ATXM1: Broken Wings

(Yes I am well aware of the irony associated with TLI doing a Kyosuke route walkthrough but I've played Ryusei's route far too many times by now)

This guide is composed using two resources, my personal save file that I use to play through stages initially and then the fresh save I get screenshots from. So my recommendations don't just come from someone who's pushing $6 million+ in playthrough returns and has 600-999 PP saved up for every character, but from experience in both normal and second playthrough-on gameplay. Additionally, I'm not someone who's looked directly at the game's code but I am familiar with SRW mechanics in general. So there may be mistakes from time to time regarding the specifics of one ability or another, in which case I welcome corrections as my goal here is to be informative.

ATX Map 1 sees our introduction into the world of Original Generation. Two hundred years after mankind's advance into space, in 179 Space Era the exploration vessel Hiryuu encountered previously unknown mobile weapons in the vicinity of Pluto. Identified as extraterrestrial mecha and codenamed the "Aerogaters," this encounter was soon followed by the crash of Meteor 3 in the Marquesas Islands. A perfectly spherical asteroid containing advanced technology later identified as alien in origin, termed as "Extra-Over Technology," this meteor and the Aerogaters prompted Doctor Bian Zoldark, who was studying Meteor 3, to alert the Earth Federation to an imminent invasion on part of the Aerogaters. The Earth Federation Army began rapidly reorganizing their "Personal Trooper" mobile weapons development as part of a response to the coming invasion, and now several years later Kyosuke Nanbu is participating in the testing of airborne PTs.

Win Condition: All enemies shot down.
Loss Condition: Kyosuke shot down.
SR Point: Win condition met within 2 turns.

Right from the start of the game we're thrown several curveballs. This map is four-on-one and our only mech is the Wildraubtier FM, which has its transformation disabled and so is permanently unable to use the terrain to get a defense bonus. To elaborate, there are several installations on the field that restore HP and EN for every turn that you stand on them while passively lowering your accuracy and increasing your defense. These installations' accuracy and defense properties can only be taken advantage of by units that are standing on them, so an airborne Personal Trooper like the FM can't use them, though it can still get access to the restoration properties, which restore 20% of the mech's maximum HP and EN.

The blue-roofed tiles south of the tanks confer the same bonus and ironically can only be used by flying units, but you can't make use of them in this map without risking the SR point. This map is intended to evaluate your use of turns; since you only have one unit to attack with, you get a limited number of shots at the enemy force. The basic idea is to never attack the same enemy twice--you get two shots spread out across two turns, so attack a different enemy on each turn and counterattack everything on the enemy phase to score the SR point. (Also note that the enemy's phase is considered a part of the turn, just like the player phase. So you can win on the enemy's move and still get the SR point.)

Kyosuke has access to two spirit commands in the first stage, Accel and Focus. These should be cast immediately on the first turn to let him charge in between the Type-71s and F-28s so that all of them are within range of the Wildraubtier's Beam Cannon, while giving him a 30% increase in accuracy and evasion so that he can make every hit count. Let's do a more in-depth evaluation of the units in play.

The Wildraubtier is the first generation of airborne Personal Trooper. As such, it's vital to the development of air control in a post-EOT world, and its design is based on existing fighter models. Its Flight Mode has nearly paper-thin armor but high mobility on par with the F-28 Messers its design borrows from. The FM is designed for air and spaceflight, with S marks in each, and needs a comparable pilot; ground-based pilots like Kyosuke only hold her down.

Wildraubtier FM is outfitted with AA missiles that let it snipe enemies from up to 7 tiles away, while the Aerial Bomb and Beam Cannon give intensely powerful postmovement weapons that can strike at point-blank range or from a distance. The idea with "postmovement" weapons is that an armament with a P next to its name can be used after moving, which gives it a much wider theoretical range than what the menu shows, since you can reposition your mech freely and still get the attack it.

This makes the FM a versatile machine that is never vulnerable; she's best suited for a ranged specialist with Hit & Away, Snipe and accuracy-oriented Spirits. The Beam Cannon is also energy based and would benefit from EN Save, and has one more property that isn't such great news. Because it has the "Energy Beam" property, the Beam Cannon is rendered ineffective by the high density of water (versus air and vacuum), severely reducing its destructive properties. The Raubtier still has the Aerial Bomb and AG Missiles to combat these problems, but they lack power--she's effectively been cemented as an Air & Space unit by these properties and her terrain rankings.

Kyosuke himself is a strongly melee-oriented pilot with high accuracy, evasion and defense, and spirits geared toward those defensive stats. His Fortune skill gives him 1.5x cash returns from downing enemies, and his Counter skill lets him strike attack the enemy before they do on their own turn. Counter can be used more often with level, so at Counter L2 he can interrupt two attacks, at L3 three attacks, and so on. As such, the strategy with Kyosuke is to isolate him in a field of weakened enemies for maximum cash gain on their attack.

