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Just now, Alastor15243 said:

But why did they move into Saizo's range? There's nothing in that direction for them to path towards if Saizo wasn't already touching one of the walls.

I sent a pair north that could tank there hits for a few turns, that way I wouldn't have to deal with them until after I dealt with the enemies that spawned at the same time to the east without them interfering, the way they prioritized attacks made that a viable space to move...

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2 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I sent a pair north that could tank there hits for a few turns, that way I wouldn't have to deal with them until after I dealt with the enemies that spawned at the same time to the east without them interfering, the way they prioritized attacks made that a viable space to move...

Ahhhhh. So you were in that area, very near the reinforcements at the time? That'd do it.

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Conquest Day 19: Invasion 2

So I just discovered that there's apparently an enemy-only unit roll on the title screen if you wait too long, using ominous music rather than heroic music. Hilariously though, “villager” is one of them, resulting in a blood red, scary title card being used to introduce... Mozu.

Looks like the game knows full well how terrifying she truly is.

...It also has songstress on it. What's going on here?

Alright, so, let's do our castle chores, maybe see what the paralogues look like just in case, because I'm really not in the mood do do these right now when I'm already overloaded for units I want to use as-is, and...

...Ooh! Invasion 2 is up! That sounds like a great thing to do today, we can get Elise and Niles and some others promoted!

...Christ. Holy fuck. I just looked at Niles's stats and made a good long comparison to Shura. Granted, Niles is 2 levels and a promotion lower, but he's down four in HP, six in strength, eight in skill, five in defense, and... actually, Shura's slightly better than Niles in all of the other stats too. Honestly, I never like using Niles because his attack power always turns out like this, and I'm tempted to not even waste the promotion item on him. Just marry him off to Effie for Nina's sake and then never use him again. Even with Jakob and Azura gone my roster barely has room to breathe as it is.

Also, holy shit I forgot how terrifying Invasion 2 was. And to think, for a second, I was worried this would make too boring of an update! Alright, so, first off, gotta move the buildings around to get some better starting locations for my needs.

...Hoooooly shit, there are four maids down there with freeze and enfeeble. This is not going to be the quick exp tune-up I need. I'm gonna change course and try the actual Chapter 18.


 

Day 19 Change of Plans: Chapter 18

And now we run into the fake Izana for the third time, and honestly, I think the family reactions this time are the best by far.

Dakota: Y-you're an archduke!? Really? ...Really, though?

Leo: Impossible. He's so disgustingly casual...

Camilla: I'm a little surprised he's able to lead a whole kingdom like that...

Xander: It's downright unsettling...

Elise: Hi, Izana!! It's great to meet you too! Let's be best friends, heehee!

But then they try to make the fact that Izana knows their names suspicious, even though it's entirely believable why an archduke would know the names of foreign royals.

Anyway, the Hoshidan royals show up, the elder princes get into a royal cockfight, and Izana tells both the elder princes they'll be severely punished if they start a fight in Izumo, and unless they're saying Izumo will declare war on both of them, I can't imagine how they can have any authority to punish either of them while keeping neutral in this conflict.

So, Izana locks away the royals' weapons.

Remember that for later, viewers.

Anyway, the princes face off again in a verbal pissing contest, and it's a really ham-fisted attempt to point out how similar they are. But then immediately after, Izana reveals himself to be Zola and captures Ryoma along with all of the other unarmed Hoshidan royals.

Weirdly, Zola's plan seems to be to imprison Ryoma but kill all of the other Hoshidan royals, which seems ass-backwards. You'd think the best strategy would be to kill Ryoma and use the others as hostages, like others in the thread have said.

Also, apparently in this continuity, Zola was motivated to impersonate Izana because he heard about a banquet in Izumo that the Hoshidans were going to... a banquet which does not happen in any other route.

Also, the Nohrian royals had their weapons locked up too, and yet they directly antagonize Zola right after he reveals himself and... just somehow get their weapons back offscreen?

Anyway, on to the map, and...

