Ch 1 Epilogue "Maybe she Ejec-FUUUUUU"

Things are pretty chaotic. The group's not even earned their wings yet and they're already a man down and the commanding officer is also in a critical condition. What's more due to circumstances communication and visuals with G.A.C was tempoarily cut off during the battle putting everyone under suspicion...

During the students' confinement to the Amatsu Palace grounds we're introduced to another character who admits she was witness to the battle as well and is willfully held under confinement as well.

Eventually the G.A.C come to a voted for desicion that Anderson be punished for letting the Verein Leader protype get destroyed and held responsible for the attack on Amatsu. The students involved with the battle would also be held accountable as an additional saftey precaution.

The Amatsu station had never been attacked until the G.A.C began it's tests on mecha. Anderson may have been targeted by this new enemy, one of the students could be a spy or saboteur or this could just be a message to the G.A.C to not produce weapons and remain demilitarized.
Anderson and the students are to be exiled along with the prototype units under the pretense that they search out this new enemy and defeat it if it continues to pose a threat. The potential for keeping Amatsu and her colonists safe proves to be too strong a tide to go against and the students find themselves unable to go against the desicion.

Fortunatley the G.A.C aren't utterly retarded and are willing to put together resources, supplies and equipment for the exiles. If you achieved the chapter's battle mastery you're given two additional lines of dialogue along with additional resources. They also provide the group with a hired ace mercenary who'll help get the unit well trained and whipped into shape, que mental images of some utter bad ass henched guy covered in tatoo-
Nevermind. With Anderson stablized and walking around with little more than potential brain damage, a bunch of school kids armed with weapons of mass destruction and the best mercenary money can buy thrown into the mix there's nothing else left to other than to prepare for exile.

On the day of exile the team find that they're going to leave in style and comfort aboard the Tessaract, the private luxury cruiser turned carrier of the Verein project leader. It looks like we're all set and we're prompted to give our group a name.
As expected life aboard the Tessaract is pretty swanky, it was a luxury cruiser although living conditions are ever so slightly cramped. A course is set for Earth where the TTF will hopefully be able to requisition equipment or assistance from the U.N. However one slight problem does crop up, funding.

Although well equipped for what is litterally just a militia unit thrown out of their homes the TTF do not have a stable form of income. Money is power and we're almost flat broke. Jean however provides an option, there are many organizations throughout the solar system looking to hire skilled individuals with their own equipment and the TTF fit the bill of becoming a Private Military Contractor. Money and a chance for the G.A.C to forge additional alliances? Hell yeah.

There's even an available contract already, the Earth Federation are looking for assistance in protecting 'Project V' whilst the Principality of Zeon are looking for a well armed group of individuals to help bolster their troops for an attack on Side 7.

Welcome to the first set of flags and we're going to have to choose sides. The Earth Federation are offering more money and have more infulence on Earth. Meanwhile the Principality of Zeon are in a much more powerful position, have greater mobile suit resources and have Char.

With a side chosen it's time to get our pilots trained and well armed for the conflict to come.

Rewards
For completing Chapter 1 we're given the following
-A wad of cash. This is ontop of what we've earned in battle.
-A collection of foodstuffs
-2 Assault M4s
-2 Cold Iron Lances
-1 Plastic Armor

Achieving the battle mastery for this chapter also earns us.
-1 Assault Rifle
-1 Compact Pistol
-1 Ceramic Armor
-1 Retail MOS

Critique
Nobody cares too much that Jacqueline died apart from Ray and John somewhat. That makes me a sad virus. Sad viruses tend to do bad things.

Ch 1 Combat "+6 Dire Flail of Sundering"

Onto the real meat. Chapter one follows with the tradition of introducing the original units you'll reguarly be deploying and concentrating on beyond your favourite serieses.

It's a simple field test and evaluation of the potential pilots to be and their capabilities with M.I.V.S, a new and unique way to control a mecha. Since it's not a real battle any friendly casualties are considered out of action and shut down and as such do not leave the field. As the test progresses the diffuculty with ramp up as well.

It's a simple controlled field test with absolutley no chance of our group of teenagers getting hurt, nothing can go wrong, right?

Deployment
Friendly Forces
- Verein Unit x 8
---Bruno
---Emma
---Ikarane
---John
---Keeruu
---Ray
---Yohko
- Verein Leader NPC
---Anderson

Enemy Forces
- E.Y.E x 4
--- AI

Win Condition
As you can see the Win Condition is pretty straight forwards, blow up everything. An easy enough job considering your 2-1 advantage through numbers.

Battle Mastery
The battle mastery conditions on face value are quite simple but may end up becoming somewhat complicated as things degrade into an all out skirmish extending all over the base and may further be dilluted by expecting a little too much from the original units.
The Verein Units are grunts, awesome grunts but they're still only armed with low end equipment and weaponry and of course they're being piloted by fresh faced young adults.
You have two key allies in achieving this Battle Mastery, the military base and the helper ability.

