Uscari

That's a good summary for it. RD was more unique but PoR was better executed. I like that thieves got 1-2 range daggers, but I'm not so sure about crossbows or windedges. I prefer to balance units around accentuating their strengths rather than compensating for their weaknesses. Make sword masters certified boss killers and make archers the player phase delete button in your group. I'm also not a fan of the swapping around of the skills. One of the great things about PoR is that if the stats or supports didn't make a unit competitive with the alternatives, the skills did. I did however like how inherent skills took up 0 capacity, I wish that was in PoR (especially for Nephenee because Luna + Wrath could have been a really cool combo in that game) True, being able to transform instantly would have honestly made them so much better. I also agree that Mordecai is the best non-royal laguz in PoR (Aside from Reyson - who technically is a royal I guess?) for his availability, tankiness, movement, and smite. He also isn't a bad tank when trained due to his very high hp growth and abundant defense building supports. I used him in one of my maniac mode ironmans to clear clash because he had infinite use weaponry. That's a pretty cool idea. I actually found one of the few niches that Micaiah had in Part 1 of RD was having the accuracy to occasionally fight up ledges. Her skill bases, accurate weaponry, and support with Sothe would give her like nearly 70-80 hit with good biorhythm when fighting from below. Balancing mages to ignore terrain is a pretty cool way to give them even more utility/versatility than before. It was criminal reducing the general mage speed cap to 32, when in PoR it was 28, only 2 points less than sword masters.

You could do an ironman run where you never reload a save, or even a "super ironman" run, where you restart the playthrough if you lose/fail to recruit any unit.

Hello again, A couple weeks ago I made a topic about how I feel Path of Radiance was superior to Radiant Dawn, fresh after being both games several times on all difficulties. Although I still agree with that sentiment, I also wanted to make a topic showing some love for the aspects of Radiant Dawn that I felt were a genuine improvement over Path of Radiance, making it a worthy successor regardless of which Tellius game you think is better. So here's my list: 1. Quality of Life Radiant Dawn has faster animations, access to no animations, access to battle forecast during fight animations, healthbars, multiple windows for seeing health and experience. You get access to that straight from the start. You also have the ability to direct yellow units after your leader has moved, which I hated that I couldn't do in PoR. You have an attack speed indicator on your character cards. The shop inventory is also consistent and won't change from chapter to chapter, so you don't have to look up when you have access to things and stock up ahead of time. Overall, while I wouldn't say the game as a whole is more polished than PoR, I would say it is noticeably more polished in this area. 2. Laguz Changes Although the caps and experience gain of laguz and the introduction of the royals largely make most of these points moot, I do want to point out that fundamentally I prefer the laguz mechanics in RD more than that of PoR. The fact that stats double when transforming instead of increasing by set amounts is much better suited for a long game with lots of room to grow because with set amounts you end up inevitably either making the laguz too strong in the early game or making them too weak in the lategame. I also like that you can somewhat revert and shift at will rather than wait for the gauge to fill up and empty, which makes using laguz much less clunky. I like that the game introduces olivi grass to allow for laguz to stay up front for longer. I like that bird laguz have canto. With better individual unit balancing I think laguz could have been much more relevant in RD due to these mechanics. 3. +1 range for Marksmen I love this change, and honestly I think it should expanded in all FE games to have inherent 2-3 range archers at Tier 1. I felt in PoR that archers were pretty much useless due to the fact that they were pretty much mages with no 1 range, no staff utility, and lower damage really only at the benefit of slightly higher accuracy and durability. Having access to 3 range in my opinion makes archers much more threatening and relevant, particularly when paired with good map design. They'll never be enemy phase units, but that +1 range gives so many more options in player phase. 4. Ledges This was a really cool mechanic that added some depth to various maps in RD. It made ranged units like Archers and Mages capable of fighting more safely on enemy phase and incentivized the player to make a calculated decision on where to move their units when ascending elevation. My only critique is that on some maps when defending it could be abused to just stall enemies indefinitely and there really wasn't much counterplay if you got your units in position. I would maybe consider adjusting it so that there is an opportunity for enemies to move up even if you're blocking the ledge, but at a very steep cost to movement. 5. Tripple Effective Damage PoR's "effective weapons" were kind of a joke and never really found any use due to only being double effective. RD brings in 3x effective weapons which really forces the player to respect when enemies are equipped with them. It also just feels more fun to use these on a tough opponent and contributes to the overall more player phase focused gameplay of RD as opposed to PoR. 6. 3D Visuals Honestly, I don't like most of the 2D artstyle in RD and find that the character portraits look kind of lifeless compared to PoR, but the 3D presentation saw a huge improvement. Playing both games I find that the one created only 2 years later has aged much better visually in terms of the in-game animations and models compared to PoR. Yes it was done on slightly stronger hardware than PoR, but RD also artistically improved the maps, the animations, and the models noticeably over PoR. 7. Player Phase Oriented Combat I touched on this earlier but I think it's worth expanding on. Although RD has its fair share of squatting on a choke and letting waves of enemies crash into your wall one enemy phase, it does seem to balance the maps somewhat more in favor of encouraging the player to be more proactive in securing loot/objectives. Although I feel PoR compensates for being too enemy phase heavy by having a resource management metagame, I am willing to acknowledge that PoR would have benefited from more maps where the player is encouraged to be aggressive and use all units to secure decisive kills on player phase. There are probably some other notable improvements I should mention but these are the ones that come to mind for me right now. I might add some more later.

