Valkyria Chronicles

• Scouts are your best friend, they can cross huge sections of the battlefield but they are terribly weak at defense.

• Don't fully load up the battlefield with units from the get go. A good plan is to have a few scouts and some shocktroopers to start with and then capture a enemy camp so you can deploy your real force. If you do it the other way, you are going to be wasting CP on units that take forever to keep up.

• Also, don't assume that Orders are a waste of CP, they're actually extremely powerful.

• Try to get your soldiers to level 11 as soon as possible, since you get elite status. Level up your scouts first so they get rifle grenades, then do your shocktroopers and then your snipers.

• Abusing orders makes some sections of the game piss easy.

• Always take Rosie, Largo, and Alicia since they give you extra CP to use.

• Chapter 7 will test you, but its not that difficult. Make sure that you keep your units away from the upper right corner of the map (I think that's it)

• Always grab one more scout than you think you'll need. Don't need a scout? Grab one. Only need one to go grab a point? Grab a second.

• Yeah, don't run in front of tanks, they'll fuck you up good.

• There's not that much to know about VC that isn't common sense, each battle requires its own unique tactics.

• Make sure the enemy doesn't take your camps, which it will sometimes try to do.

• Stay behind cover whenever you can, no matter where the enemies shoot you from, they won't be able to get headshots on you.

• Snipers are not as powerful as they seem, and headshots will miss a lot for you.

• Don't take that goddamn druggie engineer, the guy with "Moody" as one of his potentials. That little shit will, at random times, decide to do dick all when you select him. I hate that guy.

• Know that if a unit gets shot at from their front, they have a chance to duck, which won't make them invincible, but will make it harder to hit.

• Likewise, shooting a unit from behind makes them unable to counterattack.

• One sniper is really good, Marina, but even then, you need to level them up a bit before they're reliable killing machines.

• Don't bother to level up engineers or snipers as much as Scouts and Shocktroopers, Scouts will be your main force in most missions once they get a few levels, with shocktroopers and lancers getting more and more situational use.

• Your soldiers become elite at level 11. Elite units get a nice boost to their stats, a larger movement range and (for scouts, shocktroopers, and less importantly lancers) a new weapon. It's definitely better to focus on getting elite scouts and shocktroopers over leveling up all your classes equally.

• Never attack an enemy crouching behind sandbags without destroying the sandbags first, unless you're using a flamethrower. Sandbags prevent all headshots, even if you're 5 inches away and on the same side. Always ruin their cover with a grenade, rocket or tank shell.

• Lancers, with their anti-explosive armor, can trigger landmines and take barely any damage. If anyone else steps on a landmine, they can avoid triggering it by ending their turn there, allowing an engineer to run up and disable it.

• Don't forget you can activate a unit multiple times a turn (the only penalty is a lowered movement range) and bank your command points from turn to turn.

• Grenades do not bounce or roll; they land pretty much exactly where the guideline shows they'll land.

• Shocktroopers, when elite, can take down tanks by hitting them in the radiator. I went through the game like 2 times before I found this out.

• You never really have to move your snipers (if you use them). The most you would have to do is retreat them at a base and deploy them at another base. EDIT: Also, you may want to hide your sniper at the end of their turn, because they die easily and will be targeted if seen by the enemy!

• Retreat/deploy can be used on the same unit in the same turn, which is a turn faster than having them return to the map after being killed and evacuated.

• You almost never need to move the Shamrock.

• The Edelweiss' best feature is the ISARA smoke, and that is critical to remember when trying for the A-ranks.

• When you travel back to headquarters, stop at the cemetery FIRST. This is because the old man has orders available to you by random chance...if you go to the training field and level up first, you will be out of EXP and who knows when the old man will be offering the same particular order.

• The main thing is to pay attention in the tutorials. It takes a little effort at first to understand the individual units and their functions, but once you build a rhythm for it it pays off. Especially watch the snipers and the engineers; a lot of the snipers die easily and the engineers are the most technical of the units.

• Also, don't hinge your entire strategy on having a tank on the field. There's a lot the tank can accomplish, but you can't plow through the battles with it. Basically, don't trick yourself into thinking the game's Disgaea and the tank is Laharl.