Christ.

Status staves everywhere. Enfeeble up top, freeze down below. And so many powerful enemies.

Ugh, it's been two hours of my time spent just figuring out what the fuck to do today. The game's great and all, but doing it on a strict timetable on a daily basis is weirdly draining. The only other game to do this to me in the marathon so far has been Thracia. I think it's probably the sheer number of moving parts or something.

...Yeah, any way I slice it, my army just isn't ready to handle this first turn. I need some more magical firepower, and that means...

...yep.

Yep, I'm finally doing it.

Ophelia's paralogue.


 

Day 19 Change of Change of Plans: Paralogue 20

Right, so, it's gonna suck having to spend 2k to promote Ophelia when it could have been for free, but I need Ophelia now, and I also need the tomes here. The mission doesn't look too complicated, unless there's some gimmick I'm not seeing. Also, almost none of the enemies are promoted, they're all at level 20, which is great for my army. It'll let me easily get some good training on the guys who still haven't promoted yet. And hopefully I can get closer to finally getting Selena and Laslow their damned S support so that I can start training up Laslow as a rally bot, because we could really use him.

Alright, let's do this.

I had this creeping, terrifying moment where I thought I failed to pass down vantage, but no, those skills go at the top of their skill list, not the bottom. Good. Okay. So.

I open up with one of my favorite moves: have Odin nostank everything so that everyone can then come in to slaughter the weakened enemies for kill exp. Unfortunately looking at the next map has made it clear that this strategy is going to have its limits coming soon, but for now, it's basically foolproof.

I notice there's an outlaw by the boss, so I'm sending Dakota and Camilla over to the closest house to him juuuust in case he's gonna do what I think he's gonna do. The other four houses are easily within our reach compared to him, so we should be fine.

Elise promoted purely through dual guard experience while backing up Odin, which is awesome.

Looks like more reinforcements are coming, with more outlaws, so I'm rushing to get all the houses as quickly as I can.

OH YEAH BABY.

ELISE IS A MALIG KNIGHT.

SIX MORE MAGIC.

SIX MORE RESISTANCE.

WITH AN ODIN PAIR-UP SHE HAS SOMETHING LIKE 46 BOLT AXE ATTACK.

FUCK YES.

On the flipside, Dwyer has been getting consistently terrible level ups since his recruitment, which is a massive disappointment. Still, he just needs to be able to heal to be worth the deployment.

Elise can one-shot knights with a bolt axe. HOLY SHIT.

But yeah, I've traded Dakota's forged fire tome over to Elise so that she can start training up her tome rank, because that's really, really going to matter for accuracy and WTA reasons.

The outlaws kinda crept up on me, but I managed to make it to the southeast village in time. The real concern though is the group gunning for the northwest one. I need to work out how to take out the ones at the southeast while still giving myself options to rescue the northwest one.

Alright, I wound up using a rescue rod to be able to use Dakota in two places at once, because I underestimated how hard this would be.

FUCK.

HOLY SHIT.

THIS IS BAD.

The enemies all started moving at once, and now I'm cornered from three different directions, with the boss's promoted minions coming from the east. I wound up doing a psychotically dangerous and ballsy move where I had to take out a bunch of enemies, make sure the one outlaw I couldn't take out couldn't kill any of the units I used to kill the others, and then have Dwyer move to a specific space and use a freeze staff so that the silver shuriken mechanist couldn't nerf Odin's defense while he nostanks, while that specific space I moved him to allowed him to provide enough of a buff to Dakota's defenses that she should be able to survive this unless I'm miscalculating my dual guard calculations horribly.

Okay, we all survived, but we're not out of the woods yet. Holy shit. Odin's gotta survive another turn, this time with the silver shuriken debuff, and we've gotta take out the eastern enemies Dakota couldn't kill. Hopefully Odin's vantage will pull through like I think it will.

...It did. Magnificently.

