lenticular

What I wished they'd done with the level is have the Dragon Vein on one side of the map but have Takumi start on the opposite side and steadily make his way over to it, using it as soon as he reached. This would -- I think -- retain most (or all?) of what people like about the level, but would also give more advance warning to prevent the possibility of gotcha momentsand have a very obvious and ominous ticking clock as he got closer to the Dragon Vein. I think it would have been better from a story perspective as well, since it makes Takumi seem like the world's most incompetent military leader to have him sit on a Dragon Vein twiddling his thumbs for half a dozen turns while his soldiers Charge of the Light Brigade their way into well-defended enemy choke points. Yeah. Some amount of unfairness is pretty much inevitable in a TRPG. At least, I'm having a hard time imagining how one could work that was completely fair while still retaining the core essence that made it identifiable as a TRPG. A better question for me to ask might have been "to what extent is Conquest an unfair game, and is it enough to matter?" As to the second part of that question, that's going to depend on personal preference, on how often the person in question runs into potentially unfair situations, but also on managing expectations. I think a large part of my disappointment with Conquest was that I'd heard people talk up how scrupulously fair it is before I played it. If I hadn't had that level of expectation, I'd probably have been more inclined to see it favourably and forgive its flaws. (And in fairness to the game, it isn't its fault that I had my expectations set too high. It never advertised itself as being a perfectly fair game.) That also matches my experience. In my sole playthrough of Conquest (started on Lunatic, finished on Hard), I ended up basically soloing the last half dozen chapters with Corrin because playing it properly felt like too much of a chore. That's a reasonable point, certainly. It's a bit of an odd situation whereby if you've played enough Fire Emblem to recognise the significance of the stairs then you've probably also played enough Fire Emblem to see turn-based reinforcements as the norm, but I'll definitely concede that it was at least possible to predict that tripwire reinforcements could be a thing there. For me, the platonic ideal for fairness is a game of perfect information with no chance or random element. As I mentioned, though, I'm not sure it would be possible to make a TRPG that meets these criteria, though many other games, (tabletop games and video games both) do so. And of course, being fair is completely independent from being good, fun, or interesting. Noughts and crosses (aka tic-tac-toe) has perfect information and no random chance, but it's unlikely to hold the interest of anyone over the age of seven.

I see your point, but I'm not sure that I agree with it. For a couple of reasons. First is that there aren't any points for artistic impression in Fire Emblem. A victory is a victory. You get given a goal, but it's up to you how you choose to carry it out. For instance, if it's a "kill boss" objective, then you can just as well choose to do it by methodically advancing across the map and killing everyone as you go or by warping in a single unit who can do high damage on player phase and having them assassinate the boss. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. Similarly, you can choose to complete a defense map by setting up defensively and holding choke points or by being more aggressive and taking the fight to your enemy. Both approaches are valid. Second, related to what you said and also: I don't think that it's desirable to be able to consistently have everything so thoroughly in hand that you're always able to respond to any eventuality. If that is the case then it probably means that either the level is undertuned or that you're playing on a difficulty level that is too easy for your skill level. (Or if you're playing on the hardest difficulty and are still completely dominating every level, then that means you've effectively achieved mastery and the game has nothing left to offer you in terms of challenge.) Of course, there's nothing wrong with just wanting a big romp of dumb fun, but I'm looking at this purely in terms of playing for challenge. If we're looking for the "hard but fair" design paradigm that Conquest mostly seems to be going for, then I don't think that it's good to require the player to overkill every level just to be prepared for potential surprises. If you need to always have something held back in reserve and should never be struggling just to get through, then that discourages a player from pushing at the limits of their ability and encourages playing on easier difficulty.

My assumption is that regular shields are mostly intended to be used on Armor and Fortress Knights, where the extra weight isn't really much of a down-side, since those units probably have terrible speed anyway. Giving them weight means that you're discouraged from using shields on other units, without really being disincentivised from stacking protection on your tanks. On the other hand, the Aurora Shield is supposed to be used on a flier, and hurting your flier's attack speed is a pretty major drawback. Hurting your cavalry's attack speed generally isn't quite as bad but is still pretty bad, especially given that anti-cav weapons are much rarer than bows. Then if you have two of them be weightless, then it would be weird not to make the third member of the set weightless as well. This is just speculation on my part, mind.

Interesting! Thank you for taking the time to write that up. You may not be an expert, but you're certainly closer to expertise than I am! I am generally very wary of anything in games thathas that high of a potential upside. Even if it doesn't end up overly centralizing, it can still end up being very high variance, which can end up very frustrating to play against. I guess, at the very least, I'd say it would be something that would want to see go through some pretty extensive play-testing before being added. But then, I am very careful by nature (must be why my special attack is so low). Yeah, I was basically ignoring Triple Battles for exactly that reason. I'd honestly be surprised to see them make a return in anything other than a Unova remake.

