Most unlikely that anyone but me is interested in this, anyway i'll share the knowledge i gained by routing this game:

GENERAL INFOS:

Crystal Warriors is a tactical RPG with 16 stages (or battle fields) to complete. To complete a stage, there are 2 solutions: kill everyone or reach the enemy gate. There is an exception for the 5 boss stages where the only condition is to kill the boss. The game is hard, experience is limited to level 9, and the choices you make with investing money can be run killers casually. In town you can buy equipment, spells and sometimes hire a new character.

There are 4 types of characters (warrior, mage, healer, the Princess), and you can choose up to 9 characters for your team to beat a level. Warriors belong to an element, while healers, mages and the princess are neutral to elements. The Princess is special, a kind of warrior that can learn certain spells. If the princess dies in combat, the game is over.

This game is based on 3 elements, Fire is strong against Wind, Wind is strong against Water and Water is strong against Fire.

There are 2 types of adversaries on the battlefield, monsters and enemies. Monsters can be tamed when beaten, so that you can use them to attack or defend when the character who tamed it is in combat. You cannot retreat from a monster fight. Enemies are the ones you really fight, their element and kind are hidden until you scan them or go to combat.

Movement range depends on the character and type of terrain, and also if you have an enemy next to you or not.

RNG:

There is not a lot of RNG in this game, but it has a big impact on the strategies and on the time gain or loss:

_monsters movements, and in a smaller amount enemies movements. Most of them can be manipulated by your actions and position on the field, but some setups show random variations among 2 or 3 possibilities.

_damage is fixed in most of the time, depending on the elements, levels, weapon and the terrain type, but in some places, there can be a variation of 1 or 2 damage which seems random based, especially against monsters.

_critical strikes and misses are your biggest concern. Critical doubles damage so it has a big impact, misses can troll you a lot. In lots of situations criticals are not wanted, because damaging an enemy to at least half of his HP will trigger the healers to heal him. You basically have to figure backstrats for any of these misses/criticals, sometimes it is not possible as it kills the run (setup fails that cause 5 min loss, or enemy who kills a guy with a critical)

STRATS:

When it is not a boss stage, the fastest will be to rush to the enemy door. Because we need money and experience, kills are needed along the way.

Most of the time, i made setups using the fact that enemies take the Princess as a primary target, leaving space elsewhere for another guy to go to the door. Sometimes Princess alone is tough enough when enemies are few and don't block her.

A lot of setups also use Princess and Murak as a team, because these characters have more movement than the other, and become strong quickly. By placing one next to the other, any of them has at least 1 tile free from enemy that can lead to free space, and they need 6 enemies to block you instead of 4 (just like in the game of Go). If needed, one of them can kill a blocking enemy so that the other can go on walking in the same round.

Additionally, i found special placement setups that manipulate enemy movements, because in a lot of stages a healer or a tough guy has the role of occupying the enemy castle door tile to prevent you from escaping. These setups are meant to cause this guy to move and leave the door open, either by trying to be sure that the Princess (or another) will have enough free space around to attract the tough guy, either in case of a healer by keeping an enemy below half of his HP each round, once the healer has moved from the door, because enemies healers never move when they heal, so he cannot rear back to the door to block it.

Sometimes healers are used to attract enemy mages or to prevent them from attacking the Princess, as they seem to be primary targets for them. Risky strat in late stages because the healer can be oneshot by a critical spell.

A special care has to be given if it is an attack turn or defence turn for combat, because if you attack an enemy below half his maximum HP, healers will heal him. But the AI healings are chosen at the very beginning of the round, when the enemy attacks begin, you are sure there won't be anymore healings in the AI turn, you can then freely damage enemies below their healing trigger, so you can kill them after when it is your turn.

DREAM TEAM:

To have the best team to beat the game, even casually, you have to buy a second healer, damage is just too big at the end of the game, even when you are level 9. So yeah, hire Oryon after stage 4, definetly.

Then, you already have your team.. you even need to say goodbye to Ratt and Dayne at one point, they will take more time to play, so even when they could be useful, the time loss is not worth it. I actually killed them in my previous runs, but i have to test if it is not quicker just to remove them from the team if possible to remove any (not found yet) :p

EDIT: By a weird routing mind process, i forgot at one point that you could end the round at any time and thought you had to play all your party characters each round. This was the main reason i ended up killing Ratt and Dayne. So in theory, you could keep Ratt and Dayne until the end of the game with just not playing them. It seems not possible to rearrange your team or have one of the characters not to play for a stage.

But the fact is that the presence of Ratt or Dayne will change the starting tile of the other characters too, and some (a lot) of setups i have found are not possible with them in the party, because the characters start at a different position and either the enemy behaviour changes, or characters are 1 or 2 tiles too far to reach positions in time. For the moment, it seems a better option to sacrifice them, as i haven't found really relevant setups with Dayne alone or both of them (Ratt is quite useless endgame, i never really considered keeping him only).

So there is a little time to gain on the record at the start of the game, because i had to move Ratt and Dayne to keep them close to the action (because the cursor to select your character is very slow, and i otimized quite a lot the order of my moves to save time). I figured strats already, but never improved my time with the fact you can end your round anytime.. well.. because the run is hard mostly ^^

Kaddath.