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Alastor plays and ranks the whole series! Mission Complete! ...For now.


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7 minutes ago, Jotari said:

even though Shiro is swordmaster so he can use Ranjito which was a terrible decision as they could have given him Master of Arms one of his actual promotion options which can uses swords alread)

Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean "they could have just had him promote from spear fighter into master of arms", then spear fighter doesn't promote into master of arms, it promotes into either spear master or basara. If you mean they could've just made him a master of arms since he does have that as one of his heart seal options, sure, but... so is swordmaster.

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Yep, this is Elise having noncombatant angst, just like Reyson in Path of Radiance, where she's developed a complex about how useful she is just because she isn't directly involved in combat, undervaluing her own contributions as a vitally-important support unit. But it's cute that Dakota offers to help her train.

Which works a lot worse if you change her over to a combat class, like Wyvern her heart seal option...

 

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

...Damn it, so I remembered correctly. The flames do change on their own. Well, at this rate nearly half the map is devoid of enemies, so having most of the walls come down isn't that huge of a deal.

Fun fact, the flames have a random pattern to them going on and off. If you have to reset that chapter the flames will behave differently...

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6 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean "they could have just had him promote from spear fighter into master of arms", then spear fighter doesn't promote into master of arms, it promotes into either spear master or basara. If you mean they could've just made him a master of arms since he does have that as one of his heart seal options, sure, but... so is swordmaster.

Oh, does Spear Fighter not promote to Master of Arms? Brain fart on my part there. Of course it has the regular version and the magic version as the promotion options. I just remember thinking Master of Arms would have been a beter option for him when playing Heirs of Fates. Which I do stand by as at least it means he could use both spears and swords instead of just completely switching from one to the other.

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52 minutes ago, Jotari said:

This I agree with completely, the chilld paralogues were clearly only tested on mid game difficulties. It takes some serious rescue chaning to save some of them as they are liable to be killed on enemy turn 1.

Not that many. Ignatius and Shiro yes, but the rest are either controllable from the start or are in no immediate danger. I've never had significant problems with the rest.

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2 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Not that many. Ignatius and Shiro yes, but the rest are either controllable from the start or are in no immediate danger. I've never had significant problems with the rest.

Likewise. It's really only those. The others are really easy to get to.

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48 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

You'll have to deal with E ranks at some point regardless, if you're doing a weird off-build that uses a totally new weapon type. At least by lategame, you can slap a +3 or higher Bronze/Brass Weapon on them, and still have very solid combat.

My point is, it's easier to deal with E ranks when the game is not exclusively using promoted mooks, which it starts doing after chapter 17, at least in Conquest and Revelation. 

48 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Yeah I would have been fine with not being able to control which brancing promotion to pick if it let the chapters the units are recruited in less of a hassle to beat with the obviously didn:t account for this design. And like I said, for some characters a default promoted class would make more sense (and in fact they do have default promoted classes in Heirs of Fates if I recall correctly, even though Shiro is swordmaster so he can use Ranjito which was a terrible decision as they could have given him Master of Arms one of his actual promotion options which can uses swords alread). If I really want to reclass them heart seals are an option (which they could also come with if cost is also such an issue).

For what it's worth, while they do have default promotions in the sixth part of Heirs of Fate normally, using the Master Seals Arete and Sumeragi drop when felled in Heirs of Fate 5 on the unpromoted children that show up in said part will have their class changed to what you promoted them to, and gives them another weapon dependent on the chosen promotion. Also, I would have issue if Shiro's class was Master of Arms, due to the level 15 skill of that class being what it is. 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

This I agree with completely, the chilld paralogues were clearly only tested on mid game difficulties. It takes some serious rescue chaning to save some of them as they are liable to be killed on enemy turn 1.

That's especially likely to happen with Shiro. Ignatius's situation, while different on the surface (he's immobile, and guarding the village you must keep the enemy out of), is still somewhat similar because he's going to get attacked and possibly die before you can do anything to avert it, as he's well on the other side of the map, and if the enemies are promoted, he starts getting attacked on turn 2... by Master Ninjas with Poison Strike. Given that Master Ninjas have high skill and boosted crit, that means his survival is pretty much a lottery; remember what I said about him being immobile? That also means he is not an eligible Rescue target (thing is, even if he was rescuable, that means the village he was guarding is wide open to being sacked, which means you lose). Selkie and Sophie, while not as egregious, are still bad, as they start very far away from you (the latter starts well on the other side of the map!), which means there's plenty of time for Artificial Stupidity to screw you over.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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58 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Not that many. Ignatius and Shiro yes, but the rest are either controllable from the start or are in no immediate danger. I've never had significant problems with the rest.

