Grand Conquest Guide
Grand Conquest is not a particularly popular mode, but it’s one of my favorites, between the bigger maps, the chance to borrow friends’ lead units, and the tactical opportunities that teleporting provides.
One common criticism is that the difficulty of the mode makes it less fun to play, particularly when the enemy team is able to teleport and attack, making it more troublesome to decisively take a camp or fort. This becomes much less insurmountable with some adjustments to teambuilding and playstyle, which this guide will hopefully help with.
Credential-wise, I’ve gotten through a round of GC exclusively on teleport mode infernal and without losing any points, resulting in a score cleanly divisible by 2,000 as seen above. About half my brigade is unmerged, and none of its +10 units are mine, so having some friends with a high investment favorite character is enough for others to do the same, no whaling required.
Table of Contents
Contents
Basics
Scoring
Consider attempting teleport mode infernal. Even if you struggle with Grand Conquest, it may still be worth playing on harder difficulties. Here’s a basic score breakdown:
| Lunatic | Infernal | Infernal+ | |
| Perfect Run | 1220 | 1480 | 2000 |
| No Fort Takeover | 920 | 1120 | 1520 |
| No Camps Taken | 770 | 940 | 1280 |
“No camps taken” means no damage to either fortress, and half score on the ‘camps held’ metric, assuming you’ve protected your own camps but not taken any enemy ones. This should be doable even at a disadvantage due to teleport attacking and fort respawns.
Notice that a match of infernal+ where you fail to scratch the enemy fortress is still worth more than a perfect run of regular infernal, and one where you can hold onto your own camps and get 20 kills is worth more points than a perfect run of lunatic.
Pre-fight Tips
Take advantage of friend units. Your own -spd Azura might be a liability that you can never safely leave in enemy range, but someone out there has a +10 wo dao Olivia who happily takes down blues. If you can use her instead, it’ll make your life easier.
Pay attention to area bonuses. I don’t change my brigade between rounds, but it’s worth considering. Slow cavalry units get a lot better when they automatically double, and armors are a lot easier to use when their two tile movement isn’t so conditional.
Look at the map layout. A cavalry-heavy team will have a hard time with forests, and one without fliers won’t appreciate rivers. More generally, defense tiles around the enemy fort is likely to make taking it a lot harder, and any sort of chokepoint or obstacles between your camps and the enemy fort is going to make getting to it a lot slower, making the deaths of your units more punishing. (However, a bad score in a critical area may be worth more than a perfect score in an uncontested one. Area count is important for rewards as well.)
Adjust your brigade over time. If one of your starter units just isn’t doing very well, or a particular reinforcement isn’t helping, swap them for someone else.
Gameplay Tips
Teleporting and respawns are limited by available teleport/spawn tiles. If you leave your units on the enemy teleport pads, it will limit their ability to teleport their units unless they can kill yours. This is also ideal for limiting respawns on forts to manageable levels.
Your dead units will be replaced at the end of player phase. If your unit dies on player phase, you will get its replacement at the end of that phase. If your unit dies on enemy phase, they will be replaced at the end of the following player phase, leaving you with one less unit for that phase. If replacements can get back into the fight quickly, losing units on player phase is sometimes preferable to losing them later.
Enemy units are replaced in the same way. Any enemies killed during enemy phase will be immediately replaced, up to the number of available fort/fort telepad tiles. This makes a strong player phase offense a high priority for taking over camps and forts.
Enemy units will prioritize taking camps over killing your units. If you can’t kill the nearby enemy units with your own, but you can take a camp in those enemies’ range, that will potentially save you two deaths on enemy phase. You can also use your own camps as bait in this way, since damage to your camps does not affect your score.
Unit Selection
Your brigade needs to be able to, as a whole, take the enemy camps and fort within ten turns, picking up 20 kills while doing so. This necessitates using both player and enemy phase, and not allowing too many setbacks to occur. Your brigade should be able to handle a number of situations and enemy setups, and should contain units to fill several different roles.
