First, an overview of the stats.


Physical Stats

You boost these by doing 'workouts'.

Strength: Very good stat if you want to kill lots of things. It increases your damage. It also increases your chance to succeed with shield attacks (knock/charge).
Good for pretty much every character, as every character will be doing some fighting.

That said, you don't have to kill everything. You can focus on other stats and still do well. But this is one of the places to focus if you want to kill things faster.

#1 stat for killing machines, less important (but still important) if you just want to survive (you will still be able to kill stuff, just not as fast).


Endurance: Affects how quickly you get fatigued (how much total fatigue it takes to fill your green circle in combat), and affects how likely you are to recover 1 fatigue when using the Respite action. Endurance is also used in out of combat skill checks for endurance related things, but nothing too crucial. Not particularly important unless you are a true badass--if you are avoiding duels and are not getting promoted to be a Centurion, endurance won't really affect you much. In my opinion this is the least important combat stat.

Combat outside of the usual battles (including any duels you fight) won't rotate you out after ~20 rounds, and Centurions are expected to stay on the front lines without rotating out (though you can, it will lower opinions of you).

You can still do just fine starting with 50 endurance, especially since two of the workouts can increase endurance (Running & Swimming).

IF you do a lot of non-battle combat, where you can't rotate out, this becomes more important. The less skilled you are with sword/shield (especially if you don't have prodigy in them), the more important this is. BUT, it still isn't all that important. You can sit there failing the respite action to wear your opponents out, if your defense is good, in which case it doesn't really matter if you succeed on the respite checks. Wait for them (use respite) to lose stance when they attack/shield attack. try an aggressive shield attack or feint (depending what you are good at), see if you can knock them down to 0 before they can recover. If you can, then you attack. Otherwise, you can chop away at their arms a bit if you like... but anyway, if you have a TON of endurance, you can just wear them out while you keep feinting/etc and use respite less often (since your fatigue circle takes a lot more more points to fill when you have tons of endurance).
Where you'll get into trouble is if your defense isn't up to par--in that case sitting around using respite (whether it succeeds or not) can be too risky.


Constitution: A good bit more important than Endurance, but still one of the least important combat stats. This affects how much health you have. The less 'badass' your character is, the more important this stat will be (to a degree).


Quickness: How fast you are; this affects your odds of getting extra actions in combat (or losing your action in combat). Note that your attitude also greatly affects this (much more likely to lose your action on full defense, more likely to get extra actions in offensive stance), as does your fatigue level & your current 'stance' amount (at 0 stance left you have a good chance of missing your action).

This also affects the success of 'quick feint'--unlike the other feints, quick feint uses both quickness & awareness, instead of just awareness.

Quickness is nice to have, especially on a more 'badass' type character. But you can do just fine starting with 50 in it and not really training it much. I rank it #3 stat for killing machines.

Note that wearing Greaves typically reduces quickness.

Coordination: Affects your total stance (just like constitution affects your total health points), your odds of succeeding in the 'recovery' action, and how much stance you recover at a time (which appears to be a fixed % of your total stance).

This is a really important stat. Having very high coordination will let you fight in disadvantageous situations (e.g., assaulting a wall where you have a -40 to stance due to your poor positioning); if you only have say 75 total stance, you'll be capped at 35, which is pretty low.
If you have 100 total stance, you'll be capped at 60, which isn't so bad.

And in 'even' fights where you don't have a stance penalty, it can let you get more done before you consider recovering.

#2 stat for killing machines, #1 stat for lesser characters who want to do well in combat.


To summarize phsyical stats:
- Strength & Coordination are king for those who want to rule the battlefield.
- Quickness is good, but for most characters not as important as as strength & coordination.
- Constitution is decent, but you don't need to focus on it generally. If your character sucks at combat, focusing on constitution, coordination, and quickness can help you survive.
- Ignore endurance unless you are a total badass, in which case it can be a little helpful but still less important than basically all the other stats.


Mental Stats

These get boosted when you succeed at using them in missions/events. E.g., if your high charisma lets you rally some troops during an event, you may get a mental stats boost. Succeeding on scavenging missions will also give you a mental stats boost.

Charisma: Important for every character. Affects your odds of increasing troop opinion of you when dicing/board gaming. Affects all sorts of stuff if you get promoted to a command position.
Getting troop opinion high early will allow easier training of sword/shield, so is pretty important.
Charisma is less important if you don't plan to be particularly good at combat (ok to fall behind a bit in sword/shield) and don't plan to be promoted to command positions.

