Useful Tips and Tricks for Lost Technology

Overview

This is mainly just a list of intermediate or advanced tips and tricks which took a while for me to discover. They’re divided into basic categories and I might add to the list as I continue to discover new tricks. If you’re looking for basic gameplay advice or tutorials, there are already good guides available.

Officers

Playing as a Main Faction Freelancer
• You can play a faction officer in freelancer mode by first clicking on a faction in the initial selection screen and then clicking on the portrait of the officer you want to play as on the left.

  

  Playing as a Mercenary Officer

  Some officers are capable of becoming mercenary officers. Mercenaries can recruit up to 19 squad members, gain money based on the merits they earn in battle, and can be hired to fight alongside a faction for 3 turns. In order to become a mercenary officer, you must first choose to leave your current faction with Roam. A prompt will appear asking to confirm leaving your faction. If your character can become a mercenary, a second prompt will appear. Hit cancel and your character is now a mercenary!

  
  Leader and Squad Skills
• You may notice your officers have leader skills, assist skills, or squad skills. Only the leader of a squad (the furthest to the left) will apply yellow bordered leader and squad skills to the rest of the squad. A skilled leader can improve the stats and resistances of the other seven members in their squad. A few officers can also pass attack skills to their squad if it is labelled as a leader skill. Lar’s ability to give his entire squad musket attacks or Skelar’s ability to give his squad bow attacks are examples of this.
  Assist Skills
• The really useful tip here, which took me a while to discover, is the difference between leader skills with yellow borders and assist skills with green borders. Most factions have at least one character who has assist skills which drastically increase the stats of the leader the assisting officer is assigned to. Let’s take a look at Mirka as an example. You have two choices with her, you could have her lead a group of elven sword guards and give them +10% to their stats, orrrrrr you could put her in Ephemeral’s squad and give Ephemeral +50% to her combat stats and +30% movement speed. This raises her stats from being an ok at everything fighter with a generally weak technique at high ranks into a murder machine who can take Chromium or Hissa head on and wipe out entire armies of level 30 opponents with a well aimed technique. I feel the choice is pretty easy on where Mirka is most effective. Unfortunately assist skils for the same stat do not stack. There are also active assist skills an assistant can give to their leader.
  Skill Targeting
• If you’ve ever been frustrated by your officer firing a technique off at a lone summoned wisp because it was slightly closer than the blob of infantry and mages coming at you, then this fun trick is for you. If you left click on ground, you’ll notice a red arrow appear. All of your units will now fire their ranged attacks either onto or in the direction of the spot the red arrow is located. Pause the game, left click the ground where you want your technique to fire, and enjoy immensely more accurate special techniques right where you want them. Double left clicking will remove the red arrow.
  Masters of Magic

• There exist in the world officers who devote themselves to one type of magic. Their mastery is so great they gain 2 techniques at level 30 and 40. They are incredibly powerful and able to affect entire battlefields in seconds if you can recruit them and level them. Their names are hidden behind the spoilers if you want to look for them yourself.
  Fire-Baldur
  Ice-Elsa
  Lightning-Dustin
  Poison-Line
  Earth-Elephant
  Stone-Tungs
  Metal-Titan
  Light-Cotton
  Sonic-Gianni
  Water-Saros
  Wind-Leandre
  Dark-Tuchulcha
  Wraith-Leraje
  Holy-Tycho
  Curse-Isidore

Units

• You can use your existing units to recruit more of themselves. This includes your higher level units which let you recruit units at level 10, 20, 30, and 40 immediately at the base recruit cost * level of recruited unit (x10 for level 10, etc) so long as you have at least one to do the recruiting with. Most officers will also be able to recruit higher ranked versions of their soldiers as their level increases, but only for their own squad.
  Training
• Having generic units stay in a zone without moving, recruiting or attacking will allow them to train. By default, training raises their level by 2, increased by any training leader skills an officer might have for their squad. They can train up to the average level of all officers in your faction shown as “Max Level” below your faction leader’s portrait.
  Right Clicking
• You can recruit an entire squad or fill an existing one with a single right click. This is much more efficient than using left click if you want to mass recruit units.
• You can also right click a window to close it instead of hunting down the little X in the corner.
  Debuffs

• At the bottom of your unit’s character sheet is its debuff hp. So long as these stay above 0, the character is not afflicted with the debuff. The unit will regenerate all of its debuff hp by 10 per second. You can guess how long a debuff will last by dividing the negative number by 10. Some abilities deal a % of their damage dealt as debuff damage and others will deal only debuff damage. Both types of debuff damage are affected by its corresponding anti and DEF or RES just like normal damage.

