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How has Fire Emblem discouraged low manning? (and Should it?)


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I've been thinking a lot about low manning, which is the practice of playing through Fire Emblem chapters using only a few units (let's say 5, not counting utility units like thieves and staff users). The theory of this style of play is that you end up with a small squad of high level, all-star units that can self-sufficiently spread out, kill what needs killing, and more efficiently play through a map than if you had 10+ units with lower stats and trying to manage all their health and exp gains. It takes less mental power, it takes less IRL time on player phase and it's a natural extension of people replaying a fire emblem game and stress testing what's possible with however many units. Kind of like an LTC, but not sharing the ultimate goal of a low turn count. Many LTCs incidentally low man wherever it makes sense. And it's worth mentioning that low manning might be a short term strategy for any person's playthrough. Maybe the early game units are trash and you're waiting for better ones in mid-game to slot into your long term squad.

There's little debate that low manning is "optimal" in many fire emblem games, but does that make for a well designed, open-ended strategy game? I'm not coming at this question from a Game Balance or Unit Balance perspective, I'm coming from a "Fire Emblem should cater and respond to all styles of play" perspective. Is a game where low manning is clearly better than deploying 10+ units a lesser game? In my opinion, (don't feel like you need to agree or disagree with me) I think so. Because players like using lots of units but also don't want to feel like that decision made the game harder on them. If I low man and the game gets arbitrarily easier than the alternative, then the game has failed to respond to that mode of play.

I want to survey how different FE games addressed low manning as a strategy (intentionally or unintentionally. I can't very well speculate the reason(s) certain things change game to game, even three developers would likely provide three different answers).

  • FE2: This is the first game whose exp calculation better reflects most FE games. Instead of enemies giving you a fixed amount for damaging or killing them, now it's a complex calculation influenced by your unit level vs the enemy's level (and class tier). Therefore, there's a strain on how quickly units can reach higher levels. FE3 would revert to a modified FE1 formula, but since half of the game is a remake of FE1, this is an understandable revision.
  • FE4: FE4 is the rare game to not have deployment limits along with FE2, so if you want to use and raise every character, nothing is stopping you. However, what's really worth mention about FE4 is its child pairing system. Where the mothers and fathers are encouraged to get as many stats and good items as possible to pass down. That's minimum 16 units in Gen1 you're thinking about beefing up and optimizing to some degree, assuming your pairings are already planned out. There's also a Ranking system. Granted, only a small fraction of players are playing for a good Rank, it definitely informs what is "optimized play" in a FE4 context. To max out the Experience requirement in a ranked run, you need to raise every unit. I think I heard the average level you're aiming for on each unit is 20 for both Generations, though I'm not about to do the math myself, since I know a unit's initial level does not count, only levels that they gained during a playthrough. 
  • FE5: Fatigue fatigue fatigue. Units not named Leif will accrue fatigue from every combat. And once that number exceeds their Max HP, they have to take a break for a chapter. If you have a rare, valuable S Drink, this can be subverted, but you may need them later (mostly for staff users, who accrue fatigue faster as they use higher level staves). This results in a game where you're encouraged to use even more than the standard 10-16 deployment slots. Having extra units trained up lets them sub in when someone else is taking a break. I haven't played through all of FE5 myself, but it seems clear this is a low man-unfriendly FE game. Thracia does also feature a ranking system, however it does not track experience gained as one of its criteria
  • FE6 and 7: The Experience criteria in Ranked runs makes a return, this time concerned with the actual amount of experience points rather than level. That might not sound like a distinction, but it does further encourage the use of more, lower leveled units that accrue greater amounts of exp from each kill. It's true that Nino will never be a good unit, but if you're playing for Rank, it makes too much sense to level her up on those late game enemies. Furthermore, FE6 offers Bonus rewards for getting a high rank, So I think that encourages a slightly higher fraction of players to try out a Ranked run. While FE7 has the Tactician Bonus boosting your units performance the more you maintain high rankings throughout a playthrough.
  • FE8-FE12: No Ranking system and no new developments I can think of. Bad games lol. (feel free to add whatever is relevant to the discussion)
  • Awakening/Fates: Oh hey kids are back and there's a lot more mothers to manage. I know Awakening is basically the poster child game for low manning. Just pair up Robin with Chrom and grind your way to untouchable stats and skills. Conquest is probably interesting because of the handful of ninja chapters that will throttle your low man attempts, but since it's not a game that allows for endless grinding (outside of DLC) I don't know how thin the game encourages spreading experience.
  • Three Houses: Okay, now we're back to really addressing the Low manning situation. The first new game mechanic that really decides victory in this game is battalions and gambits. Even generic offensive gambits from an untrained unit can be a potential game changer on certain turns, and someone's gotta hold Stride. So you may as well raise up good units to carry them. By choosing to deploy under the maximum, that's how many battalions you're robbing yourself of. The second new thing is monster battles. These enemies have multiple health bars, and excess damage from the first health bar does not carry over to the next. You need a minimum of one attacker for each. Monsters are best met with a crowd of units and a full loadout of gambits in order to break their armor pieces before they get replenished.
    • But at the same time, I see people low man in this game because their units see more rounds of combat. More class mastery and skill experience, which is easily as important as gaining combat exp from battles. Both modes of play are catered to, neither is easier or more optimal than the other. We will never fully grasp how perfect this game's systems were.

