Panthera

Pretty sure the way AS works is every five points of strength reduces total equipment weight by one.

So far I'm loving the writing. While there are some overly silly anime tropes that fall flat here and there, by and large it's great. There's a ton of thought put into fleshing out the world, and the characters have been very interesting so far. I'm doing Blue Lions and man Dimitri is turning into a favourite character for me.

The Bishop in chapter 3 that rather infamously opens the Meteor chest to use it on you has a Chest Key to enable his shenanigans, so if you can capture him you'll be able to grab a chest key.

I'd say improve his bases. Obviously a horse would be the best thing but that's a big change. Roy's biggest issue with combat is just that his bases are so sketchy that even with good growths, he never actually becomes good unless he hits some implausibly high level. Give him like, +2 HP, +2 Strength, +2 Def. Add some Res I guess just for kicks and maybe an extra point of skill and speed, and suddenly he's looking a lot more solid. Still not particularly special, but he has some meaningful durability and chip damage in the early chapters (on things other than just Cavaliers) now to help him get started.

I think the issue of droughts and famines is being overstated - Mila's blessing presumably prevents them (and makes farming easier in general) but it isn't the only way to get food. Her power does not extend to Rigel and yet the Rigellians have managed to survive, they just have to work harder at it. Mila's departure would be a rude awakening for the Zofians in terms of the extra workload they'd need to survive, but it wouldn't be an existential crisis I don't think. As far as Rudolph going for Mila first, I think it probably just boils down to the fact that his plan works a lot better if Zofia's side is handled first. If he seals Duma, he creates a ton of opposition to himself at home, but the resolution of that conflict, whether it's with him in command or not, doesn't leave a lot of room for the unification he wants. The Rigellian civil war would presumably give rise to a ruler that wouldn't be easily overthrown, leaving a violent conquest of Zofia as the only real way to unite the two, and Rudolph explicitly doesn't want that. He hopes that the era of war is a bloody but short one that ends when the continent is united in their opposition to the man responsible, Rudolph himself. Setting the stage for a Zofian rebellion seems a lot more likely to create a "hero" (like Alm) that will play his part; it also leaves Rudolph himself in a much better position to come up with a new plan if he needs to. If the Deliverance fails, Emperor Rudolph is in a much better position to pursue his goals than Exiled Rudolph or Dead Rudolph.

Duma's regeneration jumps up from 5HP to 40HP when he's low on health. I don't know the exact number but I assume it's whenever he gets below the same 50 something where he becomes immune to non-Falchion damage.

I don't think her behavior is all that crazy frankly. Unpleasant, sure, but understandably so. With her vision of Alm dying, it's clear she's mainly worried about what might happen to him if he keeps fighting initially. She's being pretty reasonable up until the point Alm lays the blame for the Rigel semi-occupation on the previous king, which, while correct, is obviously going to be a sore point for her given that it's her father. So she snaps and storms off, but in the following scenes she's back to worrying about him and feeling bad for the whole situation, and the next time she gets to talk to him she's quick to apologize for it. I actually like how they handled it, it was a lot more abrupt in the original (good old NES minimal dialogue), this time they actually gave her a good excuse to be angry. It doesn't make her right, but it makes it understandable why she reacted the way she did, and again, it's not as if she doesn't acknowledge herself that she overreacted.

As people have said, she's pretty useful for a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like saving villagers, helping Claude, picking off those meteor guys in the desert, etc. It's a little questionable how much some of those things are entirely necessary, but she at the very least is doing *something* that's both useful in some way (even if a lot of it is just self-improvement) and largely unique to her, which puts her up on a lot of other characters. Between semi-exclusive access to the brave lance and being able to use various swords, plus the stat boosting villages and generally a lot of money from all the villages she can get to so much faster than everyone else, she's got the resources available to make up for her sometimes questionable stats.

Attempting Conquest Lunatic for the first time and I think I might need some help. At chapter 12 and pretty much needed luck to get past 11, mainly because of the ninja room. My Corrin (+Spd Samurai, which seems redundant but I'd heard it works) is kind of useless, she's still in her base class and can't kill anything, so I can't reclass her or she'll be useless (strength is too low to one round anything without Arthur pair up, maybe not even then). I've heard Odin can help a lot thanks to Nosferatu, and he's done some good things but his magic is falling behind and he'll start being ORKO'd by everything unless his speed actually goes somewhere. I basically don't have any units that can do anything useful besides Camilla and Effie (w/Arthur), who at least can kick a lot of ass but everyone else basically can maybe 2HKO things and die equally fast. Even Silas for all I've heard is kind of crap (he can do a lot of damage, but his speed has barely grown, and even with VoF up he dies in 2 hits to most things). I haven't tried 12 yet, debating doing the Percy paralogue first for some EXP, or just starting over with a better Corrin. Is it normal Lunatic procedure to have next to no one that can handle more than one enemy without being on death's door, or am I super unlucky with growths or just dumb? Like I'm looking at 12 and I'm pretty sure that literally no character I have can deal with the area with the Spendthrift guys unless I burn a Freeze to prevent having to face multiple enemies, and I've burned through too much Freeze already. I feel like I must be doing something wrong here but I'm not quite sure what. Spreading exp too widely or something maybe, but I didn't think this would be like Awakening where you let Robin solo so that you can let Robin solo some more. Could kind of use advice (also note that I'm playing with no DLC or multiple paths or anything online, so I can't get any cheesy win-buttons that way.)

