for your second and subsequent playthroughs and only your highest score counts. See Second Game Bonuses for the bonuses you can buy.
 * 3) *You can see your Score in the top right quadrant of the screen. In this particular example screenshot as 57
 * 4) Action fans - the player begins the game with 2 action fans per turn, but this can be increased with Satisfaction bonuses.
 * 5) System menu will allow you access the save and load menus, and various settings related to the game system
 * 6) The Items screen lets you see all Items under your possession, for use or for equipping.
 * 7) Troop menu - see below
 * 8) Prison menu - the prison can be opened through an event from start of game, and afterwards allows you to capture enemies during battle and later recruit them
 * 9) Cost (コスト) / National Power (国力 NP) - the total cost of all your commanders combined. Player NP is the sum of NP for each province you control. The game will not allow you to hire a new commander who will put your total cost over the nation power but sometimes you can't hire certain new commanders (like reinforcements) when at the maximum. If your total cost exceeds your NP, you will receive half as much income from the provinces under your control every turn.
 * 10) *You can see your Cost / NP in the bar to the right of your troop window button presented in this particular screenshot example as 8/15
 * 11) Satisfaction (満足度 SAT) - SAT comes from H'ing heroines or other Rance related actions and can be used to trigger a bonus menu selection. See Satisfaction bonuses.
 * 12) *You can see SAT in the bar to the right of the Cost / National Power, in this particular screenshot example as 5
 * 13) Gold (金) - Gold can be used to increase a commander's maximum troop size or replenish dead troops, it can also be used for several events within the storyline. See Parameters & Formulae for methods to obtain Gold.
 * 14) *You can see Gold in the bar to the right of the SAT, in this particular screenshot example as 5700

Territory commands
During the player action phase, the player can choose from a variety of event commands in provinces.

What you can do in a turn is generally limited to the number of Action Fans you have (found directly below the action list you can see below, right by the word "行動回数") and, of course, what you can do with them. Here's a picture showcasing some simple commands:

Generally, commands can be broken down into 5 types, all explained below.
 * Blue Commands (建設): Construction or Expansion
 * Yellow Commands (交渉): Negotiations of any kind
 * Red Commands (合戦): Battles and Dungeons
 * Green Commands (探索): Exploration
 * Purple Commands (???): Events
 * Blank Commands (No tag): All sorts of miscellaneous stuff.

For Blue, Yellow, and Green commands, you must gather up a certain amount of points from your units. Each character has three different stats for this: one for construction, one for negotiation, and the one for scouting/searching. Purple, Red, and Misc. events can be done instantly, provided you have an Action Fan.

↓ Show/Hide common territory commands ↓  'Blue Commands' have two uses for the most part: [(Construction Points needed to add 1 NP to province) / 3]
 * &lt;Province&gt; の開発 (国力UP): Increases the National Power of the province by 1. The maximum National Power any one province can have is 30. The formula for knowing a provinces' current National Power is:
 * 次の合戦の準備 (#%): Gives you an advantage shown by the percentage during the next battle fought in that province. See Parameters &amp; Formulae.

'Yellow Commands' can vary a bit, but overall you'll see only three options:
 * &lt;House&gt; に宜戦布告: Declares war on the selected House.
 * (Missing name): Forces the opposing House to surrender, making it your vassal.
 * 人材発掘: Unit name (Class): Recruits a unit of the specified class.

