Hire or recruit new soldiers

[uncleseano]

By that I mean should you get the recruits from the town centre NPC or should you hire mercenaries from the guild? Does it even matter? Also any advice on beginner builds? Like when you get your third Union for elysion

[PinkPаптҥэя]

The recruits from Town Square are Soldiers, the ones from the guilds are Leaders, either unique or generic ones.
Generally you want Leaders, since they have better stats, better stat growth and have more skills. But you have to pay for their hire.
Generic leaders can be as good as unique ones, but they start with their one or two skill trees and won't add more at certain BRs like unique leaders do.
Soldiers cost nothing and can be used for temporarily filling up slots in your party and discarding them later, without having lost money.

Concerning team building: The most important thing early in the game is having someone with Vivification ability in each union. For that reason (among others) it's better to have less unions (= with more members) in the early game.
A unit learns Vivification Herb after 18 successful uses of Restorative Herb, so you might want to push herbs over mystic healing early in the game, given you have enough gold (start hunting and selling rare monsters).
The earliest reviving units in the game are Neales, an Athlum Soldier and Faye, a generic leader from Celapaleis. Don't forget to buy herbs for Vivification in Athlum.

[uncleseano]

Great, thanks for the advice, I'll get right on that. I already have a bunch of creatures that I had captured but I was keeping them for some thinking that they were important later. I'll sell them off now so if they ain't needed.

Any once I have room in my party for more member I'll make sure to grab guild mercs over the cannon fodder. Thanks again!

EDIT: By any chance do you know of any mods for TLR? I would be looking for stuff like better graphics, textures etc, or maybe even just stuff that removes that awful map music!

[PinkPаптҥэя]

The music can be turned down in the settings.
AFAIK there are no mods for this game, except for some weird graphics mod:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/23310/discussions/0/412447331652151830/

[uncleseano]

Yeah that ENB just over saturates everything so it looks an lad on acid vomited all over my screen. I dropped it quick smart!

Though this:
http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Tweaking
is great, lots of nice performance fixes there

[uncleseano]

Is there a list out there in internet land that shows Battle rank by zone? As in what is a good rank for each area to be at

[PinkPаптҥэя]

Originally posted by uncleseano:

...As in what is a good rank for each area to be at

BR is by no means an indication of your party's strength or skills, so the question probably misses its point.
BR only indicates (roughly) how many enemy unions you've defeated so far.
The game then uses BR to adapt the enemies strength, so BR mostly is used against you, actually...!
Whether your party did improve or not is not reflected in that BR score, but in the unit's stats.
So you can gain BR with or without improving your party's stats, that depends on the battles:
- Short battles against weak targets will gain you almost nothing, still increasing your BR
- Long battles against strong targets makes you use a lot of arts and therefore improve your stats a great deal; still your BR increases by the same amount as in the first example.
That's the other reason why fighting easy mobs is not recommended, but hunting rares is.

Originally posted by uncleseano:

Is there a list out there in internet land that shows Battle rank by zone?

It concurs more or less with the order of unlocking of the areas (with only very few exceptions); the more you progress in the game plot, unlocking new areas, the higher the enemy's BR get.
Even within the same area the mob's BR is usually quite low, while the rares have a higher one.
You can guess an enemy's BR by the type of standard attack command you're getting:
http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_Commands
As a guideline, don't fight enemies where the attack command reads 'Drive 'em out!' or 'Clean 'em up quick!'. There's nothing to gain there but BR...

[uncleseano]

Yeah I know what BR does I was just asking because after going through the catacombs/mines and having a tricky enough times I twigged that my moral was always almost 0.

In fact I've never seen that special move that Rush, and all my attacks say stuff like 'Don't be afraid to Die' etc. I'm so confused, on one hand I'm told to not fight creatures and the other says to fight all of them!

Now when I do fight I get a great deal of stat increases. I'm BR 8 after doing the mine

[PinkPаптҥэя]

Of course it's OK to fight. This game is about fighting battles after all.
But after a while you might get to a point where many battles become very short, sometimes less than a whole turn. And that will hurt your progress because many times only the first union will get the chance of using arts. BR will increase nonetheless without getting anything stat-wise in return for the rest of the team.

That point is not now, as you probably noticed the increase in difficulty entering the Catacombs.
At this point the battles are challenging enough to last a couple of turns.
But as soon as you notice a certain type of enemy yielding only one-turn battles, I'd stop fighting those.