Daisenryaku Perfect 4.0

General informations

One of the latest Daisenryaku games of the Perfect series, released on consoles and PC, and sporting a fully localized Steam version, released in October 2018. The Steam version received negative reviews, mainly because people were expecting a game like Daisenryaku Exceed, and not a game like Daisenryaku Perfect. Also, the localization is all over the place, and the sprites are rather blurry. Despite all of this, this is one of the best strategy games of these last years for people who like games like Advance Wars. With hundreds of units, hundreds of maps, very customizable rules, and a comprehensive map editor, there's plenty of fun to be had here.

Mechanics

Rules

The player moves units on a map divided in hexegonal tiles called hexes. These units must be used to capture enemy buildings and destroy enemy units. The goal is to either destroy all enemy units, or capture the enemy Capital.

Phases

The game is IGO-UGO (I go, you go): I play during my turn, then you play during your turn. Like in most Daisenryaku games (but unlike in Exceed), each turn is divided into several phases, usually only two: a movement phases, where you order your units to move, attack, and perform other tasks; and a production phase, where you build units. It's not like in Exceed where you can do both in the same phase; why? I don't know. There are also other phases in some cases, like the missile phase during which ballistic missiles can act, but we'll see this later.

Movement phase

During the movement phase, the player can order their units to perform various tasks.

Moving

The simplest is moving (click on a unit, then click on an available hex and the unit will move to this hex).

Attack

If the units has weapons equipped, it can attack other units. Most of the time, the attacking unit must be adjacent to the enemy unit - this is called Direct Combat. If the attacking unit is equipped with ranged weapons (like in the case of Artillery units for example), it will be able to attack units several hexes away - this is called Indirect Combat. Just like in Advance Wars.

Special actions

Units can also perform other actions like Capture, Parachute, Lay roads, Embark, etc. The most common special action is Capture, to capture buildings (only infantry units can do that). Just click on the icon in the action menu. All of these special actions are described in the game manual.

Units are resupplied at the beginning of the Movement phase.

Production phase

During the production phase, the player can click on any production building located less than 8 hexes from their Capital and start buying units against money. Production buildings include the Capital (HQ), Army bases, Air Force bases, and Naval bases. Units bought this way will become available in the next turn, during the Movement phase. If the ruleset allows for units to be stored in buildings, several units can be bought at the same building. If the ruleset models supply, production buildings must be supplied (linked by roads to the Capital or a big city) to be able to produce units.

Stats behind units and their weapons

The game's localization being what it is, and the manual being not too intuitive, it's easy to get lost in the stats.
Here I'll talk about the stats with their names as they appear in the English version of the Steam release.

Each unit is made up of sub-units (usually 10 but it varies). This is the number represented on the side of a unit icon on the map.
Each sub-unit has a number of health points, this is what the game calls Strength. If a unit has a strength of 3, that actually means that all its sub-units have 3 HPs.

Each unit is equipped with a certain number of weapons (some non-combat unit don't have any weapon though, like regular supply vehicles).
In the game structure, weapons and units are independent from each other, and weapons are attached to units. For example the weapon AIM-9 (the Sidewinder short-range Air to Air missile) is equiped by several fighter aircraft in the game (F16, F18, etc), and for all these fighters the weapon will have identical stats. In short, a unit doesn't come with weapon stats; only weapons have weapon stats. And weapons equip units. Thus a unit is only as strong as the weapons it carries.

Weapons have 2 main stats: Firepower and Accuracy Rate. Firepower determines how many HPs (strength) a sub-unit will loose when hit. Accuracy Rate is a percentage (a number between 1 and 99) that determines the probability of a hit. Accuracy Rate determines this for targeted units that are Super High, High, Low, Hard Armor (like tanks), Soft Armor (like infantry), Sea, and Undersea.

To better understand how it works, let's take an example.
A tank with 10 sub-units and 3 strength (meaning each sub-unit has 3 HPs) is attacked by an infantry unit equipped with RPGs. In this hypothetical situation, an RPG has 2 firepower and 45 accuracy rate against Hard Harmor. For each infantry sub-unit, the game will calculate if the RPG actually hits something (45% chance). Then it will distribute the resulting damage randomly to the tank sub-units. Maybe all tank sub-units will end up with -2 HPs (since the RPG has 2 firepower). Maybe some tank sub-units will receive several hits and other zero. It's all random at this point.

Now there's a final important stat that I've left out for clarity's sake. It is the Avoidance Power stat, a stat carried by the unit and not by one of its weapons.
The Avoidance Power is a value that lowers an attacking weapon's Accuracy Rate. Just like Accuracy Rate, it is a percentage (between 1 and 99) determined for units that are Super High, High, Low, Hard Armor (like tanks), Soft Armor (like infantry), Sea, and Undersea.
Let's take another example.
An SPAA (Self-Propelled Anti-Air) unit on the "Ground" altitude level attacks an airplane unit situated in the "High" altitude level. The SPAA is equipped with an AA weapon with an accuracy rate of 65 against "High" altitude units. If the airplane has 25 avoidance power against units attacking it from the "Ground" (as is the case for the attacking SPAA unit), the SPAA's 65 accuracy rate will be lowered by 25, thus it will become 40.
A unit with a high Avoidance Power (for example 99) can become virtually invicible because of that: it will never get it by enemy weapons. I don't think a unit with such high Avoidance Power as 99 exists in the vanilla game, but it's possible to create one with the Weapon Editor. As a matter of fact I did, and it made the unit invicible against enemy units attacking it from the ground.