lenticular

Merchant Military: 5/10. I actually think that this is (just barely) good enough to see actual use. It's one of only two E rank battalions to give a boost to magic attack (and we will get to the other one, oh yes we will), and comes in just about early enough that that still matters. I also don't overly mind the weird anti-synergy of having a physical damage gambit on a magic damage battalion. For my play style, I very rarely find myself caring about damage on gambits. I use them mostly for rattle and for breaking monster shields. So I mostly see Poison Tactic as having considerably better accuracy and AoE than Group Lightning. The worse range is a bigger drawback for me than the bad damage. Bandits: 1.5/10. I am pretty sure that I have never used this and will never use this. Still, if I did have to use it for some reason, it's early enough and tolerably OK enough that I could imagine getting at least a bit of value from it. Seiros Archers: 6.5/10. Fusillade is really good. When we did our gambit grading thread, we collectively ranked it as the third best offensive gambit in the game, excepting the unique gambits on the house-leader battalions. And of the two we ranked better, Resonant Flames attacks using magic, and Poisoned Arrows has poor availability. So, the combination of "Fusillade" and "D-rank" means this is definitely seeing some use. I think this is probably at its strongest for the Blue Lions, who don't have another comparable option available, and are actually a little bit lacking when it comes to good battalions with offensive battalions. Just solid overall. Remire Militia: 0/10 and Kingdom Youths: 0/10 and Empire Youths: 0/10. These are bad. They are notably worse than the Church of Seiros Soldiers, the worst of the battalions that you get get given for free in Chapter 2. Except that you get them between Chapters 7 and 10, far beyond the point where they might have had any relevance.

Who said anything about best? I was asking for ridiculously broken. If you want more specific than that, how about "ridiculously broken in ways that you find interesting, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy"? For Mantle, my base assumption that any god-weapon would be able to pierce it. Sure, it's presented in Radiant Dawn as being immune to any damage except from weapons blessed by Yune, but that's because Ashera and Yune are the only gods in that setting. I'd assume that it would be vulnerable to anything else with divine provenance. So, Falchion, Heroes' Relics, Yato, Divine Dragons, etc. Which would have it still be good, but not instantly game breaking. For some reason, I never thought about putting Raging Storm onto a infinite durability weapon. That would definitely be much cleaner than using Armstrhift and trying to get up to 50 Luck. I'm not sure what you gain from using Amiti, though. You lose out on the brave effect if you're using a combat art, and without that, Amiti is pretty much just another sword, no? Regardless, once you've got infinite attacks, I'd think the next thing to focus on would be defense, since you can't attack infinitely if you can't survive. Something like PoR Vantage could still hard counter this build.

Never is a long time. Even if they currently have no plans to make a game without an avatar (which I would very much believe), who's to say how long that will be the case for. Trends in gaming will change. People's tastes will change. New people with new ideas will be involved with making the games, and existing people will move on. Fire Emblem in five years might not look anything like Fire Emblem now. For comparison, five years is about the time between Radiant Dawn and Awakening. When Radiant Dawn came out, was anyone predicting that in five years, FE would be back on handheld, with infinite grinding brought back, permadeath being optional, and shipping being a big deal? I certainly wouldn't.

If all the different skills, weapons, and abilities from across all the different games in the series were combined into a single game, what would be the single most ridiculously broken combo? I'm thinking of things like hypothetically being able to combine Raging Storm (Three Houses) with Armsthrift (Awakening). Feel free to combine anything from skills, weapons, support bonuses, crests, holy blood, accessories, combat arts, personals, or anything else.