What else warrants mention from individual games? Do you enjoy low manning? Do you agree that Fire Emblem games ought to discourage low manning to some degree?

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1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Is a game where low manning is clearly better than deploying 10+ units a lesser game?

To me it depends on exactly how tedious it is to use more units. It's a single player game, so I don't really care about it being balanced, but I think that it's telling if all I want to do is blast through the game with one unit to get things over with. It's more of an issue with Pokemon than Fire Emblem though.

Quote

Many LTCs incidentally low man wherever it makes sense.

Speedruns lean even more heavily on low manning; they often use only one carry and utility units. I find that LTCs and other kinds of challenge playthroughs generally have more combat units and need to fulfill more side objectives especially when doing full recruitment.

Maybe I'll post my thoughts on each individual game later, but to me some of the biggest offenders are FE4, 8, 9, and Awakening.

1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

FE8-FE12: No Ranking system and no new developments I can think of. Bad games lol. (feel free to add whatever is relevant to the discussion)

I'm going to disagree with you on FE12. The speedrun is probably different, but just basing off of dondon's 0% growths LTC there's a lot going on with every single unit that's being deployed most of the time. FE11 is the one that seems bad of the two since there aren't as many things to do most of the time besides warping a unit to the boss and seizing.

The main takeaway for me is that the best way to prevent low manning is to give the player a lot of worthwhile side objectives to complete in most maps. That also makes the games more interesting. Then again there is a certain kind of charm in being able to shut my brain off and just enjoy the story, and that's not possible when there's too much to do. FE9 is the prime example of that for me.

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2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

FE8-FE12: No Ranking system and no new developments I can think of. Bad games lol. (feel free to add whatever is relevant to the discussion)

I think that the Tellius system of Bonus XP is worth discussing a little here. It doesn't discourage low-manning, but it can encourage using more units. If someone wants to use lots of units, bexp makes it easy for them to do so, stops any units falling behind, allows lagging units or late recruits to catch up quickly and easily, and so on. And in general, I think that's the right approach. The best way to move people from low-manning to full-teaming (for want of a better term) isn't to make low-manning suck; it's to make full-teaming better.

Unfortunately, while bexp does make full-teaming a lot more attractive, it's also a huge buff to low-manning, especially in Path of Radiance. Yeah, I could use all that bexp on Rolf to make him vaguely competent, or I could just use it all on Titania and witness her apotheosis to full on goddess. Radiant Dawn mitigated this somewhat by changing the bexp curve so higher level units got less out of it, but it didn't get rid of the problem entirely.

