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Girls' Frontline [GFL]: Longitudinal Strain Story event is live
General_Armchair
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What is Girls' Frontline:
It's a turn-based strategy mobile game developed by MicaTeam
What's the story about?:
GFL takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where World War III and the accidental release of an alien substance known as "collapse fluid" into the upper atmosphere decimated the human population and transformed much of the globe into an inhospitable wasteland full of dangerous mutated creatures. In the years after the war, humanity made great strides in advancing the field of robotics so that humanity could remain safe in our green zones while our robotic servants could perform the hazardous job of cleaning up the collapse fluid contamination from the surrounding territory. These robots, which came to be known as "Dolls", were designed in our own image and eventually supplemented our workforce in other areas of civilian life. Defending humanity from the nightmare mutants is the military's problem though. We take on the role of a new Commander in the Private Military Company "Griffin and Kruger." While the military is outfitted with state of the art purpose built war machines, G&K takes a more budget friendly approach to outfitting their forces by creating what are known as Tactical Dolls or T-Dolls by purchasing civilian model Dolls and programming them to be proficient in the use of pre-war firearms.
Your job as a commander of G&K is to patrol the territory around human establishments to ensure that the green zones stay safe. Your primary opponent in the early stages of the story are the forces of Sangvis Ferri. Sangvis Ferri was a doll manufacturing company. However they've had a bit of a Skynet problem after the events of the mysterious "Butterfly Incident" resulted in the machines taking control of SF facilities and murdering all of the human employees. The SF threat falls withing G&K's jurisdiction and it is our job to keep it contained.
Much of the story to date in the english client focuses on G&K's conflict against the forces of Sangvis Ferri. Details concerning the state of the globe at large have mostly either come from supplemental material, are expounded upon in later story events from the Chinese or Korean servers, or were explored in the predecessor game "Bakery Girl" which takes place in the same setting.
What's the gameplay like?:
The gameplay reminds me a bit of the combat in advance wars. Before the battle begins, you take your units and arrange them in into squads. You then deploy those squads on the map and spend action points to move them around to capture terrain and fight enemy units. For the majority of fights you will just be sending your squads up against foes that they have an advantageous matchup against and then just sitback and enjoy the show. However you can take a more active role in the fight by moving the squad members around the combat zone mid-fight, ordering individual squad members to withdraw from the fight, or manually triggering special abilities at key moments. Such micromanagement is necessary against many bosses and harder opponents.
How greedy is the gacha?:
I'd describe GFL's gacha as being extremely F2P friendly. It has two gachas. A construction system for manufacturing T-Dolls and a "Resupply" gacha for acquirng cosmetics such as dormitory furniture and alternative costumes for your T-Dolls.
The construction gacha is where you get all of your combat units, and rolls on this gacha are made with standard resources. Essentially you make your gacha rolls with the game's equivalent of the "Stamina" resource present in other gacha games. I've been playing since the launch of the english server last year and have a 91% complete collection despite not having spent a cent on T-Doll manufacturing.
The cosmetic gacha is more akin to the usual premium currency gachas that you may be familiar with. You spend tokens to roll for costumes and furniture. However this gacha makes use of an exchange ticket and black card system as its "pity" mechanic. Every time that you roll on a cosmetic banner, you receive "exchange tickets." Accrue enough exchange tickets and you can directly purchase any cosmetic on the banner. If you receive a duplicate costume, then you receive a "black card." Accrue enough black cards and you can exchange them for a costume from any previous banner. A select handful of costumes aren't present in the black card exchange shop, but most of them are there.
Is the game P2W?:
You don't need any kind of paid power boost to compete in most of the content in the game. The vast majority of the content is single player and you can complete it even with suboptimal non-meta teams. The one area where P2W might come into play are the competitive ranking maps that are present in many of the major story events. One could boost the power of their units by spending money in the shop to increase their supply of skill data for upgrading your unit's skills. However from my personal experience such a boost will likely only be relevant to someone who is attempting to score within the top 100 players. The important prizes are generally acquired from scoring within the top 40% or 50% of players, which is well within the reach of completely F2P accounts.
You also don't need to be lucky in the Gacha to create competitive teams. Believe it or not, but many of the characters handed to you as story rewards are rated as S-class units on many tier lists and are mainstays of meta combat lineups. Also, some of the most powerful units are relatively common gacha drops.
Is it safe to play this game on an emulator?
Yes. The devs embrace play on emulators. However automating gameplay via macros is not approved.
Does it have good music?
Yes
https://girlsfrontline.kr/db/musicplayer/
Is there a list of PA players?
I'll make a google doc or something once we need more than one hand to count us. For the time being, player ID's are as follows:
General_Armchair(Armchair): 44424
MrGrimoirre(Pixflare): 680050
Hades: 4157
Ranlin(Alendra): 684498
Ranlin's wife(JavaCat): 676792
Axen 502804
Darkwolfe: 679947
Brody: 688002
Chrono Traveler (Zerthim): 685379
Ironsizide: 683062
Orphane: 8994
CrimsonJazz: 725340
Abotkin: 791901
MillOps: 815173
Dalantia: 841778
Grimthwacker: 857629
Stabbity: 935473
Kakodaimonos(Skorg): 967723
Elderlycrawfish: 937336
Dongs Galore 34079
An aside about censorship:
I don't want to open a can of worms with a full discussion about censorship, but I will say the following:
*The game uses censored art of the characters by default.
*The censored art is less lewd than the original. At worst I'd say that the most lewd original art is Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue levels of lewd.
*Several instances of religious symbols have been removed in the censored art. Notably the original art of some girls involves some crucifixes that were removed in the censored version.
*Several instances of national iconography were removed. Some badges depicting national flags were removed, and some of the girls that use firearms from Nazi Germany have had iron crosses and red armbands removed from their designs. If you're worried about swastikas though, that symbol was never used in the original art.