Alliance Infantry: 1/10 and Alliance Duelists: 1/10. The worst battalions we've looked at so far, though not quite bad enough to warrant a 0/10 score. About the best thing that can be said about these is that there isn't as much competition here as there is in the other houses. Even so, these are such a small step up from "literally nothing" that I probably wouldn't want to spend the money on them. When you're getting thoroughly outclassed by "what if I buy a second copy of the Church of Seiros Soldiers?" you know you've done something wrong. If we're looking for plus points, +9 Hit on the Infantry isn't awful, and Mad Melee on the Duelists is kind of OK? If you combined both of those onto a single battalion, it might even be able to sneak up as high as as 1.5/10. But alas, no. Alliance Brawlers: 5.5/10. The same battalion as their Empire and Kingdom equivalent, but I'm giving them a slightly higher score since their competition is that much worse. Alliance Magic Corps: 4.5/10. My first instinct with these was to treat them the same as the Kingdom equivalent: if I'm running two (or fewer) mages, then I'm not running these; if I'm running three (or more) then I am. And after consideration, I still think that's mostly true. Except that I'll ammend that to say that if I'm running three mages then I'm probably running this. But my disdain for Group Lightning is such that I can certainly imagine running something else. I can imagine running Lorenz and preferring the Church of Seiros soldiers for the prot and the better gambit. I can imagine running Hapi and not feeling that this was worth the effort of raising her Authority up to D rank. So, yes, I do think that this is worse than the Kingdom equivalent, but I'm still using it enough of the time that it doesn't score much worse. Alliance Knights: 6.5/10. I was looking through the older rankings I'd given to compare scores and make sure I was staying consistent, and apparently when I was rating the Knights of Seiros, I said that the Alliance Knights were better than the Knights of Seiros. I'm not entirely sure what past-lenticular was thinking. These are virtually identical, and any difference between them is too close to call. So they get the same score as all the other C rank Knight battalions we've looked at so far.

Question about this. My understanding is that Byleth supports require more support points per rank than other supports (since Byleth typically gets way more points through the monastery and teaching). So I'm guessing that this will mean that everyone else unlocks their supports super quickly, but then Byleth lags somewhat behind. Is this something you looked into?

I agree with what everyone else has already said about how you don't really need any maths beyond basic addition and subtraction, but I want to add something else as well. Fire Emblem has something of a reputation for being a hardcore, punishing game series. And it can be that, but only if you want it to be. At least for modern Fire Emblem games (so, anything on the 3DS or Switch), if you choose to play on the easiest difficulty settings then it's a very forgiving series that is friendly to casual players. If you're feeling intimidated, then I would recommend starting off with the easier difficulty settings and see how you find it. That should be enough for you to get a feel for how the games play, see if they're for you, and so on.

Fire Emblem in general isn't very good at showing character development for anyone outside of the main characters. Storytelling through support conversations and paralogues, all of which are skippable, means that the most we can have is a character who changes briefly and then immediately changes back. So if we're looking for characters who don't grow much, then pretty much everyone. If we're looking at characters who are one-note, then significantly fewer. Almost all of the characters who you mention have some amount of depth to them. I take issue with how some of them are portrayed, I don't particularly like some of them, but I think that most of them have at leasta few different facets to their characterisation. The worst of the ones you mention, in that regard, is probably Gilbert, but that's not really surprising. He's only really around for half the game, only has 9 supports, and only 3 of them go above a B. He just doesn't have enough screen-time to really fit as much in as other characters. And obviously, the overall least developed playable character is Anna.

Personally, I feel that issues of unit distinctiveness and deployment diversity tend to get overstated. With pretty much any Fire Emblem, you build you own team so you get to decide how much you value deployment diversity and how you weigh that against how much you value pure optimisation. Yes, it is certainly possible to build an "oops, all wyverns" team in Three Houses, but it's also possible to build an "oops, all paladins" team in Sacred Stones. I also think that there are ways to differentiate characters other than just their class. In Three Houses, there's bases, growths, personal abilities, combat arts, spells, supports, and crests. To me, Wyvern Lord Annette and Wyvern Lord Seteth feel plenty distinct from each other, so I don't really see it as a problem. Though, that said, tastes vary and it's entirely understandable for you to want to theorycraft a system that meets your own personal tastes. I'm not sure that this system would necessarily work out, though. Part of the problem is that you just have so many classes. By my count, you have 39 different promoted classes (not counting the different dancer variants, and not counting any oddities like Lords or Manaketes who would likely exist outside of the system). By comparison, Three Houses has a total of 25 classes across Advanced, Master and DLC classes (again, not counting Dancer or unique classes, and counting War Monk and War Cleric as the same). Fates has 28 promoted classes (excluding Lord, Dancer and Beast units, as well as DLC/amiibo classes, and counting Maid and Butler as only one) and that's split across the two different routes with many of them not really in competition. With the best will in the world, getting 39 well-balanced classes just isn't going to happen. Some of them would be overpowered and some would be underpowered, and the temptation will always be to converge on the overpowered classes. So, let's say that flying classes end up being the overpowered ones. In that case, the temptation is just to give everyone their flying promotion, consign anyone without a flying option to trash tier, and end up with a morass of sameness by the end game. And of course, you don't have to do that, you have plenty of other options, but you have plenty of other options in Three Houses or Shadow Dragon as well.