The problem with this map is that Kyosuke's terrain rankings are AABA, while the Raubtier's are SABS--Kyosuke's Air and Space rankings are one rank less than the FM's, and how terrain ranking works is that if either the pilot or the machine exceed one another, the ranking gets rounded down. So in this case the Raubtier's S ranking is rounded down to an A, because that's the highest rank that Kyosuke has, limiting how well he can use her in combat.

The other problem is that Kyosuke's ranged attack, while not abysmal, is definitely not something you want a Raubtier pilot using and so the FM's attacks are weaker than if she were being piloted by a range-oriented character. This will not be an issue once we can pick our own pilots for deployment, but for now it's something you'll have to grin and bear as Kyosuke can only one-shot enemies with a counterattack in this state.

Once Kyosuke gets a suitable melee mech his performance will far exceed any and all expectations. For his development I'd recommend Prevail, Revenge, Infight and Expert. Prevail is a skill that increases the pilot's Hit/Evade and their mech's Crit/Armor by a certain percentage the more that their HP falls. Like Counter, Prevail comes in levels, starting at L1 and maxing out at L9--it's most worthwhile at L7 onwards, where at 20% HP a unit will get a 30% boost to their hit, evasion and armor, making this a free Focus and an extra boost to their defenses, while at 10% HP it jumps up to 35%. Prevail L9 gives a full 45% boost to accuracy, evasion and armor at 10% HP; the result is that it takes exponentially more hits to kill a pilot with Prevail as they get closer and closer to 0 HP, such that enemy fire will be reduced to doing the bare minimum 10 damage per hit and whatever current mech has the Prevailing pilot has for all practical purposes tripled its hit points. This is chiefly ideal for Super Robot pilots, but Kyosuke's mech is a distillation of Super and Real that has the advantage of being both extremely evasive and capable of taking many, many hits.

Revenge is recommended because it complements Nanbu's Counter skill, doing 1.2x damage on a counterattack. Taking into account his already impressive melee stat, with Kyosuke in the right mech he can cut enemy attacks short by taking them out before they come into play. Infight is a basic L1-L9 skill that boosts melee damage, reinforcing Kyosuke's natural offense and his Counter-Revenge combo. Expert conserves EN, using all weapons at 70% of their natural cost. After Kyosuke gets his custom mech, Expert may appear to be a strange recommendation, but he does get an attack later in the game that's EN-based and will serve as your main boss killer. The mechanics of the attack are a little specific to be getting into right now, but to maximize its effectiveness you have to pay its cost two to four times a turn and sometimes on counterattacks, so Expert is definitely something that you'll see a lot of mileage out of.

Unfortunately, we're talking about these skills in a vacuum, and Kyosuke can't actually have all of them. Pilots are limited to to six skill slots, and Kyosuke comes with three prefilled; Fortune, Counter and a ??? skill that he learns by leveling up. His fourth skill slot is taken up by SP Regen, a skill that regenerates a flat 10 SP every player phase. SP Regen is expensive at 100 PP, but it's also virtually impossible to complete a first playthrough without and every pilot that you intend to use long-term should learn it. Spirit commands are extremely important to the Original Generation games, moreso than in any SRW before or after, and late in the game you can restore entire fleets by picking the right terrain to camp out and defend on while SP Regen builds up your skills for healing allies and then initiating all-out attacks. For the final two slots I tend to go for Revenge and Infight to complement his play style, but if you're on a second playthrough or later you can probably stick Prevail on him for a 10-damage-per-fight Kyosuke.

The Type 71 Waldung is an S-Ground tank with intermediate grade armor, a 7-tile main gun and a poor postmovement autocannon. Because the autocannon is extremely weak and only has a range of 1, the Waldung is easy to lure out with mechs that hang just outside of its effective range. Unlike the Raubtier FM, the Waldung is a small-sized unit, which means that it's very agile but has poor offensive power versus virtually anything larger than itself. There are four sizes in Original Generation, from S to LL, with smaller units featuring greater accuracy and evasion while larger units get defensive bonuses.

Unlike its ground equivalent, the F-28 Messer has poor armor and is king of the air. Its mobility is almost twice that of the Type 71 and its small size makes it both deadly accurate and evasive. The Messer has much better postmovement weaponry from its Homing Missiles, but due to its S size these lack power, and none of its onboard systems can snipe at the same range as the 71. It's the best of the worst, with superior extra weapon space to seal this position. Note that despite their S rankings on the ground and in the air, neither of these units can actually use those ranking due to the AI only having an A in each.

At the end of the stage we lose the use of the Wildraubtier for the time being, so there's no chance to invest the money earned from this stage. Next map: A New Beginning.