Other than in the original games of the Valkyria Chronicles franchise, you will not be able to control your characters actively in battles. In Valkyria Duel, all characters come in the form of cards. Collecting and training them, as well as choosing the right ones to fight in battle is the central part of this game, so getting used to handling these cards is rather helpful.
Obtaining Character Cards
To obtain character cards, you will have to spend either TPs or GPs. By selecting the Card-button in the upper left corner of the window in your base overview, you will find the Card Conversion Screen. Here you can choose which kind of points you want to spend for which kind of cards and how many of them.
|
100 TP |
1 card (any rarity) |
|
300 GP |
1 card (better chance of getting R and SR cards) |
|
3000 GP |
11 cards (better chance of getting R and SR cards) |
|
1 Special Card Point |
1 card (UC or R rarity) |
|
50 Special Card Points |
1 card (R or SR rarity) |
After selecting the way of obtaining the cards, a short animation will play and you will get a list (in case you chose to buy more than 1 card at once) of the cards you just got. Character cards that have not yet been in your collection will be marked with a new-tag, and by clicking on any of the names of the characters, you will see the card in detail. Note that you can access the character's profile by double-clicking on either their names or their cards.
Card Limit
You have a set limit of 60 cards in your possession at any time. Once you have reached this limit, you will not be able to obtain any more cards until you have either sold some of them or sacrificed them to let one of your other cards gain experience. It is not possible to obtain cards in any other way than visiting the Card Conversion Screen, so there should never be an instance in which you will have more cards than 60 and are thus forced to select some of them right then.
Squad Management
After the relatively easy process of obtaining cards, managing them is a bit more difficult, but still pretty easy to do. To gain access to the Squad Management Screen, follow the directions of Menu → Squad Management Screen. This is the overview over your soldiers who will be deployed in battle and how strong your army and characters therein are.
Card Points Limit
First of all, note that you have a limit of Card Points in your army: The sum of all your active cards must not be higher than this limit to be found on the right hand side of the screen under Cost. To raise this limit, either gain a Rank Up by participating in enough battles to qualify for a promotion, or increase the level of your base. Either way will allow you to have 10 more Card Points in your squad. The bonus is later diminished to 5 Card Points increase.
The Elements Of Your Squad
Every squad you will face as well as your own one has the same basic structure and possibilities. You can have a maximum of 13 characters in your army, as long as your Card Points Limit has not been violated yet.
Before you fill in all of the 13 slots, you should know that not all your selected soldiers will do the same things: There are different positions to be filled in.
The leader is the single most important role to be fulfilled in your squad, and whoever takes this position will also be displayed as your representative in the Opponent Select Screen. There is of course only one slot out of the 13 which is the leader, so choose yours carefully.
First of all, all of your leader's stat points will be counted towards your total strength. He will also be able to form combinations as well as activate his or her personal potential. What makes the leader really stand out however is the ability to give an order. Not all characters are able to do so: Only the ones with a Command Point icon (
) in the upper left corner of their cards are able to give Orders, and are thus predestined to be a leader. If you place a character with an order in any other place other than the leader spot, they will not make use of this ability, which also means that only one order can be given per side in a battle.
By scrolling down some more, you will find the final 8 character slots, which are separated from the above five one for a reason: They follow different rules. First of all, they are neither able to give orders, form combinations or use their potential. Worse, they do not contribute with all of their strength indicated on their card. Depending on which slot of these 8 you assign them to, their strength will differ. You may have noticed that these slots seem to have different descriptions if no cards are placed on them. The reason for this is that each slot only takes the amount of points of one of the 8 stats each character has and counts these towards to squad's total strength. Try to compare the Kanji on the empty slots with the ones of the stats shown in the character's profile to identify which slot uses which stat.
What this means is that characters which do not seem all that strong in the overall, but with a lot of points in one specific stat can still contribute a lot to the total strength of the army.Assembling Your Squad
With the knowledge of the different roles to be fulfilled in a squad, all that remains is to assign the positions and maximize the strength of your soldiers.
To place a card on a specific slot, click on the latter one to bring up all the cards in your possession with the amount of points they would contribute on the slot selected. You can choose different criteria by which to list the cards by selecting one of the options which appear after clicking on the button in the upper right corner.
Cards that are already placed on a slot are marked with the set-tag, characters that would exceed the Card Points Limit if chosen now are marked with a warning-tag.
If you feel up to the challenge, you can put together your squad from scratch and work on the best solution – or you can let the game give you hand in the form of an auto-fill in: By selecting the second button from the top in the upper right corner, you can tell the game to either:
- Put together the squad that contains the most valuable of your cards, which will typically have a high amount of points.
- Select any number of already set cards to be locked in place, and then proceed with the above method of filling in the rest as best as possible with valuable cards. This way, you can set characters to a specific location and let the game calculate the best solution from there on.
However, it is important to say that this auto-fill in feature does not necessarily give you the optimized squad that is possible with your current cards! Sometimes you can still achieve some improvements to the total strength by swapping in different cards and doing some experiments on your own. For example, the game's suggestion might not use all of the cards up to your Card Cost Limit, because it put a valuable card with high costs in your squad, which could be replaced with two or more different cards to not only use the Card Cost Limit more efficiently, but also providing more points accumulated.
When using the auto-fill feature, before accepting the proposition you will get a note telling you, what the total strength of the squad will be compared to what it was before the application. This gives you a good first indication of how useful the feature's result would be. Do not forget though, that strength is not all that matters! Sometimes a bit less strength can be made up for by Combinations or Potentials of your Officers or your Leader!
Training Your Characters
Preparations
As in the original games, characters do not gain immediate experience by participating in a battle. To train your troops, you have to have built a Promotion Examination Center first. More important, characters in Valkyria Duel are trained by sacrificing other cards. This means that you should also have a disposable amount of cards you do not intend to use any longer – indeed you will not be able to use them anymore after feeding them to a selected character.
Powering Up Your Cards
Select your Promotion Examination Center and then click on the second option on the left side: It will bring you to the Strengthening Screen.
Here, the basic methods are very similar to how you manage your squad in the Squad Management Screen: The character you want to train has to be placed on the single slot in the upper left corner. By clicking on the slot you bring up all of the cards in your possession. After choosing the beneficiary, you have to fill at least one and up to all 12 of the slots below: By clicking on them, you will see all of the cards you have at your disposal which are not part of your selected squad, so there is no danger of accidentally sending one of your squad members to the death. After you have selected all of the cards you want to sacrifice, the amount of money (DCT) that is required to execute the training is displayed on the right hand side: It is the lower one of the two DCT-values; the upper one represents your current total of funds. By clicking on the black button and accepting your choice, you will get a power up animation as well as the results of your training: The amount of experience gained in %, as well as bonuses and new potentials and the like.
Do note that sacrificing cards of the same class type or the same character will grant the trained card a bigger experience boost.
| Valkyria Chronicles Duel Gameplay | |
|---|---|
| Gameplay | Battles | Bosses | Buildings | Cards / List of Cards | Items | Missions | Ranks |
| Others | Card Rankings | Events | Menu Translation | Official Playguide | Terminology |