Dispatches are side missions in which you send off various units from your garage to do stuff for a period of time (usually on the grounds of hours). Each mission has requirements that bots have to meet to improve success rate, usually requiring 5 bots capping at 20% success rate each to guarantee success. These are typically intuitive and a lot of times involves having bots of at least a certain level, having bots whose stats exceed some threshold, or having bots that have certain cartridges and equipment.
If the mission succeeds, you receive a prize (which I'll go into later), your robots will get experience if they can, and you may get Dispatch Points. The main purpose of running dispatches, ultimately, tends to be to get EX Tune Materials that are given by certain discs.
Dispatch points are used to perform higher level missions. It should be noted that they are consumed to perform those missions, not simply retained.
From a Dispatch Point perspective, there's basically three kinds of missions.
- Some Missions have no dispatch point requirement, and give you some small amount as a reward. The Sirius and Spica discs you can buy for UC almost exclusively contain these, and this is basically your means to build up Dispatch Points early on as they tend to be extremely easy to satisfy the requirements.
- Some Missions have a Dispatch Point requirement, and give a higher amount of Dispatch Points back as a reward. These tend to have much larger requirements of bots (such as what iKray cited, some require you to have 5-15 tunes across the dispatched bots), but their actual yield is higher than that of the free missions. They also tend to complete faster. Deneb Discs have a lot of these missions, and once you start getting a lot of bots that do satisfy these requirements, they make a much faster means to gain Dispatch Points (and some rewards along the side).
- Some Missions have a Dispatch Point requirement, and either give you less Dispatch Points or none at all. These missions are all about the end prize, and it's for them that you build up all your Dispatch Points.
So let's do a quick overview of Disks. I'm only going to go over the ones still in general circulation, not any of the special event discs.
- Sirius and Spica Disks are the ones you buy in the shop, they have only free missions, and are basically a means to build up Dispatch Points. They give you all manner of general tuning materials on average, so it's also a quiet way to just stock up on those. Sirius has a fixed set of three missions (unlocked as you complete the earlier ones), while Spica has a hodgepodge collection of many types of missions.
- Deneb Disks, found in pretty much any game mode, are basically a step up from Sirius/Spica, and consist primarily of higher cost/higher yield missions. They also give materials, you won't see a big difference from the yields of Sirius/Spica.
- Altair Disks, also found in pretty much any game mode, give you quests with 200-350 Dispatch Point requirements, They give various slotted part prizes as well as the occasional EX Tune Material.
- Rigel Disks have two kinds of missions - missions (typically from Clie, who you might remember from Sirius Disks) that require 500 Dispatch Points, and missions that have decidedly less requirement and give a little refund. The 500-point missions generally give EX Tune Materials, while the other missions tend to give slotted parts and other tuning materials. You can get these from the Super UC Gara and the UC Gara DX.
- Vega Disks consist of a single mission, are found rarely as Arena and Arcantus prizes. This mission takes 3 days to complete, consumes 1000 Dispatch Points, and requires 10 robots. I have not personally done it but I'm under the impression that it gives a fair amount of EX Tune Materials.
- Ivis Disks consist of 3 missions, like Sirius in that they are unlocked over completion of earlier ones. They give random tuning materials, some minor accessories, and have chances to yield special accessories (Mini Dress Ivis Beta, Big Black Ribbon, Red Layer Ribbon, Gothic Headdress WR, and Ivis Print Fan). The first two missions tend to give mostly mats and the occasional unslotted accessory. The third mission costs 60 Dispatch Points but has chances to yield slotted versions of those accessories. Still has a chance for tune mats and other minor accessories like Silk Hats, though, if you're unlucky.
So, basically, discs are used to do two things - passively run them to build up Dispatch Points, and then use those Dispatch Points to aim for either EX Tune Materials or accessories/slotted parts. Since you can't regularly get those things from active play, then if you have spare bots that are capable of doing these, it really is just a background process to run while you do your normal arena or missions or questing, and pretty much gives nothing but profit (even if it may be weak at times).
