Owns

Great job finishing this up @Whisky. I enjoyed building it and learned a lot while doing so. Was hoping someone might finish it up with more unit stats and for people to get some use out of it. Always nice to see continued interest or someone adding to a project!

You've convinced me to do SS before letting this game go. I love Seteth.

Wow, looks like I'm the only one who voted VW ^.^. I just completed VW, my 3rd route having done CF first, then AM, then VW. Yet to play SS, will be doing Cindered Shadows now. I think the reason I prefer VW is probably because it reveals the most about Fodlan's history and lore which I care about. It's also the most epic route imo. To be honest, I'm actually a bit frustrated by how little we learn about Fodlan's mysteries in the CF and AM routes. I spent a lot of time carefully picking apart dialogues, going through the books in the library, etc trying to better understand and piece together the secrets, then comes VW and plainly tells you everything! It completely changed my opinion on the CF route as well (which I now consider a major tragedy). While the CF and AM routes tell you more about the characters, their motivations and struggles, it left me with little to go by in terms of understanding Fodlan's history, so as a player I never had enough information to make up my mind about what I truly want for Fodlan's future. Story wise, I prefer CF over AM, but the implementation of AM was done much better imo. That said, when AM ended it didn't feel like a battle for Fodlan, more a battle for Dimitri, his motives were mostly self-centered, which is fine just different. CF has a good combination of personal motives and grand plans for Fodlan's future. Tragically though, Edelgard seems to have an inaccurate account of Fodlan's history, as passed to her by TWSITD. So that makes her route such a tragedy because her hatred of the church was largely misplaced, she was manipulated. But at least she had the sense to go after TWSITD as well afterwards too (which should've been a playable part of the route). Whereas VW has the most idealistic grand ambitions with a large focus on Fodlan's history and mysteries. Even the paralogues its characters are involved with are all important for lore-building (Leonie/Linhardt's, Claude's, Marianne's, all help us to better understand the past and give us glimpses of the past that I don't think we see anywhere else). Claude too has good personal reasons for his ambitions but I think this route could've done more to explore his past experiences. It felt like the least personal route to me.

Supports question: Why do I no longer see the heart icon after battles with linked attacks. If the units have already reached maximum support level, do they no longer gain support points? I'm trying to get certain characters paired up before the end of the run but it seems no matter how many meals or linked attacks I do I can't get the Close Allies list to change. I was under the impression that the Close Allies list in the Notes page ranks units in order of highest support and 2 units will get paired at the end if they're both listed at the top for each other, is this correct? To be specific, trying to pair Lorenz with Manuela and Claude with Hilda.

I've been pretty busy myself lately, but I think your table format should do what I want. I just need to figure out a practical/efficient way to get it working automatically with the battle predictions as well. Each row would need its own independent calculation but anyway it's something that can be done. I probably won't get around to it for a bit though. When I can find enough time and mental energy to do it lol. This is the type of thing that would be perfect if the sheet had enemy counter attacks factored in as well. Yes you could do this. Once you have a copy you basically own the copied sheet and can do whatever you want with it. So yea if you make any interesting additions you can share it with me and we can consolidate in the main version.

