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Research Basics

Introduction

The Research menu is where you will be increasing your units’ skill levels, optimizing your equipment, ensuring that your fairies are well raised and upgrading your dolls through the Neural Upgrade system.

Skill Levels

This is where you improve all your units’ skill levels. This takes longer the higher the skill level is, combined with higher multipliers for Fairies and Coalition Ringleaders.

For example skill level 10 for a normal T-Doll will be 24 hours while a skill level 10 Fairy will be 48 hours.

Skill levels take time and data. This differs between the different unit types, T-Dolls, Fairies and Coalition Units. For Fairies and Coalition units see their respective pages.

For T-dolls it is as follows, Intermediate and Advanced Data are shortened:

Skill level Data Cost Time
1→2 100 Basic Data 1 Hour
2→3 200 Basic Data 2 Hours
3→4 300 Basic Data 3 Hours
4→5 120 Inter Data 4 Hours
5→6 200 Inter Data 6 Hours
6→7 300 Inter Data 9 Hours
7→8 400 Inter Data 12 Hours
8→9 200 Adv Data 18 Hours
9→10 300 Adv Data 24 Hours
Total: 600 Basic, 1020 Inter, 500 Adv Data 79 Hours

While this might seem like you might need additional slots, there is little to no reason to grab additional slots as you are much more restricted by Data (the materials used for skill leveling) than you are by time. As such the base 2 training slots are more than enough for normal skill training use.

Skill Data is obtained from Combat Simulations and you can read more about how to optimize this over on the Combat Sim page. If you already know how this works but simply want to optimize as best you can, see BSJ’s page on Data Simulation and Hassium’s page on the week’s Coalition Drills.

It might seem like you have a ton of data lying around from clearing your Career Quests but it will swiftly run dry leaving you to rely on Combat Sims for data as you start skill leveling your dolls and fairies.

As a beginning note you should focus on skilling up your offensive dolls like 416, M4A1 and ST-AR15, as well as your RFHG team where both your buffing HGs and your self-buffing RFs will need skill levels.

As another example, dolls such as G11 and Grape (Carcano M91/38) or Fairies such as Illumination or Parachute require their skill levels to be at a certain level to get the most out of them and they are held back significantly if they do not have the required skill levels. 

  • G11 gains 3 attacks from her skill only at skill level 9. 
  • Grape only gains enough stacks to guarantee her skill activates at skill level 10. 
  • Illumination increases the echelon’s sight range at night by +1 at skill level 3 and +2 at skill level 10 making it pointless to stop anywhere but these two levels. 
  • Parachute can hop to any unoccupied helipad within range and gains additional range as the skill level increases but is severely limited by how far away the helipad can be until skill level 10 where the range is unlimited.

Note that Grape’s skill is not needed against pretty much any enemy until around ch10 where high health enemies that she can pick off easily become more common. 

Information such as this is noted on each unit’s individual page so for anything that’s not just a flat % increase to RoF or FP or such it is recommended that you check out what skill levels are required for them to function well.

For fairies specifically see the Fairy page where all this is gathered for non-event fairies.

Equipment Enhancement and Calibration

Enhancing and Calibrating equipment will increase the stats and performance of your dolls using said equipment.

Equipment enhancement is unlocked by beating 1-4N while Calibration is unlocked by beating 2-4N.

Example partially calibrated but unupgraded VFL vs maxed VFL.

Upgrading and calibrating the correct equipment is crucial to get the most out of your dolls and echelons. Focusing on enhancing your gold equipment for offensive dolls that helps them kill things faster will greatly reduce the amount of damage you will take in combat, as opposed to defensive equipment which just leaves you standing around for more punishment. Enhancing blue or white equipment is not worth it as the improvements are extremely minor and the cost is not worth it.

It should also be noted that the order of calibration and enhancement does not matter.

For more info on how equipment enhancement and calibration works and which equipment you should focus on upgrading, read the Equipment Basics page.

You can use equipment enhancement pills or other equipment as fodder.

Equipment that has been enhanced will transfer 80% of the enhancement exp to a new item if used as fodder.

Equipment enhancement pills are primarily gained from the Forward Base.

Fairy Enhancement and Calibration

Enhancing fairies is crucial to ensure they can boost your echelon well in combat. 

There is a massive power difference between 1☆ and 5☆ fairies and enhancing them will take both time and resources. Not only are fairies slow to level, but to enhance them you will require a lot of additional fairies to feed to them.

For the fairies that come from the 500x4 recipe, you should only ever feed them duplicates of themselves as non-dupe fairies only provide 10 exp as opposed to 100 from duplicates.

For the expensive fairies from other recipes such as Parachute, feeding fodder (fairies you have already raised from the 500x4 recipe) is more efficient most of the time.

For more information on fairies see the Fairy page.

Neural Upgrades

As you reach Commander level 60, you will be able to mod dolls that have a Neural Upgrade (you can check these in the Index by ticking the Neural Upgrade toggle).

Modding a doll will increase their rarity which will improve their stats, tiles, skill and granting an additional skill at mod2, as well as a SPEQ and additional skin at mod3.

Modding dolls costs Neural Fragments and Cores, as well as FCCs (New Type Fire-Control Components) for 5☆ dolls.

For more info regarding Neural Upgrades see the Neural Upgrade page.

For info on which dolls to mod see the Neural Upgrade Priority page.

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