Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
15 
Report this post
-While the game is on the stingy side when it comes to giving out luxite/pulls I would say overall the game is still fairly f2p friendly since you don't need to pull for character dupes like in other gacha games. There is a daily dungeon that allows you to farm up to 9 character shards a day (important note is that the shard dungeon only gives you 3 shards per character you use in the dungeon max) which will slowly allow you to star up your characters.
-Tier list wise I would recommend you look up a youtuber named Hawky Gacha since he's one of the more active content creators covering this game and has some good/useful guides.
-As for how to spend your resources I don't know what kind of player you are but assuming you are a meta player I would recommend you go for SP Safiyyah and Kvare both of which are pretty much must have units that will be coming out soon and in the long term (6 months from now) save for SP Inanna.
-The community is small but has a strong core following, and the current revenue was doing pretty well last video I saw so no fear of eos at least within the next 2 years or so.
Hope this helps and have fun!
If you mean rank competition where whales compete each other for top ranking, this game's population is low enough for most of us to ignore that..
All free online games claimed to be f2p friendly. But bear in mind it's a Chinese made game, so those FOMO and sales tactics and unfair features you hated are all in this game.
Pay wall locked contents exists.
If you want a similar game, try out Langrisser M instead. It's far more "free user friendly"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350146489
There's too few characters in the game for a list up right now, and bear in mind that this is a gacha game, power creep exist, so your "best tier" is always the "recently released characters".
Focus on level up your commander's level so you can fully access the full game and get your hands on the highest paid out daily quests. You can then do the Spiral of Destiny for some story and achievement collections until you ran out of story to pursue. After that, it's just repeat and rinse daily.
There's no in-game world chat, only guild chat. So... don't expect much of a chatty community.
The population of their original Chinese server doesn't do good and have reached new low monthly, the official forum is near dead right now.
As for the population here on Steam combining Global + Japanese + Korean servers...
Here's your report: https://steamcharts.com/app/2526380
Just because there are worse gacha games out there doesn't mean there aren't generous gacha games that made this game looks stingy in compare. This game ain't the worst but it's definitely not on the good side either. Remember that this game have pay wall locked contents, so it's not 100% free player friendly.
I have endless amount of gemst in SoC. Got every good character and still still have 30k for Khvare and Sophia.
150 per pull, 2% and characters get added to standart banners. You can even get characters you want from cashback from pulls.
Only Snowbreak does it better with 100% banners. Or Limbus company.
Every last mainstream gacha is WAY worse. 0.2-0.6% chances. pulls that cost 160-200 gems. And very little free gems.
Sure, as its been said, you only need a single hero from a banner and then you can just grind it out to five stars. But getting that hero can be irksome.
Then there is the store. The prices are an absolute joke and completely overpriced compared to other gachas.
Gacha who told you you only need 1 character lied to you, free players are designed to be never able to caught up with the whales. 300 fragments are needed to get your character to 5 stars, and you are limited to farm 3 fragments max per day per character. So it will takes 100 days minimum for you to max one character without constantly pulling for dupes in the gacha. Power Creep happens every 2 weeks to one month (depending on the update speed of each game), and 3 months are more than enough to guaranteed that your max character is no longer in the meta by the time you maxed it. Especially when you are playing miHoYo games, they will require you have multiple characters or even multiple teams at end game to be able to finish some of those special rule stages. Most free player's only option is to skip those rewards. So yeah, whales gets richer in resource when it comes to that.
As for the price in these Chinese made games, that price is "normal" for those Chinese, especially when most of these game companies are located in Shanghai, where miHoYo is located. Well, they relocated to Singapore for their global business right, but Singapore is among the top 3 expensive city in the world, speaking of which Hong Kong too, where XD (Xin Dong) is located. So they based their price range on that. Not all games have regional pricing like Steam/Valve, greed goes wild until someone can proved to them what they did is wrong by earning them more money using another method. But sadly, even when they did release their games on Steam, not all devs picked up that regional sales culture here on Steam. Right now, as far as i can see, only the giant companies followed, the smaller ones don't and stick to fixed price rate global. Especially the gacha games.
