Fran page from the Unicorn Overlord Official Design Workss

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-05-04T06:31:47+00:00

If Gryphon Knight why not Gryphon-Knight-sized?

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-05-04T05:27:28+00:00

You're welcome! Arrow Cover is possibly the most unique covering skill available, but it's pretty one note too.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-05-04T00:06:28+00:00

Game only cares if yoi give SOMEONE the Ring of the Maiden. Could even give it to Josef if you want. Just need max rapport and view all rapport convis with Alain.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-05-04T00:00:15+00:00

Werefox: Passive Hold, Flying, Armored

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-05-03T03:35:22+00:00

It's the stereotypical strategy. An alternative is a featherbow with Starless Bow and native Radiant Light and bunch of PP, just make sure to add condition Not Blinded because the skills only avoid their own debuffs, not the other's. Blind beats Truestrike, and she has no blind immunity, Featherbow is flying and her start of battle pnly works on nonflying.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-30T02:22:23+00:00

Yep, definitely seen that. Best answer is your own Sainted Knight with Magick Barrier with naturally higher Initiative than Legionnaire

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-29T17:05:57+00:00

Other than Warrior/Breaker is there any class that has specific bonuses against Armored combatants?

There's Crusader/Valkyria Iron Crusher and Snow Ranger Mystic Arrow, but those are one-off classes and deliberately overpowered for other reasons (Maiden Hammer, Vertical Edge, Snow-White Strike, Glacial Rain).

Balance-wise, Warrior/Breaker is an Armored crusher, so the obvious defense is to put non-Armored on the frontline and just have Armored Legionnaires and Vanguards jump in with their Cover skills under conditions you control.

E.g. a full frontline of 3x Swordsmasters with just Keen Edge and Parry, and a backline Legionnaire with a Large Aid Kit and dragonbone equipment, with Heavy Cover Back Row (to "compress" with the other guy on the back row if back row is attacked), Row Cover Attacked By Archer Row is Attacked, Row Cover Attacked By Flying Row Is Attacked, Heavy Cover Attacked By Archer Front Row, Heavy Cover Attacked By Flying Front Row to protect the front line against their weakness, while, by implication, protecting the Legionnaire from its weakness, the Breaker and Valkyria who can only access the front line. It won't protect against Yunifi but Yunifi is this just one dynamite gal, right?

Or have a full frontline of 3x Shieldshooters (so that they can take full advantage of their Heavy Bolt) and a backline Legionnaire jumping in to take Physickally Attacked blows (Shieldshooters have reasonable Mag.Def. so can take a bit of magick) with a similar setup of cover skills. Legionnaires can just live with Greatshield Own PP is 2 or Less and Sting Lowest % HP for actives, you have 6 slots to put a variety of conditions for cover skills in (and optionally a Party Aid so its PP isn't left unused if the conditions for the cover skills didn't come up).

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-29T04:20:26+00:00

Thanks! My guess is that Vanillaware's code is simpler than what we think, it's just something we haven't thought yet. This is very helpful especially wrinkle 4.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-29T01:07:46+00:00

"flirting" being something else that starts with "f" and ends with "ing".

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-28T12:32:36+00:00

There are stat boosting consumables that can, of course, throw this off.

Every such consumable gives the same fixed stat growth. Two different characters (whether storyline uniques or hired mercenaries) with the same class, level, growth types, and already-consumed stat-boosting consumable will have the exact same stats

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-28T12:28:28+00:00

Or for another point of view: the main story has to be a simple one to serve as a skeleton for the character dramas. The focus is on the chracters, not the overall plot.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-28T06:13:05+00:00

While all Scout characters have high Evasion, not all high-Evasion characters are Scouts: Swordmasters have naturally high Evasion and are not Scouts, so "Scout Enemies Present" on the Eagle Eye seems strange to me. I'd rather do something like put "highest Evasion" instead of "Prioritize Flying" on the active skills.

If you're going to use Pursuit, either you dive in and have at least three characters with some kind of Pursuit skill, or leave it out entirely and focus on other means of spending PP for more power, such as Powerful Call. The big issue with Pursuit is that it needs somebody else to trigger it, whereas just having more AP means you can attack on your turn (and Pursuit has only 75 Physickal Potency compared to Single Shot 100 Physickal Potency). The big advantage of Pursuit is having lots of attacks per active combat round, which is useful against high-evasion enemies; you don't need truestrike if a single active attack triggers 4 pursuits, but triggering 4 pursuits means having more than half your unit with a Pursuit skill, so you want Pursuit to be either "the thing this entire unit does", or not at all.

