Won Before the First Hit — What the Official Battles Post Means for Players

A week after the September 17 dev stream gave the first live look at combat, the Yakkamon team's guide series has stepped into the arena. The Battles post is eight numbered points long and it is the first written account of a fight from the moment you set your team down to the moment you get paid. The stream told us the shape — an auto battler where planning is 70% of the result. The post tells us the parts: a setup stage, a bench, skills you pick, a type on every attack, substitutions, three kinds of item, six kinds of fight, damage that follows you home, and a payout.

The team's own summary is the best one-line description of the system so far: battles are won before the first hit lands. Here is what the eight points say, what is new in each against what the streams had already shown, and what we would do about it before early access opens.

The eight points, in plain terms

Nothing in the post contradicts the stream. It adds to it at every point, and points 2, 5 and 7 change how we would build a roster.

Point 1: the formation is the game

The stream said 70% of a fight is decided before it starts. Point 1 says what that 70% consists of: a placement phase where you drag each Yakkamon onto the board and choose where it stands. Three things are named as mattering — who is up front, who is tucked behind, and which types are placed where. The first two are the tank-and-hitters logic the team already described with AROC, the rock Yakkamon parked in front. The third is new: position interacts with type, presumably because attackers move into range of whatever is nearest and you would rather that be a resistant body than a weak one.

It also closes the August chapter for good. The third dev stream described fixed lanes acting top to bottom with positions locked before the fight. “Position them however you like” is not a lane. Treat everything written about lane order and lane initiative as design history.

Point 2: the bench changes what a squad is

This is the point to read twice. The stream's “three or four” has been the site's squad size for a week. The post says most fights are team fights with several per side and reserves waiting on the bench to jump in when one goes down. Read together, three or four is the number on the board at once; the roster you bring is larger, and the extras enter as fighters fall.

That is a different roster-building problem. A four-slot squad rewards four excellent monsters. A four-slot board with a bench rewards depth — the fifth and sixth are not spare, they are the second half of the fight — and it rewards order, because a reserve arrives into a battle already in progress against whatever is still standing. It also quietly answers a question the stream left open: how a fight lasts long enough to be strategic when every Yakkamon acts on its own. Attrition and reinforcement is how.

Two smaller notes. Some encounters are one-on-one, which is probably the wild-encounter case — one hunter, one angry monster on the ground. And “several per side” is deliberately vague; whether the count is fixed, scales with the fight type, or grows with trainer level is not stated.

Point 3: you pick the skills, and that raises a question

The automatic part is as the stream described: a Yakkamon moves into range, attacks, and its skills fire when a condition trips. The post's examples are more everyday than the seed that sleeps its killers — heal when health drops below half; when this one faints, stun whoever took it out — and that is useful, because it shows the conditions are ordinary state checks (health thresholds, fainting, presumably kills and turns) rather than exotic triggers. Chain reactions are built by lining those checks up.

The new sentence is that you choose which skills each Yakkamon carries into battle. On its face that is a loadout: at setup, a Yakkamon takes some of what it knows. It sits awkwardly beside the August ruling that skills are respecced only expensively, by extracting one from a monster and moving it to another, and that buildcraft comes from breeding rather than hot-swapping loadouts before every fight. The two are compatible if a Yakkamon has a pool of skills it owns — bred, extracted, learned by leveling — and you select which of them it equips for a given fight. That reading is ours, it is the natural one, and it is not confirmed. How many skill slots, and where the pool comes from, are the two numbers this post leaves out.

Point 4: coverage is your skills, not your species

The site has carried thirteen types, one per Yakkamon, and a weakness count (two for dragons, three for everyone else) since the summer streams. Point 4 adds the rule that turns those into a combat system: hit a weakness for more, hit a resistance for less — and, crucially, every skill has a type of its own. A Yakkamon's offensive coverage is therefore the set of types across its equipped skills, which is the same design that lets a single creature threaten more than one matchup. Combined with point 3, skill selection is also type selection: bring the skills that punish what you are about to face.

And you know what you are about to face, because the post tells you to scout the enemy team in the setup stage. That is the counterpick loop in one line — see their lineup, pick your board, place your types — and it is why placement and type are named together in point 1. What is still missing is the chart. Thirteen types and a multiplier in each direction is a lot of table, and none of it is published.

Point 5: the 30% has three verbs

The stream showed one live action: a potion. The post gives the live game a full vocabulary. You can substitute — call a fighter back and send a reserve in, which with point 2 means the bench is a resource you spend on timing, not only an insurance policy. You can drag items onto the field, and the three examples are three classes: a potion on a struggling ally (heal), a debuff on a dangerous enemy, a shield before a big hit (protect). And before the bell you can equip one preparation item that gives the whole team an edge from the start — a slot, singular, which is the kind of constraint that becomes a whole sub-game.

Two things follow for the farm. Battle items are consumables, and the game's items are crafted from what your monsters gather — so the crafting bench is now an armory, and the untradable free-to-play layer gets one more sink. And “timing is everything” is the team saying the 30% is a skill: a shield before the big hit, not after, a debuff on the monster that is about to matter. Watching a fight is not optional if you want the live third of it.

