BASIC GAME PLAY: Two minutes and done?

Some players visit the game, do their job and fight a boss, pay respect, and bam! They're done! It takes a minute or two and they say, "Where's the attraction to this game?" Fair enough. Here is what I would say to a new player about using energy and stamina to level up.

At level 14, it should take about 180 XP to get to the next level. At this stage, leveling is your goal, because the stat points (SP) that you get are how you grow.

Each time you level up, you get 5 more stat points (SP), which you will want to use on energy. The first thing I tell a beginner to do is to try to get his Energy and Stam to 100. Why? Because the game gives you one energy and one stam every 5 minutes. If your capacity is 100, and you use all of yours up, you can get back in 8 hours and have 96 of each - you'll get the full benefit of the "manna from heaven" for Energy and Stamina. I like to see them both more like 150, so that you can go more like 12 hours without missing out. The game gives you 288 Energy and 288 Stamina in 24 hours.  

So, very basically, you want to acquire S and E, and convert them to XP, so you can level up. Converting E to XP happens doing district jobs. In the first district, Slums, there are six jobs you can do - Find Leads, Skull Station, Skull Hideout, Skull Armory, Skull Market, and Skull Boss. After you finish them, you can go back through and "five-star" them - do each one 4 more times. When you finish 5-starring a district, you get a reward. For district 1, it's 5 Favor Points (FP).

I don't recommend 5-starring a district until you've made it to the end of the following district. My reasoning is that sometimes the next district has a job that needs a lot of cash for weapons. When that happens, you can do some of the jobs in the previous district to whip up quick cash. Once you finish district 2 once through, you would go back and 5-star district 1.

In another thread, I'll talk about why you might want to rush to finish district 3, or district 5, before you 5* anything (it's about opening more seats for lieutenants).  But for now, we'll just say that you turn E into XP doing jobs. The average conversion is about 1.2 XP per E, but you can get 1.5 XP per E if you keep doing "Find Leads" over and over. There are a couple of pretty good ones in Tracks (District 2) also.

You convert Stamina (S) into XP two ways. One is to battle. The other is to do "Boss Jobs." I don't battle. My guys are at level 400-500 and still at battle rank 7-8, where they were in the first week or two. I do boss jobs. There is a reason. Battling converts stamina to XP at a rate of 2.0 XP / S. Boss jobs convert stamina to XP at an average rate of 2.5 XP / stam. I like to level up, so I want to get the most XP for my S and E. Besides, the more I battle, the more i get hit when I'm not doing anything, and they take my money!

So, in general, I do district jobs and boss jobs until I'm out of E and S. Then I let it go until later.

When I was at level 11, I had 50 energy and 28 stamina, which would normally get me 50*1.2 XP for the E and 28*2.5 for the S, and that's ... um, 70 XP for the stam, and another ... 70 for the energy, so that's about 140 XP. At level 11, I think I needed 200 XP, so after I used up my S and E there was a shortage. I call it a hike. I had to hike 60 more XP.

You get 12 E and 12 S an hour. That means that you can convert energy to XP at a rate of 12*1.2 XP/hr, or 16.4 XP/hr. You can convert energy to XP at a rate of 12*2.5 XP/hr, or 30 XP/hr. So, the hiking pace is about 46 XP/HR and about 1100 XP/day. I think of it as 1000/day, because that way if I need 600 XP, I think it's 60% of a day. If you are only about 60 XP short, come back in 90 minutes, you can level up. 

After you reach 150 E and 150 S, you might decide you want to go the Attack / Defense route, or the Energy / Stamina route, or something in between. You have some time before you get there, sometime around level 50-60. That might take you a week or ten days. If you do it faster or slower, no worries. 

So, if you come in during the morning, and play two minutes, cool! But you'll probably want to come back about 8 hours later, to empty your newly collected E and S. Who am I kidding? I would come back at the exact minute I expect to be able to level up!