  From left to right, the debuffs are:

  • Poison: Deals damage over time.
  • Paralysis: Unable to move or take physical actions. Can still use magic.
  • Blind: Unit will attack in a random direction when trying to target an enemy.
  • Silence: Unable to use magic.
  • Fear: Unit will fall back and won’t attack.
  • Confusion: Unit will move in a random direction and attack whatever it moves into. Ranged units will attack nearest friend or foe while moving in a random direction.
  • Petrify: Unable to take any actions or move.
  • Death: Has a % chance to instantly kill a target on hit. The target’s death anti will reduce this chance but there is otherwise no defense.

  This gal is toast with 38 seconds of poison.

  In Battle Buffing
• The few buffing skills in the game such as a rune staff can buff a stat up to double its starting value. I say starting because if you have your stats increased by an assistant or a leader, you can further buff those stats in battle to double the boosted value. Your stats are also color coded to represent whether they are higher or lower than normal. Blue means your stats can’t go any lower. Green means they have been reduced. Yellow means they’re been increased, and red means they are as high as they can go.
  Experience

• Lost Technology lets units gain experience from almost any action taken as well as scoring killing blows. A healer supporting the dwarves in a siege will level incredibly quickly indeed, and even casting buffs or summoning will give exp.
  Summoning

• Summoned units default at 20% of the caster’s level. Some rare officers instead summon more powerful units, with what % of their level is given to summoned units shown alongside the max summon count. Regular summon spells are no longer usable after the summon limit reaches 0.
  Summoning blocks of ice, stones, and using special summoning techniques will also subtract from the summon count and will continue to function even after the summon limit reaches <0, so use your regular summon spells early and any other special summoning methods afterwards to maximize your summons.
  
  Healing

• There is a HP lost stat in the upper left of the character sheet during battle which shows how much healing a unit can receive from regular healing spells. When HP lost reaches 0, a unit can no longer be healed except by HP REGEN, HP absorb, skills which say they ignore hp lost, and special healing techniques.

  

Formations

• Line formation will make your soldiers stand in a long line, which is useful if you plan on switching to auto or want to make your frontline more of a wall to stop cavalry from flanking. Yes, there are a few officer AI’s who can be quite good at flanking. Glaring at you Diethard and Dirk. The big downside to auto is its tendency to lump your soldiers together into one big blob. Having your soldiers march to the enemy in a line and then hitting auto will cause them to scatter much more effectively and be more likely to avoid all of your frontline blobbing on the enemy melee units. For melee heavy armies like the lizardmen, I’ll even tell my army to move -through- an enemy army in line formation. Your ranged units will still move away from nearby enemies and your melee units which collide with an enemy will still stop to fight whatever they ran into, but your other units will keep moving forward, further improving the effectiveness of auto now that the enemy is flanked on both sides.
• Group Formation will tell all of your soldiers to lump as close as possible on the same spot. Extremely useful for sieges when you want to cram as many units as possible onto the often tiny walls or get your units to focus their attack on one part of a castle. Otherwise should be avoided to prevent taking excessive damage from techniques and magic and to prevent your ranged units being unable to fire due to ally obstruction.
• Square Formation is useful for armies which rely heavily on ranged damage. It brings your units into a square shape with frontliners towards the arrow and backliners away from the arrow, while putting enough space between units to allow them to fire without being obstructed. In small numbers, line is probably better for kiting, but for a large army, line will cause them to stretch across the entire battlefield and move unpredictably depending on what part of the line they are assigned to while you’re trying to get them away from the enemy. Square keeps them closer together, so they can keep raining focused firepower down on their opponents without getting scattered as easily and run down. Not advisable for use with auto as it will just make the blobbing even worse.

Story

Unreleased Stories and Unlockables
• Stories which have not been released lack all of the event checks besides the basic win or lose shared across all games. The final dungeon for Musket will not appear and game clear flags will not be switched. If you want to unlock hidden characters who would normally be unlocked by these in the japanese version, you have to modify the .dat files which is covered later.
  Sometimes Losing is Better

• Reinald has an alternate story if Agnes is trapped and defeated in the imperial capital while Diethard is roaming. The only fully translated story requires travelling to Fortress City Cecropia and being hired by Cunitz.

