tacticsfan999

I don't think your "this comment isn't honest" is an honest comment, especially since I already explained my point of view on it in this thread, which wasn't addressed. I also said that I could elaborate on anything so all anyone needs to do is ask and they'll get plenty of details. And it's extremely awkward to have to deal with rudeness from a moderator. I'm locking myself out bye all.

I'm starting a new playthrough and I'm just going to share my thoughts throughout, some of which I'm sure could be discussed as a lot of other people have played this mode. I have finished H5 without warp skipping or boss grinding before, but it's time to turn up the difficulty. Merciless Difficulty - If I picked anything less then I wouldn't a masochist and the world wouldn't make sense. No Reclassing - This mainly punishes Sedgar/Wolf. They are no longer useful. It also means less flying utility. No Warping - We have to fight through everything in this one. No Forging - Forges can basically be used so that your team can one-shot multiple enemies each turn, which helps a lot. So I banned it. No Online - I don't think people in medieval times even had internet. All Bosses Killed within 5 turns of engagement - This is to eliminate the possibility of boss grinding because boss grinding in this game is actually really good. No Arena - I'm not even sure if arena is useful but now it's banned. ... I'm not a master FE player so I'll probably struggle sometimes. I have a sloppy FE style. Chapter 1 I decided to use Marth as a level 1 king piece. I had the idea to rush Cain's lance rank to D that way Cain would basically be a second Abel. I got an iron lance and 3 javelins, but in retrospect I should have gotten 4 javelins. Caeda can distract some pirates and make this chapter way easier. I also put Jagen on the fort with a silver lance which helps. With these tricks this chapter becomes more relaxed but there's still the boss. Killing him in 5 turns can't be done with 100% reliability so sometimes you'll have to reset if you're doing the challenge I listed. We get Wrys which is an awesome unit. Chapter 2 Early on in this battle Cain's lance rank reached D. At this point Cain can use javelins and is basically another Abel, with essentially no investment required. Now I turn to grinding Abel's lance rank to C though, and then after that I'll get Cain's lance rank to C. I deal with the first pirate and the northern enemies, then block both bridges to take out the cavalary. The rest is really easy. You can always retreat to form a concave formation and kill any enemy group easily. I let Darros die. I also got some hand-axes (only needed one without Darros though.) The boss is easy with a map save. Chapter 3 I formed a blockade for the northern enemy group and killed them as fast as I could while the western 3 pirates showed up. It seemed close but luckily I got a crit. I really recommend not losing anyone in the previous chapter (I lost Darros). One way to make this part easier is to just sacrifice a unit to the enemies that you don't need, such as Darros (I told you not to let him die, so you can let him die here.) I try to grind Wrys staff rank to C. I plan to replace Wrys with Boah so I'm not sure if it'll actually matter. I'll be able to have two physic users on part of chapter 10 and on chapter 11 (and then get Boah on chapter 12). The boss is easy with a map save. I went with killing edge crit into devil's axe with Barst. Chapter 4 I simply killed Matthis. I can't forge or reclass, but that leaves lots of gold for other things. I bought every weapon I could possibly need, plus a fire tome for Merric (very important). You can rush all your enemies to the north of the bridge and then form a blockade and methodically eliminate every single cavalry and fighter. I used this strategy and it worked very well. I learned a really cool trick by accident. If you put a unit (even Wrys) one space away from the enemy knight then the enemy won't be able to attack at all and won't move. You can use this to safely recruit Merric, and then methodically take out the bow users and the knight. I got Merric to about level 5.5 by the end of this chapter without boss grinding (for more than 5 turns). I did this by feeding him every kill, including the boss, and I trapped one of the horseman so that he could attack it repeatedly from an adjacent space. I bought 5 steel lances here. In retrospect 4 might have been enough. Team Focuses So Far: Cain, Abel, Caeda, Barst, Merric, Wrys, Lena

That's a neat example.

I've heard that band but not much. I tried your favorite song from the album, "Coming For You." I'd rate it 5/10 for me. That means it didn't do anything for me but I didn't dislike it. I think if I listened to it more then it could go up to a 6/10 maybe because it's sort of fun sounding. The solo was my favorite part because it brought some "rowdy energy" with it. I didn't see the whole music video but I noticed it had brains smashing on the floor? I mean I definitely think the music video matched the music. It didn't seem serious but rather just out of control and entertaining.

