zahlman

Umm, wat? They let boys ride pegasi now? o_O

Eh, not really IMO... This is Sparta! Sure he could defend himself. Like Paperblade pointed out, he should be able to solo the map. Didn't you see his map sprite? He's promoted! Ooh, she wants to walk lyn to the altar, ara ara~ It's worth pointing out that this is pretty much yet another "What?" in disguise. Lyn is apparently much better at pulling on swords to make them come out than Glass is. So much for his peerless swordplay. He probably meant that he only engages in swordplay by himself. It's worth noting that this priest instantly recognizes not only that Lyn is Sacaen (which most people would), but her tribe (which he really has no reason to be aware of). And yet, somehow this guy is one of the few who Lyn doesn't tell her inconsistent sob story to... OK, I have to call bullshit here. He just finished saying that he's the one who prevents the sword from being drawn, not some mystical sword spirit. But hey, maybe IS was trying to make a veiled statement about real-world religion? AND MY AXE... wait, you don't have Dorcas yet. Or Wil for that matter. More innuendo IMO. I lol'd. But it should be "WAT DO".

(I merged my posts. Isn't there an option to delete your own post here? I'm not seeing one, derp.)

Juno can be recruited with Zealot, and Dayan can be recruited with Roy. Besides, you can get Tate with Klein without Thany's involvement. At least, that's what the SF character recruitment page says. D'oh, of course. Apparently you can't decline gaidens in FE6 either. So um um um... what's the most Evil Fun way here... OK, you can do whatever gaidens you want (besides the ones you can't, obv), but they do count towards turn count. It's up to you to disqualify yourself for them if you don't want to spend turns for them. So for example if you think you can get 12 and 12x both done inside 20 turns, then go for it. If you can't, then maybe you want to just farm Exp somewhere in 12 up to turn 21. But OTOH, there's a lot of treasure in 12x, maybe it's worth it... Douglas is thus available for drafting, but that means you'll have to spend turns in 16x :D You are going to need some !!long term!! planning to make this work out as well as possible for yourself :) (Hint: maybe you'll want to suicide some more characters...) Up to a total of your remaining Gold, yes. (So up to a total of 100 in round 1.) Cecilia is more than willing to repeat the exercise on Hard after this finishes, if there is interest.

What are you talking about, there are still about 23 hours remaining for the first round, and you can join late anyway. EDIT: Draft rule 9 will be relaxed for the first round only. I will give you one chance each to amend your bid in case you do something seemingly silly Cecilia thinks this is an excellent idea, and will give you an honourable mention - but no turn bonuses. Unless you can make a plausible argument that the death required spending extra turns to set up, then you will get credit for those extra turns. Honourable mention also goes to Eclipse for being the first person to submit an (already-amended!) bid, forgoing almost a whole day of negotation/thinking time. Cecilia likes it when people are impulsive especially teenage boys with names starting with R P.S. Feel free to lie to others about how you bid, obviously :)

Cecilia says thank you, but brown-nosing won't get you anywhere. I'm just hoping she doesn't beat anyone up this goes as smoothly as anticipated. I like to think I'm pretty good at the whole "making good (complete, formal, still fun to work with) rules" thing. Edit: quite right Eclipse, for some reason I was imagining that someone other than Sue could recruit Shin (actually I guess I completely didn't consider the issue). I'll go check for other effectively banned characters and edit accordingly Ok, so that rules out Shin, Gonzales, Percival, Garret, and Douglas (I think? since you won't get the gaiden... anybody know if he shows up in ch 17 instead if you miss 16x?). Echidna is not banned; you can recruit her with Lalum before you kill Lalum. Dayan can apparently be recruited with Roy, although it would be kinda weird to pick that route without Sue/Shin, but whatever.

