Valkyria Chronicles: Grinding levels.
I think the problems I've been having battling the Batomys dreadnought in The Battle at Barious was because my lancers were sitting around level 4 or so, my scouts and shock troopers were at 6, and my snipers and engineers were also barely leveled. Just leveling up with the missions isn't doing the trick.
So it was time to head into the skirmishes. The first skirmish can be done in a single move — actually, it can be done by a single character in a single move, but that skirmish isn't worth much XP, so I moved on to the next one, one of the city maps I did in the campaign. I managed to finish that in three moves, which was good enough for a "B". I looked at a cheat guide to find out how to do it in a single move — I've already done this map in the campaign, this is not cheating really.
Once I had the single move version done, I moved to the third and last, for now, skirmish, the woods one. That one took me a few days to do when it was in the campaign. I had some ideas after I finished that I put into play here, and it cut the time from 8 moves to 7 moves — still only good enough for a "C".
Back to the cheat guide. As with all the ones before, if your strategy (for the skirmish) involves moving the tank, you've lost. The winning strategy is to ignore the frontal route and just take a fast moving squad of a sympatico shock trooper – scout pair, for the bonuses, and an engineer to keep people healed and resupplied. Doing it this way I got it down to four moves — eligible for that "A" rating — and by tuning the approach (using the engineer far more heavily to keep both the shock and the scout in grenades and also alive) got it down to three moves for my last try.
I leveled scout, shocktrooper, lancer and sniper to level 8. Once more should get my engineers to 8 as well. Then I'll head back into the desert with lancers that can actually hit where they aim.