I read up on the chapter before posting about it, just to refresh my memory. Turns out that blocking the stairs is basically worthless on that level since it doesn't block the reinforcements from spawning. That's not really the question that I'm asking; sorry if I was unclear. I'm not asking whether it was possible to get out of the situation once I was in it. That's basically unknowable, given that I certainly can't remember the exact positions and stats of all my units. Unless you're claiming that it is fundamentally impossible to get into a position with no solution (which would be an extremely bold claim) then we'll never know for certain whether I was in a truly no-win situation or just one that I personally wasn't good enough to get out of. My question is whether I should have known enough to have been able to avoid getting into that position in the first place. I don't disagree that it's one of the games where weapon triangle is at its most impactful, which is why it's even more of a problem that the bonuses aren't clearer. I never bothered to do calculations for player phase attacks. Why would I? I can use the combat preview to get the answer much more quickly and easily. I only bothered doing the arithmetic myself when working out enemy phase attacks. If it helps you to imagine it, a. I was playing on Lunatic mode with everything that that entails and b. I was using a very defensive, turtling strategy. I had my strongest units (Camilla and Effie) blocking the chokepoints, they were in defensive stance, and I wasn't really focusing on killing anything that wasn't able to break my formation. In fact, it was beneficial to keep them alive, since they clogged up the enemy formation and made it harder for the actually dangerous enemies (especially the ones with Lunge) to get into position to attack me. These tactics were serving me well right up until the point when the water went away, at which point I was overwhelmed with these enemies who I hadn't killed, and my best units were in defense stance so weren't able to contribute as much offensively. I don't know. Maybe I just had the absolute worst luck with Fates and chose literally the one single strategy that makes this unreasonable? Wouldn't be the first time that my luck with Fates was abysmal. That's a fair point. Like I said, it was with Camilla in Birthright that I actually had this problem, and it's probably more reasonable to assume she only gets to use each DV once, since she'd still be able to fireball three times that way. Whereas I was playing Birthright on Hard, and I absolutely did expect the Camilla fight to be easy because the rest of the game up to that point had been easy. (And it was still easy; just not quite as easy as I had originally believed.) I think that FE games are fundamentally different from pure war games in that, with Fire Emblem, it's generally assumed that it should be possible to get through a map without losing anyone, whereas in pure war games, there are almost inevitably going to be casualties. If I were playing a war game and managed to get through a map without any losses, then I'd think that it was poorly balanced and way too easy (unless I'd managed to come up with some especially brilliant tactic). And I don't want to come off as if I'm complaining. I don't think that Conquest is a bad game because of any of the things I've mentioned here. It's a game that I don't particularly care for because it doesn't match up to my tastes, but that's very different from it being a bad game. If it comes across as if I'm saying that it's a bad game or that it's less fair than other Fire Emblem games, then, to be clear, that is not what I'm saying at all. What I'm trying to do is question the received wisdom that Conquest is a fair game and that even on Lunatic, if you die then it's your own fault. That's the only thing that I'm disagreeing with.

I'm by no means an expert on competitive doubles Pokémon, but this seems pretty overpowered to me. Moves like Dragon Dance are already pretty good, so making what is essentially "Dragon Dance but way better" seems like it's asking for trouble. The ability to buff speed and attack by three stages onboth pokémon with only a single turn of setup seems absolutely wild. I think if I were to try to do something along these lines, my first instinct would be to say that you couldn't stack the same on a single turn. So, for instance, if you had one pokémon use Action Pose and one use Guard Pose, then each would gain one stage of attack, speed, defense and special defense. On the other hand, if one used Action Pose and the other used Combat Pose, they would each gain one stage of attack, speed and defense, and the second buff to attack would be "lost". This would still be strong (and I'm worried it might still be too strong) but it's nowhere near as strong as your original version.