Dungeon Crawl

Why?
• Because seriously you should try it, it’s a rush at higher floors as you pull off strategies which are impossible in the rest of the game and make it seem boring by comparison. As you progress through the dungeon crawl, all kinds of wild stuff gets added to random mode. It also lets you see the hidden factions in the game as well as get nuked by them.
  Summoning and You

• Rank V summons or other summons which you can directly control are considered squad members by the game, meaning they inherit all leader bonuses and skills. Hopefully this tip combined with the summoned level tip helps you get farther into the dungeon.
  Anti

• Your anti stats are applied to the enemy’s attack before your DEF and RES stats, making anti an extremely powerful stat to boost. It can make a huge difference between getting hit for 3000 damage with no anti or getting hit for 10 damage with 80 anti. The formula for damage dealt is (random number between 0.8 and 1.2) * (attack damage) * (1 – (corresponding anti / 100)) – ((DEF or RES) * (random number between 0.8 and 1.2)). For example, if someone with 200 SKI fired a musket, their attack damage would be 200 SKI * 400% = 800 attack damage. If the musket hits something with 40 ranged anti and 200 DEF, the attack would first be reduced by 40% (480) and then reduced by 200 (280) without considering the random variations.

The Floating Castle

This one gets a whole section to itself. If you don’t approve of taking advantage of AI stupidity to overcome the Floating Castle or of editing files, then just skip this section and keep throwing the few flying units you can find in the game at your demonic adversary and I wish you good luck in your endeavors!

I’ve found one reliable trick to take the castle easily from observing AI behavior in Free Mode. AI factions have the bad habit of mindlessly moving their entire army towards whatever territory they have just conquered in the direction they wish to keep conquering. This is why you’ll often find abandoned territories ripe for the taking on a different front from where the AI has been fighting. You can abuse this against Crime to take their fancy floating castle without having to deal with the aggravation of actually fighting on the map. Simply conquer the rest of the island, then leave the mountains and demon capital unguarded so the AI will take the bait and claim them. This will either lead to the castle being completely emptied or reduced to a much smaller garrison which is much easier to handle. You can keep repeating this until the castle is empty. It may be tedious, but it will save a great deal of time from trying to take on the castle with the few flying units in the game, especially when defense units are turned on. You can also use this to trap demokrisha. Taking the floating castle is much easier if you can recruit the roaming demon officers and use their units. Even if you can’t recruit them, the neutral garrison will be weak and easily goaded into charging out of the castle by your summoned units so long as defense units are turned off. Otherwise you still have to get in there and destroy the capital building in the center.

You can also use file editing to easily and permanently do away with the floating castle’s tomfoolery.

1. First browse your local files with steam and go into ->lost technology->stage
2. Then change z14s7.map and z14s7_fr.map to z14s7.map.backup and z14s7_fr.map.backup
3. Now you can take any other stage you want to replace the floating castle, copy it, and rename the copy to replace z14s7.map and z14s7_fr.map, making sure to replace both or else it will not work in all game modes. You can find a list of stages in ->LostTechnology->script->official->detail->detail_spot.dat. I chose to replace the floating castle with another copy of bonneville, which is z14s3.map and z14s3_fr.map.
4. Now you’ve well and truly destroyed the floating castle forever, or at least until you rename your map.backup files back to just .map. This also allows the AI to successfully fight each other in the Castle, so it no longer prevents AI expansion.

Unlocking Hidden Characters with Modding

• Browse local files for Lost Technology in the steam library and go to LostTechnologyscriptofficialrundom.
• Now edit rnd_system.dat with any text editor. I’m using an open source software named notepad++ in these examples, though regular notepad can work too. You will want to delete everything to do with erase at the top of the file which looks like the red circled text in the picture below.
  
• Now scroll down to the bottom of the list of addv’s and look for the game clear checks and simply delete the if statement and the set of brackets around each group of addv’s.

  

• Scrolling further down, you’ll see some more complex checks. Simply delete the if statement, the first bracket following it, and the last bracket as shown below.

  

• Go back to the official folder and open unit.dat . Go to each of the characters you want to add to random mode and set enable_select@sc_random from off to on or erase the line to allow them to be selectable at the start of random mode.
  

• Browse local files for Lost Technology and go to LostTechnologyscriptofficial.
• Edit scenario_fr.dat for Free Mode and scenario.dat for Story Mode and add your desired characters to the list in roam, making sure to follow the existing format of separating names with a comma. This is all you need to do to select the hidden officers in free mode.
  
• For story mode, edit unit.dat and set enable_select@scl from off to on or erase the line to allow crime and other desired units to be selectable at the start of story mode.
  

Factions with Translated Stories (as of Oct 2020)

Because I’m sick of looking it up, I’m putting it here for easy reference to myself and whoever else finds it useful.

• Dragon Knights of Fevnir
• Reinald Empire Alternate story: Only Cunitz has a full story. Short intros for Musket and Castus
• Alfheim
• Apoitakara
• Kingdom of Gug
• Castus
• Lion Revised
• Cunitz
• Musket (on Discord)