Gambits

As you progress through the game, as battles become much harder, Gambits will become very useful. Gambits basically allow your party members to automatically react to a situation. But how well it works depends on how you utilize the Gambits at your disposal.

Gambits work as simple logic gates. When activated a Gambit will make a character perform an action on a character when a condition is met. The action can be an attack, spell, use of a Technique or use of an item. The character can be an ally or enemy; you can set a Gambit to heal an ally or attack an enemy. The condition refers to what you have set the Gambit to react on.

One of the first Gambits you will acquire is the Ally:HP < _____ kind. For example you can use the Ally: HP < 100% Gambit. If you assign the Gambit to a party member you are instructing him to automatically perform the action when any allys HP falls below 100%, in battle or not. If you make the Gambit use a potion, every time someones HP falls below 100% the character will use a potion on that ally, unless you dont have a potion. Now, you might not want to waste a potion every time someone takes a tiny bit of damage, so you can set it to act on 50% or 60%.

This example is just one of many Gambits you can set up, and the real power of the system will become apparant as you create multiple Gambits. Initially, your characters will only have a few Gambit slots, in most cases just one. You can gain additional slots from the License Board, with a maximum of ten slots per character. This can open up a wide variety of battling possibilities. Early in the game most set ups will probably involve attacking enemies and healing allies, as well as stealing from enemies when the battle begins.

Party Leader:
1- Foe:HP = 100% -> Steal
2- Foe: Nearest Visible -> Attack

Character 2:
1- Ally:HP < 50% -> Potion
2- Foe:Party Leaders Target -> Attack

Character 3:
1- Ally:HP < 50% -> Potion
2- Ally:Status = Blind -> Eye Drops
3- Foe:Party Leaders Target -> Attack

This is a good example of how the logic gates system works. The Party Leaders first action is to steal from the enemy, only when its HP is at the maximum. This will most likely cause him to only steal once as your allies will have already hit the enemy before he will have a chance to steal again. If the condition of the first Gambit cannot be met, it will move onto the second Gambit and attack the nearest enemy whose HP is not 100%. So if a Gambits condition cannot be met, the next Gambit will be triggered. Keep this in mind when creating your set-ups.

Character 2 will heal first and attack second; this is very important because if he was set to attack first and heal second, he would never heal until there were no more enemies left, which could lead to problems. So Character 2 and 3 will check to see if anyones HP is below 50% before attacking. Only the first character to act will heal, the second will just move onto the next Gambit as the persons HP will no longer be below 50%.

Once you have finished setting up your Gambits, be sure to activate them. You can turn individual Gambits on and off in the Gambits sub-screen on the Party Menu, so if you didnt want a certain character to use a certain Gambit in a certain battle you could easily turn that particular Gambit off but keep the rest on. A characters whole Gambit list can also be turned on and off on the battle menu. When a characters Gambits are on a golden G will appear beside his action meter.