Lot of reasons I like Genealogy the best. Love its soundtrack and combat animations, for example. I think it has a more interesting setting and characters than most of the series too. Mainly it comes down to gameplay. I love the unique inventory system; I probably wouldn't want it to be used again, but in this game, it works. Basically all of the game's ideas are like that - they seem super easy to mess up, but in this one case they combine to create an amazing experience. Even if some of the maps are too empty at times, I love that it gives the game a sense of scale that nothing else in Fire Emblem ever has given me, and I love figuring out various weird ways of handling any given problem. The second generation system is a lot of fun to play around with to create weird pairings, even if it is super easy to break in half. FE4 does a lot of odd things, but they add up to create a game that I have an incredible amount of fun playing, and I always like a story with compelling antagonists. Alvis and Trabant are both very interesting characters, and Manfloy may be pretty basic but he pulls off the standard evil sorceror trope a lot more impressively than most (probably because most of them, not just in this series either, wind up seeming massively incompetent whereas Manfloy actually seems like a legitimately dangerous villainous mastermind).

I didn't really mind the missing experience much, Chrom got enough from dual strikes and did well for himself in the previous two chapters to be good (he was like...actually a viable front line character come endgame, even though I rarely used him that way), Panne and Sumia managed a little bit and otherwise I wasn't really using any characters available at that point in the game anyway. I'll definitely have to mountain turtle a bit next time I play though, if nothing else it sounds a lot less luck based than what I was doing.

Nah, Chrom was paired with Robin the whole time. The problem wasn't being able to tank the reinforcements - I had the personnel to do it easy. The problem was the enemies on the map from the start all rushing ahead, and with a Robin that couldn't be exposed to bows, I couldn't have her mow them down in large enough numbers to clear room for Lissa/Maribelle to get out of reinforcement range. Even Fred would have needed to dodge/dual guard once or twice to clear a free path, by which point the reinforcements would never spawn anyway since the map would be done. It's really funny for me to see the talk of chapter 7 being so easy, but I guess I made it harder on myself with the Pegasus Knight Robin thing. Which in turn allowed the entire last third of the game to be trivialized with three Galeforce users clearing out any and all threatening enemy phase stuff or just one turning maps, so I shouldn't complain. EDIT: Tanking on a mountain pre-reinforcements: I basically needed Chrom's help to make sure Robin could keep the Wyverns under control with his dual strikes one rounding them. From what I've read Chrom can handle way more than I gave him credit for, so I'll probably do that next time I play.

Welp, just beat Lunatic mode. After the early chapters were brutal, the game got easier. I heard about the difficulty spike from chapter 16/17 on, but it didn't matter. I think that aside from a few times where I messed up my first turn actions (danced the wrong person, had rescue users in dumb places), I only had to reset twice from 18 onwards (once in 18 when a Griffon Rider killed Anna, once in Cynthia's paralogue where I forgot that her inheriting Rally Move meant she could use it to let her allies get closer and kill me). Granted, I had heard enough about the mode to know what I should do - FeMU x Chrom, pass down Galeforce, Veteran godkid army. By the end of the game Morgan was basically invincible, Rightful King + Sol + Armsthrift meant from Chapter 22 on half my strategy was "nuke with Yewfelle, Helswath tank". Infinite use Helswath is pretty absurd for those last few maps. Grima got one rounded, in retrospect if I'd been smarter with Rescue/Olivia I could have taken him down on turn one without even bothering to have Morgan's pair up partner equipped with anything, which would have been funny. Honestly the hardest map for me was chapter 7. I had Robin as a Pegasus Knight at that point, which allowed her and Chrom to steamroll a ton of the map but the archers were a huge obstacle; without the ability to charge headfirst into their range, I couldn't begin to advance far enough forward to not get nuked by the reinforcements. Eventually I needed to get fairly lucky with dual strikes to rout the map before those wyverns showed up from behind, it simply wasn't possible for me to get out of their range without getting killed.

Wow. I knew Berdo was a pretty lame final boss and fun to screw with and all but that just took him to a whole new level of failure. Totally going to neuter him like that next time I play this game.

Congrats on clearing Geyse out, god that battle is an utter nightmare. My first reaction when I looked at his stats and saw he doubled everyone and was basically immune to magic was pretty much just staring at the screen saying "Uh" for thirty seconds. Then the skeleton hordes started coming out and...yeah. Pain.