Need help regarding support/pair progression

[Arn]

I started playing this game today and everything was all fine and dandy until I saw not everyone have support with each other, so I decided to restart and try to do a proper progression.

 

But then I just started to try to "optimize" strategies, like only trying to put characters that can gain support with each other, this made me reset some chapters because I wasn't paying attention to enemy attack ranges and stuff. However, my biggest wall so far is trying to put optimize who to pair with who because of bonuses, some characters are obvious but others are rather hard, since I'm aiming for the pairs with lowest points(like Stahl/Miriel) it's rather uh... useless to pair them up because of bonuses.

 

So, how should I approach this? I'm playing on Hard/Classic with a future Lunatic playtrhough in mind.

[eclipse]

Less emphasis on supporting everyone with each other?  I usually run with a married couple, and any other supports are incidental.

[Bartozio]

In terms of playing optimally, the best way is probably to just pair a female avatar with Chrom and have her and her kids carry the whole game for you (especially in lunatic and lunatic+). Everything else just becomes a means to get to the point where they can effectively carry in that case, so you don't need to worry about longterm goals for them. This isn't just the fastest way to clear the game, but also by far the easiest.

If you want to have more fun and use more characters, you should probably at some point sit down and decide who you want to S-support together and focus on just building those supports (so constantly have those characters paired up, unless there's a very clear benefit to clearing the chapter in not pairing them up). Most people prefer focussing on optimizing the kids, since they tend to just become better versions of their parents and you can find a ton of guides on how best to pair them. If you want to focus on using the parents themselves, I'd say you should decide who to use as combat units and pick whatever pair up seems to benefit their stats the most from who's left (for instance, in my lunatic+ playthrough I really liked to pair Lissa and Tharja with Lonqu and Gregor, because magic units are amazing, but they lacked the speed to double by themself).