Thank you for taking the time to read this, many of the tips and tricks are for both general gameplay and some more specific to each campaign. I've played this game since it was a demo and slowly saw more and more things added overtime, having managed to beat the first boss, who is now Campaign 2's boss, a couple of times with plenty of failures both reaching him and fighting him on what was formally "Normal" which included his phases that are now in "Hard".

As of making this guide, the game is in 2.1.5. I expect, and desire, for this guide to eventually be outdated and replaced by a more experienced and more thoroughly involved person who can know the ins-and-outs of the game better than me. As admittingly while I know a lot of the surface stuff and some specifics, there's a few more pieces I am unfamiliar with.

I have experience with Armored Core series, specifically; Verdict Day, some of 3, and 6. I've also played MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and Battletech (both the game and boardgame), and have been a fan of mech games for awhile. So I'm used to looking through stats and spreadsheets, which this game has a lot of stats but no spreadsheets (yet).

This is also my first guide and it may appear rough for that reason, I apologize.

Without further adieu, let's get into the guide.

At it's core, Granvir is a mech-based roguelike with customization seen similarly to Armored Core. You move with the speed and grace of a Mechwarrior mech and with enough pieces and upgrades, you could somewhat emulate the speed of an older-gen Armored Core (Think AC1-Silent Line), but ultimately you're slow, bulky, and so are your enemies, encouraging a tactical approach and knowing when you pick battles and use cover and enemy prioritization. So, sadly, no GUNDAM speed-demons here. While theoritically possible with certain combinations, always assume you're a slow walking tank who fights equally slow walking tanks.

With this in mind, you can still "sprint," dash, and jump for evasion. Your enemies will usually only dash if you're too close to them or trying to close the distance. But for you, you have to also manage your heat, which can prevent you from spamming dashes and jumps too much and leave you easier pickings for enemies.

There's also time management during downtime in safe-spots at the end of each region, which can make your break your runs depending on how well you manage your limited time.

Your customization options are as follows;

• Body
  
• Legs
  
• Arms (Left and Right)
  
• Reactor
  
• Weapons (Explained below)
  
• Backports (Explained below)

While at first appears to be slimmer than what AC could provide in previous entries, this still leaves plenty of room for build and skill expression.

Weapons themselves are wide enough for a focused or mixed build, listed as;

• Melee (Both one and two-handed)
  
• Firearms (Both one and two-handed)
  
• Sideports (Think cannons)
  
• Backport (Also think cannons or rockets)

I've held a bit off on Backports, because those are unique but can be a pain to equip, simply because not every Body of a Granvir can support them, or some need to be modified to have Backports which will always tell you if they can be on their description. Backports can range from the weapons previously mentioned, to "Plumes" which aid in venting out heat quickly and a cargo container to let you carry even more loot.

Damage works pretty straight forward here, but there's some nuisance here. For starters, you have Hull and Armor, and every bodily piece of your Granvir contributes to the total Hull and Armor values you have while still tracking their own pieces individually. More on this later. Then there is the third bars, Internals. More later.

Armor is the first layer of your defenses, think of it like DOOM's (the original 1 and 2) armor; It soaks damage for you, but it will go away slowly till you start taking Hull damage.

Hull damage is your actual "health", the squishy meat under the crab armor you want to crack to get to the juicy meat.

You're enemies work the same way, and you may notice they take "green" damage before dipping to "orange" and then "red" numbers. That's because you're punching through their Armor to get to their Hull, damaging that previously mentioned juicy meat inside. But like the juicy insides, there's another cavat to the Granvir; Internals.

While I'm not sure how it exactly works, I'll do my best explaining it in an educated manner. Internals are the "third health bar" all Granvirs have, they are tracked individually from the main health-pool of Hull and Armor, and if any of those bars are reduced down you lose that part. But most importantly; If you lose your; Legs, Body, or Reactor, you die. But you can lose your arms/side-port cannons and backports and still be fine. But the more Internal damage you take, they start taking debuffs, such as arms not handling recoil so well, legs slowing your speed down, and reactor not taking as much heat as it could.

As far as I can tell, there's two ways to take Internal damage; Hull being lowered and by a precentage of damage taking to Hull there's a chance you take Internal damage, with the more lower your Hull is the better odds you take Internal damage. Or when Hull for that part is depleted you start taking Internal damage.

While I am aware this is wordy for a general guide, this should be important to understand how both you and the enemy take damage. And I hope a much better guide in the future clarifies how this works. But there's two big take aways you should note; Damage can carry over from Armor to Hull if the damage reduces Armor enough. And some Granvirs can appear "tanky" if you're just firing at them almost blindly.