 

55 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Likewise. It's really only those. The others are really easy to get to.

Thats still two maps that are far more of a pain that their designed to be. If Offspring seals actually provided some kind of benefit or disadvantaged compared to promoting normally then Id be all for them, but they literally just do what could be done automatically.

41 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

My point is, it's easier to deal with E ranks when the game is not exclusively using promoted mooks, which it starts doing after chapter 17, at least in Conquest and Revelation. 

I really dont see your argument here. If you use an offspring seal and then a heart seal then yes, you will have to use E rank weapons...but if you use a heart seal anyway you will have to deal with E ranke weapons. This goes for every unit in the game. Having E rank weapons but being at a comparable level to the enemies is far better a situation unless youre really arguing youd prefer to find an enemy on a stationary throne who cant counter attack and pelt them with pebbles until your level 1 unit is S rank. In other wrds, using a heart seal = dealing with E rank weapons it:s always gonig to be a trade off for reclassing, it doesn:t matter when or what level you do it at, itll take the same number of attacks to get to the next weapon rank.

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1 minute ago, Jotari said:

Thats still two maps that are far more of a pain that their designed to be. If Offspring seals actually provided some kind of benefit or disadvantaged compared to promoting normally then Id be all for them, but they literally just do what could be done automatically.

Free weapon ranks, but more importantly, free EXP. An early child will partake of the same finite EXP pool everyone else does, the longer you wait, the less limited EXP the child will consume, and their stats will be fine. You can fluff up a mid-lategame army in a way you couldn't if you didn't have buns still in the oven. A longer wait means less availability, which means less helping, but thats the fair tradeoff.

I'm someone who is much more inclined to recruit later than sooner for most children. Let Gen 1 do the work, let Gen 2 supplement them when it is needed. 

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24 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Free weapon ranks, but more importantly, free EXP. An early child will partake of the same finite EXP pool everyone else does, the longer you wait, the less limited EXP the child will consume, and their stats will be fine. You can fluff up a mid-lategame army in a way you couldn't if you didn't have buns still in the oven. A longer wait means less availability, which means less helping, but thats the fair tradeoff.

I'm someone who is much more inclined to recruit later than sooner for most children. Let Gen 1 do the work, let Gen 2 supplement them when it is needed. 

But Im saying they could just join at the same level with the same weapon ranks they get anyway with an off spring seal. Ie instead of using an item to scale their level to your army they could just be scaled to your army by default. Unless theres some benefit to recruting early and then promoting after a few chapters of not using them (do the off spring seals scale to the chapter recruited or the chapter used? If it:s the latter then I could see some use as keeping them as more variable spares if you lose someone in an iron man run) its exactly the same thing.

Edited by Jotari
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So, I need to share my experience with child units from my recent unspoilered play through Birthright. It was... let's say "not very positive"? Yeah. That works.

Generally speaking, there are two things that will make me bother with supports in a Fire Emblem game. Either I need to care enough about the characters and the story that I want to see the support conversations, or the game needs to be difficult enough that I really feel the need to squeeze out every advantage that I can mechanically. When neither of these apply, I generally won't bother. I don't find the process of building supports by constantly having the same two people fight together to be an engaging one, so I skip it. This was the case here. I picked up a few C and B supports by accident along the way, but that was it.

Now, it's worth noting that, up until you hit your first S support, there is absolutely nothing in the game that suggests that doing so will give you a new unit. Compare this to Awakening, where there is storyline justification for the kids, and Chrom's forced marriage and the subsequent reveal of Lucina's identity mean that you're introduced to the mechanic pretty early on and know that it's something you need to be doing. Fates had absolutely none of this. And given how the whole thing with the alternate dimensions makes absolutely zero narrative sense and is a giant ass-pull, there is no reason at all within the game itself to even imagine that getting an S support means you also get a new unit.

It is also worth noting that regular new recruitment basically stops after chapter 13 of Birthright. In chapter 13, you get Scarlet and Ryoma. After that (15 more chapters total if you include endgame), the only new character you get is Shura. Unless you happen to know that upgrading certain buildings in my castle also gives you a new recruit, which I didn't. Obviously. Because how would I?

I was playing ironman and taking a few losses along the way, mostly due to carelessness and inattention. It was somewhere around the early twenties chapters that I started to notice that I didn't have enough usefully-levelled units for full deployment. The number of deployment slots was slowly going up, and my number of usable units was slowly going down. It was only at this point that something clicked in the back of my brain. "Hold on", I thought. "I'm pretty sure I've seen people talking about kids in this game." The game itself had still given me no indication that this was a thing and I was going entirely on out-of-game knowledge, but that was when I decided I would actually try to get a few S supports.

