Avestus

I don't see the problem here. Having suitable characters for one-turning the endgame of conquest requires some strategic planning as well (like saving rescues, taking pegasus knight tiwh pass as prisoner and so on), and it's quite all right, when the player is rewarded for it. So, the chapter is completely doable. If you want to do it without rescue - well, you make some additional challenge yourself and the chapter is still doable, although it requires a lot more tactical planning. I see nothing wrong with it and no failure in design. You can beat it either by strategy or tactics. The latter is harder, but it's your own whim to limit your choices. I don't see why devs should go easy on players seeking additional challenge.

I bought Revelations after beating Conquest for MP-optimizing purposes, but i couldn't endure it more than 18 chapters. I really regret spending my money on that. The praise for Conquest's gameplay and map design is well-deserved. It's really superb, certainly one of the very best in the series. It's a shame that nothing of the kind can be said about its story...

Will i enjoy this DLC if i consider Nohr's stroy to be offensively stupid and Revelations path to be way too dull? For me it's okay if it is removed from the main story, but is it well-written enough to be treated as stand-alone arc? Btw, i never recruited children in Nohr or Revelations.

It's quite funny that when I played without using children both Silas and Camilla (who is considered to be almost OP) were pretty meh thorughout the entire playthrough and ended up as mostly pair-up and ability bots. :( I

There is no such thing as "Fates world". There's just a series of poorly-linked locations with no detailed background and no sophisticated thought put into their creation. Thus, as of now, there's nothing interesting in it, and i don't want another game with world-building of teenager fanfic level.

Well, I think it's actually good that you don't have too many options for God-Tier tanks since that's exactly why you're forced to play with careful counter-attack and attack stance preparations. That's why Conquest felt ways more tactical for me than, say, awakening. If you don't get hero reclass for Xander he also stops being ultimate tanking machine starting from ch 25. And between that and his arrival time... well, he is God-tier, but I still stuck to Effie with javelin for many game situations. Even being fed with speedwings, Xander doesn't always double, his res doesn't really allow for rng-proof magic tanking in insane amounts and so on. And in terms of how the aforementioned counter-attack vibe you can use a good variety of units for "humble" tanking, trying to utilize the positioning of different emenies groups to your advantage. Overall, it doesn't feel right for me to completely kick ass on EP, even if it does require some strategic and tactical planning. I think making emphasis on player phase was right decision for Fates.

Honsetly, i was so glad after finally beating those berserkers and generals along with reinforcments spawning from stairs after you provoke them, that I never tried it and just finished the chapter. Those guys are nuts and scary. And i know for sure there must be some reinforcements too... screw that spy's shuriken.

Well, in my book it's vise versa :) The point of LTC is to utilize right skills, positioning and calculate exactly the units and stats you need for all battles with future strategy in mind. Buying skills or using rewards does give you sometimes gamebreaking advantage (like dual weapons or falcon wing) but grinding only supports... well, it's not like the author hides anything. So you can decide for yourself how much praise the TC should get. His strategy can be implemented without buying skills and using rewards weapons/classes, it's clever and nice so for me this video is cool and this approach is legitimate. You're free to think otherwise :) I do agree that with support grinding prohibited it would've been harder to implemet this,but the core strategy is still nice. And it's nicer to grind supports than rely, say, on some 14% crit. The core strategy doesn't change.

Well, it is legitimate, since supports can be grinded even in Conquest in MyCastle battles. So all you need is free skills castle with uneqipped units (there is at least one of these in top battle rankings for Europe). I personally think that for the purpose of LTC grinding supports in the way i mentioned is pretty legitimate. Thus hacking them is also OK since you just save 30 minutes or so of finding and grinding respective MyCastles.

