Have been reading for the past week or so and i think a good guideline would be to play the difficulty that says something like recommended for Fire Emblem series veterans and avoid any that require you to beat the game at least once to unlock if they are giving bad recommendations for what are good difficulties to play that is on the game.
Also if you are still looking for ways to put more weight on game-play for scoring it you could split ironmanability in to 2 categories 1 the honor/blind friendliness which would cover not just ambush reinforcements but also getting one shot out of fog of war or any major reinforcement waves that completely change the map on an individual map basis but also on a larger scale of are there trap chars that seem like are worth using when you get them but end up just being xp wastes or do important weapons suddenly stop being sold in shops without warning or are sub objectives hard to tell identify or unclear map gimmicks. Then have a 2nd category that focus on just ironmanability after you have beaten a game 1 or 2 times and focuses on what happens if you make mistake does someone just get oneshot or do they take 60%-80% of their hp and you have to then scramble to to adjust to that as well as how deep are is your bench to take losses or just deep enough that you adjust your army by a char or 3 to adjust to your play style or how long/hard does it take to get some one off the bench and able to help out with out babying them and are there a bunch of one offs/very rare items and weapons that you have on active team most of the time that you really want to keep and someone dieing while holding them is a disaster.
Edit: for honor/blindness how clear are recruitments and how consistent are they and how often do you of needed to do something on 1 or more earlier levels to get someone on a later level and for ironman how easy is it to lose someone just to bad luck because of a miss/unluckly sub 10% crit that you cant do anything about.
Rare
