zahlman

Like hell I don't, Mr. Awesome-face Guy.

O hai, what a coincidence.

Oh dear, do hackers around here have a habit of randomly leaving? that sucks >_< Or did you mean that you don't talk to hackers much because you don't hack yourself :s Actually I don't really "hack" myself very much either, rather I make tools for hackers Mods: OK to put shameless self promotion here? Including links to mah threads in other FE forums?

I've been using Seth@Javelin; didn't expect it to matter...? o_O

Ah. I usually have her do a lot of work in the few turns she's available :/ :) Ok, but... so that she's in range of Tethys to get danced for another attack? Or what ETA: just watched the Ch8 video. I feel noobish now: I didn't realize you can canto after unlocking a door, and had for some reason assumed that Reginleif is essential to pwning Tirado quickly, and thus set up a massive rescue chain for Ephraim. Regarding your comments on luck: the Armorslayer would only need to hit 3 times out of 4, but I guess that's still less likely than getting all 4 with the Silver Lance (8 does use double-RNG, right?), and using the Armorslayer on EP wouldn't put you in range to use the Silver Lance if you missed either... so yeah, if Tirado's a dick then he's a dick :/ I bet the Armorslayer ORKOs in Easy though However, wrt Eirika, couldn't you have her use the Pure Water from Ch.2 before being rescued? It looks like it would still need to be at +4 to let her survive both mages...

But you're warping units right up there anyway, and just have to attack him before allowing a unit into his purge range on EP... it doesn't seem that complicated? Maybe I'd appreciate it if I tried it myself :P Ok, that definitely explains the disparity there. Hrm. Should work in Easy too, yeah? Hmm. I guess movement isn't a big problem for him, but there are two important places to be (near each boss), and a lot of need for durability... I still have trouble imagining it. Overall? I know there's a mod to the calculation, but Hard mode enemies are both higher level (right? or do they just get stat bonuses :| ) and more plentiful... He would be in easy mode too, and the main reason I went with Artur was because he'd be able to spam Torch in ch 11 which would make it much easier for him to get to A staves as soon as the Warp staff was ready. But I guess it wouldn't be that hard to get Saleh there :/ I did feed all the energy rings except one (that went to Tana, needed for the pwnsome 7-turn ch12 result) to Artur. So yeah. The main planned changes are: - Figure out how 3-turning ch4 works...? o_O - Saleh to be the main warper. - Swiftsole goes to someone else (starting to sound like Saleh would be a good idea...) - moar RNG abuse in places where it seems likely to actually accomplish something - see about that 1-turn for ch 17, and if Myrrh can still get enough exp to be useful later - I forgot to promote my cavs, which might help >_< - Try using insta-promoted Gerik a bunch (I actually benched him for this run o_O Seems like I greatly underestimate the pwnsomeness that is Garm... ?) I was also thinking of attempting LTC for 7!LHM...

I wouldn't want to do a proper debate because honestly I don't care that much. I'm just too easily drawn in to this kind of thing, I guess. Integrity, I admire your persistence in responding to all of that, and regret spending the time to write it, so I'll keep the summary short. I think the key idea in my ranting is that Cecilia appears to be intended to fill the same role in 6 that Saleh does in 8, and can't do a good job in that particular role. As discussed in the recent Lute vs. Gerik debate, Saleh is a sufficiently pwnsome replacement for Lute that you'd only be using them both if you want to double up on Anima; Cecilia OTOH could supplement Lilina but isn't going to replace her any time soon - at least, certainly not with my playstyle. I can see how you'd fill the role out instead with one of the other Anima users, though. Just that they aren't prepromotes. I guess that isn't a particularly important factor, and I didn't really think about it that much. So yeah, PEMN, but using Lilina made things a lot easier for me. Between her and Miledy (who I believe gets a lot more respect in general), much of my remaining hair was saved. I don't consider myself a fanboy (of any character, really) but it's hard to make this kind of argument without coming across as one, if only because there really aren't direct comparisons to be made (which seems to be our main point of agreement). And I'm not really good enough at FE to want to attempt FE6 with any real semblance of efficiency anyway Oh, and what I meant about WTA/WTD is that because of the monsters (other than Bonewalkers/Wights/whatever), a greater % of FE8 enemies ignore WTA/WTD completely. But yeah, the reduced avoid bonus/penalty in 6 was kinda lol, and certainly surprised me. In retrospect it probably accounts for a lot of my frustration :s

... You know, I really want to say "Lay off, if he's having fun spending 1499 turns to beat FE8 then that's his business, let him have his fun". But then I think, "wowwwwww, 1499 turns, I can't fathom having fun at that rate". But then again, I can't fathom an awful lot of what a lot of other people seem to think, so.. There was a time once when I did this kind of thing in Lyn mode for FE7 because I thought having 20/0 characters plus a 20/20 Kent or Sain would help a lot in HHM. It doesn't really, and you end up ironically not wanting to use these characters that can't gain any more exp until you finally find promotion items for them.