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Awakening/Fates: Oh hey kids are back and there's a lot more mothers to manage. I know Awakening is basically the poster child game for low manning. Just pair up Robin with Chrom and grind your way to untouchable stats and skills. Conquest is probably interesting because of the handful of ninja chapters that will throttle your low man attempts, but since it's not a game that allows for endless grinding (outside of DLC) I don't know how thin the game encourages spreading experience.

As well as ninjas, Fates has a bunch of other debuffs that get applied to units. The various seal skills, hexing rods, and self-inflicted debuffs from higher tier weapons all come to mind. If your units have their stats dumped into the toilet, it's pretty desirable to have other units who can pick up the slack as well.

I also don't think that kids do that much to discourage low-manning. If you're planning on just using a few units throughout the game, I'm not sure that you'd necessarily care about access to/the strength of additional units that you aren't going to use. Again, if anything, it's probably more into the realm of encouraging full-teaming rather than discouraging low-manning. If you want to use lots of units, hey, here's an extra mechanic to make it more fun. If you don't want to, then you can pretty much ignore it.

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

What else warrants mention from individual games?

The Emblems in Engage work similarly to gambits in Three Houses, except to a vastly increased extent. You're missing out on more by leaving Emblems at home than by leaving Battalions at home.

While they're not really specific to individual games, two other things that go towards discouraging low-manning are discouraging enemy phase play and having greater class diversity.

Low man tactics almost inevitably end up being enemy phase tactics. With fewer units, you inherently can't kill as many units on player phase, so have to either rely on enemy phase or take a lot more turns. So any of the methods that various games use to incentivise player-phase play probably belong on this list as well.

Similarly, the more that different classes play differently and have different purposes, the more important it is to have more units to fill all these roles.  If half the map is filled with archers and the other half with mages, then neither your pegasus knight nor your armour knight is going to be able to solo it (unless they're so OP that they actually can, of course). More recent FE games are typically better than older FE games at making different units be good at different things, but they're still not great. There certainly aren't as many distinct roles as there are endgame deployment slots in any game in the series, and it's still too easy to make units powerful enough that they can do (almost) anything.

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Do you agree that Fire Emblem games ought to discourage low manning to some degree?

I do, yes. I think that, to at least some extent, it's part of a game designer's job to save the players from themselves, and stop them from optimising the fun out of their games (hat tip to Sid Meier and Soren Johnson). Playing with lots of different units is the most fun way to play Fire Emblem. Or at least, it really ought to be the most fun way to play. Pretty much the entire game is designed around the idea that you'll be playing with a full team, so if that isn't the most fun way to play then the designers have done something pretty seriously wrong. So with that in mind, other aspects of the game design should be funneling players into playing in this most fun way. And if low-manning is actually the most efficient and easiest way to play, then that's a bit of a failure of design.

I'm the sort of player who will almost always choose "what's most fun" over "what's mechanically optimal", but even so, it always feels a little bit jarring. Come on, game, why are you making me choose? Optimising is fun in and of itself, but if I want to have the fun of optimising, then I can't also have the fun of large(ish)-scale tactical combat? I want both!

(Which isn't to say that I think that low-manning should be completely unviable. I like that it's an option. I like that people can play that way if they want to. I like that I can play that way if I want to. I just don't want it to be the best option.)

1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

I'm going to disagree with you on FE12. The speedrun is probably different, but just basing off of dondon's 0% growths LTC there's a lot going on with every single unit that's being deployed most of the time.

Wouldn't a 0% growths run be just about the worst case scenario for low-manning, though? I mean, the whole point of low-manning is that the units you do use see more combats, gain more xp, and become more powerful as a result. With 0% growths, that pretty much kills the entire raison d'être, no?

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2 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Wouldn't a 0% growths run be just about the worst case scenario for low-manning, though? I mean, the whole point of low-manning is that the units you do use see more combats, gain more xp, and become more powerful as a result. With 0% growths, that pretty much kills the entire raison d'être, no?