*If you wish to use the uncensored art, then it's as simple as performing a construction roll with a very specific recipe. I won't list it here but you can find it.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
General_Armchair on
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Posts
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I'll probably need to re-arrange these tips in a bit, but let's start with some basics.
First of all, here's some links to a few useful resources:
Analysis of the various different units in the game: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10LJdksnM3zipOb72IneJD7WVp3765JYJEGg0LnodzDI/edit#gid=2064854378
Assorted other guides : https://www.gflcorner.com/
Detailed breakdown on enemy units and how to best defeat them: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TjHC4Vaed8dFqSkagM6teNlmBjFGPiUbTRnTnvxnnu4/edit#gid=176989280
Logistics calculator: https://gfeasdf.github.io/gf/main.html
Leveling up and upgrading your dolls
There are three steps to upgrading your doll's baseline stats.
1: The first is leveling up the dolls in combat. What confuses some new players is that levels themselves do not boost your stats. Instead they boost your stat cap.
2: Once you leveled up and raised your cap, then you need to ENHANCE the doll. You can enhance the doll by consuming enhancment capsules or by trading in excess copies of low rarity dolls.
3: At certain milestones, you get the opporunity to "Dummy Link" or "link" a doll. Linking a doll gives it an additional body that's networked with the main body. This boosts both the HP and firepower of the combined unit as a whole. To link a doll, you either need duplicate copies of that specific doll or you need sufficient "dummy cores" which are a wildcard resource that can be consumed in place of duplicate dolls.
A warning about "core hell":
As a new player, you're going to initially get an infusion of resources such as dummy cores as you complete assorted achievements. Once that low hanging fruit dries up, your supply of cores will mostly come from discarding unneeded copies of higher rarity dolls. Said dolls are a bit hard to come by early on. Now the other problem is that as you level up and link up your dolls, the cost to link them increases with each link. 5* units are also cost more cores to link than lower rarity dolls. To use a 5* unit as an example, your first link will cost you 15 cores. The second also costs 15 cores. The third costs 30 cores. The fourth link costs 45 cores, for a grand total of 105 cores from start to finish. If you bite off more than you can chew, then it's possible to enter a state that has been termed "core hell" where you have no cores and need more cores to give your team the last power spike that it needs to be strong enough to reliably farm cores.
Some people recommend avoiding using 5* units until after you get your first team fully linked. I don't think that it's necessary to avoid 5* units, but you most certainly should focus almost all of your cores towards upgrading your main team until after you fully link it. You should try to use lower rarity dolls for your secondary teams so that you can link them via duplicates instead of your precious core supply.
Types of guns
There are 6 types of weapons in the game: Handguns, Submachineguns, Assault Rifles, Rifles, Machineguns, and shotguns
Handguns: Handguns are fulfill a supporting role in GFL. They provide tile buffs that are capable of buffing all types of dolls. Their contribute to their team by using those buffs to supercharge their teammates, and sometimes they fulfill the role of an evasion tank on the squad's frontline. Additionally, in night battles, they cut through the fog of war to provide vision to adjacent nodes. However as a new player, handguns won't be particularly useful. The potency of handgun buffs increases with each link, so as a new player their buffs are going to be week. Handguns also need exoskeleton equipment to reliably dodge tank, and they're not permitted to equip that until level 80.
Submachineguns: SMGs are one of the main defensive classes of weapons and fulfill the role of dodge tanks. Additionally they provide buff tiles that will buff your Assault Rifle units. Some SMGS provide offensive support via special abilities like fragmentation grenades or incendiary grenades that provide AOE damage that is adept at taking out swarms of weak enemies.
Assault rifles: Assault rifles are one of the main DPS classes in the game. They have all around balanced stats and tend to have abilities that either boost their own DPS or hit the battlefield with a grenade. They have moderately high movement speed, which makes them some of the best choices for dancing around the battlefield during boss fights to avoid powerful forecast attacks from the bosses.
Rifles: Rifles have a varied set of roles that they can fill, and they have buff tiles that boost handguns. Battlerifle style rifles such as SVD or M14 fulfill a DPS role similar to Assault rifles, however it's notable that the targeting algorithm for rifles prioritizes the enemy backline first. However rifles that are based on sniper rifles, anti-material, and anti-tank rifles have extremely low rates of fire that tend to be ill-suited for general combat but have a niche in boss hunting. These dedicated boss hunter teams are refereed to as "bamboo" teams and have as many buffs stacked onto the rifles as possible so that they can kill the boss with one big boosted attack. I've been told that the name "bamboo" is a translation of an onamonapia that sounds like the report of a loud rifle in some asian language, although I'm not sure which one. It is also worth noting that rifles can equip armor-piercing ammo for defeating the armored enemies that mostly appear in night battles.
Machineguns: Machineguns provide absolutely monstrous spike DPS at the start of a battle. However once their sustained damage is hurt by the requirement that they spend several seconds reloading their ammo boxes between their devastating volleys of fire. Machineguns have tile buffs that generally boost shotguns. It is generally advised that new players avoid using machineguns since they consume resources at an extremely high rate. Especially ammo. Like rifles, machineguns can equip AP ammo. MG's also have extremely low movement speeds that makes it hard for them to be micromanged on the battlefield.
Shotguns: Shotguns are the second dedicated tank class. Shotguns however are armor tanks. Armor directly reduces the potency of enemy firepower, but cannot reduce it lower than 1 point of damage. They provide tile buffs that boost machineguns. Like machineguns, shotguns are slow. It is also worth mentioning that shotguns can only be produced via heavy production, which means that acquiring them is extremely expensive. Even many veteran players generally pace themselves to one heavy production roll a week in order to partially subsidize the roll via the rewards from the weekly quest to perform a heavy production.