The more people, the fewer average characters everyone ends up with. More fun! I did forget to say, technically, that the draft ends when every available character has either been drafted or banned. At that point, you can still "join late", just that you'll only be able to use forced and recruited-that-chapter characters, plus Cecilia. It's not like normal mode is impossible with only forced characters, it'll just take longer. Actually, I might "late-enter" myself just for lulz

DISCLAIMER: Nothing in the following should be construed as implying any opinion about any FE6 character. The concept of Psychotic Yandere Teacher Cecilia is something that randomly occurred to me as a way of justifying some interesting special rules. PYTC will take the stage now, and the rest is written in her character. (If you think she's overlooked anything in the rules, please discuss it in the thread and I'll clarify. If you think this draft is a stupid idea, well, nobody's forcing you to take part.) Helloooo everybody! Take your seats, the class, er, draft is about to begin. Muahahahaha! This is not an ordinary draft because zahlman here doesn't like being generic. Silly boy, NPCs are supposed to be generic... anyway. Pay attention, there may be a quiz. I will do the rules of play first and then the rules of drafting. Rules of EMBLEMAN GAEMZ Common/Free 1. Roy and Cecilia are common-law, er, I mean, common, and free, always. <3 2. Every other female that Roy can support with, hereafter referred to as "whores", are also free, but keep reading. That means Thany, Sue, Lilina (*spit*), Lalum and Sophia. 3. Forced characters are free in the chapters where they are forced. 4. Recruitable characters are free in the chapter in which they are recruited. General 1. We are playing FE6 on Normal mode, because you all did your homework last week and I was actually mildly impressed. 2. You must get Roy x Cecilia A support. I don't care about anyone else, as long as Roy doesn't support with any whores. 3. Speaking of which, whores must die on the chapter where they first appear. No sympathy! You can let them do what they like during the chapter (except support with Roy), as long as they don't survive it. So don't worry, you can still have Sophia get that Guiding Ring. That's all she's good for, anyway. 4. You must do Lalum's route, so that I can see her suffer. That means Elphin and Bartre are effectively banned. I hope they don't take it personally, I still think they're bros. 5. Yes, Lilina dying means you will not be doing any gaidens and will end the game early. I hear the brown-nosers whining already. Suck it up, kids. Sheesh, it's like you want extra homework or something. That means Karel is effectively banned. That's okay, Fir's a big girl. Actions for undrafted characters 1. This is pretty simple, kids. Undrafted, unforced, un-recruited-that-chapter units may not be fielded, and thus may not do anything. 2. Everybody else (i.e. everyone who has an excuse to be fielded) can do as they please, except you know obvious cheating like mine glitching or whatever. Penalties 1. In case you couldn't tell yet, I am strict and will not tolerate any naughtiness in my draft. You ought to know by now I swing a pretty mean ruler. Breaking any rule above = GTFO. Don't field undrafted units. Don't support Roy with whores, and do kill them off promptly, including Lalum. Get me my lover-boy. Everything else should follow naturally. Rules of DRAFTAN GAEMZ 1. This is an auction draft. Everybody gets 100G to start. 2. Because this is an auction draft, it is for as many people as want to participate, and there are no restrictions on how many drafted characters you end up with. 3. We are not doing the traditional auction thing, even by IRC, because it takes way too long. Instead, we are going to do rounds of simultaneous bidding. Each round lasts until midnight, Eastern Standard Time. In each round, you will send zahlman a PM with your bids, up to your current remaining Gold. EDIT from zahlman, because it apparently wasn't clear: you may, and are kinda expected to, bid on multiple characters in each round, up to your total remaining G. That's what rule 10 is all about. At midnight, zahlman will check all received bids, award characters to players with the highest bid, and make an update post indicating who's drafted who and how much Gold they still have. Obviously, zahlman is not participating, because he would have an unfair advantage. 4. You may join late! You will just be treated as if you didn't bid on anyone in previous rounds. Obviously I don't recommend this. 5. You don't have to do anything to tell me you're participating, except start sending me zahlman a bid every day. I have zahlman him to do all the hard book-keeping work, so there's no problem. 6. If there is a tie for a character, then nobody wins the character in that round. 7. After each round, I will pick a character at my discretion to BAN!@!#!#$%~ This mostly makes sure the auction ends eventually, in case you're all thinking of playing a prank on your teacher and arranging ties all the time. 8. In case it wasn't obvious, if you're not the highest bidder for a given unit, your bid amount for that character is returned to you. 9. Only your first submission for a given round will count so get it right. EDIT from zahlman: Draft rule 9 will be relaxed for the first round only. I will give you one chance each to amend your bid in case you do something seemingly silly. I had a really hard time convincing Cecilia about this... 10. If your bids add up to more than your current remaining G, zahlman will adjust them by removing bids, starting with the last one listed, until you're in the clear. 11. The fun part~~~ <3 You may negotiate and discuss with each other about who you're going to pick, and practice your diplomacy. Diplomacy is an important skill for tacticians, after all. However, you are not bound to anything you say to each other and may certainly also backstab by doing something else muahahaha~~~! And I don't want to hear any complaints because YOU WERE WARNED 12. The first round begins NOW gogogogogogo! Available characters for Round 1 (everyone minus Roy, Cecilia, the whores, and effectively-banned characters): EDIT just to be nice and formal: As usual, we are playing for low turn count (assuming you want to be competitive about this, as opposed to having Evil Fun times). Nothing else matters for your score, although see the reply down-thread about extra credit for humiliating whore deaths. There are no restrictions on shopping, except the implicit restriction of available gold.)