Probably anything I'll say has already been said better in this post. One other thing that was mentioned briefly in linked comment but I want to emphasize is getting the best answer to the monthly student questions after instruction. I'd save scum if I answered wrong because it gives a LOT of prof exp (600exp). Another one is winning the tournaments for whopping 300exp. Considering getting mission assistance to use the character in tournaments as well if needed (looking at Felix). The reddit post about fishing you linked seems to be looking at fishing from the perspective of gold, not exp. Fistfuls of Fish event got me somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the way from rank A to A+ and allowed me to reach A+ prof rank in Ch. 10 during my current run. Apparently you can reach A+ even faster but this is my fastest yet. The way I approach fishing is similar to the comment I linked in that early on I use it mostly to close out levels, but I also do maybe 1 or 2 extended fishing sessions on certain special events. 5* bait I save only for Fish Mystery event. During Golden Fish event I'll use any 4* bait and under and I'll fish as much as I want/need for money. Fistfuls of Fish event, I'll use all bait less than 5* that I have for the exp as well as stocking up on ingredients for meals. Lots of Large Fish is also good for ingredients and if you just want to close out a level. You should try to get Perfect fishing as often as possible and prioritize large fish (Red shadows) since they give more exp, but don't let your bait go to waste and just catch whatever on the 3rd bite. My only exception to this is if I'm fishing during Fish of Mystery using 5* bait, in which case I'd rather try my luck for a 4th or 5th bite than pull a non rainbow shadow on the 3rd bite even if it goes to waste. But if you don't really care about using Goddess Messenger for meals then this isn't important. I typically catch 5 or 6 of them per run. For the quest requiring an Ancient Fodlan, I also catch that during Fish of Mystery event, which iirc happens the month after you get the quest. This guide is probably the most comprehensive I've seen about Prof experience and it lists the amount of exp you get with each fish you catch. So you can see how during fistfuls of fish if you get a Perfect catch on a red shadow, you'll get several fish yielding 30exp each, I seem to recall 3-5 fish, that's over 100exp from a single bait. You won't always get Red shadows of course but you can see how you can get a few thousand prof. exp from a single (long) fishing session during this event if you've been saving up bait. You can think of this as serving two different purposes. The first is to use your highest damage weapons for Combat Arts. You will rely heavily on combat arts in Maddening so you want the highest might weapons available to you, typically Silver. The other side of this is when you want to maximize your attack speed to either avoid getting doubled or for a select few characters, deal a double attack. In this case you want the lighter weapons. In the early game you'll rely on Training+ weapons for speed, later you'll be able to get the same results using Iron weapons depending on the weapon type and character. Ultimately you'll want each character to carry a mix of weapons switching between them as needed. If you have a speedy and strong archer, consider also the Mini Bow, not only is it cheap and available, it might allow certain characters to double some enemies from as early as Ch. 2 or 3. I did this with Claude in my GD run. Eventually Leonie was able to do it on occasion too. A Mini Bow+ has double the might of Training Bow+ , while it weighs 3 (as much as a Training Bow+), which means if you have only 10 str you'll receive an AS penalty of just 1. Some characters start the game with 10 str and enough speed to pull off early doubles with it. Petra can probably double certain enemies as soon as the mini bow is available but I don't think it's a very useful weapon past the early game.

Hubert learns Frozen Lance as a budding talent which means he will likely be able to OHKO enemies earlier than anyone else on your roster using either a Silver Lance+, Blessed Lance against monsters, or Horse Slayer against cavalry. The latter is less important when you get Dark Spikes but remains a cheap option. His Mire spell will be very important especially in the early game for it's Def -5 affliction and range of 3 to support linked attacks. He also gets early access to Arrow of Indra when you complete his paralogue which is a strong weapon. He can make a strong Dark Knight. She will be a good sniper or Bow Knight if you focus on her crit stat. With a killer bow+, crit battalion, and critical ring she should reach above 70 crit against many endgame enemies. It's easy to activate her personal ability on maps with fire terrain so be sure to do so. Her glass canon build however focuses on her lance combat art, Vengeance. You can use Blessing gambit to safely get her to 1hp after which she can practically ohko nearly anyone i guess. Here's an example of a somewhat 'meme' dark knight build for Bernie but you can see how powerful she can be (with both magic and Vengeance) in the screenshots linked in this comment by Rengor1997. Petra can be good at a lot of things, I think many consider her strongest route to be Wyvern Lord though. She's basically a stronger Ingrid, just grab Deathblow before getting on wings Pegasus Knight > Wyvern Rider > Wyvern Lord. The only real advantage Ingrid has over her is high Res which makes Ingrid excellent against mage enemies. Regarding the rest: Yes, battalions are very important, try to get everyone to a minimum of C rank but I'd say the majority will want to end up at B or A rank. There is this pretty good early-game ranking guide if you want specifics. I don't ever optimize this much and mostly feel it out, but it's still probably nice to look at and is the only real step-by-step guide I've seen for this game. My general approach for Maddening is to stick to simple builds as much as possible, nothing that requires investing heavily in more than 2 weapons (an extra D+ in axes for Brigand is okay) plus authority and flying/riding/armor as needed. I might do something more complicated for 1 or 2 characters. Bear in mind that for mounted/armor classes you will get a lot of the skill points by simply being in that class. Similar for authority, by just having a battalion equipped so get everyone a battalion as early as possible prioritizing those whose auth you want to raise higher/sooner. You should do Seteth's seminar in that first seminar for the Auth boost. You really don't need to recruit everyone, I don't go out of my way for anyone (Edit: except for paralogues, special supports, or guard adjutants, and obviously if it's someone I genuinely want to have on my roster). It can certainly make things easier since you do get extra money/items and you won't have to face them later on but I don't know if that's worth not spending your activity points on morale or Byleth's training. Try to focus on raising your Prof level early, for earlier access to higher monthly funds, stronger weapons, activity points, instruction points, etc. This early investment makes a huge difference as the game goes on and raising your unit's ranks quickly makes a big difference on how they perform especially with the boosts of Prowess and ability to use silver weapons sooner. The other big thing is to use guard adjutants on your tanks so you may want to recruit 1 or 2 characters for the sole purpose of making them armored knights to be guard adjutants.