Basic Echelon Design:
Generally your teams are going to be based around pairing a tank class with the DPS class that they buff. The three most common general purpose teams are:
*AR/SMG teams that consist of one or two SMGs boosting three assault rifles. Sometimes one unit is substituted for a handgun to provide vision in night battles or because the handgun has a good skill.
*RF/HG teams that consist of a few rifles boosted by a few handguns. While handguns aren't really true tanks, they can fulfill the role in a pinch and often the rifles have enough damage output to kill most targets before the handguns are forced to take too much fire.
*MG/SG teams consisting of one or two shotguns boosting two to three machineguns. Sometimes a handgun or two is included to either further boost the damage buffs on the machineguns or provide vision at night.
Some niche teams are:
*5HG: handguns buffing handguns buffing handguns buffing handguns. This echelon is notable for being extremely resource efficient since handguns consume very few resources. This echelon might be dusted off in an attempt to conserve resources when an event requires to you run some maps that are relatively easy and that your main teams would be expensive overkill.
*Bamboo: A team consisting of bamboo rifles buffed by firepower boosting handguns for the sole purpose bypassing a boss's mechanics by OHKOing the boss with a supercharged shot. Such a team generally SUCKS at general combat and must be escorted to the boss.
Sometimes you might want to try and create a hybrid team to patch up the weaknesses of the pure teams. Here are some examples:
1: AR/SMG teams suffer against enemies teams that feature high accuracy snipers that are backed up by a large group of meatshields. Said snipers can defeat the evasion of the SMGs. However by embedding a rifle in your AR/SMG team, the rifle will ignore the meatshields in favor of targeting the snipers in the enemy backline. That will reduce the effective DPS coming towards your SMGS.
2: RF/HG teams sufferer against swarms of weak enemies such as Dinergate packs. By embedding a machinegun in your rifle team, the machinegun can mop up dinergate swarms really quick.
3: MG/SG teams have relatively poor accuracy and struggle to hit highly evasive units. Notably scouts on night maps. Embedding an assault rifle with a grenade skill can take care of that problem since ARs can equip night vision to boost their accuracy at night and the grenade damage algorithm is unaffected by accuracy.
Resources
There are four basic resources. Manpower, ammunition, rations, and parts. They regenerate passively over time up until you reach a soft cap that raises with your account level. However you can also gain resources by dedicating one of your teams to run a "logistics" mission. You can gain resources well above the soft cap. Your passive regen merely turns off once you hit the soft cap. Manpower is mostly used for deploying and repairing units, ammunition is consumed in combat, rations are consumed as your teams spend time on the battlefield and in combat, and parts are mostly used for repairs. You're going to want to get as many logistics missions running as soon as you can.
Crafting
When you craft a doll, you have to provide a recipe for the crafting. The recipe that you use determines what types of dolls that you can get. For example, by spending enough resources you can completely exclude all handguns from the potential drop pool. Most recipes overlap in some way, so you won't be able to perfectly target a specific type of weapon. Micateam provides a selection of recommended recipes that you can use to target specific classes of dolls. Some people speculate that specific "voodoo" recipes have better odds, but there isn't sufficient data to really prove anything. However you can at the crafting log to see recent 4* and 5* dolls that have been crafted by other players and just copy their recipe to try to mimic their luck. I forget the drop rate for 5* units, but it's a drop rate for 5* units in general. Not all 5* units have the same rarity. For example G36c is WAY rarer than Thompson despite them both being 5* SMGs. There are even some 4* units like G36 or Stetchkin that are rarer than most 5*s, and some 3* units like Makarov that are oddly uncommon. That rarity doesn't necessarily relate to potency. For example WA2000 is one of the strongest dolls in the game right now and she's one of the more common 5* rifles to craft. You are guaranteed a 5* roll sometime in your first few crafts. I don't think that it's worth your effort to try re-rolling your whole account to try and game that in your favor.
If you try to roll specific recipes to game the system, I'd recommend rolling for handguns, ARs, or MGs until you get your first 5*:
Handguns: Basically every single 5* handgun is valuable and has use in late game teams. Although as a new player, you may need to mothball the handgun for awhile.
ARs: All 5* AR's are going to be useful to you as a new player. Long term the grenadiers are more niche than the self buff ones, but even they'd be a big upgrade over the 2* and 3* units that you're likely to have as a newbie.
MGs: There are only four craftable 5* MGs. Of them, only one of them (MG4) is bad. Two of them, MG5 and PKP, are top tier meta MG's. The final 5* MG, Negev, is niche but is one of the best dolls to field against specific marathon boss fights such as Garm or Judge.
Trying to bank on a 5* rifle can backfire since there are a lot of bamboo rifles that will only be useful once you can build a specialized team around them. Rolling for an SMG could backfire both because Thompson is just so common of a 5* drop and the SMG pool is full of dolls that are kinda niche like Suomi, G36c, or SR-3MP
Starting goals
As a new player, your initial goals should be the following:
1: Rush through the campaign to unlock the Anti-Rain team and unlock better logistics missions. The anti-rain team are all very good dolls and every one of them are decent candidates as members of your first main team. Also, later story chapters unlock logistics missions that are generally better. Feel free to call in support from people on your friends list. Many people have super-charged OP echelons designated as their support echelons that you can call in as backup. There is no shame in leaning on those and watching them make a beeline towards the enemy HQ.
2: Spend gems to increase your echelon count so that you can run multiple logistics mission simultaneously. As a F2P player you'll want to go back to the story missions and S-rank as many of them as possible for the S-rank achievements that provide gems as a prize. If you're not F2P and opted to buy some gems, then a few new echelons is the first thing that you should buy. Eventually you'll want the full ten echelons, but six is a good initial stopping point since it gives you four to run logistics 24/7 and two that you can have use for combat.
