Anouleth

Popehat, I think, has said most of what needs to be said about safe zones here. Which is the other problem with "safe zones" and the other demands of student movements; that they are almost hilariously misdirected. Aside from getting some hapless adjuncts fired and installing some "equity advocates" (who will collect their salaries and then do nothing), what are these movements going to achieve?

No. Neither Russia or the US are interested in turning the entire planet into a lifeless rock. I think that the United States and Russia would be more likely to activate their nuclear weapons by mistake than on purpose!

I think part of the problem is trying to impose concepts of "good vs. evil" and "freedom vs. tyranny" onto medieval era conflicts that were usually not about goodness or freedom but rather power. Was the Anarchy, or the Hundred Years War fought for freedom? We might say that one side or the other had a better claim to the throne, but is being slightly more descended from the previous king than the other guy really the same as being on the side of Goodness and Virtue? In practice, one King was much the same as another; if you supported a particular king, it was not because he was Just and Moral but usually because you had a material stake, skin in the game. Part of the reason the Wars of the Roses went on for so long was because in their victory, the House of York had stripped many defenders of the Red Rose of their pride and property, giving them a strong reason to support the Lancastrians.

People are wrong to give Hitler credit for the economic recovery in the 30s which has been re-evaluated by historians. The actual good policies that helped the economy most were inherited from the previous government and carried out by Hjalmar Schacht, who (although sympathetic to the Nazis) opposed rearmament and was eventually forced out of the government. And although the economy did grow under the Nazis, the standard of living remained poor and rationing remained part of German life even before the war started, because so much of the economy was devoted to supplying the Wehrmacht. After the war started, the economy was sustained by forced labor from concentration camps and occupied countries such as France. And corruption was rife at almost every level of the German economy. The belief in Hitler as economic savior is a reflection of the success of Nazi propaganda, not of any quality that Hitler himself possessed; he was personally uninterested in economic issues and any economic position he supported in public was for the sake of convenience, a prelude to attaining greater power with which to carry out his insane vision of epic war between civilizations. And there's no doubt he left his country in a worse state than he found it in. Hitler was not a great leader. He became leader in the first place only by using violence on a massive scale to intimidate his political opponents on the left and by deceiving those in the centre. Once in power, he turned his country into a dystopian war economy and capped it off by declaring war on every major power on the face of the planet (except Japan). The best decision he ever made was his last one.

Rule number one of debating: answer the question you want to answer and not the question you were asked.

The political compass is not really a good test. Virtually everyone who takes it ends up being ranked as left-libertarian and some of the questions are really loaded (just look at the first one!)

Favorite: Anything that rides a horse. Least favorite: Swordmasters.

I think PCC was generally a good thing because it was a system that allowed for more reliable critical hits on units with good PCC. Of course, this was somewhat undermined by everything else about Thracia being an RNG-fest, with movement stars, single RNs, staves missing, and movement growth.

Most bosses in FE5 are not really fast enough to consistently double, though, and you wouldn't let units that get doubled by them fight them anyway (except for Xavier, obviously).

Because any run will have some funds left over at the end, get some amount of treasure, and get some amount of EXP, in practice the difference between an LTC run and a ranked run is one of degree, not of kind. Ultimately, both restrictions are arbitrary, but we can express a preference for one over the other because it leads to more interesting gameplay and decision-making, and I think in that case it's LTC gameplay that wins. I'll explain through an example: suppose three different ways to play FEDS. In the first, we get 10000 gold to spend over the entire game and can never have any more. In the second, we have 50000 gold. In the third, we have infinite gold. It should be clear that the first wouldn't be very entertaining. We would be forced to use mainly Iron weapons and rarely get to use any forges. By restricting the amount of gold we can spend by too much, we can no longer make meaningful decisions about what to spend gold on. In the third, we can make decisions, but because there's no restriction, they're meaningless. Our decisions become uninteresting; with infinite gold, why not max out all our weapon stats? The ideal is somewhere in the middle, between the two extremes; enough gold that we can make decisions but have to really think about them. Personally, I feel like rankings don't achieve that happy medium.

