********************** * FINAL FANTASY * * CRYSTAL CHRONICLES * * MY LIFE AS A KING * ********************** * FAQ/Walkthrough * ********************** Version 1.0 Jake Alley Contents: Sec01 Frequently Asked Questions Sec02 Downloadable Extras Sec03 Town Building Sec04 Your Daily Ritual (Or All About Morale) Sec05 Crazy Voodoo AI Tricks Sec01 Frequently Asked Questions Q: When do I actually get to form parties? A: Once you get the ability to make a tavern. Q: How do I get access to the first tavern? This boss WON'T DIE! A: The boss in question is immune to physical damage. You need to send in a decent level black mage to kill it. It might help to send a fighter or 3 in minute or so before the black mage to clear a path through the monsters. Q: What's the story with these shop materials bequests? A: As you upgrade things in shops, periodically you hit a wall where you need to post a bequest to get new materials. Once you hit one, click around the map for a completed area with the new behest listed. It won't show up if you haven't fully explored the area (but will be mentioned in the notes). There's generally more than one such bequest, they have to be unlocked in order. The boss' level is tied to the item level, not the area level, but your adventurers don't take that into account, so completing these can be tricky. Crazy voodoo AI tricks help. Q: What's with this "shape changing" dungeon? A: If you get a high enough percentage of it explored in a single day, it quits shifting around, allowing you to tackle it normally. Highly trained thieves help, sending in as many people as you can helps, luck is still a huge factor. Q: Can I rearrange things later? A: Yes. Once you can make Black Mage Academies, you get the ability to remove buildings from the map. Stand at the enterence and summon Chime to mark them for demolition. The next morning, the building will be gone, you'll get the building cost back, and as soon as you rebuild it, it will be just like you left it. Oh, and for what it's worth, demolishing houses has no effect on your active adventurers. They'll live inside the castle in the short term, and move back into the next house of any size you build. Q: How many of everything can I eventually build? A: If we're talking about your first time through the game, with no extra downloads, you can, by the end, build a total of: - 30 houses total (either small or spacious) - 2 Bakeries - 1 Emporium - 1 of each shop (Weapon, Armor, Item) - 1 of each training building (Warrior, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage) - 2 Taverns - 1 Guild Hall - 2 Fountain Parks - 1 Bulletin Park This allows you to have: - 16 max adventurers - 2 fixed parties - 2 bequests posted per day - 4 max morale spheres - the 2nd best level of kingdom development Playing on hard or very hard (available after winning once), you gain the ability to make an extra: - 10 houses (40 total) - 1 Bakery (3 total, giving the 5th morale sphere and best level of development) - 1 of each shop (Weapon, Armor, Item) - 1 of each training building except Training Hall Sec02 Downloadable Extras There are a variety of additional features that can be added to the game by paying for downloadable extras. This guide will not be mentioning them for several reasons. 1- Plenty of other people can tell you everything you want to know and more about each download as it is released, so I'd just as soon not constantly be updating this guide. 2- The same basic strategies still apply. 3- Personally, I'm not a fan of the whole practice of squeezing as much money from people as possible with things like this. 4 (And this is the most important one)- Thus far, none of them are honestly worth using. We have an extra large house, which while possibly nice for maximizing cash flow on normal mode just for the sake of doing so, is terribly inefficient for difficulties where that much money is actually useful. We have even more training buildings which add a wider variety of skills, but there's no way you can actually make use of all of them and not have your adventurers wasting half the day in town. Then of course we have the extra races, which while cosmetically would be a nice change of pace, and save you the hassle of getting everyone into the right class, aren't going to seem all that efficient when compared to the characters you've already built up by the time you unlock the ability to use them. Sec03 Town Building Laying out the various buildings in your town is one of the least time consuming, but by far most important aspects of the game. An inefficient layout won't have a really noticeable effect until about halfway through the game, but if you're careless, eventually you're going to wish you'd put more thought into it as you begin rebuilding your whole city to get people to stop taking until sundown to actually head out and explore. There's two basic things we need to worry about when planning out where to put each building. First, there's dealing with where everything is going to fit. Buildings come in four different sizes, taking up 1, 2, 4, or 6 spaces. There's only 13 places on the map where one of the largest buildings can be placed, you'll fill 4 of those on normal, 6 on hard. There's only 7 places you can fit a 4 space building without using part of one of those lots, we need 5 on normal, 8 on hard. There's a fair bit of leeway in both cases, but since we're going to be wanting to keep the more important buildings clustered together, you're going to want to reserve as many of the big open lots on the north side of town for shops and training buildings. The second major concern is adventurer travel time. The daily routine of your adventurers goes like this (skipping anything which hasn't been built entirely): - Wake up in their house, head to a random fountain park for a bit of morning relaxation. - Head to the behest posting that most interests them, and wait for your approval. - Go