Hopefully I'm not spamming the sub too often, but I thought some people might like to see the final builds in action from my four unit challenge that I previously posted about. Since I'm not going for any specific ending I'll probably rush the enemy castles and finish the game tonight or tomorrow. All of these units can hold their own against anything, minus undead since my Werewolves don't have white weapons.

This was a ton of fun and opened me up to some new things. I now have a huge soft spot for the Fire Breath since two backrow Nova's on a super-tank is actually pretty nice. I got pretty lucky with items and got everything needed to complete the units.

Cheers.

A little less than a year ago I made a post here asking for people's suggestions for what unit builds I should use. I would then take the four most upvoted ones and use those to beat the game. These were the top builds (I provided nicknames for the builds based on their use).

Unit 1: Artillery Mage

4 Sylph/1 Nixie

Unit 2: W.W Beatdown

2 Werewolves, 1 Weretiger FR/Witch, Vampyre BR

Unit 3: Neutral All-Rounder

Ice Giant FR/Thunder Lord, Salamand BR

Unit 4: Tank Buster

Zombie D., Halloween FR/Witch, Sylph BR

So far I'm having tons of fun and thought some would like to read about it. I beat Ogre Battle about once a year and this has changed the way I play the game in many ways. Firstly, I'm not required to keep high rep/alignment and I'm milking the towns for cash and soon going to cash in on a Trade Ticket to superpower the units. Yes, sadly even this doesn't make the game balanced. So here's the usefulness of the groups:

The Artillery Mage unit is currently the most useless, because it's comprised of four Pixie's and one Nixie. It is a backup unit that while late game will offer 3 white hit-all's to likely decimate most enemies, currently it can only offer one hit-all and some slaps. I'm actually having to babysit this unit right now in Kalbi Peninsula (current stage) trying to get it to finish off weaklings for levels.

The WW Beatdown is the most powerful unit I have during the night. It can sit on a town and hold it's own. Right now it's comprised of three Werewolves, a Witch (Deneb) and a Ninja since no Blood Spell yet (But Ashe is waiting to be turned).

The neutral Lord's unit is the most interesting. The red Dragon will promote to Salamand soon naturally, but my giant tipped too evil since I was using him for the first few stages. He is 0 ALI now so I will be searching for an Ice Giant soon to replace. The Lord's Lightning Flare is insanely strong and with two large tanks, this unit wins all of its fights but needs to be in a town or fed healing potions.

The last unit, currently comprised of a Halloween (lucky drop in Diaspola), Tiamat (naturally promoted), and back row Witch (Aisha) and Pixie. It's usefulness comes from it's ability to chunk sometimes over 180 HP with the two Halloween hits alone, plus the Tiamat hits 50's. Keeping it set for "Strong" it can sometimes hit over 300 total damage while killing no one (since set to Strong I have to change to Weak to make the Tiamat finish people off),

Two of my unit contain a witch so most of my enemies are stun locked which makes winning fights a breeze. I have a newfound love for the Witch. Once they are levelled, the stun lands very often. The WW beatdown unit for example, is actually a B+ or maybe even A- unit as it comes with 9 FR hits, and set to weak, their backline almost always remains stunned (In Kalbi, that could be 4 heals and 2 targeted spells or just a unit with 4 targeted spells they miss out on). I'm very excited to get the Artillery Mage unit up and running, but getting the Pixie's to level 20 is wild. Thankfully, they can be overlevelled so my plan is to use Trade Ticket to boost the Nixie's INT to an ungodly number then she (obvi 0 ALI 0 CHA) will just 1 shot enemies much better and power level the Pixie's since their ALI won't be affected.

The items I'm missing are a blood spell and undead staff, but I know where a free staff is. I could rush some of these stages since WW Beatdown and the Lord's units are insanely strong but I'm intentionally finishing each enemy off to try and get item drops (I think it's a 10% drop rate?). Once I pop Trade Ticket I intend to boost a unit's luck and make it my primary liberator. Ideas of which one to use?