Large sections of the base provide any units standing in them a +30% bonus to defence and evasion as well as providing a passive +10% HP regeneration and +20% Energy regeneration. This includes the various buildings scattered around the base the massive 3x4 block that is the run way and hangers and strangley enough the outer walls of the base. Don't be afraid of sticking a badly damaged unit on these squares and keeping them out of the trouble. Infact abuse the poor base personnel reguarly.

Helper is a catch-all pilot skill that combines Support Attacks and Support Defence. All your pilots will have level 1 Helper. For every level of Helper that pilot can provide one support attack and one support defence per turn to any unit that they are adjacent to. Through support attacks you can drop the E.Y.Es much faster and support defence will let you mitigate damage throughout your entire party instead of watching some poor pilot get lanced by four or five eyebeams. So keep your units in pairs at least where you can at the very least to maximize damage output.

Engaging
When engaging the E.Y.Es keep in mind that your maximum range is 4 squares at best whilst theirs is a good 6 with no dead zones, so it's best to gain ground quickly. Infact your close combat equipment will prove to be much more effective than your light machineguns and much more profitable. Scoring critical hits with your close combat weapons on E.Y.Es gets you free money in the form of scrap metal which'll auto sell later on.
The single E.Y.E attack will hit units on defence+ squares for around 80-100 damage with crits hitting for 120 whilst your own attacks can vary between 70-100 (Or 50-70 in the case of Ray) against targets not on defence+ squares so plan accordingly.

Event 1
An additional E.Y.E will spawn in after your first turn and the A.Is will be allowed to open fire on you. All part of the test and easily kept under control as one of your units takes it down in one shot.
At the start of your next turn an additional four E.Y.Es will spawn only for another one to be promptly taken out by a support attack from Jackie and Keeruu.

Event 2
Four more E.Y.E.s will be dropped in on the base this time sitting on defence squares. Ray will attempt to show off his ineptitude wasting a few rounds which'll result in John opening fire on him for realativley little damage. The E.Y.Es will also adopt a weakness to slash weapons which means your close combat weapons will see bigger numbers.
Planting your units on the squares in which the E.Y.Es spawn will displace them essentially dropping them out in the cold as your units take their cosy spots planted on the offices of the G.A.C.
To deal with the E.Y.Es that manage to spawn on defence squares you can either brute force your way through their well defended positions or you can sacrifice a turn of damage dealing to hit them with Impact Launchers, a 1-2 range post movement weapon that knocks the target back a square.

Event 3
Three more E.Y.Es will spawn in at the end of your turn and their AI given a slight tweek making them much more menacing. If you've been slacking off with taking out the E.Y.Es things might start to get complicated especially if your team is spread out all over the place.
Anderson is given the green light to assist you mostly as a show of force...
Or to just show off his much better equipment. At the very least now Anderson will be running around killing a target every turn with a penchant for kill stealing. What a dick.

Event 4
After clearing out all the targets a final enemy unit will spawn, but for a change it's not an E.Y.E and it's not even supposed to be here. All hell breaks loose as Jackie (God damn it! She was the best one!) is obliterated. Sit back and rage as everything goes onto auto-pilot.

Time to update the killboard.

Ch 1 Prologue "Idlewild"

All stories need to start somewhere. Nothing like a bit of sobering Aeolia Schenberg to get you started or to remind you of the ultimate cutsey goal you are required to accomplish since of course you are the good guys...

As with all original intros you're hammered with a plethora of new names, new faces and to the detriment of some abbreviations. Some of these are explained, others are not perhaps either to keep the players in the dark or just a minor omission by the scripters.

Just as with a good majority of tactical RPGs plot exposition is presented through a background image setting a scene and disembodied heads chatting away and conversing with one another. Although not very animated there is however a good library of good quality character portraits to be found here (really good quality).



Although at times the script can be somewhat rough around the edges it still manages to communicate what it has to (delicious typos) and is unfortunately effected by good old Japanese text wrapping. Awesome.

Anyway I digress, onto a quick and gritty plot synopsis.

An alliance of tradesmen and economic power blocks known as the G.A.C work tirelessly to stimulate systemwide economic growth through free trade and diplomatic talks designed to open up borders between the many number of colonies in our solar system.

Their headquaters is the Amatsu Space Station, a combination of space colony and a major lynchpin in space bourne trading routes throughout the system.

Frightened by the prospect of one of the many other alliances or potentially a much more powerful nation deciding that the militaryless G.A.C or the undefended Amatsu Space Station might be a rich target to annex there's really only one option, to develop their own defence force to act as a preventative.

With so many rich traders, and buisnessmen willing to put in resources developing, maintaining and funding a mecha unit doesn't seem too far fectched. The only problem lies with the fact that without any millitary force to draft skilled soldiers or pilots from the G.A.C can only rely on an ambassador's well off son and a collection of teenagers trained on video games. Herp a friggin' derp.