I think it was chapter 25 when I finally hit my first S support. Actually, I think I hit three of them on the same chapter. I picked one of them at random. It wads the one with Ryoma's kid. He was a low-level idiot green unit who suicided into an enemy unit on his first turn, way before I could get anywhere close to him. Obviously, I did not get a new unit from this paralogue. I looked at one of the others that I had, with Silas's kid. I looked at the map, saw that it also contained a low-level green unit who started nowhere near me, and backed out without doing the level. I didn't bother even looking at the third one I had or grinding up any more S supports.

I did manage to complete the ironman (technically tainted, since I got a game over in an early chapter when I lost Corrin because I wasn't used to the enemy dual attacking  yet by that point and didn't care to restart the game just for that) but it was a little too close for comfort at the end (I had a level 4 unpromoted Setsuna in my endgame team). This is only the second FE game I've ever ironmanned, after Shadow Dragon, and this was a far less friendly ironman experience. Regular recruitment was Three Houses levels of front loaded (and at least Three Houses has the excuse that it's not designed to be ironmanned), and then subsequent recruitment beyond that is hidden behind a game mechanic that is completely missable and not even hinted at in the game? WTF, game? Who thought this was a good idea?

Having since read up a little on how everything is meant to work, I can certainly see how it could be an interesting system if you know about it in advance or if you stumble into it early on, but it absolutely needed to be better signposted or hinted at in-game and it absolutely needed to scale better into the late game. Because, honestly, this part of my experience was miserable.

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4 hours ago, Jotari said:

I really dont see your argument here. If you use an offspring seal and then a heart seal then yes, you will have to use E rank weapons...but if you use a heart seal anyway you will have to deal with E ranke weapons. This goes for every unit in the game. Having E rank weapons but being at a comparable level to the enemies is far better a situation unless youre really arguing youd prefer to find an enemy on a stationary throne who cant counter attack and pelt them with pebbles until your level 1 unit is S rank. In other wrds, using a heart seal = dealing with E rank weapons it:s always gonig to be a trade off for reclassing, it doesn:t matter when or what level you do it at, itll take the same number of attacks to get to the next weapon rank.

True enough. The thing is, on two routes out of three, by the time children are coming with Offspring Seals, enemies are all promoted, and having to work on a new weapon type sucks when enemies are actually threatening (as opposed to being able to use a stronger weapon against actual threats while working on new weapon types when I'm not threatened by powerful enemy units). Now, this can be averted by forging, but I consider the fact that resources in general are connected to real time and social features to be a big misstep this game makes, because I'm likely going to play at my own pace, and not bother to boot it up every day just to collect resources.

Anyway, while we're talking about it, I can't be the only one that thinks that the fact that in Birthright, Midori's paralogue doesn't open up until after Kaze survives chapter 15 means her conception has some... interesting... implications... can I? Considering that the other paralogues unlock immediately upon S support being achieved, it seems even more blatant.

3 hours ago, Jotari said:

Unless theres some benefit to recruting early and then promoting after a few chapters of not using them (do the off spring seals scale to the chapter recruited or the chapter used?

IIRC, it scales according to when they were recruited.

4 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Free weapon ranks, but more importantly, free EXP. An early child will partake of the same finite EXP pool everyone else does, the longer you wait, the less limited EXP the child will consume, and their stats will be fine. You can fluff up a mid-lategame army in a way you couldn't if you didn't have buns still in the oven. A longer wait means less availability, which means less helping, but thats the fair tradeoff.

I'm someone who is much more inclined to recruit later than sooner for most children. Let Gen 1 do the work, let Gen 2 supplement them when it is needed. 

The thing is, as some of the children have goodies tied to their paralogues (Ophelia, Nina, Soleil, among others), I'm not convinced the tradeoff is so fair, as it also means you get less benefit from the stuff you get from the paralogues... also, with some of the gen 1 units not exactly being all-stars, no matter the route, I'm tempted to get the children early so I can bench the obvious weak links and actually have an A-team. Which gives me the impression that hard work (in this case, the harder work brought on by the enemies being exclusively promoted) hardly works.

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

So, I need to share my experience with child units from my recent unspoilered play through Birthright. It was... let's say "not very positive"? Yeah. That works.

