PPPPPPP270

Most FE games were fine with the deployment slots being fine at the maximum value with a few of the hard mode maps in FE7 being the exception. Though what I think is the worst maps for excessive deployment slots is the Priam level in Awakening and Clash in Path of Radiance. The problem is the games never made it possible to grow your army in size gradually and then this level shows up and you just don't have units that can contribute properly. Awakening is a game where low manning is heavily encouraged because of the stupid reinforcements and fast enemy scaling especially in lunatic mode. Clash doesn't work as units you would have for filler don't exist. There's no tier 2 magic unit that uses staffs for some reason and your laguz units fell off.

Apparently Intelligent Systems didn't do much of the heavy lifting for Three Houses so they should have a game on their way. I doubt it's Fire Emblem though. I feel like the next Fire Emblem game is next year and unlikely this year.

I did an ironman of Path of Radiance and would use that save to carry over to Radiant Dawn hard mode which won't be an ironman. I will admit I reset the entire game until I completed chapter 9 with 0 deaths, because that's when you start getting new characters and losing character super early is extremely crippling gameplay wise. Also to get used to playing an ironman as my normal strategy of super aggressive turn 1s that doesn't result in a death isn't going to cut it. So far my deaths include: Kieran (chapter 11 tried to save the house with elwind but died to mages) Zihark (chapter 11 apparently Zihark and Lethe isn't good enough to do the top part of the map) Mist (chapter 19 was in range of a wyvern lord and got one shot) Marcia (chapter 21 there was a brave lance general boss with wrath. I also lost the full guard which is really bad which really sucks) Rhys (chapter 23 got into range of a short axe and didn't notice the short axe warrior) Boyd (chapter 26 he got crit by a brave sword swordmaster and had provoke equipped so took a bunch of attacks) In the end I had a few character reach level 20/20. Ike transfers his capped speed Jill transfers her capped skill strength and speed Astrid transfers her skill strength and speed Oscar transfers nothing as he capped nothing It was a fun experience but I realize how stacked mounted units are in this game and how annoyingly tanky enemies are later on in the game. You need max might forged weapons to one round a lot of enemies if your strength isn't the greatest while needing good enough speed. I see why Ike isn't that great in this game because of how shitty swords are. I had to do the final level with wrath/resolve Ike and it was riskier than I thought but was able to kill Ashnard for 2 no problems.

I wrote a list of new mechanics introduced in Thracia and many of these mechanics were just cut out or largely modified in future installments. Some of the new mechanics just weren't used at their fullest. People say fatigue exists to prevent overuse of the same units but I heavily disagree. There's so many stamina drinks and strong combat units have good HP that you can just rotate around decent units. Fatigue resetting to 0 after one level is pretty big. Fatigue only seems to exist as poor bandaid to the stop people from using staffs. Staffs are so laughably overpowered, especially late game. It ends up that the best strategy ends up just being just staff abuse and skip the actual level and you probably should as some levels are just dumb/lame like 21x, 22, and 24x. Or just completely incapacitate annoying enemies like status staffs. Some of the escape levels don't feel like they were designed as escape levels. Some maps just have 0 worry of a unit dying at the end of a map and Leif needs to awkwardly wait. Chapter 5 is a huge example with the stupid ass treasure chest outside. This game does have some pretty fun mechanics like FUCC and infinite trading but a lot of the unique mechanics are just stupid like movement stars, floored/capped hit rates, and staff missing. These mechanics are just frustrating and/or unpredictable. Thracia mechanics.txt

I think the enemy status staffs in Fire Emblem 5 are some of the most useless enemy types in the series. You get access to plenty of silence users that can just shut them out for the rest of the map and the enemy has 0 answers to silence since only one enemy in the entire game carries a restore staff. The only real map where status staffs is a problem is Salem but you can either warp capture him with Finn.