That example was actually shared earlier in the thread and they use the forge crit underflow glitch, so I don't take much stock in this example. That is pretty much the argument I am making. Both games do to some extent have this problem, but RD is almost built on this design while in PoR it is the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of trainee units in PoR do turn out noticeably better than their pre-promoted counterparts when trained. In RD there is either an insignificant difference, no real difference, or even in some cases actually turn out worse than the non-trainees. I guess this becomes a matter of preference. I don't want to take anything away from the joy you felt in raising a meme-tier unit to accomplish something outlandish, but I just prefer balanced units over this particular type of accomplishment.

Tormod has celerity, a decent strength growth (allows for potentially doubling with siege tomes), and a double fire support with Reyson, which makes him a beast with investment. Illyana is the weakest of the non-prepromote mages, but even she comes with shade and has pretty good supports with Gatrie and Mordecai, two units that actually can be decent in Maniac Mode. The non-prepromote cavalies in PoR pretty much are all better statistically than the prepromoted ones you get when trained. You might think these advantages don't matter, but I'm coming from the perspective of someone who played PoR Maniac Mode in an Ironman, and I found that the differences did matter. They probably don't matter in NA PoR in Hard Mode, but I found them pretty noticeable in Maniac. Lucia and Stefan are both prepromoted units and not growth units so for me it's not that relevant which one is better in this discussion. I agree Stefan is better but I will point out that his abysmal luck is a liability in any playthrough without Ashera Icons. Geoffrey is absolutely NOT on par with the other paladins you train in the game. He's got good defense but that's about it, his speed, damage output, accuracy, and weapons are sub-par compared to the growth paladins. His biggest utility is plugging a chokepoint and 1-rounding Wyvern Lords in player phase with a forged silver bow, which is pretty nice, but nothing like what Oscar, Kieran, Makalov, or even Astrid can accomplish. Callil actually does not suck in PoR, and I think is actually the strongest prepromote you get in the game. Her stats are very comparable to Tormod when trained and comes with far better bases. The trade-off though is no celerity, worse supports, and no staff. Bastian (and Lucia) is hot garbage but that's more of an issue specifically with him than the game as a whole. But even with their worse endgame potential, these prepromoted do have a strategic reason to be used, which is they cost less to invest in, and you still get serviceable alternatives without syphoning experience for other archetypes you want to train. They also are straight up there if you are doing an Ironman run and lost one of the better units earlier on. I can't say the same about RD, because the high level units that join your group generally have the same endgame potential as the ones that needed to grow, because everyone hits their caps. There are some exceptions, like how Fiona and Astrid when trained are better than most of the other paladins, but it doesn't even matter because you get royals and you don't need them to be better than your other paladins, you just need 1-2 range canto units that can take a hit from magic spirits on enemy phase while you get your royals in position.

