Sankai Ou no Yubiwa:Walkthrough

珊海王の円環

Sankai Ou no Yubiwa is a game where you pick one of 6 factions, with the aim of ultimately subjugating all the rest for their rings.

After defeating a faction, the players is given a choice, which determines whether they end up with the Law or Chaos ending for their faction at the end of the game. Each faction starts 5 points in either Law or Chaos, and each decision nets you 10 points in Law or Chaos. This means there will never be a tie between the two points.

You can see whether you are aligned more towards Law of Chaos from the green and red bars on the skull ring like indicator at the bottom of the screen. While it is possible to write here which choice is aligned towards Law and which towards Chaos for all characters, the only thing it will save you is a reload when the choice comes up for each faction, since you can always refer to the indicator to see if your choice was correct.

A faction is defeated when their leadership points is reduced to zero. The faction who deals the last blow is considered to have defeated said faction. For the purpose of scene collection, the player ought to ensure that he deals the last blow to all factions. A faction's leadership points are reduced every time it loses a battle. Ship to ship battles result in a greater loss of points, with the biggest being from cannon combat.

Cannon Combat
Cannon combat is the easiest and most effective way of defeating a faction. This is because:

1. You need only fight 1 group.

2. It causes the greatest loss of leadership points.

Using cannon combat, one can can defeat a faction with 10 groups on their ship with just 1. Winning cannon combat causes a loss of leadership points to the defeated faction which is approximately 3 times that of ship to ship boarding action.

To initiate cannon combat, the target's faction's ship be in cannon range of your ship (which is 1 move away at the start, upgradable on the ship upgrade page), and you need to pay a small resource cost of 100 mineral, 300 magic stone, and 100 wood to execute the command.

Winning cannon combat is a relatively simple matter. Have a unit man your cannon while you ensure the enemy doesn't man theirs. The main thing you need to take note of is: Don't kill off all enemies.

The reason being, that similar to boarding action, if you defeat all enemies, the next group will instantly spawn, swarming and most likely defeating your exhausted first group.

Thus the best method of ensuring one retains control of the battlefield (and thus the cannons on said battlefield), is to leave at least one enemy unit alive to ensure that enemy reinforcements never come.

Unit Combat
The main things you need to take note of about unit combat are:

1. Unit size.

2. Ranged or not.

3. Movement.

4. How to retreat.

5. Formation

Pictured is a magic type unit with movement 4 and size 9. The red circles indicate where the information is present on the status page.

Unit size
Units come in 3 sizes, 1, 3 and 9. According to the tutorial, the rock paper scissors when it comes to units is as follows: 1 > 9 > 3 > 1. This is because each minion in a unit can only be engaged by a maximum of 3 enemy minions in an opposing unit. Thus when 1 v 9, 6 minions are doing nothing.

As a general rule, units of 1 have the lowest total health and units of 9 the greatest, making units of 9 the best for soaking up damage. However, because partial combat damage to the individuals in each unit is recovered for free between battles, units of 1 are good at saving healing costs. This is because when a unit of 9 loses 1/3 of the total hp, 3 of the 9 are considered incapacitated. When a unit of 1 loses 1/3 of its total hp, it will start the next battle at full health.

Ranged or not
Small numbers of ranged units make your group more efficient because they don't have to trip over the rest of your melee units in order to attack an enemy. Magic type units are also ranged. While most ranged units have approximately the same short range, catapults in particular have a much longer range.

Movement
The movement stat of the unit not only determines its movement speed in combat, but also how many times it can travel on the world map. Groups specialized in taking territory quickly should be made up only of fast units, as the group will always have the map travel speed of the slowest unit.

How to retreat
In every battle there is a blue area near where you start. This is the retreat area. Units moving into this area start a 10 second countdown, after which they are removed from combat. The point to note is that individual units can be told to retreat by pausing combat and dragging their indicator to this blue zone. This is important for one reason: retreating units ignore collision.

If a unit is simply told to move somewhere, they will collide with allies and enemies alike, and most likely you've just given the enemy a chance to hit them for free because they won't be going anywhere. To avoid this, order them to move to the blue zone then command them to move elsewhere when they are clear of the battle. Keeping them on the battlefield at low health instead of retreating also gives them more experience when combat ends.

Formations
At the beginning of combat, you may change which formation you are using. Each formation is weak to one other formation and strong to another. Using the correct formation can thus give you can edge in combat. To see which formation you ought to use, you may use the scouting command to reveal enemy formations for 3 turns. Alternatively, if you memorized each formation's strength and weakness, you can save scum to choose one that the enemy is weak against, since enemies never change their formations.

Magic
Winning battles early on hinges a lot on strategic use of magic in combat. More spells can be acquired by defeating other factions for their rings, leveling up the faction leader, and defeating certain bosses. The spells of each faction and how to use them are explained here:

Aritz Granados
When fighting Sonya or Arvid Groth, prepare anti magic for when they cast their spells. Use invulnerability against Rafaela when she buffs her units. Dragging and moving a unit can be useful in cannon combat to sneak a unit onto the enemy cannon.

Sonya
When fighting Arvid Groth, prepare anti magic for when he casts his spell. The damage spell is good, but Rafaela's is much better if you know how to use it.

Agnes
When fighting Sonya or Arvid Groth, prepare anti magic for when they cast their spells. When units are healed, they recover any members lost during combat. Once combat is over, the losses need to be healed using resources.

Rafaela
When fighting Sonya or Arvid Groth, prepare anti magic for when they cast their spells. To use Rafaela's damage spell, stop all allied units from moving at the start of combat by switching their ai to defensive mode. Start charging the spell targeted at the middle of the battlefield and release when enemies run into it. You can often damage the whole enemy group for a hefty amount this way.

Arvid Groth
When fighting Sonya, prepare anti magic for when she casts their spells.

Borja Roger
When fighting Sonya or Arvid Groth, prepare anti magic for when they cast their spells. The iron curtain spell lasts relatively long, and can be used to make an impenetrable front line which ranged units can use to stay safe while raining death from behind. Enrage is often used by the ai to prevent units from retreating.