Ahhh, ok ok ok. In 3.7, the whole thing with their current ages is approximately clear as mud in Pent and Douglas' dialogue. I totally couldn't follow that part. Thanks very much for revising it :) It would have helped if I didn't derp and think that Klein and Clarine were supposed to be fraternal twins. It looks like the exact age gap isn't stated anywhere, but that seems like a more than justifiable choice, as long as we're making things up to fill the gaps... ... But why would he go all the way out there to avenge House Cornwell?

Really? Doing a separate run for Easy is a waste of time then? Or are there any other differences (e.g. exp formula)? And damn, you've gone even further than me, I don't really have any more to contribute now. Eagerly looking forward to seeing your ch4 (2 turns = the northwest reinforcements don't show up?!) and ch10 (exploiting something in the ballista AI I assume). Is there just a problem with covering ground in ch 11? With all the other awesomeness uncovered thus far, it almost seems like it should be doable in 5 o_O BTW, how many retries are these taking for you? I know ch12 was a real pain for me...

We didn't really interact directly but I definitely was following your hacking threads. And hey The Good Guy, good to see you, too.

On Easy the Pure Water drops, the energy ring needs to be stolen. asdlfkja. I went through it again and got Ch2 in 4, Ch4 in 3 as discussed, Ch10 in 4, Ch11 in 6 (Gerik is pwnsome, don't know what I was thinking benching him), Ch12 in 6 (!!! I promoted Franz in order to reach that last boss, and Tana can get the Bael early and survive against Wyverns with 2 secret books, 2 dragonshields, an angelic robe and a fair amount of luck), recruited Speedwing Amelia on Ch13 (barely any harder), worked out how to do Ch14 in 7 if I'm not hallucinating... ... and then realized I hadn't trained a warper. FFS. Seems like Saleh doesn't really get a chance at this speed though because his offense is needed all over. So maybe it's just not possible to put everything together. Or maybe it's just a matter of training both of them, and using short hops with Artur until Saleh can take over. If everything can really be put together the way I'm hoping, then we're looking at a minimum of something like 89 for easy mode. Yeah, for Ch2, if Eirika isn't even doubling the bandits then you're definitely doing to need some crits for my approach to work. :P