3: Increase your battery generation rate. Batteries come from your dolls' dormitories. The algorithm is based on both how many dormitories that you own and how comfy that they are. Comfort is provided by furniture which is acquired from the cosmetic gachas. Batteries are used for a variety of tasks such as manufacturing combat reports (XP items that you have shove down the throat of a new unit to power level it) or upgrading facilities like the data room (this place makes the combat reports) or the fairy room.
Once you've gotten logistics running 24/7 and have gotten your dorms unlocked and moderately comfy, then at that point gems are almost entirely for chasing costumes that you think are cute or buying resource packages that you think look nice. You've kind of graduated from "new-player" status and will start working towards getting multiple balanced echelons setup so that you're prepared for events that demand that you deploy many combat worthy teams simultaneously.
Fairies
Eventually you'll get the option to make fairies. They're crazy UAVs with holographic avatars that think that they're literally fairies. The warehouse where we store them has a big stryofoam and paper mache fantasy castle where they hang out. They provide passive buffs to your teams and also have active abilities that can be utilized by expending fairy commands. You can increase your max supply of fairy commands and the regeneration rate by upgrading the fairy room.
Duping
You don't need to run duplicates of powerful dolls to complete any of the content in this game. At most, duplicates may prove useful during the competitive ranking maps that are included with major story events. On the other side of the coin, some events tend to provide significant stat boosts to specific dolls and it would be advantageous to make use of those boosted stats even if the doll would normally be weaker on a level playing field. In such a case, you may find yourself at a disadvantage by having a stable of duplicates of only the most powerful dolls compared to someone with a more varied roster who can make use of those stat boosts. If you do want to run duplicate dolls, the following is a rough guideline of dolls that are arguably beneficial to level duplicates of. The graphics were sourced from Girls' Frontline Corner, and I think that the suggestions are sound as of September 2019.
assorted equipment recipes
"Voodoo" recipes for crafting T-Dolls.
https://gf-db.github.io/gfdb/gfdb.html?type=
Auto-battle resource efficiency
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I also read that there was a datamine to determine what types of units that the characters are based on what types of equipment that they can equip and what special unique equipment that they'll receive for the event.
*Dana: A shotgun with equipment that grants +damage and +Armor/Evasion
*Dorothy: A handgun (HA!) with special hollow-point rounds (+DMG, -Armor pen)
*Sei: An SMG with a +Evasion boosting piece of equipment
*Stella: A rifle with a special camo cape (+crit damage, + rate of fire, -Movement speed)
*Alma: A machinegun with a special ammo box (+damage, +volley count)
*Anna is being added as a fairy, but I don't know what stats or skills that she has.
Jill however is a mystery. Apparently she has three unique equipment slots and a plethora of unique equipment choices where each piece of equipment equates to one of the ingredients in VA-11 HALL-A. I'm not sure how that's gonna work. Maybe some kind of drink mixing mechanic?
To my knowledge the way that Girls' Frontline handles collab event characters is that they're unlocked as event completion rewards. That's how things worked for the Blazblue/guilty gear collab at least. So if you want the characters, then you should be able to get them by simply leveling up a force strong enough to complete the event story. No luck in the gacha should be required. Extra costumes for the characters will likely be purchasable in the cash shop. (Edit: Drama has unfolded this morning about a Twitter announcement that this collab is breaking precedent and that alternative costumes will be in the gacha)
Below are the character portraits that were teased on twitter.
I only have two cropped pictures of the portrait for Anna's fairy
I've also updated the upcoming events post for the EN server. Notable changes are that a "voucher" or "Boss Hunt" event is starting next week. Also, it was announced that the EN server will experience the "Cube+" event in July. Cube+ is a re-run of the "Operation Cube" event from last fall, however an extra set of harder difficulty maps has been added alongside the story of the event being told from the perspective of different characters.
Also, since this thread doesn't seem to be picking up much interest, I don't think that I'll bump the thread anymore if it stays this dead. I just wanted to share the character portraits.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I started playing GFL and really appreciate the information here, it's allowing me to run things pretty smoothly.
My IGN is Pixflare, if anyone plays and wants more friends.
Just an FYI, you can't search for friends by name. You need their user ID#. My ID is 44424 (off by twenty!!!). Send me an invite. My friendslist was full, but I kicked an inactive player off to free up a slot. There are only two things really expected out of friends. The first is to hand out likes to people's dorms during point events that require people to receive likes. The second is to eventually get 10 dorms to increase the amount of batteries that people receive when you visit. That said, no one can tell if you skimp on handing out likes and new players have higher priorities than beelining to 10 dorms and reasonable people realize that it takes time before a F2P player can flesh out their dorm count. Some people get salty though if they see that you have both a low dorm count and a wall that's plastered in tons of posters from costume gachas.
I need to update my friend support echelon eventually, especially the night battle team, but it should be strong enough to brute force through most of the story battles except maybe some of the boss fights against Dreamer since MG teams are kind of suboptimal in that fight.
We're nearing the end of the voucher event. Make sure to kill the bosses from chapters 1 through 6 each day to get currency to exchange for prizes. At the very least try to unlock TAC-50. At present it's the only way to get her. She'll likely be added as a drop reward in a future event, but the drop rate will be tiresome so try to pick her up now while you can still buy her. The equipment pieces are probably priority #2 followed by either the furniture or tokens.
We're also in the middle of "Dataweek." All of the combat sims are available for use at the moment, wheras normally they open up during scheduled days of the week. Data mode is the most valuable, so try to stock up on as much intermediate or advanced data as you can.
