ajmiam

The tool has been moved to github: https://ajmiam.github.io/ to use it, and https://github.com/ajmiam/ajmiam.github.io if you want to view/fork the source code. Note although the repository has a .csproj file that's just because I was using Visual Studio to compile the typescript. In actuality the tool is a single web page with all of the JS in the same folder so you could directly open it on your machine without a server if you choose. Just double-click index.html. I realize the output format is inconvenient for ROM hacking, (notably the skill IDs and class IDs don't match the actual game's) so I can work on outputting it into a more convenient format if people would like. (I don't currently have the knowledge or the hardware to do ROM hacking of my own, so I'm limited in how I can help, but if you can give me the exact format of the results that would be most convenient to work with, I can make it happen.)

Thanks for the report! I'm always interested in seeing other people's strategies and how they turn out. How did Chapter 13 go for you? I know that's widely considered the toughest point of the game after the early game is over (and maybe even tougher than the early game, especially if you go in with an inoptimal setup and no backup save file).

One thing I have found is that if there's an enemy formation that's tough to approach safely (because it has many units on its edge with overlapping ranges, or because you're also dealing with turrets or a constant stream of reinforcements coming from their direction) it can help to throw an Impregnable-Wall-upped bait unit at them to aggro them and break them up. In that case, why not use a Venin weapon? All your attacks deal 1 damage anyway, so why not use a weapon that has a bonus effect? The answer to "why not" is that if you placed your bait unit close to the rest of your army, you'll ideally be swarming the lured-in enemies on your next Player Phase and they won't live long enough for the poison to take effect. However, in some cases, the enemies won't be able to reach the rest of your army right away. Maybe (1) there's a wall or gap in the way that only fliers can pass over, or (2) maybe you deliberately left everyone but your bait unit far away from the group you're baiting. Or maybe (3) the group is just SO overwhelmingly huge and in-your-face that all you can do is find a chokepoint and hold onto it with I-Wall for several turns straight as you slowly pick off the enemies. In these cases, the poison will have time to do its thing--and getting in a "free" 10%-20% damage now can be surprisingly helpful for completing one-round kills later on. I encountered situations 2, 3, and 1 respectively on chapters 13, 14, and 15 of VW, and in each case the poison did make a few kills easier to snag. (In Chapter 13, this is how I approached the group just to the left of Pallardo after I survived the initial rush. In Chapter 14, I heavily relied on I-Wall to hold off the initial rush of enemies on the left. In Chapter 15, I sent some units over the lava to engage enemies early, but the archers made it dangerous to do so without I-Wall.) I think Venin weapons are pretty useless on most maps, but there are a handful of cases where they can be a little helpful--and it doesn't hurt to have one in your convoy to bring out for just those cases. WORD OF WARNING: Do not upgrade your Venin weapons to their "+" versions. Due to a bug, their "+" versions never inflict poison, making them just worse, delicate iron weapons. Maybe this'll get fixed in DLC 4, we'll see.

I say Bolt Axe is good, and am surprised people say it's underpowered. Like others have said, it's useful just by virtue of being a 1-3 range option that works on enemy phase and doesn't require a combat art slot like Curved Shot. I have it on Seteth and it's quite good--never his strongest attack, but useful for setting up kills by other units (especially on armors). The combo of flying and 1-3 range magic damage--with Faire support--isn't really a thing otherwise (until Wave 4 DLC drops). Regarding Venomstone: You can get it from the Wild Demonic Beasts (they're the gray ones that have the Poison and Poison Strike abilities). However, they seem to drop it very rarely; I'd estimate about 5-10% of the time you'll get a bundle of 1-3 Venomstones, and the rest of the time you'll get Umbral Steel. If you have the paid DLC, it's far easier to get Venomstone by feeding the cats and dogs around the monastery, as they can drop it fairly often, along with the highly sought after Wootz Steel and Mythril. (Pet food is a good use for all the cheap "share a meal" ingredient fishes from Fistfuls of Fish.)

There seems to be a bug with Venin weapons...namely, that upgrading them to their "+" variants takes away their venom. Ordinary Venin weapons like the Venin Axe and Venin Bow have a 100% chance of poisoning any unit they hit (unless that unit has Commander, Ancient Dragonskin, or Immune Status), but the Venin Axe+ and Venin Bow+ never inflict poison. I assume this is the same for the Venin Lance+ and Venin Edge+, though I haven't tested them yet. Funnily enough, the descriptions for the base venin weapons say "A (weapon) that poisons foes" whereas the + variants just say "A reinforced venin (weapon)" without mentioning poison, making them strangely precisely accurate. Still, I don't think this behavior is intentional.

