Note: I’ll be playing through on Warlord, but the same strategies will apply for lower difficulty levels. You might see slightly fewer enemy characters in some squads, but I believe the number of squads is the same across difficulty levels & the largest difference is enemy stats.

You’ll start with two squads: your main character (MC) with some fighters and a healer and Zelos with two archers. Zelos is already quite high level, so you might consider focusing xp toward MC’s squad. You will receive more xp for kills than just fighting, so Zelos’s archers can be used to soften up stronger enemies for MC to finish off.

Seizing objectives has a chance to increase leadership and loyalty for the squad that takes the objective and if a squad other than MC takes the objective, the MC’s squad has a chance to receive leadership and loyalty as well. Objectives are also a great way to build up loyalty and leadership for new squads that aren’t quite ready for the front lines.

This level is more of a tutorial and introduction to the systems, so merely move forward to the enemy base and follow the instructions the game gives you for now. Sybil and Jules will arrive to give your army a bit more firepower & show you some basic tactics.

Interlude

After the stage there’s quite a bit to do. First check out the dialogues for a little more story depth & technology points & then select two new technologies. I recommend the two that give you more recruit slots: Apprentice Training & Merchant Envoys. You will eventually unlock them all though, so don’t worry about missing any of them.

Next recruit some new characters to fill out your army. Raising characters from level one improves their stats, so I recommend recruiting a bunch of level 1 characters of each class with reasonable elemental affinities for their role. You can change affinity later, but those items are in short supply in the early game.

• Dark Affinity: ++strength, ++magic, -loyalty, -leadership, –hp
• Light Affinity: +leadership, +loyalty
• Water Affinity: +magic, +hp, -strength, -skill
• Earth Affinity: ++hp, -skill
• Lightning Affinity: +skill, +strength, -hp, -loyalty
• Fire Affinity: +strength, +loyalty, -magic

Also note that raising the primary class statistic is usually required to promote to higher tiers. Particularly for the fighter tree, characters without +strength will wait quite awhile for tier 3 promotion.

Hiring at least one advanced class mercenary will give you a leader for a new squad to expand your army as well. Ideally they would have high leadership, a complementary element and a trait that either accentuates a strength or covers for a weakness of the class. If there isn’t an ideal leader available, I wouldn’t force it: there will be plenty more chances to hire one later and you will be promoting characters very soon as well.

The apprentice Jacobin isn’t the ideal damage dealer, but his affinity earth and immortal spirit trait will both significantly mitigate his frailty. This could be useful to allow placing a mage in a more forward squad without constantly risking his death. However, his leadership isn’t particularly high; we’ll need to hire someone else to lead the 5th squad.

After hiring is all done, it’s time to reform your army with the new recruits. I recommend clearing everyone out except your leaders and then adding back the most fitting characters to make squads as strong and balanced as possible.

Jules’s squad should get all your best archers & if you have enough serviceable ones left over, I’d recommend making a second archer squad too. Excepting archer squads, you will want a healer in every squad and to focus on armored characters up front. Three heavy armor characters is best to spread out the punishment, but advanced classes like Zelos can be an exception to that.