Like mentioned above, there are rules and laws for loot boxes restricting greedy designs of game companies. But most game companies used those laws to implement more selling chances and demands due to those laws are not perfect yet and hadn't caught up with the whole internet age (sadly, since 20 years ago). eg. Korea, the country who spam the globe with online games, is the 1st to came up with the anti-fatigue law, restricted game play online, so, game companies designed the "Stamina" system. Which they used the law to sell us stuffs like "stamina potions" and further "by the name of the law" restrict free players from catching up with the paid players. Right now, only Japan has the most laws against gacha, funny as it sounds since Japan is the origin of Gacha, so their Gacha games are actually the fairest to its players (not 100% without greed, mind you). Langrisser M may be made in China by ZLong, but it's under the contract and control from the Japanese company Masaya(Extreme), so they are making real J-game there (at least for Langrisser M only). Unlike miHoYo and XD who fake their games as J-games but is actually making their Chinese economy culture based games, which isn't much in control despite the rumors about their government, there's no enough laws in China to deal with them yet. Tencent who used to have Chinese government full trust (known the the Gov's dog back then) is the worst among them, they invented that "Auction House" greed system that fits into the Chinese rich 2nd generations where they don't even know the importance of money and they only know that they have too much money that they may never finish spending for their whole life. These Auction Houses are there for these type of rich to compete their richness. Everyone puts money in the auction, only the one that places the most money gets the 1st prize, top 3 prizes are rare and nice things, but the rest of the "condolence prize" are junks like craft ingredients and such, and all the money are taken by the auction house, including the money of those who didn't get the top 3 prizes. And to top it up, how "strong" your character is doesn't only depends on their gears and levels, there's extra "permanent" stat boost that came from other stuffs (miHoYo games have these too but on the moderate side when compared with Tencent's), such as, collecting a certain avatar picture gives you +3 str, collecting a certain mount/vehicle gives you +15 def, collecting a certain avatar frame gives you +2 mdef, even chat stickers and chat bubbles gives you stats, outfits and all other vanity stuffs comes with permanent stats.... Well for those who can afford it, it's the ultimate "fair to consumer" design, because every penny you spent in the game is somewhat "worth" something in return... and ironically, these games do come in "free to play" format, and free players aren't even on the starting line as a "consumer", imagine your Lv80 character get 1 shot kill by a Lv50 whale in the arena... that's one full realistic material world they have there, a lot of lessons to be learned for the "free players" who are treated worse than beggars in online games.
So if you want to go into details, gacha itself ain't the worst economy system out there for sure. But remember those who have experienced the old school online games before some of the weird laws interfere have experienced some of the best out there, online games that works not much difference to offline games exist back then.
Ironically, back in the old days, where online games do not have unfair design and often are subscription based (high commitment)... despite everyone is having the same thing on the same game balance, 2nd rated citizens still exist in these games as well, where a certain "free player" will going around "begging" others to pay for their subscription fees. So i won't say there exist a game that's 100% fair unless it's an offline game with no vanity competition in design. That's probably the reason behind why Steam has a report showing they followed 1.7mil users "with 141 millions total play time on record", and check their spending activity on Steam from 2024 to 2025 and reported that those Steam users spent 20 millions on microtransaction and 73 millions on offline games. Which means Offline games still wins the heart of most paying gamer. But sadly, it also means, despite the hate on microtransaction, they still get their fair support from paid users, so do not expect these online games to died out any time soon even when you hated their unfair designs...
As for "free to play" online games, where FOMO and Vanity competition at its highest peak, the "fairness or game balance" often doesn't take the free players in account. The "real fun" and "true balance" only starts when you started to pay in these games (yes, some might argue they can be happy with the 2nd rated treatment and pretended that there's no one living a better and easier life than them in the same game). In fact, these games are often designed not to let any free players catch up with the paid players, period. And sometimes it's worse, free players are often considered "numbers" that made the game look highly populated to attract more of those that may pay (and these who pay aren't always players, the numbers are used to attract investors in the game's company share holding). And since free players do not contribute much to the server maintenance, they aren't really welcomed to stay long by most default designs. So the "free" part you get there are often harsh and short termed, most players quit before seeing end game, or the game free part is short where everyone can finished in a really short term. They aren't designed to let free players stay for a long time at all. You either need to be extremely stupid with math, had a loyal heart of a dog that never doubt others may harm you, or had too many free time on hand to be able to tolerate those "free system".
Just because the game let you collect fragments for 3 months to max a character doesn't mean they are being fair to you, like i said before, power creep exist in all online games that sells you weapons and characters, by the time you collected enough fragments to star up your characters, they are already out of the meta and is no longer able to compete with the whales that spent money getting the most recently released characters on max stars (ever wondered why 3 months are needed to farm the fragments?).
As long as a game separates its players to 1st and 2nd rated citizens, there's no way it can be fair.
