ATXM4: Iron Wolf

Win Condition: Tausendfussler defended.
Loss Condition: Tausendfussler shot down.
SR Point: All enemies shot down within five turns.
Condition Changes (Turn 3):
Win Condition: All enemies shot down.

Doctor Kazahara's Tausendfussler and its anti-Aerogater cargo are being pursued by a rogue enemy force. With only minimal onboard weapons and no word of reinforcements, Kazahara's left to take them all down in a lone Fussler run in the opposite direction as fast as possible.

Our pilot for the start of this map is unfortunately not Kazahara himself, but a faceless EFA pilot. Compared to pilots of similar level, the EFA Soldier has poor Melee and Ranged stats, extremely low Maneuverability and Defense, average accuracy and poor Evasion. This is a pilot that's carried by his machine, and the Tausendfussler is unfortunately on the bottom rung of mechs, below even the Type 71. The EFA Soldier relies on the Tausendfussler's high HP along with his Vigor Spirit Command to tank hits, which would be a generally viable strategy just for surviving...if his SP pool weren't so low that it could only cast one command per sortie. His role is instead intended as a support pilot, using Trust to replenish allied HP and Cheer to double the experience they gain for one battle, hopefully the killing blow on a high-level boss unit. As stated though, the EFA Soldier's SP only lets him cast one of these, so if you intend to cast Cheer or replenish allied hit points, it's best to keep him far from combat.

And while your immediate reaction may be to direct him in just the manner from my opening statement, the best way to complete this map is to move the Fussler to the eastern side of the lake, where ATX will arrive to provide backup on turn 3.

Since the range-1 Gatling Gun is the Schwert's only postmovement weapon, and the enemy boss is stationary for this portion of the map, you can safely pull the Soldier a minimum of 5 spaces away from the enemies and force them to waste their turn chasing him over to where ATX will spawn, and otherwise spend that turn on taking minor Gatling Gun damage. The F-32 Schwert lacks the Messer's mobility and has easily shreddable armor, but tries to make up for it in HP and speed, darting over a whole 8 tiles per turn. She's small, has almost no weapon space, has an S in Air and a D in Space, with that S being restricted to an A due to the mystery pilots' terrain rankings. Her homing missiles are identical to the Messer's, making her a poor copy of it that's still above the Waldung. Next-generation fighter my foot.

The ATX team introduces a new mech for this map, along with the new weapon equip mechanic. The Gespenst Mark III Alteisen is our first permanent mech of the game, joining the team with no strings attached. She's a heavy armor, fast but low-mobility PT...minus the low-mobility part. Her high HP and EN let her go nearly anywhere on the battlefield and take a whole battery of hits with her armor. The Beam Coat on the Alt cuts 5 EN from her power supply to reduce all beam damage by 900 points, making for an amazing wall that can get right up there with the Type 0 with 500 more armor in upgrades. So the long and short of this setup is that the Alt is built to take hits like a Super, but still has the dodging abilities of any Real Robot. Kyosuke's Focus only pushes that further, making the Alt an all-star of the mechanics that would make any individual machine "good" but on one mech put it up as a mainstay unit for the whole game.

She's got good weapon space--more than you'll ever use--and an S in ground warfare, with A/A for Space/Air and B in Water. She's medium sized, perfect for Kyosuke's Hit/Evade and aggressive attack stats. She also has 3/5 of her weapons as postmovement arms, with a max range of 4, effective range of 3 and unmoved range of 5. The Heat Horn doesn't see much use due to being range 1 and sharing that with the two of the Alt's three ultimate weapons. The Revolver Stake is her main loadout--it's an extremely powerful melee weapon with six shots and a range of 3. Upgrading the Stake also upgrades Kyosuke & Excellen's Rampage Ghost combination attack further down the line, making it necessary for the endgame and a very versatile weapon overall. The Heavy Claymore is the Alt's initial best attack, with 4 shots Range 1-2 and a 110 Will restriction. So it's easy to trigger but difficult to use due to not being postmovement. (Kyosuke fixes this with his Assail Spirit Command, which enables the use of premovement weapons as postmovement weapons for one turn, which also makes the Claymore a great bosskiller.) In addition to mostly being strong postmovement weapons with great accuracy and +35 to +50 Crit bonuses, the Alt's main armament is consistently kinetic or supreme across the board. That reveals a key aspect of the Alt--her melee focus, kinetic weaponry, beam coating & high range paired with Kyosuke's Accel makes her a devil of the water. The Alt can simply march in and let the enemy waste EN on her with beam weaponry, then slaughter them using the Stake or Claymore with Infight and 1.2x counterattack damage. The Alt is already a perfect fit for Kyosuke; slap a Water Jet on her, pump some PP in to upgrade Kyosuke's terrain rankings later on, and the two will have a field day at the beach.