This is something I dislike and Fire Emblem is super guilty of it. All the good characters are attractive. All the evil characters are either unattractive or a select few especially evil characters might be attractive. If they are attractive, then they sometimes also look evil anyway. I don't know if this changed later on but...needless to say, it makes me find it hard to take the visualization seriously as "art." In real life what you look like has little to do with your personality. People are already biased towards attractive people so making them an exaggerated feature of a video game universe doesn't help with that. The brain makes associations even when we aren't consciously aware of it. I'm also not criticizing the artists and I appreciate their talent and products. I just don't appreciate the way they are strewn together in the games. It's an issue with directing, not artists.

I've used VDSC some. It's free and can do basic enough things. I don't think it has any time limit or anything that extreme. They even allow you to export directly to YouTube if you want. All I've ever done with is is putting together multiple video clips into a single clip or deleting sections out of a clip.

Wait, are we talking about telemarketers or scammers? I suppose the two intersect but in general I don't talk to scammers because it'll encourage them. As for telemarketers, I haven't been contacted by any yet. I wouldn't be mean to them unless they angered me because I know they probably hate it more than anyone else. Also I'm not good at being mean to people anyway, although I fantasize about it sometimes. Now if someone is telemarketing but what they're doing is scammy / unethical but not illegal, then I don't know. I haven't had that situation. I recently had a call that said if I didn't call back then I was in serious legal trouble. Stuff like that makes me angry, but I didn't call back because, like I said, I don't want to encourage them.

I should have maybe said that power doesn't take into account all tactical considerations. Power would be a formula based on unit statistics, but how do you factor in things like movement, range, flying, and staves? There are more subtle things to consider too. For example, maybe a unit is really good against several units on a map, but maybe those units aren't bunched up into a difficult mob. An even more subtle consideration would be effective weapons. Maybe a unit can use an effective weapon to OHKO one enemy unit, and a silver weapon to 2HKO another enemy unit, but it can't necessarily do both at the same time (say if it was baiting both enemies). I wouldn't argue that power isn't really important but I would argue that if you were trying single out a uniquely special mathematical formula for it, with the hopes of explaining unit strength in a satisfying and generalized sense, then you wouldn't be able to. Let me know if you still disagree or if you have any thoughts. Thanks! I am quite critical here but not of tier lists in general. Personally I've used a tier list for every Fire Emblem game I've played. I'm more critical of Fire Emblem character tier list discourse when it attempts to elevate itself to some kind of level of debating "the truth," often as if every single unit placement has a right answer. My theory is that the reason this happens is because people don't put more effort into defining what their tier lists are trying to do in the first place. Everyone has a different perspective on the same words and concepts. I go a little further and say that if people did try to really define what it is that they're trying to do with tier lists, then their definitions would never be wholly satisfactory in terms of what players care about. There would always either be some seemingly arbitrary choice involved or some aspect of gameplay that's not really addressed in a satisfying way, even if it still leads to a fairly meaningful tier list. So your "standard-of-judgment" I think is closely related to what I mean by "well-defined criteria."

Fighting games are an interesting example for tier lists. I think, in any gaming community, the tendency is usually to go straight for tier lists. However imagine instead a "tier matrix" where each fighter is ranked against each other fighter. If you had this plus character usage stats then you might even be able to project the tier matrix into a tier list. I say project to suggest that information would be lost in the process, like projecting a cube onto its shadow. Yeah availability is a whole other topic but I don't think it's a good fundamental concept. I appreciate the flexibility with which you view tier lists. I agree with what you're saying. I actually put the "stat point sum" tier list on my blog as an example of something clearly defined but not terribly interesting. I think your "rigorous" might be what I'm referring to as well-defined. To me something is well-defined if it is defined unambiguously. For example, pi is twice the first positive zero of the cosine function. So when I speak of well-defined tier lists, I mean tier lists defined with equivalent precision. That's what I had in mind too. I tried to capture that idea in terms of a reliability-speed tradeoff. Like you said, you don't want to die too much (reliability) but you also want to go fast (speed). So I think there are many "efficiencies" because there are many different tradeoffs between reliability and speed that could be considered.