'Red Commands' are generally brought down to four types, though two are basically the same. Additionally, outside of FFA there are also some fixed battles in some provinces that will always spawn the same enemies for you to fight in commander battles:
 * &lt;House&gt; と合戦 (攻め込む): Attacks a territory of a province under control of a particular house. Example: The Demon Army is: 魔軍と合戦 (攻め込む).
 * &lt;House&gt; と合戦 (奪い返し): It's the same as fighting, except the territory is in a province you control.
 * Dungeons: The name of each dungeon is at the beginning and only the end changes a bit, but they are easy to recognize.
 * Botan Hunt: If the Oda House, or a vassal of the Oda House controls them, then this event is available in Sado (requires Uesugi Kenshin and Naoe Ai) and Owari (requires Kouhime and Sill). After either one of these events has been done, the event in that same location will not be able to be done again until a turn which is divisible by four has started. Note that this does not mean that the event can only be done on turns which are divisible by four.
 * The event in Owari gives a base reward of 500 gold, increasing by 50 every time the event is done.
 * The event in Sado gives a base reward of 700 gold, increasing by 100 every time the event is done
 * Note that the increase from Owari/Sado will also increase the reward from Sado/Owari, so if you've done Sado's event twice and Owari's once, your second completion of Owari's event will give you 500+100+100+50=750 gold.
 * Doing this event enough times rewards you with the Golden Seal (60 'Boar Points' are needed, Owari's event gives 10 per success and Sado's gives 20), one of the Six Great Treasures.
 * The Botans will start at level 10 and their level will increase by 1 every time Owari's event is done and by 2 every time Sado's is done.
 * There is no upper limit to their levels, or the gold rewarded for victory.
 * Aside from the wasted fan, there are no consequences if you lose either of these battles.
 * Challenge Golden Bear: Available in Edo and only doable once, the player must fight 6 Golden Bears (4 level 40s, 1 level 50 and 1 level 60), upon victory the player will be rewarded with the equipable Power Golden Bear, which will increase the Atk of a unit by 2 points.
 * Headfish Hunt: If the Oda House, or a vassal of the Oda House controls Amazon, 死国 (Death Country/Shikoku), Naniwa, Senkan Nagato, Texas, or Toukaidou, then on any turn which is divisible by 10, this event will be available in the controlled location. There is no limit to the amount of times this event can be done per turn, but it can only be done in each location once per playthrough. In this event, the player must fight 3 level 20 Headfish. Victory rewards you with 5,000 gold; defeat has no consequences beyond the wasted fan.
 * Monkey Hunt: If the Oda House, or a vassal of the Oda House controls them, then this event is available in Saitama (requires Kentou Kanami) and Himeji (requires character-cleared Yuzuhara Yuzumi), both one-time events with 3 level 30 Monkeys. Doing it in the first province gives Kanami 5 levels and gives you 5,000 gold, and doing it in the second province rewards you with the Kanzou Mask. Defeat has no consequences beyond the wasted fan.
 * Panda Hunt: Available in Kazusa 2000 (requires Hakkin Dasan) and Mid Earth (requires Sill and for said province to be under your control), they are both redoable but there's no solid information on when, the one in Kazusa 2000 seems to be redoable 4 turns after first being done and then every 8 turns after the second time it has been done but the one in Mid Earth seems random. The player must fight 3 Pandas (level 30, 350HP). Doing it in Kazusa 2000 gives Hakkin Dasan's unit 500 pandas, and doing it in Mid Earth gives Mid Earth 2 more National Power. NOTE: this event will still be available even if Mid Earth has 30 National Power.
 * Search for and Defeat Ogres: Available in Death Country (requires Sill), can be done twice, the first time will have you fight 6 level 25 Blue Ogres, the second time replaces the front row with level 30 Red Ogres. Each completion gives all commanders a level.
 * Seiitai Shogun: Available in Saitama and only doable once, the player must fight 3 Red Ogres (level 30), 2 Botans (level 10) and the level 80 Shougun who has a hit-all attack that requires preparation and requires 3 shrunkens to cancel. Victory gives you the Seal of Approval item and the ability to declare war on the Dokuganryuu house,

'Green Commands' have three types:
 * 迷宮を探す: Used to discover a dungeon in that province.
 * 秘宝 Item Name: Used to search for a particular item or person.
 * Covert Action: These can range from preventing the targeted house from attacking on their next turn and causing a revoult, reducing the house's number of troops to assassinating random enemy commanders (not key NPCs).

'Purple Commands' are all "???" and are usually for scenes (similar to Blank Commands) or other random stuff (such as Rance Satisfaction bonuses, etc.). Some might be H-scenes, some might not. Under most circumstances, any of the options to speak with a person in your roster is usually under a blank command, but if an event can happen, a "???" tag will show up next to it.

Command requires too many points (item searches, declaring war, prison recruitment)
There are some actions in the game, particularly item searches, like for Tange Dog, but also simple things like declaring war on another faction that require a lot of points to complete. So many points, in fact, that it's impossible to do it all at once.

You are not meant to complete these in one action. If the command fails because you have insufficient points, the points you already put in will be deducted for next time, so even if something requires 99 points, it can still be done - just over many turns.

Because prison recruitment doesn't take an action point, it's always worth reducing the points for a high point commander you want if you have an idle commander at the end of a turn who you don't expect to use in defence.