Unit types
Sweeper: A unit that can get kills on player phase. This unit should ideally be able to win same-color matchups, if not up-color ones, and have some way of engaging in multiple battles without needing healing. Effective damage can be useful, as long as the unit can kill respectable fraction of the enemy units you face, preferably in one round of combat.
Examples: fury desperation Nino, firesweep galeforce Cordelia, bold fighter brave bow Jakob, Reinhardt, bow Hinoka
Tank: A unit that can survive combat on enemy phase, and preferably kill the units attacking it. A good tank can survive some up-color matches, and last through multiple fights with some form of self-sustain (especially important when the enemy can teleport attack.) Aether with a breath skill or some other form of cooldown reduction helps here, as will other forms of damage mitigation.
Examples: steady breath aether Fae, vengeful fighter distance counter Effie, brave Ike, Sigurd
AoE: Any unit with an area of effect damage or debuff ability. Healers using pain, gravity, or candlelight, dagger users, or smoke skill users are the most common of these. This unit may or may not be able to get its own kills, but it will need to be able to survive attacking, either with solid defenses, or by preventing counterattacks altogether.
Examples: pain++ Lucius, refined Jaffar, dark breath female Grima
Dancer: You only get one dancer, and it’s extremely important to keep them alive. Ideally you want one that can take a few hits on enemy phase, and doesn’t have too many glaring weaknesses.
Hybrid: Any unit that fulfills multiple roles. This can be a chip damage healer with enough attack and speed to get kills, an armor unit capable of respectable mixed phase performance, or a dark breath dragon that leaves enemies debuffed while tanking them.
Notable Skills
WoM: An incredibly handy skill for dancers, and any reinforcement unit whose b-skill isn’t absolutely critical to their performance
Drag back: Handy for pulling a stubborn high-defense enemy off of a fortress tile. Works best on flying units, and units who don’t need a b-skill (often brave or firesweep users are preferable here.)
Galeforce: Incredibly useful on any melee unit that can get kills without an offense special. This allows you to have more “moves” per turn than the enemy team, which can be the key to making a decisive push on a camp or fort. Goes well with firesweep, brave, and slaying weapons, bold fighter, and heavy or flashing blade. The goal is to activate galeforce on just about every player phase in order to make the most of it.
Aether: Very handy special providing both damage and sustain. Like galeforce, some form of cooldown acceleration works well with it. Helpful for tanks, especially with a breath skill.
Miracle: Ideal on healers and potentially on ranged sweepers who don’t need an offense special to get kills. Surviving an unfavorable enemy phase while leaving the unit’s health low enough to be WoM’d to can be handy.
Friend Units
There’s no obligation to use units from your friend list in GC, but it can certainly help if you’re lacking a particular unit type, or a highly merged or skill invested version of one. If you don’t have a convenient source of in-game friends, consider acquiring some from larger communities. The FEH subreddit has a megathread for sharing friend codes, and Discord servers often have channels for such as well.
Sending out requests to arena foes can work, but they’re more likely to accept your request if your own lead unit can potentially help them. Consider putting forward a merged and/or highly invested unit of your own, preferably one that others often won’t have an equally powerful copy of themselves. If your lead hero can fill one or more of the above unit archetypes and help potential friends in Grand Conquest, so much the better.
Be sure to check on any friend units in use before updating your allies when editing brigades. Finding that the galeforce sweeper you rely on has been replaced by your friend list’s third +10 Nowi can be an unwelcome surprise, as can finding that a borrowed ally is missing their seal, or using a double rally instead of reposition.
Note that any empty spaces in your brigade will be filled by random units from your GC team. These units can be acceptable if you really have nothing better, but they’re often lacking assists or build synergy, and I don’t recommend rolling the dice on them unless you’re looking for a challenge.
Building a Brigade
A brigade is essentially made of three parts: the eight units you start the fight with, the four units immediately after them, and the rest of the brigade following those. These three parts should be considered individually and as a whole, in terms of teambuilding. Above is my brigade. Let’s break it down.
