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Is A 3 Houses Ironman Possible?


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I'm not the best at 3 houses and I'm not the biggest fan, but I do like iron manning games, I'm just not sure if it's possible to beat 3 houses. From what I've seen, done, and know, if anyone dies. It's game over. Pre time skip you might be able to salvage it if you lose someone like Ingrid (not saying she's bad) or someone that you recruited from another house. The only route that you could go and reliably win would be CF since ch 1 of post time skip will pretty much end any run.

Maybe I'm wrong. What do you guys think?

Edit: I forgot to add that I'm assuming Maddening mode. Hard and Normal are very doable, but Maddening just seems unbeatable to me.

Edited by GramerNazy
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Simply put, 3H is one of the worst games for ironmans. You don't get that many characters, and there are other problems.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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Depends what difficulty you're playing and how long you hold out before losing anyone. Also whether you're playing "a true iron man" where a failed objective is a deleted file. With prior knowledge, I'd argue a true iron man on hard or lower is plausible (I say with prior knowledge because it means avoiding some of the nastier tricks the developers thought the divine pulse justified). Maniac's another beast entirely. That said... the amount of time spent off the map, plus the fact you literally stop getting new units after the time-skip makes it ill-designed for it in the least. I know I more or less attempted it on my first playthrough (hard AM)... but had to break true iron-man rules twice. Once when Rodrigue ended up dying because I didn't know where he'd appear being a first time player. The second being because of the hill trick on Gronder field resulting in Byleth's untimely death. From there... it was smooth sailing until Ashe ate a low % crit on the second to last chapter. But... because I was using Shamir as an adjutant since I got her, she was able to fill in for him adequately (albeit not perfectly) on the final chapter.

That said, I missed the majority of the paralogues that run. Some of them, (particularly Petra's/Bernadetta and Marianne's) are not very friendly for such a run, even with the prior knowledge. The one with Caspar/Mercedes can also be a pain if you have either one unlevelled. So I'd say what paralogues one attempts will factor into it as well. A lot. As will which route you attempt. The difficulty (we established it). Even Adjudants used (I'd suggest using ones that could potentially replace units that are at risk of death).

Would I recommend it? No. On that first (not exactly) game over, (because divine pulse exists).  I made the compromise that I'd divine pulse back to the start of the battle and not change my set up (items, starting postitions, etc) in both situations, as I was not going through so many hours of game again.

All said, I'd say a true iron man is possible, luck allowing. But it goes from fun to not fairly quickly because of the game's design philosophy.

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"All said, I'd say a true iron man is possible" I forgot to clarify that I was assuming maddening mode. When I think Iron man, I think no turn wheel and if an objective failure loses the game, the game is over. Sorry for not clarifying those things originally and thanks for your opinion on this subject.

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I think as mentioned above, prior knowledge is key. If you don't allow yourself the ability to research anything about the game, or even just the structure of the route at hand, you're almost definitely gonna get deaths. Even if you were to avoid all auxiliary battles/paralogues, I think it'd be straight up impossible if you don't plan on letting allies die either (i.e. Ch. 5 Gilbert, or Randolph/Ladislava in Ch. 12 CF).

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Honestly, I think Three Houses is one of the worst games to iron man, cuz unless you recruit a lot of students from other houses as well as the faculty, the game doesn't give you a lot of replacement units if someone dies. Plus, once you reach the time skip, there's no more recruits whatsoever with the exception of Gilbert in Azure Moon and Jeritza in Crimson Flower (and technically Lysithea in Crimson Flower as well if you didn't already recruit her in the Academy phase).

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The law of probability says yes

However it's just a maybe, you would have to be very lucky

Like the others have said you have a very small starting team, and considering how the game feels like a lot of it was balanced around the Turn Wheel not using it is a problem in the long run.

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Yea, I saw a Maddening BL ironman that got finished up floating around there somewhere.

Found the guy again.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6K9MCF1vKmqdo3or4xeUbA

Though I haven't actually watched the whole run, I just saw it pop up, so I don't know what minor things said person held themselves to besides no divine pulse.

Edited by Caster
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If a game can be beaten normally, then it can be beaten in an Ironman context. There are no points in the game, even in Maddening mode, where you need to lose a unit, use tbe Turnwheel, or get a game over, in order to progress. It stands to reason that if you make no mistakes, you can beat an Ironman.

Having said that, it is almost certainly possible to put yourself in an unwinnable scenario. Suppose you're playing Silver Snow, you powered through the game with Edelgard, Hubert, and the Church units, and now you're on Chapter 13 with a bunch of untrained Black Eagles. Oh, and you let Seteth die in chapter 12. The objective is only to "beat Pallardo", but with bad enough builds on ill-trained (or possibly dead) units, it may become impossible to do so. This is true for any playthrough, but especially so in an Ironman.

