Marienburg

I think most of the changes you suggest make for a worse story, cutting out depth and moral ambiguity to the characters and institutions.

Most monsters in the game have 1-2 range so they wont counterattack 3 range attacks. You can use a 3 range attack like curved shot and one other attack to break a tile. Shield tiles will also break in 1 hit if hit by gambits or attacks effective against monsters. When a shield tile breaks, the monster will not counterattack for one attack. It also won't counterattack if an attack kills off a healthbar (this is a good time to get your mages in on the attack, otherwise they can't do anything because of the counterattack killing them). If you want to break shields for the resources, then you want battallions with blaze, poison tactics, fusillade and group flames, later upgrading to line of lances and resonant flames. But it's not always worthwhile breaking all of the tiles and its more effective to just break 1 or 2 tiles and focus your damage on those tiles to just kill the monster. There are a few missions where you're constantly being attacked by monsters and constantly breaking the shields with gambits will lead you to run out of gambits and get overrun, the first instance of which is Byleth's paralogue that becomes available in Chapter 8. I'd recommend getting Felix and Byleth to D in bows for curve shot (it's good to have in general for trivializing enemy flyers) and getting the Caduceus Staff from the Ocean View paralogue when it becomes available to give Annette 3 range. You can also recruit Lorenz and do his paralogue for Thyrsus which gives +2 range, but warning that paralogue can be kinda tough if your team doesn't have the tools to skip it.

I just had to fight my way out of of Lorenz's paralogue the intended way on a no-skirmish run because I overwrote my main save file without having had certified into flyers and man that was not easy. It's one of those encounters that really makes you feel the difference between a bad unit and a great unit.

Roy, as a character and in terms of his overall plot, isn't very different from Ike. I find it weird that Roy gets criticized and Ike gets lauded, but maybe I'm just projecting my feelings about Elibe and Tellius.

It's Magic/4, usually it's /2. Flayn to her credit has pretty good magic growths though.

fwiw black eagles already have 2 physic users in lin and dorothea, that team doesn't necessarily need a dedicated healer

Derp. You're right. I just read the first part about NG+ and my brain went straight to wait what ? before finishing the paragraph XD

But now I'm confused by the implied 13 hour silver snow run.

You can finish maddening without doing anything special with skills. I'd argue it's more important to make sure your characters get their good combat arts, eg Ashe and Caspar are bad until they get hunter's volley and FIF, at which point they become pretty good.

Good point about Catherine, I forgot about that. She trivializes that chapter to the point where I seriously prefer to play Reunion at Dawn over the Tower without Catherine.

If you are aware of what's going to happen in Chapter 13, Crimson Flower is arguable one of the harder routes because your starting roster has the hardest time in the early game. Your only standout unit is Petra, everybody else is lukewarm and middle of the road. Edelgard is strong but axes are heavy and have accuracy problems that get you into trouble. Caspar can't really tank, Ferdinand is a bit slow. Hubert having a bane in faith is a nuisance. Dorothea is Dorothea. Bernie's cool. But overall it's just sort of meh, you don't have anything remarkable to help you solve the problems that the first chapters throw at you.

I think it's in all of her supports with Dimitri.

I didn't do anything fancy with Dimitri on my Blue Lions run and just kept him in his lord class line, so he needed his stats to do a lot of the lifting for him and he ended up being just kinda meh? In chapter 13 it was my dark flier annette who did most of the heavy lifting.

Why is Naruto vs Neji just a worse version of Jacob vs Esau?

For me it's FE7, which I haven't finished yet. FE6 was my first GBA game and ended up being my favorite FE. Then I tried FE7 and had to put it down at Ch.19. At first I thought it was GBA fatigue, but I enjoyed playing through FE8 afterwards, so its something about FE7 that doesn't click with me. I find the map design to be a really big downgrade from FE6 and each map just ends up feeling like a slog despite being smaller than FE6 maps. I somehow found the FE8 maps more memorable as well. The first fog map in each game kinda illustrates my problem with FE7. In FE6 its Ch9 where you have villages on opposite ends of the map, so you gotta break up your forces and that creates a tension, but you also have Shin and Fir running around in the fog so you're anxious to recruit them and not kill them. In FE8 its Ch6 where youre trying to get to the kids in time, but also trying to find the boss, but there's also cavalry reinforcements coming from the fog from behind you so you also have this sense of being stretched thin that you do in FE6. It's easy, but I still had Joshua die to one of the fog reinforcements because I overstretched, and then the map creates that internal tension where you realize that Joshua died for an Orion's Bolt and now you feel bad about wondering if you should've just let those pixel children die. In FE7 the first fog map is 13x and its like, ok theres a village, you just send Marcus to pick it up, everybody else can just hunker down. Or you can go push out a bit and kill the brigands instead of waiting for them to come to you, it really doesn't matter. Maybe hector mode makes things more interesting? But even then you still have to slog through Eliwood mode to unlock it.