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.

The most essential unit is Jagen. I suppose you don't need him but is there really any other unit that would be as frustrating to lose? He is the early game champion. The most spectacular combat unit is Caeda. She can one-shot cavalry/knights with a forge, and take hits well with +HP and dracoknight. The most powerful ability is warping and Lena is its best user. The biggest difficulty curb stomp in the game is Sedgar. As a general you can immediately grind him to invincibility and let him carry you for the rest of the game. It turns H5 into H4 because he can just enemy phase a ton of enemies and render them hopeless against your main army. Who would be able to do that if not for Sedgar? Other than Wolf that is? And Wolf is amazing too, just not quite as much as Sedgar. If Wolf is a blue giant, then Sedgar is a blue giant that's a little bigger.

Kris is boring. I would rather have a character that I dislike. At least then I would feel something. At least then there would BE something. I like Corrin better. In some sense she's more dumb and inconsistent but that's good! At least it makes me feel SOMETHING. Like amusement say. Kris does not even have that. These are just my own feelings about Kris. I'm not saying Kris is an objectively bad character. Maybe there are people who really like him/her. That's perfectly fine more power to them. I'm just expressing how I feel about Kris. From a character point of view. Gameplay-wise, I think they're pretty fun if not just a little too strong.

For me No$GBA runs faster and I combined it with No$Zoomer for more options. I was trying to record gameplay but the footage was extremely laggy with Desume. Now I have a setup that looks a little worse but it actually records okay. If you can't get a better computer, then maybe that could be a way around the issue.

I strongly disagree with a lot of what was said here. At the top of the list is the idea that "H5 is unfair." It's a challenging difficulty mode for those who want a challenge. It's nowhere close to unfair. Some anecdotes: people have defeated it with 0% growths, people have defeated it without resetting, and my first FE game experience was Shadow Dragon H5 and I made it to chapter 10 before restarting to try something else. The extra difficulty modes are there to be enjoyed by the player. Normal is for beginners. H1 is for those with light experience. H3 is like a traditional hard mode. H2 and H4 just fill in the gaps between H1, H3, and H5. H5 is the challenge mode, for being challenged. Tactics in H5 are also the richest and most diverse out of any of the difficulty modes because you have to utilize your units better to survive. Not seeing the difference between two adjacent difficulties in the first chapter doesn't say a lot. The first chapter is pretty homogeneous. There are stat thresholds that aren't necessarily going to change within one enemy type from difficulty to the next but over the course of an entire game the higher difficulty is is going to put up a little more resistance which is why it's higher. I also don't like reducing the difficulties to Normal - H2/H3 - H5. Normal mode is more like a casual mode for total beginners. If we're reducing the game to three difficulties then something like H1 - H3/H4 - H5 makes more sense. H1 is the normal mode. H3/H4 is the hard mode. And H5 is the challenge mode, like lunatic. The gap between H4 and H5 is the biggest in terms of difficulty as far as it appears to me. The pirates in H5 on chapter 1 can be overwhelming for a lot of players but in H4 they're far more manageable. However I won't say that H1 - H3/H4 - H5 is the best. I just think it makes more sense. This is really just an extra paragraph to argue something but it's the first three paragraphs where I strongly disagree. The game sold over half a million copies so I'm sure lots of people have played H2 - H4 difficulty levels. In fact those are some really important ones because that's the range of "traditional hard" for this particular game, which is what a lot of players like to tackle on a second playthrough.

It's possible to get all pre-Ch.10 children before starting Ch.10. The same is true of Ch.17 (in that case, you get all children.) If you exclude invasion battles though then it's not possible to get all the pre-Ch.10 children before starting Ch.10, but it's almost certainly still possible to get everyone before starting Ch.17. In fact you can get pretty decent pairings with this rushed strategy, but it's certainly not the best approach or anything. I guess it depends on playstyle to some extent exactly how rushed to make marriages. I tried it for the pre-Ch.10 children and found it a bit tedious. I'd rather just play a little less streamlined. Maybe ignore a few children but get all the others, and with better pairs too. And I'm not sure how good of an idea it is to rush so many paralogues which is part of the rushing approach. But yes getting all the children in the game is more than possible. It can actually be done quite rapidly. I can't remember but I think I had ~4 paralogues extra before chapter 17 for finishing all S supports. So taking out the invasions will constrict things some more but it's probably possible.