An XP boost event also just started today and until july 1, so now's a good time to level up some units. As for future events, we're expecting Cube+ in July. That means that you'll want to have some night teams ready. You'll also need multiple teams ready for at least some level of combat since you can't call in help from friend support echelons on event maps. Barebones requirements will be a handgun in every squad that you field to produce vision in the fog of war, and you'll want to have nightvision equipped AR's for dealing with unarmored enemies and either Rifles or MGs with AP ammo to knock out armored enemies. If you're producing fairies already, then you might want to consider leveling up the skill of an illumination fairy. However that's a lower priority than getting a pair of paradrop fairies online.
Corpse dragging 0-2 is the gold standard for people that are power-leveling since it has the best return on XP per resource expended. However it is time consuming. If you're a newer player who can't quite farm 0-2 yet, then there are some earlier farming maps that are alright. IIRC 4-3E, 5-4, and 5-2E are popular.
I haven't had much time for grinding, so I've been running 6-4E recently. It's way worse off on XP per resource expended relative to 0-2, but it blows 0-2 out of the water in XP per run because you get bonus XP for bossfights and 6-4E has five boss mobs on it that my team can easily knock down.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer. There might be someone out there in TV land who's wondering the same thing. Otherwise you can always send me a PM if you think it's not something worth bumping the thread for.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Been trying to have a mix of Dolls available, though after reading a bit, I've dropped MGs. Don't have heavy production yet, so I can't make MG/SG squads. Atm I'm stuck on two AR/SMG squads, one with an M14 in it. When I get another decent Rifle, I'll make a HG/RF squad.
I did accidentally core hell myself a bit, but it'll sort itself out. And I sent you a friend request.
I went into it a bit above, but priority 1 is improving your resource income via upgrading your logistics missions. There's two parts to that. The first is unlocking better logistics missions by completing more chapters of the story. The second is to increase your echelon count so that you can have four simultaneous logistics teams running at once. Once you have the resources rolling in, then you can do more crafting which should help you get out of core hell. Here's a link to a resource income calculator so that you can try to pick out the best missions to run to maximize your income. Be sure to be honest with your estimate frequency for checking in to complete the missions. The 15-30 minute runs may have some of the best resource per hour, but that doesn't help if you only log in every six hours: https://gfeasdf.github.io/gf/main.html
Once you have ~6 echelons (two for combat, four for 24/7 logistics), then it's kind of a judgement call about whether you keep upgrading to 10 echelons or if you start expanding your dorm count to catch up to your echelon count.
How far have you gotten through the story? Since we have a voucher event ongoing, it's key to try to get at least through chapter 6 ASAP so that you can maximize your rewards. The event is almost over, but you can probably still got some nice goodies. You can call upon a friend's support echelon once per day, and mine should be able to defeat every boss up to chapter 6 easy. Although it might struggle against chapters 7 or 8 since again my support team is an MG/SG team and they struggle a bit against Dreamer. If you get stonewalled there, PM and I'll try to get my team reconfigured for a few days into something that can mop the floor with Dreamer. You may want to visit random people's dorms and spam out friend requests to get some other strong echelons to call upon, or look to see if you can find a group on reddit or something.
You also might need to hold off on a proper HG/RF squad for a bit. Such teams assume that your handguns can fill in for the role of evasion tank, which they can't really do until they are equipped with exoskeletons to boost their evasion. That doesn't unlock until the HG reaches level 80. Until then you'll either need to make due with an SMG in your main tank position, or stick to embedding the occasional rifle in an AR/SMG team. You have M14 which is great since she's super good. Keep an eye out for SVD, WA2000, or Lee Enfield since they're really good general purpose rifles. Springfield is pretty good for general use once you loot a copy of her match grade ammo which boosts her fire rate. SV-98 and G43 are pretty decent early game rifles if fate hasn't been on your side for crafting the stronger ones. It's mostly the slow shooting "bamboo" rifles that are really niche and are unsuited for general combat.
All of that said, most of the guns within a specific class are good enough to use even if they're not optimal. If you think that a doll is cute then I wholeheartedly recommend following your heart to use her in one of your teams. She's probably more than good enough to compete. One of my most heavily invested dolls is the 2* machine gun FG42, and she's more than pulled her weight in the competitive ranking events so far.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I did get Springfield, so I'll be pursuing her special equipment when I can.
And yeah, I do consider a RF squad a long-term thing, which is fine as it will take me a while to get enough gems to upgrade. At the moment I'll be running the squads I have to max level, and not shake things up too much.
I just want to make sure that your math is right and that you have the correct end date. The voucher event ends on the 28th. That's the last day that you can accrue more currency. The shop stays open for an additional week after that so that people have additional time to spend their currency. I just want to make sure that you're aware of the two different dates since the discrepancy has bitten people in the ass before.
You can call in friend support echelons 20 times a day, but you can only call upon a specific friend once per day. There's also a Griffin echelon that you can call on but some of them are kinda bad and I can't vouch for their competency. By leaning on those support echelons you should be able to defeat everything through chapter 6 in a day or so.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I'm throwing out friend requests left, right and center, so should have enough support echelons available to be fine.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I haven't had particularly great luck with early Dolls though. I must not be doing something right, though, because all the guides I've looked at suggest blazing through the story while also only leveling one echelon but pretty quickly I'm spending a lot of time waiting on repairs for my main team.
Are you better off just grinding xp every now and then to unlock the next big power bump or something? I mean, I'm not quite done with chapter 2 still. Maybe I need to try to avoid fights and just capture the command post more.
*Guides recommend rushing the story because doing so unlocks more lucrative logistics missions. Logistics missions are your primary source of resources, so beelining to unlocking better ones is the best way to upgrade your resource income. What some guides neglect to mention is that they assume that new players will lean heavily on calling in over-leveled friend support echelons to steamroll through the story. If you want to progress through the story on your own merits, then that's fine. The guides however assume that you're trying to get up to speed as fast as possible and that requires getting those logistics missions online ASAP. You will be revisiting the missions with your dolls alone anyway for S-rank completions since doing so rewards you with a reward of gems. Summoning friend support echelons can potentially disqualify you from S-rank completions since you are required to achieve a specific kill count for S-rank victories, and the kills made by the support echelons don't count. It's possible that the support echelon can kill too many targets and make it impossible for you to achieve S-rank.