I'd like to shift away from hypotheticals and talk about my own personal experience with this chapter. I had started playing Conquest on Lunatic, because I had heard that it was hard but fair, that I would lose units or game over, but when I did it would be my fault and not because the game had thrown something at me that I had no way to see coming. I took my sweet time on that chapter. I think I was up to something around about turn 30 or 40. Very inefficient, but efficiency wasn't my goal; getting through the level was. I'd spent time waiting for status conditions to burn off, for instance. One side effect of this was that enough time had passed that, even though I had seen the stairs, I felt confident that no reinforcements were coming. I've never known a FE level that leaves reinforcements that late. And besides, even if reinforcements did come, I'd fully cleared the area around the stairs, so I shouldn't have to worry about being overwhelmed. Then I carefully advanced a unit or two into the boss room, and nine reinforcement units appeared. In addition to the two units in the boss room (I had already killed one through the wall earlier in the level), this meant I had 11 enemy units to deal with. Now, keep in mind that you only have 10 units total for this chapter, and this includes non-combat units Elise and Azura, as well as just-recruited base Nyx and recruited-one-chapter-ago almost-base Odin. Killing 11 enemy units isn't happening. Even killing just the reinforcement units isn't happening. I spent a decent while (maybe 20-30 minutes at a guess) trying to figure out if there was any way I could save the situation, but I couldn't come up with anything. I looked at killing as many enemies as I could, trying to run away, just trying to have my squishies run away but leaving my stronger units to fight, body blocking, various different combinations of the above, and I couldn't find any way of saving things. I tried to find a configuration that gave me the highest chance of the enemy missing, carried out my plan, the enemy didn't miss, I lost a unit (I think it might have been Azura, but I'd not swear to that), and I reset. Now, to me, that didn't feel like it was fair or like my loss was my fault. Obviously, there were things that I could have done differently that would have let me beat the chapter, but I don't feel that I had any way of knowing about them in advance. I was subsequently able to beat the chapter, but only after I knew what the reinforcements were and when they would spawn. Do you disagree? Do you think that I made fundamental mistakes and that I should have known better? And not just that I could have known better but that I should have done. Maybe I could have figured out that since there weren't any turn-based reinforcements that there must be tripwire reinforcements instead, but I don't think that's something that is reasonable to expect of the player. I think it depends on the prevalence of the things that you're checking for. Like, in Conquest, you absolutely should be checking all enemies for skills but in Path of Radiance, that would be a waste of your time. There just aren't that many enemies with skills in PoR, and most of the ones that do exist either have marginal effects, low activation chances, or both. I can easily imagine that someone could play through the entirety of PoR without even realising that it's possible for enemies to have skills. So if you do get screwed over by an enemy skill activation, then yes, technically the information was there and you could have avoided it, but no I don't think it's reasonable to expect the player to keep on wasting their time checking for enemy skills after multiple chapters of the game showing you that there's no reason to. Similarly, yes, it is technically possible to see that there is a slight shimmer of a Dragon Vein behind Takumi in Chapter 10 of Conquest, but the game doesn't go out of its way to make sure that you actually see it, nor does it give you any reason in past chapters to actually think that you ought to check for it. A question for everyone: on the first time that you played Conquest -- assuming that you hadn't read spoilers, watched someone else play, or otherwise had foreknowledge of what was coming -- was it a surprise to you when Takumi first lowered the water, or had you seen the Dragon Vein or otherwise managed to predict what was going to happen? I'm assuming that the vast majority of people were caught unaware and that this wasn't something that we were actually supposed to see coming, but if a bunch of people tell me that they absolutely saw the Dragon Vein then I'll happily concede the point. I apologise. It was absolutely unfair of me to lump a bronze sword in with a pile of cabbages. If you need me for the next three hours, I'll be giving penance for my disrespect to the glory of bronze weapons. No mabush spawns or fog of war, certainly, but I don't agree that there aren't any gottem moments. I've already said why I consider both chapter 9 and chapter 10 to fall into this category. Reinforcements don't have to be ambush spawns to be unfair. Conversely, reinforcements that move on the turn they appear aren't necessarily unfair. There's a high correlation between same-turn reinforcements and unfairness, for sure, but they aren't necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. I also disagree that all info is visible to the player. Most information is, sure, but not all. Weapon triangle bonuses aren't, for instance, and they also change through the game as enemy weapon ranks get higher. I know that I lost a unit to doing the calculation for how much damage an enemy would do, determining that my unit would be left alive on one or two hitpoints, and then having them die because I hadn't accounted for the fact that weapon triangle advantage was now doing extra damage too. Are you telling me that was my fault? I'm not saying that Conquest isn't fairer than any other Fire Emblem game. It probably is. It's certainly fairer than nonsense chapters like Foreign Land and Sky or One Survives. My point is that "fairer than other FE games" is a low bar and that doesn't make it fair on an absolute level. I'll also add that there's a discrepancy between our DV uses and enemy DV uses in these chapters. All game, we have only ever been able to use each Dragon Vein once. Hinoka and Sakura get to use theirs indefinitely. I wasn't caught unaware by this in Conquest, but only because I'd played Birthright first and been caught unaware by it there. In Camilla's chapter, I was totally not expecting it when she used the same Dragon Vein on me for a second time. Otherwise, I would probably have been equally as surprised when Sakura/Hinoka did it.

[This is brought over from a thread on the General Fire Emblem subforum in an attempt not to derail the thread over there any more than it already has been. As a quick summary for anyone who doesn't want to go back and read that thread, the topic of discussion is how fair or unfair Conquest is. That is, to what extent does it include luck or require having already played the game or read spoilers in order to avoid various pitfalls. My position, essentially, is that it's not too bad for a Fire Emblem game, but that's a low bar and it still has a good number of problems.] To some extent, yes, but reinforcements tend to work differently from one FE game to the next meaning that you can't necessarily apply something learned in one game to another. For instance, in some games, you can stop reinforcements by standing on stairs but that doesn't work here. In some games, the only reinforcement trigger to worry about is turn count, so "I waited a long time and no reinforcements came" can reasonably be taken to mean that no reinforcements will come. Again, that isn't the case here. I'm not really sure which point you're trying to make here. Is it supposed to be something that you can't predict or soemthing that you can? If the former, then that's a reasonable design choice, but hardly in keeping with the spirit of being a fair game. If the latter, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a player to meticulously examine the terrain behind every enemy. Some people might manage to stumble across the Dragon Vein before it's activated, but I can only imagine they're a very small minority. If a level is only fair if you're paranoid and obsessive then that's as good as not being fair in the first place. If you're lucky, you can get stuff like stat boosters, eternal seals, or brave weapons. If you're unlucky, you can get a bronze sword and a pile of cabbages.

