A bit of background of my gaming experience with Aigis: I don’t really play this game that long as compared to some veterans, but I do experience most of the content, from all four event types up to later story missions and awakening content. This is written based on my mistakes at those times, some key decision makings that I have made and some opinions on build paths.
It is also sufficient to note that due to my situation I was never able to play this game with real money be it JP or EN, so the option of buying crystals is totally out of my reach, thus every point I make here is based from a completely free player’s perspective, so it may not work on players that invest on crystals in any case. Also, some of the guides might not suit your moral ethics in terms of exploiting loopholes of the game, so you can skip that as well; they provide advantage, but are not necessary measures.
Section 1: Starting the Game – Exploits and Tricks
First off, because you are a free player, you must acknowledge that rare units are just as it is worded: Rare. Your chances of getting Gold and above units are going to be hard, simply because of the low access to crystals at this stage of the game. Fortunately, it is also at this stage that rare units are not necessary to enjoy most of the content; Sure, you will not be able to get most of the R-rated CGs but if your point is to enjoy the strategy then this should not be a big issue as most of the content right now are possible to be cleared with free units.
To kickstart the game at an advantage here are a few exploits and tricks you can use. They are entirely of your preference, and you can choose not to follow any of them. In most cases I use one of the tricks, but the exploit part is mainly a plan; I have not tried them, and probably won’t need to use them but it is entirely up to you.
1. First Pick
First pick is a common practice in JP version; Players first pick a unit with the 5 crystals given from the start of the game in an attempt to secure strong rare kickstarting units or simply Black units in order to power level the first 100 levels by clearing story missions quicker. The rule of thumb is as follows:
- Any unit that is Black is a good pick(Note that not all Blacks are good kickstarting units)
- Any unit that is Platinum, but satisfy the HAT combination is a good kickstart pick(HAT stands for Healer-Archer-Tank, with Tank mostly associated with Princesses or Heavy Infantry)
- Anything below Platinum are not good, reroll.
Rerolling can mean 2 things; You abandon the account totally, create a new account and roll again, or you delete the current account and re-register. Given the tedious process most players will most likely not try this trick but selected few will, especially because of Real Money Trading(RMT) where there is incentive to get as many first pick accounts as possible and sell them, or simply just abuse the referral system to get another extra pick every 5 accounts created. Regardless, running first picks can tremendously help out a free player. I personally run 2 accounts on JP; My first account is not a first pick, while my second account was a first pick Nanaly. It only took me less than a fortnight to clear everything up to Immortal Beast with Nanaly alone while the timer is almost 4 weeks with a first pick Gold healer on my main. Also, there are free players who do this at their free time to collect rare unit CGs; Unorthodox, but it is also one way to collect everyone’s R scene without having to spend a single cent.
2. Referral System
I have not tried this before, nor I feel the need to because as far as I know this is not a JP feature, but I was told that you get 100 gold for every referral capped at 500 gold max. If this is true, it is a way to get extra crystals by creating multiple accounts referring yourself. A standard general exploit with referral systems that happen all over the internet. The thing with this exploit is it can be easily tracked and cause you trouble, and to be fair 5 crystals is tempting but not quite worth the effort. I would probably just say, use this at your own risk.
Once you are done with the above, or if you ever did any of the above, you want to move on to your daily side of things.
Section 2: The Long Term Plan – How to Spend the Crystals
To date I have played 2 different types of long term plans involving crystal expenses on JP:
Plan 1
You stock up huge tons of Crystals, then mass spend on vital events like collection/farm or Summons. Hongfire’s free player guide is similar to this plan, although the version that I played is slightly different in terms of Crystal ceiling.
Plan 2
You spend once a while on Dailies while netting surplus Crystals, mass spend on vital events and only resort to Summons when there is absolutely enough in extras. This is a frugal plan where you mostly rely on guaranteed sources like events and Trading Post to build a strong team, sacrificing diversity yet still maintain a strong core of units.
My experience and take on both plans? Go for the latter if you are a purely free player, while the former is probably more suitable to players who do buy Crystals but plan to control their spending budget. Especially in situations like EN where drop rates are exorbitantly low and Crystals extremely rare, the latter guarantees smooth growth of your team while the former is a lot riskier, though will work wonders if luck is on your side. Ultimately it is up to you to decide how will you approach the game, and what you prioritize on. There is no point of picking a plan to then regret it later and quit the game, it would be a shame if that is the case.