Generally speaking, there are two things that will make me bother with supports in a Fire Emblem game. Either I need to care enough about the characters and the story that I want to see the support conversations, or the game needs to be difficult enough that I really feel the need to squeeze out every advantage that I can mechanically. When neither of these apply, I generally won't bother. I don't find the process of building supports by constantly having the same two people fight together to be an engaging one, so I skip it. This was the case here. I picked up a few C and B supports by accident along the way, but that was it.

Now, it's worth noting that, up until you hit your first S support, there is absolutely nothing in the game that suggests that doing so will give you a new unit. Compare this to Awakening, where there is storyline justification for the kids, and Chrom's forced marriage and the subsequent reveal of Lucina's identity mean that you're introduced to the mechanic pretty early on and know that it's something you need to be doing. Fates had absolutely none of this. And given how the whole thing with the alternate dimensions makes absolutely zero narrative sense and is a giant ass-pull, there is no reason at all within the game itself to even imagine that getting an S support means you also get a new unit.

It is also worth noting that regular new recruitment basically stops after chapter 13 of Birthright. In chapter 13, you get Scarlet and Ryoma. After that (15 more chapters total if you include endgame), the only new character you get is Shura. Unless you happen to know that upgrading certain buildings in my castle also gives you a new recruit, which I didn't. Obviously. Because how would I?

I was playing ironman and taking a few losses along the way, mostly due to carelessness and inattention. It was somewhere around the early twenties chapters that I started to notice that I didn't have enough usefully-levelled units for full deployment. The number of deployment slots was slowly going up, and my number of usable units was slowly going down. It was only at this point that something clicked in the back of my brain. "Hold on", I thought. "I'm pretty sure I've seen people talking about kids in this game." The game itself had still given me no indication that this was a thing and I was going entirely on out-of-game knowledge, but that was when I decided I would actually try to get a few S supports.

I think it was chapter 25 when I finally hit my first S support. Actually, I think I hit three of them on the same chapter. I picked one of them at random. It wads the one with Ryoma's kid. He was a low-level idiot green unit who suicided into an enemy unit on his first turn, way before I could get anywhere close to him. Obviously, I did not get a new unit from this paralogue. I looked at one of the others that I had, with Silas's kid. I looked at the map, saw that it also contained a low-level green unit who started nowhere near me, and backed out without doing the level. I didn't bother even looking at the third one I had or grinding up any more S supports.

I did manage to complete the ironman (technically tainted, since I got a game over in an early chapter when I lost Corrin because I wasn't used to the enemy dual attacking  yet by that point and didn't care to restart the game just for that) but it was a little too close for comfort at the end (I had a level 4 unpromoted Setsuna in my endgame team). This is only the second FE game I've ever ironmanned, after Shadow Dragon, and this was a far less friendly ironman experience. Regular recruitment was Three Houses levels of front loaded (and at least Three Houses has the excuse that it's not designed to be ironmanned), and then subsequent recruitment beyond that is hidden behind a game mechanic that is completely missable and not even hinted at in the game? WTF, game? Who thought this was a good idea?

Having since read up a little on how everything is meant to work, I can certainly see how it could be an interesting system if you know about it in advance or if you stumble into it early on, but it absolutely needed to be better signposted or hinted at in-game and it absolutely needed to scale better into the late game. Because, honestly, this part of my experience was miserable.

Oof.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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3 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

True enough. The thing is, on two routes out of three, by the time children are coming with Offspring Seals, enemies are all promoted, and having to work on a new weapon type sucks when enemies are actually threatening (as opposed to being able to use a stronger weapon against actual threats while working on new weapon types when I'm not threatened by powerful enemy units). Now, this can be averted by forging, but I consider the fact that resources in general are connected to real time and social features to be a big misstep this game makes, because I'm likely going to play at my own pace, and not bother to boot it up every day just to collect resources.

Yeah but that just goes back to how that's an issue of reclassing in general and not something to do with the offspring seal at all. If you decide to reclass a late game recruit like say, Fuga, you're equally going to have to deal with weapon ranks as reclassing Seigbert or Midori.

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4 hours ago, lenticular said:

 

I think it was chapter 25 when I finally hit my first S support. Actually, I think I hit three of them on the same chapter. I picked one of them at random. It wads the one with Ryoma's kid. He was a low-level idiot green unit who suicided into an enemy unit on his first turn, way before I could get anywhere close to him. Obviously, I did not get a new unit from this paralogue. I looked at one of the others that I had, with Silas's kid. I looked at the map, saw that it also contained a low-level green unit who started nowhere near me, and backed out without doing the level. I didn't bother even looking at the third one I had or grinding up any more S supports.