I think that Conquest has its fair share of "unfair" situations, by which I mean either they are heavily reliant on luck or they require you to have either played the game before or read spoilers if you're to avoid falling into various traps and gotcha style situations. Off the top of my head: The reinforcements in Chapter 9 (the one where you recruit Azura and Nyx) can easily spawn in a way that it's impossible to react to, depending on how your units are positioned when you trigger them. In Chapter 10 (the port defense chapter), there's no real way to predict that Takumi will use a Dragon Vein and that it will completely change the nature of the objective and invalidate certain strategies. Some of the map gimmicks aren't well explained, and failing to understand them can easily lead to death. I know I failed Chapter 19 (the kitsune chapter) when I first saw it, not because of any inherent difficulty in the mechanics but because I didn't understand what the mechanics were. The mess hall is very RNG dependent, especially if we're assuming no online. You have to worry about what your native ingredient is, who's on duty at the mess hall, what random stat gets boosted, and who in your party receives the buff. There is literally a lottery. For a game that's so heavily reliant on skills, it should be possible to look up which classes give which skills and what said skills do in game. There's basically no way to optimise a character if you don't know the skill system ahead of time. Speaking of skills, skill proc percentage chances are another layer of RNG to contend with, and are more pronounced in Fates than in most FE games. There's no way to see weapon triangle stats in game, which is absolutely a trap in a game that sometimes expects you to calculate every single point of damage. Enemy units have different rules for Dragon Veins than player units. We get single-use Dragon Veins, they get infinite-use Dragon Veins. To be clear, this isn't to say that I think that Conquest is a particularly unfair game. I don't. But that doesn't mean that it's a paragon of fairness either. It's probably better than most Fire Emblem games in this regard but that isn't saying much. It still has plenty of little things that can easily trip up the unwary.

Oh, for sure. I don't disagree with you at all. When I said that dragon was overpowered, I was only referring to the type itself when viewed in a vacuum. It has a lot of practical problems in gen I due to complete lack of moves and the fact that the only fully evolved dragon pokémon is also flying type giving it a quad weakness to ice in a generation where blizzard was also overpowered. The only way I'm claiming that it was overpowered is purely in terms of its type match-ups, nothing beyond that. I think one way to look at it is this: what would gen I have looked like if dragon type had as many different pokémon and as many different moves as other types do, while retaining the same resistances, vulnerabilities and effectiveness? It would be... a mess. Even more of a mess than gen I already is. If you think that lack of dragon types in Kanto is a problem -- which isn't an opinion I share, but is certainly one I can respect -- then the solution wouldn't be to add more dragon types. It would be to completely rebalance how the dragon type works (nerf its type match-ups and give it more moves) and then add more dragon types. Whereas for fire types in Sinnoh, the change really would be (and was) as simple as just throwing a few extra fire pokémon into the mix.

So, it's a little bit removed from your original topic, but let's go for "how could we change the typings of gen I pokémon to give better type diversity?" I'm going to assume that I can't change anything about a pokémon other than it's type (so, no changes to designs, names, move pools, etc.) and that we're only working with the types as they were available in gen I (no dark, steel or fairy; using gen I type chart). Bulbasaur, ivysaur, venusaur: all grass/poison -> grass. There's nothing in their design that really screams poison, and grass/poison is overused. Would also remove their weakness to psychic. Sandshrew, sandslash: both ground -> ground/normal. I wanted to have normal in at least one combination that isn't pure normal or normal/flying, and these seemed like good targets, both in terms of thematic fit and having a decent normal type movepool to take advantage of the STAB. Nidoqueen: poison/earth -> poison/ice. I have no idea what's particularly earthy about the nido lines, and wanted to change either -king or -queen to make them distinct from each other in a way other than colour. I decided to go for ice partly since it learns a couple good ice moves, partly to match the colour, and partly because we still don't have a real poison/ice pokémon. Venonat, venomoth: both bug/poison -> bug/psychic. For type diversity and to fit their move pools (even if it does make their names silly). Psyduck, golduck: both water -> water/psychic. Do I even need to explain this one? Doduo, dodrio: both normal/flying -> ground/flying. Kinda OP typing, honestly, but I wanted to reduce the number of normal/flying lines so I don't care. Gastly, haunter, gengar: all ghost/poison -> ghost. I don't see any good reason why these couldn't have been monotype ghost, unless someone thought that the psychic type was underpowered and needed more targets to victimise. Which they really didn't. Onix: rock/ground -> rock. There are way to many rock/ground pokémon, especially since it's a horrible type. Let's separate the two types a little, and also make Brock's ace be slightly less of a pushover for 2/3 of all players. Marowak: ground -> ground/fighting. I like this thematically, and also like pokémon that gain a second type on evolution. And while it's true that it doesn't learn many fighting moves, nor do other fighting types in gen I (eg poliwrath, hitmonchan). Rhyhorn, rhydon: both rock/ground -> rock. Similar reasoning to onix. Starmie: water/psychic -> water/electric. I don't think this is any worse a match in terms of how well it fits thematically or in terms of move pool, but it would move away from an overpopulated combination (with the slowpoke line and now the psyduck line) and also add a non-legendary dual-type electric pokémon. Vaporeon, jolteon, flareon: water, electric, fire -> normal/water, normal/electric, normal/fire respectively. This could have been the precedent for all future eeveelutions. Why not let them keep their normal typing when they evolve?