shopping, compulsively visiting every adventurer shop and their training building, in a random order. - Head to the tavern to form a party. - Leave out the appropriate gate to reach their goal for the day. - Return through that same gate, and head to the castle for their wages. The major efficiency issue, generally speaking, comes from the shopping step of this process. Assuming you're building everything, that's 4 buildings any given character is going to run around between. If you have, say, the weapon and armor shops right by the bequest boards, and the item shop and training buildings clumped together elsewhere, it's quite possible that at least one adventurer will cut across the entire city four whole times because they don't want to look at swords until they're set on potions. It's also possible for someone to decide to run over to the fountain park you stuck down in the corner instead of the one right near their house. The solution, therefore, is to put your bulletin park right by your initial bequest post, keep the shops as close to the two as you can manage, and generally ring the whole shopping district with training buildings. When playing on hard, you have the added headache to contend with that you get extra versions of these buildings to deal with. The same basic logic still applies though. Keep all the 4 space shops in a tight clump, stick the 2 black mage buildings near each other, etc. It's generally a good idea to use the leftover space in the area to place fountain parks (if you're planning to bother with them), and taverns. Hitting the tavern is the last thing people do before heading out, so you might be tempted to place them by the 3 exits. There's no guarantee that they'll head to the one by the exit they plan to take though, so it's much more efficient to place them close to the stores. Everything else is going to be a low priority you're encouraged to stick off in the boonies down south. This means you'll have a few adventurers taking a long trip to the behest postings, but it's nothing compared to shopping time, since it can only happen once a day. If you really want to be extra efficient, make sure the leaders of the permanent parties you set up in your taverns live in single space housing by the bequest boards. Say, the lot adjacent to the first board, and the house built automatically at the start of the game. The leaders will be ready to take their orders right away, and the rest of their party members get to skip this step entirely. Now for a more in-depth look at all the things we'll be building. Houses: (Building limit goes by total houses, ultimate cap of 30 on normal, 40 on hard) Small House 1 Space 100 El Potential Adventurer +1 NPC, +10 Gil/Day * Large House 1 Space 250 El Potential Adventurer +2 NPC, +20 Gil/Day Spacious House 2 Spaces 300 El Potential Adventurer +3 NPC, +30 Gil/Day Housing Placement Tips: On normal mode, you are eventually going to want to eventually replace all small houses with spacious ones. On hard, you will eventually want 20 spacious houses, 20 large. In either case, it's generally a good idea to place your first few houses in northern lots with odd numbers of spaces for easy access, but once you're just filling up all the space you can, concentrate on the southeastern section of town (by the lookout tower). It keeps them out of the way of higher priority buildings, and on hard mode allows for amazing morale farming with the final development upgrade. Citizen Shops: (1 Emporium, 2 Normal Bakeries +1 Hard Bakery) Bakery 2 Spaces 200 El +1 Morale Sphere, passive morale boost Emporium 6 Spaces 600 El +2 Morale Sphere, passive morale boost, adds shields/daggers/torches shop inventories Citizen Shop Placement Tips: Adventurers don't touch these buildings, but the NPCs living in your various houses like to periodically pop into them if they're nearby, giving you a slight morale gauge boost each time. Therefore, you want to surround them with as many houses as you can manage. Adventurer Shops: (1 each Normal, +1 each Hard) Weapon Shop 4 Spaces 200 El Sells weapons to adventurers Armor Shop 4 Spaces 350 El Sells armor to adventurers Item Shop 4 Spaces 300 El Sells potions and torches to adventurers Adventurer Shop Placement Tips: As previously stated, cram these as close to your behest boards as you can. On hard mode, if you want to completely fill in the town, one will need to go down in the 10 space lot just south of the crystal. It's one of two lots that will leave unusable space without a 4 space building on them, the other can hold the guild. Adventurer Training: (1 each Normal, +1 all but Training Hall Hard) White Mage T. 6 Spaces 500 El Switch to and get spells for White Mages Black Mage A. 6 Spaces 500 El Switch to and get spells for Black Mages Training Hall 6 Spaces 450 El Warrior stuff, can "Gain EXP" risk free Gaming Hall 2 Spaces 350 El Thief stuff, adventurers can get free gil Adventurer Training Placement Tips: These are essentially more shops. Only one will generally be hit by a given character, since they're class specific. Those not on behests might visit the Gaming and Training Halls for their alternate uses, but efficiency isn't a concern there, so don't worry. Special: (2 Taverns, 1 Guild Hall, 1 Inn) Tavern 2 Spaces 500 El Sells weapons to adventurers Guild Hall 4 Spaces 300 El Sells armor to adventurers Inn 2 Spaces 400 El Sells potions and torches to adventurers Special Placement Tips: Taverns are the last place adventurers visit before leaving town, after shopping. Keeping them near the shops is extremely important. It also helps to keep them where you can generally keep an eye on them, if you're inclined to give everyone stat boosts on their way out of town. The Inn is essentially a house for visiting, randomized, extra adventurers, and should thus go with your other houses (but not near citizen shops). The Guild Hall is a building only you personally ever visit, and thus can (and