Tino

That probably wasn't my exact strategy (I only remembered the last part exactly), but what I outlined was about what I did. Maybe I killed the soldier on turn 2, maybe on turn 3, I don't remember. I just recall they didn't bother attacking Matthew, and that the soldier suicided into Hector, be it on turn 2 or 3. My memory is usually better than this, but I got some... unfortunate news a few hours ago, so to say, so my mind is not entirely clear. I wish I could be more elaborative here, sorry... : (

Turn 1 Hector attacked the wall. Turn 2 Hector breached the wall. Matthew opened the door to the red gem chest. Here I could sort of trick the fairly stupid AI. Both Hector and Matthew were in range of both the soldier and the archer. However, archers tend to attack 1-range units over 1-2 range units. So I had Hector equip his wolf beil. Enemies also seem to prefer attacking lords over thieves/other untis (maybe I was lucky here, because I also seem to recall Matthew and Legault being the primary targets on previous runthroughs, but whatever), so the soldier suicided himself into Hector, and the archer decided to attack Hector as well. Turn 3 Matthew got the gem, and Hector killed the archer with a critical hit. The thief opened the door to the chest room, so enemies could get to Matthew. Again though, due to fail AI, Matthew got attacked only once, and with far more movement than the unit that attacked him (which was the knight), he could easily get away. Turn 4 Matthew got away, Hector moved up to the door. Turn 5 Matthew opened the door, Hector moved up. Turn 6 Hector moves up more. Turn 7 Hector attacked Wire, but missed (which was fail). Wire missed too, though. Turn 8 Hector got attacked on the previous enemy phase, so Wire had only 14 hp left while Hector would deal 15 damage. Game. Set. Match. So yeah, I actually could have done it in 7 turns hadn't it been for that bad luck at the end. But then again, maybe I was lucky at the start, too, who knows, so I'm definitely satisfied with my result. And it's also the first time I went north, because I always took the southern route (and always got the same turn count, or one more turn, using both Hector and Matthew).

They sure would be interesting to watch, so I definitely am interested.

Use a monospace font in your text editor - to make it easier for yourself - and use spaces to align everything properly : o

I did the first few chapters... Chapter 11 I broke through the wall, then had Matthew open the door and get the red gem. The enemy thief opened the other other door, so that the enemies could get to my (unequipped) matthew, and he got attacked by one knight, which he survived quite easily. Then I had Hector and Matthew fall back to the door west of the room, while all enemies ventured into the chest room, so there was no way they could ever still reach me. It was just free path to Wire, who was very easy to kill. Everything else, except for the northern archer and soldier, remained alive. I'm that nice. Turns: 8 Total turns: 8 Name lv hp str skl spd luc def res Hector 2.84 20 7 4 5 3 9 1 Chapter 12 Marcus is so damn awesome. I sent Hector east to attack the pegasus knight. I gave Dorcas Bartre's axes, and then moved Lowen, Marcus and Dorcas eastward. I made sure everybody else was either out of range or had no weapons equipped. Hector lost about half his hp, so I moved an unequipped Oswin east to act as a distraction and had Hector use a vulnerary. The distraction didn't help much, though, but having Hector on a forest turned out to be plenty anyway. Down south, Lowen, Marcus and Dorcas could easily hold their own against the handful of enemies. So I moved Marcus north the third turn. The next turn, most of the southern enemies were gone, so I started moving Lowen and Dorcas up as well. Zagan started moving towards Hector, so I sure was glad I moved Marcus up early (he also prevented Serra from dying, because she got hit due to a slight, but apparently nearly fatal error). Yeah, I don't know if you get penalized if non-drafted units die, but I just like having everybody alive. On turn 7 Matthew finally managed to sell the red gem he stole earlier, because that money may very well come in useful. Dorcas got the final kill. This was much easier than I had expected. Turns: 7 Total turns: 15 Name lv hp str skl spd luc def res Hector 4.96 22 9 4 7 3 10 1 Marcus 1.37 31 15 15 11 8 10 8 Lowen 3.08 24 7 6 7 3 7 1 Dorcas 4.21 31 8 8 6 4 3 1