So in short; Focus on one spot on an enemy Granvir and you eventually will win, or if you want to reduce their effectiveness take their arms or side-cannons.

With all that said, here's some overview tips for general play;

• Experiment
  It may seem obvious, but you do want to experiment and learn for your first runs. Expect not to live or go far, grab everything that seems cool, go ham, make losing fun.
  
  
• Part Priority
  Now you may want to run dual-pistols or that fancy chainsaw sword or go bonk with that massive hammer, weapons should be considered secondary, even tertiary, to you. Because the most important parts you should focus on getting are better Legs and a Reactor, preferably T2 for both if you can, either from finding them in supply drops, enemy caches, or when you arrive at a safe spot between missions.
  
  Now it may sound like mobility is king here, and is sort of is, you want the better speed from Legs and better heat and cooling management fro Reactors so you can be faster and more evasive. This goes for any build, even those that want big and powerful weapons unless you're fine slugging it out (Hey I don't judge, did the same thing a few times).
  
  
• Modifying the Granvir
  So you got some parts but you're thinking about when to modify your Granvir. That 6 hour cost (by default) is steep and will eat your hours away. So, here's some things you should consider;
  Are you replacing a major part of your mech? Legs, Reactor? Consider holding off until you need to replace multiple parts for the most effective Modifying
  Do you want to replace a weapon? Is the weapon a hand-held one? You can go to your inventory and manually replace it with another weapon. If it's a side-port, see above.
  Finally got a Body with a Backport and you've been sitting on a Backport item? Go for it. Especially if it's a Plumage, more heat management!
  
  
• Weapons and Builds
  Now this is more to your preference as to what kind of build you want to go for. Some say hands for many of the hand-held weapons, some say side-cannons so you don't have the risk of losing your arms and therefor your gun or melee, others mix the two. It's up to you. There isn't a meta (at the moment of this guide's writing) formed as most weapons serve their purposes very well, from early to mid to late and end game.
  
  However, you will see three types of ammo; Heavy, Medium, and Light. I'll quickly break down what they are;
  - Heavy. Used for Side and Backport weapons
  - Medium. Used for all handheld weapons
  - Light. Used for integrated ranged weapons (machine-guns in the body for example but Flamethrowers do not use ammo)
  
  There are the very rare Energy Weapons using Energy Cells, but those are self explainatory.
  
  
• Ammo Management
  Even on Normal, you can go through ammo quicker than you expect, even from fighting naturally. Some weapons take more ammo than others. Always make sure you hit your targets, it's obvious to say. But if you really want to conserve ammo, consider a melee weapon, they cost no ammo to use.
  
  
• Time Management
  More campaign specific, but you always want to carefully manage your time in the hanger, which is reflectively of how well you did in the mission. Took a lot of damage? You're spending a chunk of it repairing before anything else, unless you're paying the 6 hours (again by default) to Modify and swap out your parts, as previously mentioned all parts' Hull and Armor are tracked individually.
  
  
• Learning to Pick Fights
  It's very tempting to fight every single enemy on the map and fight every single base, but remember; you are one pilot against an army. The game makes you an Ace, but even Aces can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers and with enough sloppy play, and the enemy knows this. If you fight one Granvir, you're fighting usually two or three more, sometimes even more if you aggro'ed a nearby base while fighting a patrol or even a Hunter squad that called in to fight you.
  
  It's important also to note the Escalation bar will always be ticking up slowly, either when you're idling in a mission, fighting Granvirs, or running around. And the higher that bar goes, the harder the enemy will come at you.
  
  
• Pilots
  While they are campaign dependent, they depend purely on your playstyle. Do you want more money? Mercenary. Want to tweak and spend less time playing with your Grandvir? Engineer. Want to take enemy parts away and even refill on ammo from their bodies? Scavenger.
  Due note each pilot has a different set of starting parts for their Granvir.
  
  
• Carry Over Parts
  You want to keep some parts for future runs? This is how. Everytime you die, you are allowed to keep parts from your past run you had on your mech, including anything in your cargo hold but not ammo. If you save that part, even if you pick it, it will remain in the carry over parts for the next run. You can only have 10 saved parts.
  
  
• New Game +
  As of this update, if you decide to do a NG+ run, the bosses at the end will upgrade to their higher-difficulty version. So for C2, if you played on Normal, that boss will now be treated as if you were playing on Hard, and if you do another run that will now be Extreme. This is true for playing on Hard and on NG+ you get the Extreme version of that boss.
  This also lets you carry every single piece of your mech, in cargo, and even in it's very damaged state over, into the new run. But not your money or rep. And if you're Mercenary in C2, your starting debt will come back.