should) be crammed in the far southeast corner to fill the awkward lot shape, stay out of the way, and be visited while chatting with the citizenry. Parks: (2 Fountain, 1 Bulletin) Fountain 2 Spaces 200 El Chance of recovering adventurer morale Bulletin 4 Spaces 150 El Allows extra behest posting Park Placement Tips: You are going to want to keep your Bulletin Park right by the original behest board for reasons that should be obvious. Fountain parks should be in the same area as well, both for optimal adventurer pathing, and so you can clean out any demoralized adventurers who end up loitering while you assign everyone's tasks. There should be an image found in the same location of this guide with a suggested layout of a hard mode town. While not necessarily the most efficient possible, it has been proven to keep shopping time short enough not to cause problems, citizen visitation easy to manage, and evenly fills out the map. On normal, you have much more space than you need, and can therefore fit everything important in the northern portion of town, leaving the rest free for your 30 spacious houses. Sec04 Your Daily Ritual (Or All About Morale) Every day starts off with a review of the previous, and new behest posting. As a general rule of thumb, you want to clean out areas in ascending order of level. If you have a level 8 area and a level 9 area, hit the level 8 first even if you think you can handle it. There are generally extra incentives to going in order (dungeons assuming you'll have access to certain types of equipment for instance), and of particular concern, the boss of the dungeon containing the first available tavern absolutely requires a black mage to kill the boss, which you will unlock right before it sticking to sequence. Next, it's time to actually make sure everyone hits these. Adventurers generally line up to receive orders for the day fast enough that you should wait before doing anything else, but you can usually squeeze in a quick building or shop visit as they line up. We'll discuss some of the finer points of dispensing adventurers in the next section, but it should be noted that each dungeon only has so many monsters to be found in a given day. Send everyone to the same place, and most will miss out on experience. On the other hand, send two people to kill the same boss, and one might clear out the monsters so the other can reach it at full HP. With the adventurers on their way, it's time to start hitting the shops and summoning new buildings. Gil, generally, is a non-issue, and really, elementite flows in pretty reliably too. If you know you're getting a new building type the next day, you might want to save 200 El or so to make sure you can build it right away, otherwise, spend it when you can. For shop upgrades, I suggest the following priorities. First, get everything up to level 10 or 15, then hit the Guild Hall to crank the adventurer cap up to 8 (and hire the newbies, obviously), then max out the adventurer pay rank (for them, gil IS a concern, and this doesn't cut into your daily income beyond the one time costs). After that, max out the adventurer cap (and hire up to the full 16), then just keep investing in all the shops and training buildings, keeping everything at roughly the same level. You should be able to maintain an absurd lead on what the adventurers are actually capable of buying no matter what. That out of the way, it's time to set in on the daily morale grind. First, we need a bakery. On your second or third day, you should see someone standing around by the fountain talking about bakeries. Follow up on that, you'll end up getting a sketch from a moogle. Build one ASAP and you get access to the morale gauge. The morale gauge increases from talking to people. Either citizens with a green smile over their heads, or adventurers on their way out of town, or back for their daily pay. It also increases when citizens talk amongst themselves, or visit a citizen shop. Each time it fills, you get an extra bonus to the day's Gil income, and you get a morale sphere if there's an open slot for one. Each bakery adds a slot, the emporium adds two. These spheres have two uses. First, you can take them to the castle, and cash them in with Chime to work towards developing your city as a whole. The perks for doing so are as follows: 1st upgrade: May build first fountain park 2nd upgrade: May build spacious houses (very useful) 3rd upgrade: May declare holidays (see below) 4th upgrade: May have Pavlov talk to people, and access morale boosting fetch quests. 5th upgrade: May address people from tower (makes all citizens come out willing to talk, not possible on normal). The first two upgrades are particularly handy, and quite easy to get, just by talking to every adventurer on their way out and back from behests. Once you have a nice flow of morale coming in though (or you just have time to kill during the huge lull between the second and third upgrades), it's time to shift your focus to the second, and more important use. Morale boosting. Every day, once this becomes feasible, summon chime before talking to your first citizen, and spend a sphere on the morale boost option. Your morale gauge will be replaced by a gradually depleting red bar (the original gauge will continue to fill as normal, it's just hidden). While this bar is up, you have two very useful abilities. First, talking to an adventurer will give them a minor stat boost for the day. Second, talking to a normal citizen will increase their household's happiness meter (which can be checked by visiting their house). This in turn has two very handy effects. First, when a meter fills, you can visit the house when the official owner is home to receive a random medal that can later be given to an adventurer after they kill a boss. Second, and much more importantly, that house will start leaving the lights on at night. The more houses that do this, the longer your period of activity