Note: There are multiple attractive ways to rigorously define what efficiency is. Exclusion Idea: A unit is as strong as how much harder the game becomes without that unit. Problem: Some strong units will be at the very bottom of the tier list because of an anti-synergy with another unit. Participation Idea: A unit is as strong as how much it's utilized in-battle with perfect play. Problem: How to measure utilization is arbitrary, unit impact is not fully assessed, and units recruited late are penalized in a peculiar fashion. Frequency Idea: A unit is as strong as how often it is deployed with perfect play. Problem: Frequency of use can be measured in different ways and might not correspond to how impactful the unit is. Power Idea: A unit is as strong as its statistics against other enemy units are good. Problem: Power ignores tactical considerations. Efficiency Idea: A unit is as strong as how useful it is in an efficient playthrough. Problem: This isn't well-defined. Economical Idea: A unit's strength is determined by how expensive a perfect opponent would make that unit, in the context of distributing costs over all units, to lessen a player's chances of victory if the player had only so much buying power. Problem: How much buying power the player is allowed is arbitrary. It also can't address synergies and anti-synergies properly. Meta Idea: There must be some criteria which are well-defined and fully satisfying. Problem: There are none because the nature of characters in the game don't lend themselves well to linear concepts of what makes a unit "good." Units have synergies and anti-synergies which keep them from being properly considered in isolation. Furthermore, there are many chapters and units change over time. Conclusion The point of this is to introduce the idea that it might be that there is no such thing as a well-defined and fully satisfying tier list criteria. Here the term "fully satisfying" is not given a definition but it means essentially that the criteria shouldn't have arbitrary aspects, overlook something important, or overestimate/underestimate factors. I've worked on all of these ideas so if anyone wants more explanation about an idea/problem then feel free to ask. I think tier lists should exist as quick advice for non-expert players on how useful each unit is. They should not be studied to death to try to "carve into stone" the "correct tier list" because there is no such thing. Instead a more interesting use of time and energy would be to study team management strategies (strategies for short). Well-defined and fully satisfiable criteria exist for strategies, unlike for units by themselves. The only problem is that there are generally 10^(some large number) number of strategies, which is too many to organize into a list. Instead they can be grouped into categories and the categories can be ranked. The best strategies can also be sought after. I know this probably won't happen but please be respectful with disagreements.

I work towards that very hard, thanks Sooks. That sounds nice to me. Thanks for the welcome. It's mainly theoretical. I don't think any tier list can really have a well-defined and fully satisfying background concept. The criteria I spelled out in those essays though could be used in practice, just not without some labor. For example in the exclusion list it's not hard to argue that Jagen > Gordin based on the criteria spelled out, but the exclusion list isn't fully satisfying. And hello!

Thanks Guill0. And yeah sure! https://femaniac.blogspot.com/2020/08/tier-list-essay-pt3.html (Two Examples) https://femaniac.blogspot.com/2020/08/tier-list-theory-essays-p5.html (First Attempt) https://femaniac.blogspot.com/2020/09/tier-list-theory-essays-pt8.html (Second Attempt) They are attempts to create rigorously defined tier lists that are still meaningful to players. I'd say they aren't without their flaws but I hope they're interesting. When you really try to clarify what's good, you start to realize that it's something for which there is no really satisfactory definition.

I'm flighty and unhappy. I wrote stuff about mathematical tier lists on the subreddit. I played through H5 and I'm doing an H5 challenge run video series right now which I'll post once I have enough initial videos. I'm already in therapy so yeah, no need to tell me to go to therapy. You just have to accept me, or not. I'm open and for very good reasons and it's nothing negative. I'm exclusively focused on gameplay. I'm one of those. My goals in FE are to do cool challenge runs and criticize the concept of character tier lists in Fire Emblem games. If I have a lot of energy then I might try proving that FE combat is NP hard or something stupid. I have a math degree so I like to incorporate that into my game hobbies. I'm extremely open and accepting of people in conversation. I don't like it when people are rude or disrespectful to me. I read and study academic fields that I find interesting but don't expect to see me in the political section because, yeah, no. I've played tons of games of all kinds of genres and tend to try to challenge myself in all of them. I use sarcasm but I don't use it as a weapon unless someone is being rude. It can be more like "hey look how ridiculous this sounds, surely not a reality. I hope that makes you feel better about your worry." That kind of thing. Or just something eccentric and neutral. Anyway, that's everything that there is about me. If you're interested in intersecting math and FE then feel free to contact me. I hope your day goes better than expected no matter where you are, and that's my intro.

My impression is that Fates tries desperately to charm you but without any real depth behind it. I don't like that but some people do and their preferences aren't beneath mine. It's all equal. I'm just saying that I don't like it.

You're only a Fire Emblem fan if the Fire Emblem Counsel says so. And they haven't awarded anyone FE Fan status whom hasn't played all the FE games in years. So yeah I'm afraid if you want to be a TRUE FAN then you're going to have to buckle down and play through every single Fire Emblem game. That's just what it takes these days.