One thing to note here is that the Blue Lions have more reason than the other two houses to train up Authority rank early on multiple units. They have the best early game rally unit in the form of Annette, they have Dimitri who will often want to rush to A rank for B. Vantage + B. Wrath, and they also have more and earlier Part 1 paralogues than the other houses, giving quick access to a lot of nice B rank battalions. This means that their E rank battalions probably aren't seeing as much play as in other houses, and their C ranks are probably seeing a bit more play. Kingdom Infantry: 5/10. Meh. Not bad. Also not exciting. Just meh. Kingdom Lance Co: 2/10. These aren't awful (for their authority rank and join time), but they're simply outclassed by the other available option that have some combination of more hit, more prot, or a better gambit. I'm trying to imagine the circumstances where I'm using this, and it's tricky. Maybe if I'm doing a team of 10 physical attackers? Kingdom Brawlers: 5/10. Literally the same as the Empire Brawlers in every respect except name. The plus side here is that they aren't competing against the Empire Archers. The down side is that you're probably rushing more units through E rank as fast as possible. The overall same score seems right, though. Kingdom Magic Corps: 5/10. I find this pretty clearly worse than the Seiros Magic Corps by virtue of the less accurate gambit. This means that if I'm only getting one of the two, then it isn't going to be this one. So the question is, how many magic wielders am I running? Sometimes it's just going to be Annette and Mercedes, in which case this is langushing unused. Sometimes I'm going to have recruited Hapi or Constance, or I'm going to be trying a magic build on Sylvain or Ingrid, in which case this makes the cut. "Maybe I'll use it sometimes but I'm not going to be enthusiastic about it" is pretty much the definition of a 5/10 on my scoring scale. Kingdom Knights: 6.5/10. Given my opening comments, I'm unlikely to be choosing between this and Seiros Knights, and much more likely to want to get both. And overall, they do a pretty similar job. The stats on this are a little bit better, but I value the first copy of Blaze more than the second copy of Assault Troops, so I rank them basically evenly.

Mythological creatures that aren't dragons. Personally, I'd like to see a phoenix or maybe a unicorn, but there are a ton of cool mythological creatures to choose from.

I did say that I thought it would be a long shot. But I think it would be a much better bet than trying to send Falcon Knights against F-35s and expecting success.

Going by 2022 CYL results: Eagles: Caspar and Petra Lions: Dedue and Mercedes Deer: Ignatz and Leonie Wolves: Balthus and Constance Church: Gilbert and Catherine Going by number of works on AO3.org: Eagles: Caspar and Petra Lions: Dedue and Mercedes Deer: Raphael and Leonie Wolves: Balthus and Constance Church: Gilbert and Catherine So, basically the same lists by either metric, with the only difference being the swap of Ignatz for Raphael. So that makes me reasonably confident in the results. Though, notably, both measure which character is liked by the fewest people and not which character is disliked by the most people, which would likely yield different results.

In a direct conflict, not even close. Even if the earth military were restricted to weapons and armour from 1022, we'd still win just by virtue of logistics, communications, and manpower. Magic is all well and good, but we see that I highly trained combat mage is about as effective as a highly trained archer. Given the choice between the ability to lob a few fireballs or the ability to use radios and railways, no competent general is choosing the fireballs. In an indirect conflict, maybe? For instance, what happens if you take Lehran's Medallion and give it to some high ranking military or political leader? It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that leading to a civil war that could take down the country in question. It'd still be a bit of a long shot, but a better chance than a direct open conflict. I can also imagine that a very talented spy with a berserk staff could do a whole lot of damage. Manage to infiltrate -- let's say -- a meeting of the leaders of the UN Security Council, and before you know it, Liz Truss is trying to gouge out the eyes of Xi Jinping and it's anyone's guess what happens from there.