I'm making melee a separate part here due to how much it differs from ranged play. At first it's going to feel discouraging to use at first. It feels slow, clunky, but the damage is crazy even if the pay-off can feel very off with how much you're spending to repair your Granvir after a few engagements. I'm here to tell you that melee is hard but with proper training, you can cleave through encounters once you know what you're doing.

To explain: Melee isn't as complicated as Chivalry 2 or Mordhau or even the simple Mount & Blade series, it's simple. You walk up to bad-man, and attack. Every swing makes heat, and you have two types of attacks determined by the "Combat Style" you have, which can be swapped by pressing C. I highly recommend you use the available Testing Field to see how fast you are with both styles, as most weapons swing horizontally and vertically at the push of C, and some purely have one combat style which you can typically figure out (Looks like a spear, sounds like a spear, moves like a spear, ergo it must stab like one!).

I highly recommend you also learn when to swing. It might be tempting to swing always, but your weapon can and will catch on terrain like trees and buildings, eating the heat and not completing the swing. And if you're swinging like crazy, you will cause so much heat you won't have enough to dodge out of the way of attacks or in rare cases eat melee attacks from an enemy Granvir.

So from this, you can easily summarize that melee is higher skilled and much more part relate, specifically good Legs and Reactor. Early game will be daunting, but once you get the hang of it, if you want to commit to it, then it can be rewarding.

But wait, the enemy dodged away? Keep chasing them. Dash forward to close the gap and swing. Even if enemies try to kite you, you can dash to keep the pace up. It's how even melee enemies will try to stay on you.

But now you killed them, most likely they're going to explode. As of this patch, the explosion timer from Reactors increase from 1.6 seconds to 2 seconds, giving you time to dart away and ready yourself for the next opponent.

There are a few more hidden mechanics with melee that the developer shared in a forum post discussing the flaws of melee, I'll quote his response when he chimed in before a day or two later updating melee;

Originally posted by Airborne Games:

I’m always going to be trying to mitigate these detriments or add detriments to other options. Here are some of the things already in-game to help melee close the gap.
>melee damage resets enemy targeting timers. Eventually they will fire but only bosses have that much HP.
>baseline melee damage is way higher. I want to say I weight the melee property at 1.5x dps and ranged at 0.75 dps for picking a baseline dps target.
>enemies have a reaction time for noticing you. Taking damage skips this timer but melee doesn’t deal damage right away.
>rain and night are massively more beneficial to melee with the reduced visibility range.

From that update he made shortly after this; Grouped up enemies will no longer fire through each other to get you, and must have a clear line-of-sight to start readying to fire.

What this means in basic turns; Enemies with direct fire weapons such as pistols and rifles and cannons, need to have a full clear sight of you before attempting to make their shot. This gives you time to take care of a group without the whole squad firing on you. The expection are in-directs, IE those who lob shots over cover and allies, to fire.

Taking one good look at this may give you mixed messages. "Why such a big description?" Well, this is technically the first of the assaults the company, Millennium, are doing. This is their first appearance and it reflects this in their Granvirs being pretty basic, until you get Hunters called in and see what will be more "advanced" designs that'll be common in the other two campaigns.

But, most importantly there's a game already called "Granvir: Zero Front" out and free. I will make this clear: You cannot play with someone who has the Zero Front copy with the main game. The dev has mentioned it's two different versions of the game and they do not interact with each other, so consider it a more extended demo than the demo already Granvir has.

With that out of the way, what is Zero Front? Is it a much shorter version of base game (C2) and more fast pace with layouts and your build getting online quicker, even getting tiered parts much quicker. If you have time for a quick game, this is what you'd want to play. Alternatively, this is also a good place to try and see as many higher-tiered parts as possible for later campaigns. Which will be explained later.

Quick tips

• Treat this as a more arcade-like mode. It's much quicker than the other two, and losing isn't as bad as you're quickly back in the fight working to the end.
  
• Granvir enemies are "basic" types, ones you don't see well armed compared to later campaigns. You only will see the higher-advanced ones if you get Hunters called in or at the final mission.
  
• If playing on Hard or Extreme, expect at least 1 or 2 Aces to appear in the final mission respectfully. These are the same Aces in C2 and do not drop anything upon defeat, so do not consider using this campaign to farm for their drops.
  
• A quirk here is repairing your Granvir will also require an item called a "Replacement Part", and you always start with one.
  