I haven't quite played all of the paralogues on Maddening (missing Weathervanes of Fodlan, War for the Weak, The Silver Maiden, and Retribution) but here are my thoughts of the ones I've done...(difficulty rating out of 5) Death Toll: Difficulty 1 with a turn-1 boss kill, 4 if you try to rout. People say "warp-skip", but you start so dang close to the boss on the right that a Stride is good enough--I had Ashe Deadeye the boss and then Cyril Point-Blank Volley for the kill. The annoying thing about this map is that if you try to play it "legit", you end up having to Stride or Warp your way over to the bridge anyway, because if it's not down by Turn 2 the villagers will either get caught by the wolf or make a right turn and get blasted to death by magic. Also there are a lot of enemies near the starting point on the right side, which can make it difficult to find good positions for those units at first. An Ocean View: Difficulty 1. You have a quite powerful flier, and it's a sand/coast map. The enemies just have no hope of reaching you fast enough to pose a threat before they're dead. The Forgotten: Difficulty 1.5. This one seemed much harder until I realized that the thieves with droppable items never actually initiate combat--if their target exit is disabled because the stronghold enemy was defeated, they'll just stand in the corner and let you wail on them. Since you can ignore their attack ranges, you have more space in the bottom of the map to work with than you might initially think. The challenge is all in dividing your forces properly during preparations; once that's taken care of, the rest should flow naturally. Eternal Guardian: Difficulty 2. Just be aware of where the Bolting users are and you should be good. I'd recommend clearing out the left side before you approach them, as they're on the right. The golems are oddly reluctant to initiate combat. Rumored Nupitals: Difficulty 2.5. There are plenty of reinforcements to deal with, but most of them don't have high MOV and none of them are fliers, so they're unlikely to overwhelm you if you're careful. Tales of the Red Canyon: Difficulty 3. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but I had a way easier time with this on New Game with Golden Deer than I did on New Game + with Black Eagles. Part of it might be because on GD I focused on regrouping my forces with Byleth as soon as possible instead of taking on all the birds right away. Land of the Golden Deer: Difficulty 3. The first couple turns can be hairy to survive due to your limited space available. After that, there tends to be a lull for a few turns before the rest of the enemies rush to the goal, which can be pretty difficult to deal with. For that reason, I tend to take advantage of the lull to push towards the boss and end him before the rush becomes a problem. This is probably one-turnable, though I never tried; in that case, it drops to a 1. Oil and Water: Difficulty 3, with two special tricks. The first, pretty easy, is be sure you have a flier on your team (which you should anyway). The second is to make sure you recruit Hanneman, but not Manuela. On Maddening, unrecruited Manuela auto-levels to LV 21 for this battle. This gives her EXACTLY enough Spd to equip Nosferatu without being doubled by the Pegasi that eventually rush her down, and EXACTLY enough DEF to survive two hits total from them even if she misses with all of her Nosferatu counterattacks. This should buy you enough time to deal with them before they take her out, and then your flier can intercept the Rapier thief before he runs off. Foreign Land and Sky: Difficulty 3...if you know to rout as much of the map as you can before triggering the reinforcements. That means taking care of the bottom-left, then moving everyone out of the bottom-left before moving anyone into the bottom-right. Forgotten Hero: Difficulty 3.5. A weird one; for some reason, most Demonic Beasts are just not that threatening on Maddening mode even if they do take a while to bring down. The wolves don't move at first, and the poisonous beasts are slow enough to not be a big threat. The Snipers and magic-users, on the other hand, are much more troublesome due to them appearing out of the fog and hitting hard enough to pack a punch. Once they're gone, the boss is pretty tough on paper, but in practice Encloser or Banshee will make a joke of him, holding him in place until you're ready to take him down. Sword and Shield of Seiros: Difficulty 4. It can be pretty tough trying to make progress against the constant wave of Pass reinforcements, but I discovered that if I sent a token force to approach the boats from the south (instead of just the north), it pulled a few of the enemies in the north down towards the south. That let me eventually move in far enough for the boss kill. Shamir can easily kill the wyvern reinforcements that enter the town, but if you don't have a way to intercept them over the water, it'll be a race against time. (It seems based on the dialogue that enemies entering the town a total of 5 times--even if they're not on consecutive turns and even if they die right away--disqualifies you from the best reward; can anyone confirm this?) Darkness Beneath the Earth: Difficulty 4 if you want the reward. The mages can thankfully survive one round of combat with the monsters, and can be quite helpful when it comes to breaking them with their gambits, but once they do run out of gambits they tend to make normal attacks and die when it would be smarter to do nothing and live. It takes a lot of care to correctly determine how to split up your army and which monsters to go after first. I found Hubert's Banshee spell to be an invaluable tool for locking monsters in place, preventing them from attacking either my units or the green units. I never quite beat this without one of the dumb mages making a suicidal attack on the last Ally Phase, but I did well enough to get the special spear. Legend of the Lake: Difficulty 4. Lategame fog is even more obnoxious to deal with than earlygame fog since the enemies have enough Mov to reach you from outside Torch range. Ugh. At least you can shut off the reinforcements? There's also a boss with pretty powerful magic and about 38 Crit, meaning you'd better have lots of Goddess Icons if you don't want every single combat with it to become a game of Russian Roulette. That said, as far as monster bosses with 500+ HP go, it could be worse... Falling Short of Heaven: Difficulty 4 if you've played it before, 5 if this is your first time. You know what sounds like fun? S.T.R. Assassins and Pegasi. In fog! Actually, no, I don't think anyone in their right mind would call that "fun". Do yourself a favor and warp-skip to the bishop on the right so you don't have to deal with any Pegasi beyond the ones that are on the map to begin with. True Chivalry: Difficulty 4 if you want the reward. As others have said, this one pretty much has to be a rush to the boss because of how many green units there are to save. In fact, if you don't take care of the enemies north of Rodrigue (by killing or gambiting them) he'll die Turn 1. The congested layout of the town, and this being a Part I paralogue, means you'll have to be basically perfect at using the movement options available to you (Stride, Dance, Warp, Draw Back, etc.) to reach and defeat the boss in time (Turn 2 or 3). Oh, let's not forget the boss is an Assassin on a fort, so you'd better hope the accuracy check RNG is in your favor. (Try using Assembly to pull the boss off the fort if you can.) Insurmountable: Difficulty 4.5. Apparently Almyra has read the guides saying that Bow Knights and Wyvern Riders/Lords are the best classes, since that's pretty much their forces in a nutshell. After dealing with the initial onslaught, you'll find there's an endless wave of oncoming wyverns to deal with until you take out the wyverns with battalions. That makes for pretty slow going, but my Edelgard was pretty tanky so she was able to survive several rounds of combat with them and eventually make progress against the stream. Dividing the World: Difficulty 5. Oh hey, it's the same map as the one above, and just about as hard, if not harder. Apparently heavy armor is useless since these ally knights cannot survive more than 1 or 2 rounds of combat with ordinary Cavaliers, which outnumber them 2 to 1. Pretty much all the enemies have high MOV. Your best bet is to pick one green unit and defend them with all you've got, since there's no way you're saving all of them in time. Thankfully, just saving one is enough for the relic. The Sleeping Sand Legend: Difficulty 5. This is Legend of the Lake's boss, 38 Crit and all, but even stronger and with 15 more Attack Speed. That's bad enough, but to even get to him you have to slog through a desert of troublesome enemies that are almost all built to ignore the movement-slowing sand. After that, you'd better be careful about when you enter the central structure, as that triggers two pairs of Wyvern Lords to fly in from the west and north, obliterating anyone fragile who happens to be in their range. You'd better believe I let out a big sigh of relief when this one was done. The Face Beneath: Difficulty 5. Hilariously, the Death Knight is the LEAST worrisome thing about this map. You need to somehow find some way to extricate Mercedes and Caspar from the cliff before the enemies eventually come after them, but if any of your units not named Mercedes or Caspar ends their turn north of a certain point, Mercedes and Caspar will be inevitably wrecked by NINE same-turn reinforcements. I basically lucked out on my winning attempt--Mercedes and Caspar were able to take down the beast in the northwest (Mercedes using a Resonant Lightning gambit and Caspar hitting it with two Fierce Iron Fists), and other than that they only got attacked by a magic user, which was one of the few enemies not strong enough to one-round either of them. It seems you need to advance north with your team just far enough to attract the attention of the enemies up there, but not move anyone beyond the stone pedestal in the center. This has my vote for toughest paralogue I've completed. The Secret Merchant: Difficulty 3 on Crimson Flower, 6 on other routes. On Crimson Flower, this isn't anything special since you get to do it post-timeskip, but on other routes...this was the one and only paralogue where I just threw up my hands and said "Forget it". This is before the time skip, and you're expected to deal with S.T.R. Grapplers and Bow Knights (!!) that appear from seemingly arbitrary spots on the west, north, and east borders of the map. Yes, pre-timeskip, you're expected to handle enemies that can hit you if you're 12 spaces away from where they show up without any warning. I made two attempts at this, couldn't get halfway done, decided the rewards weren't worth the hassle, and moved on to the rest of the game.