(Note that once the reinforcements show up, we actually get an almost-exact copy of the EFA Soldier for our second Tausendfussler, letting us work around the "one Spirit per map" restriction the EFA is so fond of, but without Cheer factoring in.)

For this map I chose to make up for Bullet's unsuitable mech by assigning him to Kyosuke's old Gespenst Mark II (not Excellen's, because hers has that "custom" weaker Jet Magnum) and putting Excellen in the TT. While Excellen can't make use of the T-Link Ripper, she can use the Mega Beam Rifle or the equippable M13 Shotgun (pictured) for much better damage than Bullet could use the Ripper. These changes are all temporary though, as the early maps of Original Generation love to cram your pilots back into their story-determined units.

In order to score the SR point, focus on mobilizing your units to the southwest, using Kyosuke with Strike or Sanger with Sense to pursue Tenzan. I generally use other units before Sanger, because he's something of a Jeigan character in Original Generation in that he doesn't have much room for growth or customization, and his raw power makes him an easy XP stealer that prevents your other pilots from developing early on. Note that even if you shoot down Tenzan before the Schwerts, the Schwerts will still remain on the map, so you can still score the SR point if you take him down first.

Tenzan's piloting a Lion Test Type, which has decent armor, poor mobility and speed, and HP/EN comparable to the Gespenst Mark III. It has an S in Air, A/A for Ground/Space and a C in Water. The weapon space is expansive and its medium size does help with keeping Hit/Evade consistent. The units' onboard weapons are lacking due to her only postmovement being a weak Gatling and none of her main arms being usable at Range 1, creating a deep flaw where the Lion TT cannot defend herself in close quarters despite being an assault-oriented Armored Module. The 6-Range Homing Missiles and Railgun do make her an ideal sniper for Hit & Away/Snipe pilots. Ultimately the first generation in flight-based AMs is less clumsily implemented than in their PT counterpart, but this Lion brings nothing to the table that the Wildraubtier FM didn't already, or do better.

The big guy himself is basically what you want out of a Lion pilot, with Gunfight L1 to amplify the Railgun damage and an emphasis on his Range stat. Revenge powers up his counterattacks, but Prevail L1 is somewhat misplaced since Lions taking hits is a rare sight--for the most part they either dodge or go down in one blow. Thanks to his Defense, Tenzan can survive one blow from the Revolver Stake, but Heavy Claymore blows him out of the water and he can't really use Prevail even after taking so much damage since its main use is in stopping attacks that the Lion herself can't handle. He also can't use that S-Air thanks to his own terrain rankings, and so long as you have Focus active, that 241 sum Evade shouldn't mean too much.

After the stage is over you'll get a Water Jet part, and from the engagement you should have a Chobham Armor that you can equip. As discussed previously, you can put the Jet on the Alt and equip Excellen's mech with the Armor, to compensate for her weak stamina while turning Alt into a water devil. Of course, putting the Chobham on the Alt and a Water Jet on one of the Gespensts is another option, since Kyosuke's Accel lets him move freely in the first place while the Jet can help catch Gespys up, and the Chobham can save you a difference of $35000 in the long run to put the Alt's Armor on the same level as the Type 0 (the difference between four and five levels of Armor is enormous.) For new game+ the Water Jet route is probably best for the Alt, while first runthroughs can benefit more from the saved cash and early defensive power. Taking the Chobham route will also leave you room to start upgrading the Revolver Stake, an important step towards Kyosuke's long-term development as a frontlinesman and bosskiller.