(Not picking on you BTW, but replying to your post seems like the best way to clarify my own thoughts at the moment) Yep. IMO FE8 is quite a bit different in feel from most other FEs (not just the GBA ones) simply because of the monsters (and the corresponding watering-down of WTA/WTD). But the other day I was chatting with some friends and let it slip that it's "not really FE" because of that, and pretty quickly agreed that it's really not fair to say that at all. 6 is of course different from 7/8 in being longer, having an obviously simpler engine, and being all seize-throne missions. It would be better if getting supports weren't so dreadfully tedious, if the cast of characters were smaller, and more characters had more real relevance to the story. I didn't really think the FE8 story was that much more impressive (although I will grant it seems to have fewer plotholes, and the whole thing with Lyon is actually pretty cool), but I have to admit that you have more reasons to care about a much larger percentage of the blue team in 7 than in 8. (Although I don't like how so many of them in 8 have some direct tie to nobility...) Yep. Do any of the non-GBA games have "claim 3 points" BTW? ? FE6 predates FE7, so this is a strange reason to praise FE6. It's rather FE7 that fills in the backstory that FE6 implied. Yeah, this part always seemed a bit strange to me, actually. If your (as Roy and Lilina) parents wielded them, why do you have to re-track them down? How did they get lost again in environments vaguely resembling the ones where they were first found? This is one of the things I wanted to re-work in making a combined FE6/7 master hack/remake that I will totally never have time to do Yeah, I like large maps too. I don't feel like you can make up for that lack of variety by just making the game longer, though. The opposite, if anything. As for the gameplay... well, that's even more subjective. I feel like for the most part FE is FE though, so yeah. :/ More chapters, definitely. More characters, nah. You get too many in every game as it is, really. Honestly, sometimes I wish they'd cut to the chase and give you like ten named characters max (and all of them early on), of which you pick like 4 or 5 for a map, and then they each bring in a small cohort of generics. Can't say I have a preference in terms of the variations in the main theme. FE8 has some really awesome music. But really, I think all three of them have some awesome music - certain tunes really stand out to me in each. But in terms of the actual sound rendering quality, 6 is inferior. Just compare the vendor music between 6 and 7. FE8 does this ("organ" arrangement of Lyon's theme; Ray of Hope as a main theme rearrangement in addition to the one you usually get for the epilogue; probably some other variations I'm not thinking of), but not to the same extent. Re 7, I would say that "Anguish", "Reminiscence" and "Shattered Life" are also musically related. And actually, if you shift the key, "One Heart" and "Loyalty" are not that different melodically... But yes, I agree that "Unshakable Faith"... 'works' really well in the places where it's used. "The Final Battle" in 8 (the corresponding theme, I guess) works well too, though, and seems like the right kind of music for the situation, even if it isn't a rearrangement. I think I have to give the nod to 7 overall though, just for the sheer quantity of music. The sound room is clearly bigger than in the other two games (and its interface is way nicer too IMO). Fun factoid from hacking experience: the total audio data for FE7, including samples, audio tracks, instrument descriptions etc. takes up about 4MB, i.e. a quarter of the available space on the 16MB cartridge that they packed it on.

Yeah, the apply vs. save interface is kind of a mess, sorry about that. That was one of the things I think I was supposed to redesign/fix back when I was still working on this.

IDK if this is addressed in the beta (i.e. I'm talking about 3.7 here), but to be honest I feel like the writing in Pent's tales needs a bit of work. It's not clear why Jaffar has switched over to the red team again, and Nino doesn't seem to be quite in her usual character (maybe that's deliberate because she's supposed to be older now? But she still seems to speak too formally IMO), and while the Canas/Nino dialogue seems intended to clarify the whole situation with Niime leading into FE6, it still didn't really seem to make everything click for me. Also, I found the way Pent and Douglas talk about the kids at the beginning of the gaiden to be overall fairly confusing. Maybe just because I'm not familiar enough with their FE6 backstory... but I don't really understand why Pent seems so willing to speculate on Klein and Clarine's future abilities. Did Athos teach him a thing or two about how to see the future? ;) Re Hector's story: I think I noticed a few oddities about the text, but damned if I can remember them. What exactly are you supposed to do with Erik? Only Serra seems to be able to talk to him, and that doesn't accomplish anything. He also seems to have a small chance of pwning himself on Orun's units. As far as the map design goes, it seems like you're forced to move slowly at the start, and then have an eternity of peaceful terrain to cross after defeating the reinforcements from the south. It takes even longer to detour and recruit Fargus, who then isn't particularly useful :/ (...And WTF is he doing in this chapter anyway?)

