Three Houses Iron Man is Fun and VERY Doable!! (A Guide & Tips for Your First Iron Man)

[TheChoZenOne]

Note: this is just my opinion. It is simply just my feelings and thoughts about this and my goal is simply to make fans of the game happy and encourage them to try something for fun!! That is all. This isn't meant to be taken so seriously and overanalyze the game design. I am well aware of the poor design choices of the game and am not defending those choices. I am simply giving a way to tackle the game and make it available to fans who have doubts of trying an iron man due to many urging against it, but for those who might really want to.  So let's all have a pleasant discussion. Anything otherwise will be ignored, so don't bother, and keep your thoughts to yourself if you don't have anything nice to say. Just like you have your opinion, I have mine. 

 

Now let's begin!!

 

After now completeing both a Hard & Maddening Iron Man, I just want to give my thoughts on here. A lot of people have said it isn't possible or isn't fun to do. And I want to just urge anyone who hasn't tried it and loves Three Houses to give it a shot. After playing this game I can confirm, it is very doable to do 

1. A Hard Mode Iron Man on ANY route

2. A Maddening Iron Man on the Crimson Flower Route (bare minimum)

 

If you allow yourself to use all the tools the game gives you, it is a very fun and an okay investment of your time to do if you are a fan of Three Houses and willing to try it. Prepare yourself though, it requires you to throw away everything you know about iron manning with other fire emblem games. It is a very different game after all. You have to be willing to put in a lot of work if you want to accomplish completing this (mostly Maddening. Hard is a lot more doable). For Maddening, you want to make sure you study the reinforcement spawns of every map before each map so you know what to expect. It's not as time consuming as you think. All it takes is a few minutes of one's time to look on the fire embelm wiki.  It has all the reinforcements spawns laid out for you there.

For the arguement of what happens when you lose a unit, you simply want to recruit any students by using renown to get them up to A support so you can replace them with your fallen unit. Be ready though, because after timeskip, you want to try to lose as few amount of units as possible. But do not worry. Right before the timeskip initiates, make sure to recruit every other student and ashen wolf you can, so that way if someone dies, you have someone to replace them. Now how is this possible? They might be too low leveled you say? You want to make sure you have Professir Rank A at all times (use renown in the very beginning of the game for this) then simply use your 3 adjutant spots to train up 3 backup units, as they will train up just enough every battle to be able to replace any fallen units. Make sure you obtain the experience gem, so that way if you need to train them for the next battle when you are grinding (which you should do atleast twice a month for maddening anyways) you can slap the exp gem on them and level them up very quickly. If you have a knowledge gem you can also quickly get them to learn Death blow or Fiendish blow respectively (if they are phys or magic units) and they will be all set to replace your previous units. 

This is a hardcore, balls to the wall iron man challenge, so you must be prepared. It will not hold your hand and give you units throughout the game like other ones, so you have to make use of as many of the things the games give you. If you have any questions from me, I have all the info provided to tackle this challenge if you want to try it out for yourself. Also, check out my recent playthrough of me doing a Maddening Mode Iron Man for Three Houses on the Crimson Flower Route. It was quite the amazing journey!! It has everything there to help you on your quest for Three Houses Iron Man: 

Hard mode:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtQEfrONYtZDePBPySFz_fWEDAvxkWVHt

 

Maddening Mode (recommended for guide):

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtQEfrONYtZAncP2aQE64q_wluxpvYoIv

 

Also here are some random recommendations I have for tackling your first Three Houses Iron Man:

 

1. Get the Thyrsus. Its very useful, especielly combined with magic range+ skills and 3 range spells. It gives you A LOT of coverage!!

 

2. Make Knowledge Gem a priority!! There are 2 you can get in the game, and they are very helpful for completing classes for skills as early as possible that can help you A LOT on your run!! One is in the "Tale of the Red Canyon" Paralogue (in the chest). And one on Chapter 11 (by collecting all the crest stones in that map).

3. Experience gem is helpful for training up backup units who are falling behind in levels, so if you want that quick replacement, use this!! Be sure to pick this one up in the Hanneman/Manuela Paralogue. (JUST BE VERY CAREFUL, use rescue or stride to get Manuela to safety, she is in a very scary spot)

 

4. Try to always have some units with the "Shove" or "Draw Back" combat art. You will be surprised how much this comes in handy in emergencies when you make a mistake. It can make the difference between your unit dying and surviving to live another day.