Next map: Soaring Dragon

ATXM3: Kill or be Killed

On route to Langley, an EFA Tausendfussler transport ship is assaulted by Aerogater mechs, leaving the on-board pilot Brooklyn Luckfield to defend the Fussler's cargo. In order to secure the Fussler's escape, Brooklyn has to deploy alone and fight off the AGX-01 "Bug" Megillots.

Win Condition: All enemies shot down.
Loss Condition: Allied mech shot down.
SR Point: Win condition met before
Tausendfussler reaches the west end
of the map.

This is another map heavily slanted heavily towards the enemy in terms of numbers, but we're in a superior machine and after three Megillots have been shot down, we'll receive three reinforcements to even the odds. So in the grand scheme of things our little army has doubled once again from the preceding stage. There's no strict turn limit on this SR Point, but if the Tausendfussler gets to the end of the map then you've lost the point--effectively that's three turns to destroy all of the enemies in. You shouldn't need to use Bullet's Alert Spirit Command here, because the Megillots have pretty poor accuracy and their attacks are weak enough that his type-TT can take it, but do take the time to cast Accel for Kyosuke and be sure to take advantage of Excellen's Hit & Away. There are a couple hang ups about this map, however.

First, the Tausendfussler. The Tausendfussler is a low-mobility, low-armor air transport. It falls even behind the FM in armor, is size LL--the largest class of machine--and has only A & A in Air and Space despite being a dedicated transport craft. It has only a point-blank postmovement weapon, weak 6-tile Homing Missiles and low accuracy bonuses from the weapons. The AA Autocannon does have +40 crit but it's too underpowered to make use of it. The Fussler's only saving grace is its huge HP and EN--even though it has no onboard weapons to use that EN. It's a battleship with none of the qualities that make a battleship good. Its huge size prevents it from hitting anything while getting hit by everything, it has no armor to back that HP with and its weapons demand a Hit & Away skill that Tausendfussler pilots just aren't trained with. In other words, a giant kingpiece.

Nobody asked you!

Second is Bullet. Bullet is not a bad pilot by any means, and is actually well balanced right now in terms of melee vs range. His accuracy and evasion are on par with Excellen, while he's got Kyosuke's defense. A nice middle road, with accuracy/evasion Spirits that draw from the series staples. Alert makes him unhittable for one battle, while Strike ensures that for the next player and enemy phase all of his attacks will hit. Alert is great for going into the enemy phase with, and since it costs just 10 SP for most pilots, SP Regen makes it free to cast early in a map where you're just setting units up. Telekinesis further boosts Bullet's acc/eva for each level he takes in it, making him a dodge master, while Infight reveals my real problem with this map and many to come, that Bullet's real role is as the melee pilot he was back in Alpha. His terrain rankings are the same as the majority of ATX members, A in all but water. This is perfect for a Gespenst, but Bullet's Gespenst is special and especially customized for him so that it will specifically be worse than a normal Gespy. What he needs is a melee mech, and if you confine Bullet to the mechs the story hands him for the OG games, then Luckfield will be severely lacking for the next 59 or so maps.

The TT is not all bad news. She has slightly higher HP and EN due to her customized nature, and otherwise is only different from a standard Gespenst in terms of onboard weapons. Functionally the Plasma Cutter is a weakened Jet Magnum that works regardless of Will and fails underwater. The MegaBeam Rifle is 105 Will-restricted with just 6 ammo, but has a good accuracy bonus and is almost on par with the Jet Magnum in terms of damage. The trouble is that while all of these are great postmovement additions, they only work with 2/3+ distance in tiles from the mech and target, and Bullet is a melee pilot.

This is all part of a bigger issue. The Gespenst Mark II Type-TT is the first mech we get specifically designed to work with Telekinesis. The T-Link Ripper is literally unusable without at least Telekinesis L1, but Bullet may as well not have it--due to how his stats develop and being an Infight pilot, Luckfield's damage with the Ripper will usually be identical to his damage with the MegaBeam Rifle. This is the problem with Bullet; he gets constantly assigned to mechs that in no way complement his stats and usually mislead the player as to what he's supposed to be doing. The TT would be more usable in the hands of a ranged pilot, but even then she's held down by her plethora of beam weapons. I went into this a little in previous maps, but water in this game is not so much a terrain type as a debilitating status effect that stops all beam weapons from working as intended. So Plasma Cutter is Bullet's best weapon but only works on dry land and in space. I would recommend the TT to Excellen since she has a weakened Magnum anyway, but the Ripper is Telekinesis restricted and she'll be getting her own custom mech soon enough.

