Alastor15243

Just want to make sure I get this straight: you're perfectly fine using DLC to grind, but you draw the line at visiting other peoples' castles?

Yeah, it's just Levant's been insisting that Forges are so ludicrously expensive they're a waste of money, and meanwhile I finish every game with enough spare cash to buy four eternal seals and enough tonics to buff every unit in my army for both chapter 27 and the endgame, without making any major expense cuts. So... I'm trying to work out what the hell is going on on his end.

So... how... exactly... is forging this impossible, ridiculous expense?

So... how much money do you have by the end of the game?

So are you just not getting a lot of the gold you get throughout the game?

@JSND Alter Dragon Boner You actually can’t get +3 in a stat at the mess hall. All double-dipping with something like meat and beans does is guarantee you’ll get the max of 2 if you haven’t put Jakob or Mozu on cooking duty. And it sounds like that’s a highly diminishing investment once you get to the late game where enemies start getting tougher and dodgier, especially when you’re talking enemy phase when a few of those auras won’t be around. Plus may I remind you that that is a ludicrously optimistic level for Arthur in chapter 14, and involves separately training up another berserker to 20/5 at the same time, when the average army doesn’t even promote until mid chapter 17, much less reach level 5 promoted by then. And again, ARTHUR. How am I supposed to justify investing in him as an enemy phase unit in an Ironman game when he has a base -5 dodge in guard stance as a berserker and enemies start getting crit rates in the 10s to 20s? And if I can’t use the strategy in Ironman, doesn’t that mean it relies on pure dumb luck to work? And @Levant Mir Celestia, how much class changing are you doing? I sent the avatar and Laslow through around 3-4 classes each and then sent Xander and Camilla through Bow Knight and Dark Knight respectively and back and that didn’t cause me any major problems.

How many tonics are you buying? We are talking a difference of nearly 50 thousand gold between our personal experiences, and tonics cost 150 a pop. I just don't get what could possibly be going on here.

You must be making some other extreme purchases if you feel you can't afford forges. That's not nearly enough to set you that far back, even if you were so inadequate you gained literally nothing from chapters 8 and 16.

Okay... what staves do you buy and use?

I had enough money left at the endgame of my latest conquest run to buy Camilla, Leo, Xander and the avatar an eternal seal each. How many staves are you using?

Oh I know about those things, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Okay, I've heard that Ophelia can be made sufficiently powerful enough to one-shot enemies, but berserkers doing it with a +3 hand axe is news to me, especially since that's a hell of a higher threshold to hit especially against defense and without life and death. What sort of enemies are we talking about one-shotting here? I'm guessing sorcerers and ninjas, right? Not anything sturdier?

What sort of forge? Are you talking a +3? From what I gather that's the highest forge you can get on a hand axe in conquest since it can't be purchased infinitely. And what sorts of damage stacks?

The plot is even clumsier than the other two, but more importantly, the unit balance is utterly terrible and all of the maps consistently lack any forward pressure to keep things interesting, it has none of Conquest's clever gameplay design, and every gimmick they throw at you simply makes the game move more slowly. It's really difficult to describe, but it's a horribly unengaging and mindless slog.

It's not so much what Birthright did wrong as it is what Conquest did right. Conquest has a radically different design philosophy from nearly every other game in the series when it comes to difficulty. It's the only game in the series to make extensive and creative use of skills on enemy units beyond simply slapping some class skills on there. The other games' idea of difficulty is to buff up enemy stats or drastically increase enemy numbers. Conquest's idea of difficulty is to hand-craft its enemy waves and formations so that they will eat you alive in countless fascinating ways ways if you try to do anything too obvious, and force you to think outside of the box and consider the various options the party you've built gives you to win each battle. It's brutal, but extremely fair, and it never ever ever throws you anything that would render a blind ironman run of the game unrealistic.

It's really only the story that's garbage. The actual gameplay is pretty damned fantastic. Conquest is probably in the top 2 best fire emblem games ever made, and Birthright's pretty good. Don't buy rev though, unless you really like multiplayer and minmaxing. It somehow manages to take everything Birthright does wrong and magnify it a thousandfold.

Non-doubling 1-2 range is pretty much pointless, frankly. I don't see how that of all things is what puts berserkers above wolfskins. You're pretty much never going to be in a situation where you'll kill more units on enemy phase with a single-attack 1-2 range weapon than with a normal doubling melee one. And if leaving a bunch of wounded enemies to pick off on player phase is the benefit, I hardly see how that makes a difference unless you're fielding a ton of units who can't orko, which would be... odd. I personally find dynamic defense and near immunity to critical hits far more useful than hand axes. And as someone who does a bunch of ironman runs, having a non-zero enemy crit rate is a pretty major dealbreaker for me, and it basically renders a unit unfit for enemy phase personally, rendering the hand axe "benefit" for berserkers even less practical. That's why I gave up on Arthur. I tried to make Arthur work, I really did. But his terrible luck makes him unusable as an enemy phase unit and he's too slow to be a worthwhile player phase one.

Well, generally when people don't like characters I like, I try to find out what reasons they have, if any. If the reasons are good, I think about it. If it comes down to a simple difference in fundamental values, I shrug and move on. If their reasons are stupid, I have a good laugh with myself and move on.

Because it would be a living nightmare to ceaselessly live a facade around the one you love in order to gain their approval?

What I meant was that you said his behavior is an act to repel people, but he doesn’t act any differently towards his spouse in the privacy of their home.

He acts exactly the same when you marry him.

Precisely my argument.

I've actually heard people argue that Micaiah handled the blood pact terribly and that there were better and obvious ways to get out of it, though honestly I don't understand what on earth they're talking about.

What the hell game are you playing? It's not remotely that bad at all.

Funny thing, while I agree it's hilariously stupid and bullshit, my ideal version of Fates I have in my head actually keeps that plot device intact, with one huge difference. I won't spoil it because i plan to do a huge writeup of it though.

Are you referring to his low defensive scores you were talking about earlier? Can you clear something up for me? If I understand your position from what you said here and in other threads, you simultaneously think: *The Hoshidan roster is so fragile that it impacts difficulty significantly * Pair-up, which lets you sacrifice one unit to triple the survivability of the other, is unnecessary and a waste of time. Do I have that right?