... Because I'm guessing most of you don't know me, although I've been involved with the FE community in other ways for quite a while. To be more specific, with the hacking community for the GBA versions, although I do also play those versions from time to time (and have set myself random challenges, aimed for LTC etc... although FE6 HM is plenty hard enough for me as it is). To be more specific, I helped Hex (/Xeld/Obviam/whatever else you guys have learned to call him) a bunch with FEditor (mostly just cleaning up an older version of it to be much shorter and better organized, and then tossing around a few design ideas and not really doing much after that). I've also made a utility for ripping/burning audio tracks and converting midi files, which many hackers are now using in addition to/instead of Sappy. My current big project is NM3 (which officially is not short for Nightmare 3; while I drew a bit of inspiration from those tools, mine works completely differently) which will be much more general-purpose than just FE hacking. Sorry to say I've been procrastinating horribly on it, though. Anyway, I'm here because I was referring to the SF guides for miscellaneous info for an LTC playthrough, and re-reminded myself that I never actually did anything about the forums here, and that my absence seemed rather odd, all things considered. So... hi :)

Lilina doubled plenty of wyverns for me, the ones that didn't get OHKOd anyway. She's not flattening, but she's doing damage in a couple of key places. She gets more opportunities to train because there are more places where you don't really have an option. I didn't say that. I said Lilina is fast enough for the things that it makes sense to target Lilina with. The point is that Lilina looks better in the FE6 context because the Res does matter to Lilina. Sigh. I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I'm comparing the characters on the basis of their relative usefulness compared to their blue-team companions, each within their own game. Maybe you don't consider that a valid basis for comparison, but I think it's at least as valid as anything else that lets you compare characters from different games. It's certainly more valid than just comparing bases and growths, when the enemies are all completely different. Sigh. Of course you can use both Lute and Saleh. The point is that FE6 puts more pressure on you to do more of the work with Lilina. Thus, she becomes more important in the context of her own game. Yeah, fine, having people who can use staves well is important, too. I was talking about the respective units' offensive potential, though. - Won't come remotely close to capping any stat I didn't consider Lugh/Hugh/Ray because they aren't prepromotes, and I didn't consider the others because they aren't anima users. I have my recollection of playing through Hard mode, tearing my hair out a couple times until I got the idea to do this, and marvelling at how much easier things were as a result. (And then tearing my hair out a couple more times figuring out how to deal with the rest of the enemies that didn't fall within her path. I didn't claim to be good at this...) It's not a vendetta FFS. The point is that Lilina doesn't have the same kind of option to be replaced. Who's DA? Thanks for the reminder to go properly introduce myself here, though. Cecilia has horrible bases and less-than-stellar growths. (10 speed + 25% strikes me as especially bad.) The arguments being put forward for her being any good are "she's pre-promoted and mounted". Seriously, when that's all you have going for you, how are you not all-around terrible? I don't really value durability in magic users in the early game, because they aren't supposed to get hit / do serious work on EP. Late-game, they need to survive, but dodging works pretty well. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't find I had to put any particular effort into training Lilina in FE6 Hard mode, beyond, you know, the overall difficulty of everything. Blarg. You are correct that my argument was inconsistent here. If it weren't for the Slayer skill, Light magic would suck even worse in FE8 than normal because WTA/WTD matters so much less. "Lute is top tier" is a meme I picked up somewhere along the way. Presumably it arose out of her self-aggrandizing personality? :/ I don't particularly care much about other people's tier lists (and I'm definitely not trying to make any myself), I just found it odd to see a bunch of bashing on Lilina in the context of a runthrough for another game entirely, when I remembered her being pretty much essential. ETA: Derp. DA is the OP, right? Yeah, sockpuppeting your own thread to revive an old, irrelevant discussion because you just have to share your own opinions would be pretty terrible. Fortunately that's not what's going on here, but I do suppose I owe DarkAndroid125 an apology for the sidetrack. But then, I guess the original discussion is pretty much done anyway... ?

Wouldn't getting the body ring require an extra turn or two on that map anyway? If you actually use Myrrh (maybe you can't get her enough experience the way you're doing things, though? My 2-turn strat for Ch 17 has her take out several enemies there on EP 1) and max her Str, then her crit will do the job by itself. Just saiyan... BTW, do we know what determines the unit placement at the start of part 2? Also, why would you need to rescue Myrrh for this strategy? Franz is used here for unimportant things (e.g. recruiting Amelia). :P Not using Eirika is unsurprising since there's just no time to train her, and as buff as Eph is, he always seems to be surrounded by even more buff units. As for Cormag, it would cost 3 extra turns just to have him appear so he could be recruited, so yeah.