We're in something of an interesting place here, because for the chapter 3 house-specific battalions, we know exactly which battalions are available and have a good idea of what units are available as well. Maybe we've added Wolves and maybe Sylvain, but probably nobody else. This means we have a pretty good idea of what sort of battalions we're going to be wanting. Yes, there are different possible builds that might want different battalions. And yes, we might not be fielding a full team. But by and large, Chapter 3 Black Eagles is going to look pretty similar from game to game. Linhardt, Dorothea and Hubert are likely all prefering battalions that boost magic attack. Petra and Edelgard are probably both looking to spend some time in Pegasus Knight before all that long. Caspar is probably lagging behind in Authority. That sort of thing. So what's on our shopping list? Well, ideally we want to get up to 10 battalions (enough for all deployed characters to have one) as quickly as we can, though we might have difficulty affording this before more battalions start trickling in from Chapter 5. We already have three battalions from Chapter 2, which roughly means that we're only interested in getting at most 7 of the battalions that come available at Chapter 3, and if we aren't getting them immediately then we are never getting them. I think I would want to grab the Seiros Holy Monks, Seiros Magic Corps, Seiros Pegasus Co, Empire Magics Corps, Empire Archers, Empire Knights, and maybe Empire Brawlers or a second set of Seiros Mercenaries. Ideally, I'd love to take all of the E rank battalions to make sure everyone had something immediately, but that's typically not going to be practical. So that's the overview, let's look at these individually. Empire Infantry: 1.5/10. Pretty awful, with very little to recommend using them. It is, however, just about possible to imagine a circumstance where these might just barely be usable. Maybe you have everyone stuck at E Authority and have enough money to buy every Battalion on offer, somehow? Maybe you're doing a LTC and the Lure gambit somehow allows for a faster completion of a chapter? I'm not really believing it, but it's at least conceivable, which keeps this from the lowest of low scores. Still, I think this is worse than Seiros Sacred Monks and I gave that a 2. Empire Warriors: 4/10. I'm not using them, which means a score below 5 on my grading system, but they're fairly close to being usable, so they aren't much below 5. 4 points of physical attack is decent at this stage, but this just comes up short compared to the Empire Brawlers and the Seiros Mercenaries, and I will very rarely want all of them. Having a unique gambit seems like it should be a positive point, except that it's a unique bad gambit. Which is less positive. Empire Brawlers: 5/10. Comparing these with the Seiros Mercenaries, these have +1 attack, -10 hit, +10 avoid, -2 prot, -1 res, and a somewhat better gambit. And they become available 1 chapter later, and cost money instead of being free. I'd say they're pretty clearly worse than the Mercs. But still, they're right on the verge of "maybe I'll use them, maybe I won't", which is a definite 5/10 in my ratings. Empire Magic Corps: 6.5/10. Very similar to the Seiros Magic Corps. And on the one hand, this has the Seiros Magic Crops as competition, but on the other hand, it comes on a route where you have an above average number of magic users. So the same overall score seems appropriate. Empire Archers: 8/10. Fusilade is a great gambit, so getting it so early, you'd expect maybe some dodgy stats here. Except you actually get +3 attack, +15 hit, +3 prot, and +3 charm? That's outstanding for a D rank battalion. It feels like there should be a catch, but there isn't. This has a good chance of seeing use from the moment you buy it up until the point when your last straggler finally manages to reach C in Authority, which is a good long stretch of game. Empire Knights: 6.5/10. Sufficiently similar to the Knights of Seiros to get the same score as them. Slightly better, but I agree with @Dark Holy Elf about stiffer competition cancelling out that slight advantage.

For me, the single biggest factor that I care about is that the game is released in the west with an English language localisation. The second most important thing is that the game is on a home console and I don't have to suffer through handhelds in order to play it. Therefore, the 2000s beat the 2010s 2-1, so that's where my vote goes.