I happen to think this ability is decent...but not for mages. Most of my mages either one-round enemies or do so much damage that the extra chip from Poison Strike is irrelevant. However, I think it works well with most bow users, and honestly any physical attacker that isn't a Grappler or War Master. Sometimes they just won't have enough oomph to kill without a lucky crit, or can only reach their target with Curved Shot, and this skill can help ensure that the next unit gets the kill and it doesn't become a 3-round KO. (Enemies in Maddening can have surprisingly high bulk and evasion, even units like Grapplers that one might not think of as tanky.) I particularly like Poison Strike on Ashe because he can set up faraway enemies for easy kills if he lands a Deadeye. (In spite of his Reason bane, the overall investment to reach D+ Reason is pretty small compared to advancing a half-letter grade on Bows towards the endgame.) Further, you can combine Poison Strike with the Impregnable Wall gambit for a zero-risk way to wear down non-monster bosses--a technique I like to call "Safe Striking". Certain bosses with Counterattack--specifically, two that appear in Chapter 17 of Crimson Flower--just output so much damage that I found I had no ways to attack into them normally without a very high risk of losing a unit. We're talking numbers like 30x2 Mt, 75 Hit, 33 Crit against my whole army. Poison Strike ignores the drawback of Impregnable Wall, as well as all status-blocking abilities like Immune Status or Commander, so you attack the enemy for 1 damage, you take 1x2 damage, and they lose 20% of their HP. Just do this until they're low enough to kill with a unit that isn't under Impregnable Wall. Saved me a lot of stress in that chapter (and, incidentally, Chapter 17 of VW), it did. All told, I like having it on several of my units and swapping it in or out as the map demands.