 

5. Use DLC (if possible). It's not mandatory, but the Ashen Wolves, and DLC classes are VERY useful (for Maddening Mode especially). Dark flier and Valkyrie have some amazing utility that will help a lot in mid game/end game.

6. Battalions are your friend. They boost stats, so make sure you give ones that give necessary boosts. Crit to critters. Hit rate for shaky hit rate units. Tankyness for your tank units. Avoid for your fast ones. And strength/magic you might want all the time for most of your units that are attacking constantly. Having Impregnable Wall, Blessing, Stride, Dance of the Goddess are super useful, so be sure to use them and keep them safe. Because if a unit falls while holding onto one of these battalions, you will lose them forever. So try to keep them on units you keep out of danger most of the time!!

7. ALWAYS take your time and play when you are in the right state of mind. It's not worth it if you are tired. You are likely to make mistakes and lose a lot of your hard-earned progress. So play when you are AWAKE and concentrating!!

(Then again, that's what makes this iron man so hardcore and devastating if you lose. Making it more thrilling and rewarding for everything you accomplish. It's not for the faint of heart, so beware and prepare yourself if you fail!!)

 

8. Do not take too long of a break from your iron man and try not to play other fire emblem games during your run. It may confuse you coming back from it and adjusting to all the three houses-only mechanics again, it can easily cause mistakes, so be cautious of this!!

 

9. Don't be afarid to use what you need to!! Someone once told me Maddening Iron Man isn't forgiving, so shouldn't you. Use DLC items, classes, characters, renown. Don't resrict yourself. A lot of people like to put self-implemented restrcitions for other FE games, but for this game, I do not recommend it at all. You are justified for anything you use for this challenge, since this is a lot harder to iron man than other games. Also side note: I'm here to vouch that I didn't use renown for class skill levels. I trained those up naturally. So I recommend doing that too for a more natural challenge. It trains yourself to make every Instruct/Seminar session count. But that's only if you want to, it is a very hard challenge so only do what you feel is doable for YOU.

10. Professor Rank A is a must!! Atleast.... if you hate the monastery. The monastery is slow to get through sometimes and you are going to need it a lot. If you want to reduce time however, and do not want to gift all your students constantly to get all those motivations up, simply feed all your units with your plentiful amount of activity points that are available to you at the very start of the game if you simply use renown to make your Byleth get Professor Rank A. Feeding students is very necesarry and you're gonna want to always maximize the amount of times you instruct them at max motivation. Getting those skills as early as possible, especially in Maddening is very helpful. (Death blow, fiendish blow, darting blow, hit +20 etc.)

11. Rescue or Warp are very helpful. Try to have them on your team if you can. I personally didn't have rescue on my current maddening iron man run, but a flier with warp can help as a nice rescue alternative in emergency, since you are able to canto out of the danger zone in certain situations.

12. Right before timeskip, put every single convoy weapon in all of your units inventory (even the ones you recruited who aren't doing anything). All your inventory gets fully charged up on durability and is a very nice exploit when you're low on money or ore. 

 

13. Make sure to get money, ore and meat when necesarry. Always do the highest level maps to get as much experience as possible when grinding in between main battles. Make sure you are at a good level to take them on though. If you need rare ore, do get it!! It's helpful for forging good weapons and repairing if needed. Money is good when you don't want to repair and simply want to buy weapons to replace them. 

 

14. Reminder: For backup units, if you have the extra resources, make sure they are getting to their classes they need to, so that way when they are needed as a replacement unit, they are already halfway through getting the necesarry skills to keep up (like death blow and fiendish blow etc.)

 

15. Protect Byleth, your lord, and your waifu at all costs!! You lose the run when you lose Byleth, Edlegard, Dimitri or Claude. And we all know deep down we lose... when we lose our waifu in our iron man....

Jokes aside. Always pay attention to the Defeat Condition. If there is a unit on there that can cause a game over. PROTECT THEM AT ALL COSTS. While not mandatory, Alert stance+, Sword Avoid, Brawl Avoid, guard adjutants and the Blessing gambit on these units, help keep you at ease during the maps throughout the run!! Speaking of guard adjutants....