Troop menu and personal stats
↓ Show/Hide unit overview ↓ 


 * Affection - the smiles represent progress to the next upgrade
 * Relationship - Red is hate, orange is normal, blue is trust, pink is love)
 * Hit Points - Only used in commander/dungeon battles.
 * Level / Level Limit - the current level and the maximum level for this character. A character's level limit cannot be changed in game. Character level can be increased by:
 * as a reward option for increasing the relationship with the character.
 * by giving the character a Happiness Pokkuru (see Sengoku Rance:Items).
 * when completing the last level of a dungeon (for the first time for that dungeon), every commander gains a level (even if they were not used in the dungeon)
 * by special events. In particular Ogawa Kentarou has an amazing level up ability in most game routes.
 * Note: Your level only affects dungeon/commander battles (and greatly reduces enemy damage if yours is higher [Rance/Kentarou can go to 99]). It doesn't influence army battles, outside of the damage done by attack where the commander personally attacks (e.g. Commander Charge). (see Sengoku_Rance:Dungeon)
 * Job - The commander may have different job type than his fellow troop soldiers. The job of the commander is only important in dungeon/commander battles
 * Skills

In the Troops screen you can find all your Captains and other troops, along with their skills and main stats. Though in this screen you can only see the left side of the status of a commander, at the top is the life (体力) for when exploring dungeons, followed by the LV and occupation of the unit. Along the left side are the skills: offensive, defensive and passive. The green bar displays the number of soldiers in the unit, current and max and the red button is similar to an "accept" used when working with the sliders at the bottom. The top one (補充) will refill your units. Directly below is the cost rate, in this case for each unit you need 4 gold. The middle one (増員) will increase the max number of soldiers in the unit at the price shown below per unit. There are limits to the max which increase with the flow of the game or other events. The last one (解雇) will fire troops, in this case giving you the money shown below per unit you fire. At the bottom is the total cost in gold (金) for the changes to the sliders and the cost in national power (コスト) to the right. Do note you can change the sorting by using the top buttons.
 * 必要數值順: Will sort the commanders by parameters. For example, if you are doing a search and press this button, your commanders will be ordered from top to bottom by who has the highest search points.
 * 並び替え: Modify the line up by hand.
 * 解雇: Select a commander to remove him/her from your lineup.

In the Captives screen you can see all the units in your prison. By selection one and pressing the button whereas the three sliders would be, you can use units to convice the captive into joining your army. Simply select units until the number of your negotiation points goes over what the captive requires.

The Cost is the added sum of the cost of all your units compared to your National Power. If the former exceeds the latter, you will be receiving only half of your normal income until you can regulate the cost. Satisfaction is used for Rance to obtain certain bonuses, among others. Your current gold is just that, the gold you have on hand, and the turn is at what turn you currently are.

If you noticed in any of the previous screenshots a counter at the top of the map, near the System (システム) button, those are the current points you have. Each turn the counter decreases by one and certain actions increase them. They are used for 2nd and further games to obtain bonuses.

Also, in the System screen you can see your current objective (in Japanese obviously) and the current seals that have been broken. After five have been broken something might just happen...

Enemy turns
Sengoku Rance has a fairly well developed enemy AI.

Once you end your turn, each enemy faction will have their own turn and can perform various actions, mostly at random.

Recruiting and replenishing troops
Houses will continuously recruit commanders and replenish their troops. It is impossible to make them completely run out of commanders or troops to attack with, although you can usually decrease their troop count to a very low number after a long period of time (30+ turns).
 * The Demon Army in most routes will never run out of troops or commanders. In the True history route, the demon army will get a ton of commanders and troops every turn until Ishiji is released, after which they will start to replenish their troops at a slower rate. The Demon Army gets much more troops in the other routes.

Limits on enemy attacks
On normal difficulty, most houses will usually only attack you once a turn. On 1 star difficulty, this increases to twice a turn and on 2 star difficulty, this increases to thrice a turn. Some exceptions like the Shimazu blitz apply regardless of difficulty, and Tokugawa seems to have a tendency to launch 3 consecutive attacks in 1 turn (only once) on Mamushi oil field after the war starts.

Battle System
There are two types of battles: frequent troop battles and infrequent dungeon battles.

Troop Battles


What matters in these battles are the units' troop sizes, which in a sense act as the HP of their commanders. Once a unit's troop size hits 0, it is considered annihilated and taken out of combat.

Directly below the unit's size is the number of actions it can take, represented by small war banners. White banners show unused action points, red banners show points already spent, and yellow banners show how many points the current action will take (see screen below).

Above the unit windows is the turn order (not shown). This displays when units' turns appear, determined by each unit's Speed stat, the presence of speed buffs, the class of the unit and what move the unit last used (although no exact formula is known). When you hover over an action for your unit, a green arrow may appear between unit names; this determines when the current unit's next turn will appear. If there is no green arrow, then that unit's next turn will appear at least two turns later than the last unit in the turn order. NOTE: If a unit has no white banners left when their next turn comes up (possible when an opposing unit has removed their last one), they will simply be passed over and removed from the turn order.

Along the center of the screen is the battle clock, displayed as a number of bars. Each bar will disappear when a unit takes action, and when all of them disappear, the battle will end; the winner is then determined as the side the indicator on the bar at the top of the screen is not on. As long as the indicator is to the right of the bar's middle, you'll win the battle even if enemy units are still alive. Alternatively, defeating every opposing unit will make you the victor.