I think with Kanto, the problem isn't so much the abundance of certain individual types, but the abundance of specific type combinations. Grass/poison is one that comes to mind, for example. Kanto has 14 grass types across 6 evolutionary lines. Of those, fully 9 pokémon and 3 lines are grass/poison (the bulbasaur, oddish and bellsprout lines, opposed by the paras, exeggcute and tangela lines). Other type combinations that are overused (to varying extents) would be normal/flying, ground/rock, bug/poison, bug/flying, water/rock, water/ice. I mean, how many people playing Red and Blue thought that rock was immune to electric based on their experience with geodude, onix and rhyhorn? I get the feeling that for the first generation, they mostly came up with the pokémon designs and then tried to figure out what type or types would best represent what they'd come up with, whereas later on it seems more as if their deisgns are at least partly inspired by typings. That is, they have started to think -- to some extent -- of what typings would be interesting to include from a gameplya perspective and then came up with designs to fit the requirements. Fair comment, but on the other hand, fire starters were often weak early on in early generations. In Kanto, for instance, charmander was weak against both Brock and Misty, whereas bulbasaur was strong against both of those first two gyms. Of the first four generations, three of them had a rock type gym as their first gym. And probably the only reason why Johto didn't was that it didn't repeat any of the gym types from Kanto. I suppose you could say that fire types were always strong against early-game bug pokémon, except that early-game bugs were always weak enough that you really didn't need type advantage to deal with them and if you did rely too extensively on your fire starter against the bugs then that could put you in a bad position when you come to the rock gym. I don't think there's ever been a situation in which all of the starters were completely balanced against each other, but it's usually been fairly close with a few pluses and minuses each way.

At least in Generation I, I'm pretty sure that some of the weirdness was intentional. Balance between types wasn't really a thing back then, at least not in the way that we would understand it today. Look at dragon type back then: nothing resisted dragon and it was resistant to the majority of special-attacking types. It's basically an overpowered type, but deliberately so. It's not a type that you encounter often. Unless you go out of your way to grab a dratini from the game corner or fishing in the Safari Zone, then you as a player will never own a dragon type. And most likely, you aren't ever going to see a dragonite until you fight Lance, the pretend final boss of the game. Unless you already knew it was there, very few people were going to go to the trouble of getting a dratini and then go to the trouble of leveling it up to level 55, despite the slow xp gain. Basically, dragon was the overpowered type that went on the overpowered pokémon (second highest base stat total in teh game behind only mewtwo) that you (probably) only saw while fighting one of the game's major bosses. And if you wanted to use it yourself, then it was possible but you'd absolutely have to earn it. It was never intended to be experienced by the player in the same way that they experienced water types or flying types, for instance. (Of course, the whole thing where it was meant to be an intimidating boss was completely negated by the bug with the AI of Gen I which meant that all you had to do was send out a posion or fighting type and none of Lance's dragons would ever attack you, but that doesn't detract from the intention behind the type.) Ghost was similarly a weird type that didn't really work like other types. On the Gen I type chart, there were 6 damage immunities and 4 of them -- fully two thirds of the total -- involve ghost pokémon (with ghost being immune to normal and fighting, but normal and psychic being immune to ghost). The double immunity that ghost and normal have to each other is particularly weird. Nothing else like that existed at the time, and nothing along those lines has been added since. It was a rare type specifically because it was so weird. I'd say that generations I and II very much had this sort of design philosophy, generations V and onwards have had a more modern design philosophy where types have been supposed to be balanced against each other, and generations III and IV were something of a transition period between the two where they were committed to moving towards more balanced typings but were still feeling out how things were supposed to work. (Consider: doubles as a format was introduced in gen III, and the first VGC worlds were during gen IV.) So in all, I do think it's reasonable to hold Sinnoh to a different standard to Kanto, because they were aiming to do different things. I also think that one of the reasons that people home in on the fire types in Diamond and Pearl is that it imblanaces the starters so much. Fire, water and grass types are always in something of a unique position in Pokémon games because they are the starter types. The ideal has always been that you should be able to choose whichever starter you like best and that it shouldn't advantage or disadvantage you too much. The scarcity of fire types really skews the viability of the starters in a way that I think that people don't like. If you want a good fire type then you kinda have to choose chimchar; if you want good water or grass types then you have options other than just piplup and turtwig.