Point 6: gyms work while you sleep

Four of the six fight types were known: wild encounters and hunt battles come from the Hunting post's angry temperament, live PvP is the arena (still not an early-access feature, still aimed at early next year), and player gyms were prototyped on stream. Event fights are new by name, with no detail. The real news is one clause about gyms: you leave a team behind for others to challenge, and it can be earning you wins even while you're offline.

That makes a gym an asynchronous defense — a team, a formation and a skill setup that fights without you, against trainers who chose to visit. It fits the stream's description of gyms sitting outside the core reward loop with leaderboards and status attached, and it is the purest expression of the 70% rule the game has: a defending gym has no live input at all, so it wins or loses entirely on how it was built. It is also a roster question, because a team standing guard in your gym is a team not on your bench. Whether gym defenders take persistent damage from challengers (point 7), and what a gym win actually pays, are not stated.

Point 7: damage sticks, so depth beats a bigger front line

“A Yakkamon that limps out of a fight carries that damage with them until they're rested or healed.” The site had hints of this — the hurt and knocked-out states in the build, an in-game notice telling trainers to rest their squad before a hunt — and the FAQ has said a lost hunt probably costs at least a recovery. Point 7 makes it a rule, and extends it to winning: a victory that leaves your best hitter at a quarter health is a victory you pay for in the next fight.

Three consequences. Rest is a battle resource: the stream's bed queue — too few beds and tired Yakkamon line up for one — now caps how fast a squad recovers, not just how fast it works. Healing items have a job outside combat, and so does whatever a “rested” monster means in hours. And the roster argument from point 2 becomes sharper: the trainer who can field a second team while the first heals fights twice as often as the one who cannot. The post says it plainly — you'll need to manage your roster between battles rather than throwing the same team at everything.

Point 8: three payouts, one of them new

Items, experience for the Yakkamon who fought, and trainer-level experience for you. The first two were expected. The third is the first mention of a trainer level as a thing battles feed — a progression track for the account, separate from any monster. What it unlocks is not said, but a level that only fights raise is a reason to fight even when the item drop is not worth the damage.

And the last line settles a hunting question: beat a wild Yakkamon and you might bring it home. The Hunting post gave three temperaments and told us only that the angry kind starts a battle; now a won battle is one of the three routes to a catch, beside charming the affectionate and paying the greedy. “Might” is doing work in that sentence — a win gives a chance, not a certainty.

What this does to the advice already on this site

Breadth beats depth, again. The Game That Starts the Next Morning argued type locking makes roster breadth the cap on production; the Hunting and Clock posts added temperaments and shifts. Battles add two more legs: type coverage across the skills you can equip, and enough bodies to bench, sub, guard a gym and heal at the same time.

The manager, not the player, holds. Our reading of the stream — you pick the squad and where they stand, and keep a potion for the touchline — survives intact, with a bench and a substitution board added to the dugout.

The crafting bench gains a customer. Potions, debuffs, shields and preparation items are consumables, and consumables are crafted. Every battle you fight is now demand for the farm.

Beds are a battle stat. We called beds a capacity after the stream. With persistent damage, they are also the rate at which your army comes back.

We have rewritten The Battle System around the eight points, touched Looking After Them, Your Base & Your Gym and Hunting, and updated the field guide, the quick reference and the FAQ.

How to get an edge

• Build for the bench, not the board. Aim for six to eight fight-ready Yakkamon before you care about a perfect four. Depth is what substitutions, gym duty and persistent damage all draw on.
• Learn the chart before anyone publishes it. Every fight shows you damage against a known type. Log attacker type, skill type, defender type and whether the number looked boosted or dulled. The thirteen-by-thirteen table will be crowd-sourced within days of early access; be one of the sources.
• Treat skill selection as type selection. When you can see the enemy team, equip the skills whose types punish it. A Yakkamon's own type is where it is weak; its skills are where it hits.
• Keep a second team healed. Damage sticks. Rotate: one squad fights while the other rests, and build beds before you build a bigger front line.
• Save the shield. The post's own example is a shield before a big hit. Items are consumables from your own crafting bench, and the one you use late is the one you wasted.
• Put a real team in your gym. It fights without you and earns while you are offline. A gym defended by leftovers is an open invitation; a gym defended by a formation you tested is a passive income of wins.

The five questions we'd put to the team

• How many Yakkamon stand on the board at once, how big is the bench, and does either change by fight type?
• How many skill slots does a Yakkamon have, and where does its pool of skills come from — breeding, extraction, leveling, or all three?
• How long does “rested” take, does a bed heal damage as well as stamina, and do gym defenders carry damage between challengers?
• What does a preparation item do, and is one per fight a hard cap?
• What does trainer level unlock?

The first and the third decide how many Yakkamon a serious trainer needs, which is the number every other decision in this game hangs off.

Read next

• The Battle System — the system page, rewritten around all eight points with the stream and August underneath
• Dev Stream Recap: the Battle System Unveiled — the September 17 tour: 70/30, four stats, AROC and the blizzard pot
• Every Wild Yakkamon Wants Something — the Hunting post whose angry monsters are point 6's wild encounters
• The Game That Starts the Next Morning — the breadth argument that just gained two more legs