Some basic combat mechanics

Turn based combat on a grid system is an indispensable part of the game so here are some mechanics and statistics that will shape how that aspect of the game is played. Every turn the player must control one character on the battlefield and use them to move or attack in a way that completes the map objective. Enemy characters also receive turns and will attempt to hamper the player. Winning will most often revolve around eliminating all enemy characters from the battle field. Characters have a body or health stat from one to eight. Attacks reduce this stat and when the the body stat reaches zero the character dies and loses a spirit point. Every turn the character stays dead an additional spirit point is lost. When all spirit points are lost the character is permanently removed from the game. The spirit points starts at seven and any reductions transfer to all future battles. So if the main character is injured and dies his spirit is reduced to six for the rest of the game. If he is dead for multiple turns his spirit can be reduced even lower, when it's reduced to zero that's a game over. Because a body stat higher than five is extremely rare it is likely your characters will die often without the aid of armor. Armor effectively adds extra points to the front end of a character's body stat. So if a character has two body points and three armor points an attack dealing five damage is necessary to kill them.
Damage from physical attacks is obtained by applying the simple equation of force*weapon sharpness. One hume mustering up their full might can usually create one to two units force. A strong well trained warrior can muster one to three. Weapon sharpness can be increased by upgrading the materials used to forge a weapon. Damage from Zoal attacks is force*technique+Tox. So a spiraling drill of liquid Zoal would not have the same force as a large pushing wave, but it would have greater technique and do more damage. Tox or toxicity is the amount of Zoal that can be channeled through the mind before damage and death is incurred by the raw psychic energy. Tox is increased every time the character uses Zoal, but a character can also expend extra Tox to make a technique bigger and more dangerous.
Turn order is decided by speed. Characters with higher speed take turns first and characters with extremely high speed can sometimes take double turns.
Knowledge is a somewhat useless stat until the player unlocks the spirit talker job. Then a higher knowledge allows a character to summon greater spirits.
These stats with the exception of armor also play a critical role on how good a character is at civilian jobs as well. But I'll go over that later.