Original Generation 1 is so inundated with water maps that having beam weapons as a main loadout with no kinetic alternative is an immediate mark on that mech's record, and the TT is definitely not doing herself any favors by having her alternative be ranged. Right now everything's fine since we're on land and the AGX-01s are weak, but these problems are only going to snowball if we let them, so getting Bullet a more appropriate mecha is one of those things that players have to constantly manage in the background up until the middle of Original Generation 2. (It doesn't help that he's force-deployed a couple times in the TT and another ranged mech later on.)

The Megillots are low-mobility, low-armor like the Fussler. They only have a B in ground and A/A in Air/Space despite being AirGround mechs. They're small and accurate with good HP, but lack weapon space and only have 80 EN to use their Ring Laser main weapon. Charging is their only postmovement, it's only range 1, and everything they have to fight with is weak. I would put it below the Messer but better than the Waldung. Their charge puts them in the direct line of fire for Bullet's Plasma Cutter in this stage, so we've really nothing to worry about.

After three Megillots get shot down, Kyosuke and Excellen will join the fight in their Gespenst Mark IIs, along with one new allied unit...

The Grungust Type 0 is our first real glimpse of what an endgame mech looks like, with armor, HP and EN straight out of Mazinger and Gunbuster from past games. Type 0 takes hits perfectly, reducing most damage to SRW's baseline 10. Its best terrain ranking is an S in Space, with As in Air and Ground and a B in Water; this is the best of the ATX mechs we've seen so far, and its dedicated pilot has an S in Space to complement it. He actually has an S-Ground and A-Water, so eventually equipping the Dustproof part to modify Type 0's Ground rank so that it matches Sanger's may be a good idea. (You can do the same for his Water rank with a Water Jet, but the circumstances of Sanger's deployment across the game are such that you'll almost never have the Type 0 in water.)

Type 0 comes with the Break Block skill, preventing armor-reducing missiles from taking effect--the ultimate wall. The Type 0 is also almost nothing but postmove weapons, limited only by their close range. The Boost Knuckle is a paradoxically ranged melee weapon effective at 2-4 tiles with a strong accuracy bonus and power just behind the Jet Magnum. The Hyper Blaster is range 1 melee, and supreme so it's not affected by water. The Colossal Blade is a 5350 (!!) power 140-Will restricted melee weapon and this mech's best attack, with a whopping 55 critical bonus. All of these weapons are high accuracy, and while they do drain a ton of EN, upgrades can fix this. (The Boost Knuckle is limitless though.)

The Type 0's pilot even learns Spirits to push him to 140 Will from turn 1, making it basically unstoppable if upgraded accordingly. The final onboard weapon, the Armor Breaker, does not damage but reduces the enemy's armor to almost nothing, leaving them wide open to followup attacks. Overall the Grungust Type 0 is the best mech we've been given in these past three stages, and is leagues above the Mark IIs.

Major Sanger Zonvolt is a pure melee pilot, befitting for the Type 0. His 144 defense is great for its ability to take hits, and he even learns Guard for tough boss fights. His Hit/Evade are up there with our snipers too, so that Sense Spirit is going to remain decorative for a few stages. His one fault is his lack of customization; Sanger only has one skill slot left at introduction, best saved for SP Regen. Command boosts nearby allies' hit/evade, Infight helps him with his Colossal Blade and other attacks, Counter lets him get the jump on bosses, Prevail lets him keep on tanking the damage he takes, and Hit & Away is just icing on the cake to swap him out for another point-blank pilot like Kyosuke.

After you clear out the Megillots, reinforcements arrive and Sanger will pull back to let you handle the rest. This is not a difficult stage by any means and you'll already have the SR point by this time, so feel free to rush in with Excellen's Support and Kyosuke's Fortune, and try not to let anybody fall behind in levels. You'll now have enough cash to begin upgrading your mechs, but I'm going to say to hold off on that until we've gotten some more permanent forces. Next map: Iron Wolf.