Elona Shooter: General issues and strategy

Rarely can you find a flash shooter with such a deep and captivating atmosphere as this. It is a truely amazing castle defender shooter, which involves many RPG aspects giving it a deep and fascinating atmosphere and great playability. I find it highly addictive (which is good).
Elona Shooter is based on the rogue-like RPG Elona and can be played e.g. on Kongregate.

For a list of skills in Elona shooter, see the Skills section. There is also an overview about which class can learn which party skills here.

And finally, my guide to day 150+ is finished!! Please find it here.

The following are some basic observations and tips. It is a long list, I know. But if you have any progress issues in the game, this should help you. And please let me know if you have any corrections/comments etc.

What to do if you screwed up
As the game is mostly based on randomness, you will have to restart very often - especially as a beginner. Check out the article about how to back up flash game savegames if you are tired of being punished for having bad luck again.

How to buy chickens and sisters
Yes, there is a page two on the tower menu. Yes, a lot of people don't know that, and I also noticed only after a while. In it, you can buy e.g. chickens (which you should!), upgrade the Smith so that there are more weapon slots, or buy a Villa so that you can hold parties to increase damage for the next day.

Manual Reload
With many non-automatic weapons (e.g. Hunter's Rifle, Shotguns) it is a MUST to reload after every shot. The delay will be barely noticable, but avoids the incredibly long timeout for a full reload when the weapon is empty.

Some skills cannot be levelled up
For example, the Assassin medal gives every character a starting skill of Sense+1. The Hunter class, for example, cannot gain this skill under normal circumstances. So, the Hunter cannot level up that skill, which makes the situation rather confusing because it is there, and you can focus on Sense as long as you want, it will never go up. In a way, that skill slot is blocked. On the other hand, a Hunter can not learn so many skills anyway.

Party skills
It does NOT give any benefit to have one Party Skill learned by multiple characters in a party. It clearly says so in the games' documentation. Some people claimed e.g. that having several characters learn "Active" would give more AP. That is not true.

Aiming issues

1. If you have trouble aiming because the game screen is too small, just zoom in with your browser (press CTRL and +) until the flash window almost fills all of your screen. I have tested that with Firefox only, might not work with IE, Opera, etc. On the other hand, some people might like the smaller flash size because they will not have to move their mouse so far for aiming...
2. The size of the crosshairs in combat varies. The bigger they are, the less your accuracy will be. A very small crosshair, on the other hand, indicates that you will hit almost exactly where you aim at.
   

The Ragnarok Sword
Once in a while you will find the Ragnarok Sword. If you use it in combat, all hell will break loose upon you. You need to have some very good equipment (e.g. Rapid Bowguns, Gravity Guns and/or Rocket Launchers and/or Grails) in your party to beat the wave.
The chicken way out of this is to use the sword at the end of the day, right before the finishing screen appears. That is a good way to get the medal in the first place, like when you find the sword on day 1 or 2, which happens suprisingly often. Takes the fun out of it, though. Defeat the Dragons you must, young Skywalker!
One note after having reached day 150+: Once you have come this far, you will laugh at Ragnarok. My noble with his Rapid Bowgun Mk-15 slices them in half before they can even think of firing.

Perfect Games
It is usually a good idea to go for perfect games, as you gain a lot more money out of it. A game is marked perfect, if the castle health is full at the BEGINNING OF ALL WAVES. Hence, having the repairman on level 1 or 2 makes this a lot easier, because they repair the castle automatically BEFORE each wave. E.g., if your health is 51/54 because three chickens hit you, and repairman is on level 1, they will heal 4 HP before each wave, giving it full health again.

Titles and Fame
Promotions (i.e. the ability to "Claim Title") occur on certain days. For example, on day 100, you can claim the title "King". It seems that there is no connection to fame, as some people say. Actually, I have no idea what fame does. Perhaps, fame will get a meaning in a future update of the game.

Also, there is the Impossible Badge medal that gives +20 to starting fame. Since the medal is fairly hard to achieve, perhaps even the hardest there is, one might expect that fame plays an important role. But again, I did not find any evidence for that.

Inn Activities

1. Don't spend too much money on the museum. The gain is not really high, especially when there are not many medals.
2. The two empty slots in the bottom row of the Inn menu are probably reserved for future updates.
3. Taunting multiple times in the same day has a great effect on your reward, but not as much on the enemy health! I taunted 5 times on day 23 and got 5000+ gold on day 24.
4. After day 100 or so, you will get a major portion of your money by taunting. The big advantage of taunting over most of the other income sources is its good scalability with the costs (Upkeep, Wages, etc.). That is in contrast with e.g. the museum, which provides almost constant revenue every day.
5. The Villa becomes essential after day 50 or so. You should spend all spare money there. There is no maximum level for it, but having it upgraded to level 10 around day 100 along with some neat equipment will make things a lot easier. Party on!

Team mates
When hiring team mates, they should have level 10+ in both Aiming and Teamwork, except if you hire them before day 10. In any case, make sure they improve in both skills, because sometimes there are NPCs that do not level up there anymore.

Tower Updates

1. Little sisters are nice to have, especially with the Love skill which gives an amount of gold per sister shot. But you should not buy more than 30. First, they get way too expensive after Lvl 20-30. Second, they tend to roll off the visible screen area if you have more than around 40, making those useless.
2. Buy lots of chicken. They really pay off later in the game. But no more than 120, as they become somewhat expensive around that.
3. From my experience, the looter and trainer updates don't give many benefits. Don't spend money there unless you can really afford it.
   
4. Similarly, you should not update the museum until day 30+. With all medals, it gives less than 300 gold per day on update lvl 1.