For me, the best way to improve is to pause for a moment every time you die, lose a unit, need to reset, etc. Ask yourself what went wrong and what you could have done differently to avoid the problem. There are lots of possibilities. I got overconfident. I didn't check enemy stats/weapons/skills. I was too passive and got overwhelmed. I was too aggressive and over-extended. I brought the wrong units to the map. My initial formation was poor. I chose the wrong unit for the job it was doing. And so on and so forth. If you figure out what you did wrong then you'll be able to avoid doing the exact same thing next time, and you'll also start to notice patterns. What are the sorts of mistakes that you make a lot? Once you figure that out, you can start to avoid that mistake before you even make it.

I don't have the time/energy/brainpower to respond to most of this, but I do want to touch on your question here. As I said before, I think that another purpose to limiting fishing is to protect the player from themself by making extremely degenerate and un-fun ways of playing impossible. If fishing were infinite then someone somewhere would fish themselves all the way up to maximum professor rank in chapter 1. If Divine Pulse were infinite then some people would start using it literally every time they missed an attack. Keeping it limited conveys to the player that they aren't supposed to be using it whenever they have anything even slightly bad happen, but only to recover from serious errors or to fundamentally change strategies.

I don't agree with this. Just because something is finite doesn't mean that you're supposed to push it to its limit. Let's look at some other examples from Fire Emblem: In Sacred Stones, it is possible to grind in the Tower and the Ruins for stat boosters. While there's no limit on how many of these you can receive, there is a limit on how many you can use, since units have stat caps. This does not imply that you're supposed to grind all your units up to max stats. In Shadows of Valentia, it's possible to over-level before reclassing, but only up to level 20. This doesn't imply that you're supposed to grind to level 20 before you ever promote. In Fates, the maximum forge level for a weapon is +7. This doesn't imply that you're supposed to grind for money and resources until you can get everyone a +7 weapon. In Three Houses, every battle lasts a maximum of 99 turns. This doesn't imply that you're supposed to use all of those turns doing broken weapon grinding. These things aren't limited because of balance (or if they are, then they are balanced ludicrously poorly). They are limited to protect an obsessive player from their own self-destructive behaviours. They're basically a kindly barkeep saying "I'm going to have to cut you off there, pal. How about I get you a glass of water instead?" It's obvious considerably less time-consuming to use every single piece of available bait in Three Houses than it is to get all characters a +7 forged weapon in Fates, but both cases are past the point where it stops being either fun or helpful for the vast majority of players. For most players, it doesn't matter whether they can have 40 pieces of bait per month, 400, or 4,000,000. In all cases, it's "more than I need".

My point isn't that increasing stats is good. If you increase your stats then that will make the game easier and will potentially allow you to succeed with strategies that would otherwise have failed. I do not dispute this. My point is that the game is sufficiently lenient and has sufficient margin for error that it was never necessary to rely on these borderline strategies in the first place. For instance it is absolutely possible that giving +1 speed to all your units might allow Annette to reach the speed breakpoint to allow her to double enemy swordmasters, and this might allow her to secure a one turn kill that she otherwise wouldn't have been able to hit. However, this is completely irrelevant if you could instead secure a one turn kill with Felix or kill the unit by attacking with both Annette and Mercedes or use a gambit to disable the swordmaster and then kill him next round. In this case, having the extra point of speed isn't really helping you beat the level; it's only giving you more options for how you do so. (I also think that it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to compare Rallies to the boosts from cooking, given that Rallies give a stat boost that is 4 times as large. Also, if we're specifically talking Rally Charm then it's worth noting that the food buff that gives charm doesn't actually require fishing.)