*You can have four logistics missions running simultaneously, so this is also why guides recommend spending your first gems towards unlocking additional echelons.
*Guides recommend focusing on one echelon, and perhaps even avoiding using higher rarity dolls, because of the risk of falling into a state that's commonly called "core hell." As a new player you're receiving a quick influx of cores from various achievements, but long term your primary sources of cores are from crafting duplicate Dolls or rescuing Dolls from battlefield drops. As you level up Dolls, you will occasionally be allowed to "link" them by consuming either duplicate Dolls or a set number of cores. Linking is a huge power spike for Dolls, but the link cost goes up as you level up higher and higher. If you spread yourself too thin by linking many different echelons, then the higher difficulty levels with better drop rates of 3* Dolls may be too difficult for any one of your echelons. It will then be a real drag bringing any echelon up to par as cores slowly trickle in. That's why people recommend heavily upgrading one echelon so that you will have one workhorse team that's capable of farming cores to upgrade the rest of your forces. Again, remember that you can avoid spending cores by spending duplicates to link a Doll. Even common 2* and 3* dolls, when linked, are strong enough to run missions with better drop rates.
*Make sure that you remember to enhance your Dolls. Leveling up merely increases their skill cap. You need to enhance dolls by "feeding" them excess dolls or enhancement capsules.
*You're on the right track with thinking about capturing the command posts. Chapter 2, notably the boss fight in chapter 2-6, is arguably the first time that the game tries to get you to think outside the box for solving a mission. That boss is usually too strong for the average player's echelon to readily defeat if they just made a beeline through the campaign with their own units. That's mostly because you're probably still lacking a decent supply of assault rifles and are relying on a force mostly comprised of SMGs and handguns. Your dolls also might not have any links yet. But defeating the boss isn't a victory condition. You merely need to capture the command post, which you can do without defeating the boss by encircling it. In later missions and some events, you will encounter enemies that are not intended to be fought head-on. One example are the Jupiter cannons. They're horrifically powerful static weapons emplacements, but you can weaken them and disable their main guns by encircling them. Once weakened, they're pushovers. That said, most of these extremely hazardous enemies can be taken on by specific teams that are purpose built for the job. In the case of the Jupiter cannons, normally one of the shield SMGs like Thompson, MP5, and G36c make use of their invulnerability shield to weather the horrendous firepower and buy time for their teammates to defeat the threat.
*As for repairs, I recommend making liberal use of quick repair tickets. Ultimately you're going to start collecting these faster than you can spend them. Many veteran players have hundreds or even thousands of the things piled up, to the point where repair timers are almost a forgotten legacy mechanic. Occasionally major events might eat through big chunks of your quick repair ticket supply, for the most part the things just keep piling up.
*Don't be afraid to perform battlefield repairs if you need to. You can repair any doll in your echelon when you're at a friendly airfield. Doing so costs a quick repair ticket and has a doubled resource cost. It also disqualifies you from S-rank completions, but sometimes you're less concerned about S-rank and just need the win.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
...if you equip an item, can you later remove it and use it on someone else? or does it bind to them
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
That's with 3 echelons running chapter 4 and 5 logistics.
For those of you that logged in today, you should have seen that the dates and rewards for Cube+ have been announced.
The event takes place from July 2nd to July 29th. The above image illustrates the rewards that you will receive for completing each mission in the event. Chapter 2 will likely be geared towards more veteran players, but hopefully you all can complete chapter 1 since it has the juiciest rewards. I expect chapter 1 to be the same as Operation Cube last fall, and I know some players joined mid-event and managed clears.
E1-1 rewards a 16Lab night vision optic, which will be a boon to you since the entirety of Operation Cube takes place at night and you'll want every single one of your ARs to be equipped with the best night vision that you have.
E1-2 rewards the 4* handgun SPP-1. She's kind of a niche doll, but her skill lowers enemy evasion. That's notably useful if you really need for your MG's to fight high evasion enemies at night for some reason.
E1-3 rewards 16Lab armor piercing ammo. Night missions have armored enemies, so having good AP ammo really helps for taking down the heavily armored targets like Manticores.
E1-4 rewards the 5* Assault Rifle OTs-14 aka Groza aka the "Night Queen." She is an exceptionally good Doll that should be considered the grand prize that you aspire to unlock. She has good buff tiles and respectable performance during the day. However, once the sun sets, her skill changes from providing a 70% increase in damage to a devastating 200% increase in damage. That's enough to secure her the position of being the most powerful nighttime AR that's available in the game*.
The above rewards from chapter 1 are not available to veteran players who already received them during the original Operation Cube.
E2-1 rewards 200 calibration tickets
E2-2 rewards a trophy that is a piece of 5* furniture
E2-3 rewards 200 tokens
E2-4 rewards a badge for your ID card and a 5* wall decoration for your dorm.
The furniture is a bit more valuable that it looks at first glance. Most of the furniture handed out by these story events are part of the "Elite Emblem" furniture set. That means that it's possible to rack up set bonuses by showcasing them in your dorms. For example, one of my dorms currently has 21,000 comfort. 10,000 as the baseline comfort from filling it full of furniture, plus 8000 from the set bonus from including twelve pieces of elite emblem furniture set, a 3000 from a trio of pets. Normally getting 8000 bonus comfort would require whaling on a furniture gacha to unlock the majority of the set, but participation in enough events will eventually let you elevate several of your dorms to such lofty levels of comfort.