• Your items in the depot will transfer between hangers, regardless of what pilot you chose.

The "main" game of Granvir, what the original demo only had and what we've played for months on. Most of my experience came from this campaign, and what you're most likely going to play the most, as I would recommend a few runs here if you feel C1 is too quick for your liking.

While a lot of the general tips apply here, especially with C2, there's some more specific tips here that will help you;

• By default, your items in the depot will not transfer. Only the Resistance Ace pilot's first 4 items will transfer. If you want to transfer, be sure you use the Porter option. It costs credits to put items in, but costs nothing to take them out.
  
• Take your time going through and try not to rush ahead. Remember the phrase; Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
  
• While you can always go back regions, ask yourself this question "Is it worth it?" Enemies, and Escalation will continue to raise, but the loot in previous regions will stay the same tier as if you were traveling to them for the first time. Consider only doing this for landmarks or important locations.
  
• Preplan your route, which important objective do you value the most? Will you take an Ace down? Always check what a region has before going forward, as you may not have access to certain vendors like a Porter or weapon/component ones.
  
• Consider taking a loan early on, as you'll be able to pay it off with well-time play. This is because if you pay your loads, you get rep with Atlus, allowing you to buy an upgrade so you do not have to spend a hour just looking at regular shops. Black Market will always take a hour, but it's better than spending 2 just to look at their wares.
  
• Once you make it to the end and face the big base, always have a cargo slot open for carrying "The Package," which will appear in spawn once you load in.
  
• Any Ace you did not kill will appear in the base once you place the Package, so if both Aces are still alive keep it in the back of your mind they will attempt to jump you. In fact, if they appear at the base, don't fight them if you can, you are on a time limit to escape the blast radius because it will kill you regardless of your build.
  
• If you made it to the boss and died? Congrats! No, seriously, congratulations. Even on Normal getting to that guy is hard for new people, so dying should be an honor. Now that you've faced him, focus on optimizing your runs and preparing for him better, you've taken a significant step getting to the end and it's time to make getting to him more consistent.

The 3rd and last (as of writing) campaign of the game, the one that came with the paid game and the longest out of all three campaigns. Where C1 you could do in 20-30 minutes, and C2 may take a hour or less, C3 could easily eat a hour and more of playtime. And it shows through it's unique mechanics within this campaign and the much harder enemy variety here. At this point, the Millennium Company has adapted to your tactics and made sure they're ready for you and your allies.

I'll be upfront about two things here.
Firstly; Expect to break down your playtime into sessions. This is a slow battle, and you're time, both in-real-life and in-game hours, will be taken up a lot. You will die and fail, but learning is half of the battle.
Secondly; I haven't completed this campaign. I've taken some cracks at it but I gotten as far as the last mission before succumbing to a thousand cuts. It is a brutal experience, made for people who have played the previous two campaigns and want more, and I love it.

Do not play this Campaign until you've mastered or feel experienced enough with piloting your Granvir, because this campaign is the hardest thus far.

With that said, here's some tips;

• Time is your biggest enemy, and the biggest nemesis is the new Manpower resource. You will be thirsty for men and women to join you and lend you their power like your Goku charging the Spirit Bomb, because everything you took for granted isn't here. Shops? No. Black market? Nope. Factories? Nah. Everything is built from scratch and you're sourcing the people.
  
• That said, it can be hard to figure out a build-plan for yourself, so here's a general idea; Mechanic and Modifications should be first, you will save time repairing your Granvir between missions. Then figure if you want shops or manufacturing, either first or focus solely on one.
  
• Shops work as you expect in the C2, including needing to buy an upgrade to reduce the time it takes to even look at what they're offering.
  
• Manufacturing is very interesting. Once you get a hand few set up, it allowed you to build any parts and weapons you've unlocked through previous runs. Yes, any part. It's a steep cost and will appear in your depot when you complete a mission, but this means by the mid-point you could theoretically be loaded on T3 and T4 parts. However, manufactored parts do not have modifiers or tweaks like with items from the Shops or found in caches in missions. So you may have to spend longer getting modifiers or if unlucky get the same piece you just made with modifiers in a mission.
  
• All your items will remain stored in the depot, so do not worry about losing them or your base.
  
• The maps are much bigger, about 1.5x or 1.25x bigger, than C2 maps. Expect to get busy and carry extra ammo for longer fights.

I may have missed a few things, I'll admit I am not perfect, I hope I covered enough to help and get you going. I apologize if this guide rough and I hope this guide is eventually outdated by someone with more focus for finer details, as this is a general overview of the game and should get people going.

Thank you for reading.