Ero Dungeons Strategy Basics

This document is intended as a “noob guide” of sorts, trying to help people who are struggling to get started in the game.

You don’t need to read this guide to play the game, and it may be more fun to just play the game and find things out for yourself. But if you’re lost and just can’t get started, this is an attempt to help you with the basics of early game.

It does not try to thoroughly explain all game mechanics, and isn’t meant as a late-game strategy guide. It’s just supposed to let you find your legs in the game, so you can explore the game and see which strategies work for you, hopefully without being confused and losing constantly.

Basic Strategy

This section is meant as a quick introduction to the basics of how to think about games like this. You can skip it if you already know, I just figure I should explain these things just in case.

Your Resources

Broadly speaking, most games are about resources in some way or another, spending one thing to gain another. Looking at which resources you have at your disposal in this game, some of which may not be as obviously resource-y:

  • Gold - this is the obvious resource for many things in the game. Not much use in combat though, except to buy consumables (more on that later)
  • Mana - the secondary upgrade/utility resource. Again, no use in combat.
  • Characters - your characters themselves are resources. You can get more from the stagecoach, you can “spend” them getting captured.
  • Stats - character stats are a resource you’ll slowly build up over time. You don’t really spend this, but it’s worth being aware of.
  • Levels - like stats, you want these to go up.
  • HP - your character HP is a resource: Finishing a dungeon on 10% HP gets just as much loot as finishing it on 90%. Running out of HP is bad, but it is another resource to spend.
  • Lust - lust is a bit more tricky than HP because it has less obvious effects, but it’s still a thing to care about, it can be quite significant
  • Durability - equipment durability is a bit sneaky because you don’t notice it much until it’s gone. More on that later.
  • Actions - beware the action economy. In combat, a 4-character party facing a 3-character party means that each round, one side gets 4 turns, the other side gets 3. This can add up fast. It also means that you want to be spending actions wisely: The squad that spends all their turns moving characters around does much less damage, but will still receive the same incoming damage.
  • Inventory items - consumables can help, but cost gold and inventory space.
  • Inventory space - you will run out, and have to make choices on which items are more valuable than others.

Combat Basics

At its most fundamental, combat is a damage-race where you want to beat them before they beat you. Of course, there’s plenty of strategy in the details:

Team Composition

Your classic roles that you want to cover in a good team are Tanking, Healing, Damage.

Tank

Tanking is the most notorious “obvious to people who already know this”, but to provide a brief explanation: Incoming damage is damage either way, but it’s easier to deal with on some characters than others: You’d rather have them hitting a 20hp warrior than an 8hp mage.

Most high-damage enemy abilities hit the front character in the team (right click enemies to see their moves and what they can target) so simply keeping your tank in front already does half their job.

So the tank is about taking hits so others in the party don’t need to. Tanks typically want high HP and high equipment durability, and having moves that taunt or add block tokens can also help, though tanks are usually still doing damage, too. Traditionally, the warrior is the classic tank class, though other classes can tank, some more easily than others.

Healer

Healing is about sustain: Allowing you to fight longer by stretching your side of the damage race. Beware that you likely can’t “outheal” all incoming damage, but still, having some healing available lets you pick up low-HP characters. A team with only healers likely won’t output enough damage to get far, but in balance, some healing is very useful.

A healer obviously needs abilities that heal. Single-target heals are most useful to heal a specific target, though group heals can sometimes be good to keep everyone topped up, with often more total heal output per move, but no way to direct it. The traditional healer is cleric, though other classes also gain some healing tricks at higher levels.

Damage

Damage is what you’d expect: Make their HP go down. Most abilities in the game are damage abilities, though they differ in damage amount, how they target enemies, and other effects and conditions. There are many other utility effects and statuses, but if you’re just starting, it may be worth focusing first on “vanilla” damage abilities, to build an intuition of how the turn economy works.

Some damage abilities hit multiple characters at once. You’ll need to do the math yourself, but these are often more damage per move overall than single-target abilities, so long as there’s enough enemies to hit. They can also be very useful at removing many defensive tokens at once.

Initially, mage and rogue are your classic “traditional” damage classes, bringing little utility other than “make them dead fast” on early levels, though this can change later.

Team Composition

Typically, you’ll want to make sure your team has at least one tank, at least one healer, and enough damage that fights don’t go on forever.

You can experiment with other compositions later, but if you’re struggling early, sticking to a “1 tank, 1 heal, 2 damage” composition might be easiest.

This means you’ll want to check the stagecoach often, and make sure you keep a balanced roster on reserve, so you always have a basic party available even if one of your main carries is unavailable for some reason.

Do note that you can recruit people at the stagecoach, and change team composition - trying to do the whole game with the 2 starting characters would be very difficult indeed.

Basic Tactics

So, you want to keep your tank in front, your healer keeping low-HP folks up, and the rest beating down enemies, usually trying to end the fight as fast as possible.

Note again the action economy: The more damage you do per action, the faster you’re done with the fight. And the fewer enemies there are, the less damage you take per round.