That's fair. I don't really think of Three Houses as being a resource management game, but if that's the lens that you're viewing it through, then yeah, it's a pretty lousy one. I guess I think of the monastery parts of the game as being more like a life sim. There are some basic bare-bones minigames in there, but they're pretty straightforward and -- for me at least -- not really the point. I view the monastery as primarily being aboutstory. Or not even that; I think of it as primarily about characters. Yeah, there are some basic minigames there too but they're not why I'm there. This somewhat gets into questions of authorial intent, which always tend to get messy. I'm not sure I'd agree that it's presented to the player as being a resource management system, because that's not how it came across to me. I play both resource management sims (eg Banished, Surviving Mars) and raising sims (eg Long Live The Queen, Growing Up), and the monastery portions of the game came across as much more akin to the latter than the former to me. I think it is fair to say that if the monastery was intended as a resource management system then it didn't really succeed at that; it's also fair to say that if it wasn't intended that way but came across that way then there was a failure to communicate the intent behind the game. Yes, it gets you resources that you can't get from anywhere else, but my point is that you don't actually need those resources. You need to fish if you want to be able to cook the +speed meal, but you don't actually need to be able to cook the plus speed meal. You can get through the game perfectly fine without it. You can get through the game perfectly fine without hitting professor rank A by chapter 9. And sure, there's an argument that game devs should protect players from themselves, but that only goes so far. It's also a player's responsibility not to play in ridiculous anti-fun ways. If you choose not to fish, all you are doing is making the game slightly harder. You're not locking yourself off from any content. There aren't any characters that you can only recruit if you fish, any chapters that you can only play if you fish or any support conversations you can only view if you fish. Just a slight increase in difficulty. For a player who is struggling to make it through the game (on whatever difficulty settings or self-imposed challenges they're playing by) then I can certainly see why they might feel that they absolutely had to fish and might resent that fact, but I certainly don't see that Alastor is struggling in his currecnt play through. First, if you find the fishing minigame fun then you absolutely should play it as much as you want to. You're not the only person who finds it fun. I have a friend who typically hates basically every fishing minigame in every game ever, but for some reason actually enjoys the one in Three Houses. There's no accounting for taste. If you enjoy it, then that's great! It's there to be enjoyed. The point that I'm trying to make is that people who don't enjoy it really shouldn't feel compelled to do it anyway. As for the rest of your comment, well, obvious statement is obvious, but: Fire Emblem is not Pokémon. And perhaps even more to the point, single-player Fire Emblem is not competitive Pokémon. In competitive games, it makes sense to eke out every tiny advantage that you can because your opponent is probably doing the same. Games can and do come down to absolutely razor thin margins. Single player games don't work like that. The challenges that you face are always going to be at the same predictable level, and once you've surpassed that level, you are going to win. Having an extra point of speed might occasionally allow Alastor to use strategies that he wouldn't be able to, but it isn't going to alter the final result. He's going to beat the game either way. If you want to use a Pokémon analogy, let me ask you this: do you need to breed a full team of pokémon with perfect IVs in order to beat the Elite Four? No, of course you don't, because the Elite Four just aren't that difficult. If you built a perfect competitive-viable team, grinded them all to level 100 and then took them to the Elite Four then you'd get nothing but a big anticlimactic letdown.

All you're really demonstrating, though, is that if you deliberately play the game in a way that isn't fun then the game won't be fun to play. Which is true but hardly something that needed a demonstration. Pretty much any game can be played in a way that stops being fun if you really put your mind to it. And OK, so you do a lot of cooking together, but do you really need the bullheads? Is it really that imperative that you have that extra point or two of speed? If you didn't have it, then would any of the upcoming maps become so much harder that you wouldn't be able to get through them? Or so hard that they'd be frustratingly difficult to get through to the point where you'd have less fun due to how hard they were?

OK, sure, but... why? It's not as if doing all that fishing is meaningfully increasing your chance of beating the game. It's not as if you needed to do more fishing to decide how you feel about it. It's definitely not that you're doing it because you enjoy it. So why are you doing it?

I think that there needed to be some sort of display of divine power from Sothis very close to the beginning of the game, though it needn't necessarily have been time rewinding. But if you just completely removed the time powers from the script and didn't replace them with anything else then I don't think that Sothis's story would have worked. Having a big show of power right at the start shows both Byleth and the player that this isn't just some weird halucination. It's something real and it's powerful. I think that was necessary for later events (Sothis being revealed as the name of the Goddess, Sothis merging with Byleth to escape from the void) to make sense and not feel like they came completely out of nowhere.

Well, there's a lot of a difference between drawing inspiration from multiple different characters as compared to just a single character. If a character is drawing inspiration from King Arthur, Robin Hood, Peter Pan and Legolas then they aren't really an expy of any of them. They become their own thing. Pretty much any creative work is going to be inspired by multiple other works. The greater the proportion of inspiration that comes from a single source, the more likely it is that the character is going to be creatively lazy and/or legally dubious. There's also a big difference between copying a folk tale or work that's in the public domain (eg Robin Hood, Journey to the West) and copying a character whose IP is owned by a corporation that is notoriously protective of said IP. Artistically, there's little difference between ripping off Robin Hood and ripping off Mario; legally, there is. It's also worth noting that while a lot of characters that are straight rip-offs of other characters do exist, many of them have been created by companies who have legal teams who can advise them on exactly how close to the line they can get before reaching the point where they start infringing on trademarks or copyrights. And sometimes they end up going to court anyway, like the time Universal tried to sue Nintendo because of how similar Donkey Kong is to King Kong. You seem to have some sort of a sense that what you're doing is somewhere close to the line of what is and isn't acceptable. I'm assuming that's why you were asking about copyright in the first place. And if you're anywhere in that vicinity, your only options are to get proper legal advice or to just risk it. Personal anecdotes and pages on TVTropes are fine for creative advise, but they're worthless when it comes to questions of exactly what is and is not copyright. My advice, for whatever little it's worth, would be to give up on any idea of commercialising your project. Once money starts changing hands, that just opens up multiple different cans of worms that you almost certainly don't want to deal with. If you keep it as a hobby project then you can much more easily just focus on the creative and artistic side of things and not worry about the legal side. (Which isn't to say that you would be completely protected from legal consequences if it's a hobby project. You wouldn't be. IP infringement is still IP infringement. But it would decrease the risk of things going bad and make it a whole lot easier to extricate yourself from if they did.)