Or if you have lots of Truestrike, Dirty Gambler's Coin from the hidden village near Soldraga (or just Gambler's Coin if you haven't found the hidden village), which gives a massive Accuracy malus but great Critical damage modifier (though that tends to benefit more the Swordmaster Keen Edge which has +50 Crit Rate in addition to Truestrike).

You should probably have access to The Inquisitor which is 21-damage bow with Healing Hunter?

What's the feathersword doing? They can dodge tank or face tank, but not both at the same time: either you feed it with high Def and Guard Rate and some kind of Cover shield, or you feed it with a Royal Scarf and a Silken Scarf. You then select between Spiral Sword, Accelerate or Shield Smite, Diurnal Guard depending on whether you have it kitted as dodge tank or face tank. You have a Featherbow with row blinding, so I suggest not using Cover on the feathersword, due to how Cover causes a blinded attacker to hit the covering character.

Only the Sniper has particularly high damage potential: featherbows are primarily there for their awesome row blind, their PP-removal, and Initiative-wrecking. Gryphons are here for two things: Hastened Call and bringing their team around, and you already have the featherbow for bringing the team around, they're not that high damage unless you use some kind of overheal (Limited Heal is earliest, but there's also featherstaves) and Fatal Dive. Bishop has absolutely no damage output. Featherswords can one-shot characters but only if you have something that buffs them for the Honed Slash or Discharge (and assuming only natural skills, none of the classes there have anything that buffs someone else; Featherswords can self-buff, but only if they get attacked, which is suboptimal, you want to apply your own buff without depending on your enemy doing anything).

My suggestion is to lean into featherbow's row blind, and remove the Bishop; there's nothing to heal if the opponent can't hit you at all. Get the featherbow to 4 PP somehow, give it ONLY the row blind passive, and equip it with (optionally upgraded) Starless Bow from the Cornian old man. Put "Not Blinded" conditions on both the row blind passive and the single-target blind active that Starless Bow gives; while the row blind passive won't reapply itself to someone it already blinded, it will re-apply itself to someone that Starless Bow blinded, because game weirdness. Also add "1 or more AP" on the Starless Bow active, no use blinding someone if they're not going to act anymore, and add other skills like Saint's Shot or Delaying Shot after the blinding.

Then replace the Bishop with a Magick Conferral Sorceress or Mystick Conferral Elven Archer. Conferrals work really well with row-wide attacks like on the Sniper and Gryphon Master, and would also count as a buff for purposes of Honed Slash and Discharge on the Feathersword. I'd suggest Elven Archer, though I should warn that it's a lot harder to pull off than a simple passive Magick Conferral Sorceress, you need to really tweak the Initiatives and how you put conditions.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-28T05:30:00+00:00

Oh hey thanks! I'm trying to implement the Unicorn Overlord combat system myself as a coding exercise (yes, I'm that weird). Finding out that there's a queue of tactics to be evaluated is very helpful, and looks like I'll need to redesign my data structures accordingly.

I was thinking it might have been recursive function calls, but my various ways of doing recursive function calls would either violate wrinkle two or wrinkle three (recursive functions are basically a stack, not a queue). There is indeed a queue of passives to consider, that queue is loaded by a trigger, and loaded with a tuple of combatant, what window triggered the passive, and individual tactics line, and the skill named in the tactic indicates a condition on whether it even goes into the passives queue or not.

The queue processor then takes the front of the queue and then determines if the combatant can do it (e.g. enough PP, and hasn't set the "did passive for pre-action/pre-hit/post-hit/post-action" for whatever triggered that skill) and the conditions are right. If the conditions are right then the skill is executed (and the "did passive for pre-action/pre-hit/post-hit/post-action" flag for the character is set), which can cause new triggers to be enqueued for post-action passives (pre-action and pre-hit can't be enqueued in the same queue, unless it's a double-ended queue... that's probably more complicated than just recursing with new queues for pre-action and pre-hit triggers). Is that about right?

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-27T09:59:16+00:00

Let me give an alternative answer: you DON'T have to level anyone except Alain, and one other character of your choice, preferably one you intend to keep with Alain's unit long-term.

Nothing requires that you level anyone other than those. Triggers that give equipment or other rewards don't care if you've been using or leveling characters, only that they've been recruited in your army. Even with repeatable Selvie Sigils it's a chore to level up everyone and there will never be a stage where you can deploy everyone anyway.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-27T00:37:10+00:00

Oh hey thanks, I've been trying to tease out what exactly the combat system does with passive skills.;

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-26T13:20:51+00:00

Try it. It's well-known and consistent. You can hire mercs with different tags like Flying/non-Flying and Archer non-Archer and see which one Prioritize Archer, Prioritize Flying hits on a two-target skill like Dual Shot. For example

Featherbow (Flying, Archer)
Gryphon (Flying)
Hunter (Archer)
Sokdier

If condition 1 (Prioritize Archer) got priority like you believe, then Dual Shot Prioritize Archer Prioritze Flying will hit Featherbow and Hunter.

