Whisky

Roy doesn’t actually gain much from promoting. He normally gets the Sword of Seals at the same time as his promotion so some people might confuse the “Roy is good after promoting” with “Roy is good after getting the Sword of Seals”. The promotion itself doesn’t have very good promotion bonuses and doesn’t give him anything beyond a few stats. Don’t get me wrong, it would help. It just wouldn’t change things much without adding some kind of promotion bonus. Actually, is it better to have hard bonuses or just remove them completely? Removing hard mode bonuses might make it easier for the game to be balanced for both Normal mode and Hard mode, without that balance changing between game (modes).

I think this is a bad idea. If ambush spawns are designed fairly (and they can be), then there wouldn’t be any issue with them being in Normal Mode, and if they are designed unfairly, then they should [not] be in the game at all. Adding unfair mechanics is a terrible way to increase difficulty. If ambush spawns were still in Hard mode exactly as hey are now, and I had the choice of removing them in Normal mode or keeping them in, I would keep them in. Unfair ambush spawns are easier to deal with in Normal mode because the game is easier, and then when you play on Hard mode, you already know about them. So playing Normal mode prepares you for Hard mode. If they weren’t in Normal mode and then were in Hard mode, then they would be even more bs then they already are by coming as a complete surprise to the player who thought they already knew what to expect after playing on Normal Mode.

I haven’t really played very many Tactical RPGs, and the ones that I have all play so differently from FE that it’s difficult to compare, and I wouldn’t exactly do that other games have better gameplay than FE. I think the most similar game I’ve played to FE would be Super Robot Wars. Either that or Shining Force. I pretty much like all the Strategy or Tactical RPGs that I’ve played. I like the whole genre so it makes sense that I’d like FE. To say anything more specific would depend on the game. Edit: permadeath is one of the more unique aspects of FE, which I like about it.

I don't disagree with you, but the counter argument would be that older games without Divine Pulse already had bad game design. I say just design the games fairly to begin with and then we won't need Divine Pulse, so remove it. Any death at that point would be your own fault.

That would help, but it would still be possible for her to die if you get unlucky, though that would be much less likely. Well, yeah, I guess all of Sacae is kind of cruel, but Law of Sacae is the worst of it all. Yeah, that would be good. It gives you incentive to move into his range and you can get rewarded for doing so. After all, If he didn’t move at all then there wouldn’t be much point in him even being on the map.

- Tweak ambush spawns. I won’t say remove them, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. There are some ambush spawns that are fine, but some that are unfair, so just remove the unfair ones or tweak them to make them more fair. - Fix the Douglas situation. That chapter is really annoying solely because of Douglas. Make it so that he just sits in a corner and doesn’t move or something. - Klein and Tate will randomly not move on their turn, but their squads will move, making it almost impossible to recruit them without killing their squad, causing you to miss out on the promotion items. This shouldn’t be able to happen this way. - Echidna can die on the same turn she appears, although there are ways to prevent this such as sacrificing Klein’s squad, that still doesn’t seem fair. Just make Echidna and the enemy Fighters appear on player phase. - Some tweaks to units to balance them out a little better. I think some units definitely need some rebalancing, but I’m a little iffy on this, because there are people that like using weak units. I don’t think that every unit needs to be even. - I don’t think the story needs much changing, though now that FE7 is a thing, they could connect the stories better and maybe add in some characters from FE7, but nothing too much. - Skills/Abilities would actually be a great way to balance units better. Weak units could be given good and unique abilities to make them stand out and give them a purpose. - branching promotion options like in Sacred Stones could be pretty cool. - Fix The Law of Sacae. - Give Roy an earlier promotion and have it give him some kind of bonus, like a leadership bonus that increases Hit rates of nearby allies or something.

This exists in various forms already, though I wouldn’t mind seeing more of it. Visiting villages before they get pillaged by pirates, getting chests before they get looted by enemy thieves, keeping green units alive, recruiting red or green units. These are all secondary objectives that the games have and there are some others.