 

16. Guard adjutants are very helpful. Your backup units aren't doing much. You may want to sometimes have them in brigand or mage during easy grind maps so they can get death blow or fiendish blow ASAP. But when you are doing main story maps, have them get to armor knight or brawler as soon as possible!! These provide you with guard adjutants and if you are at Professor Rank A, you can protect 3 of your precious units from a fatal hit once per battle!! That's very helpful!! So protect Byleth, protect Edelgard, protect your waifu (that's what I did xD) or any other unit that causes a Defeat Condition and you should be good to go!!

17. Do not take on paralogues if you feel it's too high of a risk. In fact do not do most of them!! It is not worth losing a unit over getting a simple item you wanted. You want to do the least amount of high-risk maps as possible during this run!! Unless you are VERY familiar with the paralogues and their reinforcements, do not do them, they are not necesary. It is entirely doable to complete the iron man without them. However. The knowledge gem and thyrsus paralogues are VERY worth the risk, trust me. Just be careful!!

 

18. New Game+ is very much recommended. It allows you to carry over gambits that you can't have in certain routes on a normal run, and you can use renown all you want to do literally everything I recommended you SHOULD do xD

 

19. Have fun. If you fail, do not worry. Chapter 2 is dumb, so don't worry about failing on it. I and many others have got crit several times just to officially start the run correctly 🤣 Don't let that discourage you!! This is probably the worst designed map in the game for an iron man specifically, so feel free to not count it as an iron man map if you don't want to and start at chapter 3!!

 

Edit:  

20: Chapter 5, make sure Gilbert dies and that he doesn't trigger any of the archers from above. Avoid these danger zones at all costs!! All the units randomly just start charging you if you get in the range of units at the top. So be VERY careful.

21. Also be weary of enemy skills like vantage, miracle, or wrath-type skills. Always check skills and battalions on enemies every so often!! There will be times where it may catch you off guard, so be weary!!

 

22: On Chapter 4, the Death Knight randonly moves and this triggers when the dark mage reinforcements stand next to him. Either defeat them before then, or be ready to defeat the Death Knight or the boss before he reaches you.

 

Note: this is an Iron Man, so it is without divine pulses or retreating allowed since that kinda defeats the purpose of an iron man run. I thought this was obvious, which is why I didn't state it at first (since that is similar to not using Mila's Turnwheel during an iron man of Echoes). But I will mention it here just in case. Hope there is no confusion now 🙏

(End of edits)

 

I will be making a video version of this topic, so look forward to it soon!! I will try to use video examples to showcase the different tips!!

 

Thank you for reading and I love you all!! I hope this either convinced you to try an Three Houses iron man for yourself or at the very least intrigued you to read about what it took to complete an iron man on Three Houses for me personally!! God bless and keep gambitting my fellow iron manners!!

(P.S Hapi best girl ❤️)

 

 

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by TheChoZenOne

[Michael Danielson]

Quote

5. Use DLC (if possible). It's not mandatory, but the Ashen Wolves, and DLC classes are VERY useful (for Maddening Mode especially). Dark flier and Valkyrie have some amazing utility that will help a lot in mid game/end game.

cries in no DLC

1 hour ago, TheChoZenOne said:

Use DLC items, classes, characters, renown.

cries in no DLC again

1 hour ago, TheChoZenOne said:

And we all know deep down we lose... when we lose our waifu in our iron man....

What's a waifu? I've certainly never heard of it...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But for real, this is all advice I'd agree with. Essentially use every resource you have, understand the mechanics, and have a plan and stick to it (though my synopsis of that is horribly oversimplified 😅).

The only point I'd add is understanding the maps. You don't need a perfect understanding of each and every map, but you need to be aware of maps that have silly components that can screw you over. I know you mentioned preparing for the timeskip by having all of your items on your units to get them replenished, and this is certainly good. But a part to add is if you're playing on a route that has Hunting by Daybreak to plan your skills and items to prepare for that during Chapter 12 since you don't have a preparations screen. Another thing is making sure Gilbert dies in Chapter 5 before he can step in the range of the archers on the upper level and make every enemy rush you. Other similar components naturally follow; it goes along with just making sure you have a plan but nonetheless I think it was a good point to state explicitly.

Once again, congratulations on successfully completing the arduous Maddening Iron Man, looking forward to your video on the topic!