Yeah, I just saw that, and have already realized a few things that could be done better in my own playthrough. I probably still could accomplish more by training Saleh in staves rather than Artur, for example. I also missed the Purge tome in Ch. 16 which might have been useful in Ch. 18? :/ I'm also face-palming now for not spotting the rescue-warp technique for Ch. 19 when I used it for 20 :P Single-turning Ch. 17 is really impressive (I didn't imagine that Seth could be transported there on the first turn, much less succeed in that environment... besides getting the critical, how lucky did he need to be?) and 5 turns for Ch. 15 is colon-oh impressive. Can't wait to see a video for that one :) (For most maps, the actual enemy difficulty isn't the worst part, I suppose... but Hard mode certainly does have some extra units in places that would make some of my Easy mode strat impossible. OTOH, Easy mode means you don't get as much xp -> lower Mag growth -> shorter Warps/Rescue. You're also forced to waste turns on the first few chapters >_< ) ETA: Oh man, I just realized that even with Artur's pathetic Warp distance, there's no real reason I couldn't have sent Myrrh over the wall first instead of Rennac. The treasure there is totally not useful for the later chapters after all. I guess the basic idea is to send Seth-rescuing-Eirika over next, yeah?

I independently (although I am following dondon's commented run for FE7 HHM 0% growths, and inspired by a lot of the strat there) attempted to minimize turn count for Easy difficulty, Eirika's route, for lolz and science. I have achieved a total turn count of 102 turns. I'm pretty sure this can be improved, but I'm pretty sure not by much. My "rules" are that I don't care about anything else (even recruitments/unit deaths - although I didn't come up with any strategies requiring a deliberate sacrifice), and RNG abuse is ok (but should only be used where it's really needed) but glitches are not. The detailed breakdown: (Edited to spoilerize the breakdown. That was impolite of me, blarg.)

Ok, so I'm dragging up a bit of old discussion, but you guys seem to be missing a few things here. You can't really just compare stats directly between the two games. Yeah, Lute is top tier, but there are a few reasons to give Lilina more credit: - Lilina supports with the main lord. Some people care about that kind of thing. There's also the part where the game rewards you for keeping her alive in so many ways beyond actually being able to use her, whereas Lute is, in that regard, just another unit. She's not even important in cutscenes. - FE6 tomes are stupidly light. In 8, Lute's lol con actually matters. Yeah, MK!Lute can offset that, but there's an early game to worry about too. - Speaking of which, MAG growth certainly does matter for power mages, because there's an early game to worry about too, and it sucks when you double something and still don't ORKO. You want your power mages to actually take units out early on. Lilina's speed has always been adequate for me. Keep in mind that most of the red-team units that are prime targets for magic are also pretty slow. - IMO/IMX, Res matters a lot more as a stat in 6 than it does in 8, and there are maddeningly few blue-team units in 6 with good res. So even though Lilina turns out (slightly) worse than Lute in general in this regard, it's worth a lot more in an FE6 context than Lute's res is in a FE8 context. - One huge factor that's nothing to do with the units' stats themselves. In 8, you get Saleh, a solid prepromote anima user, partway through. If you're playing efficiently, Lute may well not have caught up to Saleh's offensive stats by the time you get him, and he'll still have slightly better Def and HP. (higher skill, too, not that it matters, because it's not like it's hard to hit enemies with magic...) In 6, you get... Cecilia. An all-around terrible unit who can barely even move on the level where you get her. Seriously, having a mounted unit join your team in a desert level (and full desert at that - FE8's "desert" has merciful normal terrain at top and bottom) has got to be one of the best/worst trolls IS has managed. Anyway, the point is that Lute has a reason to fade away from the spotlight, while Lilina is essential to the whole game. - Speaking of which. Chapter 21. I swear this map was built especially for Lilina to show off. You stick her on a forest tile in advance of everyone else and she wtfpwns legions of wyverns on enemy phase, none of whom have more than about 20% display hit and most of which have more like 2%. Otherwise, they mob your team and there are just too many of them for you to make decent progress. She doesn't even need Aircalibur to do it, either. Lute, OTOH, will never get an opportunity like this. On the few levels where you can counter a lot of not-overpowering enemies on enemy phase, they're generally either (a) decently-accurate damage dealers in early game, or (b) monsters, which Artur will be much more effective against (literally).