Okay. The danger of dying has officially passed. But the odds of getting that calamity gate are basically nil. Not without letting someone die. Because I don't have anyone but Dakota, Elise, Odin and Camilla who can handle the remaining enemies crowded around the path to the calamity gate village, and in order to get to the house before my freeze staff wears out, an enemy has to die so that Odin or Elise (paired up) can get to the space they need to get to to kill the outlaw next turn after I use my last freeze staff use.

And Camilla and Dakota are too far away.

...No... wait...

...I can just transfer them!

...Yes, and then... I can kill the mechanist with Elise, freeze the outlaw...

YES! HOLY SHIT! I TOOK A LOT OF RISKS DOING THAT THAT I PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE, BUT FUCK IT! IT WORKED! CALAMITY GATE IS MINE! HOOOOOLY SHIT! I FEEL GOOD RIGHT NOW!

Words cannot describe what a clusterfuck that was. It kinda makes me wish I were doing this in video format so I could better convey the sheer chaos of the situation I got myself into and out of. So many thoughts were running through my head that it would've taken me half an hour to fully write down my thought process, and it would've probably been worthless due to not having visuals. Still...

HOLY SHIT.

I FEEL SO ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

THESE ARE THE MOMENTS I PLAY FIRE EMBLEM FOR.

Alright, and, we're done. And I managed to get everyone to level 20 at the last minute. Awesome. Now let's see the ending of this.

Okay, voice acting aside, Odin's interactions with Ophelia are pretty damned adorable.

Oh, also, Missiletainn's description is hilarious. It's the weapon you get, I think, for getting all of the villages. “Ophelia only. Skill/Res+1. Not a sword.”

Hooooooly shit do we have a lot of supports. Okay, let's check this out.

...Shit, it looks like none of them are making progress towards the remaining pairings. Damn it.

Camilla B support with Dakota.

Okay, this support is pretty funny.

As for Dakota and Dwyer, the B support feels an awful lot like her A support with Elise, talking about whether or not being soft-hearted and compassionate is a weakness on the battlefield.

...Odin and Ophelia's C support was... basically nothing but a cliffhanger. I hate it.

Ah, Camilla and Keaton! That's... kind of a pairing I was going for! On and off. Don't think I have room for it, but hopefully it'll still happen...

...It's just Camilla kinda weirded out by Keaton's “treasure-collecting” tastes. And from what I remember, that's basically all of what the chain is about, with the S rank being an out-of-left-field subject change.

Alright, now for Elise and Ophelia.

...Ignoring Elise's obvious underage-ness, this is actually pretty fitting, that the girl who was all into Odin's LARPing shenanigans gets this support set, where she jokes about being a chosen one as well.

Ophelia... apparently... doesn't think she's a chosen one? Then what was all that nonsense in the paralogue!?

But then Ophelia breaks a plate weirdly, and the support is over.

...Arthur and Effie's support is too simultaneously boring and bizarre to dignify with a response.

As for Selena and Arthur...

...Selena basically takes it upon herself to figure out how to cure Arthur's bad luck. But it goes no further than that here.

Well... that's it for today. Time to wrap up, or I'll be late for the shit I've got to do.

Tomorrow we'll hopefully be better equipped to handle Chapter 18!

Stay safe, everyone!

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13 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Ah, Camilla and Keaton! That's... kind of a pairing I was going for! On and off. Don't think I have room for it, but hopefully it'll still happen...

...It's just Camilla kinda weirded out by Keaton's “treasure-collecting” tastes. And from what I remember, that's basically all of what the chain is about, with the S rank being an out-of-left-field subject change.

That's a particularly potent pairing for end game as it allows you to combine Savage Blow with Grizzly Wound to turn Keaton into a player phase unit that can reduce an enemy into single digits no matter how bulky they are. You can make it even more absurd if you use the logbook to give him poison strike via an Avatar marriage too, though going that far is just amusing over kill.

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25 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

YES! HOLY SHIT! I TOOK A LOT OF RISKS DOING THAT THAT I PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE, BUT FUCK IT! IT WORKED! CALAMITY GATE IS MINE! HOOOOOLY SHIT! I FEEL GOOD RIGHT NOW!