Bah. Semantics. Sort of. Pick off kills in ch 4? How do you want him to do that? You only have four turns to achieve the goal of the chapter, which requires you to rush forward so that you don't have the time to properly protect Soren, which is - perhaps not surprisingly - pretty much essential for Soren to pick off kills, because he's going to get killed if he's not protected unless he's very lucky. I mean, look at Soren's defensive parameters: 18.0 hp, 19.0 avo, 2.0 def. Now look at enemies: 13.0 atk, 91.8 hit. Or more accurately, 18 enemies 2HKO him, 4 enemies 3HKO him. So on average Soren is getting 2.2HKOed on average while facing ~86% true hit. So his chance to die in 2.2 rounds is .86^2.2 = ~72%. Pretty damn huge, if you ask me. In ch 5, yes, he can do a little bit more, but there it's probably still preferable to have him weaken enemies to let somebody else take the kill, because so many enemies are being thrown at you that you don't want to take any unnecessary risks with the units you choose to defend the gates with. If you let one of those attack first, that unit may very well get wounded, and if Soren might then be able to kill that bastard, the defending unit may take another hit. Or maybe Titania and Gatrie are defending the gates, in which case the charging enemies will either die before Soren can get to them (they'll likely target Titania primarily, who will kill everything that comes at her, and if they attack Gatrie, he either kills them or leaves them with a: a fair amount of hp left so that Soren can't kill, or b: just enough hp so that Soren can kill). Long story short, the chance that Soren's getting any kills is small to nil. And only, or almost only getting in pot shots doesn't gain you much exp, I can tell you that. As for ch 6, I can easily see Titania higher than base due to boss kills (if you want to beat chapters within the turn requirement for maximum bexp, it's often preferable to let Titania kill the boss, as she can do so the quickest). Plus, there's a hammer available which you obtained in ch 5. lv 3 Soren w/ wind: 9.2 atk, 7.9 spd lv 2 Titania w/ hammer: 32.5 atk, 7.0 spd lv 7 Ike w/ regal sword: 22.0 atk, 10.3 spd lv 7 Boyd w/ hammer: 30.0 atk, 0.0 spd So here we have four units who might do pretty well against those knights. Looking at those knights, they have 26 hp, 13 def and 4 res. Nobody but Ike can double them. Soren deals 5.2 damage, which is a 5HKO. Titania deals 20.5 damage, which is a 2HKO. Ike deals 8 * 2 = 16.0 damage, which is a 2RKO. Boyd deals 18.0 damage, which is a 2HKO. What if Soren would be lv 4 here? He would deal 5.6 damage twice for a total of 11.2 damage, which is still a 3RKO, so he's still worse than everyone else. And on top of that, the knights in ch 6 have javelins, so he's also facing some real danger. I mean, he does get 2HKOed by them while facing ~58% true hit rates. That's still quite dangerous, if you ask me. So yeah... Level 5 seems more reasonable here I think my lv 4 is perfectly justified. May I ask why? As far as I'm concerned, we're talking about beating ch 4 in 4 turns, and there's no way Soren's going to get a kill every turn. One kill is probably the most he's getting. Besides, why would the player benefit most by giving Ike and Soren kills over the other units? I do believe giving Ike and Soren those kills instead of others doesn't really help us beat the chapter with that fairly sick turn requirement. Yeah, sure, whatever. Too bad that entire mage band doesn't exist until after ch 7. Oh, since I already covered why lv 4 is fine in ch 7, I'm not going to bother going over your stat analysis, since I'd just be repeating myself, which is kind of pointless. Huge hit advantage? Nah, if Mia has ~87% true hit at the very least, she'll have much more than that the vast majority of the time, so she'll still have something like well over 90% true hit on average. That doesn't really bother me too much. It's a slight advantage for Soren, granted, but it's really not very significant. 1-2 range and vantage cancel eachother out, sort of. Okay... Bexp for the win, by the way. lv 10 Mia iron: 13.6 atk, 15.4 spd -- 23.0 hp, 38.6 avo, 7.8 def, 3.0 res steel: 16.6 atk, 12.0 spd -- 31.8 avo Mia gets 3.1HKOed here (at high hit rates, I know). That's really not half bad, since it means she can take some hits before getting killed, and vantage helps quite a bit here, too, because it means she may finish something off on the enemy phase without taking the hit she would have taken without it. So yeah, Mia doesn't really need that 1-2 range in order to be useful for defending. I mean, cool, Soren has it. Does it give him a real advantage over Mia? No, not at all. Mia can't attack from a distance, but Soren can't actually defend. To use your own words: ... 1-2 range enemies, which aren't too common for a good while. So 1-2 range enemies shouldn't really post that much of a problem. I mean, hey, you said so yourself! Okay, so you give Soren a band he can really make use of, and Mia gets the band she desires probably the least? Heck, she'd even benefit more from a priest band or something. It's not like hit is a problem for her. She'd benefit a lot more from something that gives her more offense, too. And it's not like Soren is the only one contending for the mage band, either. True, there's less opportunity cost and whatnot, but that doesn't mean he's guaranteed to get it. Or if he does, Mia is basically guaranteed to get wrath, in which case she'll beat Soren easily. I promoted them at ch 16. What makes you think this should happen so much later? I mean, there's bexp for a reason, and there's tons of it. Why would you not use it, when it can make your units promote by ch 16 (perfectly possible) and make everything much easier? And yeah, ch 16 gets us back to my previous comparison, and whether Soren has used the mage band full time or not, Mia will still be superior there. First of all, it's not like Mia's taking 2 times as many hits due to avo and there not being that many 1-2 range enemies. In ch 16 I count 6 enemies with 1-2 range, and 3 dudes with a bow, which means not even 25% of the enemies uses a ranged weapon. Not very worrysome once again. Second, her concrete durability is two times as good as Soren's at this point in the game, so she would have to take twice as many hits in order to make that equal. But since that doesn't apply, her durability is quite significantly better, despite the existence of a handful of ranged enemies. I do believe being able to survive at least 7 rounds or something on average (still talking about ch 16 here) is pretty darn good in combination with her avo. Yeah, Oscar, Ike, Gatrie and whoever else have better durability, but that doesn't mean it's terrible. Her avo is nice indeed, but she doesn't quite have to rely on it. Soren, who is getting 3-4HKOed instead of 6-7HKOed, does (1-2 range or not). You're making it seem far better than it really is. Exp is plentiful in this game, and units can (and probably will) promote very early. This means units can become pretty darn durable very early, which means the value of healing drops fairly quickly. It's nice that he can do it, and it's useful from time to time, but really nothing too exciting. Besides, another thing I didn't mention in my previous post is that Mia may very well get wrath for that vantage/wrath combo, which is probably about even in usefulness to staves, or a little bit better (because it may very well take some time for Mia to drop below half health).

