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Does the amount of enemies/combat increase with each FE game?


MuteMousou
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So, awhile ago I went in and individually counted the amount of enemies in each game from fe3 to fe6 to see if there was a significant difference in enemy amount. Of course, I know this can be hard to compare because reinforcements are often integral and some games have larger maps and so on... so it's harder to compare but I haven't made the effort to take that all that into account fairly, moreso just making some basic observations. The reason I wanted to do this in the first place because I sort of had the idea that the reason 2RN and OP 1-2 range weapons were invented in the first place was to account for the greater amount of combats the player would experience in games like fe6-10, especially since fe7 reintroduces rout maps.

However, the results don't necessarily seem to go along with what I thought. so fe1 book 1 has on average 18 enemies per map, book 2 has 22, then fe4 through 6 all have about 28 enemies per map (a map in fe4's context is considering a single castle as a map)

While it is very obvious that fe3 has less enemies overall than the games after it if you think about it for a bit, for the later games this proposes a bit of a more complicated answer. My guess is that, due to the various mechanics in each game that make it easier to influence how certain things turn out at certain points, the developers decided that 2RN would be appropriate for fe6. What I mean is, if you compare fe6 to fe4 and 5, fe4 has many ways of trivializing combat or making it easier through skills, leadership stars, as well as the ability to just... run past the enemies sometimes. Fe5 is different since it sort of is built around the idea that you won't fight everything in every map because a good portion of the game expects you to use warp staves or other staves to ignore a lot of the enemies, along with the fact that enemy stats in the game aren't the greatest. This is also ignoring the fact of skills like charm, accost, and other mechanics such as capture baiting and innate supports. 

So, in comparison to each of those games, fe6 both doesn't have any many ways of trivializing enemies through warp or similar things, but it also doesn't have much of any way of altering combat other than just...using a different weapon or attacking from a different space. Essentially, its design is taking the mechanics of fe3 but then not including some pretty integral things from that game such as warp staves and innate supports, (but also introducing a few other things such as reaver weapons) while also having much more enemies in general. This is not really to say anything bad about any game here, but I think with the lack of ability to influence combat in general in fe6-8, and arguably fe9-10 as well, the usage of 2RN makes a lot of sense since you're both doing a lot more unavoidable combat in those games while also having less tools to manipulate the outcomes of them. So while fe6 has about the same amount of enemy density as fe5, I would say that fe6 has more enemies you have to fight and also has less diverse ways of dealing with them, and that's a large part of why 2RN as a mechanic was made, to reduce frustration due to lack of agency in other areas. This isn't meant to claim that this is a good or a bad thing, just that, I think that this is a consequence of those things. There's also later games but I don't want to make this too long by going into details about those things.

Anyway, what does everyone else think about enemy density, 2RN, and why these things changed over different games?

Edited by MuteMousou
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Part of it has to do with how many enemy units the system can support, which naturally increases with hardware evolution. You see this with FE1 having at most 20 starting enemies; FE3 has a limit of 32 per map; FE4 thru GBA settle on a limit of 50; and Tellius can exceed that. It should be noted that the next game (Shadow Dragon) has much lower density and a lower enemy limit (60); New Mystery props it back up, particularly on Lunatic where it tends toward zerg rushing with reinforcements, but that's more to scare the player into wrapping up the map than being intended to fight them all. But it still doesn't go back up to FE9 Maniac/FE10's peaks, nor do the following games... correct if where I might be wrong here.

Overall it does show a paradigm shift around the time of the GBA engine, perhaps to make the game feel more "epic" by making full use of the enemy counts the game can now handle. It also coincides with a lot of changes that make them more manageable, such as the peak 1-2 range meta, fewer same-turn reinforcements and as you said 2RN. This way of thinking seems to have peaked at Tellius though, with latter entries dialing it back for various reasons, although a focus on stronger enemy quality might be the biggest. High enemy density becomes suffocating if ORKOing isn't the norm.

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I suspect that the reason why enemy density is low in some of the early games is due to the fact that map animations ran slowly. High enemy density would be boring for the player. Game speed significantly increased during fire emblem 6. During my run of fire emblem 3, I got annoyed with the long and boring map animation so I just soloed many late game chapters with Linde as a nosferatu tank. 