You really had some rotten luck trying for Ryoma's kid first. His kid and Benny's are the two in Fates that almost require the rescue staff to keep alive to recruit if you wait till the lategame. Silas's kid is much easier to keep alive, and recruit (its the other green units on that map which are aggravating to keep alive...)

 

4 hours ago, lenticular said:

 

Having since read up a little on how everything is meant to work, I can certainly see how it could be an interesting system if you know about it in advance or if you stumble into it early on, but it absolutely needed to be better signposted or hinted at in-game and it absolutely needed to scale better into the late game. Because, honestly, this part of my experience was miserable.

Sorry you didn't have a good time in part due to going in blind. Most of them scale far better, but you really stumbled into the absolute worst of the child paralogues...

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2 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

You really had some rotten luck trying for Ryoma's kid first. His kid and Benny's are the two in Fates that almost require the rescue staff to keep alive to recruit if you wait till the lategame. Silas's kid is much easier to keep alive, and recruit (its the other green units on that map which are aggravating to keep alive...)

 

Sorry you didn't have a good time in part due to going in blind. Most of them scale far better, but you really stumbled into the absolute worst of the child paralogues...

Doesn't help that Ryoma is the last father you get in either route he's in (well there some others after him in Revalation but you can't save in between) meaning unless you grind to S support right away you're almost guaranteed to be going for Shiro in the late game.

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5 hours ago, lenticular said:

Now, it's worth noting that, up until you hit your first S support, there is absolutely nothing in the game that suggests that doing so will give you a new unit.

True, but that's not the only benefit to getting supports, and the game makes that more than reasonably clear. Did you never check out what the shops had on sale and notice that there are seals that let you reclass to your best friend's or partner's class?

Also, how much did you make use of guard stance?

 

Edited by Alastor15243
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2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Doesn't help that Ryoma is the last father you get in either route he's in meaning unless you grind to S support right away you're almost guaranteed to be going for Shiro in the late game.

I made the mistake of having my first child unit be Tharjas.

The only other one I ended up getting was Morgan since I couldn't be bothered grinding out battles (since you have to wait IRL days for that.) so I'm hoping Fates makes it not as much of a pain to build supports.

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18 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

True, but that's not the only benefit to getting supports, and the game makes that more than reasonably clear. Did you never check out what the shops had on sale and notice that there are seals that let you reclass to your best friend's or partner's class?

 

Oh, I noticed that. I just didn't see much point in using them. At least, not on a first playthrough and without knowing the game. Reclassing is great when you know what you're doing because it lets you selectively grab the strongest skills, or it lets you switch to classes that cover a unit's weaknesses, but without the necessary knowledge, it ends up being a trap more often than not. It's just as easy to accidentally switch into a class with terrible skills or one that diminishes a unit's strengths and emphasises its weaknesses. And that's doubly the case in Birthright where a lot of the classes are completely new to the series. I might have a shot at guessing who might be good to reclass to a knight or a mage or a class I'm familiar with from other games, but there's no way I'm going to know in advance who wants to be a mechanist or a blacksmith. (Don't get me wrong here, I do actually like the use of unfamiliar classes; they just slow down learning the game.)

So, overall, my thinking was that I'd mostly leave people in their default classes because that would give me a decent class diversity. I wanted to try out all the new and unfamiliar classes and see what they did. And in cases where I did want to change classes, I had heart seals to play with. That gave most characters choices of two first-tier classes and four promoted classes which was more than enough. What's more, using the friendship/partner seals would have meant I was duplicating classes which would have gone against my goal of class diversity.

So, yeah, there are other benefits of getting supports, and the game did make that clear. The problem was that the benefits that it presented weren't of any interest me, whereas the one that would have been useful to me was hidden.

From what I have read since and what everyone has said, it does seem that I was unlucky. For thigns to play out the way that they did required a string of events: I had to be playing without any out-of-game knowledge, I had to be playing ironman to make me really need the replacement units, I had to be uninterested in the other things that supports offer (conversations, pair up bonuses, reclassing opportunities), I had to play in such a way that I didn't stumble into any S supports by accident (which is not a given since I did pick up an A+ support by accident), then when I did finally get a kid, it had to randomly be the very worst one for my situation, and then that had to demotivate me enough to give up on the child paralogues entirely. While none of them individually seem that unusual, having all of them at once does seem unlikely.

I guess that the thing that irks me is that it feels so unnecessary. It would have been so simple to bring attention to child units in some way, and that would have completely removed the problem without really costing anything.