@Whisky thanks for the kind words. Yes I agree that ensuring everything works properly should be the priority. That's part of the reason why I decided to share it now before adding more to it. Good point about the documentation. I tried to make using the sheet as intuitive as possible, but yea things probably won't be as obvious to someone seeing it for the first time as they are to me. I'll add some more instructions and descriptions. I was actually hoping you could help out with the probabilities analysis part. The way it's set up now was intentionally done, essentially it's the odds of getting a kill with "exactly" that many hits, or at least it should be. "Hits" here does not refer to the number of attempts, rather actual non-misses, so either a regular non-crit hit or a crit. That's why the damage considered in each case is done that way. I realize this isn't the most useful analysis to present, but it's better than nothing at this point. More of a placeholder. I did leave a note saying the analysis section is still under development. Ultimately, something more in line with what was being discussed towards the end of the effective crits thread is what we want: the odds of dealing enough damage to get a kill as a function of the number of "attempted" hits. Where "hits" would include the possibility of a miss, non-crit hit, or crit. Let's just call them trials from here on, so an attempted hit is a trial, OHKO = an attack involving 1 trial (single attack), 2HKO = 2 trials (double non-brave attack), etc. To get what I'm talking about then each column OHKO through 5HKO needs to include every possible xdamage outcome for that number of trials. We would also need to know the relative likelihood for each outcome to ensure that the highest likelihood option is the one that gets reported in case more than one outcome could potentially get the KO. These should also be calculated as "at least" x damage. Is the table format you used in your spreadsheet all that I would need to get it working this way?

My Battle Predictor has finally reached a state that is workable enough to share. Hopefully this is near completion. This is a massive, user-friendly calculator that mimics what the in-game battle prediction does. The user inputs base stats, chooses equipment and ability selections from drop down menus, then selects a map to see the battle predictions against all enemies on that map given the chosen setup. Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBlgPxchHTory0WiKJuvsc5w-ybUEXlmPBs864hgWXI/edit?usp=sharing Screenshot of example result below. Everything in this view is automatically generated except for the selections of the attack Range and Map. Setup and stats input are done higher up in the sheet: I hope you enjoy using this to aid, with practical examples, discussions on various builds or to simply experiment with builds and see what kinds of outcomes can be expected. Please make a copy of the sheet to use it yourself. There are also tabs listing all the game's equipment, weapons, spells, and battalions in a Filtered View. These can be used as a convenient reference if you just want to look something up. Using the filters/sorting functions to change the display will not affect the calculations. Features: A message for anyone who might like to help improve this calculator: Some ideas for future versions that may (or might never) be added: If you have any ideas, suggestions, thoughts, or feedback please do let me know. If you find this useful, that would be a nice thing for me to hear as well 🙂. Finally, I honestly don't know if anyone is even looking for something like this or if I end up being the only one who uses it lol, but regardless I wanted to thank everyone on this forum for being good sports and an excellent source of knowledge. Personally, I'm quite satisfied with even just the journey of creating this, figuring out every little piece of the puzzle bit by bit to make everything work. Special mentions go to @LoneRecon400 and @Whisky who aided in more direct ways towards this calculator but many ideas that went into this came from various discussions with many people here. So, Thank you.