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It has been done. I saw a post on this on reddit.

Here are the rules the guy followed:

 

Quote

The rules that I used:

  • Game over ends the run

  • No resetting, the dead stay dead

  • No Divine Pulse.

  • No DLC missions: E.g. Feeding animals tutorial, Teatime with Rhea etc...

  • No DLC items. E.g Vajra-Mushti, Chalice of Beginnings, DLC Stat boosters, Renown, etc...

  • No DLC classes.

  • No NG+

  • No Anna or Ashen Wolfs recruitment (Anna's secret shop is allowed)

  • Maddening difficulty

It seems that the entire run was recorded and you can watch it on youtube as well. I've seen other discussions suggesting slightly different rules for Iron Man too.

I'm personally still relatively green with this game, doing my first Maddening run currently but if things continue to go smoothly then an Iron Man run sounds very interesting for me to try later on.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2020 at 8:05 PM, Owns said:

It has been done. I saw a post on this on reddit.

Here are the rules the guy followed:

 

It seems that the entire run was recorded and you can watch it on youtube as well. I've seen other discussions suggesting slightly different rules for Iron Man too.

I'm personally still relatively green with this game, doing my first Maddening run currently but if things continue to go smoothly then an Iron Man run sounds very interesting for me to try later on.

I don't see any "No Grinding" rule there :p

With grinding, things are a lot easier since you can get Weight -5 and Armor Knight's 12 Def/Fortress Knight's 17 Def on EVERYONE which makes things massively easier (plus A rank bows on everyone so they can all do Hunter's Volley lol and other such shenanigans).

I did it myself on my NG Maddening run because I'm not that hardcore a player lol. All my casters had 19 Strength (Warrior base) and 17 Defense (FK base) at level 20 along with Weight -5. My physical units all had Weight -5 as well (because due to the AS calculations, Weight on weapons/spells is the main reason you get doubled early on; later it's just the absurd Speed stats of FKs and Assassins) and once level 30 hit my males could pick up Quick Riposte.

 

Side note: post timeskip, I'm of the opinion that it's better from gameplay perspective (not time investment) to due the DLC battles all weeks besides the first each month. Gardening only gets you 1 stat booster per week you do it. DLC battles give you 3 per, though they are map-dependent. But having 3 Strength/Magic/Speed boosters in a single week is vastly superior to Gardening. Cooking is debatable since it applies to your whole team and stat boosters don't, but the Stat Boosters are permanent buffs.

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I'm thinking it'd be crazy difficult. A main thing about the game (for maddening at least) is that you will most likely lose at least one unit every battle, or at least seems to be built around that logic. Without Divine Pulses, maddening will be difficult but not impossible. Although an Iron-man run is probably near-impossible, depending on the route (as you're planning on doing CF it'll be shorter, chapter-wise) so It's probably possible but losing any of your "amazing, can't live without" units could make it impossible. I'm no expert on this but this is just my opinion on this. If you do plan on doing the iron-man run then good luck 🙂

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On 7/10/2020 at 1:21 PM, Ivan Tridelan said:

With grinding, things are a lot easier since you can get Weight -5 and Armor Knight's 12 Def/Fortress Knight's 17 Def on EVERYONE which makes things massively easier

I don't know how much grinding was done in that Iron man run but on the surface it doesn't look like anything excessive was done beyond good planning and strategy. By the way, the same person recently completed a GD Iron Man run too:

 

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On 7/10/2020 at 7:21 PM, Ivan Tridelan said:

I don't see any "No Grinding" rule there 😛

With grinding, things are a lot easier since you can get Weight -5 and Armor Knight's 12 Def/Fortress Knight's 17 Def on EVERYONE which makes things massively easier (plus A rank bows on everyone so they can all do Hunter's Volley lol and other such shenanigans).

I did it myself on my NG Maddening run because I'm not that hardcore a player lol. All my casters had 19 Strength (Warrior base) and 17 Defense (FK base) at level 20 along with Weight -5. My physical units all had Weight -5 as well (because due to the AS calculations, Weight on weapons/spells is the main reason you get doubled early on; later it's just the absurd Speed stats of FKs and Assassins) and once level 30 hit my males could pick up Quick Riposte.

 

Side note: post timeskip, I'm of the opinion that it's better from gameplay perspective (not time investment) to due the DLC battles all weeks besides the first each month. Gardening only gets you 1 stat booster per week you do it. DLC battles give you 3 per, though they are map-dependent. But having 3 Strength/Magic/Speed boosters in a single week is vastly superior to Gardening. Cooking is debatable since it applies to your whole team and stat boosters don't, but the Stat Boosters are permanent buffs.

