Intro

It seems to happen to everyone, we get Esther in our party with her Gogo we do a couple of battles and soon realize that she can't keep her mana. The AI keeps using overkill spells on the familiar encounters, so by the third encounter our party is out of mana. Worse even, on boss fights they run around and don't heal themselves and end up dyeing pretty easily.

Commands

I'll start by having a small section about commands. By early Mid-Game, you are given two new button presses, [All-Out Attack!] and [All-Out Defense!]. They are very useful, especially if you keep your Tactics as "Don't Use Abilities". They are good because they overwrite the current Tactic.

Even if you have tactics set to "Don't Do Anything", if you press [All-Out Defense!], if your AI is below 50% health, it will cast heal on itself. This is a great way to tell them to heal themselves with a button press.

Insights on the AI - What character is selected

Before we talk about the spells that waste us mana, let us talk on what character the AI puts out. For example, the AI doesn't try to select Swain and then use his mana, instead it tries to select the best familiar that swain owns, and then uses its abilities accordingly. This is important to understand to select your tactics.

The rules the AI seems to use are:

1. Put out the familiar in the first position.
2. If the first familiar is too weak (its defense is too low for the current enemies) then select the party member with the highest defense.
3. If the current familiar is low on stamina, then select the owner

Now that you understand its selection order, you may realize that Swain is out all the time because his familiar's defenses are too low. This will happen when you get him, and will remain for a while while you get a tank leveled up.

Once Swaine's tank's level is on par with the current enemies, he will be the one primarily out, and the reason for that is that every knew dungeon or region will have enemies that are stronger than your party (at least at the start of the dungeon), therefore your highest defense character will be sent out. By the end of a dungeon, when you start to be stronger the opponents, then your first familiar will be the one out.

Tactics

Now that we understand who is sent out, you may realize that the tactics to choose from depend on the level of your owner vs familiar and also depending on the spells the familiar has.

At the start of the game

As many other players, I soon found out that it made a lot of sense to set tactics "Don't Use Abilities", so that the AI would still participate on the fights, but would conserve their mana for when I needed to either heal, or steal, or cast a specific spell.

But I felt the game was less fun that way. It makes sense at the beginning while your party is getting all to the same level, but it won't be the most fun as the game progresses.

Early-To-Mid Boss Fight Tactics

Your characters will die in bosses at the beginning. At firs there doesn't seem to be any good tactic to solve this:

• If they are on "Do What You Like" or any other "free-will" tactic, they will use up their mana and won't have enough for healing.
• If you have them on "Keep Us Healthy" they will still use up their mana on buffs/damaging abilities and use up their mana.
• If you have them on "don't use abilities" then they won't heal themselves either.

It seems a lose-lose in all those cases.

What I found out to work the best for early fights is to keep the non controlled party member as "Don't Do Anything". This tactic is great for this case because it actually means the AI will defend all the time. This gets them out of our way, keeps them alive and conserves their mana. On top of that, when you defend a Boss ability, you get extra/better glims. This will help Oliver get mana glims to keep casting spells at the boss.

Mid-Late Game tactics

I'll start by saying that I did not want to play a game where I would have my party members cowering and defending all boss fights. For me the interesting part is managing a party, heal them and select the best spell for the moment, and still let my AI cast some spells and do what it likes and survive the boss fights.

I kept most of my game with tactics of "Don't Do Anything" and only by the end did I realize that there was something better.

The Best Mid-Late Game Tactic

The best tactics for late game is any of the "Keep us healthy", "Back us up", but to change the first and tank familiar spells to be low cost spells.

By mid-late game the first familiar or tank familiar are the ones sent out, since they are stronger than the owner.

Taking Swaine as an example, I was using a Jabber, Sunshine and Monolith and the character selected by the AI that was out most of the time was monolith. That is because monolith has the highest defense and would survive all new encounters I faced. This familiar does about 1 damage every single auto attack. This means that you will go most of your game with Swain's/familiars doing and taking exactly 1 damage, which is nice because Swaine doesn't die, but it is very useless (I spent some 60% of my playthrough with Swaine's party doing 1 damage, why didn't I realize this sooner...). Monolith has a great magic attack, often more than your early "magic familiars". Megalith learns Water Bomb (4MP) which is one of the cheapest water damage spells. It does good damage as well, especially for the high magic attack of the familiar. What worked best was to remove the spells that I have no use for.

For example monolith has Petrifying_Puff (18MP) which is too costly for Swaine's mana pool. That spell is a 25% chance of instant knockout. I can guarantee you, you will never use that spell more than once. You can think of it as a spell that takes 72MP to 100% knockout another familiar with a 0.8*4 + 3*8 = 27.2s cast time. A complete waste of a spell on retrospect.

So what you want to do is remove any high cost damage spells from your tanks, leave them only the support/damage/heal spells that are low cost. You can leave spells like Bracer (8MP), or Water Bomb (4MP) or Healing Tear (4MP)

For you attacker familiar, that I usually put on the first slot, the AI seems to use auto-attack more often than spells. It seems to cast spells sometimes, when I press "all-out attack". Therefore, you may want to remove any high cost physical spells from them, they usually don't make much of a difference compared to the auto-attacks that they would do in that time frame.