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2 minutes ago, lenticular said:

From what I have read since and what everyone has said, it does seem that I was unlucky. For thigns to play out the way that they did required a string of events: I had to be playing without any out-of-game knowledge, I had to be playing ironman to make me really need the replacement units, I had to be uninterested in the other things that supports offer (conversations, pair up bonuses, reclassing opportunities), I had to play in such a way that I didn't stumble into any S supports by accident (which is not a given since I did pick up an A+ support by accident), then when I did finally get a kid, it had to randomly be the very worst one for my situation, and then that had to demotivate me enough to give up on the child paralogues entirely. While none of them individually seem that unusual, having all of them at once does seem unlikely.

Yeah, your story read like a worst-case scenario for a blind ironman of this game, and I feel really bad that it happened to you. While I think the system's great, it certainly admits of some bumps, and you seemed to wind up hitting every single one of them by sheer happenstance.

I am curious about what you did with guard stance though, because the way I played, even if I had no interest in reclassing and didn't know about children, I still would've gotten S supports early on simply because I found guard stance so useful.

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20 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Yeah, your story read like a worst-case scenario for a blind ironman of this game, and I feel really bad that it happened to you. While I think the system's great, it certainly admits of some bumps, and you seemed to wind up hitting every single one of them by sheer happenstance.

I am curious about what you did with guard stance though, because the way I played, even if I had no interest in reclassing and didn't know about children, I still would've gotten S supports early on simply because I found guard stance so useful.

I used guard stance a lot, but not consistently with the same people. Instead, I'd swap in and out depending on what was tactically useful or expedient at any given time. Sometimes that would be whoever gives the pair-up bonus of whatever stat I need at the time (usually speed, defence or move). Sometimes it was when someone needed to be protected from danger, like using a flier as the back line when there were multiple archers about. Sometimes it was someone who wasn't going to be useful fighting independently, like a magic user against a bunch of high-res enemies. And so on. So the end result was that I wound up picking up a fair few C and B supports, but not getting any single pairing up to S.

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15 minutes ago, lenticular said:

I used guard stance a lot, but not consistently with the same people. Instead, I'd swap in and out depending on what was tactically useful or expedient at any given time. Sometimes that would be whoever gives the pair-up bonus of whatever stat I need at the time (usually speed, defence or move). Sometimes it was when someone needed to be protected from danger, like using a flier as the back line when there were multiple archers about. Sometimes it was someone who wasn't going to be useful fighting independently, like a magic user against a bunch of high-res enemies. And so on. So the end result was that I wound up picking up a fair few C and B supports, but not getting any single pairing up to S.

Huh. Well, one thing I meant to say earlier was that I wanna congratulate you for beating the blind ironman in spite of all this. Sorry you didn't enjoy it as much as I hyped it up, and I hope it wasn't a waste of money for you!

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23 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Huh. Well, one thing I meant to say earlier was that I wanna congratulate you for beating the blind ironman in spite of all this. Sorry you didn't enjoy it as much as I hyped it up, and I hope it wasn't a waste of money for you!

Thank you! This is very much not my normal way of playing Fire Emblem, but I do like to change things up now and again, just to get a bit of variety. And while I will probably continue to whine and complain about it, I did enjoy myself overall. It's a game that has a lot of really nice ideas, even if I don't feel they quite come together into a single unified whole. But at the end of the day, after I finished Birthright, I then went and bought Conquest, so yeah, I do have to admit that I am enjoying it overall, despite my misgivings. (I'm doing Conquest on Lunatic Classic, but not ironmanning this time. I'm only on chapter 9 so far, though.)

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Revelation Day 12: Paralogue 11

Alright, I'm just waiting on the clock striking nine so I can get started with my visits for the day. We're gonna do the paralogue for Hinata's son Hisame, something I've never done before. Yeah, in this game, kids are tied to the father, not the mother. Probably because the legendary weapon users are all male and they wanted to make sure that subject matter was a big deal in parent-child supports. And I guess the idea of having only women using the legendary weapons didn't sit well with the devs, and they didn't want to make five characters who can result in two children, and... yeah, sorry, I don't have time to talk about this, it's visiting time.

Hiya Maof06! Good luck on your new file! Take a lottery hat! And remember, if you have accessory requests, just speak up!

Autumn and I made Theo, and... man, I wish I understood what the fuck was the thought process behind including these things. They'd be a cute novelty if there were any realistic way to train them. They might even be a fun challenge run that way! But as it stands...

Oh yeah, listening to the Anna music at Undyne's castle reminds me! Anna's theme is used in the main game! For some reason it's the music used for the stupid “this is where babies come from” scene!

Anyway, I think that's everyone. If I missed you because I took to long to get to you yesterday and it didn't unlock by the time I seemed finished, I apologize, and I'll be sure to visit you tomorrow!