Yeah, I've given a little bit of thought to that battalion as well and I'm not sure how I'm going to rate it. Because it is probably not worth the opportunity cost of delaying the paralogue until chapter 11, meaning you get the other rewards and the battle xp later, and potentially also need to devote an extra week to fighting in chapter 11 that you otherwise wouldn't. So, there are three potential appraoches to grading it: just say that you get it in chapter 11 and ignore the opportunity cost, say that you get it in chapter 11 but count the opportunity cost against it, or say that you get it in part 2, sicne that version is in some ways better than the chapter 11 version. Truly, the great quandry of our age. For me, I think it's a combination of two things. One is to try to imagine the battalions in their best possible circumstances. Or at least, the best circumstances that will come up reasonably often. I don't want to bend over backwards to devise elaborate hypotheticals where some battalion might be good, but I think "didn't recruit Sylvain or Anna" is a situation that comes up often enough to be a worthy consideration. But beyond that, I also think that it's relevant that doing other paralogues simply take time. The in-game cost of a single battle point one week is negligible, but Three Houses is a long game, and sometimes I want to play it without having it take longer than it has to, in which case I don't want to be doing extra paralogues just for item rewards. And yeah, I do realise that there is an irony to a woman who voluntarily spends her free time arguing on the Internet about the relative merits of different battalions then turning around and saying that saving time is more important than micro-optimisation, and yet here we are. Yeah, I also generally end up giving him a proper battalion as soon as I have enough to spread around (though he's the last to get one). The point I was trying to make wasn't so much that it's good to keep him battalionless long term; it's that the benefit that he gets from a battalion is much smaller than it can initially seem like it should be, and smaller than the benefit that other units get. It's still an overall upgrade for him, but not a particularly big one.

I agree that having The Immaculate One as the final boss was the right choice overall, and also agree that having nothing at all would have been better than the epilogue text that we got. Of course, I'm generally not a fan of how Fire Emblem handles epilogues in general. There is a tendency for them to try to nicely wrap everything up in a bow, and it never really works for me. That said, I do think there are ways that they could have had a gameplay fight against TWSITD while still keeping the final battle against Rhea. One would have been to include some sort of postgame. You beat Rhea, get the ending cutscene, credits roll, you go back to the main menu, can start NG+, all that usual stuff. But you also have the option of doing a final chapter or two. I'm not the biggest fan of postgames myself, so this wouldn't be my choice, but I know some people love that sort of thing, so it could have been an option. The other possibility would have been to rewrite the story such that an encounter with TWSITD actually happened before the final fight with Rhea. I'm imagining something like this: As they get closer and closer to Fhirdiad and to overthrowing Rhea, the alliance between Edelgard and the Agarthans grows increasingly unstable. Both sides can see that Rhea is going to fall, and they start thinking about what comes next and manoeuvring against each other. And then, TWSITD outright betray the Imperial army, leading Edelgard to send a strike team against them to kill Thales/Arundel. Only after cutting the head from that snake do they turn around and go back for the final battle against The Immaculate One. Yes, that is very bare-bones and would need substantial fleshing out to actually be a workable story, but I only present it as a sort of proof of concept. Ultimately, they were making the story and if parts of it didn't work for whatever reason then they could have changed it. At least in theory. In practice there are all sorts of considerations of budgets and deadlines which might have prevented them from doing so, but in theory, they had full power to change anything that they wanted. If practical considerations were such that their only options were either the unsatisfying epilogue text or an anticlimactic ending, then I think they made the right choice. It's just a shame that they weren't able to rework things in such a way that neither were necessary.

I don't think that Combat Arts would invalidate Emblems any more than they invalidated Gambits in Three Houses. Just as Gambits and Combat Arts were able to coexist and each have their own purpose and niche, so too could Combat Arts and Emblems. For instance, it's fairly easy to imagine a system where an Emblem Engage is substantially stronger than a Combat Art, but is much more restricted in how often you can use them. That said, from what we've seen so far, it does seem as if Combat Arts quite likely haven't made it into this game. If that is the case, though, I think it's more down to just cutting out old features that they don't want to develop further rather than any fundamental incompatibility.

