Following the murder of Emperor Altair II during a revolt spurred by his most loyal general, Fabian "The Master of the Six Devils," the world is in disarray and four nations splinter from the empire. Players assume the role of Fabian's son, tasked with taking up their father's mantle and forming their own army of Mercenaries to bring peace to the splintered lands of Brown Dust; they must find the truth about why their father committed treason and thrust the world into ceaseless war.
The gameplay of Brown Dust is quite different than combat of other gacha games. You have no direct control of your units, however, how you position your units, what turn order you have them go in, what team composition you use, and how you plan to counter the opponent is much more paramount than in other mobile gacha games.
In the formation screen, you set up your units on a 6x3 grid. In general, your unit will only attack enemy units in their same row, unless there are no units, and then they will attack the row beneath them. However, the units themselves are very unique and behave very differently from one another. One unit might have a "Skip" pattern, which means they attack the second unit in a row. Another unit may have the "Last" pattern, where they only attack the farthest back enemy in a row. Still others have AOE patterns, where they attack in a line, square, or cross pattern. In addition to this, you can choose the order in which your units go. Let's look at the below fight and see how you might want to play this out.
Your units are on the left, enemy on the right. Let's say that Enemy 1 is a very powerful buffer who will make all other units incredibly powerful. On row two, we would want to place a unit that attacks the last enemy in a row to take out the enemy as fast as possible. Now say that Mage 5 and Mage 6 deal massive damage to their entire row. We want to take them out too, right? Well, Mages take one turn to charge. So we might be able to get by with stacking a couple "Skip" units in the top and bottom row. Why? Because if our skip units kill Warrior 9 and Warrior 10, then the "Skip" will target the Mages, because they are now the second unit. We can see that the Mages have numbers "6" and "7", so as long as our Skip units are before that, we will go first and take them out before they can cast their powerful magic.
This is one simple example of how this game can have incredible depth and strategy despite the player not having direct control over their units.
There are over 1200 unique fights in the game right now, as the game has been out in other regions for just about a year, so there is no lack of content. Global servers are concurrent with other regions, so there is no wait for content they may have.
The game also has a very nice auto repeat feature. For anything not-story content that you would want to farm, you can simply click auto repeat and close the game. The repeat time per stage is ([3 seconds] x [number of turns in your fastest run]), with a minumum of 20 seconds. You don't have to have the game open, you don't have to leave your screen on. Just let it farm that easy content and go on with your day.
PVP is a large part of the game. Some people really hate that, because it rewards whales. And you know what? It does. But you can auto repeat it and not even look at it for the normal arena.
However, there is also live PVP. What this entails is you and your opponent each go back and forth choosing units and placing them. So you can place a unit, get countered, counter that unit, or throw in curveballs mid-draft to make the opponent take a step back and perhaps overreact to a bait play.
It's an interesting take on live PVP that makes the game quite unique, and is a large part of the game's appeal.
The gacha in this game has two layers. The first is your standard gacha. You pull for heroes. The rates are: 1.2% SSR (1% dedicated to rate up), 7.83% SR (5.03% dedicated to rate up), and 90.97% R. You have banners, etc etc. Standard gacha stuff.
Then there is the Dominus Octo summon. This has special, rare, and powerful units only found in this summon pool. The rates are: 0.2% Domimus Octo, 2.04% SSR, 13.01% SR, 84.75% R. Those are some...rough rates. However, you can earn tokens called "Ancient Coins" in-game to summon half of the pool of Octos, and you can pick your Octo. I believe that when they add a new Octo, the oldest of the non-purchasable Octos get added to the pool to spend Ancient Coins on, but I cannot find definitive information to confirm or deny this.
Dupes are very important as this is how you raise skill levels and learn new skills, but the game gives out skill books during events. Because it is much easier to earn skill books for R and SR characters, and get dupes for them, this makes R and SR characters quite strong...until you reach the point where hyper whales will spank you. But that's PVP gacha for ya.
There is, however, a guarantee system that does not reset between banners, called the Mileage system. After 100 pulls you can pick any 4* character, after 400 you can select any 5* character.
If we make a guild, I'll add the information here.
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