Glad to see you having fun, thats more or less the feeling Conquest gave me on the first playthrough, it was good, I won't forget that. For all the aching and "and next up is that, ugh" on subsequent plays, that when I got that feeling, it was worth it.

 

10 minutes ago, Jotari said:

That's a particularly potent pairing for end game as it allows you to combine Savage Blow with Grizzly Wound to turn Keaton into a player phase unit that can reduce an enemy into single digits no matter how bulky they are. You can make it even more absurd if you use the logbook to give him poison strike via an Avatar marriage too, though going that far is just amusing over kill.

Or, try BerukaxSaizo on Revelation. Savage Blow + Poison Strike + Pyrotechnics = 60% of one enemy's HP gone and 40% off of enemies caught within the splash radius. Add Lunge and Replicate for maximum madness. Now if only there was a non-hack way of getting him Grizzly Wound... And Revelation wasn't Revelation, wherein there just isn't anything to use the combination on that is challenging, and without anything challenging, it doesn't feel so merited to assemble and hence fun.

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40 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Anyway, the Hoshidan royals show up, the elder princes get into a royal cockfight, and Izana tells both the elder princes they'll be severely punished if they start a fight in Izumo, and unless they're saying Izumo will declare war on both of them, I can't imagine how they can have any authority to punish either of them while keeping neutral in this conflict.

As yet another entry for the "what scale is this game's map anyway?" files, this would make sense if Nohr and Hoshido were both small and there was an overlord/Shogun/Holy Roman Emperor/whatever to come down on them for breaking neutrality.

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2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...Christ. Holy fuck. I just looked at Niles's stats and made a good long comparison to Shura. Granted, Niles is 2 levels and a promotion lower, but he's down four in HP, six in strength, eight in skill, five in defense, and... actually, Shura's slightly better than Niles in all of the other stats too. Honestly, I never like using Niles because his attack power always turns out like this, and I'm tempted to not even waste the promotion item on him. Just marry him off to Effie for Nina's sake and then never use him again.

...aaaaaand now you know how I feel about Niles. Everyone and their grandma swears by him, but he NEVER becomes anything even remotely deserving of the hype.

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1 hour ago, lenticular said:

As yet another entry for the "what scale is this game's map anyway?" files, this would make sense if Nohr and Hoshido were both small and there was an overlord/Shogun/Holy Roman Emperor/whatever to come down on them for breaking neutrality.

That was the role I assigned to Valla in my Fates radical rewrite. I moved the kingdom to the mountains north of both kingdoms on both sides of the Bottomless Canyon. A secluded and austere third country of old that serves as an international mediator. It keeps to itself and projects an image of tranquility to the outside world below the peaks. Valla stays as quiet as its blessed Silent Dragon, the one who is the innumerable Stars to the solitary Sun and Moon of the Dawn and Dusk Dragons, and is likewise superior.

This ritualized aloofness from international affairs has been with great consistency followed for many centuries, perhaps a millennia or more. And because of this, the lesser nations on the rolling plains beneath it accept Valla's assertions to cultural supremacy, and accept the few judgements Valla does make as perfectly neutral and in line with the divine order of the universe. When Valla asks if it be allow to negotiate an issue on the international stage or within a realm, the matter is immediately and without hesitation brought before them, and when after weeks and months of consideration it reaches a decision, be it favoring one side or a compromise, it is followed regardless of any mutterings by the various parties.

-Of course, this is how it worked until about 20 years prior. When Mikoto and Arete's cartoonishly pure evil brother the young King of Valla invited Garon's and Sumeragi's fathers to the negotiation table over a dispute related to a new kingdom I invented. Said kingdom straddled the now-shrunken Bottomless Canyon, and which had lost its ruling dynasty in the middle of a Nohr-Hoshido war in the country, and was hence likely to be taken by one side or the other or split between the Dawn and the Dusk. The King of Valla executed both then-monarchs and launched a simultaneous invasion of Nohr and Hoshido using soldiers super-powered by the Silent Vein, which failed as it approached the capitals of each kingdom because Young Garon and Young Sumeragi rallied their troops in totally unrelated last stands and beat back Valla. They sent each other envoys and agreed to a truce until Valla was destroyed, they then invaded the country separately and met near the capital, where together with katana and axe they simultaneously chopped down the King of Valla.

