EdeaCreamer

Initially, I used Nightmare to edit the third-tier trainees's movement pointers so that they all used 'flier' movement while keeping ground-type terrain bonus pointers. This works fine mechanically, but when the sprites step on the ground/etc. in battle animations, the sounds produced are much heavier than they were in the previous tiers (like a Fighter stomping around), even when the battle occurs on a tile infantry units can cross normally. I suspected the 'flier' pointers simply didn't have references to the appropriate sound bytes (in fact I initially thought the step sound being used was a Wyvern Lord/Knight landing after an attack), so I changed the pointer used by the tier 3 trainees to 'civilian' and then used Nightmare to make the terrain crossing costs for that pointer set match what a flier gets. However, upon testing the third-tier trainees sounded exactly the same as before when taking a step, far too heavy (again on a tile that infantry can normally cross). Now, listening to these little kid sprites thudding around like giants when they move is highly amusing and doesn't have any mechanical detriment, so it's not the end of the world if I can't fix it, but I would definitely like to know where the sound associations for movement relative to battle animations are located as the class terrain type editor itself doesn't seem to change it (I'm hoping it's an obvious oversight on my part); it'd be nice to give them their previous light/gentle step sounds. If additional information is needed please let me know; thanks in advance for any insights.

Most of the male designs aren't so bad (there are still some stinkers). But God damn, every last women in this game is a runway disaster. Lady Gaga would quirk a brow at some of these looks. Also Alear is still just as awful as when I first saw them. Ugh.

So like, is this just using in-game resources? Because that's fine; it looks like it just costs SP that you're earning from actions in-game (like winning battles) to unlock pieces of character art/minor boosts to your Emblem Rings. What would raise my hackles is there being a system in place to purchase unlimited additional SP packages for real-world currency.

Where is this 'gacha' business coming from?

Reminds me a bit of SaGa Frontier, as well, one of the scenarios in that game follows a monster collecting all set of legendary rings to save his homeland from destruction.

Vander and Louis are my favorites at the moment. (Opinion): Every single woman in this game is a design nightmare, so far. All of them. It's like the devs loaded all of these girls into a giant cannon naked and shot them through a series of clotheslines filled with brassieres, halloween costumes and life-sized Barbie-doll accessories. Not a one of them I'm able to take seriously. Now, FE has never been the peak of 'realistic outfit design', there's been some crazy shit in the past (still remember Jakob spending most of the game wearing a chef's hat on his head and a Hoshidan medicine cabinet on his back), but this? This is a whole new level...and apparently we're going to play dress-up with them even more.

Despite their crazy design elements, both versions of Alear feel very "safe." Pretty much all of the Avatar stand-bys are here: their base personality is best described as 'milquetoast', there's something sinister about them they don't remember (hi Robin), they have a background that's super-special-amazing-dragon-god-awesome-tier, which in turn leads to a lot of these characters being a bit too enamored with them (hi Corrin), they're a sword-wielder and have a Prf-Sword (once again my desire to have MyUnit use a weapon type I'm actually interested in at base is dashed, haven't been able to do that since Kris), and they can still be re-named/re-sexed despite the game absolutely being worse for that (hi Byleth). Now, this is an 'anniversary celebration' game, so having call-backs is to be expected...but having that be the sole excuse for what would otherwise be considered blatant pandering/laziness rings...hollow, I guess? I am glad, at least, that the possibility of this title being a gacha like Heroes is rapidly dwindling to zero (we'd have gotten more blatant hints, by now). Also, what I've seen of the gameplay so far (the most important part for me) interests me, so I'm betting I'll be able to overlook this stuff (like I did with Corrin...).

...man, this did not do it for me. But, this wasn't a gameplay trailer, and the gameplay elements we've seen so far for Engage have been quite interest-piquing, so I still have high hopes.

Still love the gameplay, still find the characters entertaining if not exactly deep, and still take umbrage with the plot (though by this point it's mixed with a healthy dose of indifference).

Hana is an unfortunate victim of Fates' dodge-tanking scam. The intent, IMO, is that she never gets hit, so you're supposed to be entertained by her dodging everything thrown at her that would otherwise kill her instantly. Of course, Fates's sub-50% hit calculations do not work this way, and she regularly gets her butt handed to her on higher difficulties (especially if she has WTD). PEMN, but I've had Hanas that at level 20/20 possessed Res in the mid 20s and Def that barely got into double-digits (the worst one had a Def of EIGHT. I'm not sure she ever proc'd it). So yeah, if you're going to use her I also either recommend getting her into a class that uses Hidden Weapons or Bows, or if keeping her in the Samurai tree relegate her to Tag Teaming/swapping her around in a Guard Pair-Up to lure enemy Green units. Honestly Hana's one of Takumi's better partners (both he and Kiragi like Astra and Line of Death, at minimum).