That's true to an extent, but off the top of my head there were always objectives spread out through most maps (he also feeds Palla a bunch of stat boosters to make her a carry, so there are some similarities) so that more units were necessary regardless. I could be wrong though; I haven't really looked at any LTC runs of FE12 outside of that.

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There are two other aspects to Thracia 776 that weren't discussed: mandatory minimum deployment and Escape maps. The former outright prevents you from lowmanning in the strictest sense, and the nail-in-your-foot deployment ruling might require you to get creative to deal with certain loadouts. The latter is an objective that requires everyone to seize, sure you can subvert it but it comes at the cost of losing them until the jail paralogue. Part of this has to do with ranks, but many players feel compelled towards full recruitment even without it... or the most you can sanely achieve (hi Xavier); and it does feed into the more engaging maps discourse because in tandem with the deployment floor it forces you to engage your cast in some way other than forgetting they exist.

Ultimately there's no real silver bullet for lowmanning since the gameplay frequently encourages you to lean on a minority of your units at some point (i.e. Jagen on Shadow Dragon H5), and there are multiple ways for lesser units to contribute even if they aren't frontlining.

5 hours ago, samthedigital said:

I'm going to disagree with you on FE12. The speedrun is probably different, but just basing off of dondon's 0% growths LTC there's a lot going on with every single unit that's being deployed most of the time. FE11 is the one that seems bad of the two since there aren't as many things to do most of the time besides warping a unit to the boss and seizing.

Pretty sure that was a joke, the "lol" at the end's a dead giveaway.

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1 hour ago, X-Naut said:

Pretty sure that was a joke, the "lol" at the end's a dead giveaway.

If we're talking specifically about the ability to low-man games the other games are kind of bad about it though, so if it's a joke it's still pretty close to the mark. FE8 is Seth Emblem, FE9 is Titania to Jill/Marcia, etc. There's some nuance, but they can still be pretty bad about it most of the time.

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10 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Do you agree that Fire Emblem games ought to discourage low manning to some degree?

Well, all the devs have to do is create some more siege maps and make it an "kill boss" with an absurd amount of reinforcements. I also think that it's kind of unusual that an medieval fantasy game doesn't regularly include what happens when you lose an fight or provides an alternate condition for losing one, but that's just me.

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There are some things that are obvious to limit low manning, such as exp ceilings, but here's the ones I think are worth discussing:

1. Making Enemies hit hard, but not durable 

One of the main reasons why Low manning is successful is because juggernauts have the capability of one rounding more enemies on EP than most of the team can take down on PP. A good way of fixing that is by doing the above.

FE12 is a good example of this, as Kris is one of the best units in the series, yet even they struggle to take on more than 2-3 enemies on Lunatic due to how hard the enemies hit. Not only does this prevent one man army situations, Enemies having relatively low defense also allows other units to one round enemies with a moderate amount of investment, rather than something like FE6 where even the best units struggle to one round without crits.

2. Give lower end units niches and ways to better themselves 

Earlygame units do not scale well compared to other units in a lot of games, such as with Radiant Dawn or Engage. This is typically the result of enemies scaling to the point where only through substantial amounts of investment are earlygame units like Edward or Alfred actually able to one round.

The best way to fix this is by giving them relevant niches or ways to grow themselves better, which can be done a multitude of ways. You could go the weapon route, where you give a special weapon, but Edward shows why that's not a great option. It's better to go with the more interesting skill route, such as with paragon that expires once they hit a certain level or utility skill only they get such as Chain Guard or a Guaranteed doubling skill that halves defense. There's plenty of interesting options to be had here.

3. Design Maps maps to prevent it

Most of the time the biggest thing that enables Juggernauting is just map design. Enemies need to be dangerous and / or cover each other ranges to really prevent low manning, which for a lot of fire emblems just isn't the case. Easy solutions to that would be to add enemies with defense penetrating attacks for certain units or a freeze staff that exclusively targets your strongest units. 

Also, Warp Staff has to go, at least on the hardest difficulties. The thing allows you to skip way too much combat with it.

