psy_wombats

I've also only cleared through xenologue Ch3 on my maddening run around ch21. I'm not using the DLC in the maingame run. So far it's not been much fun at all to the extent that I'm taking a break from the game for a bit. But my notes anyway: General: Ch1: Lategame prepromoted units make the map easy enough. Thinking about doing this map early gives me a headache. Ch2: Ch3: I'll probably post more when I get back to this, but, I think this xenologue just kind of epitomizes the bad parts of Engage -- significantly easier if you interact with it at the "right" time, encourages creating 2-3 favorites and neglecting the rest, maps are 3hr slogs with spam reins

I was also unable to aggro anything individually, and resorted to dance'ing my Corrin-sync'd unit to freeze the other bosses and focus-fire one per turn.

I'm a sucker for forums mafia /in

I'll admit that I've played basically all of this game half-drunk so my reading comprehension might not be the best for these scenes, especially first run through. I'll look this back over when I have access to my switch again but I was just so confused by this scene because neither character's actions seemed to justify what they were saying to each other. I really wanted this to be like what RD "Ideals Collide!!" wanted to be but I couldn't understand Edelgard's actions playing to what she was speaking, or Dimitri's turnaround from haunted homicidal maniac to protector of the status quo for some reason? and opposed to sacrifice? after he's personally slaughtered legions of imperial soldiers And yeah Ashnard's actions seem dumb and villain-ish to me, but so do Edelgard's sort of. They both have a nominally noble goal in mind but they approach it in such a dumb manor (continent-wide war) that I couldn't help but discount their spoken motivation and look at the outcome. I also played BL first and post-timeskip seemed like a hellscape to me so maybe I'm biased though haha. (in that first few chapters seeing how characters like Ashe were changed in the five year intermezzo kind of cemented how the world had gone to shit) I guess my point is, in the context of this thread, Edelgard's route doesn't really expand on lore plot stuff more than church/GD does. On the church route in particular you can get a decent insight into her character. I Insert other media

Yeah, that scene's what I'm talking about. It feels like they say "we will never see eye to eye!!" to each other half a dozen times, and maybe I misremember but beyond Dimitri yelling at Edelgard about sacrificing a lot of people, their positions aren't actually established. I feel like the game /wants/ to set this up as the primary difference between those two characters but skips ahead to this payoff argument scene without setting up Dimitri in opposition to Edelgard at all, and Edelgard's position is undermined by the question of how "invading every single other political entity in Fodlan" translates into achieving her ideals. I was expecting her route to attempt to explain some of that, but it jumps right back into the whole conquest thing and I don't think it really does a good job of justifying Edelgard so much as making her as a kind of like... more personable Ashnard? It seems like the route is less necessary to understand the plot per se, and more necessary to get x Edelgard endings haha like, she goes from "person with flimsy excuses to justify actions required by the plot" to "person with flimsy excuse to justify plot-required actions, but finally learns to express feelings and show weakness"

Edelgard's deal isn't really that well-explained in her route either. The game is sort of framed to have Edelgard vs Dimitri be a ~clash of ideals~ or something but then neglects to really fill in their actual ideals. The most the BE-E route does is humanize Edelgard a bit buuut you actually aren't missing any major parts of the plot. Her motives are shaky because the she needs to be in conflict with the other lords for the rest of the game to make sense and it only sort of works. and as for the death knight, BE-E actually does the least to expand on him and he vanishes from the game completely on that route haha

BL route is entirely concentrated on Dimitri and his conflicts and doesn't really deal with the slitherers or other stuff much at all, and its narrative follows a different, more traditional FE path. I think I liked it more than the other three routes. GD/Church is the only obvious copypaste job and it's unfortunate you went through those two first, but it's hard to say whether you'd actually think BL was different enough to warrant another playthrough. The monastery is going to be identical no matter what. If you decide to do another run right away I'd say play BL over Edelgard's route for sure though, just because this game's character writing is so much stronger than its main plotline and the all the BL characters have nicely interweaving backgrounds and supports. No harm in waiting a bit or for lunatic mode etc before doing the rest though really. There's not much (if any) lore stuff unique to the Edelgard or BL routes.

In my run, hegemon-Edel only targeted like, Mercedes or other squishy backliners so it was never an issue. Even if she did land a hit, it's not like I was expecting those characters to be tanking any other hits on enemy phase so there was no KO risk. And the aggro lines are still there. Oh, huh. But that guy's like 10 squares away, I would assume everyone kills him pretty fast. I think I tasked only two characters with that entire side (and one of the was comedy-value mortal savant Ignatz) and they still blitzed through before any reinforcements showed up.

I played BL first without the benefit of NG+ and I didn't see anything too tough on the last map. The asshole mage with a reduce-to-1-hp spell was fun to deal with but I think by tackling the first room carefully it all went mostly smoothly. Having Byleth and Dimitri able to tackle the middle room without too much worry was also nice. I think Edelgard's route was actually the most difficult for me in terms of the final map because less chapters to prepare (screw grinding on weekends) and the pegknight reinforcements always required special attention. Catherine and Cyril running around with brave weapons also added an element of challenge. Easiest I think would be GD, actually. Last map is almost trivial because of no reinforcements and nothing charging at you.

Supports really aren't that important in this game. Anyone can go with anyone, just support units you find deploying together.

Spending time in useless units shouldn't be too much of a concern. There aren't very many useless units in RD, just a few hampered by poor accessibility. Although you'll have an easier time early on if you stay away from Leonardo and Fiona. The randomized nature of levelups in FE can have a big affect on how units turn out too -- Boyd isn't bad at all, maybe he just got some bad levelups in your playthrough. In general just try to make sure your units are leveling up somewhat equally and you're not letting one overpowered beastunit kill everything because as you noted, it'll make everyone else underleveled. RD definitely has a few early units that are very strong but shouldn't see much action until later because they start out at such a high level and everyone else needs the xp. Forced units: Ike, Micaiah, Sothe, Sanaki, Ena, and Kurth are all forced into the endgame. Plus a heron IIRC. Not that you're necessarily forced to use them, but it does make stuff like training a non-Sothe thief silly because you only really need one thief... The difficulty modes in PoR are unique to the NA version yeah. There was originally no easy mode in JP, and there's not one in RD either, so the minimum difficulty level you can find in RD will be significantly harder than PoR easy. Good luck!

Hi all -- Is this open to new entrants? I'm trying to get back into shortstories and a THUNDERDOME-ish prompt thing seems about the ticket. (And if so, the deadline would be what, July 6th?)

Thanks for the welcome, I'll be sure to post that project at some point haha

yeah having the player avatar romance students seems kind of sketch. I'll probably end up just pairing students off and chilling with bachelor-Byleth haha.

Hey all -- I've been out of the loop on all things FE for a long time now just because I just haven't played anything handheld in ages... but I've been following the Three Houses news pretty religiously, so I figured I might as well try to get back into things. Path of Radiance got me on to tactics games and I don't think I've been really looking forward to a launch like this since the buildup to Radiant Dawn. Plus it's been forever since I was active on a board big enough to support a mafia game so uhh there's that. Here's looking forward to TH. (I'm also finally getting around to coding up a tactics engine of my own, but I'm low on creativity at the moment and will probably end up crowdsourcing ideas about mechanics etc at some point haha)