That's interesting. I think I get the idea. The best defense is a good offense. If there aren't any enemies leftover on player phase then no allied units can die, which really simplifies the battle. A unit with mediocre offense and defense could be a bad player phase unit because if they miss a kill then the last enemy won't go for them, but for the most fragile unit and kill it. So their own bulk didn't even matter. I'll have to think about these things more. Its an expansive topic. I thought about it for a while. This assessment doesn't apply to what I said in the walkthrough. It's independent of all that. If I missed anything major then let me know because sometimes I miss the elephant in the room, but still this should be some useful info. Leo can also be a sorcerer with vantage in a natural way (using 1 paralogues) by chapter 18. It takes the same number of heart seals. If you check his stats you'll see that his magic is better accounting for effective levels but I don't think it matters. For all intents and purposes, they have the same basic magic output. Leo seems to have an especially, unusually good pair in Nyx. His bulk is significantly better: +6.5 def avg at cap, +5.5 res avg at cap, and this is assuming a lvl.20 promotion for Ophelia. Ophelia has the advantage of getting vantage sooner. After looking through it, it seems that adventurer Niles might be a good pair for Ophelia. He can give lots of magic, speed, and +1 move. Nyx gives Leo +2 magic more, while Niles gives Ophelia +2 resistance more. However, Ophelia can build supports faster. Overall Leo is going to hit a little harder, but Ophelia will double more often (~ 4 more speed given lvl.20 promotion). Grouping everything together, it looks like Ophelia's major advantages are getting vantage quicker and having more speed throughout the game. Leo's major advantage is having way more bulk for playing a tanking role and hitting a little harder. Also lvl.20 promotion for Ophelia would take a while, so earlier promotion is probably better (but also means the stat gap between her speed and Leo's speed gets a little smaller). On the topic of bulk: Bulk translates into better offense. The smaller a unit's death zone, the more effective mobility they have. The more effective mobility they have the more attack targets they can pick and choose between thus improving team offense. And that's ignoring the ability to tank.

My reply is sort of multifaceted. I'd first just explain that the pairings I chose aren't optimal. I barely understood pairings when I made the walkthrough so they were mostly based one me stitching together ideas from other sources. I also didn't want there to be difficult or tedious supports to build because it would then make the game harder for the beginner to manage them all. Strangely it was just a couple days ago that I realized that it was possible to get every paralogue possible before chapter 10, before chapter 10. This lead me to wonder if such fast progress was worth it. The XP benefits, for instance, partially wear off later on in the game. Some units recruited early on won't be as good (assuming they would be used). However the boosts for that part of the game would be huge, and weapon rank benefits would be longer lasting. And there's items, and sometimes gold. Having so many rally defense users doesn't sound appealing to me although it does paint a picture of the potency of the strategy. I think the value of each additional rally defense user drops off, with 1 being an excellent idea, 2 being a great idea, 3 being a good idea, and 4 being an okay idea. That's purely my judgment though. And, incidentally, my walkthrough lead to probably 4 rally defense users give or take 1. I was able to find a way to get every paralogue before chapter 17 with ease, and every paralogue available at the time before chapter 10 too. Most of the pairings were great or decent but it's okay to have bad ones (for the child) assuming that child isn't worth using. I'm still trying to figure out what right balance is here. Effie/Arthur is a pair that I'm fascinated by for strategic reasons. I believe in Effie/Arthur now, but I didn't when I made the walkthrough. I think I misunderstood how paralogues could be spammed for different effects, such as speeding up S ranks and unlocking even more paralogues. I was always under the impression that the player should only unlock maybe half the paralogues. Anyway, I've been thinking harder about pairs and paralogues lately. Yeah I think killing Takumi by turn 6 is the goal. Yes that bold phrase is a typo, thanks for pointing it out. I'll fix it. Okay yeah, good point about Leo/Nyx vs. Leo/Niles. I definitely missed that. I think it's worth it then. We can have Elise/Odin instead of Nyx/Odin, which should be no problem. A heart seal is required (a master seal would be required for Nyx and Niles alike) but that might be okay for +3 mag and a new paralogue. I'm not that knowledgeable about Ophelia so let me know what you think, but she doesn't seem as good as Leo to me. Elise!Ophelia has way less bulk than Leo as a dark knight, and Leo's offense is slightly better magic and slightly worse speed. Overall, Leo's better bulk and similar offense make him seem like the better unit. Of course. The comments are appreciated.

I made sure kill chances were always 0%. The seal defense is accounted for, yes. Niles gets a 75% chance per attempt, the first attempt taking 2 turns I think, then maybe 3 turns each time after that. I'm not sure how many turns it is per attempt after the first attempt but I'll assume 3. If it's not 3, then any extra turns it takes are 2 seconds each (Action: end turn). Let's assume it's 3. That means an average of exactly 3 turns against Haitaka with complete reliability. A 98.5% chance it ends before turn 9.

It's not just a theory. I've done it several times. It's zero risk, reliable, and it rarely takes that long.

In my testing the shrine maiden was never an issue. A mounted unit reaches her faster than your other units. She uses up her 2 entraps quickly or gets killed and it's over with. I had times when she failed to entrap and times when she successfully entrapped. She's an unwitting ally. A beginner to lunatic. For example, in the walkthrough I say that finishing chapter 8 on hard "comfortably" is the minimum recommended background for playing on lunatic. Haitaka might heal up to full but it doesn't matter. You can just try again. He's going to get captured. I went through this process several times on chapter 9. I could write a mathematical equation for it if I had a save next to him. 1) Do damage til his health is within capture range. (100% safe) 2) Assuming all units are safe, have Niles/Arthur do a capture attempt. (100% safe) 3) If success, then done. If both attacks miss, then go to #4. (100% safe) 4) Retreat Niles/Arthur and anyone else. Heal up. Go to #1. (100% safe) Azura = infinite healing (not that you need it). The only thing that changes over time is level-ups that might eventually make the loop unreliable (although I doubt this). However, that means you'd have to go through dozens of loops while failing to capture Haitaka. Failing 12 times in a row is a 6 in 100 million chance, and that'd probably get you 1-2 level-ups that probably wouldn't matter. And there are still probably other combinations that could work.