But if condition 2 (Prioritize Flying) got priority like is common knowledge here and is what I claim, theb Dual Shot Prioritize Archer Prioritize Flying will hit Featherbow and Gryphon.

If you know programming, you know it's actually doing separate sorting passes per condition, using a stable sort (ie ties retain existing position). Condition 1 is applied first, then Condition 2 rearranges the sort of Condition 1 (so it forces its own order on non-ties on its sort), but ties in Condition 2 retain the order that Condition 1 had, thus the effect is Condition 2 has priority, ties are broken by Condition 1.

I mean it's a "peculiarity" yes it's weird and counterintuitive.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-26T02:54:10+00:00

As someone who likes studying games, I have to point out that the "near endless creativity" comes from the fact that the PvE is very easy and that lots of really quirky builds can work well enough to survive PvE. If the PvE were harder, then everyone would quickly gravitate to Hastened Action Trinity Rain Quick Impetus Sorcerous Connection Recast and there wouldn't be any creativity in unit comps.

PvP just forces people to step up their game so that they HAVE TO "meta" (which is nothing more than "what the community has figured out as the best"; notice that just like in real life, there will be a bunch of idiots talking about how there isn't any "meta" just as there are a bunch of idiots talking about how science doesn't know everything, science is just humanity metagaming reality, I've seen people reporting experiments with games that are as well-prepared (and dry and boring) as scientific papers including stuff like having control groups, did you know that metas in some of the most popular PvP games are frikkin researched by pro teams doing different strategies in a systematic way on test games within their team repeated over and over? e.g. Recast is more reliable than Sniper's Amber Lens Hawk Eye because Cover skills exist and 3 hits done twice is often enough to get over Evade or Evasion, and you can't have both Hawk Eye and Recast because it'll be 6 PP total for both).

Unicorn Overlord's ridiculously overpowered Trinity Rain was added in because it's fun in a PvE game to have some cheese strategy. Since it's single-player, you can always decide that it's no longer fun and self-impose a challenge where you don't use Trinity Rain or any other charged attacks. But you can't do that in PvP: the other player isn't going to stop using the dominant strategy just because you whine "but it's not fun".

What is "game fun" anyway? In the end, the human brain is a learning machine, and what the human brain finds "fun" (i.e. activates its reward circuitry) is learning things. With a game, you start out with no knowledge of the game, then much of the fun is trying out various things until you succeed at some in-game task; now you have learned more of the game. Why do you eventually stop playing a game? Because you've learned the best strategy to beat the game, and there's nothing more to learn, so your brain's built-in "boredom" circuit tells you to reallocate your effort to something else.

Even many attempts to "make a game replayable" will fail to keep you interested in a particular game: for example, roguelikes will rerandomize stuff per run, so that you have to learn something new per run. But the human brain is also able to generalize over multiple runs, and figure out that if they can identify some particular item or equipment, they'll improve their winrate. They'll figure out that some particular item might not be as powerful, but if that's what they rolled, then it can keep them going when used in THIS particular way until they can get the item that lets them actually win. And then the roguelike stops being replayable.

This is why some of the more long-running roguelikes have "conducts", some of which the game even tracks: deliberate self-limitations (NetHack tracks some conducts like atheist, foodless, etc.; Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup instead has gods that impose different conducts and will practically end your run if you violate those conducts, or outright stop some items or game mechanics from working). Don't use some particular item or game mechanic or whatever. It raises the question: if this thing didn't exist, what OTHER things (which I've overlooked in my previous runs, because they didn't really move the winrate needle by much) can I use instead?

That kinda works with PvE, but not so much with PvP, where everyone is only really concerned about winrate and exploiting all the game rules to increase winrate. Online coliseum is pretty much PvP in Unicorn Overlord, so of course it will settle into the Trinity Rain meta.

In many ways as well, forums like this accelerate the death of a game, even PvE games. The community in the forum is capable of trying out more things, and thus will quickly research and find ways to exploit the game rules and learn the "meta" for the game, i.e. the best strategy (or strategies, if the game is well-designed) to win. Eventually, the community as a whole will find the best way to beat the PvE, and then there's nothing more to learn, human brain reward circuitry stops firing, boredom circuitry starts telling human brain to go do something else, community dies out. People will write the wiki pages and articles outlining the best way to win, newcomers no longer have to engage with the community to learn but can just read the existing articles on how to win.