The biggest difference in both plans are the priorities of spending, of which necessary expenses like unit expansion are allocated, yet prioritization of the Trading Post and Summons are different. To sum it up:
Plan 1 – Expansion(Necessary), Farm/Collection Event(Necessary), Summon(High Priority), Dailies(Low Priority)
Plan 2 – Expansion(Necessary), Farm/Collection Event(High Priority), Summon(Low Priority), Dailies(Medium Priority)
Of course there are other avenues like Trial Protections and Second Barracks, both are included into Event and Expansion as a generalization.
Section 3: Going Forward – Plan 2
I feel that Hongfire’s guide is general enough to highlight how Plan 1 plays out, so I will be writing on Plan 2 which is the plan I am using on Nutaku’s account. This plan requires 3 things to execute properly:
1. Information
You need to be able to keep yourself updated to the latest development in JP, and use it to your advantage. Sure, some will argue that JP and EN are not rolling out the same content, but lets be real here: majority of the contents on Nutaku is exactly the same as DMM, where other differences are accounted to restrictions to underage unit nudity depictions, event order and the way certain units are rolled out. However, 2 important factors did not change at all: The win conditions and challenges for most, if not all of the current maps are similar to JP, and most of the important units are still available through the same channel. Therefore it makes no sense at all to totally disregard JP’s content and only base on what Nutaku is releasing, because in the end Nutaku is not a part of the developer team, and the restrictions are not from JP’s side so there is no incentive to create EN only content on this ground.
2. Patience
Patience is almost a must for this plan. I know the strong urge to try out your luck by clicking the Premium Summon button, but you must remember that for every click you make you essentially spend 1 month worth of Crystals on a lottery, and 50% chance you will roll something you can get from 2000G summons at a rather frequent rate. In fact, most of the time even the 37% chance on Gold units might not worth the 5 Crystals given the time it takes to collect them. Important to note that of all 3 urgent mission types farm events are probably the most common ones, yet are also one of the most costly given the drop rate. With all these in mind you will lose a lot of footing if you lose patience in executing this plan.
3. Sacrifice
Accept and acknowledge that you will have to sacrifice perfectionism for the greater good. Everybody wants to own every unit, their CG, CC, maxing their skills, hitting limit values for their unit costs, and for future patches, upgrade their Awakening and for some, Skill Awakening. However, like any other growth strategy games, these are the ways game publishers make money by providing those necessary resources to do so (which in this case are the Crystals), and if you are playing for free you won’t be able to afford to allocate your limited resources everywhere. Fortunately the developer of Aigis did consider this aspect and you will find that by allocating your resources properly you can still play this game at a macro level with ease, albeit not being able to get every Black/Platinum/Gold/Silver/Whatever unit available. Besides, it is important to know that optimizing resources to build a strong core team is always going to thriumph a “perfect team” that is not built properly. As event speeds up and more content gets released you will find it harder to consistently build your units without sacrificing events and whatnot. Time becomes an important asset as the game content expands if you plan to play free.
Section 4: The Core Units – First Pick Choices
To start off, if you do go for the First Pick trick, you want to build your team around that First Pick so it is vital that you get it right from the start. If you don’t, then just play it out with Silvers and Golds; they will still be integral to most of your Story Missions which is your main source of EXP and fodder unit grinding. To support this, while I do manage to pull a Black healer on first try without having to resort to the trick I don’t use Liana that much in my videos.
A couple of example units that I consider extremely worthy as a First Pick:
1. Nanaly
This girl is an absolute goddess for the most part. Firstly, she is an archer, one of the consistent Physical Damage dealer in the game. Secondly, she is a ranged unit, so you actually can expect her up time to be quite long. Thirdly, her skill is as broken as it is that unless we are talking in context of a super high defense unit like Armor or Golems Nanaly can just take almost everything down on her own on skill activation. Finally, her cost is cheap considering her contribution on maps. Building around her requires 3 Silver Archers, not so hard considering the number of Daniela and Soma you will be getting from the free mission, although it will almost certainly guarantee that you can’t CC both of the Silver archers if you CC Nanaly without additional Silvers.
2. Sybilla
Sybilla is actually not a good kickstarter due to her high cost, but once you have an adequate early rush team built she can do most of the tanking and damage for you due to her insane skill and base stats. Her potential will only get better as the game progresses and Awakening is unlocked. I won’t be able to review her as extensive since I don’t actually play her at all (no luck in getting her) but from general observations on VODs and friends’ reviews she is definitely a late game unit.