So typically, you’ll want to mostly take enemies out one by one, focusing down whoever you can hit that’s closest to dying - unless you have some important utility to do, or want the efficiency of multi-target stuff. Also consider the different enemies: Some are easier to kill than others, some are more dangerous than others. Some enemies are best left for last while you deal with their friends first. Personally, I like taking enemy sorcerers and alchemists out first, as they have fairly low HP, but like using multi-target abilities that eat through party HP rather quickly if left alone.

If you find your characters out of position, beware that using the move action is inefficient in terms of action economy: Enemies get another turn while you’re doing no damage or healing. Sometimes this is still necessary to get your characters into a position where they can be effective, but sometimes it’s best to just leave them in awkward positions, and use actions that do other stuff and move, like warrior and rogue has, to try and slowly move people back into place.

If there’s only one enemy left, it’s sometimes possible to deliberately stretch out combat to give your healer more turns to heal up the party, but this is a bit dangerous: You can’t heal durability damage, for example, often a bit of healing isn’t worth the extra risk.

If one of your characters gets captured in combat, beware the implications to action economy: You now have one less action per round, going from 4 characters to 3 characters means losing roughly 25% of your damage output. The game asks you if you want to retreat when this happens, and you’ll often just want to take it up on that - better to lose just one character than to lose four in a salty runback. Though sometimes, if you’re close to the end of the fight and/or the end of the dungeon, it might still be worth to risk it.

Sustain

Some notes on sustain: Obviously, if you start a fight on 20% HP, it’s going to be harder than if you go into it on 80% HP. The idea of “how high can you keep your resources while making progress” is often called sustain.

Early in the game, with just basic healing, you likely won’t have infinite sustain. You’ll heal a bit between rooms, but without items to improve that, it’s not going to save a character from near death.

Bringing consumables can make a big difference early on: Most of the healing consumables can be used out of combat for a 50% heal. I often bring a few stacks of a 100g consumable into dungeons for some extra sustain, though beware of spending too much: you’ll still want to run a profit doing the dungeon to begin with.

Difficulty

Note that dungeons vary in difficulty, indicated by color. Rescue missions will decrease in difficulty over time, though this will give the rescued character more time to get corrupted.

While you can of course do whatever you want, higher-difficulty dungeons are tuned for characters with higher level and more equipment.

If you’re having trouble in dungeons, you might want to stick to a squad of mostly the same level, taking on a dungeon with difficulty matching the majority of your squad - so sticking to novice dungeons, early on.

Progression

So how does the game get easier / how do you get to the more difficult stuff?

Part of this is simply you getting better at the game, and more able to navigate its mechanics. But there’s plenty of in-game power too:

The most important is probably adventurer levels. When you inspect your adventurers (right click) the left sidebar shows their “goals”, satisfy enough goals and they level up. This is typically doing something in a dungeon, but some of them are in town, or more esoteric things like “start 2 dungeons without underwear”.

Gaining adventurer levels gains a bit of stats, but most critically provides access to more advanced abilities, which often just straight do more damage than the basic level 1 abilities, though they’re often also a bit harder to set up and use properly.

There’s a big difference between novice and adept, so early on, you’ll probably want to focus on adventurer goals to level up your novices. Beware that adept characters won’t make progress to their goals while in a novice dungeon: You can still bring one along for support, but once you have a mostly adept party, it’s probably time to start doing adept dungeons, and so on.

Building upgrades will also make the game a bit easier, and these are probably the main place to spend gold and mana on early, as building unlocks are forever. In particular, you might want to look towards upgrading the stagecoach early, as that can give you better stats on new recruits, and eventually lets you skip novices entirely and recruit people directly at adept level.

You can also improve your characters with the training facility, and futz with their quirks at the mental ward, but beware that these are quite expensive: they’re mainly meant as a late-game option, once you no longer have buildings you want to upgrade. Early on, it might be better to spend upgrades on buildings.

Setbacks

This is not a game where things go to plan. If you’re used to playing RPGs where you quicksave a lot, and reload a save whenever you hit a spot of trouble, that’s not how this game works.

In this game, you’re supposed to take risks, sometimes they work sometimes they don’t, sometimes random weird things happen, and the game is about rolling with the punches and thinking on your feet, falling in the hole and then figuring out how to climb back out.

There are few if any irreversible things in the game: Captured characters can be rescued, curses can be resolved, jobs can be changed, quirks can be cured. That’s not to say that these things are trivial, however.

It’s for you to decide how you want to deal with this. If you want to be a coldly calculating leader who fires people on a whim, you can. If you want to carefully nurse everyone back to health, that’s fine too.

But note that a big amount of the content and fun in the game is about dealing with this, about not having the absolute minmax perfect team but one that’s good enough, about hitting an unfair roadblock and beating it anyway, or about making a heroic stand that’s ultimately still doomed to fail.

While you are supposed to care about stats and play with decent strategy, you have room for mistakes and bad luck, you don’t need to give up right away just because something didn’t go your way. (But retreating on getting someone captured might still be a good idea, most of the time)

Have fun

Ultimately, it’s a game, not a competition. Play it your way.

Make silly goals. Watch what happens. Make up elaborate backstories.

There’s no one right or wrong way to play things, so long as you’re having fun and being entertained, the game is working.