One thing that really bothered me about Three Houses is the class system pretty robust and fun to build around, but the problem stems from the game encouraging multiple playthroughs and the fact the starting units are basically blank slates allowing for full customization and reused maps. It ends up giving the routes a severe lack of variety between each house as all the houses must have a white mage,black mage,archer, and to make things worse they seem to have very similar growths between the archetypes. In Fire Emblem Echoes imagine if both routes had a similar cast of characters unit wise. Celica's route was unique because it consisted of a bunch of magic units with several mercenaries. Alm's route was a bit more customizable with the villagers and was a more well balanced team. Also THEY DON'T REUSE MAPS. Granted a lot of Echoes maps in general were really bad on both sides. If they keep the Three Houses class system in the next game, I want to see the starting cast of units start out as intermediate classes and just cut out the beginner and noble/commoner classes. It just slows the early game down by a crap ton. 4 movement on every unit is so awful.

The 3DS games I think had the most useful armor knights along with Radiant Dawn. Awakening especially on lunatic makes armored units good pair up. Frederick gives a solid +1 movement and defense. Kellem is a good pair up bot providing 5 defense and 3 strength. Extremely useful in the early game. Too bad he's mostly worthless as the lead unit like 90% of Awakening's cast in lunatic. Fates had Effie who hits hard and can be moved around with pair up making armored units not fall behind. Benny I heard is physically impervious to most enemies but never really used him myself. I've seen someone get a really strong Ignatius with Beruka and Benny when they did a no Nohr royals challenge run. Echoes armored knights is technically suboptimal and it's basically only carried by Lukas. Half arrow damage as a passive is nothing if you already take 1 damage. Radiant Dawn had a pretty solid armored units if you don't count Meg and Brom. Tauroneo and Gatrie have abnormally high speed growth but not sure if their speed cap harms them later in the game though Tauroneo doesn't care as he can just resolve to boost his speed. It's just low movement is a killer in a lot of Fire Emblem games and the armored units you do get have either terrible stats or the maps just don't favor them at all. I can't believe how laughably bad armored units are in Three Houses. Being stuck at 4 movement until great knight is such a terrible thing. They don't even get strength modifiers from fortress knight until great knight and it's only 1 strength. Also nuking your speed even further from armored knight really seals the deal. You just get doubled by everything so the extra defense means nothing in maddening mode.

In the older games where stat boosters actually had a gold value I would probably sell them. Though you can make a case in FE7 using talismans for res is actually useful due to the abundance of enemy magic.

Recovery roar is pretty useless as there are very rare chances of units even being inflicted with debuffs by the time you obtain this battalion. I guess canto restore is good but you could go dark knight if you want that on Mercedes and with better range. I'm assuming it's the Kingdom wyvern battalion. Blue Lions route has access to only 2 good flying battalions(Galatea and Cichol) while the other routes get 4-5 good ones. Kingdom wyvern is not one one of the good ones sadly. 15 hit and 5 attack is pretty decent but it doesn't compare to the other flying battalions like black eagles pegasus or immortal corps. My maddening BL run had 4 fliers Ingrid, Seteth, Annette, and Sylvain. Sylvain sadly got the short straw as Seteth can just easily reach A rank authority and use the cichol and don't worry about training more authority after that. Ingrid's personal would go to waste if I used the kingdom wyvern. Annette is using lightning axe so why even bother for physical attack. Also the new magic flier battalion looks pretty sweet for the stats it gives and it comes with a resonant lightning which is fantastic a must have for wyvern Annette.

I'm more familiar with FE5 than FE4 but I feel like a FE4 remake should keep the idea of large map that are the length of several normal maps. More radical changes would be like changing items and pursuit. Axes and lance weight is what makes enemies in Fire Emblem 4 so slow as enemies rarely carry lightweight weapons and if they do it's a stupid ass sword armor. Ways to speed up certain parts would be welcome like possibly giving you a rescue staff earlier in the game or map the warp staff like every other game and change return staff to be the old warp staff. Every Fire Emblem remake changed many things and added new mechanics. Echoes despite being faithful still added a ton of new characters and combat arts. Some classes like falcon knights got nerfed while buffing the healer classes to actually gain EXP from white magic. I'm expecting the possible FE4 remake to add in new characters. Hopefully it isn't a badly done avatar character. Mechanically I feel like some things are just really stupid like weapon weight creating a massive bias for sword users compared to the other weapon types.