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by Michael Danielson

[TheChoZenOne]

4 minutes ago, Michael Danielson said:

cries in no DLC

cries in no DLC again

What's a waifu? I've certainly never heard of it...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But for real, this is all advice I'd agree with. Essentially use every resource you have, understand the mechanics, and have a plan and stick to it (though that synopsis is horribly oversimplified 😅).

The only point I'd add is understanding the maps. You don't need a perfect understanding of each and every map, but you need to be aware of maps that have silly components that can screw you over. I know you mentioned preparing for the timeskip by having all of your items on your units to get them replenished, and this is certainly good. But a part to add is if you're playing on a route that has Hunting by Daybreak to plan your skills and items to prepare for that during Chapter 12 since you don't have a preparations screen. Another thing is making sure Gilbert dies in Chapter 5 before he can step in the range of the archers on the upper level and make every enemy rush you. Other similar components naturally follow; it goes along with just making sure you have a plan but nonetheless I think it was a good point to state explicitly.

Once again, congratulations on successfully completing the arduous Maddening Iron Man, looking forward to your video on the topic!

 

Yes!! Thanks for this!! If anyone else has any important points I missed for tips, please feel free to remind me!! Yes, make sure Gilbert dies and don't trigger the Chapter 5 enemies to start moving. Stay out of the enemy archers range that are at the top of the map!! Make that a PRIORITY!! Glad I was reminded, this is very important!!

[Dark Holy Elf]

You don't specify, but I'm assuming ironman in this context means both no resets and no divine pulse?

I've never wanted to do a no-resets no-pulse run of Three Houses Maddening, despite doing no-resets in other games, because Three Houses Maddening has a lot of places where it can kill you and not have it feel like your fault, including:

• Three Houses fog is terrible. The basic archers can potentailly outrange your maximum torch range. You basically need to memorize enemy placements to reliably lose nobody.
• Same-turn reinforcements basically need to be memorized. A few maps have some truly egregious ones.
• Weird bugs like Chapter 4 where the Death Knight can be randomly aggroed if an enemy moves close to him.
• Some maps (particularly paralogues) have weird triggers which you just have to learn/memorize. e.g. aggroing every enemy by moving across an invisible line in Forgotten Hero, the massive reinforcement swarm in Face Beneath or A Cursed Relic, the ambush spawns in Black Market Scheme.
• Enemies can change targeting AI for seemingly arbitrary triggers, sometimes. e.g. for one I saw recently, the northeast wolf in Tales of the Red Canyon will only attack Byleth. Until anyone (even Byleth!) attacks it. Then it can go after anyone.

Now maybe some people like the chaos of losing units to things you can't have foreseen. My understanding is that's kind of the original intent of permadeath. I, personally, do not. If I lose someone, I want to feel like it was my mistake. Some Fire Emblem games are very good about this (I could gush about Conquest here). Three Houses, much as I like the game, is not. Still better than some other games out there, but there are definitely a few places where the devs clearly just waved their hands and said "Well, if this screws someone over, they can just rewind".

 

That said, a lot of these problems are much less egregious on Hard. I think I'd definitely rather do a no-NG+ Hard run than NG+ Maddening... they're not that far apart on raw challenge, but the lack of same-turn reinforcements would make me feel much happier.

1 hour ago, TheChoZenOne said:

Chapter 2 is dumb, so don't worry about failing on it.

Interesting. I always found Chapter 2 significantly easier than both 1 and 3, at least on Maddening (I don't remember how I feel about them on Hard). You mostly just need to know not to accidentally aggro any enemies too early.

[lenticular]

A few comments. First, I think that when talking about any sort of challenge run, it's always worth taking the time to spell out exactly what restrictions you're using. From what you've said, I'm assuming that you're specifying no resets and no Divine Pulse, but are allowing everything else? Honestly, if I just heard "ironman" without any qualifiers, I'd probably assume no NG+ and no grinding was included, but that might just be me. My point isn't that any specific ruleset or set of restrictions is better or worse than any other, just that it's good to make sure that everyone is on the same page before starting the discussion.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone claiming that an ironman of Three Houses wouldn't be doable. I don't doubt that some people have said as much, but most of the discussion I've seen on the subject has agreed that it would be possible but not very fun. After all, the plays we make after a Divine Pulse were always avaialble to us, and there's nothing inherently stopping anyone from playing mistake-free the first time around.

