HoloParade A-chan Motivation Guide

This guide will show at what level you should stop leveling A-chan to maximize overall motivation gain. It does not consider:

Damage from A-chan beam
Motivation gained from killing enemies / losing talents
Defending your flag / sacking it intentionally
Additional motivation gain from cymbals

This guide assumes you start a game by initially sinking all your motivation into A-chan levels, and then never upgrade her after that. The measurements were done with 70 trophies and extrapolated to the lower trophy counts.

Tl;dr: What Level is Optimal?

There are two numbers to decide what level you should stop leveling A-chan: How much motivation you wish to spend on talents, or how long the fight will take. While the time taken depends on your trophy level, the motivation does not (give or take 1 or 2 motivation, with some exception).

Motivation Range	Optimal Level	Time (70 trophies)	Time (0 trophies)
0-50	Lvl. 0	<1:18	<1:34
50-100	Lvl. 4	<2:17	<3:06
100-140	Lvl. 7	<2:47	<3:43
>140	Lvl. 8	—	—

If you expect a very short fight, not leveling A-chan is fine. If you want to farm trophies (<2:00 completions), then level 4 is the best place (level 2 is also fine). Otherwise, level 7 is the best, and if you have the motivation to spare or are doing endless, then get level 8.

Motivation Mechnanics

This table shows the motivation rates (motivation per second) for each motivation level and at each A-chan level (Note that only 70 trophy rates were measured: the other trophy counts were estimated by using the motivation up % rate on the rate, not the time elapsed — as a note, it may actually be the other way, I’m not sure). Each level increases your motivation rate by about 8%, up to a maximum of 1.8x multiplier at level 8.

This table shows how long it takes to reach each A-chan level, assuming you make perfect level ups each time. The yellow columns are the trophy levels where you increase your initial motivation.

Here’s the graph for 70 trophy motivation that was used to make those suggestions above. It’s really quite messy, so it’s better to just list out the intersections:

Upgrade	Motivation	Time
0–>1	51	1:11
1–>2	45	1:02
2–>3	67	1:32
3–>4	56	1:18
4–>5	107	2:19
5–>6	108	2:20
6–>7	105	2:17
7–>8	136	2:47

In other words, it’s never efficient to stop at lvl. 1, since you either should have stayed at lvl. 0 or gone up to lvl. 2. Lvl. 2 is actually more efficient than lvl.4 for about 10 motivation (16 seconds), so make with that what you will.

I’m lazy, so I’m only going to include the intersections for the 0 trophy motivation:

Upgrade	Motivation	Time
0–>1	47	1:34
1–>2	45	1:30
2–>3	67	2:09
3–>4	56	1:50
4–>5	108	3:10
5–>6	108	3:10
6–>7	105	3:06
7–>8	136	3:43

You can see that the motivation doesn’t really change with changing trophy count