Brigade Sections
Initial team: These eight units need to function as a cohesive whole. You might not lose any of them, if a match goes particularly well. The initial team should include your dancer, in order to make the most of the support and flexibility they provide. I prefer to build my initial team with the dancer, two to three tanks, three to five sweepers, and an AoE unit. Hybrid units make it easier to reach higher numbers in each category.
(In my initial team, Hinoka, Maribelle, Jakob, Cordelia, and Effie are all sweepers, with Effie doubling as a tank, Maribelle adding AoE damage, and Hinoka providing movement support with guidance and flier guidance. Fae, Sigurd, and Effie can all tank, Maribelle as mentioned provides splash damage, and Olivia dances and assists the team with her tactics buffs. Because of the tactics, there are exactly two units of each move type in this brigade, but this may vary by individual choice.)
Immediate backup: These units might show up anywhere between turn three and turn ten, depending on how well the match is going. They should slot themselves tidily into any subset of your initial team, since you don’t know exactly who they’ll end up replacing. I prefer making this part of the brigade out of WoM-using AoE and sweeper units, but if you have trouble with tanks dying early on, including a replacement tank in your immediate backup might be worthwhile.
Last resort: These units should only start showing up if you’re having some trouble with a particular objective or set of enemies. I prefer them to cover a range of possible scenarios, since their goal is to get you “unstuck” from a problem situation. As with the immediate backup units, they should have wings of mercy unless their b-skill is absolutely critical, since it’s important to maintain a strong presence in enemy territory in later turns, where setbacks can start costing points. (My last resort team is pretty hodgepodge since I don’t use them often, and it hasn’t been subject to much editing.)
Brigade Balance
Your brigade needs to be able to handle whatever units get thrown at it. Not everyone has to be able to win every fight, but if one particular enemy unit can stop your entire team cold, you’re in some trouble when the RNG decides to bring that unit up. Your initial brigade and, to a lesser extent, your backup units, should be split along a number of axes.
Weapon triangle: Self-explanatory. If most of your brigade is red, a large number of blue units will be pretty inconvenient to fight through quickly.
Melee and ranged: Less about type weaknesses, but having more tiles to attack any given target from, as well as flexibility of positioning in general, are both very helpful. Melee units tend to have higher total stats and are usually better for tanking and enemy phase, as well as taking space on player phase, but ranged units usually have a wider range of tiles to take and attack from on any given target, making them good as sweepers and especially as teleporting reinforcements. I tend to favor starting with an even split of ranged and melee units, then leaning more towards ranged units for reinforcements, but this can vary by map, movement type, and personal preference.
Damage type: Some units can be built for a very high def or res. If all of your units are physical, a 50 defense enemy on a defense tile with a few buffs might be pretty difficult to shift, but a dragon or mage may have no problem clearing them out for you. The Mathilda above showed up a few times in my GC runs, and killed my borrowed +10 Fae at one point without taking damage. Having a physical unit to finish her off was pretty helpful.
Movement type: While it can make sense to build your brigade to take advantage of area bonuses, it’s worth keeping in mind that effective weapons can be inconvenient even against the weapon triangle, and it might be worth bringing a few units who can protect your units from them. It can also be handy as a provider of mobility, particularly with fliers to guidance armors or infantry around, or to reposition your units across rivers or your horses over forests.
Effectiveness: this one is much more optional, but armor effectiveness in particular can sometimes help to shift particularly stubborn units off forts, or deal with problems the rest of your team can’t.
Using the Brigade
This part is a bit more difficult to quantify and, unfortunately, “just win” isn’t helpful advice. I didn’t record any matches from the recent GC, but here is a video from an older one, before enemy teleport attacks were removed. My team and strategy have stayed pretty similar in setup, if not in exact units used.
My general approach is to attack the fortress before anything else. Any enemies starting on a camp who walk towards your fortress can no longer teleport back to their own. As long as they don’t actually damage your fort, it’s fine to leave them and the camp alone and let them wander around out of your way. Camps can be taken once the enemy fort is safely locked down.