Tl;DR: Play Berwick Saga. It really shows how removing enemy phase really spices the gameplay and removes any thought of lowmanning.

Edited by LoneRecon400
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18 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

To max out the Experience requirement in a ranked run, you need to raise every unit. I think I heard the average level you're aiming for on each unit is 20 for both Generations, though I'm not about to do the math myself, since I know a unit's initial level does not count, only levels that they gained during a playthrough. 

To get A-rank in Experience, you need 1000 level-ups total. Scary, right? But it's across a total of 47 playable characters (24 per generation, with Finn in both). Collectively, they start with 236 levels. If everyone makes it to level 30, you'll have 1410 levels. So, a difference of 1174 levels. As such, you can get A-rank while "missing" as many as 174 levels. With 47 units total, that works out to between 3 and 4 levels per unit. Looked at another way, you want you average final levels to be at least 26-27.

In other words, if you're going for a ranked run, you do need to train up everyone, at least to some extent. That said, several units can get nearly all the levels they need out of the Arena. Especially once they get the money to buy the Paragon Band.

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11 hours ago, LoneRecon400 said:

1. Making Enemies hit hard, but not durable 

One of the main reasons why Low manning is successful is because juggernauts have the capability of one rounding more enemies on EP than most of the team can take down on PP. A good way of fixing that is by doing the above.

FE12 is a good example of this, as Kris is one of the best units in the series, yet even they struggle to take on more than 2-3 enemies on Lunatic due to how hard the enemies hit. Not only does this prevent one man army situations, Enemies having relatively low defense also allows other units to one round enemies with a moderate amount of investment, rather than something like FE6 where even the best units struggle to one round without crits.

This x10.  (Agree with the rest of LoneRecon's post, incidentally.)  The more a game is player-phase focused like FE12 or 3H without using certain strategies, the more you're rewarded for fielding a large team: that's more actions with which to score a kill on your own terms.  The more enemy-phase focused a game is, the more low-manning is rewarded - even if Radiant Dawn or Awakening were hacked to be even stricter on overlevel units gaining XP, those are games where a lot of action happens on enemy phase in general without some very specific strategies to get around it.

Map design can help somewhat for encouraging large teams (note how rare natural size-1 chokepoints are in Engage, for all you can roll your own chokepoints with fire terrain & Freeze staff there), but the existence of Classic mode means you run the risk of bricking a playthrough if you expect a full team always deployed (well, barring some sort of FE11-esque replacement troops mechanic, perhaps).  Can still work if there are optional flavor objectives to do like recruiting Nino & Jaffar on Battle Before Dawn, of course, although that risks the deathmarch player getting even further behind.

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  • 5 weeks later...

The obvious solution to low manning is harder end games. You should eventually run into a wall where you just plain can't easily clear the final few maps without a fully trained army...the issue with this is that we also have Perma death, meaning we need to make it still possible to clear the final maps with a small army in case they were killed off. I think recent games have done a much better job at balancing their end game chapters, though at the cost of some design away from Perma death (I made a thread about that). But balancing the ability to play the game with a small army against it being designed for a full army is always going to be an issue so long as Perma death exists. Replacement units like in Shadow Dragon for Fates are a bandaid on this issue to some extent.

On 3/19/2023 at 6:06 PM, lenticular said:

I think that the Tellius system of Bonus XP is worth discussing a little here. It doesn't discourage low-manning, but it can encourage using more units. If someone wants to use lots of units, bexp makes it easy for them to do so, stops any units falling behind, allows lagging units or late recruits to catch up quickly and easily, and so on. And in general, I think that's the right approach. The best way to move people from low-manning to full-teaming (for want of a better term) isn't to make low-manning suck; it's to make full-teaming better.

Unfortunately, while bexp does make full-teaming a lot more attractive, it's also a huge buff to low-manning, especially in Path of Radiance. Yeah, I could use all that bexp on Rolf to make him vaguely competent, or I could just use it all on Titania and witness her apotheosis to full on goddess. Radiant Dawn mitigated this somewhat by changing the bexp curve so higher level units got less out of it, but it didn't get rid of the problem entirely.