Troop types
There are different types of troops, each with their own skillsets that they can use during battle. The general type of a unit can be found by looking at the small tab on the unit's window. Some units, such as Warrior, Foot Soldiers, and Musketeers, can attack only while they are in the front column of battle, while ranged units can act from both columns.

Buffs
There are several up arrows under the portraits of the units; they are status boosts granted either by skills they own or from bringing Tactician units into the battle.
 * Red: Attack Boost
 * Blue: Defense Boost
 * Magenta: Intelligence Boost
 * Green: Speed Boost

Footsoldier guard
As a general note, Foot Soldiers (the shield-type) have the ability to Guard other units. Whenever a unit in that column (some translations say row, but relative to what appears on screen, it's the column) or in the whole group if the Foot Soldier has the 'All Guard' skill is the target of an attack, the percentage shown above the Foot Soldier's troop size is the chance that his/her unit will take the hit instead. In addition, the Foot Soldier takes half damage from all physical attacks (i.e. all attacks that do damage based on a units Atk stat) other than Guard Break while Guarding (although, possibly due to a glitch, if a Foot Soldier's guard chance is reduced to 0 as described below, and not by the use of the move Guard Cancel the Foot Soldier will still take half damage from all physical attacks).

If a Foot Soldier is hit by an attack, there Guard chance reduces by 40% (if a Foot Soldier is protected by Guard Shikigami, there Guard chance does not reduce).

The only way to bypass a Foot Soldier with 100% or greater Guard chance is to use a move that hits more than one unit (e.g. Volley) or to target that Foot Soldier with an attack that hits only one unit, while another Foot Soldier is positioned such that they will Guard that Foot Soldier (Foot Soldiers can Guard each other but will not Guard themselves).



How to attack
To attack, simply hover your mouse over an enemy portrait and click on a displayed option. Hovering the cursor over one of the options will display on your acting unit the number of Action Points it will use (symbolized by yellow banners).

The same applies for defensive and support actions; just hold the cursor over an ally portrait instead.

Killing or capturing
When the battle is decided (either by the turn bar being completely drained or one side being completely wiped out), a box may overlap a unit's window.
 * Blue "Captured" label: Only seen on enemy units. It means that you've captured them and they will now appear in your prison.
 * Red "Killed" label: The unit has died and will no longer appear in the game. This can happen to your annihilated troops as well, though the chance depends on a number of factors.
 * Any item that commander was equipping at the time gets put back into your inventory.
 * If Rance's unit is annihilated, then he will be always be Killed at the end of the battle and you get a GAME OVER.
 * There's an item, Charm of the Immortal Fox Deity that specifically prevents the character who equips it from dying.
 * Find out more about capturing or killing chance.

Dungeon Battles
In dungeon battles, your commanders fight alone much like a dungeon RPG. Each person fights alone in the order given at the top of the screen. Most commanders have two attacks: the first uses one action fan and does decent damage, while the second uses all remaining action fans and does something special (usually extra 1.5 times extra damage). To attack, hover over the enemy you want to attack and click on the action you want to use. Dungeons have multiple floors, each holding monsters that must be defeated. To clear a dungeon, you have to defeat every monster on every single floor. This is made easier by the fact that you can switch out characters when needed. To do this, hover your cursor over the character who you want to switch out and choose Switch, although any given unit cannot switch themself out. Unfortunately, the characters that you switch in are decided at random; the only exception is Sill, who will always be the first to switch in for the the back row.

Learn more about dungeons and solo battles.

Leveling
In addition to clearing dungeon floors, you can gain levels in two ways:
 * Talking to a character with 7 affection will give them an upgrade menu, including the option to level up
 * Releasing multiples of 5 prisoners at once gives you one Happy Pokkuru item, which increases the level of one of your commanders by 1 (for example, if you release 11 prisoners at once, you will get 2 happy pokkurus. The 1 extra will not carry over to the next time you are in the prison)

Happy Pokkurus are best used on Rance due to his high level cap, and as he partakes in many important commander battles. Using commanders with defeated warrior hunt, sticky ground or light attack can allow you to net enough Happy Pokkurus to get Rance to level 60 or above without clearing any dungeons by the time of the Honnouji temple incident, which makes the commander battles there much easier.

Having both Defeated Warrior Hunt and Sticky Ground in the same battle will as good as guarantee captures. A silly way to grind for Happy Pokkurus is to give Shizuka the Charm of the Immortal Fox Deity and bring her to battle with a version of Suzume that has been given Defeated Warrior Hunt. With this, neither of them can be killed, but any capturable unit that you successfully Assassinate will be captured. To save fans, this trick is best used when you get attacked.