Do you mean the hallway on the right side with Spy's Shuriken/Poison Strike/Grisly Wound Master Ninjas on both sides? That shouldn't be too bad if you have a Shurikenbreaker bow user: 1) Send any non-squishy units to stand below rooms so ninjas move into the corners near the hallway and attack down through the 2-thick wall 2) Send Shurikenbreaker bow user (Niles in my case) into the hallway to kill one of those ninjas through 1-thick wall 3) Have Azura sing for bow user 4) Have bow user turn around and shoot the other ninja or escape if needed (if you escape, repeat these steps for the side you didn't kill) 5) Have someone Shelter Azura to protect her from certain death Once you get rid of the Spy Shurikens it should be much easier. The enemies don't actually break the walls so you can mostly ignore those Master of Arms pairs in the rooms until you're ready to fight them. Have someone with good defenses advance into the range of the Great Club guy; since the club has low Might, they should take very little to no damage even on a crit. If you mean the left side, you should be able to use Sing/Shelter to kill (or at least provoke) the enemies outside the Lunge Room of Death without actually ending your turn in Lunge range. After that...if you're on Lunatic I don't see how you get through without at least 1 Freeze use on an automaton, possibly 2. I never completed that side myself--Benny was, amazingly, able to survive being Lunged into the room, getting dog-piled by the enemies, and losing 15 Defense in a single turn, after which the rest of my team broke through the walls and took out enough of the enemies. But if he'd gotten Lunged twice and lost 6 more Defense, he would have died, so the Freeze on one automaton was necessary. After all that, I didn't want to chance it with the second Lunge chain that led to Saizo's room, so I headed back and Benny actually fought Ryoma through the screen and won. I think it's just staves that cause movement (Rescue, Entrap) that won't work on units inside that chamber.