Having thought about it, I don't think the kind of gameplay that the FE7 rankings reward is particularly interesting.

I said FF8, and that's what I meant; Final Fantasy 8. I suppose technically it's FFVIII, but w/ever.

The increase in stats isn't necessarily symmetrical, though. While most stats in Fire Emblem are "opposed", in that one point of defense cancels out one point in strength exactly, not all of them are, such as HP, staff range, movement, changes in skills, changes in weapon access and so forth. In addition, stat gains are not totally symmetrical between player units and enemy units; for example in FE6 through 8, enemy and player units alike tend to have higher growths in HP and strength than in defense, and this is taken to the extreme in FE11 and FE12 where HM bonuses do not apply to defense at all. In addition, both enemies and allies vary in level and as the game continues, this variance may also increase as the developer chooses a mixture of low level and high level units, or the player chooses to distribute experience in a different way, or to forgo experience or pursue it. The developer, indeed, has the power to control these long term changes by adjusting growths. A unit that has balanced base stats, but lopsided growths (such as 20% strength growth and 80% speed growth) might find their use and application transforming radically over the course of the game as they become more specialized. Even now in Fire Emblem, units do not remain at exactly the same power level relative to all enemies throughout the entire game. If they did, the game would be less interesting. I do enjoy Advance Wars, but sadly Intelligent Systems has decided to stop making them. So, Fire Emblem will have to do! I don't necessarily have a problem with positive feedback loops. However, when people suggest constructing elaborate and complicated negative feedback loops and trying to hide them from the player with smoke and mirrors, just so they can continue to have a positive feedback loop in the game, I think it rather begs the question; wouldn't it just be easier to reduce the effect of the positive feedback loop or at least refine it to have less potential to totally break the game? Rather than trying to use complicated AI changes and rigging the RNG and spawning different unit types in order to prevent abusive strategies like "give every kill to Robin", wouldn't it just be better to rethink a character progression system that allows Robin to solo the entire game in the first place? I remember as a teenaged kid, playing FF8 and being utterly disappointed, almost to the point of disgust, when I found out that enemies got stronger as you levelled. I stopped playing. And the hilarious part is that the "negative feedback loop" backfires horribly, as the optimum strategy is to remain at the minimum level forever and just abuse the tedious but imbalanced junction system to increase your stats, since the game only gets harder when you gain levels, and not when you level up GFs or gain new abilities. Negative feedback loops, like positive feedback loops, can be manipulated by savvy players. If levelling your characters makes enemies harder, and enemy stats are based on your average stats, why not pack your army with low-stat healers and dancers and have just two or three dedicated combat units who can effortlessly shred enemies? If the game gives you free Gaidens if you're low on units, why not engage in mass suicides to get that fourth Warp staff? The notion of a negative feedback loop rests on the conceit that the developer can keep the player in the dark. As soon as he figures out what the game is going to reward him for, it's just another mechanic to be used and abused.

So what you're saying is that the game should deceive the player into thinking that they're making progress, while working behind the scenes to cancel out the impact of their actions?

What is the point in letting the player train units if it makes enemies get stronger too? Why not just cut player growths? This just sounds like needless stat inflation. This seems like an awful lot of work. Wouldn't it be easier to simply remove the positive feedback loop of experience->growths->high stats then to construct a negative feedback loop to try and cancel it out perfectly?

My interpretation is that Rausten is extremely isolated by it's geographical location and that contact between them and the rest of the world is rare. Located in mountainous, harsh terrain, it's less of a country and more of a holy city keeping watch over Darkling Woods. After all, the whole point of Eirika going to Rausten is presumably because it's a large undertaking to go there, you couldn't just send a pegasus knight. Rausten only started experiencing monster attacks in the past ten years, but there's been so little contact with the rest of the world, word hasn't spread. Monsters in the mountain passes have made it even harder. This was started by Riev, who came to the Black Temple and starting reviving dead monsters. He then travelled to Grado and told Lyon about the power inside the Fire Emblem. Of course, all this is contradicted slightly by a bunch of Rausten knights showing up in Chapter 13 Eirika Route and then never being mentioned again. But fuck Eirika Route!