Meanwhile, Valla ceased to exist as a living kingdom. The regicidal treason of Valla after the aforementioned centuries of absolute reverence led to systemic acts of rape, pillage, and murder on the part of Nohrian and Hoshidan troops. Their monarchs did not condemn these acts given they too were very angry and felt betrayed. Arete's and Mikoto's brother and their father the king before him had also abused the heck of out of the power of the Silent Vein. They did this to turn the delicate environment of the mountains and steppes, able to sustain small to moderate populations, into thriving soils able to provide for enough manpower to be worthy of a first-rate kingdom. The two kings of Valla were jealous that although Valla was the greatest kingdom on paper, over the centuries, as Valla did almost nothing with the world below, Nohr and Hoshido had swallowed many little polities and gone from city-states centered around their present-day capitals into great empires that had capacities greater than Valla and threatened to steal its traditional political clout. The Silent Vein had been exhausted of much of its energies and the environment had grown so used to the abnormal influx of fertility-giving magic, that losing it overnight caused everything to collapse into sterility.

The annihilation of Valla's towns and villages and the people therein and the termination of the land's fertility, was accompanied by the flight of those who weren't killed to Nohr and Hoshido, refugees desperate for hope one and all. These refugees included Princess Mikoto, shorn of her regal attire and the ability to lead her people, who just happened to be at a crisis-created soup kitchen the day Queen Ikona visited and saw there was something different about her and chose to save her from destitution by including her in her personal staff. Arete on the other hand had been freed from the prison awaiting execution her brother threw her inn for a attempting a coup, and was captured and passed along by Nohrian soldiers as a concubine until she reached Garon.

-And so Valla ceased to be as a living kingdom, it was abandoned. Barring:

  • Bandits fleeing Nohrian/Hoshidan law.
  • Looters looking for valuable stuff that wasn't taken by the Nohrian & Hoshidan armies in the initial devastation.
  • Some pastoralists migrating their flocks for the season to feed on the grasses and other plants that still survived in the hardy clime.
  • And the Flame Tribe, who had centuries earlier relocated to Valla from the south-center of the world map after Valla had resolved a conflict between the Flame Tribe and the fourth kingdom I invented. They retained revisitation and inhabitance rights at their most sacred volcanic mountain and the immediate environ at the coast near the Bottomless Canyon, but otherwise migrated to the mountains of Valla, where they were accepted as equals with an autonomous government and decent lands to call their own.
    • The Flame Tribe saw the King of Valla as foolish for the deception & regicide, and immediately declared neutrality when Hoshido and Nohr invaded. Their pleas that they had nothing to do the terrible act were accepted, and they were spared most of the brutality, barring isolated incidents by undiscriminating soldiers, which the kings apologized for. Unable to reach agreements with the two kingdoms over a new migration with Valla gone, the Flame Tribe by default inherited Valla. Their numbers were small enough and their adamantine spirits strong enough to endure in the devastated landscape in a mixed sedentary-nomadic life.
  • The Ice Tribe, living in the taiga of western Nohr, had sided with Arete's and Mikoto's brother and had taken to war against Nohr to assist Valla's invasion. This was because Valla was worshipped by the Tribes as the guarantor of their existences against the various threats which had wanted to conquer them time and again. Garon very happily put the savages in their place by attacking the Tribe and settling centuries of conflict between the Ice Tribe and Nohr with a decisive blow that put the Tribe under Garon's appointed overseers on the lands he picked for them. -So much the opposite of the Ice Tribe golden age wherein they established a dynasty that had ruled over Nohr itself.
  • The Wind Tribe in southeastern Hoshido was conflicted about whether to side with sacred Valla or and denounce its evils and experienced a civil war. Young Fuga, nowhere near the leadership yet but aspiring to a good position within the Wind Tribe, was among the emissaries sent to Hoshido expressing both a desire for Hoshido to stay out of the civil war, and proclaiming the Wind Tribe would emerge standing against Valla's actions. He met Sumeragi for the first time this way. Fuga by the way as part of a generation of young Wind Tribe people who had received some education in Hoshido, an attempt both intentional and passive at Hoshidan cultural assimilation of the lesser states subject to the Dawn Kingdom's hegemony.
  • The two Wild Tribes of Kitsune and Wolfskin were totally neutral and kept to their territories as they had for centuries in-line with Valla's decrees that these non-human native peoples of the world should be allowed to live in peace with everyone else. For them, there was no war, barring a few opportunistic individuals who felt the end of Valla's political hegemony meant there was nothing stopping them from taking Wild Tribe lands and skinning its inhabitants.