Episode 11B: "Uninvited Guests" (Part 2) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ycq2BpMXsHpPeVgGPYTG78RQ4nhdQFXbxosWU4I4v-g/edit?usp=sharing (Once again, please let me know if the link isn't working properly.) I said one weekend...it took one month?! My apologies, but one thing led to another and I got distracted with IRL things and a few side projects...including a random-skills Conquest Lunatic Classic run that I'm doing just for fun, using the same settings on the shuffler. (I might post brief summaries of its progress alongside the log of this run. Spoilers: Lunatic Conquest is still hard; the randomized skills make it easier in some ways but harder in others.) To anyone who's still following this, thank you for your patience. :) In any case, I will announce if I decide to abandon this playlog. It's not an extremely high priority for me at the moment, but I do wish to continue making it; I just can't promise speedy updates.

Episode 11B: "Uninvited Guests" (Part 1)

Episode 11A: "Old Sage, New Tricks...?"

...Continued from previous post Episode 10B: "Pony Express"

Episode 10B: "Pony Express" Continued into next post due to image limit...

Episode 10B Preparations

Episode 9 Final (Post-Chapter 13 Storyline) Episode 10A: "LEVIN Weaponry"

Episode 9B (Part 2): "Unexpected MVP" Due to the lateness of the hour as I'm typing this, the end-of-chapter storyline and unit summary will appear in the next update.

Just a small update... If you saw the team composition I chose, you were probably internally screaming something like "WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY SUBAKI AND REINA, YOU IDIOT?? THEY'RE FLIERS TOO!" (At the very least, this is what I was screaming to myself about halfway through playing this chapter.) Nevertheless, I did it on the first try...it took all kinds of thinking outside the box and some dumb AI exploitation, but I managed to reach the Berserker boss without killing more than 10 non-Vallite enemies, and defeat the boss with Kaden. In fact, I only took out 3 Nohrians...and 0 Hoshidans! But it's a bit too late for me to write up the full summary today, so look for it tomorrow evening if all goes according to plan.

...Now I really wish we got a map with Kaden and Keaton trying to defend Cyrkensia. ...Well, this gives me an idea! I was already planning to add a condition to this map's objective, but I'll incorporate this as well. Speaking of which, if anyone wants to spice things up, you can suggest additional conditions for me to add to the map objective during any of the upcoming chapters, as long as they're reasonably doable/not extremely tedious, and especially if they fit thematically with the chapter story! Except Chapter 17. I already have a special condition reserved for that one.... For this episode I've decided to do something different: I'll put the Preparations in its own part and explain my battle plan, and the next update will contain the execution of the plan. This way, I won't know how well the plan works out before I tell you all what it is. Episode 9B Part 1: "A Bridge Too Short" Will my plan work? Will the objective I set for myself turn out to be completely unfeasible? Find out when I start the battle in the next update!

Here are a few things I'm doing in my current Revelation playthrough that you might be interested in: 1) Come up with thematic self-imposed additions to the map objectives, eg Chapter 10: Chapter 13: 2) Focus on using characters you haven't used that much before It seems like you're going to be using (almost) everyone, since you said you want to go for optimal pairings. But maybe for the actual chapters, you can focus on letting characters who didn't shine much in your previous runs get some time in the limelight, and restrict the other characters to being used in Challenges (to build support) and Paralogues. 3) Don't use the royals' unique weapons Pretty simple. Without their special weapons (especially the no-drawback 1-2 range Swords), the royals are still very good, but closer in power to the other characters. E.g., my Mozu, as an Archer, can give Takumi a run for his money in certain situations, especially because she has a bit more Speed than him. Finally there's the thing in my sig, which uses an RNG to pick new level-up skills for all the classes, but at that point you're pretty much playing a completely different game that might not be to your tastes (especially if you're looking to make optimized character builds)....

I'm curious, has anyone managed to solve all (or most) of the upcoming skill clues so far without peeking at the answers? I'm sure some of them were much easier than others.... Moving on... Episode 9A: "Crunchy and Good With Ketchup"

Episode 8B: "Cold Feet"

(apparently my previous post went through even though there was a "bad gateway" error...sorry for the double post)

Here's the chapter-by-chapter review of Lunatic Conquest I mentioned a while ago. My strategies are probably not optimal, but I'm interested in seeing how they compare to others'...and how my opinions on the most fun/difficult chapters compare to others' as well.

Episode 8A: "Socially Awkward Prince(ss)" (Note: Please read Episode 7B Addendum above if you haven't, as I put the post-Chapter 11 plot there instead of here like I said before.)

Episode 7B (Addendum)