I actually don't know. Super Mario RPG wasn't really a game that focused on writing. It was more focused in how they innovated the gameplay with action commands you see in every Mario RPG and add some platforming to the exploration of the game.

There were the warp witches in Echoes and they had the most confusing AI. They for some reason attack archers and get themselves killed. Sometimes they don't teleport but it's probably so you don't just get jumped suddenly by a dozen of them. Now enemy staff users have always been extremely obnoxious. I think the worst instances is Genesis in FE7 and the fortify bishops in the last few levels of FE12, and most enemy staff users in Conquest. As for Fire Emblem 5, I found enemy status staffs to be complete jokes because the game gives you so many silence staffs and insane deployment slots that you can just silence them and they have 0 answers to silence.

I'm kind of against making one of your own starting units a dancer. I think it would be better suited to fill the dancer slot by someone completely different. Also for the early game every physical unit should have an iron bow in their inventory. It will make the first half of maddening much easier to handle. No need to teach them bows though.

Are we still on longbows? I had units with a longbow equipped but I never used it. I used bow knights and 4 range 8 movement is plenty for what you want to do. Longbow is way too heavy for my liking I think that's the core problem. I can have units double and easily kill mages with just bow knights then still have movement to kite back away from danger. The hit rate penalty and the mediocre hit rate of long bow doesn't help either. A steel bow does the same damage but it considerably more accurate and easier to forge. Forged iron bow is just busted. If you are doing golden deer, you would use failnaught instead. Shields are weird. I would say not getting doubled is way more beneficial to make yourself tankier than more raw defense. Dedue is really good early but I found to him to be really lackluster by the time chapter 9-10 is rolling around. He's just too slow and on maddening enemies do a metric ton of damage reaching values in the 50s by the time he joins back. By that point I have plenty of units capable of doubling or dodge tanking. TH is a very player phase heavy game and enemy phase tanking is flyer dodge tanks or wrath vantage builds.

I did 2 maddening runs and I did do some of the grind maps but didn't do the crazy exploits like rusted weapon farming or methods that took up numerous turns to level something. I stuck to methods that didn't require to do a map like fishing for professor EXP on certain days. There's also dumb mechanics like cooking every week for month long stat boosts. You can have +2-4 speed every story level this way. Those battle quests are really easy skill EXP as skill EXP doesn't scale off the enemy. So you equip a knowledge gem or two on someone and their adjutant and they would gain over 70 class EXP. This made it really easy to to wait on those battle questions then learn death blow on a bunch of different units in a single map in only a couple turns wasted.

In my early game maddening run. All my physical units had an iron bow and eventually iron bow+ along with an iron of their main weapon. Probably a steel weapon that I happen to get from quests. Late games my bow knights would either have an accuracy/speed ring with iron bow+ brave bow silver bow+ and maybe something else. Battalions is probably one that emphasizes hit rate and not care much about the defense or avoid. So even battalions like royal guard is fine. I only deploy usually 2 mage units and give them both heal staffs and the ranged increasing ones. You can swap between the two freely. The rest would have the same kind of inventory as the bow knights but swap the bow with a hand axe/javalin. Granted that isn't necessary with how easy it is to just use retribution. A flier might have the aurora shield or evasion ring. Fliers just take the best battalion possible with their limited options. Item management isn't big of a deal now that magic is tied to the character instead of an item.

Nothing is worse than the snow map in Revelations. They made this map way worse by giving almost every single enemy a droppable item in a route where there's very few item drops in general making money and gear fairly tight without random battles.