Right, let's do the paralogue. Yep, so, here's the first of those child paralogues that have been the topic of discussion in the thread lately. For those of you who don't read anything in this thread but my playlog entries (or if it's the distant future and you're reading this after the hypothetical fall of Serenes Forest, and this marathon now only exists as a reply-free bundle of word documents I've posted somewhere else)... the child paralogues are essentially how this game handles late-game prepromotes.

Whether it's because the devs knew they had to get all the shippable first-gen units frontloaded if they were going to add a child system, or whether it's because they figured that late-game prepromotes in a game full of class-hopping and skill-collecting were bound to be more subpar than ideal without some extra skills, they decided to take the child paralogue system of the previous game... and make the recruitable children and the enemies scale with the party's progress in the game, thereby turning the children from a potentially game-breaking school of Magikarp just raring to be turned into Gyaradoses... into far more reasonably-balanced units who need no extra training to get up to speed with the rest of your party and the recruitment of which will provide a sufficient challenge for you no matter where in the game you are.

I love this system in theory, and I find it pretty great in practice. However, it does admit of some pitfalls, as has just been discussed. As Lenticular's experience demonstrated, if you're playing this blind, then you're out of luck if you underestimate the value of pairing characters, and also there are two really bad ones where it's almost impossible to save the kid late into the game because there's this thing called an offspring seal that makes sure the unit gets auto-leveled without robbing you of the chance to pick their branching promotion, but before they use it they're stuck at base class level 20 while the enemies could be promoted level 15, and Shiro and Ignatius... don't tend to survive long enough to get rescued late in the game for this reason.

There are a few other issues though:

1: The game never actually explicitly spells out how skill inheritance works, and when your first child paralogue doesn't have the unit on the field right away, you don't have a chance to connect the dots without restarting.

2: If the unit you're replacing in the army is a father, you can still do his child's paralogue, but unlike with Chrom in Awakening, Corrin can't recruit any of these characters as an alternative method, so at best you're forced to keep them as green units for the whole map in order to recruit them (or just beat them if they're an enemy), and at worst you won't be able to recruit them at all. I think. I don't actually know for sure of any instance where not having the father makes recruitment impossible, but the point is it generally makes it harder.

Also, one minor annoyance I have, one that's relevant here, is that Hisame here, being Mozu's son, has aptitude. His scaled base stats are not remotely higher for having inherited it. I'm pretty sure his offspring seal auto-levels would be better, but basically, the sooner you get Mozu's kid, the better they'll be, because the more of their levels you'll get to apply that 10% growth bonus to.

Anyway... onto the ridiculous plot of these paralogues. In this one, along with a few others, they actually touch upon how shitty of a parenting decision it was to put these kids in Deeprealms.

...Also, Hinata says he remembers when he was Hisame's age. Hinata... still looks like he's in his teens.

But anyway, yeah, Hisame's basically like “Bitch, I've had to learn to survive without knowing my parents because I only see you once a couple of years, and you still haven't figured that out! Leave me alone, I want nothing more to do with you!”

Unfortunately Hinata didn't get enough dual guard exp to gain a single level, so Hisame's not getting any oni savage skills from him. No big deal. If I wind up using him, it'll probably be as one of Hinata's reclasses anyway. But I doubt I'll use him. I'm mostly doing this paralogue to show off the system. Honestly, this might not even be wise, given I have no idea how crazy Lunatic might get, but fuck it. I've got more S supports coming.

Hisame starts as a neutral unit separated from our forces, but thankfully he's not actually in range of any of them to start, so we have enough time to save him. He has at least one turn, and that's more than enough for us to get to him, and if all else fails, Elise can make it with the rescue rod.

I've decided to pair Leo up with Hinoka, because I've never seen their supports and I'm curious about them.

I have to remember that faceless often have random skills, and they can be nasty. I see one with countermagic, which is basically counter except it only works on magic but doesn't need to be in melee range. Thankfully, like counter, in this game it doesn't work when the user attacks.

Right, just to cover my bases, I'm gonna try to recruit Hisame with Corrin and see if it works. Make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass earlier. I've been confident of things before that turned out to be wrong (I somehow thought that when Alm or Celica dies in Echoes, you're given the option to use the turnwheel on the game over screen, but when I tested it, no dice, didn't happen).

...Nope, can't do it.

These enemies are really weak for this point in the game. I guess because they weren't designed with Revelation's ludicrous stat inflation in mind? It's kinda jarring. Maybe it'll make more sense when I play Birthright. I guess it could be that these paralogues are just supposed to be easy and I never noticed, but it didn't feel like that on Conquest...