There's no 'No grinding' rule on the list because I have no clue how I would define 'grinding'. Are paralogues considered grinding? The key rules of any ironman run are: a Game over ends the run and no resetting. Additionally for FE3H, no DP allowed. Any further rules are just restrictions that I use to make it more challenging. Some items are nice to have for an ironman, like the Ochain Shield, Rafail gem, Thyrsus and others. If paralogues are considered grinding, this would make an ironman even more difficult as it already is. The game is unforgiving for losing a unit mid/late game. Avoiding crit or increasing attack range is a nice utility to make an ironman run more manageable. 

In my last two iron man runs, I tried to avoid excessive grinding. (I did an exception for Seteth. I gave him Reposition before chapter 12. He basically solo'ed his own training mission, the one with Lvl6 units) 

  1. I'm not grinding weapon ranks in aux battles. E.g: pressing end turn with a rusted weapon until turn 99. 
  2. I only do aux battles/paralogues every last week of the month. I might do an exception before chapter 12 if I need/want to do some additional paralogues.

What I currently allow in my runs:

  1. Fishing to get extra money. Professor rank is not that important but a nice side effect. I only do one fishing session in the run and that's usually like 45-60 minutes of fishing. It's super tedious and I'll try to avoid it in my current CF run. 
  2. Doing Aux battles/paralogues every last week in the month to get money/meat/ore/items/relics/battalions. 
  3. Using units as an adj. to get an ability that I want. This makes your team for a short time weaker, but in the long run stronger. E.g. Lysithea learned Hit+20 because I used her as an adj. for some time. Giving that unit a knowledge gem speeds everything up. 
  4. For the safety of the run, if I need to rely on my tank to keep my units safe, I put him in a choke point and let him deal with the threat. E.g. Using a formation so that thiefs can't use their ability Pass, etc.. (I really hate thiefs with pass early game) If no choke point is available, I'll spam the Impregnable wall gambit. 
  5. Focusing on a specific unit if I want a certain ability on it. E.g Leonie needs A-bow rank asap -> make her an archer/sniper to get extra bow rank in aux battles/paralogues. Change her class back to FK/WL in important battles.
  6. If Lysithea/Flayn have nothing to do, they will use a rescue/warp. Getting levels on your warp/rescue user to increase warp/rescue range is important. 

Money is probably one of the most important resources, even if you get plenty of it during the run. Certifications can get expensive. You simply can not get everyone's weapon ranks high enough to succeed all the certifications on the first try. My Leonie missed a coin-flip 5 times in a row for her Wyvern Lord Cert. That's basically 15k gone. That's why I think you can't completely avoid aux battles. You can certainly reduce them. My runs are not optimised for that and I'm still trying to improve my runs.

At the moment, I like to play slow and I avoid taking unnecessary risks. This might change in the future. But first I want to finish every route, before I try to over-optimise and minimise the use of aux battles.

At the end, I just want to have some fun. 

 

 

 

 

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I'd say aux battles should be fine in FE3H Ironman, aside from the ones available on Normal that don't cost activity points.  Unlike things like the Tower of Valni, aux battles have a limit on how many can be done, not to mention a significant opportunity cost (weekends spent on aux battles are weekends not spent doing mealtimes, etc. in the monastery, meaning your support ranks and motivation levels suffer).

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As a minor addition, if you're not banning her due to being DLC, Anna can be recruited post-timeskip, and will be appropriately leveled.  So you do have her for an emergency deploy post-timeskip if you lose a unit.  (Note that she'll have trained / leveled exclusively in Thief, which is not ideal, but it's probably better than an abandoned 20-levels-behind CoS member recruited pre-timeskip who'd been riding the bench since.)

This is mostly trivia at this point because I don't think it's possible to sanely set up anymore, but if you have a save in the middle of a Crimson Flower run from pre-Jeritza being recruitable, he'll join the next monastery phase, appropriately leveled for the current mission.  (i.e. at a higher level than if he joins right after the timeskip).

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So with an Iron Man run, you start with your house units of course.

You can get the Ashen Wolves at any time.

If you're going CF, you don't have to worry about training house units. If you're VW or AM, you have early Catherine. SS don't bother, no Catherine, Seteth isn't a match for Claude or Dmitri, especially since they'll be prepared for Ch 13.

Recruitment from other houses allowed, I hope, otherwise things will get very dicey in a hurry, as every house has mediocre units/units who take a long time to get going.

If we assume one week of Auxiliary battles (DLC for stat booster), your weapon ranks and levels shouldn't be too bad (especially if you train everyone in Faith at the start so they can get Heal XP, though some would call this grinding; I don't as long as you aren't exploiting it for extra XP).

Possible? Yes, though I'd say SS is easily the worst off for it.

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