Fun is, of course, subjective, so I don't think it's particularly useful to present things as "this is fun" or "this is not fun", but rather to frame things as "here are some of the potential difficulties and potential solutions; do they sound fun to you?" For instance, for killer reinforcements, you have a few options. You can memorise them all, you can read up on each level before you play it, or you can just accept that you will suffer losses that are not your fault. None of these sound like fun to me, so I don't play that way. But if they do sound fun to anyone else, then great!

The one thing that I would say is that I would actively recommend against anyone trying an ironman run for their first time through Three Houses unless they were willing to read or watch a whole lot of spoilers beforehand. Even for a veteran Fire emblem player, there are a lot of pitfalls with a sight-unseen ironman of Three Houses that just don't exist in other games in the series. I know I did an ironman-style run (with slightly different rules but the same spirit) for my first playthrough of both Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fates: Birthright, and while I have niggles about both of them, they eached worked fairly well. Trying to do that for Three Houses sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, though.

So I guess that overall, my feelings would be this: don't try an ironman until you've played the game enough to know what you're getting into, btu then once you have done, make your mind up as to whether it sounds fun for you.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Interesting. I always found Chapter 2 significantly easier than both 1 and 3, at least on Maddening (I don't remember how I feel about them on Hard). You mostly just need to know not to accidentally aggro any enemies too early.

That is my experience as well. I don't think I've ever had Chapter 2 go badly for me, whereas I have definitely had runs that had trouble with both Chapters 1 and 3.

[TheChoZenOne]

11 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

You don't specify, but I'm assuming ironman in this context means both no resets and no divine pulse?

I've never wanted to do a no-resets no-pulse run of Three Houses Maddening, despite doing no-resets in other games, because Three Houses Maddening has a lot of places where it can kill you and not have it feel like your fault, including:

• Three Houses fog is terrible. The basic archers can potentailly outrange your maximum torch range. You basically need to memorize enemy placements to reliably lose nobody.
• Same-turn reinforcements basically need to be memorized. A few maps have some truly egregious ones.
• Weird bugs like Chapter 4 where the Death Knight can be randomly aggroed if an enemy moves close to him.
• Some maps (particularly paralogues) have weird triggers which you just have to learn/memorize. e.g. aggroing every enemy by moving across an invisible line in Forgotten Hero, the massive reinforcement swarm in Face Beneath or A Cursed Relic, the ambush spawns in Black Market Scheme.
• Enemies can change targeting AI for seemingly arbitrary triggers, sometimes. e.g. for one I saw recently, the northeast wolf in Tales of the Red Canyon will only attack Byleth. Until anyone (even Byleth!) attacks it. Then it can go after anyone.

Now maybe some people like the chaos of losing units to things you can't have foreseen. My understanding is that's kind of the original intent of permadeath. I, personally, do not. If I lose someone, I want to feel like it was my mistake. Some Fire Emblem games are very good about this (I could gush about Conquest here). Three Houses, much as I like the game, is not. Still better than some other games out there, but there are definitely a few places where the devs clearly just waved their hands and said "Well, if this screws someone over, they can just rewind".

 

That said, a lot of these problems are much less egregious on Hard. I think I'd definitely rather do a no-NG+ Hard run than NG+ Maddening... they're not that far apart on raw challenge, but the lack of same-turn reinforcements would make me feel much happier.

Interesting. I always found Chapter 2 significantly easier than both 1 and 3, at least on Maddening (I don't remember how I feel about them on Hard). You mostly just need to know not to accidentally aggro any enemies too early.

Sorry I meant Chapter 1. My mistake 🤣 I forget the first battle doesn't count as chapter 1

 

Well this is why I wrote up this to be able to play the game in the most fair way possible, without feeling things are "not your fault". This is why I mentioned you have to be willing to throw away anything you knew about other FE game iron mans. If someone wants to enjoy and try this one, they have to be willing to use what they have and study certain things first, which I mentioned.

 

Thanks for mentioning Chapter 4. Yes if you have the mages reach him and stand next to him, he starts to move for some reason. I will edit and add that to my tips ASAP.