Awareness: Affects various out of combat things that can make you money/get you better opinions. In combat it helps you with feinting (both making feints, and resisting them).
Note that wearing a helmet will tend to reduce awareness.

Intelligence Affects success at board gaming, along with a variety of other things out of combat. More important if you are promoted to command positions.
Note that very low intelligence characters can gain a ton of morale from the 'sacrifice' misc activity.

Skills

Javelin:

Decent skill, but not as important as the others. It affects how accurate you are with throwing javelins.

Can be useful, but you won't typically focus here. In general you'll want to use your two 'freebie' (no over-exercise increase for the first two) javelin trainings each time you have downtime, but generally not more than that.

Sword

Very important for all characters, though if you suck at combat you can neglect this in favor of defense.

It affects:
- Hit chance of normal attacks (significantly).
- Success of the initial checks for feints (the secondary checks are awareness or awareness + quickness based).
- How much of a penalty to hit you get when attacking a soft spot, AND affects how much you may find a soft spot. (E..g, if 'normal' attack has 75% chance to hit, and enemy has 50% armor coverage, a low sword skill might have a 55% chance to hit a soft spot on torso, and instead of 50% chance of hitting armor, maybe you have a 40% chance of hitting armor. With high sword skill, this could instead be 70% chance to hit a soft spot, with only a 25% chance to hit their armor.)

If you want to fight duels, you will want your sword skill to be fairly high.

Shield: Also fairly important. This affects:
- Hit chance of feints against you (initial check; secondary check is awareness or awareness+quickness)
- Hit chance of shield attacks against you (knock/charge; affects initial check, secondary check is strength based).
- Hit chance of weapon attacks against you.
- Defending against ranged fire.

Morale & Opinions

Morale: Affects almost every combat action. You'll want to balance between keeping your morale high and doing lots of training. The more you overtrain, the more morale you lose.
If you are a total badass, you can let morale get really low to get in extra training--this is trading off a bit worse combat performance for some extra skill/stat boosts. But if you are good and just kill lots of enemies, you can farm your morale back up during battles.

If you aren't good at slaughtering lots of enemies, your main morale increases will be from:
- dice/board gaming (if you win money & increase troop opinion)
- 'having fun' leisure activity
- random events/etc.
- If your intelligence isn't too high, the 'sacrifice' activity (under 'misc') can give you a huge morale boost.

Note that morale has a label on the bar (very low, low, content, high, very high, superb): The bonus/penalty you get to all the actions morale affects is determined by the label. So if you are content and lose 10 morale but are still content, your hit chances/etc won't have changed.

Use this to your advantage--you can "spend" morale by overtraining; try to 'spend' to the low point of your label (e.g., if you are at the high end of content, you can "spend" quite a bit of morale before it drops to "low"). Of course, if you want to maintain high morale, you will need to balance leisure activities with your training.

If your morale is very high/superb, you can either spend it down to content, or try to maintain it at a high level and do less training. You'll need to consider how likely your training is to be successful (as you get better at any particular skill/stat, its odds of successful training drop), and how much you'll need the bonuses from high morale in the next battles.


Troop Opinion: This is really important because it affects whether you can spar with better and better warriors. As your sword & shield skills increase, you'll find you need better opponents to spar with if you want to increase them further. The only way to get access to better opponents is to boost troop opinion. You gain it from:
- dice/board gaming (can also lose opinion, especially if you have low charisma)
- killing enemies in 'sanctioned' battles. (Any battles where you have other soldiers with you, typically. If you play as a real douche-nozzle you may have situations where you are off doing things you aren't supposed to be doing--killing enemies there won't boost troop opinion)
- various random events/etc

Centurion Opinion: Affects where you get sent for scavenging missions (if your centurion doesn't like you they may send you to places with very few resources), and your odds for promotions. Not sure if it affects anything else.

Pre-Consul Opinion: Can affect promotion chances, also you may get extra points at the end of the game if you get promoted further during your epilogue; having high opinion here helps with that final promotion.

What will your character be good at?

Here are some synergies you can look for:

Intelligence + Charisma: If you have high int & cha, you can use the board gaming leisure activity to farm both troop opinion & morale.

With dicing, your win/loss of money is random, though your charisma will give you the same odds of increasing/decreasing troop opinion as it will with board gaming.