If Ashe will be your only bow class character, I wouldn't switch him to a dancer, you need at least 1 bow user. Considering you're using Lysithea as well, you could make Annette your dancer. I don't really like this option because it forces you to choose between her strong rally abilities and dance, but it's something I think a lot of people use. Personally, I enjoy stacking Rally boosts with Special Dance. In Part 2, there will be a lot of maps that with a max of 12 deployed units. If you don't mind adding to your roster, Flayn makes a good dancer, it's what I would do personally. Otherwise, Ferdinand can be a good choice and can double as an evade tank if you build him right.

No, it's too different from the format I have in mind which I already had most of in place before I even started this thread. That's besides all the UI stuff involving conditional formatting and other things that I don't think can simply be copied over from excel to google sheets which is the platform I'm using. But it's useful for me to compare calculations with in the early phases, though ultimately I compare with in-game battle predictions. I got a couple of good ideas from your sheet too for some things to add to the display for the user so I'll definitely credit you at least.

You're looking at it here from the perspective of the receiving end, but yea this exactly the main point of this thread. Crits can be quite deceiving because the odds go up dramatically when you increase the number of chances available! Glad you enjoyed the thread, it's been quite an involved discussion for me! Yea no worries, and thanks to you as well for raising some important points and contributing with good analysis. Apart from yourself and @Whisky I should probably mention @Cysx too who also contributed with some great points and lengthy analysis. Honestly, this thread ended up being much richer than I anticipated thanks to everyone and I ended up learning a lot as well. Well that's a lot of... recon for a... lone person to do! 😄 Anyway, like I said, these tables are pretty much exactly what I need to drive the calculator I'm working on. It's probably unnecessary to have all the stats for every single map in the game since the goal imo is to be able to see how various class/character setups will do against certain enemies. I imagine people will mostly be interested in endgame enemies, like the final 1-3 chapters of each route, and maybe a select few other maps like possibly chapters 12, 13 and paralogues. That said, I'm happy to include any stats that have already been gathered, who knows what kind of analysis someone can do given more information to work with. So if you have any more data you feel comfortable sharing then please don't hold back. What you've already done gathering all this is the majority of the hard work anyway, which I'll just try to make the most of. Very close now to a first working version of the calculator which I'll be starting a new thread thread about when it's ready (possibly this weekend). One thing that would help if you find yourself with some time to spare is adding a "Unit Type" column that says if the unit is cavalry, flying, armored, monster, dragon, etc. If more than one of those I'd have each entry in a separate column. This is so I can added the correct multiplier to the damage calculation if the chosen weapon/art deals effective damage to an enemy. No worries though if you don't want to bother or don't have the time, I'll add them myself when I can, it's a small thing compared to the impressive amount of info you've already listed.

Thanks for this @Whisky. With your help I finally figured out the "simpler" way of calculating it by using the complement. What we really want when I was saying before at least 3 crits and 1 hit is that we want all possible ways of getting at least 3 crits and no more than 1 miss. P(at least 3 crits and no more than 1 miss) = P(at least 3 crits) - P(3 crits and 2 misses) where P(3 crits and 2 misses) include all permutations of that. The other oversight I had is that the odds must be considered differently now that we are distinguishing between normal hit and crit (which I wasn't doing the first time), so as you pointed out we use: P(miss) = 1 - Hit = 0.1225 P(hit, no crit) = Hit * (1 - Crit) = 0.8775*(1-0.6) = 0.351 P(crit) = Hit * Crit = 0.5265 From the above formula we already have P(at least 3 crits) calculated from before as 0.549595, but this doesn't care whether the remaining 2 attempts are hit, miss, or crit. What we are looking for now is to exclude getting more than 1 miss, ie. P(3 crits and 2 misses) P(3 crits and 2 misses) = P(3 crits) * P(2 misses) * [permutations (with repeats)] P(3 crits and 2 misses) = 0.5265^3 * 0.1225^2 * [ 5! / (3! * 2!) ] = 0.5265^3 * 0.1225^2 * 10 P(3 crits and 2 misses) = 0.021901 and finally, P(at least 3 crits) - P(3 crits and 2 misses) = 0.549595 - 0.021901 = 0.527693 = 52.77% Okay, I say this is the simpler way but in reality I don't think I would've reached this without you first doing it the more complete way of listing all possibilities and like you say that approach gives the necessary check to see that things sum to 1 so we know we aren't messing up. But I think it's nice to work it out this way as well because it helps build intuition and makes it easier when I need to solve a similar problem. Anyway, thanks again. With this, it's possible for me generate the above contour plots in terms of at least xdamage as opposed to at least ncrits, if I wanted to. Not sure that I will, but if I ever want to, I can. I don't plan on doing so, but I was thinking that if one really wanted to compare all the different classes then one way to analyze them would be to generate an (x,y) plot with damage on 1 axis, probability on the other axis, then for each class have a histogram (dots) of where the class damage is expected to be against all endgame enemy units. Each dot represents one possible outcome against one possible enemy. So you can imagine for each class a circular region on the plot where there's more dots closer to the center and fewer near the edges. In the end basically the class with a circle whose center is higher and more to the right than others is "better" (or at least deals that amount of damage more consistently). The smaller the circle, the more reliable the damage. Along the damage axis, one could add labels of enemy unit names at the damage threshold needed to kill that enemy (taking into account hp and total prot). I might be missing some consideration but I think this would work.

