Crimson Flower is too easy.

[Marienburg]

If you are aware of what's going to happen in Chapter 13, Crimson Flower is arguable one of the harder routes because your starting roster has the hardest time in the early game. Your only standout unit is Petra, everybody else is lukewarm and middle of the road. Edelgard is strong but axes are heavy and have accuracy problems that get you into trouble. Caspar can't really tank, Ferdinand is a bit slow. Hubert having a bane in faith is a nuisance. Dorothea is Dorothea. Bernie's cool. But overall it's just sort of meh, you don't have anything remarkable to help you solve the problems that the first chapters throw at you.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

15 minutes ago, Marienburg said:

If you are aware of what's going to happen in Chapter 13, Crimson Flower is arguable one of the harder routes because your starting roster has the hardest time in the early game. Your only standout unit is Petra, everybody else is lukewarm and middle of the road. Edelgard is strong but axes are heavy and have accuracy problems that get you into trouble. Caspar can't really tank, Ferdinand is a bit slow. Hubert having a bane in faith is a nuisance. Dorothea is Dorothea. Bernie's cool. But overall it's just sort of meh, you don't have anything remarkable to help you solve the problems that the first chapters throw at you.

There's also no access to Catherine for an easier run of Chapter 5. Now imagine all of that, only you do have to do the hardest version of Chapter 13, have one less deployment slot in the entirety of Part 2, and you're disencouraged to use Edelgard in Part 1. You also lose access to Hubert, but he's a wasted slot anyway. All Silver Snow has over CF is...two more months of instruction in Part 2, not to be confused with the three months that VW/AM get, SS is one month shorter than them. SS also has more potential paralogues, which I suppose is an advantage considering that's a key source of combat exp, but paralogues are the hardest maps to begin with outside of the very early game so you could argue either way. SS does eventually get easy again in Part 2 - fairly soon after 13, but the difficulty spike of its endgame map is about as jarring as 13's was. 

[Marienburg]

4 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

There's also no access to Catherine for an easier run of Chapter 5. Now imagine all of that, only you do have to do the hardest version of Chapter 13, have one less deployment slot in the entirety of Part 2, and you're disencouraged to use Edelgard in Part 1. You also lose access to Hubert, but he's a wasted slot anyway. All Silver Snow has over CF is...two more months of instruction in Part 2, not to be confused with the three months that VW/AM get, SS is one month shorter than them. SS also has more potential paralogues, which I suppose is an advantage considering that's a key source of combat exp, but paralogues are the hardest maps to begin with outside of the very early game so you could argue either way. SS does eventually get easy again in Part 2 - fairly soon after 13, but the difficulty spike of its endgame map is about as jarring as 13's was. 

Good point about Catherine, I forgot about that. She trivializes that chapter to the point where I seriously prefer to play Reunion at Dawn over the Tower without Catherine.

[edgelordweeb]

Unless you're talking Maddening I find that all the routes in this game are really easy unless multiple units get hard fucked statwise. CF I guess is probably the easiest though, but not by much. BL is similarly easy. GD is the hardest imo bc I don't get as much mileage out of the units, especially early on. Raphael and Ignatz are kind of terrible and you don't have strong reliable front liners like BL and CF, both of which have lords who can take up this role and more. Claude is insane but I find it easier to work with units I can just charge straight forward with in the early game bc it's 3H and it can be trivialized by ramming someone like Dimitri through the map as fast as possible with 0 thought unless you're on maddening.