asdlkjfkladsjfkla this part is massively inaccurate and the reason for any and all unreliability (except for failure to follow directions, of course). It would be hard to do better without getting annoyingly technical, which most people wouldn't want to bother with, but it's meaningful and valuable, so I do so below. Things that are compressed are supposed to be smaller. The 00 bytes are making things longer, so that clearly hasn't happened. These palettes have had the compression algorithm applied to them, but it hasn't worked out so well, because the data just isn't that compressible. Or is it? The data that you're seeing is actually a single chunk, from one "10 A0 00 00" word to the next. This is the header for the compression format: 10 indicates the compression format (LZ77), and the rest is the size - in this case, A0 = 160 bytes. A palette is 32 bytes, so this data-chunk is 5 consecutive palettes. Why 5, I have no idea. But you should keep in mind: there are places in the ROM where single palettes are written uncompressed; there are places with sets of 4 compressed palettes (which I'd think makes more sense in general); and I'm pretty sure there are places where a single palette is compressed (which is mind-bogglingly stupid, because basically no single palettes will actually compress, and it would only save a couple of bytes even if it did). Anyway, it's entirely possible for a palette to compress slightly if the palette repeats some colours, or more generally repeats a sequence of 3 or more bytes. This is very unlikely, but possible, in the context of an individual palette. For these groups of palettes, there is actual compression benefit, since e.g. the NPC palette will generally just have 3 or 4 entries changed to switch blue team -> green team, and the rest of the colours will be the same - so there's a chunk of repeated data that can be encoded as such. The encoding could happen to contain something that looks like a colour you want to edit (unlikely but possible), resulting in you editing the wrong thing and wtfpwning your ROM. The part of the data where the new, changed colours are written, could still contain a 00 byte. These aren't "separators" btw, although it might be more convenient to think of them that way; it's an 8 bit value where each 0 bit means "grab a byte of plain data from the following data" (and a 1 bit would indicate "at this point, grab a 2-byte code for compressed data and uncompress it").

Did you seriously just have Hector totally disown Lilina? O_O

I kinda feel like it would make more sense to have Geitz where Fargus currently is. : If she's in her 30s in FE6 as per general consensus, she wouldn't be anywhere near a loli in the EN timeframe. Hell, she could barely be younger than Nino. (Ok, I guess she could squeeze into the loli range then...) Edit: Actually, you know what... come to think of it, if Pent's tale has Klein and Clarine as newborns, then it must be fairly early on in the 7-6 time gap. So that might mean Nino's sprite is a bit too aged...

I'm loving Dreg's non-subtlety. It feels oh so early-game generic FE boss :) Looking for an editor btw? I did notice a few typos and some things in the dialog that could be tightened up. I didn't take notes though and I'm super tired at the moment x.x

Well, I suppose, but those weren't the comparisons I set out to make, only ones that became necessary to defend the claim of (un)viability. Anyway, I argued my point, and you apparently think it's a poor one, with fairly good reason. I don't particularly care anyway, so I yield.

I wasn't planning to argue, or even debate, in the first place. But I'm not good at not-debating. I was talking about the ability of X to pick up where Y left off; comparing X to Y is not the point. The point is about whether it's viable to do things this way (and save a promotion item). This necessitates X being not noticeably worse than Y at Y's job. Being better at it is a nice bonus. I can certainly see how it could be interpreted that way, though.