-Ignore my childish ramblings which I still remember so well!😅

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
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11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Alright, I wound up using a rescue rod to be able to use Dakota in two places at once, because I underestimated how hard this would be.

FUCK.

HOLY SHIT.

THIS IS BAD.

The enemies all started moving at once, and now I'm cornered from three different directions, with the boss's promoted minions coming from the east. I wound up doing a psychotically dangerous and ballsy move where I had to take out a bunch of enemies, make sure the one outlaw I couldn't take out couldn't kill any of the units I used to kill the others, and then have Dwyer move to a specific space and use a freeze staff so that the silver shuriken mechanist couldn't nerf Odin's defense while he nostanks, while that specific space I moved him to allowed him to provide enough of a buff to Dakota's defenses that she should be able to survive this unless I'm miscalculating my dual guard calculations horribly.

...one rescue use down already. Perhaps necessary, but always a high price to pay...

 

11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

...No... wait...

...I can just transfer them!

...Yes, and then... I can kill the mechanist with Elise, freeze the outlaw...

YES! HOLY SHIT! I TOOK A LOT OF RISKS DOING THAT THAT I PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE, BUT FUCK IT! IT WORKED! CALAMITY GATE IS MINE! HOOOOOLY SHIT! I FEEL GOOD RIGHT NOW!

Its things like this that Conquest so great to play.

 

11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Oh, also, Missiletainn's description is hilarious. It's the weapon you get, I think, for getting all of the villages. “Ophelia only. Skill/Res+1. Not a sword.”

Really you get it as long as Ophelia lives...

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Conquest Day 20: Invasion 2

Alright, now let's give this thing a shot.

...Yeah, uh... this is still pretty damned terrifying. Mostly those damned merchants and maids. If they were almost anything else this would be a cakewalk, but there's the constant fear of what those bastards might do. Thankfully, I've got a pretty well-fortified position and a huge moat they're likely to have to wade across to get to us, so I think I have a pretty solid plan.

I hope.

Okay, so, first things first, Laslow, as calculated, can one-shot these falcon knights on the east side, so I have him do that paired up with Selena, and then Mozu, Effie and Camilla finish off the rest of them.

Effie gets quick draw, and her speed's finally been picking up lately! She's got 19 as a level 3 sniper. She's still 2 behind her averages apparently, but it's more than workable.

Okay, next, I've gotta start making those maids waste those staves. I've got Dwyer, Felicia and Dakota standing at the bottom, on the northern side of the unbreakable building barricade, standing next to each other in case of freeze-induced emergencies and letting those staff users have at it. The freeze staves will definitely be wasted by the time any of those enemies show up, and given all the crazy My Castle buffs, the enfeeble ones won't be nearly as scary.

Finally, Odin, paired up with Elise, uses calamity gate on the great knights and mechanists on the west side. He's got a speed tonic and meal, so he can double them all.