As well as ninjas, Fates has a bunch of other debuffs that get applied to units. The various seal skills, hexing rods, and self-inflicted debuffs from higher tier weapons all come to mind. If your units have their stats dumped into the toilet, it's pretty desirable to have other units who can pick up the slack as well.

I also don't think that kids do that much to discourage low-manning. If you're planning on just using a few units throughout the game, I'm not sure that you'd necessarily care about access to/the strength of additional units that you aren't going to use. Again, if anything, it's probably more into the realm of encouraging full-teaming rather than discouraging low-manning. If you want to use lots of units, hey, here's an extra mechanic to make it more fun. If you don't want to, then you can pretty much ignore it.

The Emblems in Engage work similarly to gambits in Three Houses, except to a vastly increased extent. You're missing out on more by leaving Emblems at home than by leaving Battalions at home.

While they're not really specific to individual games, two other things that go towards discouraging low-manning are discouraging enemy phase play and having greater class diversity.

Low man tactics almost inevitably end up being enemy phase tactics. With fewer units, you inherently can't kill as many units on player phase, so have to either rely on enemy phase or take a lot more turns. So any of the methods that various games use to incentivise player-phase play probably belong on this list as well.

Similarly, the more that different classes play differently and have different purposes, the more important it is to have more units to fill all these roles.  If half the map is filled with archers and the other half with mages, then neither your pegasus knight nor your armour knight is going to be able to solo it (unless they're so OP that they actually can, of course). More recent FE games are typically better than older FE games at making different units be good at different things, but they're still not great. There certainly aren't as many distinct roles as there are endgame deployment slots in any game in the series, and it's still too easy to make units powerful enough that they can do (almost) anything.

I do, yes. I think that, to at least some extent, it's part of a game designer's job to save the players from themselves, and stop them from optimising the fun out of their games (hat tip to Sid Meier and Soren Johnson). Playing with lots of different units is the most fun way to play Fire Emblem. Or at least, it really ought to be the most fun way to play. Pretty much the entire game is designed around the idea that you'll be playing with a full team, so if that isn't the most fun way to play then the designers have done something pretty seriously wrong. So with that in mind, other aspects of the game design should be funneling players into playing in this most fun way. And if low-manning is actually the most efficient and easiest way to play, then that's a bit of a failure of design.

I'm the sort of player who will almost always choose "what's most fun" over "what's mechanically optimal", but even so, it always feels a little bit jarring. Come on, game, why are you making me choose? Optimising is fun in and of itself, but if I want to have the fun of optimising, then I can't also have the fun of large(ish)-scale tactical combat? I want both!

(Which isn't to say that I think that low-manning should be completely unviable. I like that it's an option. I like that people can play that way if they want to. I like that I can play that way if I want to. I just don't want it to be the best option.)

Wouldn't a 0% growths run be just about the worst case scenario for low-manning, though? I mean, the whole point of low-manning is that the units you do use see more combats, gain more xp, and become more powerful as a result. With 0% growths, that pretty much kills the entire raison d'être, no?

I've implemented a bonus exp system into my newest fangamr that I think is quite novel, and I'm surprised they've never tried something like it in the main series as it's kind of an enforced variation of what Tellius might have intended.

Basically, units get bexp for not being deployed in battle. So your reserve units passively grow over the course of the game. This, in a way, does encourage low manning, has the fewer units you deploy the more units get benefits from this system. But at the same time, if works into what the op says about choosing a way to play as the fact that you have more units capable of contributing means you have more reason to field them even if you don't work on them (though the bexp, about 40 points per map, is small enough that your active u it's will still be stronger). It also leads to more interesting deployment as, typically, you're only ever going to train one archer or armoured unit, maybe 2 at mask, but by passively growing back benchers you can field more archers at once if a chapter is advantageous to archers by having a lot of fliers.

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