But that's not all of the prizes. Several rare drops will be present in the drop tables of various enemies on the maps. The exact drop rates aren't known, but many estimate that these drop at a rate of ~1% from the appropriate mobs. These dolls are not part of the construction pool, and have all either been rewards from various events or login prizes in the past.
Z62: 3* offtank SMG with an incendiary grenade. Outshone by the 5* SMG vector, but is arguably more powerful than the much more common Skorpion.
6P62: 3* AR that's notable for being the only AR in the game that can equip armor piercing ammo. Her statline leaves a lot to be desired, which holds her back a lot.
Gr G28: I swear that this is Akko but with green hair. Her statline is extremely similar to M14, who is amazing, so that makes her an amazing partner for use alongside M14 in a rifle/handgun team.
PSG-1: She's a 4* "small bamboo" rifle who arguably outperforms Springfield and Mosin Nagant. That said, both Springfield and Mosin Nagant pull ahead again once they get their exclusive equipment.
ARX-160: She's a decent 3* grenadier AR, but she's outclassed by M4 SOPMOD and FAL who are both readily available to many players.
ASh-12.7: A 3* self buff AR. She's held back by a low rate of fire and buff tiles that make her a hard sell compared to other ARs. In her defense, the competition is pretty steep since there are some really good ARs.
Five-SeveN: Here we go. She's a 5* handgun with one of the better sets of buffs in the game. Her tiles are well positioned and grant buffs to both fire rate and critical rate. Her skill further boosts both fire rate and critical rate. She's ideal for being paired alongside many rifles. I can guarantee you that many players will be trying to farm many duplicate copies of her.
The missions E2-1 and E2-2 will also have chances to drop the unique equipment for Springfield, BAR , STAR 15, MP5, and Mosin Nagant.
*technically Groza has been slightly surpassed by AS VAL MOD3 on the Chinese and Korean clients. However MOD3 upgrades are not yet a mechanic on the English client, we don't know when the English client will get her MOD 3, and MOD 3 upgrades are pretty huge resource sinks.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Though I consciously exclude cross-over stuff from that, to keep myself at least a little sane.
Cross-over events are a different beast since they're mixing IP's and have their own licensing restrictions. At present the English client only has two dolls who fall into that category, and they were rewards from the Guilty Gear/Blazblue event last fall. The first is Noel Vermilion, who is a niche handgun who most players view as nothing more than a dorm trophy. The second is Elphelt Valentine, who is actually a top-tier shotgun. She is surpassed by some shotguns in the crafting pool though. That said, it's not 100% certain that the collab won't get a re-run. Honestly the English playerbase was surprised that they renewed the contract to run the event for the English client. When they did that, they re-ran the event for all of the other clients as well. There has been some talk that a Russian client might be created. If that happens and if they renew the collab for the Russians, then english players might have another shot at getting those dolls.
Speaking of cross-over events, we were SUPPOSED to be getting a Valkyria Chronicles event, which would have been amazing, but that fell apart at basically the last moment. I don't know the full story, but it sounded like SEGA were the silliest of geese and had some downright slimey clauses in the contract that would have allowed them to utilize the Girls Frontline IP however they wanted in perpetuity in exchange for paying one initial penalty fee.
One thing that may or may not offend your collection habit are the ranking event equipment and fairies. Some of the events have competitive ranking maps where the players compete to score the highest scores. There are tiered prizes based upon how high that you place. For example, the recent Deep Dive event provided a special night scope for 9A-91 to every player who scored in the top 40% of players. I feel a twinge of sympathy for those who didn't make the cutoff, but by most accounts such a tier is reachable by those do their homework and have appropriate teams built up. I read reports that some players who started a month prior to Deep Dive ranked within the top 40%. The top 50% received between one and three Golden fairies depending on how high they rank. That fairy has some pretty decent passive buffs, but its active skill is purely aesthetic and all that it does is waste valuable command points to fling money around everywhere while making your dolls shine with golden light. The top 10% received a golden fairy with an exclusive "golden" talent, which again does nothing but add on more golden special effects.
That said, if you miss out then it's not gone forever and ever. The older clients have re-run their ranking maps from time to time to give people a new chance to compete for the prizes. Presumably the Enligh client will do the same as it ages. IIRC I also want to say that some of the most recent events on the Chinese server tied their ranking equipment to specific score thresholds instead of ranking position, but I don't speak or read Chinese so I'm just trusting secondhand scuttlebutt on the internet. IIRC Singularity's ranking map will be fought over a critscope for Kar98k, which still isn't enough to fix Kar's problem of falling into an awkward niche where she's too slow for general combat, her skill is unsuited for killing bosses, and she's outshone for killing elite mobs. That's not gonna stop me from pulling out all of the stops to try and get it though.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Oh, and I'm mostly digging my way out of core hell through crafting handguns. I've got a few of the good ones, which I'm leveling on the sly, without putting further resources into them. And since they're fast to craft, I get enough trash to feed into enhance and retire for cores.
Some other points that we knew about in advance:
*Most of the enemies were highly susceptible to being swept away by machinegun teams, so having multiple strong MG teams and a mountain of ammo to feed them made the runs easier.
*A specific boss by the name of Garm (renamed to Cerberus in the EN client, which IMO is dumb since it doesn't have three heads) required a specialty team to comfortably take down. In this case we mostly wanted to stack defensive buffs onto a shotgun until it had 60+ armor. Having an appropriate shotgun leveled, appropriate machineguns that granted +armor tilebuffs, and a maxed out ammo plate equipment went a long ways towards making the fight easier to win.
*Enemies spawned into specific helipads according to a fixed pattern. Since that pattern had been identified, it was possible to optimize the placement of our forces to better be in position to engage Sangvis troops as they spawned in. That's a significant edge over someone playing blind, especially if they accidentally captured helipads that spawned hostile troops since that would deny them potential kills and in turn potential score.
