Chapter 6: I Want Cai's Team to Feel Powerful

Chapter 6 is where I learned something about my own preferred difficulty that matters more than another optimal-build chart.

I had been treating ordinary EXP as a throttle: enough to avoid grinding, but not so much that the tactical game became easy.

Then I played the Thundercloud Knights qualifier.

Cai's team was not helpless. We were roughly on the enemy curve. But stronger guest characters were visibly ahead of Cai, and ordinary enemies were no longer falling over when my main units touched them.

I did not like that nearly as much.

What I actually enjoy with this team is the feeling that these kids have been training their heads off between matches and are now better than the normal people standing across the grid from them.

That is not a balance mistake I need to correct. It is part of the fantasy I want from Cai's run.

Where the save is now

I have reached Chapter 6: To the Land of Cybele, in Free Time 4.

I have done the current round of Free Time activities except Meals and have started Mentoring. Noctula is recruited. Sofia is still a long-term Support project. I have also finally realized that the gold Temple icons are not merely flavor: Divine Audiences give Renown.

That changes how I use Dagsion.

Divine Audiences: I probably did not permanently miss anything

When a shrine icon in Temple Row turns gold/colored, an Audience is available. The Audience gives Renown and costs no Turn.

That means my rule from now on is simple:

gold shrine icon = go talk to the god.

The fact that I did not understand this earlier mostly cost me earlier access to free Renown. I have not found evidence that skipping an Audience in an earlier Free Time permanently deletes a unique item, quest, or story scene.

Current community testing goes further and says the Renown audiences are catch-up friendly: later audiences can still appear for thresholds I had not claimed earlier. The proposed trigger pattern itself is not sufficiently documented for me to promote it to a hard rule, so I am treating the "retroactive" part as provisional.

The part I trust is what the game shows me:

If the Temple icon is gold, there is free Renown waiting and I take it.

That is especially useful now because Renown is the gate I keep hitting on recruits and Mentorships.

Chapter 6 Free Time really is mine to use

I was worried that I was supposed to locate Ahm Lu on the world map before the chapter's Free Time ended.

I am not.

Free Time 4 runs from 4/20 through 5/20. When that preparation period ends, the story itself moves into an Explore — Ahm Lu sequence before the chapter battle.

So this period is genuinely preparation time. I can use it on quests, Support, Mentoring, farming, smithing, leveling, or simply advancing once I am satisfied.

There is one thing I want to remember for when the story does take me there:

See the optional mural scene before touching the main quest marker. Tialla points the way.

After that comes the Har Hali battle and the Temple of Balor dungeon.

I do not need to search for the island early or hoard a Turn for travel to it.

Spectating: one match I currently need to remember

Inside Cai's 4/20–5/20 Free Time window, the one protagonist match I have currently verified on the published cross-route calendar is Leda's qualifier on 5/7.

The next listed protagonist qualifier is Dietrich on 5/28, after Cai's current Free Time has ended.

So my working answer is:

5/7 is the one confirmed spectate date I need to protect this chapter.

That does not mean I stop looking at the in-game Arena calendar. A calendar marker beats an incomplete launch-week list. It means I do not need to spend the whole chapter worrying that three hidden protagonist matches are slipping past me.

My new leveling goal

The target is no longer "roughly equal to the story battle."

The target is:

Cai's core should feel clearly trained above ordinary enemies while bosses, objectives and positioning still make me think.

I am not assigning a sacred number of levels because the important measurement is the battle forecast. If Cai, Peter, Tialla, Noctula and the people I actually field are routinely one-rounding normal enemies and surviving sensible enemy phases, the power curve feels right.

If every boss also evaporates without positioning, I have gone farther than I wanted.

That is the boundary.

Best way for me to gain normal character EXP

Arena Training is still worth doing every week, but it is not my main character-leveling engine. It is especially good for skill/proficiency development.

For raw level growth, my priority is:

1. Complete combat-bearing quests and useful skirmishes I was going to do anyway.
2. Keep Increase EXP +10% enabled.
3. Once the important quests, Meals, Audiences and Mentorships are handled, spend spare Free-Time Turns through the Inn's Auto-Activities, assigning my important units to Combat.
4. If I want to play rather than automate, take worthwhile higher-level skirmishes/dungeons and feed kills to the core I want ahead of the curve.