Honestly, if you're hoping to turn this into a commercial project or make money off it in any way (for instance, through Kickstarter) then you really need to go and see an actual real lawyer about it rather than just a bunch of random Fire Emblem fans on the Internet. Partly because laws and requirement can be different for commercial use compared to personal use, but also because once you start taking people's money then you have a burden of responsibility to them and you need to be able to say with complete confidence that you know you aren't going to have to take down the entire project due to legal issues. On the other hand, if it's just going to be a small hobbyist project that you're doing for fun then you can probably get away with doing whatever you want. Nintendo probably won't see your project and if they do then it will probably be too small for them to care about it and even if they do then they will probably just demand that you take it rather than trying to sue you for it (and if they do then you absolutely just take it down immediately and without question regardless of whether you think you are legally in the right because you absolutely do not want to be in a legal battle with a huge multinational corporation). And if you aren't satisfied with all those probablies and want a more definitive answer, then you're back to the point where you need to get advice from a lawyer. Intellectual property law is incredibly complicated, and if you find someone randomly on the Internet who says they can give you a simple yet definitive answer then they're either lying to you or they're deluded.

The best version of an ironman is the one that you think you will have most fun with. There isn't a Central Ironman Committee that determines a single codified set of rules that everyone must adhere to if they want it to be a "true" ironman. I do think that using the Ashen Wolves would make the game a little easier than not using them, though. Partially because they're good units, but mainly because they're extra bodies and are also free to recruit. If you're really keen on doing the hardest possible ironman then I'd probably say not to use them, but if using them seems like more fun than not, then I'd say to use them.

The part that really interests me here is the 50% chance of success that you gave. Personally, if a strategy had a 50% chance of success then I'd consider it a wildly risky strategy. If you have a 50% success chance on every chapter, then that means that you will have to reset an average of once per chapter. If we assume a game with 25 chapters, then that would means that we'd expect to reset 25 times and have less than a 1 in 30 million chance of getting through the game without any resets at all. For comparison, if we want to have a 50% chance of getting through the full game without any resets, then we would need approximately a 97.3% success rate for any given chapter. This is probably more in line with how I generally tend to play (or at least, with what I aim for; I often end up with lower success chances because I make mistakes). I don't mind if I have to reset once or twice due to RNG over the course of a game, but if we get to the point where I'm having to reset repeatedly only to do the same thing and hope that I have better luck next time, then I'm going to stop having fun. None of which is to say that my way of doing it is the one true correct way, of course. Different people are going to have different tolerances for what level of RNG they're willing to accept. Some people will prefer a quick and elegant solution with a 50% success rate while some will prefer a more methodical approach with a 97% success rate. And still others aren't willing to accept anything short of a 100% success rate. None of these approaches are inherently superior to the others but they will yield different answers for tier lists or for "worst unit" discussions. I mean, that's pretty much the point of this conversation, no? I'm not going to single-handedly come up with a method of ranking Fire Emblem characters that is satisfying to everyone. If there's any way for us to collectively come up with something better than what we already have then we're going to need to discuss it and have different people talk about what they like and dislike about different ways of ranking units. I think that looking it in terms of drafting has a problem in that it over-values units who are mediocre performers in important niches. Consider, for instance, a mediocre healer. You might be very happy to be able to draft them since even a mediocre healer is much better to have than no healer at all. However, outside of the context of a draft they might easily be a unit who you would normally never use if there were a couple of other healers available who were better. The same could be true for characters in chapters with very few deployment options (eg, Radiant Dawn 2-1) except that my understanding is that most drafts tend to include those characters for free. But then that brings up another problem if the ranking of a unit is dependent on the exact rules of a draft. I think that if I had to come up with a universal grading method, I would use a combination of "how much harder would the game be if this unit didn't exist?" and "how much harder would the game be if this unit were force-deployed for every chapter they are available?" Or maybe I would consider each metric on a chapter-by-chapter basis and then take an average. However, fundamentally, I don't really believe that it is possible to create a single grading system that covers all units and all ways of playing the game. For instance, I think that a tier list for a draft should be different from a tier list for an ironman run should be different from a tier list intended for people who have never played Fire Emblem before and are struggling through a casual playthrough on the easiest difficulty level. These different ways of playing the game will value different qualities in a unit and I think that we are better off acknowledging that. It would be much more helpful to have multiple tier lists (eg "drafting tier list", "iron man lunatic tier list", "new player tier list", etc.) than a single tier list; it is better to specify a worst unit for a specific purpose than to try to state a single worst overall unit. Sure, but there's a lot of space in between "no grinding" and "infinite grinding". If a unit requires that you baby them and field them kills for a couple of maps after which they become incredibly strong, then that's substantially different from a unit that requires twenty levels of dedicated grinding and multiple stat boosters to reach the point where they're even competitive with other units.