But since you only get morale when you both win money and increase troop opinion, to really farm it fast, you need high int. With really high int you win money board gaming much more often than you lose it. Which means when you do get troop opinion increases (good chances with high cha), you also have a good chance of having won money, which translates to also gaining morale.

This int + cha combo lets you farm troop opinion quite quickly, which translates to being able to train sword/shield skill more quickly than normal. This means even if you have poor physical stats, you can leverage your mental stats to compensate with extra sword/shield skill.


Strength + Sword Skill + okish Shield Skill: The basic killing formula. If you can keep your training in sword skill outpacing enemies defense skill, you will have reasonable odds (50%+) of hitting with a basic attack when you are both at full stance. If you really outpace them, you can get 75%+ to hit with a basic torso attack (both of you at full stance).
Higher shield skill will allow you to more safely enter an aggressive attitude, which translates to higher hit %, and more likelyhood of extra actions.
The strength will allow you (along with appropriate equipment) to deal tons of damage to unarmored areas, and to even deal some damage when you hit armor (sometimes even significant damage, if the armor sucks).

If you want to be able to defeat phalanxes, you'll need a LOT of sword skill (you probably can't get enough without being a sword prodigy at character creation), and a good amount of strength, and a good sword.


Sword Skill + Awareness + [optional] Quickness: If you have high awareness, feints will be more effective for you, and you can resist enemy feints more easily. All characters will benefit, though if you are a total badass (sword prodigy with lots of training), you may not use feints very often as your hit % will be high enough even at full stance.

Characters with high awareness should consider training quickness as well--it is pretty good if you can feint an enemy to reduce their stance, and then immediately get a second action to now attack/feint further/etc before they can even try to recover.


Strength + Shield Skill: The stronger you are, the more benefit you can get from shield skill--it will allow you to use the shield actions (knock/charge) with a much higher success rate. (The initial check is just shield skill, but to overcome resistance in the secondary check you use strength.)


Low intelligence + Money: Use the 'sacrifice' activity to spend some money to get a huge morale boost. You can use this to keep morale high even when you overtrain like crazy.

So, how to use all of this information?

Mediocre characters: No prodigies, stats all ~50.

First training period:
- You can do 2 javelin & 2 workouts without overtraining, but you can also skip them if you want more chance of higher sword/shield for the first battle.
- I typically do solo sword practice until it stops giving results every time you do it.
- Then do additional sparring [anyone], optionally with the focus bar set to defense so you boost shield skill chance.
- Try not to let morale get too low though--if you are going to drop too low, substitute your freebie trainings (javalin/stats workout), and also do some dicing to start trying to build troop opinion.
- If you are not very intelligent (int < 50), you can also use 'sacrifice' to allow you to use all but 1 of your actions on sword/shield training, and then boost morale with the sacrifice so your morale isn't complete crap for the first battle.

If done properly, your sword skill should be high enough that you can kill a few enemies during each ~20 round fight sequence. I'll often just go fully aggressive attitude and then just attack their unarmored torsos over and over.


Later on: I spend my freebies (javalin/workout), and then spar until my progress starts slowing. (Balanced with morale maintaining activities/building troop opinion via dicing/board gaming.)
Once your progress is slowing, I tend to focus more on workouts, and then use dicing/board gaming to bring the overtraining bar back down (while building troop opinion). You need to build troop opinion until you can spar at the next level with at least moderate, but preferably good chances of succeeding.
If your progress is slow, but troop opinion is low and you need more skills to be able to fight effectively (so that you can kill stuff to boost troop opinion :-D), you can set the focus slider to sword or shield to double the odds of that type of skill gain.

Sword Prodigies: I will tend to skip the solo practice during the first training period, and just go straight to sparring. The doubled odds of sword skill gain means you'll usually get a sword skill out of it, so it is worth skipping the solo practice (with pretty much guaranteed sword skill increases) since sparring will usually give sword skill, and can also give you some shield skill gains.

80+ strength | coordination | quickness: If your character started with really high stats in one of these 3, you may want to focus on training that stat up fairly early. The very first training session should still be almost all sword/shield skill, but after that you should work on getting to 90+ in that stat--you will get a lot of benefit from it.