And we can’t have fairness in a Fire Emblem game.

In general, I’m not a fan of ambush spawns, but the problem with ambush spawns is that you don’t know about them ahead of time, and some of the most fair ambush spawns are the ones that you are already given a warning about. Having played the game enough to have most of the ambush spawns memorized, they really aren’t so bad for me anymore, so giving an advanced notice of them would make things pretty fair for everyone (though it still depends on the context). Just turning all ambush spawns into regular reinforcements would make it a bit too easy for you to ambush them, making enemy reinforcements pretty much never pose any danger, so I don’t think that’s the right solution either. In the game as it is now, there are bs ambush spawns that are designed in blatantly unfair ways, but there are also ambush spawns that are designed pretty fairly and you are given a warning about them from dialogue etc. To an extent I think ambush spawns in Binding Blade are overblown. Shadow Dragon and FE7 both have cases of ambush spawns too (although there might less of them), and I think ambush spawns in 3H Maddening are much worse than most of them in Binding Blade. But to be clear, in general, I’m not a fan of ambush spawns for the same reason I’m not a fan of FOW. Withholding information from the player in a strategy game isn’t fair, which is why I like the suggestion to allow the player to see where ambush spawns will appear from the turn before.

Sounds good. I imagine there are people who would be interested in the calculator but aren't knowledgeable about how something like that would work, so it's best to make it as user friendly as possible. Ah, I see. That makes more sense now. That type of analysis could be useful depending on how it's set up but I imagine that most users wouldn't be interested in it. You could have multiple analysis sections that each present different information like that. You could do that with the method you were already using, although I think it would be harder that way. I think the table format I used in my calculator is the easiest way to set it up, at least for me. If you want, you can put the tables in a separate sheet so that they don't take up space on the main sheet. The tables and probabilities are working properly on my calculator and I think I set up more or less exactly what you want on the right side of the 'Main Sheet' on my calculator, so you can take a look at those to figure out how to set it up for your own. What I did was, I created two Binomial Distribution tables, one for Hits and one for Crits, and then cross multiply between the two tables to calculate probabilities. The only tricky part might be knowing what to multiply with what. I can try to explain that in more detail if you want. Another type of analysis I thought of is actually from a game called Battle for Wesnoth. It calculates the probabilities of having any possible amount of HP left at the end of the battle (including 0) for both the attacker and defender. It would take some work, but I imagine that type of analysis would be useful for us. I would be willing to help more actively, but I won't have much time available between work and school. Fortunately I have confidence that you can make it work on your own and with what little help I'm able to offer. The only part I'm sad about is that I won't be able to help out as much as I would like because I do find these calculations to be fun. I'll let you know if I have some time to set something up myself. If I make a copy of your file, would I be able to edit it and then share the edited version with you, and would you be able to copy over anything that you could use back to your original file?