I didn't use Donnel in awakening's lunatic (though i did use Mozu in Conquest). I want to adress a certain argument regarding trainees that always puzzles me - "they demand a lot more effort". The first thing is that they gain exp a lof faster then other units. So the actual gap is way smaller than it seems. Moreover, if you use a focused small team, you're very likely to face very moderate exp gains for them at some point. The second point is that awakening's lunatic (and here we speak of Donnel specifically) throws horrendous hordes of enemies at you and actually you can easily afford (and sometimes you are made to) to have some non-optimal exp distribution. I made it fine with (ab)using Freddy up to the chapter 22+ in no-grind no-dlc run, which means that throwing exp at Donnel is completely affordable. I agree that due to that same point (hordes of enemies actively swarming you) it is harder to babysit his initial stages than Mozu's in Conquest. But that is the only problem. "Exp wasting" is not a factor.

Mozu is a game-changer in Conquest and you do want to use her effectively. I think it's okay to reclass her right away, but for the most effective usage i'd do (and i did so in my playthrough on lunatic) it after getting undedog. The trick here is that due to gameplay reasons you'd want her to take Kinshi Knight as promoted class and stay there until chapter 24 (where she really shines in that class) because there is quite a number of chapters where her air superiority will be VERY beneficial. After ch.24 if you want a monster-Mozu, who 1-turns endgame, you really want to take all the skills from Merchant/Master of Arms/Sniper. And if you didn't take underdog before, you'd require one more level to do all this class-changing. I barely managed not to overlevel her (she ended ch.24 with lvl 14 and 84 exp which made taking all her advanced-class skills possible) and if you reclas her into archer right away, it gets even harder. Though if you're fine with taking skills from my castles (which i banned for my playthrough) or if you don't care about 1-turning endgame - well, you are okay with reclassing her right away.

Well, Niles is extremely good idea if he already has lucky seven. I personally used Felicia as wyvern knight with bolt axe for the purpose, but well - that was my lucky star with blindly choosing a very useful subclass for my avatar and marrying Felicia to him. Btw, if you're not bent on making everything ASAP, you can really take your time and do first left side with all of your forces, then right one. It took me 30 turns, so your avatar should be equipped enough to live through ~10 truns against Ryoma. Not a big deal with draconic hex and a couple of healing potions actually.

this. Also if you look at attack ranges, you can actually provoke ninjas with shurkenbreaker unit in groups of three or two. There are such squares where their attack ranges converge and you can even use Camilla/Elise adjacency bonuses while standing in that places with shurikenbreaker unit. Other than that - beware of the lunge on the left side and actively use Azura/Shelter ultimate combo to deal separately with as many enemies as possible. Then charge (take notice of breakable walls!).

Conquest has superb gameplay and a more interesrting (due to what i hear from my friends as I don't own Birthright) cast. If you can deal with offensively stupid plotholes, definetely go for it.

I did no-grind no-dlc lunatic run in awakening and he started to fall behind only somewhere after ch 20+. Lunatic throws ridiculous numbers at you, so exp is not a problem for Freddy there. You still have enough for the rest of the cast AND you can make him not fall behind. Though of course there are still some chapters (mostly the early ones) where you should only use him to whittle down enemy's hp without killing them

As far as i recall, he has smth like 50% activation rate for it so i wouldn't call this "losing to chance". 50% is definitely something that you should consider to be always active in your planning and calculations.

Well, chapter 27 is easy if you take 4 great pair-ups who can deal 1 vs 1 with the stair gurardians and deploy them all below. I took 5 pairs actually (one of them stood at the start through the whole chapter). The main enemy force moves down the corridor so you just deal with "guardians" quickly, end your turn on this side of the stairs, and on the next turn go up the stairs and rush the boss with 4 pairs. It should probably work with any set up. I personally had Mozu with crescent bow, spendthrift, life and death, +40 hit skill, bowfaire, quickdraw, so i just could reliably kill the boss in one attack with her. Rallybot from chapter 23 (iirc) also helps. For endgame you can trivialize it if you have rescue staff (even 1 usage is fine), unit who can one-turn Takumi, pegasus knight with pass (can be captured on ch 24), Niles as adventurer (so +1 movemet and pass) and at least one unit with shelter (well, you most certainly have Xander, right?).

Falcon knights with "pass" from Hinoka chapter (24) are very useful for conquest endgame. Especially if you didn't reclass Selena. 8 movement with potential 9 and B in staves form the get-go. Nice for 1-turning that nightmare.

