Interceptor

Doubt I can catch the streams, but glad to see you're still workin' this. 👍

Every gamer has a title that captured their attention like no other at just the right time: mine was Final Fantasy VI. There are few things in this world that can stir a little bit of warmth into my barnacled stone of a heart, but one of them is a 16-bit dog that protects a sassy little girl and her deadbeat dad.

From memory (admittedly unreliable), Sumia is supposed to be in one of the forward positions. She's only going to get directly attacked by one mage; the point of the maneuver is that the second mage will also move towards her to attack, which allows the barbs to get ahead of them. Mages will ruin the choke, since they hit too hard. The idea is to hold the line long enough to kill off the fliers first, before having to deal with ranged attackers. But C5 is generally a Huge Goddamn Pain in the Ass<tm>. In retrospect, I mostly got through with luck. It might be less reliable than C2, something which would seem absurd in 2013 but is probably true in 2015. Amen.

Doesn't surprise me, it's pretty old. The newer strategies are better, especially since you can conserve vulneraries for later use. If I ever win the lottery and quit my job, I'll add one of those to v2.0 for sure.

Oh please. Inside three minutes of posting, I had someone on my nuts offering up Tellius as an example of rich story/characterization. Fire Emblem Reality Distortion Field is as strong as ever. Awakening delivers an entertaining, emotional roller coaster ride of a story. That's already beyond what can reasonably be expected from a game in this franchise. It's not a failing of the game if it can't stir the feels of a cynic, or of someone who can't suspend their disbelief. You're off the reservation as soon as you start talking about the "cohesiveness" of its story, just like if someone takes issue with the realism of the weapon triangle. You know, after a certain number of examples something stops being an exception and starts indicating a trend.

No, I just have standards. Nothing in this franchise surpasses "entertaining"; not that there is anything wrong with that.

Expecting a high-quality story from a Fire Emblem game is like expecting Arby's to carry filet mignon. It has never happened before, and probably never will in the future, so this remains one of the more hilarious (to me, anyway) complaints abut Awakening. This game's plot is nothing more than a binding agent for the gameplay, like mayo in a tuna fish sandwich. There are places in this world for rich stories and characterization, and some of those places are video games, but Fire Emblem ain't one of 'em.

If you can handle H5 without deaths, you can handle Lunatic. The mechanics are not so complicated that you won't be able to figure out how to use them properly. Just keep in mind that while the difficulty is comparable to H5, you're going into Awakening blind. One of the top under-rated things about Fire Emblem is the value of practical chapter experience (i.e. knowing what's coming). These days I can do Lunatic standing on my head, but my first Lunatic run was not very pretty, and it's not like I've become an order of magnitude better at playing TBS games in the last two years.

^ I know that the discussion is about Robin here, but this is also a big part of the reason that LAURENT! is such a badass in L+. Particularly with a strong +SKL support, like Lucina on BK.

The math is right, he just worded it weirdly. Luna+ ignores half of 3, which the game truncates to 1, leaving 2 RES left.

LTC players are a minority here; a vocal one, for sure, but a minority still. There are plenty of expert players that don't worship the altar of the Turncount. Sorry not sorry if that takes away an excuse for you to be shitty to people. The thing with Donnel is interesting as a sort of proof of concept of his viability in L+. As an argument, it's pretty poor: sunk by contradictions and hyperbole. As you noted, this isn't GameFAQs.

What's the plan for dealing with Luna+ in Ch5? Do you figure that a powered-up Lissa will be enough to stay ahead of the curve? I never tried beasting through it in my PT, just because targeting only those two skills on a reset is an easy mark to hit.

Very nice, congrats on a really successful run and thanks for sharing it. It's refreshing to see that LAURENT! is exactly as much of a house with Sol as you'd think, and that Chrom is pretty usable outside of Lord. I was not expecting you to be able to field so many competent mages/staffers, but that's a thing that happened and it appears to have been pretty helpful.

It annoys me. There is just mass ignorance when it comes to the general difficulty of implementing "good" AI; your average person just takes their brain's extensive pattern recognition power for granted. It took a supercomputer just to match a Chess grandmaster at the turn of the century, and AI still can't beat a Go expert without a massive handicap, even though the game has been around for 2,500 years. I think that I am just going to post this xkcd comic in every thread where someone complains about the AI in this series:

The GBA titles aren't just dated, they have bad design that can't be explained away by the platform. It's not like we didn't have the technology to make a decent UI at the turn of the century, after all. I don't care about the graphics or the music, I care about having to fight with the game to do basic tasks. Wrangling Blazing Sword is like playing the piano while wearing mittens. PoR and RD are slightly better at dealing with this, but still made some gameplay decisions that are real head-scratchers in retrospect. This aspect of efficient use of gaming time doesn't really resonate in a forum full of teenagers and college kids; I get that. But it's a thing for gamers who lead busy lives. The AI in Fire Emblem is pretty damned good, considering what it's expected to do and what it has to work with. Do you have any idea the kind of effort and computational power it takes to do something like what we get in Awakening? There are a few logical tweaks that could be made (strategy is always going to lag when you introduce new mechanics like Awakening did), but for the most part it's fiddling around the edges. It should blow your mf'ing mind that you can even "skip" Enemy Phase on a handheld device in the first place.

Please learn to quote posts properly. I feel pretty comfortable with my original statement; your position is hyperbolic and unreasonable. It's spelled "preference", and I did specifically say that it was an unpopular opinion.