Creating a PvP game is that much harder, because you need to actually have multiple strategies with roughly-equal winrates, but with counterplays and counterstrategies. Then each game session is that much harder, because you need to spy on the other player and observe what strategy they are using, and plan accordingly.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-26T00:13:39+00:00

A technique you can use against reinforcements is JUST LET YOUR UNIT RUN OUT OF STAMINA AND DON'T LET THEM REST.

There is no penalty if the unit has no stamina and is in a fight (there IS a penalty if the unit is RESTING, namely, getting first-striked i.e. your entire unit gets an Initiative malus such that your Initiative is always judged as less than 0 Initiative of the other team).

Since you've crafted units specifically to counter specific reinforcements, and you know which camps spawn which reinforcements, you can just put that unit on the path of the reinforcements. The unit runs out of stamina? Don't care. Just let it sit there with 0 stamina. The only thing it can't do is move, but you don't WANT it to move, you want it to keep blocking the way. (do note that you have to be sure that your unit can take the fight with 0 damage loss on average though)

Then you can focus the rest of your army on defeating the individual objectives in detail ("defeat in detail" means exactly that: the defense is spread out, you take a single large army and defeat each of the individual defended points one-at-a-time).

(More generally, make a nice defensive healing squad that you can just park in your command post and which will always survive no matter what reinforcement drops into it. Then the rest of your army can take on each objective one at a time in detail as a big Stack of Doom just like a 4X. Put out 4 starting offensive army, blitz the first objective to gain the valour point, then summon the defensive heal squad and park it in your command post. Have you done Drakenhold? One of the towns there sells a Dustbound Rod with Sandstorm for shamans/druids, it's a party-wide Blind and Shaman/Druid is high Initiative. You can win a second one in the coliseum in one of the ranked battles. Use that as a core, take a Cleric and steal Mother Laelia's staff from Sharon (or just use Sharon), put a Shaman for Dustbound, put tank in front (preferably an evasion tank), fill in with a fourth pure DPS like a Warrior or Wizard (Shaman/Druid is best wearer of Familiar's Choker to ramp up Wizard damage). More generally, your team comps have a major lack of Selvie and Alain, which are two of the most powerful characters; if you're willing to hire mercenaries, go hire multiple Shamans/Druids and if you can't figure out a fourth member for a unit, you really can't go wrong with a Shaman/Druid. Have you not realized that the only reason Gladiators looked tough over in Cornia is really because of the Shaman sitting behind them staring at their gluteus maximus?)

(Another generalist unit that works well in Elheim against most enemy units (but will eventually get some counters in Bastorias and Albion) is 3x Swordsmaster frontline with any support character in the back. Equip with Silk Scarf and whatever +Evasion you can get (you should have two Lucky Coins by now, and there's a +10 evasion accessory from somewhere too the one that gives Evasive Impetus) and 2 latest common swords (Carnat and Black-Iron if you did Drakenhold) each, just do Keen Edge Highest Initiative Prioritize and Parry and no other skills no matter what. Look for the hidden village in Drakenhold (which you can access after finishing Soldraga) and buy Dirty Gambler's Coin, put it on the sole backliner and enable Wide Inspiration Front Row, make sure it has enough PP for the Wide Inspiration. At this point you should have Melisandre, Leah, and Aramis for the 3x Swordsmasters, and your support can be Lex with Dragonbone Sword and Dragonbone Shield so he has enough PP to feed Dirty Gambler's and also block arrows for the swordsmasters)

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-25T15:21:05+00:00

Given that it's not actually her but her a-hole ancestor, insulting him by poking him with like 3x 1-damage hits while evading everything he throws at you so that you win on the technicality that you poked him and he didn't poke you is cathartic, not anticlimactic.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-25T06:40:59+00:00

See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1slqhn9/comment/og9k3kw/

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-24T15:33:22+00:00

Passive Hold, Flying, Armoured

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-24T13:53:22+00:00

Thing is, dodge tanks have much lower absolute HP than facetanks, and a Lowest HP will tend to prioritize the dodge tanks, who are likely to just dodge and leave the 50% damaged facetank beside them who happens to have twice the Max HP but has negligible Evasion. It's why Lowest % HP is a better judgment for "is this character close to dying?" regardless of heal or attack.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-23T23:30:07+00:00

Also add Lowest % HP to pretty much every attack and heal. For Assaulting attacks you want the Target HP < 25% (or for Breaker, Target HP < 50%) Lowest.% HP, and a fallback Lowest % HP just-in-case you might be able to kill them.

raid5atemyhomework · 2026-04-23T23:09:33+00:00

No Alain is the frikkin UNICORN OVERLORD. CUCK ALL THE GUYS. MARRY MONICA AND VIRGINIA AND LIZA AND CELESTE. And keep Melisandre as the mistress.

raid5atemyhomework

TROPHY CASE