Agreed. It also felt to me like FE7 did a poor job of giving backstory for his character. The "wow, his family is fucked up" thing goes surprisingly un-far in explaining his evil. RE Nergal: I'm probably super-weird for this, but one of the key things that stood out for me about Nergal's evilness was convincing/letting Sonia believe she was human. I would have liked to play this up, and have Nergal not actually mentioned in the story until, oh, the outro of Night of Farewells (or else the intro to the next chapter, if you skip the gaiden). Picture it: you're already anticipating Sonia, the wife of the head of the Black Fang, because of previous conversations with Ursula, one of the Reed brothers, and IIRC the random villager who gives you Silence. The Reed brothers, in turn, you've heard about long before their appearance because of all the general rabble about the Black Fang, and Ursula appears all the way back in Ch. 7x running the show. You spend the whole game up to this point trying to figure out who the real leader of the Black Fang is, eventually getting the idea that this Sonia character might actually be more dangerous than even Brendan himself. Once Sonia appears to you, it finally becomes clear: she's been running the show the whole time. (Hell, this might even be important enough to make Night of Farewells a normal chapter...) And then, suddenly, Or Has She? No, she's really the puppet of Nergal, who until now you've never even heard of (must be hard for Athos to hold his tongue, though :/), yet is really in charge of the whole thing, having corrupted an entire organization through the literal puppet-dictatorship of Sonia. A man evil enough to basically create a voluptuous sexbot to tear apart a family, just to wrest control of an army for himself. (Of course, this doesn't reflect all that well on Brendan, either...) A man who, moreover, will let her believe she's god (or at least, you know, a real girl!), and then desecrate her corpse to reclaim precious quintessence the moment she's no longer useful. (Oh, yeah, that was another thing about the plot that bothered me: quintessence seems to violate several laws of conservation...) To say nothing of the child-abuse of Jaffar and Nino. And instead of thinking "well, the Black Fang sure seems to have changed ever since that Nergal fellow came around" for like half the game, and being able to overlook some of those details because they just aren't presented all that strikingly, you get to have it all sink in all at once. Right after Nino is done with her epic sob story. The whole time you've been trying to figure out who's really in charge, and now you finally actually know. Now that's what I call a villain! Ooh, now this is a can of worms. I can imagine a lot of potential for that approach, although I don't see a reason why Fomortiis needs to be more than purely evil. It could just be so much fun to play with, though. I could even see having seven major bosses themed after the seven deadly sins (Lyon = Jealousy?), or something like that. There are three problems I can see with this, two minor and one major. The first minor problem is that we now need a plot justification for the Demon King voluntarily transferring from one perfectly good "host" to the next. Simple: we can just say that corpses are no use to him, although this obviously means that we have to replace at least one of Lyon's appearances. (OTOH, you can defeat Riev twice, too, and there's never any explanation offered for that...) Another minor problem is justifying game balance: if the Demon King is the same Demon King all the time, why do the bosses start easy and get progressively stronger? The major problem: if not for the whole Demon King and dark stone thing, why does anyone care in the slightest who Lyon is? We could wrap up his story earlier, but then we'd have to give it far less attention (and change a bunch of things about the epilogue) to make sense. If he's still the penultimate boss, then what's his importance? If he's still the one who played with the Fire emblem and got burnt (see what I did there?) then why, upon release does Fomortiis ignore him, play around with a bunch of other dudes (why are they chosen?) and then only come back to him at the end? tl;dr parenthetical comments are awesome.

Ok, I've learned to accept that if everyone says I'm the weird one, then I am. See, the point is not to "put a lot of effort into it", it's to have a decent anima user for the entire game without having to waste a Guiding ring for it. I'm not explicitly wasting turns for this, I'm just trying to have the early-game anima user in the right places at the right times to be useful, and hopefully get some kill exp so as to continue to be useful until the replacement arrives. But come to think of it, Lugh probably does make more sense for this kind of strategy. I'm trying to save a Guiding ring at the possible expense of one or two Fire/Thunder tomes that I wouldn't otherwise bother using, bro. Actually, not even that much, since I'd have to use something else to defeat the enemies anyway.

I worked out how to get the pure water on Ch2 and still 4-turn it on Easy. Might not be doable on Hard, idk. The enemies are tougher but then there's no forced movement... anyway it doesn't matter for Easy so much because the mages aren't there on Ch8 anyway :P Isn't there also a pure water on Ch7 (mage on the west side)?

Ok, 3-turning Ch4 does turn out to be pretty easy after all, I guess I just wasn't thinking very clearly on previous attempts. Ch10 is doable in 4 turns on Easy. I made Tana able to take one ballista hit, and to get Eirika in place, she had to be threatened twice. But for some reason, the ballistae never actually aimed at her either time - turn 2, the left ballista preferred Seth (because he was slightly injured?) and turn 3, the right ballista preferred the freshly-dropped Eirika (because she's Eirika?). Obviously it helped to realize that you don't actually have to talk to tethys et. al.