The English client had a surprise where a bug introduced a territory capture scoring mechanic that was present in the most recent Chinese event but wasn't supposed to be present in Deep Dive. They kept the bug in since it directly influenced the scoring. Players who recognized and adapted to the new mechanic greatly boosted their scores. Most notably there were some one time use resupply points scattered around the map that were originally intended to be consumed to ease our fight against SF. But under the unintended mechanic, each untapped resupply point that was under your control at the end of the match provided a boost of 10,000 points. So the path to scoring the highest scores was a careful dance of protecting a supply line, capturing as much territory as possible, but no so much that you encircled and captured the helipads that SF was spawning troops from, before finally capturing a few last bits of terrain on the final turn and entering camping positions to hopefully knock out whatever troops that SF spawned on their last turned. Disabling auto-resupply in the game settings was also mandatory, lest a squad consume a resupply point by walking over it.
As for crafting handguns, that's a pretty good idea. Especially since if there are any dolls that you're likely to run duplicates of, it's handguns. If you happen to roll Contender, that's a huge win since she's useful in a lot of teams and is super rare. Welrod is one of the most commonly used since she's arguably the best handgun to serve in the role of main tank for a team. Grizzly is also relatively common for a 5* and provides a popular set of buffs. I'm still chasing down K11 from the AR pool.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
So far I've gotten Calico and several of the recommended 4-stars, so I'm getting pretty set for when I really start to optimize.
If that seems really daunting, that's because it is. But the way that these ranking maps work, it's really you versus the community instead of you versus Sangvis Ferri. There is room for you to make a lot of mistakes such as failing to kill bosses or capturing helipads to make the battle easier instead of farming the helipads for kills. There's room for you to get a low score relative to the theoretical best and still come out well above other players. Even if your forces are completely unprepared, you're given rewards for simply participating in the ranking map.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
And I've already got CMS, who I'm using as main tank for my primary unit, as well as a couple of good ARs, so I'm at least started on getting what I need.
There has been a case of a few specific people being salty that guides were being written for ranking events and intentionally sabotaging people by giving outright wrong advice because they believed people who were using the guides weren't "earning" their rank - but that's a stupid bullshit mentality because no guide is going to magically fix holes in your comps and basic strategic awareness, only give you an idea of what you should have prepared and how to get off to a good start. Those people were in the minority though so as long as you double check sources it should be fine.
Ranking maps do become mostly about e-peen because the reward thresholds are usually very generous if you're just gunning for bare minimum to get rewards like the special equip and on EN the bar is not high - all you have to do is do well enough relative to other players.
It is possible if you play throughout the day to call the same friend echelon more than once because if i remember correctly there is a 6 hr cooldown on calling on a specific friend echelon
that being said, the friend list has been expanded to 100 so it should be easy to get more friend echelons than you can shake a stick at
The other reason to rush through the story is that clearing up to ch. 3 gives you 3 members of the AR team: M4A1 at 2-6, SOPMOD II at 3-3, and ST AR-15 at 3-6. all 3 of these ARs are strong performers in their categories good enough to hang with 5* ARs due to their skill sets - M4A1 having great support tiles for her fellow ARs instead of for SMGs like most ARs do on top of her solid firepower boost skill, ST AR-15 having a unique ammunition which is better than 5* HV ammo by a full 25% and being able to equip two scope accessories instead of a relatively useless exoskeleton (ARs should not need to evade things because if they're being directly attacked, mistakes were made), and SOPMOD II also being able to equip two scope accessories which helps offset the main problem of Grenade ARs, not having self-buffed dps. They also all eventually get MOD upgrades because of story heroine power and become some of the best units in the game. The only drawback is that they are only obtained once and there is no way to get dupes of them, so you have to use cores to dummy link. Still, free good ARs are a strong incentive to push through early chapters since the difficulty is still pretty low.
One thing i haven't seen mentioned about Logistics is that you can switch between viewing their total resource gain and their hourly gain ingame by clicking on this small button here:
This is useful because if you can stay logged in/check in frequently you should run logistics with higher resource efficiency. Longer logistics aka "overnight" logistics are for when you away from your computer for long periods of time (since you wouldn't be able to login anyways to send your echelons back out on shorter missions to take advantage of the better efficiency). Of course, if you feel like you have enough resources and care more about the rewards from logistics, like delicious t-doll contracts, then run the shortest possible ones that give those as rewards.
Logistics great success rate caps out at 60% normally (can go up to 90% with Logistics success rate + events) and is based on average tdoll level of the echelon you're sending out, so if you've cycled out early game tdolls in favor of newer units then make sure to put them in your logistics echelons so you can squeeze out more resources and still making your benchwarmer t-dolls feel useful.
Since the 2.0 UI update planning mode is now god tier whenever you are farming a mission you know your teams can handle. just remember to turn on auto-resupply or plan around resupplies if you're getting in more than 5 fights overall.
If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tdolls available and want some input on which tdolls are worth investing in or passing over, I would recommend checking out GFL corner's spreadsheet on tdolls here, since they give a short breakdown of each doll which should give a good bit of insight as to what is valuable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10LJdksnM3zipOb72IneJD7WVp3765JYJEGg0LnodzDI/edit#gid=1008128016
It also has quite a few handy guides for beginners for formations and other things, so check it out if you are feeling a bit lost.
My UID is 8994, feel free to shoot me a friend request.
So the game gets a
@Darkwolfe
At present, there are only two minor events that are live. The first is a "voucher" event where the first six bosses in the story drop currency that can be exchanged for prizes in the shop. The second is an exp up event that's boosting experience gain by 50%.
The story event "cube+" will start next Tuesday. The competitive ranking map that's been mentioned in the past few posts is not expected to arrive until October or November. The Va11 Hall-A crossover event is scheduled for August.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012