The boss seems to be staying put in the center, as are two of the maids. Annoying. Thankfully, The southern forces have split up into two fairly manageable groups. The only thing truly dangerous is that dual-guarded merchant pair, who need to be taken out on player phase and have pretty high physical bulk. But as long as I retreat a little bit to give myself some more options, I think I can take them out with ease.

The first batch of status staves has been exhausted, and due to some clever abuse of enemy priority, Dakota wasn't hit by them even once. She's currently fighting off the villagers trying to cross the moat with the help of Felicia and Dwyer, while everyone else is currently prepared to face the incoming merchants.

...Christ I hope this doesn't have reinforcements, and if it does, I hope they don't show up, like, literally right now.

Okay, they do, but not from the sides. That's fine. That's fantastic. I can work with that, no problem. I'll have Odin and Elise go to guard the throne in case anything terrible happens. The initial wave of status staves is taken care of, the two merchants have just been taken out (thank goodness the dusk dragon also wounds the back unit), and now things are a lot less terrifying and complicated.

Man am I glad I split up Felicia and Dakota. Just as I suspected might be the case, the remaining maids, ahem, “maid their move” right after their reinforcements showed up, and now that I'm split up I can properly react to the incoming freeze that maid's about to IS THAT A FUCKING ENTRAP STAFF!?

THERE WAS A MAID HIDING IN THE BACK ROW BEHIND ONE OF THE REINFORCEMENTS AND I TOTALLY DIDN'T SEE! WHAT THE FUCK! NO! NO! PLEASE!

https://strawpoll.com/838x8ukzj

Stay safe, everyone.

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Soooooo... why do you think it's repeatedly been your Corrin who has been dying? Are you being more aggressive with her than other units? Is she frailer than other front line units? Are the AI units specifically targetting her? Are you just cursed? Something else?

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9 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Soooooo... why do you think it's repeatedly been your Corrin who has been dying? Are you being more aggressive with her than other units? Is she frailer than other front line units? Are the AI units specifically targetting her? Are you just cursed? Something else?

Well it happened for two different reasons each time, but the common thread is "she's my best enemy phase combatant".

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Guys, let's vote to kill a Royal, so his playthrough gets more excruciating!

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Conquest is totally the best game to iron mode guys XD

Birthright certainly doesn't deserve to be a tier below Conquest, as the game doesn't throw that much bullshit on you.

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3 minutes ago, Maof06 said:

Birthright certainly doesn't deserve to be a tier below Conquest, as the game doesn't throw that much bullshit on you.

I still blame myself for both of these deaths, not the game. The category isn't about how easy the game is to ironman, it's how fair the ironman is.

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22 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

I still blame myself for both of these deaths, not the game. The category isn't about how easy the game is to ironman, it's how fair the ironman is.

I think there's something to be said for the criticism that the gameplay having so much to keep track of in terms of it's gameplay can be a strike against its ironmanability. Course I still feel really sour about my Mozu dying against a dual strike critical initiated by an enemy that couldn't even damage her.

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5 hours ago, Jotari said:

I think there's something to be said for the criticism that the gameplay having so much to keep track of in terms of it's gameplay can be a strike against its ironmanability. Course I still feel really sour about my Mozu dying against a dual strike critical initiated by an enemy that couldn't even damage her.

Interesting take. But if I were to conclude that's an issue, would it really be an issue specifically for ironmans?

Anyway, since it's the weekend, I'm gonna take another 24 hours before looking at and finalizing the strawpoll results, just because I can. I'm really nervous to find out who you guys picked for me.

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11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

...Christ I hope this doesn't have reinforcements, and if it does, I hope they don't show up, like, literally right now

All the invasions have reinforcements from what I remember...

 

11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

THERE WAS A MAID HIDING IN THE BACK ROW BEHIND ONE OF THE REINFORCEMENTS AND I TOTALLY DIDN'T SEE! WHAT THE FUCK! NO! NO! PLEASE!

The one with Entrap...yeah that one is cruel, I didn't lose anyone to it, but the first time I played that map the end, and saw it use that was an utterly terrifying experience. Needless to say I remember that maid specifically...