Hello there. First of all, amazing job! It looks great, and I highly respect how much work you put into this. You added a few things I wouldn't have even thought to add and things that I wouldn't know how to do. Then there are parts that wouldn't be hard but would be very tedious, so it would've taken you a long time to do all of this. Overall, this calculator is amazing, and has some very useful features. You definitely out did my own calculator. Secondly, Thank you for mentioning me, and while I'm here, let this be my offer to help you with anything you want assistance with. Let me know if you have any questions or want help with something specific and I'll be more than happy to do what I can to help you out, although I might not be able to in a timely manner because I just started taking classes again. ------------------------------------------------------------ Now, of course I have some suggestions. Things to add and improvements to be made can wait. I consider it a higher priority to make sure everything you have so far is working as intended, so let's start there. Either some of your calculations are off or I'm not understanding what you're intending to calculate. The calculation for P(1HKO) is accurate, however, the whole P(xHKO) table is a little confusing without some clarification on what each cell means. Technically, this is P(KOing with 1 Attack) as opposed to 1 Hit, but I'm just being pedantic. While I'm on the subject of clarification, your file could perhaps use an instructions page for this and other things, just to be very clear for people that might not understand it, in order to make it more useful for more people, without them needing to put in the effort just to understand it. For example, what does it mean when a cell becomes highlighted in blue? I can mostly understand the file, after looking through it enough and looking at the formulas, but someone shouldn't need to look at formulas to understand exactly what something is calculating or what something means. P(2HKO) skips the possibilities of KOing an enemy with 1x or 3x multipliers. If your attack is strong enough to kill an enemy in only 1 hit, that probability will not be calculated, it instead starts off with a 2x multiplier, but then only calculates the probability of Hitting twice, and does not include the probability of only Hitting once with that Hit being a Crit. It then skips 3x and goes up to 4x. So if you deal 20 dmg against an enemy with 60 HP, the probability of Hitting once with that Hit being a Crit will not be included in the calculation. The 4x calculation only calculates the probability of getting a normal Hit and a Crit, which is calculated correctly, however, does not include the probability of getting 2 Crits. It only calculates the exact probability of dealing 4x damage, instead of dealing at least 4x damage. 6x is calculated correctly. That might be what you are intending to calculate, that information could potentially be useful, but it needs an explanation if that's the case. P(3HKO) has similar problems. It again skips 1x and 2x, starting at 3x. So if you deal enough damage to kill the enemy with only 1 or 2 Hits, then that probability will not be calculated. It starts at 3x, which it only calculates as the probability of land all 3 Hits, without including the probabilities of landing only 1 or 2 Hits with 1 of those Hits being a Crit. It then skips 4x, and goes up to 5x, which only calculates the exact probability of dealing 5x damage, instead of at least 5x damage. It then skips 6x, and goes up to 7x. Dealing 6x damage is still possible if you Hit twice with both of them being Crits, with the last attack Missing. 7x again calculate the exact probability of dealing 7x damage instead of at least 7x damage. 9x is calculated correctly. P(4HKO) skips calculations for 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 7x, and 9x. It starts at 4x, which it calculates as the probability of Hitting all 4 Attacks, not including the probability of killing the enemy with less Hits, with some of those Hits being Crits. 6x, 8x, and 10x all calculate the probability of dealing exactly that much damage instead of at least that much damage. 12x is calculated correctly. P(5HKO) skips calculations for 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 10x, and 12x. It starts at 5x, which it calculates as the probability of Hitting all 5 Attacks, not including the probability of killing the enemy with less Hits with some of those Hits being Crits. 7x only calculates the probability of Hitting all 5 times with 1 of them being a Crit, which does not include the probability of getting more Crits, or landing only 3 Hits, with 2 of them being Crits. 9x only calculates the probability of Hitting all 5 times with exactly 2 of them being Crits, which does include the probability of getting more Crits, landing 3 Hits with all 3 being Crits. 11x only calculates the exact probability of dealing 11x damage instead of at least that much damage. 13x again calculates the probability of dealing exactly 13x damage instead of at least that much damage. 15x is calculated correctly. ------------------------------------------------------------ Now, maybe you are calculating exactly what you intended to and I just misunderstood that. That information could definitely be useful, though I think it would be set up differently if that's what you wanted, and if it is what you wanted, then it needs an explanation for exactly what the numbers are actually telling the user. That's all I have for now. Let me know if you want any help with anything.

This is important to remember. I have only ever played on Classic mode and I like playing Ironmans, but the most important thing is to have fun. There is no right or wrong way to play. I’d recommend for people to try out Classic and Ironman runs, I find ironmanning a lot of fun (depending on the game), but I’m not saying that this is the right way to play the game. If it’s not for someone else then that’s fine, play the game however you want, but I’d suggest being open to playing the game in different ways if you haven’t tried it before to see if you enjoy it or not.

Speaking for myself, I only play on Classic because it adds more weight to each move you make. Every decision can have lasting consequences. But while I enjoy replaying the game again, I don’t enjoy replaying the same chapter that I just played again, which is part of the reason I like Ironmans in addition to compounding the reasons I already mentioned. Every decision has even more weight to it in an Ironman. I can understand why someone would enjoy replaying a chapter, if it’s to try to improve your strategy and try to figure out better ways to play the chapter. But if I’m only resetting to bring a character back because of my own mistake, then I’d rather just continue without them.