Then I guess ranked is fine. I like that more, anyway. Any preferences?

I haven't started yet...

Clearly I should close this :3

Hmm, I think I'll try one. Though, do you prefer debating ranked or efficiency? Because I really don't care.

lol? Anyway, welcome. Do enjoy your stay :3

Since we're talking about a speed runthrough here, even using her flight in combination with rescue makes her incredibly useful from the go, despite not being able to fight very well yet. Having that very early does give me an advantage, I'd say. edit: ninja'd

Both Mia and Soren are generally considered fairly capable units, and I have to say that's true for both of them. However, that doesn't mean they don't have their flaws. Who has the largest flaws? Soren, quite easily. I'm going to ignore anything about Soren's early game existence. He's really not too useful in those chapters, so I'm also not going to bother making this longer than necessary by talking about it. So Mia joins in ch 7. Soren has been available for a few chapters in which he's either not been able to do more than firing pot shots at enemies, or he's gotten a few kills due to the occasional finishing off of an enemy, or maybe the occasional adept activation or whatever. Either way, due to there being a time (turn) limit on all chapters, I think he won't have gained more than 3 levels. lv 4 Soren wind: 9.8 atk, 8.3 spd, 125.3 hit, 4.4 crt -- 19.4 hp, 22.5 avo, 2.4 def, 8.7 res 9.7% adept lv 6 Mia iron: 12.0 atk, 13.0 spd, 116.0 hit, 5.0 crt -- 21.0 hp, 32.0 avo, 7.0 def, 2.0 res steel: 15.0 atk, 8.0 spd, 101.0 hit -- 22.0 avo armor: 15.0 (23.0) atk, 3.0 spd, 106.0 hit -- 12.0 avo vantage Mia with steel is still just as fast as Soren is when she uses steel, and is still more durable against physical enemies despite having her avo reduced by 10. An initial 10 avo + 4-5 def lead is that cool : 3 Oh, and she could also use iron to double something if that yields better results. Soren with his wind needs more than 2.5 rounds on average to kill something physical (he needs 25 rounds or something to kill even the weakest mage, and inf-RKOes the stronger mages, the priest and Balmer, so I didn't count them for Soren to keep it 'fair'). Maybe that, due to adept, this is slightly less, but it's still well over 2. Mia is in the same situation - she needs around 2.5 rounds to kill something on average. So they are pretty much even offensively, despite Soren hitting on res and Mia being able to use a more wide variety of weapons. Defensively, Soren gets ~2HKOed on average while facing ~65% displayed hit, which equals ~76% true hit. So if he gets attacked two times, the chance he's going to die is effectively ~58%. That's pretty large, really. Mia gets killed in ~2.6 rounds on average while facing, if she has something like 27.0 avo on average due to varying which weapon she uses, ~68% displayed hit, which converts to ~80% true hit. So Mia's chance to die in those 2.6 rounds is .8^2.6 = ~56%. So they're about even defensively. "But Soren has 1-2 range!" True, but Mia has vantage, which is more of a defensive skill than an offensive one. If something has been weakened already, Mia's vantage can allow her to get that kill without taking any damage at all, so that sort of cancels Soren's 1-2 range out. So who's better? Very difficult to say. I think it would be a bit better if we would look a bit into the future, say when they're promoted. lv 1 Soren, B Ike elthunder: 26.3 atk, 14.5 spd, 19.2 crt -- 30.6 hp, 54.7 avo, 6.8 def, 19.3 res staves, 20.2% adept lv 1 Mia, B Rhys steel blade: 26.6 atk, 18.4 spd, 24.2 crt -- 32.0 hp, 49.1 avo, 11.8 def, 7.5 res armorslayer: 23.6 (31.6) atk vantage Mia can very safely equip that steel blade. She still has plenty of durability (more than Soren, anyway), and even if she would be in trouble she could just shift to an iron blade, have some more avo, and still have plenty of offense. But with a steel blade she has more atk but still enough spd to double everything in ch 16, so it's preferable for her to equip steel. Anyway, Soren 1.5RKOes the dudes in this chapter. That's pretty sweet, huh? Not good enough, though. Mia 1RKOes everything on the map but 2 of the knights, Kimaarsi and the halberdier, so she, like, 1.1RKOes everything. And she has slightly higher crit than Soren. Soren does have adept, so that makes it a little bit closer, but the gap between 1RKOing half the enemies without a crit or adept and 1RKOing nearly everything without a crit is pretty damn large, so Mia is definitely better than Soren offensively. Apparently 14.5 spd doesn't double enough. (The following is not counting the priests and thief, because they either won't attack you anyway, or they can't attack at all - just pointing out the obvious.) So, some numbers. About 14% of the enemies uses magic, so it's logical 86% of the enemies doesn't use magic (just some more pointing out the obvious : p). The physical enemies average 16.4 atk and 100.6 hit against Soren, and 16.7 atk and 103.5 hit against Mia. The magical enemies average 16.8 atk and 109.6 hit against both Soren and Mia. So, the physical enemies 3.2HKO Soren at ~43% true hit. Those same enemies need more than twice as many rounds to kill Mia, namely 6.5. Mia does face slightly higher hit rates, I guess, but unless Soren faces twice as low hit rates, that really doesn't matter. And does he? Are the hit rates Mia faces twice as high as the ones Soren faces? No, Mia faces ~58% true hit. So Mia is vastly superior defensively against the physical enemies. Then I guess Soren is better against the magical enemies defensively, but it really doesn't matter a lot in the face of vastly superior offense and vastly superior defense against the vast majority of the enemies. And I'm just going to be lazy here and say this trend continues like this, and then say it's your turn. Sorry for the walls of numbers.