Okay, one thing I really like is that all of the fathers have voiced lines saying their child's name. I wish they had more characters have voiced lines to introduce themselves with, just so that everyone's on the same page about how every name is pronounced.

Alright, the map's over. That was really mindless, mostly because it was all one type of enemy and the skills they had basically never became relevant. Let's head back to the base and...

...Okay, looks like I did get everyone on my wifi list, but there's a newcomer today! Hello, Twinks! I'll visit you tomorrow so that it's synced up with everyone else and we can still do everything at once. But glad to have you on board!

...

Ryoma: If it's true that we are what we eat, then I am made of very strong vegetables!

...That just tickles me, I don't know why.

Anyway, onto supports.

Kagero and Dakota's support here is actually fairly interesting. She opens up about why she's so dedicated to serve the Hoshidan royal family above and beyond even other retainers. Apparently it's because her elder brother, who was supposed to get the job, was frail since birth and couldn't do it, so Kagero wound up doing it in his place to preserve the clan's honor. I find it interesting that they say “as the eldest child” it was his duty to serve the Hoshidan royal family, and not “as the eldest son”. I've heard some stuff about the original Japanese version having a lot of “male bloodline” stuff that the localization cut out, and I'd be curious to know if this was one of them.

Elise and Leo's support is super short but also cute and wholesome, with Elise just asking Leo about the weird sun shower she saw.

Ah yes, and now Hisame and Hinata. ...Hinata apparently names his sword.

I'm suddenly very curious what his supports with Odin are like.

PFFFFHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh god, Mozu's support with Hisame is pretty damned funny. She finds his diary, doesn't read it, but upon seeing his horror at her holding it, she suddenly wants to. And then this happens when he says the stuff in there is private:

Mozu: Ohhhh, I see. I suppose boys your age have lots of thoughts best kept from their mothers. It's only natural for a healthy young man. But to fill a whole book with them...

Anyway, Hinoka and Leo's is super short and basically just amounts to Leo being impressed with her lancework but also concerned about how to build a strategy around such an aggressive and unpredictable style... and Hinoka basically just indirectly mocks the idea of strategy entirely. Alright, I'm kinda interested in seeing how this progresses.

Leo and Azura's is possibly the shortest I've ever seen. Wow, this game really likes doing super short ones for some reason. I don't remember them being this short!

...Alright, I think I'll cut it here for today, take it a bit easy after yesterday. Honestly, once I get to Birthright and Conquest, I plan on shifting gears a bit and doing one chapter a day, but going more in-depth about what happens in the chapters since we'll have more interesting shit going on. Hopefully I'll have the patience to do that again and not be over-eager to actually play the games rather than comment on them.

Stay safe, everyone!

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You know, for most Fates characters, I can at least say one or two things about them, or at least I remember whose kid they are. When I read "Hisame", I was absolutely certain that I have never seen that name ever before. I googled it and I don't think I've seen the portrait before. Weird.

32 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Mozu: [...] boys your age [...]

...

......

Fucking Fates, man.

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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

These enemies are really weak for this point in the game. I guess because they weren't designed with Revelation's ludicrous stat inflation in mind? It's kinda jarring. Maybe it'll make more sense when I play Birthright. I guess it could be that these paralogues are just supposed to be easy and I never noticed, but it didn't feel like that on Conquest...

 

After Chapter 18 is when the enemies start promoting in the Deeprealms on all routes (and when Offsprings Seals first appear I think). It's after 18 that Spear & Knight become particularly challenging.

By selecting to do a childlogue before fighting C18, you've picked the "optimal" moment in terms of difficulty. You can potentially have a bunch of 20/1+ characters, whilst the enemies remain without promotion bonuses.

Or, it could be you're playing a Hoshidan child chapter. The nature of each baby rescue loosely aligns with the nationality of the rapid-aging artificial human's "father". The sons and daughters of the Conquest tend to have more complicated maps, while the bokus and himes of Birthright tend to be plain old basic routs, and those who transcend the night and day are slightly in-between, if leaning towards the latter. The RevCons feature neat goodies in the maps too, whilst the 'Rights have no stuff, providing EXP alone. 

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my experience with child units in fates is that i always get them late and they always become my best units by default and that one time i did shigure's paralogue really early and he remained unpromoted trash post-seal so i just resetted. they are endgame units only imo lol.

also new weapon ranks starting at E is a dumb farce. weapon ranks peaked at magvel and tellius tbh. (fódlan notwithstanding since everyone uses everything there?)

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