3. Liana
Considering that Iris is taken out of EN, Liana becomes extremely crucial as a replacement healer. Despite her growth stalling post Awakening she still boosts strong healing capabilities and will help out in many situations given the heavy reliance on sustain in this game, but mostly you just want to have a strong heal base since it can be game saving plenty of times as you play on.
Currently these are the 3 units on summons that I know will last through a lifetime on your team if you are a free player. They absolutely thrive in most if not all maps since they take on multi-roles; Sybilla in particular is just plain out overpowered. In any case you will cherish any Black units you get from a free player’s perspective; you just hit the 3% of the lottery right?
For Platinum units, they are still considered good draws, but any units within the HAT group like Bashira, Camilla, Victoria or Gellius will almost certainly make an early impact as kickstarter units compared to others.
Section 5: Early Game – Form Your Team
You want to get all the available free units as soon as possible. This will require you to clear story missions over the course of the collection phase, but your main free unit source early will be from lesson quests, so clear those as soon as possible to unlock most of the important units including Katie. Then complete the drill quests to unlock the remainder units, though I personally feel that Cloris is not that urgently needed.
Once you got hold of these units you want to prioritise levelling core units to a certain degree that they can pull you through most of the Story Missions. Depending on your first pick you will want to form a general formation like this:
1. 2 Soldiers
2. 2 Archers
3. 2 Witches
4. 2 Mages
5. 2 Healers
6. 2 Heavy Infantries
7. 1 Valkyrie
8. 1 Bandit
9. Any extra unit depending on map, could be archer/soldier/witch/rogue, you get the point
This will most certainly form the bulk of your team with the current available unit types. As a priority, you want to have at least 1 soldier, 2 archers, 2 healers, 1 heavy infantry, 1 witch and 1 mage leveled to 30 to clear the first half of the story missions without any problems.
Once you are done with the levels, prioritize the CC of HATs first. This is because the later part of the story missions rely a lot on early Physical damage clear with heavy Magic damage clear as the map progresses. In most scenarios you will find yourself deploying in the same order: Soldier/Archer first, followed by Witch/Infantry then Mages. Depending on priorities I usually find myself CCing 1 Archer first, then 2 Healers, Infantry to 50, 1 Witch. You will also want to get the affection of these units as high as possible, preferrably 49/50 before CC and strict 100% after CC, with the exception of male units due to the availability of alcohol drops. The other thing to address here is why not Soldier first, especially for their extra 5 UP? The reason behind this is you want to get yourself a set of base team that can make an impact in challenging events as soon as possible, given that events are always coming and you don’t really have all the time in the world to skip every event to train everybody up. Having a Heavy Infantry ready will provide you the necessary defenses to clear out these event maps accordingly, while soldiers don’t provide the same level of defenses for the 5UP tradeoff. This is not to say that CCing soldiers aren’t important; they are, but at present state having early defensive units set up and ready to go is of higher priority.
Using this core formation you can grind through level 100 to optimize your Prince early without issues. Remember that you want to use your free units as optimum as possible: CC > Cost Reduction, so don’t waste your extra silver units cost reducing another silver unit unless you really have like overflowed extras.
Section 6: What to Spend, What Not to Spend
Referring back to the spending priorities, you can categorize spending into permanent benefit, low risk and high risk spending, as well as non-spending stuff.
1. Permanent Benefits
These are spending that guarantee you almost 0 risks in your expenses. To date only Expansions fall under this category since you lose literally nothing to expand your unit limit but like any other situation, spend wisely. There is absolutely no reason to expand up to 200 unit limits when your effective unit space consumption is around 80. You literally spend 30 Crystals extra for something that you will only utilize long term which can give you better return when invested elsewhere early. Also, people argued that you consistently want to expand to store units like the recent Gadoras for the skill fodders. My problem with this is you need to consider the number of units that possess Attack Skill 3/4 that you, as a free player will get in the future. Storing fodders are fine, but if the fodders are going to clog your space for long term without you finding a good place to use them then you are putting yourself in a pretty counterproductive situation.
A rule of thumb when I expand is the total number of effective units I have +16. So if I have 80 effective units that I wanted to keep including fodders then I make sure I have 96 limit where I can utilize 16 spaces for farm units or 2000G summons.
2. Low Risk Spending
Low risk spending are spending that you know with certain level of confidence that the spending are giving you a high return of investment. This applies to a couple of scenarios, mainly collection/trial event spending (not farm events sorry) and dailies.