Wallace, then.

I would definitely be glad if this would happen.

I already started planning before we started picking. Not necessarily with supports, because this is a speed runthrough after all, but with diversity. So I wanted one absolutely pwnage unit (Raven), at least one unit capable of healing and attacking (Lucius), at least one 'tank' (Lowen), etc. And I have those, as well as a very diverse team. The only mistake I made was picking Geitz >_> Oh, and I guess this sucks a little bit for oval, but I pick Rath.

Yeah, no problem. I made a silly mistake, and I actually don't mind suffering the consequences of that. It'll probably make my playthrough at least a little more interesting : p

As I said in my edit, I'll keep Geitz.

Yeah, I realize that. I was just looking for a somewhat decent unit. It's been a good while since I've actually touched the game, though, so yeah... Didn't really put much more thought behind it than "Geitz is a pretty sweet unit, so I'll pick him" and didn't think about anything else. I'll just wait for Life to make a decision on this. It's his tourney, after all. And of course I'll respect it if he won't allow it. Wait... I could also just keep Geitz and prevent you guys from getting a great unit, and then simply not recruit him. Won't cost me any turns, and I'll just have to do it with one less unit so I'll just have to do a little more work to own you guys : p If the above is allowed, forget everything I said, and I'll just keep Geitz. EDIT: Never mind, I'll just keep Geitz. Please continue picking characters so this can move on...

I thought I had read a rule on that. Apparently not >_> That's a bit of a dilemma. Now I need to go to Port of Badon to get Dart for extra turns, and need to level Lyn to at least lv 10... Looks like I'm going to have to 2-turn every map or something. Or I must still be allowed to switch him... Am I?

Geitz for me. Nils Canas Dart Vaida Jaffar Rath Farina Wil Louise Nino Wallace Renault Karla 1. Balcerzak - Pent, Matthew, Sain, Heath, Bartre 2. Razgriz - Prissy, Oswin, Guy, Ninian, Rebecca 3. rslfan - Serra, Eliwood, Lyn, Legault, Karel 4. Tino - Raven, Lowen, Lucius, Dorcas, Florina, Geitz 5. oval - Erk, Harken, Kent, Fiora, Hawkeye, Isadora

You guys are taking this to PMs or IMs from now. No more discussing of this publicly on the forums. So just tier-list based discussion from here on. Thanks.

I've never been this busy : D

Florina