Ilia, I think. Honorable mentions to Verdane and Begnion and Rausten.

man I know it's wrong but I really like the look of treck as a knight ugh, I feel so dirty now

Storing two sets of weapon ranks or stats aren't necessary, you could just arbitrarily declare that a dismounted unit isn't allowed to use certain weapon types even if they have a lance rank. You could probably do that now in GBAFE by locking Lance Knight (D) out of Lances and locking Lance Knight out of swords using PRF weapon locks.

No Treck or Igrene? :( Also I'd think Rennac would be replaced by Cath, rather than Percival.

I remember what bugged me about DD was Widget. What exactly is the point of Widget blurting out what Athena is thinking? Isn't a complete inability to hide your emotions kind of a poor quality in a lawyer? I mean, it's not like Ace Attorney is exactly delivering subtle, restrained performances. When a character is angry, the game usually makes it absurdly, abundantly clear through their exaggerated body language. And Athena is a main character; we often get told her thoughts directly! So the only purpose of Widget is to make an already unsubtle game even less subtle and some very weak humor when Widget blurts out what Athena's thinking and embarrasses her. Also the ending was sickeningly cheesy and lame and only made worse by their refusal to actually indict a "real" character in a murder. It's just a copout.

A lot of the new animations in this game were actually really good. I feel like most of the new animations in FE7 were kind of cheesy and over the top (the lords, but also Assassins). Aside from Ranger, the animations in this one are really smooth and look good too (Wyvern Knight, Great Knight, Rogue).

Whether or not something is "overpowered" or "underpowered" usually depends entirely on the context. It's easy to say that there's no way that a unit that uses both magic and physical weapons could be reasonably balanced, but in my last post, I pointed out Wendell, Tanith, Olwen, Helios, and Leif. All of these units have opportunities to make use of both physical and magical weapons, none of them render other units totally obsolete, and none of them are totally obsolete themselves. So there's no need for us to speculate on how to balance physical and magical combat within one unit when IS has already shown that it works. Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that BwdYeti has an obligation to implement it. But it's a popular feature, and one that, to my limited understanding of how this stuff works, seems relatively challenging to add in after the fact since you have to find screen space to display and room in the databases.

The game isn't that complicated but it's very punishing if you make mistakes, moreso than most RPGs.

I don't think that's really true. Firstly obviously being able to choose between attacking resistance and defense is "strong". That's not a problem, though. Being able to teleport allies is strong. Being able to ignore terrain is strong. Being tanky is strong. All of these things are potentially overpowered, but that doesn't mean we should remove flying units from the game or tanky units or Warp staves. Secondly, we've been down this road. We've had units that could target both resistance and defense. Olwen and Helios in Thracia, to an extent Leif with his Light Brand, then FE9 Tanith with her Sonic Sword. You could even count Wendell from Shadow Dragon, since he frequently reclasses between Dracoknight, Swordmaster, and Sage depending on what the situation requires. None of these units are what I'd call overwhelmingly powerful, and they often find reasons to use both physical and magical attacks. Low magic stat? Leif's magic stat is terrible, but his Light Brand is still a very strong weapon because it lets him attack at range and ignore defenses. There are ways to implement rescuing without an underlying constitution system. You could make it straight class priority, where mounted units can always pick up foot units and divide foot units into heavy/medium/light categories. It would probably be better that way, in fact. And even if constitution has a purpose, AID certainly does not, and apparently we're willing to devote valuable screen real estate to that worthless stat. I do actually like the idea of resistance pulling double duty for staff use and magic damage reduction, but in that case I'd almost certainly rename it to "Mind" or even "Piety".