I'm not going to argue the general point, because I don't see much point (different people have different play styles and different preferences), but I will comment briefly about using this on Felix in particular. Given Felix's personal ability, giving him Jeralt's Mercs actually ends up giving him -2 physical attack compared to not giving him anything. Trading 2 points of physical attack for 10 points of crit and 15 points of avoid isn't a bad deal overall, but there are certainly going to be times when I'd prefer the attack. And the battalion does give him gambit uses too, of course, but with Felix's low charm and not much help from the battalion and the gambit, it might have reliability issues. It's still not a bad choice for a Felix who is lagging in authority, but it's not a great one. Of the other characters with an authority weakness, Hapi will usually be doing magical damage and Hilda will often be in a flying class, so I don't think this is a great fit for either of them. I think the unit who might best make use of these past the early game is actually Caspar. He has the authority weakness that means he'll likely be at low authority for longer, he doesn't have the anti-synergy with battalions that Felix has, and if he's using gauntlets then he ends up benefiting doubly from the decent (for E rank) physical attack buff. My typical prefered way to play at this point is to only recruit the units that I'm planning to actually use, and not recruit anyone just for paralogue access. I know full well that this isn't optimal, and it isn't what I would do if I was trying to really maximise my chance of victory, but it is the way that I find more fun since it means I have a slightly different set of tools in every run, rather than always relying on exactly the same things each time. I also don't think that any specific paralogue reward is so overwhelmingly strong that it makes all that huge a difference in overall success chance. Sure, Thyrsus is good and the Lance of Ruin + Gautier Knights are good, but none of them are so good as to be indispensable. So I'm typically assuming that not everyone will be recruited, even if they can be, or even if they would be in "optimal" play. I am curious though if there is any consensus on whether this way of playing is particularly rare, particularly common, or somewhere in the middle. If it is literally just me who plays that way and everyone else is recruiting Sylvain and Anna in every single game, then I might tweak my grading accordingly.

I always used to grab this to put on someone, since it sounds like it should be decent, but I found that I just never ended up using it. Probably this is a playstyle thing, but I found that I just don't end up with a group of bunched up units who require healing. And you say that at worst it's three extra heals for a mage, but I also find that by the time I get to chapter 3, I'm never running out of healing, so that worst case is a bad one for me. I will admit that I had never thought of the possibility to use it to train Authority, and that is a potential niche. Though, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't you limited to only using this on an injured unit? In which case, doesn't that effectively mean that you aren't healing with a spell, and therefore you're just trading potential Faith gain for potential Authority gain? Sure, there may be times when this is a winning trade, but I'm generally more concerned with rushing to C in Faith than in raising Authority. Still, it is something, so I think I will raise my score a little.

Given the durability on that staff (which I'm guessing is a heal staff?) it looks as if magic is going back to how it was in Fates, which I'm a little bit disappointed by. I really enjoyed having magic usage limits be per-map in Three Houses rather than per-game, at least for white magic. For attacking spells, it was more of a mixed bag. But I liked actually being able to freely use all my abilities. I've found that there are basically three ways to use rare staves in Fire Emblem. Either you use them whenever they seem handy and they're gone within two chapters, you try to save them until the perfect moment and never use them, or you've played the game multiple times, know it inside and out, and know in advance exactly when you'll use them. I've never found any of these options particularly fun, so I'll be a little glum if we are going back to that. I also never really liked the setup in Fates where weapons don't have durability but staves do. Having durability only matter for one weapon type made it so that it wasn't something that I habitually checked as part of battle prep, which meant that I forgot to buy new staves way too often. I ended up having weapons run out of durability without any replacement way more often in Fates, the game without weapon durability, than I did in any other Fire Emblem. Of course, it is still possible that staves have uses per-battle and that the durability will reset to full each time. I would love it if that were the case. But if that were what they were doing, I'd expect to see a number a fair bit smaller than 25.