Just finished Conquest Lunatic endgame 1-turning it with Mozu (she is a beast if she takes all skills from all her branches and finishes as sniper) and only 1 rescue staff usage (shelter was involved to have azura dance two times though). I liked it pretty much. Just when i thought smth like "this game starts to be easy" (at Hinoka chapter) they threw at me pretty nasty but interesting chapters. The difficulty was way better than one in awakening. It's a shame that such great gameplay is (not) supported by offensively stupid main plot. :( Btw, I really wonder how people deal with endgame without rescue. On chapter 25 where debuff stacking is a problem it can be solved by very accurate dodgetanking, since there are a lot of places where each set on ninjas has one common "attack range" tile. But here the time is really pressing you. Must be a hell of a chapter...

Lunatic conquest chapter 26. All these staff users... unlimited hexes, unlimited enfeebles... i did get silence staff from the previous chapter. Not sure it will help. And here I thought that inevitable end was a "bordering legit" skil. To be fair, though, i must say that so far the game has been pretty fair in its difficulty, always allowing to break through all that terrifying enemy skills with some clever tactics. But still. chapter 26 makes me feel uneasy just by looking at the map. And i haven't seen the reinforcements yet...

While it is annoying, it does give several nice opportunities of blowing apart some dangerous groups of the enemies or coming at certain enemy groups with full force (which would've been hard otherwise because of Hex or tight space). I actively used dragon veins to blow enemies and my own troops here and there.

By the way, is European english version of Fates is just slightly adapted from what NoA did? Or did they translate from scratch? Anyone has any info on that matter?

This. Well, Conquest is not as dull as Shadow Dragon, i agree. But while Shadow Dragon was dull, Conquest (the only version i've played so far) is offensively stupid. I haven't played FEs 1-5 and 12, but among all others Conquest's story is the worst. Previous fire emblem games gave us world-building, they introduced all that feudal ties in different kindgoms which made every game relatively solid in terms of suspension of disbelief. It was always a medieval story where you always knew how the society functioned and why did all the people have the power, how they took their decisions and so on. The political structure of the world and thus reasoning for wars/alliances/betrayal was always clear. The story itself sometimes was simple, generic or even boring, but it was never THIS stupid. Actually halfway thorugth the game i made my peace with it. After seeing that nothing about world's structure is ever properly explained or detailed, "Ok", i decided, "i'll think of the game's plot as of that one of tale, having the appropriate laws of tale". Tales can be still good. But ch.15 smashed my hopes. Because for fairy tale it's ok to introduce smth like "only this weapon can smash the big bad evil and to get it you need to pry it from the depth of Hoshido". Something like what was going on with legendary weapons in previous installations. But here we don't have this tale-ish motivation. No. We have a completely stupid motivation (i try to avoid spoilers here) to conquer Hoshido which would've been impossible if the political structure of the world was depicted any better. It's childish writing. It's offensively stupid. It makes all the future tensions inside Corrin devoid of meaning, since he doesn't have neither his way nor the cause. He himself is a stupid lame plot clutch instead of a character and no one from the cast ever takes him up on that.

Quality of conquest's gameplay is very high - on par with that of RD. Quality of world-building and story is the worst in the entire franchise. Which means it IS a cash grab. The ambitious RD didn't demand additional money for playing different sides of frontlines. This game does. And unlike RD, it throws shit at you instead of proper motivation for the main plot. And there are actually a lot of similarities between this game and RD, so i don't compare them just out of the blue. We still have only one fire emblem, but what nintendo did with this title is absolutely disgusting. I just hope that some miracle will allow them to make a proper world and story in the next title. At least, they managed to get gameplay on very high and fresh level.

I'm on chapter 20 lunatic conquest and through the lion share of my run dodgetanking was dead. The only real way to do it is with the help of -breakers or air superioriy/ lucky seven (and the latter two are more like last-resort rather than viable tactics). Which basically means either waiting for very late-game or severe using of felicia reclasses (and when reclassed she doesn't do much damage). Overall i found myself almost completely not relying on dodgetanking even though i did some in awakening's lunatic, for exapmle.