 

Pretty much what you mentioned is why I went over them. Like studying the reinforcements. I have said this. This is a necessity and I am well aware of it, which is why I mentioned it. I also recommended avoiding paralogues, again, this is not meant to be a "clean, well designed iron man". I simply showcasing a way to do it if you want to avoid all the hiccups and still find some fun in it. Hope that makes sense

Edited June 3, 2022 by TheChoZenOne

[TheChoZenOne]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

A few comments. First, I think that when talking about any sort of challenge run, it's always worth taking the time to spell out exactly what restrictions you're using. From what you've said, I'm assuming that you're specifying no resets and no Divine Pulse, but are allowing everything else? Honestly, if I just heard "ironman" without any qualifiers, I'd probably assume no NG+ and no grinding was included, but that might just be me. My point isn't that any specific ruleset or set of restrictions is better or worse than any other, just that it's good to make sure that everyone is on the same page before starting the discussion.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone claiming that an ironman of Three Houses wouldn't be doable. I don't doubt that some people have said as much, but most of the discussion I've seen on the subject has agreed that it would be possible but not very fun. After all, the plays we make after a Divine Pulse were always avaialble to us, and there's nothing inherently stopping anyone from playing mistake-free the first time around.

Fun is, of course, subjective, so I don't think it's particularly useful to present things as "this is fun" or "this is not fun", but rather to frame things as "here are some of the potential difficulties and potential solutions; do they sound fun to you?" For instance, for killer reinforcements, you have a few options. You can memorise them all, you can read up on each level before you play it, or you can just accept that you will suffer losses that are not your fault. None of these sound like fun to me, so I don't play that way. But if they do sound fun to anyone else, then great!

The one thing that I would say is that I would actively recommend against anyone trying an ironman run for their first time through Three Houses unless they were willing to read or watch a whole lot of spoilers beforehand. Even for a veteran Fire emblem player, there are a lot of pitfalls with a sight-unseen ironman of Three Houses that just don't exist in other games in the series. I know I did an ironman-style run (with slightly different rules but the same spirit) for my first playthrough of both Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fates: Birthright, and while I have niggles about both of them, they eached worked fairly well. Trying to do that for Three Houses sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, though.

So I guess that overall, my feelings would be this: don't try an ironman until you've played the game enough to know what you're getting into, btu then once you have done, make your mind up as to whether it sounds fun for you.

That is my experience as well. I don't think I've ever had Chapter 2 go badly for me, whereas I have definitely had runs that had trouble with both Chapters 1 and 3.

I definitely don't recommend Three Houses for a first time run. This is definitely only recommended for those who already love three houses and are on the fence about trying it out. Again, this is why I specify the things you need to avoid for the iron man to have the most amount of "fairness". Like I do feel that its possible to avoid the "things that aren't your fault" if you take a similar route to what I did, which is why I provided a "guide" of sorts lol Also yeah I meant Chapter 1, my mistake. About the "fun" thing, I meant for anyone willing to give it a shot. I'm aware people won't find it fun. But for those who want to give it a shot may find a fun challenge from it. That's all I meant.

[SnowFire]

Cool stuff, congrats.

I will say...  and I hope this doesn't come across as an excessive phrasing nitpick...   as others have indicated, NG+ or not isn't really a "strategy", it's more a definitional "what kind of challenge am I even doing."  So saying " New Game+ is very much recommended" is kind of like saying Normal difficulty is recommended or the cheat code in Contra to give the player 30 lives is recommended - of course it will make your life easier, but it changes what you're doing.  I think NG+ offers some cool options (notably, it's the only way to get a difficulty somewhere between Hard & Maddening) and doing Iron Man with it is definitely still neat.  Just it's more a definitional thing as mentioned before, such as "This is a Maddening Classic run that allows DLC bonuses and NG+ for Saint Statues, Battalions, and Support Levels for Recruitment, but not Professor Level / Skill Level / Class Mastery."

