Monster Rancher 3 - Raising Routes, Play Strategies, Tips

On a fresh game you won't have much choice of Drills.
It's probably best to just rest the first few weeks of a monster's life, as you probably will get a high chance of failure no matter what. Resting a few weeks in a row can actually help raise Style/Loyalty to reduce the Fail rate (Just remember, as a baby, and if the Stat associated with the drill is a low stat gain for the monster, it's still going to have a high liklihood of failure).

Basic things to consider:

• Feed Nuts until you can afford a choice of other things. Only if your monster 'likes' Vine Grass, You can feed it every 3rd or 4th month,otherwise avoid it.
• You can give your monster items found on adventure, won, or given by rivals during other weeks if they are beneficial, or you can stockpile up to 10 items before being prompted to throw items away if you've reached the limit.
• For Drill Great!: Choose "As Expected"
• For Drill Failure: Choose "Keep at it"

Unlock new training areas, and their hidden drills for more choice in training options as you compete in locale specific tournaments (Tournaments with the Icons like Clamshell, Palm Tree, etc.)

More Training with Durable Items

Preparing for the future. Start acquiring Durable (passive) items as soon as you're financially able to. Start with the cheap ones which you can later sell and upgrade to a better one. Unlike previous games that use weekly items, in MR3 the Durable items are your primary source of Stress and Fatigue management.

There is no "No-Rest" method like what is possible in earlier games, but they will help you to train longer or harder between rests. Each Durable can have varying levels of effectiveness. The individual categories stack, but the items within each category do not stack. The next level item replaces the lower level item.

Explanation of Monster Parameters

• Loyalty: Indicated by the meter on the lower left of the screen, this is made up of 2 hidden values "Fear" and "Spoil". When Spoil + Fear = 100 or more, the meter is filled. Loyalty affects the following (Higher is always better):
  • Foolery chances during battles.
  • Drill success rates.
• LIF: Your monster's hit points / Life meter.
• POW: Your monster's attack strength for Power based techs (Yellow Icon).
• INT: Your monster's attack strength for intelligence based techs (Green Icon).
• SPD: Your monster's evasiveness AND accuracy.
• DEF: Your monster's ability to reduce damage of incoming attacks.

SPD is the most important stat in the game. MR3 has changed this dramatically from any other game, combining BOTH the Dodge stat and Accuracy stat into one. It is incredibly important, especially in higher level tournaments. A Tech's base accuracy (and your ability to dodge an opponent's tech) is adjusted between the disparity of your monster's SPD versus the opponents.

Stat Gains

Gain levels have also changed in MR3. Going from a previous scale of 5 increments, now it ranges from 1 to 9, with 9 being the most effective.

Every monster has an aptitude of varying degrees for raising stats, see Monster Data. These are static, but they scale over the course of a monster's lifespan. As a baby, even high stat gains will look low, and low stat gains will look pathetically bad.

You can use Monster Evolution to alter stat gains! If your monster has a low stat gain in something you want to raise up, and one of the other region variants has a higher stat gain in the same stat, if you raise a monster in that locale and feed it the local food enough times, it will evolve ito that region.

Observe your monster's techs, and optionally check out their potential techs that can be learned, and decide if you want to focus on POW or INT based attacking

Focus on the Attack Stat you chose, and SPD (Start on the highest gain stat as early as possible for the most stat gain points per week). Eventually you'll unlock drills that can do more than 1 stat at a time. Some drills will lower a stat while raising two others. These will incur more stress and fatigue than single stat drills, but can give an overall net benefit, especially if the lowered stat from the drill isn't needed.

Aging Types

Different monster Life Types will progress through their life stages at different times. This affects their stat gain scaling and at which point in their lives they reach their peek.

• When evolving to a region's subtype, the Stat Gain patterns adjust to the new region stat gain pattern, however, the Life Type remains the same for the original Life Type that the monster starts with.
• According to the JP Softbank Guidebook, the scaling of overall growths also scales success chance on drills.