Chaos Seed: Feng Shui Kairouki (1996)

Beat the game with about 45% completion. I beat most scenarios once and only 2 a 2nd time. I screwed up 1 of the early scenarios and did not get the ending you need to unlock the next set. I repeated the 1st scenario to get an alternate ending and then did the other properly. I started using a walkthrough to make sure I did not screw up again because this game is too tedious to repeat levels.

It took until the final building scenario to become fully proficient with the game. My strategy was to build a huge production room on several energy nodes and a huge refinery on a mix of energy and sentan nodes. Let the refinery work and upgrade it to level 2 as long as it has enough energy, which is why the refinery needs a few energy nodes. I did not want to fool around with transporting energy between rooms with minions. Then I built 3 summoning rooms to unlock 4 groups, a dig room to get some loot and another smaller refinery and production rooms. Use that refinery to get my own sentan while a group of 4 dragons move sentan to the primary summoning and production rooms. Upgrade that summon room to get some decent minions. With the hero I used a bird and horse. I made another group with a cat and 2 snakes and set them to patrol between the main production and refinery; they ended up being decently powerful and could often defeat enemies without my help. They even beat 1 mini boss for me. Last team was a single bird set to patrol everything for repairs. I did not find much use for detection, transfer, storage and attack rooms and found the game more bearable with a small dungeon that was easier to defend. I actually maxed out the main production room to the point where both it and I reached max capacity. The most important thing was that room was never destroyed because I camped there and every group had that room on their patrol route. I focused on destroying portals and personality defeating most enemies. I pretty much ignored feng shui though I was aware how it worked. I did build a few extra corridors linking rooms to improve the feng shui, but the strategic aspects of funneling where enemies can go was more important to me.

I did not use this optimal strategy on earlier levels because I had not learned it. Thus some of the scenarios were a huge pain in the ass. I did properly beat the level where you have to beat the boss using traps, attack rooms and minions only. I wasted my time building a huge linear dungeon with lots of attack rooms and strategically placed teleport rooms so I did not have to walk the whole thing. The bosses skipped 90% of it and I barely scraped by with a single mid level attack room, traps and 2 groups of minions. I never tried out the top tier minions, most spells and most room upgrades.

I mostly spammed the medium attack in battle, favored attack boosting equipment and abused the pulse bullet spell, which the walkthrough said was OP. I never bothered with more complicated moves. Good game overall despite having problems with tediousness and balance.