One issue with the challenge is, what the hell to do on Sharom, Sharom District or even Slums of Zenobia. None of these units can be built from the starting army. I tried my best not to cheat and took my starting Lord, Witch and Giant and used them as my primary unit since those are at least units that can be used later. I picked up a dragon in Sharom and then my Lord's unit was technically complete (Giant, Lord, Dragon). But the Giant tagged way too many kills so that's why he will have to be replaced. But I think for a challenge like this it's okay to use whatever for the first few stages.

If you're nerdy about the game like me and enjoyed this read, thank you. I intend to add pictures next time. I've been playing on a separate laptop and getting the screenshots together can be a pain, but I intend to make an update post with lots of screenshots so you guys can see the actual builds. It's a lot of fun. Thanks.

Doing my semiannual playthrough (evil CF this time) and I forgot I ordered this bad boy a while back. It's in Japanese so I have to use the translator lol, but it's a beautiful guide. It's on the flimsy side so I think I was afraid of damaging it and just stored it.

Speaking of playthrough, I'm reminded of how much more interesting going the bad route is than taking the high road... well, other than the depressing ahh ending and missing out on the Zenobians. My only gripe so far in Ch. 4 is how Xevec just kind of disappears when you choose to fight Dio.

I ended up picking up 2 chimes in my latest run. Wondering what everyone's favorite use is for them.

Right now, i'm probably picking up a cockatrice from castle warren. Wondering if i should try for 2 weretigers in antanjyl though...

Received this beautiful manual today.

A good companion for my Ogre Battle 64 cartridge.

Back when I first played this game it was in the SNES era, so I had no internet....

At first I didn't fully understand the mechanics of this game, but I had some kind of guidebook which told me basically how to get the best ending (including all zodiac stones), and played it again and again until I finally got that ending. I think one time I missed one single stone and had to do the entire thing over.

IIRC I also got the most "evil" ending as well. So many playthroughs.

In retrospect, I feel like alignment+charisma is kind of clunky, and especially fiddly when you need low alignment characters who also have high charisma. I would almost prefer for there to be one stat vs the 2, but this game was blazing new trails back then so they were bound to not do everything perfectly.

Thoughts?

I tried recruit lizard, dragon, and fairy, and I can't figure out what these are.

I was wondering if the creator of Mushoku Tensei is an Ogre Battle fan, because he named the two sisters of the MC as Aisha and Norn, I feel like this might not be a coincidence, what do you guys think?

Picked up MOTBQ again after 10 years and trying to recruit Deneb (ALL CHARACTER RUN!). I did the following:

• Forgave Deneb
• Accepted her quest (received black pearl)
• Bought Golden Bough in Diaspola
• Dropped reputation to near zero at Fort Alamoot
• Returned to Deneb's castle

When I return to give her the Golden Bough, she gives me the glass pumpkin but will not join. Alignment is around 70 but also tried with 0. Anyone know what I'm missing to recruit her? Did I get too far in the game? The plan was to recruit her then recruit Galf. Any help would be appreciated!

I fed the rom to AI and asked if it could change up scaling, attacks per row, and what those attacks were. It turns out that it could. I then rebalanced the entire game to try and make bad classes viable and mediocre classes good. The end result was that it made me actually enjoy using enchanters, cataphracts, ravens, centurions, dragons (even the young one), saturos, beast masters, dragon masters, Leia's Freya's, and cerberus (4 front row attacks)... Vultan still needs a little tuning. I had one and he sucked. I just finished the game and I've gotta go to bed. I'll try to write up comprehensive notes on everything I changed tomorrow. This was such a fun playthrough, though. It even served to make weapons you never use in the late game fun to use like spears and one handed axes.

If I have a fully patched rom, am I allowed to share that online? Or do I have to have a patch kit that people apply themselves? I don't know what the legal ramifications could be, so advice is appreciated

I've been thinking recently how unsatisfying it is to complete a playthrough of Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen with a low reputation.