On Elf's notes, if I was doing an Ironman, the good news is that past the fairly early C3 (where any surprise deaths can still be corrected cheaply), all the fog of war maps are Paralogues, and I'd certainly skip all of them, as per TheChozenOne's comment!  Definitely not worth potentially losing a key character late to a surprise Sniper position in Legend of the Lake or the like.  For wonky reinforcements, I guess "The Face Beneath" might still be tempting because the reward is very good and the reinforcements aren't THAT hard to time out if you know how they work (and bring in some Rescue Staff users if you want to be really sure), but yeah, just skip the others.  Note that if facing the full fury of a New Game+, you already have a pile of excellent battalions already trained to max rank - getting Supreme Armored Co., King of Lions, and Immortal Corps all at C-rank authority required is a pretty big difference (and throw in Blue Lion Dancers & Opera Co. Volunteers too for high-Authority characters), and so any Paralogue that simply rewards good Battalions starts looking very skippable.  (Heck, even "Tales of the Red Canyon" with its wonky monster targeting AI looks skippable...  more divine pulses when you're not using any!  The Knowledge Gem is a little unfortunate to lose, I guess, at least without NG+ hax or aux battle grinding.)  I will say that if not using a NG+, then there's certainly safer Paralogues still worth doing - Ingrid & Dorothea's is pretty easy once you know how it works and if you have Stride & a Dancer, for example, and offers a great Battalion.

[TheChoZenOne]

On 6/3/2022 at 2:02 PM, SnowFire said:

Cool stuff, congrats.

I will say...  and I hope this doesn't come across as an excessive phrasing nitpick...   as others have indicated, NG+ or not isn't really a "strategy", it's more a definitional "what kind of challenge am I even doing."  So saying " New Game+ is very much recommended" is kind of like saying Normal difficulty is recommended or the cheat code in Contra to give the player 30 lives is recommended - of course it will make your life easier, but it changes what you're doing.  I think NG+ offers some cool options (notably, it's the only way to get a difficulty somewhere between Hard & Maddening) and doing Iron Man with it is definitely still neat.  Just it's more a definitional thing as mentioned before, such as "This is a Maddening Classic run that allows DLC bonuses and NG+ for Saint Statues, Battalions, and Support Levels for Recruitment, but not Professor Level / Skill Level / Class Mastery."

On Elf's notes, if I was doing an Ironman, the good news is that past the fairly early C3 (where any surprise deaths can still be corrected cheaply), all the fog of war maps are Paralogues, and I'd certainly skip all of them, as per TheChozenOne's comment!  Definitely not worth potentially losing a key character late to a surprise Sniper position in Legend of the Lake or the like.  For wonky reinforcements, I guess "The Face Beneath" might still be tempting because the reward is very good and the reinforcements aren't THAT hard to time out if you know how they work (and bring in some Rescue Staff users if you want to be really sure), but yeah, just skip the others.  Note that if facing the full fury of a New Game+, you already have a pile of excellent battalions already trained to max rank - getting Supreme Armored Co., King of Lions, and Immortal Corps all at C-rank authority required is a pretty big difference (and throw in Blue Lion Dancers & Opera Co. Volunteers too for high-Authority characters), and so any Paralogue that simply rewards good Battalions starts looking very skippable.  (Heck, even "Tales of the Red Canyon" with its wonky monster targeting AI looks skippable...  more divine pulses when you're not using any!  The Knowledge Gem is a little unfortunate to lose, I guess, at least without NG+ hax or aux battle grinding.)  I will say that if not using a NG+, then there's certainly safer Paralogues still worth doing - Ingrid & Dorothea's is pretty easy once you know how it works and if you have Stride & a Dancer, for example, and offers a great Battalion.

Thank you. 😁 Also, I wasn't offering the NG+ idea as a strategy. I was simply saying anyone who is gonna tackle doing an iron man on maddening should do ng+ without question. I don't think iron manning the game without it would be a good idea. I think to fully get the iron man experience in a fun and mostly "fair" way is by using everything you can in this game, since this game restricts you already enough haha. But thank you for all the extra tips you added, I pretty much agree with everything you had to add. 😁

[DaveCozy]

On 6/2/2022 at 11:31 PM, TheChoZenOne said:

On Chapter 4, the Death Knight randonly moves and this triggers when the dark mage reinforcements stand next to him. Either defeat them before then, or be ready to defeat the Death Knight or the boss before he reaches you.

This happens specifically in Maddening when either a dark mage stands next to him or moves past beside him too. I don't know why they programmed him to move as if he had been handed a baton lol, but it does make the mission much more difficult than it should be. Easiest way to deal with them from my recent experience is to move as two groups at an equal pace from the sides of the map, this ensures that the Dark Mages get baited to go down the sides respectively without passing through the Death Knight.

Aside that the 25 turn limit is very generous. When I played Crimson Flower Maddening recently I cleared ch4 in 12 turns, and that wasn't with LTC pace or anything either.

Edited June 7, 2022 by DaveCozy