becomes each day. Talking to everyone you can find with a morale boost active every day will eventually get you to the point where your days are two or three times their original length. This gives you enough time to talk to citizens (and they seem to become more talkative the later it gets), recovering the morale sphere you spent and then some, and rolling over the morale gauge another few times, leading to a bigger gil bonus. It also ensures you'll still be awake when your adventurers return, letting you console the unsuccessful ones, and potentially eliminate their resulting bad moods. How important any of this is is debatable. The only real benefit is that you will end up with more gil than you know what to do with, and more medals than you could possibly ever award. Once you're at the point where your adventurers' levels are in the mid-20s, and there's level 70 equipment gathering dust on store shelves, you might want to give it a rest and just go to bed early after sending everyone off and building up the town. The only catch to constantly operating in morale boost mode is that it prevents you from entering (or staying in) hyper morale mode. Any time an adventurer kills a boss, and you aren't in morale boost mode, your moral bar will begin glowing, and all gains to it are doubled. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, time your boosts on days you expect bosses to die so that they will expire just after everyone leaves town. After your third development upgrade, you gain the ability to declare holidays (as a behest in town). This an ability you are never going to want to actually use. All it does is put you in hyper morale mode for the entire day, which you can do on your own almost every day to begin with. It also costs a decent sized chunk of gil to do this, which is going to completely offset the extra cash it would bring in. Finally, it totally decommissions your adventurers for the day. Not only will they not take on behests, they won't gain experience on their own, or shop, or do anything but sit around at home. Now, you might be thinking, this would still be marginally useful as a way to pass the time if, say, every single adventurer is wiped out, and is going to spend a day resting anyway. Horrifyingly enough, even that doesn't work. They won't recover at all during the holiday, and end up taking the next day off on top of the day you're wasting declaring it. You'd be much better off just declaring no behests for the day. Everyone who needs it rests up, everyone who doesn't levels without being told to (or gambles for extra gil), you end up with about the same gil intake for the day, and don't have to take a day off from the upkeep of everyone's happiness meters. Eventually, your day of morale farming comes to an end, and it's time for a new set of reports. When things go badly, it sometimes helps to click each point to reveal more info (up to a complete round by round account of every battle fought). Otherwise, lather, rinse, repeat until the game is won. Sec05 Crazy Voodoo AI Tricks Let's face it. The AI of your adventurers is awful. This, really, is essential to the game's being any fun. If they always did what you wanted, things would just get boring. Sometimes though, they seem to be really dead set against what you want them to do. Here's a few tricks which have a more or less proven link to better behavior. First and foremost of course is having an efficient town layout. We've discussed this enough I think. Next, keep them happy. Maxing out the pay rank, talking to everyone twice a day, and not sending people on suicide runs will generally keep everyone from deciding to pass on behests. Always set up an obvious high level and low level behest. Each posting will attract at most half your available pool of adventurers, or have more than 5 adventurers gathered around it. Specified parties count as 4 people for the first of these limits but only one for the second. More importantly, they will always consider one posting to be for higher level people, and the other for lower, and cluster accordingly as best they can. If you have 8 people around level 20, and 8 people around level 10, and behests for areas with those levels, great. If you have behests in 2 level 20 areas, the level 20 people are all going to pick the one and clump around it, the other will just attract level 10 folks with a death wish. Behests in town (changing levels, info gathering) are wildcards in this system. Post one, and a more standard one, they'll decide if the dungeon one is high or low, and send the other half of the population to the other one. This just plain sucks for class changes, since you generally want those spread out over a wide range of levels. The best solution is to either do a high level batch and a low level batch on two different days, or declare two in-town behests and leave it up to luck. If they're being really stubborn about something, reset it and switch which board has which posting. It seems to help break ties in the AI's calls, with the original board taking the higher priority. The parties adventurers form on their own go by when they enter the pub mainly. If you want people to clump up, approve their behests all at once. If you want a lot of soloing, spread them out between shop visits. Finally, as mentioned earlier, adventurers in the same dungeon step on each other's toes in terms of EXP gains. Left to their own devices, all your level 4 characters will hit the same dungeon for EXP, and thus not really get any. Gain EXP behests help spread people out, not hiring multiple people the same day helps more. This concludes this guide. If you're wondering about anything I haven't covered, just keep playing until the game explains it to you. It's very linear, and you can't really miss anything important. If you'd like to contact me about this guide, you can find my e-mail address on my webpage- http://www.kekkai.org/google/