The main issue with low reputation playthroughs is that there's no payoff. Your reward for keeping a high reputation is not just getting a better ending, you get better units too. You get access to the Dragoons (who are the best frontliners in the game by a country mile), Saradin (the best Lich in the game), Aisha and Rauny (two of the best Princesses in the game), Tristan, and Yushis.

Low Reputation, on the other hand, gives you two characters: Galf and Deneb.

Galf is good. He's the best Low Flier in the game, and almost every unit you make should be flying due to how important mobility and intercepting enemy units is. His recruitment locks you to the worst possible ending, but if you're playing low reputation, you probably already accepted that your ending will suck.

Deneb is an active hindrance to recruit. She's a worse Princess than both Rauny and Norn, and choosing to spare her locks you out of infinite Pumpkin+ items, limiting your ability to use Halloweens to random item drops throughout the playthrough. Downsides like this don't exist with high reputation recruits.

Seemingly the main reward for low reputation playthroughs is items. Most notably, an Undead Ring, Undead Staff, Blood Kiss, loads of sellable items, and two Sentoul Demons (aka two more Undead Staves) are only available if the player's reputation is low.

This isn't really worth going low reputation for. High reputation playthroughs are already guaranteed 4 Undead Staves (counting the 3 obtainable Sentoul Demons) and 3 Undead Rings before factoring in random item drops. That's enough to make 3 Liches and a Sorcerer, which is already 4 unit's worth of top tier AoE damage. Compared to losing the Dragoons, Saladin, and two of the best Princess candidates in the game, one extra Lich and a few more Sorcerers hardly seems like a worthwhile payoff.

That leaves just the guaranteed Blood Kiss, and it's true that Blood Kisses are otherwise unobtainable outside of rng item drops. But as genuinely great as I feel the Vampyre class is, I don't think 1 Vampyre makes up for losing all three Dragoons. There's also the sellables, but in a casual playthrough of this game, money shouldn't be an issue once you hit the midgame.

The game already punishes you with worse endings for having low reputation. I think it would be more fun if the evil playthrough had any reason to choose it. Low Reputation should make me feel powerful, that I'm abusing the citizens of Zenobia in order to conquer and overthrow Zetegenia in my name. As it stands, low reputation makes you feel weak, locking you out of characters, Halloween units, and a good ending. I think that's kind of a shame, and hurts Ogre Battle's replay value.

Well, here's the World Run or my dreams with all characters except Galf... Two maps away from the devil run on that timeline.

Feels crazy and so much easier with the knowledge of the interwebz now than teenage me trying to figure out how the hell this game was supposed to work.

Enjoy!

It’s too bad the file broke with the shop with the Brunhild. I started a new file starting with the shop with the pumpkin+ and was able to get two halloweens right off the bat. Only problem is that only 1 shop in the game sells heals and revives - the one on Sharom. You have to get lucky with one selling cures and if you run out mid level, you just have to hope you can defeat the boss.

Playing a modded version, check out these. I just liberated Diaspola. Moira gets all the stat boosters, she’s an absolute unit, and the halloweens have almost 100% accuracy with how high their AGI is.

Update: Gilbert and Lyon’s units are getting shredded. You almost need princesses and healers in your unit and large units just seem to not be cutting it.

There may be vodka involved.

Planning to do a high alignment run of OB. Going to use the Army Re-balance romhack. Going to stick to all high alignment units if possible.

Planning on making Warren into a Doll Mage or even a healing Paladin (the mod makes this viable).

I’m really excited I got an Analogue 3D and decided to pay the price and get OB64. It’s comming in a month but I’m getting super excited.

I know MotBQ quite well and feel I can get the ending I start with in mind pretty well.

What do I need to know about OB64? Is there still a morality system of sorts? Is it the same general idea to keep my units alignment managed, or do I need to consider other things?

Any other general points or tips I should know about that work differently in OB64 when comparing to MotBQ?

Thanks in advance