It's difficult to develop her through the intended 'Villager -> Villager Promotion -> Branch Out' method unless you're playing at a low enough difficulty where she's able to cause damage to the Faceless in her recruitment chapter. In most cases you'll either want to use a Heart Seal to get her into Archer as soon as possible, or use her as a 'platform' for a DLC class like Dread Fighter or Great Lord. If you like her and want to use her (optimal or not), then she will serve nicely as a Bow unit, especially on Conquest. However, her primary value if you're not too keen on her is as a mother to an offensively-inclined 2nd Gen unit, especially one that doesn't have a particularly noteworthy father (as both he and Mozu can promptly be benched once you get the kid). Villager is crappy -for Mozu-; it's not crappy for her kids, as they never have to deal with the unpromoted base class and can just go into its promotions to harvest Spendthrift and Line of Death, two of the nastiest offensive skills in the game (and on Conquest are otherwise practically unavailable to everyone other than very select units). Mozu also always has the perfect skill to pass down to said kid (Aptitude), so she doesn't even have to take any kill XP to do this.

Out of the Conquest-recruitable cast, I would probably go with Charlotte (her status as inevitable Xander-statstick aside). Charlotte's primary problem as a unit is her absolutely garbage defensive stats; a stiff breeze will knock her over even with her strong HP growth. The 15% (20% compared to Berserker) growth bonus to Def from Knight-tree classes is nice, but not the primary reason said tree would help her; it's the skills. Defense +2, Natural Cover, Armored Blow and Pavise are all options for dramatically improving her ability to handle attacks from physical opponents, and both promotions for Knight are capable of wielding Axes, so training/maintaining effectiveness during the re-class period would be a non-issue for her (as opposed to Troubadour, which...I am uncertain what the devs were thinking, there, other than fanservice).

Could key the skill to only trigger after the unit selects the Wait command, or perhaps to only function while the unit isn't in Guard Stance, or only if the unit is above/below a certain HP threshold (probably above, much like with Three Houses' Quick Riposte ability). I think its best uses for the player are 1) when wanting to hold a chokepoint with the unit in a Tag Team formation, and 2) when the unit is wielding a weapon that can't make follow-up attacks anyway (such as Javelins/Hand Axes, your Avatar's Dragonstone, the Nosferatu tome, etc.). For the most part it's an enemy tool intended to make Generals a massive pain in the butt to deal with (and it succeeds at this). Anyone in Guard Stance is actively hindered by this ability for already-stated reasons.

Removing the gender-locks sounds amazing. I don't mind barring certain units from certain classes for diversification purposes, but gender is not one of the metrics they should be using going forward. Fates pre-DLC has the best re-class system I've seen in the FE series thus far (the DLC goes back to being somewhat regressive, with the excuse being your unit's gender needs to match the amiibo being scanned, but meh...).

Mostly just bugged that I miss capturing a castle like that. I'm also not sure what effect it has on the start-of-Chapter 'paychecks'.

Oof. Welp, if that's the case I'll just re-do that map when I get to it. Makes me wish the game had two Warp staves...and two units at the start able to use them, lol...

Ganeshire -> (one of Sophara or Isaac) -> Rivough is the basic outline, obviously, but when it comes to the Sophara vs. Isaac part... Let's say you recruit Johan, thus making Isaac the allied castle and Sophara the enemy castle. However, the battalion from Rivough sweeps in and re-captures Isaac, oftentimes without any input on your part, so now they're both enemy castles. Julia gets a Tome from talking to Seliph after one of these castles is taken, that's also well-known, and the Tome attached to Isaac is far and away the one you want (Nosferatu). My issue's determining what happens if you decide to go ahead and capture -both- Sophara and Isaac before going to Rivough. Does she always get the Tome from the first castle Seliph takes of the two no matter the order, or does she get the one from the castle he's most recently taken? What order should this all be done in for efficiency's sake, assuming Johan's the one who gets recruited (surprisingly Sophara's not particularly vulnerable to re-capture the way Isaac is, and Johan is on horseback so he wins the brother comparison pretty much automatically for recruitment's sake)? For example, if it's always the first of the two castles taken no matter what, that means Seliph has to backtrack all the way to Sophara from Isaac to capture it if Julia's to get Nosferatu, but if it's simply the most recent of the two then you can take Sophara normally (after Isaac's been turned into an enemy castle), refrain from speaking to Julia until you've gotten down to Isaac and captured it second, then have the conversation with her. I'm just curious what the most efficient action plan is for the following goals: recruit Johan, get the Nosferatu tome (which requires the enemy re-capturing Johan's castle, Isaac), capture both Sophara and Isaac from the enemy. I normally completely ignore Sophara, and I don't have a convenient save for determining how all of this works. Thanks for any insight in advance.

I'm not sure why the charge limit on basic attack magic is so restrictive. Siege tomes and staff effects, that I get, but not just blasty stuff.