 

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3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Interesting take. But if I were to conclude that's an issue, would it really be an issue specifically for ironmans?

Anyway, since it's the weekend, I'm gonna take another 24 hours before looking at and finalizing the strawpoll results, just because I can. I'm really nervous to find out who you guys picked for me.

If the rationale for "Ironmannability" isn't "how easy is this game to ironman?", but instead, "how transparent is the game about threats that could cause me to lose an ironman?", then I would argue that the rating should be redesignated. As "Transparency", or something along those lines.

Because no fookin' way does, say, the Ignatius paralogue exist in "the most ironmannable game ever".

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Interesting take. But if I were to conclude that's an issue, would it really be an issue specifically for ironmans?

I would say yes. It's a thing that the game does that increases the probability of you losing units in frustrating and unsatisfying ways. Which is compounded by the game also encouraging you to routinely have Corrin in harm's way, increasing the probability of getting a game over in a frustrating and unsatisfying way. Essentially, if there's too much going on for a player to be able to reasonably and reliably take it all in, then you're playing with incomplete knowledge. Which is the same problem with fog of war, ambush spawns, unclear descriptions, etc. It's still a case of "I made correct decisions based on the information I had, but I did not have all the information".

The potential difference here, of course, is that you potentially could have had all the information. It's all there. However, while the Fates UI is decent, it's still not able to convey all relevant information quickly and easily. It's not like, for instance, a chess board where you can take in the entire position at a glance. You need to check every unit individually, look at their stats, their skills, their weapon, their pair up partner, etc. This leads to one of two possibilities. Either you play utterly meticulously, being incredibly careful, always checking and double checking every single move that you make or you occasionally get hit by some ridiculous out-of-nowhere gotcha. The first option absolutely kills the pacing of the game and turns it into a tedious, joyless slog. The second option gives the frustrating, unsatisfying, "doesn't feel like there was anything I could do about it" deaths that are the antithesis of ironman.

I am reminded of the quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Spoiler

“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

Just because the information is technically available doesn't mean a thing if I can't be reasonably expected to have seen it.

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I'd also add that entrap isnt exactly my favourite thing to deal with. It's not as bad as a hexing rod, but most of the the dealing with entrap involves dancing in and out of the enemies range trying to bait and pick off units because the enemy actually getting to use entrap on a unit is usually a death sentence. I'd probably be more in favour of it if it worked the same way for the player, but most of the time the enemies you'd actually want to use entrap on (like other entrap/hexing rod enemies) you just arbitrarily can't, because the enemy having zero move disables entrap for the player.

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Okay, lemme put it this way:

How should deaths happen in an ironman, if not because of mistakes like this? The death by crit I agree is frustrating, and I feel that the very concept of a game-over lord is an annoying obstacle you have to make house rules around... but I cannot disagree more strongly with the idea that shit like this, the entrap staff death, shouldn't happen in a good ironman game.

This was just me failing to analyze the possibilities of a situation and suffering the consequences. Dakota died because I made a mistake. That's the way units are supposed to die in an ironman. My ideal ironman fantasy isn't one where I beat it completely deathless, it's a one-of-a-kind adventure where what deaths do happen have survivable but tangible consequences that shape my run into a story in and of itself in ways I can never expect.

The fact that I've lost units in an ironman isn't a sign that the game is a bad game to ironman. I love the fact that this game is hard enough that in spite of all of the ways it's so much more fair than everything that came before it, I'm still experiencing the deaths and curve-balls that are half of what makes an ironman so compelling for me. Normally when I lose units in an ironman, it's because of dumb shit like fog of war. Here I'm losing them because I'm not good enough to do the game perfectly. That's not a mark against ironmannability, that's a mark in favor of its difficulty.

Edited by Alastor15243
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Alastor, you sure you're not just letting bias get in the way because you 1) like the gameplay of Conquest a lot, and 2) wanted to prove that Fates was good for ironman?

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