It's clever that RD's story structure lends itself to using everyone in some capacity, and I like that about the game. But there's virtually no incentive to actually train most units that don't start out excellent. Why bother training any of the armor knights when you can just use Harr? Why bother training Rolf if you can just use Shinon? Why bother training Edward if you can just use Zihark? Again and again this dynamic plays out throughout the game. Yes you technically use what is in front of you, but any unit that isn't good at the start is relegated to being largely for utility, and training them confers no noticeable long-term benefit for a much longer time/resource investment. I mean building the team with the strongest stats/skills/supports by the endgame. PoR rewards you much more for training growth units because there are very noticeable differences in their endgame potential compared to most prepromoted units. In PoR, Harr is way worse than Jill. Titania is way worse than Oscar. Bastian is way worse than Soren. The prepromoted units you get in this game are largely there to save you resources that you otherwise needed to invest in growth units. You make a conscious sacrifice to trade the strength of that particular unit to give to another one. RD doesn't really do this, because all of your units pretty much hit their relevant caps regardless of how good they were when they started. Different options is fun but you only take advantage of different options when there is a real trade-off to choosing them. It's not as fun if you aren't making a strategic decision by choosing a different option. Well for one thing, it's a pitfall for new players to have deliberately bad units that aren't remotely worth training to get trapped in. But more fundamentally, sure in a large roster it doesn't hurt your experience that you have no incentive to train them, but if the developers bothered to add a unit into the game, wouldn't it have helped your experience if they made them worth using? From what I can tell from my limited experience in Fire Emblem, this franchise is character-oriented, so if you're going to add a character with their own story, motivations, and abilities, why tease the player with the option to train them but make them totally inaccessible in terms of training? Sure I guess it's a feature for challenge runs, but surely the player can come up with any variety of ways to do a challenge run without ruining the basic viability of the units. I'll never get the charm of funny-bad units. There's way more reason to bring PoR units up to speed because they're actually available to do so, plus they have supports that are distinct to them, and even their own skills. Taking the example of Rolf vs Lyre, at least Rolf has the niche of being statistically the best foot archer in the game when trained, has access to the triangle attack, can use Deadeye/Longbow. It doesn't redeem him at all but at least he has some kind of niche. Lyre meanwhile has literally nothing going for her, and is inferior to Ranulf in every way except for her resistance stat, which is pretty much irrelevant because she is locked to 1-range. It's much more interesting to train Rolf than to train Lyre. This is an extreme example, but you can find other examples throughout the cast of both games, where there actually is a reason to train even the worst units in PoR, while there is pretty much no reason to train the worse units in RD.

