piffany

I always thought "Miledy" was an obvious reference to "Milady" from The Three Musketeers. So I'd spell it that way. IMO.

I will be happy to stipulate that professional players in the International Fire Emblem Tournament, which strictly homologates all competitive fire emblem play, should not use save states. But why does this matter for those of us who are playing the game for fun? Your argument is akin to "People with larger TVs have an unfair advantage when playing Halo, so everyone should use the same size TV as me." Re: the not paying for it thing, that's a separate issue. I actually own all of the FE games I play, yet I prefer to play on emulation whenever possible, because it's so much more convenient (and because I enjoy the pixel art, and love seeing the GBA games, especially, on a 27" monitor instead of a tiny little screen. But not only is "fairness" something I don't worry about with respect to Fire Emblem, I don't see how anyone should be worrying about it.

I'm a bit of a religious zealot on this. If it takes more than 200 milliseconds for me to get through the UI to save, it's a failure. With an emulator, i hit one F-key, cmd-quit the game, and i'm done. The whole beauty of emulators for this sort of thing is that it takes the choice of save UI out of the hands of the game developer, who, 40 years of game development history tells us, will inevitably screw it up. This is actually part of the reason that iPad games are so great in this manner. On iOS, its basically a requirement of the app store that apps perform gracefully WHENEVER they go into the background, period, because the OS might kill them to recover memory. So on iPad apps, the whole idea of an explicit suspend/save state just evaporates. "Turn off the device" or "switch apps without worrying about it" is your save state, which is as it should be.

I use save states so I can stop playing whenever I want to and pick up whenever I want to. Games that don't offer instant suspend/resume are made by bad software developers who should feel bad.

So it's actually possible to overtrain Micaiah in part 1? I'm just getting started (I think I just finished chapter 3, the prison chapter?) and have been deliberately leaning on her to try to avoid the "overuse Sothe" thing i did when I first tried the game years ago. Basically my heuristic is: (1) If at all possible, feed Micaiah the kill. If she has nothing else to do, sacrifice to heal and then have Laura heal her. (2) Nolan gets all of the incidental combat. He can take the occasional kill intentionally. (3) Leonardo only allowed to chip enemies to set up a kill. (4) Edward usually chips, but I have let him take a couple of kills. So basically, I've leveled Micaiah at this point to 9 or 10, Nolan is maybe 11 or 12, and Edward is at 5. I'm reasonably sure I won't want to use Edward in the long run, so I figured getting Micaiah up earlier was better. Am I erring? I'm just remembering my recent PoR run where "level Ike to 20 as early as possible" turned out to be an awesome thing to do, because it actually opened up a lot of tactical possibilities for training other characters without worrying about having to feed Ike.