tiering philosphy

[Progenitus]

i posted this in one of the other topics on this board, but that topic had absolutely no life. Instead I'll try to make a separate topic and see if it generates any discussion.

reposting what I had there to start it off.

Turns are overrated. 1 turn in a short, easy chapter like FE10 1-P is not the same as 1 turn in a longer, more difficult chapter like 4-4.

I don't remember who said this, but someone suggested # of actions or decisions to determine the weight of a chapter (although there is no formula, and deriving one will be difficult, particularly because everyone plays the game differently and thus will require different amounts of decisions to beat a given map, it's just the idea that should be incorporated). For example, if I need to make 5 decisions to beat 1-P (with a decision being where to place each unit, what attacks should be made, whether to heal or not, any trade or rescue chains I need, etc), but I need 50 to beat 4-4, obviously each decision becomes more critical in 4-4 as the chapter goes on, and most importantly, a screwup in 4-4 means that I might have to restart, meaning I have to do all of those decisions again, which is a waste of time.

Again, it doesn't really matter if Joe takes 5 decisions to beat 1-P and 50 to beat 4-4, but Bob takes 10 and 100, or if George takes 10 and 30, or if Dave takes 3 and 20, the bottom line is that 4-4 almost always requires more decisions than 1-P and thus should hold more weight (it would be extremely rare to see a player, say, take 10 decisions to beat 1-P but only 5 to beat 4-4). I don't have any suggestion for this magical formula to determine how much more important 4-4 is than 1-P especially when every person plays the game differently, but that's just part of debating; trying to see which subjective factors matter more.

while on the subject of tiering philosphy, I also had a hypothetical in another topic, posted in one that was quite lively, yet the moment I posted the hypothetical the topic died down (even after bumping the topic, it still had no action). I might as well post it here as well.

Let's say we are arguing about two bad units. Let's say Kyza vs Lethe. Now we are arguing their part 3 performance, namely how many kills they can get. Let's also assume we are actively training 6 other units (so 7 units, since we are arguing who does better in this 7th slot on the team) with the remaining slots going to healers/clean up duty/shoving/etc. Now let's assume there are 40 kills in the map, but we've determined that healers/clean up duty/etc. kill 5 enemies total, so that is 35 kills for the other 7 units.

I have a question. When determining how many kills Kyza/Lethe get, which method do you assume happens? If you'd like, you can "amend" the method to how you truly determine their kill count, or if you use neither method then please explain how you do determine their kill count.

Method 1) How many kills they can get based on their ability to fight/move/etc relative to the team. For exmaple, since Kyza/Lethe are really bad at fighting while the other 6 units I assume are much more competent, he/she may only get, say, 2 kills without slowing the team down. Someone like Ike is amazing so he gets like 10 kills without even trying. etc.

Method 2) Splitting the kills evenly among the team regardless of ability. So even if Kyza/Lethe are really bad, he/she will still get 1/7th of the kills (in this case, 5). We may or may not restrain Ike from getting some of his 10 kills, but that isn't as important.

Wow, I'm very surprised that even on something as controversial as turn counts, there has not been a single response in an entire week. serenesforest sure has changed.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Progenitus