For something simpler I gave Dimitri an evasion ring and make sure he has swordbreaker,+1 movement, lance prowless, and model leader. If your Dimitri is strong enough he should be able to walk into the forest and face pretty much face hit rates in the single digits. If you end up getting hit by a gambit. You can use a elixir or concoction. The rattled effect will wear off once you use a healing item. For Ashe, give him a silver shield and an iron lance to give to Gilbert. Gilbert should have enough defense to only take 3-4 damage from everything that isn't the assassins. The bottom side this one is weird as my strat when I did this was my Annette was a wyvern rider so Mercedes got the thrysus staff. Most of the enemies should be away from these two and the only thing to worry is a brawler. With some good trade swapping you can have Annette and Mercedes kill the brawler. If your Annette is a wyvern nothing really changes except you lightning axe the enemy. Byleth is probably the most problematic part. As builds very wildly. If you have good battalion with avoid, then use it. The battalions of the top right people should be lower priority. Might be best for Byleth to be at the starting area while Dimitri takes care of the middle.

I did Wyvern Annette on my maddening run and it turned out better than I expected. Though my planning was a bit scuffed as I put too many points into faith and got a somewhat shaky wyvern rider pass rate. One thing really problematic with wyvern Annette is the lack of flier battalions in Azure Moon. There's only 2 very good ones and 1 decently statted one. Two of those are certainly going to go to Seteth and Ingrid. If you made Sylvain a flier, you have only a D rank pegasus knight battalion for Annette that gives 5 hit. You will never use normal attacks on wyvern annette so the lost attack is nothing but hit rate might be a problem. I didn't bother recruiting other mages into my team other than Dancer Dorathea who just got a healing staff. Magic staff/accuracy ring are the only potential hold items for Annette. Annette also had exclusive access to all spirit dust resulting in a magic state 5 higher than usual. Lightning axe should be close to one shot enemies with irons and maybe steels/silvers if needed. I didn't bother using her rallies that much as my units didn't really need it that much. A rally is worth if you need to survive an enemy phase or kill many things on enemy phase.

Just making FE5 2RN is going to fix a lot of the issues with the hit rates but it would probably make the game really easy if other changes aren't dealt with.

Dragon claws exist for monster killing which is nice if you really needed some extra power from your gauntlet user to kill a monster. Granted gauntlet users are well equipped to kill monsters in general with their huge crit rate and multi hit abilities.

I heavily agree on optimization being very important. Having characters mastery more than 1 intermediate class can really make a unit much stronger than they normally should. The question is how much do you have to go out of your way to get said masteries or certain skill ranks? I would discourage grinding heavily, I do encourage finding ways to strengthen units quickly without many spending turns to milk for more EXP. Strategies that require very few turns to pull off or low skill investment is the name of the game.

I found the video very funny and decently researched for the most part. Not going to nitpick about characters being in the wrong archetype as he has joke categories of "actually interesting" and "what the fuck". He praised the series for minimal reuse of names but missed a few playable character names like Selena and Claude.

Mages have a weird bell curve in this game. Early on they kind of suck because they don't have enough spell uses. Mid game is probably their peak as their damage is pretty potent and maybe even one shot. Late game especially maddening, expecting a mage double enemies isn't happening unless you give extensive speed carrots. Mages are still useful for their white magic and won't get anywhere. Physical units especially does with really strong combat arts shine here or super cheesy strats like battalion vantage/wrath Dimitri. Along with well trained bow knights with superior mobility over mages.

I finished Azure moon and the route is pretty easy until the last few levels. A lot of siege tomes and siege weapons get used by units with massive attack stats. It can one shot some of your more fragile units. Good news is retribution exists and Dimitri can do a battalion vantage/wrath build and one round every single enemy with a killer lance+ with almost 0 risk of dying. it's really dumb it feels like the only feasible way to make endgame not a complete chore. The final boss is pretty hard but if you have the rafiel gem and a really strong brave bow user you can demolish her real fast without any risk of dying.