The thing is though that I genuinely do think PoR is better than RD, at least based on the metrics that I think should matter. It's different from me saying that two games are equal, but I just personally prefer one over the other. I think PoR beats RD in a variety of metrics that in my judgement are the most important. I also don't find the words "discussion" and "argument" to be mutually exclusive. I don't find malice in having an argument, which I consider synonymous with debate, a contest of ideas. It might be regarded as a competitive discussion, but I want to make clear I'm not judging anyone on this thread for disagreeing with me or implying that their taste is bad because they think RD is better. But maybe that's just a cultural thing I'm not accustomed to yet. RD Hard Mode's early game is definitely harder than PoR Maniac's early game, but in my experience it still to a lesser degree revolved around relying on Sothe/Volug for 50% of everything, although they are not as well equipped as Titania to deal with them. I also found that strats that worked in Hard Mode in PoR don't work as well on Maniac, I found that relying on cavs with forged handaxes alone just wouldn't cut it against the bulk of enemies, and you needed to actually train believe it or not armor knights and sages to get through some parts of the game. I agree with that, and that a game can still be difficult even if you aren't incentivized to train a lot of growth units. RD is one of those games that is difficult even if you use the best units, but I just don't think it's good design to rely too heavily on the units that aren't investment units. Maybe it was a bit strong language for me to say Maniac Mode "required" training a bunch of growth units. I still think you are strongly rewarded for building the best team possible, but I'll take your point that you aren't "required" to do that. Maniac Mode is kind of more competitive for some units and less for others. Swordmasters and Archers are kind of worthless in Maniac (they aren't very good in Hard Mode either), but Armor Knights, Fighters, and Mages are actually quite good in Maniac because of their high caps. It is true that PoR does have stronger mounts than RD, but the problem is that even if the classes in principle are more balanced in RD, the individual units are not. There is a select number of units in RD that you are gimping yourself not to use to a degree that isn't true in PoR. The weaknesses of mounted unit caps in RD are compensated for by these really good units with high caps (Harr, Jill, Laguz Royals), so you still end up favoring the mounted units for the utility they bring even if their caps are bit more restrained than PoR.

I must admit I did watch this guy's video on clash and was thoroughly impressed that he found a theoretical way to clear it. But this is hardly an organic run. He had to use hundreds, if not thousands of save states to get the perfect RNG needed to clear some of these maps. Keep in mind he couldn't have used save states without the use of an emulator, which is not an original feature. I wouldn't necessarily call it cheating the way I would with forge glitch, because this could in some universe happen without loading save states, but it's not really organic or instructive in a comparison of the difficulty of these games. Meanwhile there's no doubt in my mind that you could clear RD Hard Mode in a 0% growths Ironman, which is statistically impossible in PoR Maniac.

Have they done it without abusing the crit forge underflow glitch? Because to me, that's basically cheating. From my point of view, sometimes more freedom is actually less freedom in terms of gameplay decision making. Not forcing the player to make hard choices can sometimes lead to them never exploring other aspects of the game that are available to them because they have no incentive to. One of the main sources of replay ability for me in PoR was building my team around support relationships, and it kept each playthrough fresh because you can test how units work together as well as individually. To a degree you can do this in Radiant Dawn because of the unique structure of the game, but it's much less effective in this respect. Maybe it's because I'm new to Fire Emblem as a franchise, but I don't really see the charm or appeal in having "funny-bad" units. I don't see the point in adding a playable unit to the game if they aren't designed to compete with other units. I feel like even if some characters are worse than others, which is inevitable, there should at least be a solid niche for every unit so that the player has an incentive to try actually using them, instead of just for the memes. I like that PoR has a more competitive roster than RD, with a larger variety of team compositions that are comparable in viability. To me it's a failure of balance for a game to have units that you have no strategic incentive to invest in. In fairness, what else would this topic be? It's not exactly something you can be objective about. I honestly found that RD Hard Mode wasn't that much harder than RD Normal Mode. The enemies are almost totally the same and despite cutting the experience available I still had more than enough to cap out the units I needed to cap out. The only part that was noticeably more difficult were the DB chapters, but it didn't take long for me to figure out what strategies I needed to clear them. Even the Part 3 DB chapters mostly devolved into turtling a choke or two with any unit that doesn't get 1-rounded until it was over. That doesn't mean RD Hard Mode isn't hard, it is a difficult game, but I find PoR Maniac Mode has a much more challenging endgame simply due to the fact the game gives you much weaker units relative to what you're up against.

I just completed an ironman run of Hard Mode and I have to say that Harr is just undeniably easily the best for the playthrough as a whole. He carried both of his chapters in part 2, he pretty much solos every chapter he is in for Part 3, and he still was a force in Part 4. He eventually fell off in the last two stages of the tower because of his low speed and res but who cares he hard carried everything else. Using him is like doing a playable cutscene. Harr is just totally cracked in this game and I don't know what the devs were thinking when they removed bows effective damage against Wyverns along with nerfing thunder magic.