And to compare the whole thing on the same level if you like, by comparing other games with fragment collections, SoC is still on the stingy side when you compare it with Langrisser where you are not only able to get the character specific fragments, but also the wild-card fragments that works on all characters in L, speeding up the farm rate far faster and given its players more flexibility on the choices (weapons has the same wild-card design, so we are not tied to dupes for star up in L). So when there exist another game that are way more generous in compare, you can't avoid others calling this game "stingy".
In fact, some non-legendary has it use and stronger than most legendary in certain content.
However, if you want to get all legendary, like most gacha, you need to pay.
You don't need duplicate to max out any char, but it takes time to farm fragment to max out, so you need to prioritize well. Some legendary can do well with just 1-3 stars. No need to max out star to be usable.
While in compare, Langrisser M, there's no paid users exclusive stuffs other than vip subscriptions that gives exp boost, extra sp and extra rewinds. End game users do not need the boost at all due to we get enough ingredients to instantly max level a heroes. Extra SP are nice, but they do not come with extra sweeps nor extra stamina, so it's not really a good investment unless you wish to buy stamina just to finish your "extra" dailies. Extra Rewinds are nice, but we get enough free ones already so again, it's not a must have stuffs. So, other than these "extra" features that's pretty useless for most end game players, there really isn't anything that a free players can't get their hands on where paid players can. The only advantages paid players have is the max character stars using gacha, and the cash only store packages that let them buy ingredients without the need to farm... yup pay to win exist and unfair design still exists, it's an online game after all. But if you want to fully compare on the "free user friendly", at least they don't lock stuffs up where free players can't get their hands on unlike SoC with paid only contents. Oh... the 300 fragments requirement to max character is there in Langrisser as well, but they also comes with extra "wild-cards" fragments that works on all characters, so you can get more then 9 per day which makes maxing characters slightly faster than SoC. Plus, there's the same wild card design for weapon/gear's star up. Meaning you do not need to farm multiple gears dupes to max them, this is especially great when you need to max really really rare gears. While in compare, in SoC, they tried to sell you gacha-based gears that free players may need months to years of farming to max one or completely giving them up and use the free ones instead. And speaking of gears, the RNG rate to get extra stats on gears in SoC using legendary ingredients is ridiculous low when you compare it with Langrisser which has way higher rate based on the rareness of ingredient you used.
And to compare the 2 games' gacha. SoC is actually more "Whales friendly" than Langrisser. Due to the banners design in Langrisser weighted more to free user friendly and nothing special to benefits the Whales, while SoC let Whales gacha fragments more easily with its rules. So i won't say SoC has nothing better than Langrisser, at least, if you're playing as a whale, SoC is better and require less gacha pulls to max a character.
And winning without legendary only works in early pve contents, not the events nor the power-creep filled late contents. A 5 stars characters in this game is only as strong as 1~3 stars next higher rank by stat wise, and there's not much "utility skills" that made them important at late game at all, in fact, this game keeps releasing a legendary or "better version" of the previous characters, effectively kicking them out of the meta.
While in compare to Langrisser (again), there exist characters from the lowest rank (silver**) with special talents that is so tactically useful that some of them is still the favorite among the users after so many years (the game never did replace them with a better version, so they continue to shine over the years).
** Just to clear stuffs for those who didn't known, silver (R) is the lowest rank in Langrisser, only the 3 protagonists started as bronze (N), but they get to be promoted to rainbow (SSR) when they star-up. Collab characters like Parn from "Lodoss Wars" also share this trait, he starts from gold (SR) and ended up with SSR when star up. The rest of the characters do not change their rank when star up. But some R/SR/SSR can be grade up to SP (shiny rainbow) rank, and there exist special annual celebration characters that's on LLR (Langrisser's Legend Rarity) where they let users vote for their fav character[ac-o.namu.la] and release them as LLR during the game's annual celebration events (Any characters no matter R/SR/SSR gets a chance to be selected as the vote candidates). But note that LLR characters aren't really better than the rest of the characters in terms of tactical value, but they do look better with special love on their character designs, making them a trophy to collect. **
There isn't any x10 guarantee in this game unlike other games (eg. Langrisser) that gives a guarantee of 1 SR or Higher per x10 pull.
So you can still get a total of All Ns or a mix of both R + N lowest rank without getting any SR nor SSR in your x10 pull. They only guarantee your x100 pull here in SoC.
And the only way to "guarantee" getting the the banner hero is get ready to do 180 pull.