Basic Characters

1v1 fights: If you have a decent (40%+) chance to hit with a normal attack with 'balanced' attitude, you can try going for it if the enemy's weapon skill is a good bit lower than your defense/shield skill. If you miss the attack you'll lose some stance which allows them to hit you more easily, but if your defense is a lot higher than their offense skill, they will still probably miss.
IF THEY MISS, you can attack a 2nd time, this time from the most aggressive attitude, which will compensate for your lower stance. This is because they will likely try to recover; they will only keep attacking if your defense is really low so they still have a good chance of hitting you despite their lowered stance from missing the first time.
You can keep attacking until either you miss again (so you've lost stance twice), or until they successfully recover. If they recover, you now have a free auto-success recover. If your coordination is decent, you should get back 2 misses worth of stance loss (or at least most of it) with one recovery.

So this looks like:
- You attack from balanced attitude (50% chance to hit) and miss, you now have 70% stance (just as an example).
- Enemy attacks and misses, they are at 70% stance too now.
- You attack and hit.
- Enemy tries and fails to recover (still at 70% stance for both of you).
- Repeat (attack & hit, enemy fails to recover) until that changes.
- You miss (you are now 40% stance or so): Enemy recovers, you recover (even if enemy failed, you don't want to keep attacking and risk having 3 stance losses from missing). Note that if enemy still needs to recover, they will get an auto success since you spent your action attacking. (If you get an extra action after recovering, you can attack to keep the pressure on them.)
- OR, you hit, but then enemy recovers (so you at 70% stance, they 100%): you want to recover as now your hit chance will be too low and if you miss again, they will likely be able to hit you as you'll have pretty low stance.

If your sword skill isn't sufficiently higher than their defense to get a good hit chance from balanced attitude with both of you at full stance, OR if their offense is high enough that they are likely to hit you after you miss (with them at 100% stance, you at ~70% stance), you won't want to risk attacking right away. Do one of the following:

If your feint chances aren't abysmal (say, 30% or higher), try feinting; the only cost is fatigue buildup, you don't lose stance if you fail. Just keep feinting until either they miss attack/lose enough stance to give you a decent hit chance (and since their stance is lower, less risk of them being able to hit you if you miss; they may not even try attacking, just recoverin).
Quick feint special note: It may reduce their stance just a little, to the point where they don't try to recover yet. This can give you a little edge where they are at 90% stance and you are at 100%. It may be enough--maybe you can then go full aggressive attitude and do a deft faint with 40%+ odds of taking them to much lower stance, or maybe now your normal attack hit % is high enough to risk a normal attack.

OR, if you are getting fatigued or your feint chances are garbage: go balanced or defensive attitude & just use respite until they try to attack and miss you. Now their stance is lower and you can try an aggressive attitude feint (they will be busy trying to recover most likely won't even try attacking you, so aggressive should be fairly safe in this situation), and then if they fail to recover you can try a normal attack.

You can substitute a high% (I'd say 50%+) shield attack (knock/charge) for a feint in the above situations if your shield skill is high. Though its risky if they are at full stance, since then you will have low stance just like if you missed a normal attack. If they are not full stance you can risk it, since then they will be trying to recover instead of hitting you (probably).
Having high strength will make this more likely to succeed.

Against really tough opponents: If you don't have good chances to hit even when you are full stance and your opponent has lost some stance, you can use the following technique:
- Respite (or feint) until opponent misses an attack (or your feint succeeds, but be careful of fatigue).
- Go aggressive atttitude and try for a deft feint, unless your odds are terrible with it and normal feint or quick feint has decent odds. (if they are all terrible, go for deft)
- If you can get your enemy to lose more stance with that, great. If not and they recover, go back to the first step.
- Now that they have lost stance twice, see if you can use a shield attack to really lower their stance further.
- Keep feinting/shield attacking until either they manage to recover (in which case you recover if you are down any stance, and then go back to step 1), or until you get rid of all or the vast majority of their stance.
- When they are at ~0 stance, now try to hit them. As soon as they recover some stance, go back to feints/shield attacks to try to bring them back down to ~0.
- Repeat until combat ends (rotate out/etc) or they die.

If you are in a non-rotating combat situation (# of rounds unlimited), prefer using respite a lot while waiting for them to miss an attack. Even if you fail, at least you aren't using stamina. Further, you may want to specifically target enemy arms/legs in this situation, to try to push them to exhausted state, which has severe penalties to all checks, allowing you to finish them off (assuming you aren't also exhausted).


Against multiple enemies: Careful going aggressive attitude. You are going to have a rough time recovering because at least one of them will feint/attack at you while the others take recovery actions, meaning you won't get an auto recovery most of the time.
Try the same tactic as 1v1 against a tough opponent: respite or feints until one of them loses some stance, and then you either risk a normal attack against them, or feint/shield attack them to lower their stance further.



