I’ve learned a lot in my first 30 days and counting. Many things were not apparent and I only discovered them through trial and error. I’m trying to remember a lot of it here before it becomes second nature. Feel free to add to this list, perhaps if it becomes informative enough it will be stickied.
Environmental Tiles
These are the tiles that aren’t a solid color and have some design on them that goes with the background behind the characters.
The number of AP generated by matching them is determined by the highest environmental damage (red circle with an M in it) - if your highest character is 4, then a 3 match gives you 12 environmental AP (EP?)
Critical tiles multiply the number of tiles you receive. If your crit is 3x and your environmental number is 4, a 2 tile, 1 crit match would yield (4 + 4) * 3 = 24 environmental AP
They aren’t randomly chosen, in a given PvP or PvE event, the same missions or sections of the room always have the same tiles. Standard PvP, the top is the computer room, the left is the forest and the right is the city
The max number of environmental AP you can have is 400
Covers
Covers are needed to raise your character’s level
The max covers you can apply to any one color of a character is 5
If a character has 2 color abilities, you can max both of them out - 10 covers or 5/5
If a character has 3 color abilities, you can only apply 13 covers yielding 5/5/3 or 5/4/4 in your chosen combination
Once you find/win a cover you can use HP to increase that color or wait until you find/win more
Matching
Matching 4 or more tiles in a row/column will destroy all of the tiles in that row/column
Matching 5 or more tiles in any shape (T, L, +) will yield a critical tile and give you an extra turn
Matching two adjacent parallel lines of a single color will also crit (ie - a 2x3 section of a single color).
I matched a 9x9 solid color block once and it did not crit at all (the centre most line matched first, breaking all the other crit possibilities).
I’m pretty sure the red circle with an M in it indicates crit multiplier… The little city icon indicates environmental damage.
On that note: Buffed charaters get their environmental AP stat and their crit multiplier increased, which means if you crit on an environmental you’ll get 200+ EP instantly.