Map Takeover Steps
Step zero for grand conquest is pre-battle positioning your units. You should have an idea of who you want to go where on turn one, especially if you will need your units to use their move assists on each other. Keep an eye on who has buffs (especially emblem buffs) and who needs buffs, if they’re going to be fighting on turn one.
Turn one in the GC match linked above is used to put a tank in range of several enemies, and to allow the rest of my team to approach the fort safely. Notice that when the enemy units become primarily blue and green, rather than red and blue, I swap Nowi for Fae, allowing Fae to tank the units Nowi might not have been able to handle. This is one good reason to have tanks covering different parts of the weapon triangle.
The following few turns of the video involved some botched kill order and positioning on my part, and attempting to recover from it. However, since the bulk of my team by then is within range of the enemy fort, recovery is not too difficult. Essentially, having all your units in a single large group makes it possible to overwhelm the enemy, especially if they are missing units.
(Two other small notable points in here are the use of Lucius to prevent the wandering enemy Morgan from harming my fort, and Reinhardt’s ability to survive Effie with miracle, reducing the number of enemy phase deaths from two to one.)
After the awkward recovery phase, I am left with six of my units and only three relevant enemies, as well as control of the enemy fort. This is essentially a victory. Everything from there on is cleanup, building up kills for points, dealing with any stragglers, and taking all camps, before finally destroying the fort. Being able to select the number of enemy respawns by placing units on their teleport pads is helpful.
Critical Points
The jump between “initial turn(s) spent readying units for an assault on enemy territory” and “control of the fort” is the most difficult part of any GC match, since the enemy has respawn advantage, and usually numbers equal to yours. These turns will often be messy, resulting in deaths and occasional setbacks. Reliably getting through these group fights in a low number of turns is mostly a matter of attention or practice, but here are a few suggestions to get you started:
Never disregard movement assists. If you have two units out of range of a battle, one might be able to reposition the other closer to it, giving you an extra unit. Likewise, reposition can be used to put a player phase unit behind an enemy phase one for safety.
Pay attention to your galeforce users. If their remaining special cooldown is low, dancing them may allow galeforce activation, essentially giving you two dances for the price of one.
Take advantage of debuffs and splash damage. QR-using dragons and armors will often kill any of your units that can’t take them out, and may have the stats to prevent one round kills (especially on defense tiles,) but if they’ve had half their health knocked off by a pain-using healer with double savage blow, that’s much less of an issue.
Beware of enemy dancers and WoM users. These can increase the amount of damage done on an unfavorable enemy phase by a lot. Sometimes it’s worth losing a unit just to get rid of an enemy dancer, since your units will be replaced, but the enemy won’t get their dancer back any time soon.
Decide who you can afford to lose. Sometimes you’re stuck with an upcoming enemy phase where at least one of your units is guaranteed to die. If that happens, make sure the units you really want to have next turn are out of the way. Dancers, particularly good sweepers, or galeforce units might be a priority, but who matters the most is up to you.
Think through attack order and positioning. This is the least well-defined, but probably most important piece of advice I have. If your drag back user ends up in a space you were planning on your mage attacking from, you may be left unable to kill an enemy unit. If your healer’s splash damage lets your galeforce flier kill an enemy in one hit instead of two, galeforce may fail to proc. If attacking an enemy healer would allow them to counterattack and hit several of your units with a gravity effect, you might want to do that last. Think through all the steps involved in your plan before executing it.
Closing
That’s about all I’ve got. Grand Conquest is a neat mode that lets you pull off clever tactics in ways you can’t elsewhere, and I was extremely happy to have teleport attack mode returned to it. It takes some getting used to, but reliable victories are entirely possible if you find some friends, build your brigade, and play carefully.
Thanks to everyone in the Order of Heroes subreddit thread who had suggestions when the initial draft of this guide was posted there several weeks ago, in particular Verve, QwirkyQwilfish, and iamfanboytoo. If anyone else has their own advice or suggestions, or difference of opinion from anything here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