So you don't deny that it's easy enough to train her, then? I haven't played FE4, but I assume that nobody gives a fuck. If nobody gives a fuck about him being the only Armor, then that's because you don't have any real need for one, yeah? So then he isn't really all that irreplaceable. I explicitly gave you credit for it, and attempted to summarize my argument in the interest of winding things down here. Sheesh. But in general, in this kind of context, with me, you can assume that points not addressed are points ceded. It was only to entertain you that Cecilia got compared to Clarine at all. If you'll recall, I was originally comparing Cecilia to Saleh, because of the (apparent!) role that each has in their respective games. Namely, to give you an anima user that you can just pick up and use and have perform decently in endgame, instead of having to raise one you get near the beginning and use a Guiding ring. I can see now how the Mag base and staff skill base would make her a good replacement for Clarine, but she's not going to be a good offensive unit. Clarine obviously isn't expected to be an offensive unit. If you come to FE6 having played 7 and/or 8 first (maybe even some others?), surely you can see how you might expect Cecilia to fill that role, and be sorely disappointed? Again, Cecilia isn't being compared to Lilina, but to Saleh. Ok, so it's still 8 move vs 6 (terrain notwithstanding), but that still doesn't make her even the same kind of unit. The idea is: if you want, you can reasonably use Lute for half the game and then switch her out for Saleh. You can reasonably use Erk for half the game and switch him out for Pent (I know I do). You can't use any of the early game FE6 mages for the first half and then switch out for Cecilia, that's just insane. (Don't tell me you're going to suggest Hugh now?) (Now I'm going to have to run through FE6 again using Lugh instead of Lilina to get a feel for how it works...)

Those all look about right to me. Doubt they can be improved except with a LOT of RNG abuse. I'll have to verify that I can match them :) Sucks that you can't end ch 4 early, hmm? I can confirm that I've done 8 in 4 before but I can't for the life of me remember how. I can do 6 in 3 and also get both chests. You can't promote until the start of 9 anyway, and I don't think there's enough XP to go around in an efficient playthrough for Kent or Sain to get it, unless maybe you ignore one in favour of the other, but that's kinda hard to do in the early chapters. (Actually, wait, it's probably safe to start that on 4?) For 5 you might just be able to airlift Lyn and have her pwn Bug with the Mani Katti on EP 2... wait, is it a rout map?

@Integrity Right, and my argument is that being good compared to likely enemies isn't (or shouldn't be) the only thing that matters for ranking a character. Of course, being good enough is worth a heck of a lot of the available points, but there's also something to be said for things like relative (ir)replaceability, supports (because of the effect on both units), trainability (which for mages mostly amounts to availability of individual good targets, since they aren't supposed to attempt tanking until late game)... lots of factors. But yeah, I think we're both abundantly clear, and done here. :) Ok, so 10/1 Fire!Clarine is looking at about 8 Mag -> 26 attack with a double, while Cecilia at base has 11 Mag -> 19 attack with Aircalibur. Ok, so it's 35 with effectiveness. If I'm thinking straight, that isn't going to OHKO the late-game wyverns, which means she's not replacing Lilina in Ch 21. (Of course, Clarine isn't either. :/) And there's no "might" about the doubling; we're looking at about 6 points of speed difference here. (I guess I could say something about Aircalibur being expensive, but that's a pretty lol argument for FE6 :/ ) But I practically never use my base-class healers for additional attacking power after promotion. If anything it's the other way around. FE6 does emphasize the value of mountedness, true. But then, you get the Warp staff in the same level as Cecilia, so... Ok, 100% agreed on that one. It's not like the extra Mag cap room, you know, matters for anything. To be fair, Bors' speed growth is 40%, so he did kinda get screwed there. But yeah, lol using armors in 6. I used to use them to triangle-attack Leygance, until I remembered that I get an armorslayer, and that this isn't FE7 where there's any actual challenge to Funds ranking