I don’t know much about POR’s tier listing, but Lucia is the biggest one that comes to mind. She joins late with unimpressive base stats and in a mediocre class. Across FE6-9 I’d say most pre-promotes are pretty good. There are only a few I’d consider bad in each of the games. I don’t even know if I’d consider any pre-promotes “bad” in Sacred Stones, just “not great”. Are pre-promotes particularly good in Fates?

Can’t disagree with that!

@Owns Are you going to be adding to the file I uploaded? I’m asking because I still plan to add more to to it but it wouldn’t make sense for us to be adding to it separately. I’ll post another update of it once I’ve added enough to it. Was there anything else you wanted me to work on for it? Drop down lists were already added for Weapons and Combat Arts, and the probabilities of dealing any given amount of damage. I plan to add drop down lists for classes, abilities, Battalions, and Equipment. You were going to work on adding drop down lists for the enemies right?

True, the game is easier to beat on lower difficulties without the help of pre-promotes, but it’s also easier to beat with pre-promotes. If pre-promotes are good on higher difficulties, they will only be more effective against weaker enemies and requiring no investment, instead joining for free with good stats, still makes them good. In fact, the argument could be made; why bother investing into and training low level growth units if you get pre-promotes for free with good enough base stats to dominate most enemies? I’m not sure I agree with this point. All of the games from FE6-9 have some pre-promotes with very good base stats that will be hard for growth units to catch up to. Like Pent? What do you mean he’s less impactful? He joins for free with no investment and and amazing base stats and weapon ranks. A few extra levels won’t give Erk as high stats as Pent. If the argument is that you don’t need Pent because Erk is good enough, the same argument could be made in reverse, you don’t need to bother giving exp and a promotion item to Erk because Pent is good enough and joins for free without needing investment. edit: Not all pre-promotes in FE6-9 were good though. There are some I would consider bad. Maybe the difference is that all pre-promotes are good in Fates?

I disagree for a few reasons. Not all pre-promotes are good obviously but I think almost every game has at least one pre-promote that can’t be considered anything but great, on any difficulty and any play style. Your play style might be that you don’t prefer to use them (which is fine), but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t still be good if you did. I think the only play style that would result in pre-promotes not being good is if you grind all of your units to high level early on. On lower difficulties, pre-promotes should perform even more effectively against enemies for longer with their base stats alone, without gaining any levels. I think that using pre-promotes actually helps with experience, rather than hurting. I don’t recommend only using pre-promotes or only un-promoted units, but a mix of both. Pre-promotes don’t need any investment to become good. I think it’s a big advantage for a unit to join already good without needing any investment. If you use a pre-promote and an un-promoted unit instead of two un-promoted units then you can give more experience to the un-promoted unit making them more likely to be as good as the pre-promote. If you used both un-promoted units, then they would need more experience (and promotion items), which means they won’t be able to be as good in the long run. You mentioned Percival which is just confusing because he’s arguably one of the best units in the series. Like I said earlier, there are pre-promotes that aren’t good, but most games have a few great ones. FE7 has Marcus, Hawkeye, Pent, and Harken. At the very least, I don’t think anyone would argue that Pent isn’t great on lower difficulties (or higher). FE8 has Seth and FE9 has Titania. And FE6, I would consider a few other pre-promotes very good as well, but it has Percival. I don’t think it’s possible for one of the Cavaliers to be as strong as him when he joins. He can join in Ch 13 or 15. A level 20/1 Allen or Lance still won’t be as good as base level Percival. You don’t even get a second Knights Crest before getting Percival. You can train up one of the Cavaliers and use Percival once you get him, or even if you use two Cavaliers, you can then use all three. Even if the Cavaliers were better than Percival (which they’re not, even without HM bonuses, Percival has amazing base stats), Percival still joins with good stats in a good class without needing any investment. Percival is always great in any context.