Awakening has higher difficulties for a reason; I don't want to hear complaints about pacing from people who are grinding away on the bunny slope at the ski resort. Anyone who thinks that Ch6 doesn't feel like a "Defend" map, is invited to play it on Lunatic+ without the Outrealm Gate. There are no atheists in foxholes, and no Lunatic veterans who think that Pair-Up is "ridiculously OP". I used to enjoy the classic titles, but Awakening murdered my enjoyment of anything older than Shadow Dragon. I say this as a player who was introduced to the series at Radiant Dawn; while I enjoyed going back and playing the GBA titles at first, as of a couple years ago I simply can't stand them anymore. Unpopular opinion alert: games should be fun, and the fun:work ratio of Awakening is the highest of any game in the series. Everything about the UI and game flow is designed to stay the f'n hell out of my way, and let me do cool things. By comparison, Blazing Sword feels like going to the Post Office.

Doesn't really matter what you make her. The real powerhouse in that couple is LAURENT!, who is a complete badass, and Lucina is already contributing the necessary stats and DS+ for her part. I think that Bow Knight is strictly better overall, but honestly the difference is something that a mouse could starve on. I'd say just go with your gut.

N.O.W.I. only needs the +DEF to help with training. You can get the same effect by throwing Gregor on her temporarily, and since they are basically guaranteed a C-rank support if you use them together in their joining chapter, you probably want to do that anyway.

This is why I tell people to pay attention to the map design: Awakening already has varied "objectives" in the game, the difference is that it doesn't get in your face about it and say "HEY BUDDY THIS IS A DEFENSE MAP OK". Awakening is very good (at least early on) at providing pressure in the form of vulnerable recruitable units, strategically placed terrain, special environmental effects, enemy reinforcements, etc. For example, Ch6 is basically a Defend mission in all but name. Emm will get wrecked out by anything that reaches her, there is no One Ring easy-mode choke available, enemy Thieves will drop the door if you let them (how's that for a weak wall on the flank?), and the boss eventually rushes you. It's a really high-intensity chapter, especially if you're on a serious difficulty level. An escape mission? I give to you, Chapter 21. You have to get to the boss and kill him before the Mire sorcs (which are unreachable under normal circumstances) overwhelm your army. There are numerous places where you can stop and pick up treasure, but stop too long and you'll have reinforcements spawning on top of you. There's no stupid little Navi-fairy that hovers around your head and says "GET OUT OF DODGE BEFORE TURN XYZ", but hey look at that, you basically get the exact same crunch of time and hard choices unless your army is full of shit-stomping badasses. See also: lava in Ch18, or the backdoor reinforcements in Ch16. Objectives are useless visual noise when your maps accomplish the same thing just with their design. Awakening isn't perfect in this regard (as I said, the later maps are uneven and will fall into "open plain full of stats"), but generally speaking they had the right idea early.

These threads are always great for exposing posters who have #HotGamingTakes -- especially with regard to Pair-up -- although somewhat amazingly we don't have anyone complaining about how Lunatic+ is stupid/random/impossible. Dare I call it progress? To take one random point worth expanding on: Awakening's map design is pretty decent, at least outside of the last few chapters of the game (where you run into masses of units in the open). The early ones especially are like mini-puzzles. If someone says that pre-Valm's maps are bland/uninspired, I just have a hard time taking that person's opinion seriously: either you aren't paying attention, or your standards are so high as to be comical.

I've found that taking 85 Turns and doing a Scorched Earth full clear with Mire, is very therapeutic.

Please. Even if you are already hitting damage and hit rate thresholds, even something like forging crit will allow you to evade both Counter and retaliations. And even in the case where you hit kill thresholds, forges let you redistribute resources (like Pair-ups) somewhere else, since you have overkill stats to spare. You and I both know that Sorcerer!Laurent is going to be measurably more survivable if he can leech health without taking damage or whiffing. Not that Nosferatu is the only reason for forging (see also: glass weaponry, 1-2 range weapons, braves, etc), it's just a particularly good one. You can call it an "orange" too, but that doesn't mean that it has vitamin C. Like I said: your estimates are broken. I have a real-life example of EXP distribution that disagrees with your spitballing. I'd say that reality > unicorns. More's the pity that you never actually made that argument in the first place. Just to review: "But for in the game world, you never have 100% proc". "Never" is a pretty strong word, you know. Nonsense. I don't proclaim myself better than other people, I'm just really rude and condescending.

I didn't really ask for your opinion on it. Forges are objectively better than non-forges in the grand scheme of things, an arguing from the island where a vanilla weapon has a situational advantage is a very lonely place to be standing. The game is generous with funds, but they are not so plentiful as to be unlimited. A weapon breaking in the middle of a fight is more than just a "miscalculation" when you're facing the kind of combat that lategame Awakening has in store. Is there anything else you'd like to look silly on with regard to this topic? You've already got egg in your face by claiming that 100% AT doesn't happen, and now you've compounded it by downplaying the power of forges. The numbers you listed are made-up fairy figures. I have a LCK-screwed Robin with a 64% base AT activation rate at the end of Ch10. That rate climbs to 80% with nothing more than a Chrom support and a LCK tonic. Chapter 10. Not even at the Valm arc yet. There aren't even any 2nd gen units in play, and already I possessed a unit that was 10 LCK off of 100% AT activation. Ch15? By Ch15 there are already three units with a 68%+ AT rate. Feel free to question my credibility to your heart's content; you can see how well it's been working for everyone else, maybe you can be the Bob Woodward that blows the whole conspiracy apart. Godspeed. I brought up the timeline just to show how out of date your "never 100% AT" assertion was. This isn't something that I just did yesterday: it's been in the books for basically two years. Your LCK calculation isn't broken: your experience distribution estimate is.

I feel like Assassin is only really useful if you have enough time to get Pass (which is great). I don't think you'll get there in time for it to be handy though, not even with Veteran. I also like BK's Pair-up bonuses better for Laurent. You can always reclass Lucina back to Great Lord or something for the Grima fight, assuming that you gave yourself enoguh headroom with levels to allow reclassing to promoted.