I wanted to touch on dailies first because it is probably the single most unorthodox or weird choice here that many have been told to be bad. It is bad if you are spending on affections and spirits, cause these are high risk spending given the number of drop choices you get and their usefulness overall. Monday dailies can be either way; if your 1 Crystal gives you 1 platinum EXP armor or say 17 gold armors then it is well worth it, anything lower will probably mean you lose out, but not by that much. However, Demon Crystals are considered practically spendable by majority of the free players I have known around, simply due to their scarce availability and their usefulness, especially when you are just a couple of crystals short before a Trading Post rotation happens. Here’s a simple math:
1 D.C. run at H difficulty costs you 8 stamina. If you do not stock prior you probably will end up with only 3 runs per day. The drop can vary up to 6 stacks of 3, giving you 0-18 crystals per run. On average you most likely will get 9-12, anything above you are struck with the luck potion, anything below you need to close your client and do some luck boosting rituals before trying again. Even with stamina stocking from the previous day you only gain extra 1-2 runs depending on your stamina refresh time and your levels. Assuming you run 4 runs you get an average of 48 crystals per week (usually lower), giving you a shy of 200 crystals per month.
Now one will say that it isn’t so bad. But think about this long term. Trading Post will start to rotate this month. We wouldn’t know how frequent it will rotate, but the fact that it will start rotating means that the units won’t be the same until it gets rotated back again with the exception of the Black Ninja Saki, and Platinum Swordsman Akane, as far as JP is concerned they have yet to rotate for something else. As of now we are looking at a 3-month rotation period which means that D.C. spending will be at a lower priority given that you most likely will be able to get 2-3 exchanges per rotation for the 200 crystal units (which by the way is probably of the best net worth) but if you plan on also developing Saki simultaneously there is literally no way you can effectively do both without spending). However, if this is going to be a single month rotation you either get 0-1 unit, which is a massive difference considering a stronger version of the TP unit during the next couple of months might be integral to you clearing certain events or not. Anyway at this juncture since the Post is not rotating I’d say spending isn’t still too big of an urgency for now.
My take on D.C spending is this: It is only wise to spend if you have insufficient crystals to secure a unit prior to a rotation change at the current stage. A few extra information will determine whether this spending has to be a weekly basis thing or not, including the number of rotated platinum units in the TP pool (if it is 4 you expect 3 exchange period for the same unit in one year), duration of the rotation, your stamina cap (at level 160/180 you get 16/17 cap, which is huge in terms of effective runs you can make), your team strength and the possibility of Friday Dailies swapping to D.C at some point. Note that 3 out of the 4 Platinum units at 200 D.C cost are absolutely worthwhile to exchange, while Saki is just Saki; you will find yourself needing a Ninja at some point of the game. The point is, you are guaranteed a good source of repeatable Platinum units to help you cost reduce and skill level, and 2 of these units mainly Chydis and Spica are members of the HAT group so their usability is almost always guaranteed, especially when they are the guaranteed source of best Healer and Archer a free player can get. Comparing spending 5 crystals on premiums banking on a 10% chance in getting Camilla or 3% chance on Nanaly the crystal investments on D.C will net you more in the long run.
But most importantly, DC is going to be the only source where you get Awakening Spirits at a reliable manner. Awakening is an extremely powerful content upgrade that is quite mandatory for the progression of your gameplay to challenge future content. A proper free player should always target Awakening at least one unit every month; my average Awakening unit per month is 1.5 up to when I have about 16 of them before slowing down to train these units further. With this level of training there is no way you can achieve those simply by free farming on Thursday dailies without spending, especially when you have to spend Charisma on Awakening Bead dailies as well.
That said, you almost always want to spend crystals on collection events. These are extremely rare events (especially we are most likely guaranteed to lose one because Iris was banned by the restriction, forcing DMM to put Liana into the summon pool to balance the healer pool) that gives great units for free players. Trial events are slightly common, and the only time you will spend here is when you need the protection if you find yourself in trouble, but in most scenarios you only take protection as the last option. The importance of these 2 events that warrant Crystal spending as being low risk is mainly on the fact that they are tier based challenges, guaranteeing certain degree of cost reduction and skill levels to the reward unit greatly saving your future costs on Rainbow and Time Spirits.
3. High Risk Spending
Farm Events are high risk because of its lottery nature. Given the low drop rates on some of these events you are spending crystals on potentially zero return of investment, or a bountiful. For a free player, you almost want to consider a few things before committing to a farm event: Is the unit worth the spending? How contributing the unit will be on my current formation? Will spending on the event offsets any other alternatives I have at the moment like dailies? The answers for these questions usually require you to check out JP guides, reviews and unit stats to make the informed decision. For example, Belinda is good because her drop rate is just going to be worse when the event is recreated, whereas it is generally agreed that Colin (an alchemist that will come in the future) is probably not going to be worth the spending.