Just to clarify; the percentages I posted are rounded in order to cleanly post them here but I did not round them when doing the calculations. Also, I uploaded a new updated Excel file with some improvements, although it is still incomplete. Please let me know if anyone has any other suggestions or requests for how I can improve it further.

Hold up. Pre-promotes were great long before Fates. I’d say there are great pre-promotes in more games than not.

Like Haar said, there is another way to get 2.7x damage; 5 Hits with 2 of them being Crits. Okay, this one took me a while to figure out but I got it. There are two things to consider. First of all, P(at least 3 of 5 Crits) includes getting 3, 4 or 5 Crits. If you get 4 or 5 Crits, you won't have 2 more Attacks to multiply with and if you get 4 or 5 Crits, you will already be higher than 3.0x damage. Here's the probability for all three, using binomial distribution with 0.5265. P(3 of 5 Crits) = 32.72% P(4 of 5 Crits) = 18.19% P(5 of 5 Crits) = 4.05% The 18.19% and 4.05% will stay as they are because they already put us over 3.0x, we don't multiply them by (1 of 2 Hits) (and we can't because we don't even have 2 more Attacks if we already got 4 or 5 Crits). So the 32.72% is the only part we will multiply by the (1 of 2 Hits) and then we will add the result to the 18.19% and 4.05%. Secondly, you used .8775 to calculate (1 of 2 Hits) however, .8775 is not the probability of getting a normal Hit. It's the probability of getting a normal Hit or a Crit, but Crits have already been accounted for. the 32.72% already accounts for getting 3 Crits. This means that we know that the last 2 Hits are not Crits. They can be either normal Hits or Misses and we need (1 of 2 Hits). Now, this is where it gets complicated. .5265 is the probability of getting a Crit, as you already calculated. .3510 is the probability of getting a normal Hit (.8775 * (1-.60)). .1225 is the probability of getting a Miss (1- .8775) So how do we calculate (1 of 2 Hits) given that those Hits are not Crits? That only leaves .3510 and .1225 which does not add up to 1 and won't work properly for a binomial distribution. So I divided .3510/.1225 = 2.87. So the odds are 2.87:1. So .1225 (Miss) = 1 .3510 (normal Hit) = 2.87 We need to add them both together to get to 100. Right now they only add to 3.87. So how much do we need to multiply them both by to get to 100? Divide 100/3.87 = 25.87. 1 * 25.87 = 25.87 2.87 * 25.87 = 74.13. 25.87 + 74.13 = 100 .2587 + .7413 = 1 Now we have probabilities for getting a normal Hit or a Miss and that add up to 1. This works because the probabilities are proportionally the same as .1225 compared to .3510. Now, using a binomial distribution with .7413 as the probability of getting a normal hit to calculate (at least 1 of 2 Hits) = 93.31%. We can now multiply 32.72% * 93.31% + 18.19% + 4.05% = 52.77% I attached an updated version of my Excel file that shows a much easier way to calculate this over on the right side of the 'Main Sheet' I made some other improvements to the file as well but it is still incomplete. I recommend calculating the probability of each possibility instead of only calculating the (at least x) probabilities. My updated file as probabilities for each damage multiplier of Astra from 0x to 15x (15 Astra Hits is 4.5x normal Hits). Calculating the probability of each multiplier allows us to Sum all of them to make sure that they equal 100% and if you don't get 100% then you know that you made a mistake somewhere. Only calculating (at least x) probabilities will make it harder to double check because there will be overlap and they will not add to 100%.Battle Forecast Calculator.xlsx