Oh, thank you, that's very much appreciated.

I recently found a peculiarity post-character editing that I find aggravating: for some reason FE4 re-initializes everyone's Leadership stat (amongst other things) whenever a new Chapter begins, including your own units (it might occur when your units get their 'castle salary' money increases). Thus, in spite of setting Sigurd's Leadership score to 3 in his character data (and in the Prologue, the game correctly loads this edited score), it always reverts to 2 at the start of each Chapter (after the Prologue, which is why I suspect re-initialization of said stat at some point). I may just try to trace this later if I get particularly irritated (not a fan of having a code on all the time), but I was hoping that someone might've already developed a FE4 battle event module for Nightmare. Even if it's a rudimentary one; the main issue preventing me from just digging through the ROM for it with a hex editor is that battle event data in likely stored in massive blocks with few if any discernible patterns, making it impractical to go searching for the data that way.

I think the main thing I'd want to see is advanced combat forecasting. Due to how the game handles enemy formations and the presence of Battle Canto, not being able to easily check threat ranges (you CAN check them, obviously, but it's quite time-consuming and easy to forget due to not being able to keep range indicators locked after moving the cursor away from a given enemy unit) or target priority/enemy action order (I really appreciated this in 3H, as I'm not really a fan of trying to remember all of a given FE game's AI idiosyncrasies) can make efficiently moving your units around a harrowing proposition (and while I like being able to Save at the start of each turn, actually feeling forced to do so gets a bit cumbersome). Some other random things... I'd like to see the Inventory system relaxed, somewhat. Exchanging money between characters is overly restrictive in the original, IMO; you should be able to distribute funds in increments, and that functionality shouldn't be restricted to just Thieves and couples. I DO like the idea of each unit having an individual purse with a cap of 50000 Gold, however, and you'd still need to be adjacent to a unit to trade funds (and it'd still fully end your turn), so I'm not advocating just having a massive war chest like other Fire Emblems. Then, with regard to Thieves and couples, have their new perqs be the ability to actually exchange Inventory items while adjacent to one another out in the field, without having to go through the Pawn Shop (doing this would end the trade initiator's turn without Canto, obviously, just as if they''d initiated a Talk command). The Steal ability might even allow Dew/Patty to poach certain items (most likely Rings and items normally coded to be dropped anyway) from targets they strike in addition to pilfering from the target's purse. I would re-do the Pursuit skill so that it merely upgrades follow-up attack ability, rather than it being outright necessary for them. For example, have the base follow-up check be the attacker having 5 or more effective Spd than the target. If neither has Pursuit, that's all that's checked. If one has Pursuit and the other doesn't, the one with Pursuit is not only immune to the other's follow-up attacks, they're guaranteed to make their own follow-up (provided they can counter in the case of the defender), kind-of like the Quick Riposte ability from 3H. If both have Pursuit, the skills cancel each other out and you go back to the basic formula. I'd try to do away with a lot of the back-tracking and 'guide dang it'/'gotcha' moments that do not add any sort of meaningful difficulty and/or just pad the game out with moving units around (chapter 2 in particular is notoriously bad about this). The easiest way to do this is to divide each Chapter into sub-chapters that officially begin and end whenever a new castle's seized, and to force-relocate your units into that castle whenever that happens (so you'd have them re-Sortie each time, afterwards). This wouldn't change the actual map layout or anything, just prevent some fairly ludicrous shenanigans that punish the player for not spoilering themselves on Chapter events in advance (like the drawbridge, or the Hero Axe/Pursuit Band). Some re-balancing of the classes to not favor mounts so heavily would be nice. However, stats/combat ability is not where those balances need to be applied; in fact the foot units are very strong in actual combat compared to the mounted ones. The problem's that they never see that combat, and they can't Canto away afterwards. Putting in terrain and alternate routes on maps that specifically inhibit mounted units (including fliers) while still gating objectives requiring swift intervention would enable foot units to see some more action. There's some terrain in the original, but it's never used as a gate like that; it's always a non-issue to just ride your horse around it, to the point mounts still get to the other side faster than foot units attempting to traverse through it. Another much simpler solution is to just give everyone a horse, but that's a bit...boring?

Just starting playing it; this is looking amazing, so far, thank you for putting all of this effort into it and letting the community enjoy it.

Are Horseslayers super-effective against Great Knights? Not able to check at the moment; I can't remember if they're only considered Armored units in 3H or if they're still hybrid like the rest of the series.

Not really. I greatly dislike that I'm not able to control who gets which spells, and that heavily favors the ones who get normally rare utility spells (lookin' at you, Warp) and siege spells for free every map. I want to go back to Tomes and Staves with charges.

Three Houses didn't need an avatar, honestly. All the units are fully customizable with the game's Monastery/Instruction system for classes. Byleth should've been a fully VA'd static protag.