I don't want to respond to everything at once because I don't want to make the topic inaccessible for future commenters, I'll respond to things that stick out to me every once in awhile. I think it's an odd take to think that 3 support conversations in PoR is as far as character relationships can go, that there's nothing else to explore, and if that's really a concern you can just give them different pairings in RD. I'm not saying every character gets unique support conversations with every other character, I'm saying give them like 3-5 supports like in PoR. Most of them can be for folks they join with in their respective part, but throw one in there for the late game. Along with some structural changes to make room for this it would have added so much to the story, worldbuilding, replayability, and general entertainment of the game to have personalized supports with the units you deploy. Having everyone support with everyone hurts the personality of the game and makes individual units much less distinct from one another. I highly recommend trying out Maniac Mode because it honestly fixes the biggest problem with PoR, which is the difficulty. NA PoR is too easy to fully make use of its stellar mechanics, but Maniac Mode really shines a big spotlight on these so you really get a full appreciation of how well designed PoR is. It is true that they crank up the enemy HP, but it also adds more enemies, they are faster and stronger, promoted earlier, and in even some cases have skills despite being generic enemies. I personally think the critique that Maniac Mode is damage sponge hell is overblown. Also forging costs twice as much in japanese PoR and you chew through a lot more weapon uses in Maniac Mode so money/resources are actually kind of tight, so much that it actually creates a whole new resource management metagame which is very satisfying. I started gamecube collecting after I got nostalgic of my childhood, and found out that PoR was a rare as well as highly valuable commodity. I never played an FE game before and wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and when I got it I loved it so much it became my favorite gamecube game. After PoR I obviously had to try RD and honestly I really do like both games despite the focus of this thread. Great introduction to the series. Thank you, I appreciate that. I'm not here to hate on RD. I respect the ambition and as I noted it really did do some unique/brave changes from PoR. I plan to make another thread highlighting these. I just feel like PoR doesn't get enough credit compared to RD and wanted to explain why I think PoR is better. This is a fair point, and I agree to an extent. It does from a narrative standpoint reinforce the context of the game to have extreme conditions. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy overcoming impossible odds as the Dawn Brigade, or that I didn't get have fun going on a powertrip using the Laguz Royals. I think my overall critique here is that they just go too far with it and what starts out as a cool novelty quickly becomes an annoyance, particularly on subsequent playthroughs where I feel like I'm experiencing the same arc again and again no matter who I train. I understand he wanted to beat his master, but why kill him? I feel like the game really did not give any particular justification for why this couldn't have been a friendly duel instead of a fight to the death. It would have been so much better if the BK had any actual motivation for killing Greil.