I agree with this. I find playing Ironmans to be much more exciting than a normal playthrough. Everything has so much more weight to it. You can’t afford to get complacent. Everything really is permanent. It makes it easier for me to get immersed in the story as well when you can’t reset and when characters die they really are dead. Sometimes I’ve been forced to apologize to my units for letting them down. But more than that, it also encourages using different characters. Normally, if you don’t use Zeiss, you won’t even notice his loss and won’t think twice about him, but when I got Miledy (and several other characters) killed, Zeiss became one of my best units and ended up getting the kill against Zephiel. Cath became very valuable for me because I had gotten both of the other Thieves killed (you may consider losing Thieves to be annoying, but it was entirely my fault that they died and I’ve played multiple playthroughs with Thieves so playing with less Thieves for once made things interesting). That’s just a few examples from my personal experience. I actually agree with this, minus the last part. I really do wish FE games made a bigger deal about characters dying. The worst case of this was in played as the GD house in 3H, Lorenz and Ignatz were brutally murdered by bandits in Ch 13. After the battle, everyone was happy to be reunited and to see the professor again, and no one ever even mentioned Lorenz or Ignatz. It was very distracting and immersion breaking.

I’ve studied statistics and probability a little bit but I’ve never been good with permutations. I prefer to do my calculations with binomial distributions. The file I attached earlier has two tables on the right side of the ‘Main Sheet’, one for Hits, and one for Crits (and one for Crests but that’s not important). The Hits table uses binomial distribution to calculate the probability of Hitting y number of times out of x number of Attacks, and is dependent on the number of Attacks, which for Astra will be 5 so we will only be using the ‘5 Attacks’ column. For the Crits table, the column we use will vary depending on the probability of getting x number of Hits calculated back in the Hits table. The Crits table again uses binomial distribution to calculate the probability of getting y number of Crits out of x number of Hits. We will need to use every column of this table for our calculations. We can multiply across the two tables to get our calculations. For example, there is only one way to get a 3.0x multiplier; by Hitting 4 times with 3 of those being Crits. So I multiply the ‘4 Hits’ underneath of the ‘5 Attacks’ column of the Hits table, with the ‘3 Crits’ underneath the ‘4 Hits’ column in the Crits table. 36.32% * 34.56% = 12.55%. I went through this process for every possible multiplier of Astra with 0x being the minimum and 4.5x being the maximum. Then I Summed all of the results from 3.0x and above. The final calculation for doing at least 3.0x damage with 87.75% true Hit and 60% Crit is 52.77%. Hopefully that helps. Let me know you have any questions. edit: P(4.5x) = 4.05% p(at least 3.9x) = 17.53% p(at least 3.6x) = 22.24% p(at least 3.3x) = 40.22% p(at least 3.0x) = 52.77% p(at least 2.7x) = 66.95% p(at least 2.4x) = 79.50% p(at least 2.1x) = 87.87% p(at least 1.8x) = 93.96% p(at least 1.5x) = 97.41% p(at least 1.2x) = 99.02% p(at least 0.9x) = 99.73% p(at least 0.6x) = 99.96% p(at least 0.3x) = 99.99% p(at least 0x) = 100% Make sure to remember though that each hit of Astra deals (30% of a normal attack) rounded down. So if it rounds down, then the multipliers above won’t be accurate in relation to a normal attack. It might be better to use multipliers for a single attack of Astra. For example 3.0x would become 10x.

@Paper Jam Yeah, I forgot the details because I haven’t played that game in a while (FE7). My bad. The assassination wasn’t retconned. @Jotari, you corrected me on this earlier too and I forgot to reply, so thanks for the correction guys. I mean, some people probably don’t. But the games have Casual mode now. So pretty much anyone who plays on Classic mode would seem to prefer permadeath. The games would play very differently if they didn’t have permadeath and it’s something the series was more or less founded on and has always had so I don’t think it should be changed now. The older games in the series especially were balanced around permadeath and I think removing it would hurt the gameplay of the games a lot. They could remove permadeath in future games and design them very different to make it work, but it would be a very different game from what Fire Emblem has always been.

No, by all means, nitpick it. At first, I only offered because I already had the file, but now I’m interested in helping out however I can. Please let me know any suggestions or requests for how to improve the file and I’ll do what I can. No, those aren’t actually 100s, they’re just rounded up to save space so that it’s easier to read. That can easily be formatted to show the actual exact percentage.