I did not, so this missing piece automatically means my value should be higher, thanks for pointing this out. My brain's a bit too tired to attempt this tonight though. Calculating things in terms of xdamage is inevitably more complicated because there might be multiple ways to achieve any particular value, but I think you were right to frame things in this way because it is more useful/meaningful and makes direct comparisons to the damage of other classes easier as well.

The way I've been doing these calculations is to look at them in terms of for example P(at least 1 of 2) = 1 - P(not 1 of 2) = 1 - P(0 of 2) since the only way to not get (at least 1 of 2) is if you get (0 of 2). I think this simplifies things quite a bit, and the nice thing about considering "at least" something is that you don't need to consider all permutations, it's automatically in there. Also the fact that we're more interested in getting say "at least 3*damage" than we are in getting "exactly 3*damage" which has a lower probability of happening. In the above equation I too have been using binomial distribution formula to get the P(0 of 2) part. If I'm looking at Astra P(at least 3 of 5), then I'm asking: P(at least 3 of 5) = 1 - P(0 of 5) - P(1 of 5) - P(2 of 5) and so on for cases other than at least 3 of 5, using Binomial distribution functions for all the P(x of y) bits. For anyone interested seeing my formulas, here's a link the google sheet I used to generate my first set of plots (assuming always 100% hit). Scroll down and to the right for the Astra stuff: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w3nEIWF3rA3mYgmLe5iUiPOTgvc9_C-_LNEwsv-15nc/edit?usp=sharing For the case of wanting at least 3*damage, we want to know Astra P(at least 3 crits AND at least 1 normal hit). Correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is the same as saying P(at least 3 of 5 crits AND at least 1 of 2 hits) = P(at least 3 of 5 crits) * P(at least 1 of 2 hits) since in this case, i think the technical term is we are not doing "replacement", meaning there's no overlap between the odds of getting 3 crits and getting the 1 hit. If I got 3 crits out of 5, I only have 2 attempts remaining to get 1 normal hit, or vice versa. If this logic is correct (and i'm not entirely sure it is, but I think so) then for: I'm actually getting 54.1% chance which is slightly higher than @Whisky's value of 52.77%. With this type of calculation our results should be exactly the same. I'm thinking maybe we are putting a multiplier in different spots somewhere, unless you happened to use rounded figures anywhere in your process? The way I'm taking the probability "per crit" while taking into account Hit is I use Crit*True-Hit as the probability. So in this case for the "at least 3 crits part" the odds are 0.8775*0.6=0.5265 is the probability that would go into the Binomial.Dist function. Admittedly I'm not certain that the way I did it is correct but let's look at a simpler case. For the "at least x2.7 damage" case, I think the only possible way to get that with Astra is "at least 3 crits". If so then "at least x2.7 damage = at least 3 of 5 crits" which for 75 Hit (87.75 true) and 60 crit, which I calculate as roughly ~55% (looking it up from the plot in my previous comment, so not an exact figure). This is lower than what you listed (66.95%). Either one of us calculated something wrong, or I'm missing another possible way of getting x2.7 damage with odds that should be added to my value. I don't have the time at the moment to double check everything but I will when I get the chance and will check your excel sheet as well.