Premium Summon requires you to spend 5 Crystals banking on the chance to get a random unit. This perhaps is the biggest difference between Plan 2 and Plan 1; Plan 1 is a guide built on Premium Summons as an alternative, while Plan 2 totally shy away from this ground. The reasoning behind this is that you look at Premium Summon and you ask yourself: How many of those units are really rewarding? And how high a rate I will be scoring one of them? How many tries do I have to make to be sure it is going to be worth it? How long will it take for me to get those crystals in order to effectively spam summons?
I highlighted this base on live tests from various friendly sources that I have with 100 straight summons that the published rate is actually quite accurate. If you are targeting a certain unit then you need to also consider the number of different units of similar rarity in that pool: If there are 7 Black units in there and you are targeting only 1 then it is a 1/7 rate on top of the 0.03 chance that you will get it. Therefore it is based on this ground that Premium Summon is probably the hardest place to give free players tangible returns more so if you are just unlucky with RNG. Besides, these units will also require Cost Reduction, skill levels and CC, then Awakening. More often than not you will find yourself taking a lot more time as a free player to develop summoned Platinum/Black without committing almost everything. Some fact I always tell myself after trying Plan 1: The luckiest friend I have met so far on a free account only secured 4 Blacks over the 1 1/2 years he’s been playing this game, excluding event ones. The unlucky ones literally started new or reset their accounts after a while, or simply quit.
The bottom line is, there is a pretty high risk with Plan 1, and if you don’t plan to back up the unlucky summon runs with Crystal purchases you might find yourself in deep trouble at later parts of the game, especially during the time when events are only 1 week old before new ones come in, on top of Great March and Revival Missions. Besides, there really isn’t a lot of Black units that really stand out compared to say a couple of Platinum event units, and for those that really do stand out it is probably a lot less risky to get them via First Pick than repeatedly going for a summon spree.
4. What Not to Spend
Protection is not something you want to spend unless you are absolutely sure that you can benefit a lot from it. With the recent revamp of the protection system this is more or less an event protection turned permanent, and applies to every conventional mission map. This is huge because as more content gets released, being able to clear a certain map would unlock potential benefits in the long run. For example, if spending +5 protection allows you to clear an entire storyline mission within the time frame as well as enabling you to unlock their sortie commissioning feature then this is well worth it in the long run. These examples will only become more common as stronger story missions are unlocked as well as important event quest chains. However protections are not permanent and only last for a few days, so spending on this repeatedly as a top up feature is absolutely not what you want to do as a free player.
EXP 1.2 is probably good when the Oasis and further expansion comes in and you get some really good EXP ratio per charisma spent, but considering that more event contents and copies will also follow by the time they arrive it is not worth the investment from a free player’s perspective given the consistency of grinding EXP is probably not going to happen. Besides, the scaling of EXP requirement post level 140 is pretty steep that 1.2 won’t really give you a lot of gains for 15 days. I’ve seen people lingering around the 160s spending Charisma on events instead of leveling; the diminishing return as character level gets higher is pretty significant in this game.
Gold 1.5 is pretty similar to EXP 1.2, besides you already have the Monday dailies and the general opinion is spending the same amount of crystals on Monday probably gives you more gold than you can get at this point of the game.
Section 7: Conclusion
I hope that with this guide I can help out fellow free players out there to understand a few concepts of playing a game free and what it really means. Certain sacrifices have to be made in exchange for smooth game play; it is just how games are run these days for free players. There is a difference between playing the game and collecting items of the game. Not all items are useful to play the game; similarly not all items need to be concentrated on one account in order to say it is collected. Free collectors abuse multiple accounts to collect avatars. It is one of the multiple reasons why Aigis JP has more than 1.3 million registered users yet only less than 15000 are considered active players. And knowing that you can play the game just as well as premium players is always a good feeling.
Also I must say that Plan 2 is totally an opinionated guide; I write this based on my experience with both free player guides, and so it might not be the same situation you face when you run through them. The idea is, your experience is the only thing that matters, so don’t let that go away from you and improvise as you see fit. Like I said in one of my videos, Aigis is a strategy game with R only serving as a secondary feature and with every strategy game, it is the strategies that really mean anything to the game in the long run.
iceinhell 