The Auto-Activity part surprised me. The game explicitly supports Combat, Training and Search assignments that can yield character, class or skill experience and resources. Current player testing reports that several consecutive Combat Auto-Activity turns can provide useful normal EXP and very large Class EXP, with especially strong catch-up on characters below the expected level.

That is community observation rather than a published formula, but it fits my goal extremely well: once I have done the content I actually care about, unused Turns can become training camp.

This is one of the rare places where automating something serves the fantasy rather than replacing the game. I still play the tactical maps. I am automating the repetitive conditioning between them.

This changes the old EXP rule

My earlier rule was:

Normal EXP is a throttle.

That was reasonable before I knew what difficulty curve felt best.

It is now superseded.

My current rule is:

Normal EXP is part of Cai's power fantasy. Deliberately overlevel the core until ordinary enemies feel ordinary.

Class EXP and proficiency EXP are still excellent accelerators. Nothing about that changed. What changed is that I no longer treat being noticeably overleveled as a warning by itself.

The warning is boredom, not a number.

The Boon system makes switching after Part I make even more sense

My emotional instinct is still to stay with Cai and keep going.

Mechanically, though, Fortune's Weave rewards me for finishing the four unique Part I paths before committing to the War Arc.

The Boons are global. Current Boon documentation lists:

• EXP +30% after two completed Part I paths
• EXP +50% after three
• Class EXP +1 after one
• Class EXP +2 after three
• higher proficiency and economy tiers as additional Part I paths are completed

Some exact path-count requirements are still marked as estimates in the source, but the progression pattern is not ambiguous: finishing more Part I paths makes later play materially faster and stronger.

That is exactly what I want.

My route plan changed, but Cai is still my main character

The plan is now:

Cai Part I → Leda Part I → Dietrich Part I → Theodora Part I → back to Cai for the War Arc.

That lets me see all four genuinely distinct Heroic Games stories and collect the global progression they unlock.

Then I come home.

Cai's six-chapter War Arc is the one I want to play manually, with the Boons earned from the other routes switched on.

After one War Arc is completed, the game allows the later War Arcs to be skipped; the skipped armies still receive some EXP and are moved forward so they can participate in Salvation. That means I do not need to replay the essentially shared six-chapter War structure four times unless I want to.

Part III is a shared Salvation arc rather than "Cai Part III," so eventually the game converges. But Cai can still be the army whose War story I personally play and the unit I deliberately develop as my anchor going into the shared endgame.

That feels much closer to how I actually want to experience this game than the old plan of doing Theodora's War first.

My next recruit after Noctula

Sofia remains someone I want.

She is not the best next recruit, because on Cai she wants Support 3 + Renown 9. I can keep doing Meals and Support work without turning her into an immediate deadline.

The immediate target is Majide.

On Cai he requires Support 2 + Renown 5, plus answering his recruitment question three times. His requirements are substantially friendlier here than on the other Part I routes.

More importantly, he fits what I just learned I enjoy. His character identity is brute physical power, especially with an axe.

Nydine is another accessible option around Renown 6, but a mounted specialist overlaps more directly with what Cai already does.

So the current recruitment split is:

Majide = next practical recruit.

Sofia = long-term personal recruit.

That distinction keeps me from abandoning somebody I want just because another character is available sooner.

Chapter 6 checklist I actually care about

Before I let Free Time 4 end, I want the site to restore this context rather than send me through a generic completion checklist:

Meals still need doing.
Gold Divine Audience icons are free Renown.
Mentoring is underway — Bertrand at Renown 5 and Centurio at Renown 6 are the important current thresholds.
5/7 is my confirmed Spectate date.
Spare Turns can become Combat Auto-Activity training camp.
I do not need to find Ahm Lu. The story takes me there.
When I arrive, see Tialla's mural scene before the main marker.

And, most importantly:

I am allowed to train Cai until he feels powerful.