Badass characters: Typically against non-elite units you can just go full aggressive attitude and hack at them until they die. If they really suck just stay aggressive attitude the whole time. If they don't completely suck, go back to balanced attitude when you are using recovery action. (Staying aggressive gives you a better chance for an extra action, but also means they have a higher chance of actually hitting you.)

Against elite units you should use the same tactics as a normal character would.



Non-rotating combats: Duels and out-of-battle encounters with enemies will last until someone dies, typically. You need to be more conscious of your fatigue level. If you are a lot better than your opponent(s), you can just use normal tactics. If you are closely matched, you need to balance feints & respite actions until their stance is low enough to risk a normal attack. Consider attacking arms or legs if you won't be able to kill them with just a few attacks, so that they build up fatigue.

Once you have some hall of fame entries, you will be able to spend points when creating a character.

If you are just trying to survive as a mediocre character, shore up any glaring weaknesses as well as you can. Extra points should go in either charisma (for extra troop opinion boost chance when gaming, to allow faster access to better sparring opponents), or into constitution (if you suck and just want to try to survive), or into strength/coordination.

Most characters will benefit greatly from spending 45 or 60 points on a better sword--the starter sword does something like 5-11 dmg; the 45 or 60 point upgrades add a good bit of dmg and make it easier to get kills during the first battle, which can snowball you into an early promotion and will help with both morale & troop opinion. If you do not spend on a better sword, you'll either need to waste training time searching for a sword to buy with your starting funds (if you can even afford it), or you'll have a hard time racking up kills in the first battle. If you DO spend points on the better sword, you can ignore shopping for much longer than you can otherwise, as your initial sword just sucks so badly that you have to go find a replacement to buy after the first battle when you have some money.

Focus the rest of your points on shoring up any weaknesses you can, and/or focus towards a synergy mentioned earlier in this guide. E.g., boost int + cha a lot so that you can easily get troop opinion & morale from board gaming, and then use that to allow sparring at higher levels earlier than usual, allowing you to fast track your sword & shield skills. Or boost strength & coordination to have better combat performance. Or if you have better base quickness/awareness, boost those to enable better quick feints and abuse them in combat. (Mentioned earlier: the quick feint may remove just a little stance from the enemy to the point where they don't bother trying to recover, which can give you a small edge.)

If your character is mediocre, take few risks. Don't volunteer for extra duties. Try to stay safe and just survive.

Virtue: Very low virtue opens opportunities for monetary gain and sometimes other benefits, but your behavior will also add risks (sometimes you end up fighting enemies on your own, with no allies and no rotation to keep you from getting exhausted).

Very high virtue will tend to bring opinion benefits, especially centurion/pro-consul opinions.

Badass characters will tend to have a good amount of money, probably more than you can spend; as such, badasses (sword prodigy, esp with high strength/coordination) will tend to benefit more from being virtuous, though this isn't always true.

Mediocre characters will have a hard time getting much money--low virtue opens many ways to increase your funds, so will tend to be more beneficial here.

That said, mediocre characters can still find various benefits in high virtue, and badasses can find some benefits in low virtue. So while one may be more 'optimal' for your character, it isn't completely one-sided.


Equipment:
- Anti-armor & damage protection values are important. There is a big difference between a 28 anti-armor-piercing 8 damage-reduction cloth armor and a 40 anti-armor-piercing 15 damage-reduction plate mail. "Harder" armors will almost completely negate damage, while lesser armor will just take a little bit of the sting away from being hit.
- Early on, switching to cloth armor that has higher coverage %s can be a little helpful, but not a priority.
- Chain mail is great once you can afford it, even short chain mail is great.
- Careful of using helmets that reduce awareness too much--it leaves you more open to enemy feints and reduces the effectiveness of your own feints, not to mention all the out-of-combat checks awareness is used for. This is less of an issue if your awareness is already mediocre. If you have a high awareness character though, stick to helmets that don't reduce it much.
- If you have very high quickness, you probably don't want to wear greaves. Stats have an exponential effect the higher they are--so if you have 'normal' quickness, wearing greaves that reduce it a little isn't a big deal. (E.g., you have 55, greaves reduce it to 51, not much difference. If you have 90 quickness and greaves reduce it to 86, that is a bigger difference.) [I'm not positive about that, but from my observation I'm pretty sure stats have an exponentially bigger effect per point the higher they are.]