Sometimes, strategy games may seem intimidating. One like Grand Kingdom could seem a little unapproachable. After all, you’re given a set number of campaign quests, but also know you can take on additional offline sidequests or online war contracts to compliment that experience. Someone might look and wonder how easy it is or isn’t to build a majestic group of mercenaries. The good news is, it almost feels like the game goes out of its way to make things easier, if you’re diligent and pay attention.
First, you’re going to want to consider maxing out your character’s Technique. Why? Because it’ll boost the experience that unit earns. This will help you get more out of every battle. While Grand Kingdom isn’t very clear about it, a higher Tec stat will help a character class up and learn skills faster. You might want to put as many points in Tec as you can for Troops you don’t use as often, maybe even maxing that attribute, to ensure they keep up with more popular forces.
Investing large numbers of points into Tec makes sense for characters you are going to use often for another productive and efficient reason. With Grand Kingdom, it’s wise to invest points into the stats that are tied to a character’s skills. A good rule of thumb is to boost the Strength attribute of a melee unit or Magic of a mage, but it’s also smart to be certain. By putting points into Tec, the character will learn skills faster. You can then look at these skills in the menu and hover over them to see which attribute corresponds to them. Green and red icons will become stronger when Str is improved, adding 0.5% damage for each point invested, while a purple icon means the Mag stat will improve the attack’s strength. It’s especially good to keep this in mind with Specialist characters, since ones like the Dragon Mage will have melee and magic skills.
Scroll farming can be a big help too. Especially if you’d rather not pay $0.99 per scroll in the PlayStation Store. While there are scrolls you can get one time from gold Travel quests, there’s a better way to get them as repeated rewards. Hidden Treasure quests will give you the opportunity to get them over and over again, as they’re in fixed positions. Once you get a one of these Hidden Treasure quests, you can always get the same scrolls in the same spots. Take some quick and menial quests to get the list to refresh, like a Delivery quest, then go for every Hidden Treasure quest possible. As an example, I’m trying to power up an Arcanist I can use for the last few Campaign quests, so I’ve been hoping the mountain Hidden Treasure quest comes up. From the start point, the Magic scroll can be found if you head north, take the first right, then continue all the way to the end of that path’s branch. The furthest south west corner of this quest’s map also an SP scroll.
Keeping up with Grand Kingdom is important too. The game incentivizes consistency. Logging in every day gradually earns you rewards at regular intervals. War contracts can last a few days, giving you an opportunity to keep contributing. Also, it never hurts to send off at least one troop before you end a play session, so they can “work” for you while you’re gone and bring back some sort of reward the next time you log in.
Making plenty of contracts in Grand Kingdom is another huge help. To start, you’ll gradually work toward maxing out your reputation with that faction. This works to your advantage when heading to stock up in their shops. You’ll get a 15% discount in that nation’s store. (I’m currently getting a nice discount in Magion.) Plus, you’ll expand your own store’s inventory while you’re away. Every time you meet someone else’s troop online and they have something you don’t, it’ll end up being added to your own stock.
But most important of all, stay active. Grand Kingdom is the kind of game where you can be rewarded even if you, at the very least, pop in each day to accrue daily rewards and send units out for a sortie. It wants your troops to thrive, so go ahead and spend time distributing points into attributes that’ll help your characters grow more swiftly, grinding for scrolls that’ll help you put together better mercenaries, and building a reputation, and encountering other people’s units.
Grand Kingdom is immediately available for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