Seiros Holy Monks: 10/10. Maybe a hot take, butI think this might be the single best battalion in the game? Possibly? And I feel weird saying that because its stats are obviously completely bobbins. They are better than nothing, but only just barely. And yet, this is probably the single battalion that I have equipped in more maps than any other. Obviously, the big advantages here are the gambit and the availability. I don't think I need to convince anyone that Stride is a fantastic gambit, and this has by far the best availability of any of them. Not only does it come in much earlier, but the others are all contingent on a specific route or character (Blue Lions, Sylvain, and Anna). Since we aren't assuming a "recruit every last one of them!" playstyle, it's easy to imagine runs that don't have any other source of Stride. I also want to make the case that the stats aren't actually that big of a problem here. Sure, it would be nice if they were better, but I find that I really don't care that much. For me, the best unit to carry Stride is a healer. There are a few reasons for this. First, it's often advantageous to use Stride on the first or second turn of a battle. Your units are guaranteed to be clumped up, meaning it can hit a lot of targets, and being able to quickly reposition early can completely change the way you can engage the enemy. It's also generally unlikely that your healer is going to be needed on turn 1, so you aren't losing an action by having them use Stride. Second, a Stride user is often going to end up lagging behind the rest of your army, so it's beneficial if they can still be useful even when they are lagging behind. The majority of healers are going to have Physic, meaning that they can still perform excellently even when stuck way in the rear. So, if I'm putting my Stride battalion onto my healer, do I actually care about its stats? Well, no, not really. My healer just isn't seeing very many combats, and nothing that a battalion can do is going to make them a more effective healer. Giving them a battalion with good stats will upgrade their offense from "chip damage that I don't use very often" to "slightly better chip damage that I don't use very often" and will upgrade their defenses from "wet tissue paper" to "damp tissue paper". This isn't nothing, of course, and there will doubtless be turns where an extra few points of magic attack could make all the difference, but those turns are few and far between. Overall, this is the only battalion that I feel remains relevant for the entire game. I'm almost certainly using it in Chapter 3, and there's a decent chance I'm still using it by the time I get to endgame. Seiros Sacred Monks: 2/10. On the other hand, these are just terrible. Awful stats and an awful gambit combine to make an awful battalion. With the free battalions from last time, plus all the other battalions that become available in chapter 3, it's possible to get enough for your full squad to have one without having to touch this one, which you absolutely should do because all of the others are better than this. About the only good thing to say here is that Resonant White Magic is pretty rare, so if you do feel that you need it for some reason -- maybe a challenge run of some sort? -- then this is a decent place to get it. (Edit: raised my score from 1 to 2, in consideration of the possibility to use this to train Authority.) Seiros Magic Corp: 6.5/10. Decent enough for the time you get it, falls off before too long, but you've got some decent use out of it by the time you drop it. Gets extra credit for being a magic battalion, which means it isn't competing with many other options. Gets further extra credit for having Group Flames, the best of the three Group Magic gambits. Seiros Pegasus Co: 7.5/10. The same first sentence as I said for Seiros Magic Corp applies equally here, except that in this case, it is literally the only flying battalion you have until at least doing Ingrid's paralogue in chapter 7, and more likely until the battalion guild expands in chapter 8. For this reason alone, it's hard to imagine a run where I don't get at least some use out of this. But even beyond that, the stats are strong enough that I'd probably want to run this even if I didn't have a Pegasus Knight. The fairly poor gambit is a knock against them, but a fairly minor one. Knights of Seiros 6.5/10. For the Golden Deer and Black Eagles, this is in direct competition with the Alliance/Empire Knights that become available at the same time, and I think comes off slightly worse against them, which means I'm not as likely to use this. So this rating is for Blue Lions, where it's the only early source of Blaze, since the Kingdom Knights get Assault Troops instead for some reason. And over there, it's not bad. Exactly when you have units passing through C authority will vary, but it's usual to have at least someone get there before C rank battalions are readily available. It's also usable again when you have a bunch of people all at or around C rank at once, at which point it becomes just one of several options that you're getting some use out of.

Three Houses chapter 6. Beat the Death Knight or rout everyone else. But you're right, it could make for a fun and unique recruitment condition. I'd like to see that. It could even be used for a "pick one" Arran/Samson style recruitment, where you get a different unit depending on how you complete the level.

Agree with this. And I think that Byleth has other abilities that go beyond what other bearers of the Crest of Flames (Nemesis, Edelgard) have. Solon appears shocked when Byleth is able to escape from the spooky pocket dimension of Zahras. It wasn't just a case of discovering that Byleth had the Crest of Flames; they were able to do something beyond what even someone with that Crest can do. Crests are powerful, but they don't grant all the abilities of their originating Nabatean. I don't think there's any reason to suppose that Nemesis could rewind time any more than we should suppose that Hanneman can turn into a giant dragon turtle.