The only time I got annoyed with the enemy density on fire emblem 6, was on Sacae. The weak nomads don't even threaten and fight you; they just harass you. 

I like the 2 RN system, because it increases the value of high speed, low defense characters. On fire emblem 6, the 2 RN system is very important to the player for a ranked run, with its low hit rates, and high enemy density. Fire emblem 6 has very long maps, and having a speedy unit getting killed would cost so much time. A 1 RN system would significantly increase the difficulty of a ranked run, especially due to the fact that restarts would cost the player so much time. Fir would get killed more frequently, and during the early game, killing enemies would take so much longer. 

I got bored of fire emblem 4 due to its high enemy density, in a simple block formation, with weak enemies. It was a waste of my time. I would enjoy it only if the enemies were actually threatening.  

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I guess in a way it does given that fe6, like you said, is generally more combat heavy than FE5. I know awakening can get pretty bloated as well, especially with some of the later maps.

For Fates, Birthright can have an immense amount of reinforcements, but the other 2 routes are a lot more tame, with exceptions of course.

 

 

Look at how many enemies are going to be in warriors 2 this theory confirmed correct

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4 hours ago, MadBoar said:

I suspect that the reason why enemy density is low in some of the early games is due to the fact that map animations ran slowly. High enemy density would be boring for the player. Game speed significantly increased during fire emblem 6. During my run of fire emblem 3, I got annoyed with the long and boring map animation so I just soloed many late game chapters with Linde as a nosferatu tank. 

I'm not sure I would say it's fe6 that introduced that, as many of the improvements made to the series' speed that are used in fe6 are pretty much re-used entirely from fe5, the only major difference being that fe5 doesn't have simplistic animations where units just ram into eachother. I'd prefer having the option like Radiant Dawn to either have map animations or no animations at all, but it's not a huge deal either way.

However, in all the like 10 FE games i've speedran, I would still say that the most obnoxious game after the first 2 FE games in terms of game speed is definitely Radiant Dawn, due to how many required combats you have to go through as well as how long the animations take, even with animations off you still have to watch every single enemy's death animation, which are much longer than the death animations of any of the 2d games. I would imagine fe9 is actually worse in this respect, though I haven't done that game. My point here is that, even if fe3 is slower than most of the games after it, I think that forcing you to fight ridiculous amounts of enemies will outweigh the increased game speed at times and be more annoying than if the game had less enemies but was slower. Also because dealing with enemies in these games often entails something like "send Haar at them with 5 hand axes" because the enemies themselves are kind of just there to die and not trying to give you any interesting challenge or circumstance a lot of the time

As for fe4, I don't think I would say the game has an unusually high enemy density, moreso that the enemies are just more concentrated into small areas than other games. I can definitely see how this can be irritating since this doesn't lend well to precise positioning being that helpful... you often just kind of run at the enemies and attack all of them.

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7 hours ago, X-Naut said:

Overall it does show a paradigm shift around the time of the GBA engine, perhaps to make the game feel more "epic" by making full use of the enemy counts the game can now handle. It also coincides with a lot of changes that make them more manageable, such as the peak 1-2 range meta, fewer same-turn reinforcements and as you said 2RN. This way of thinking seems to have peaked at Tellius though, with latter entries dialing it back for various reasons, although a focus on stronger enemy quality might be the biggest. High enemy density becomes suffocating if ORKOing isn't the norm.

Yeah, that's an interesting point because if you look at Gaiden or its remake, you'll realize that they do rout maps very differently from fe7-10 and 13. Gaiden has less enemies and they're usually more difficult to kill, along with terrain being a larger consideration usually. ORKOing enemies in general in this game is also uncommon, and the focus seems to be more about figuring out what to do as situations unfold and mitigating the danger you're kind of forced to deal with for multiple turns, rather than just, send good character into 40 enemies with 1-2 range and then everything dies. This is not to say that gaiden is a masterpiece or something--but I do think I enjoy rout maps in fe2/15 the most.

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