So I've beaten Path of Radiance on every difficulty including Maniac Mode, and I've now beaten Radiant Dawn now on all 3 difficulties. After extensive play of both games, I have come to the conclusion that Path of Radiance is superior. I want to clarify that I really like Radiant Dawn and think it's a solid game. It has a lot of features that I appreciate and it did made several notable improvements over Path of Radiance. I also want to point out that as of today, PoR and RD are the only FE games I have played up to this point. So for me this topic is essentially a list of reasons why Path of Radiance in my opinion is better. I will likely make another topic highlighting the things I thought RD did better than PoR, but this is purely for what PoR does better than RD, and I think the downsides outweigh the improvements. 1. No Fixed Mode Why get rid of this feature? It was one of my favorite things about PoR and it's so great having access to a playthrough where units perform consistent with their averages. It helps contextualize the game design and critically it eliminated the risk of getting stat screwed with bad random levels. Admittedly RD patches the 2nd part up with BEXP mechanics and 3rd tier promotions but those come with their own problems I'll point out later. 2. Supports Once again PoR had an amazing way to do supports and RD just ruined it for no apparent reason. PoR built supports based on how many maps two units would be deployed on, rather than an arbitrary point system that incentivizes tedious grinding which disrupts the gameplay, which RD for some reason adopted. In addition, PoR had personalized, well written, and entertaining support conversations specific to the characters we got acquainted with. RD pretty much tore apart that system in favor of boring generic support conversations, and for some reason thought it made sense to add an obnoxious converse button to your action menu in battle, which more often than not only ends up screwing over the player who only wanted to check a battle forecast but instead was forced to commit to a move they weren't sure about. I don't even like how the support affinities round up instead of down, because once again it just dilutes the nuance of pairing various affinities together. Also did Earth really need to give 7.5 avoid? Who looked at PoR and thought 5 needed a buff to 7.5? It was already very strong. 3. Story I understand that RD was trying to be ambitious, but the conflict throughout the game felt contrived and random. The motivations of the characters weren't fleshed out sufficiently, and silly resolutions were made to various plot elements. The Blood Pact is rightfully criticized in my opinion for sacrificing any notion of logic or continuity in the name of tying up loose ends. The Black Knight's character was also ruined when it was revealed that he killed a man in cold blood just because he wanted to beat his master. There are various other issues but the point is that Path of Radiance executed its' story so much better. While it was more generic/conventional, the villain was a lot more compelling, the main character was much better developed, and there was just less nonsense. 4. Availability A lot of people criticize RD for the availability of units, and I agree with this. Although I actually like how RD structured the game in a unique way with multiple groups and parts, I think they went too far with it and should have given more time for the player to be able to choose among all their units. Parts 1-3 should have had more similar lengths rather than Part 3 dragging on forever and Part 2 being so short. Even if the parts stayed the same, we shouldn't have units that are only available for like 4 chapters out of 43. I like to see what all units are capable of by the endgame and RD makes it so that some units are virtually impossible to train for the end without insane levels of favoritism/babying. PoR has its fair share of units that require this too but the structure of the game lends itself much better to having all units being trainable, and many of them being available for the bulk of the game. 5. Balance RD is cracked when it comes to balance. In Part 1 you have a bunch of really weak units that are up against lots of enemies that are over leveled. In Part 2 it's almost a playable cutscene with the amount of strong promoted units you get, particularly Harr who practically solo's this game up until the Tower. In Part 3 it's mostly like Part 2 except there are 3 chapters where your weak units from Part 1 are at an even greater disadvantage. In Part 4 everything that happened before can pretty much get thrown out the window because you get Laguz Royals that hard carry the rest of the game. In the endgame you can bring no less than 4 of these god-tier units to trivialize the end. Not only do they overshadow your beorc units, but they pretty much invalidate any reason to train laguz that aren't them since they are stronger and never have to worry about transformation gauge. PoR meanwhile is a far more consistent experience, even in Maniac Mode where it gets pretty nuts. Your enemies scale with the level of your units much more consistently and generally your recruits aren't too underleveled or overleveled. You don't generally have to worry about recruiting units that deal litterally deal 0 damage at base, get doubled, and can't hit anything the way you do in RD. You only pick 1 laguz royal at the very end, almost purely to help you finish off the boss, rather than carry the entire endgame. 6. Game Over Conditions RD loves to throw stupid gameover conditions at the player, particularly it loves to give you a gameover if a special green unit dies, even in some cases under circumstances you have virtually no control over. I can understand how in some cases this can encourage a player to be more aggressive/creative, but in this game it generally just results in losing the map due to random nonsense like a green unit committing suicide by running into danger unequipped. PoR meanwhile keeps the control in the hands of the player, and doesn't have any gameover conditions based on the death of a green unit. 7. Hardest Difficulty RD Hard Mode for some bizarre reason thinks that difficulty comes from removing the weapon triangle and getting rid of the enemy movement overlay on the map. Why on earth would they do this? That doesn't even make it harder, it just makes it more tedious/annoying. The weapon triangle is a core feature of the game and removing that just once again like a lot of other things dilutes the complexity of the strategy. It continues to make the units less and less distinguishable from one another, which ties into a later complaint. PoR admittedly has its' hardest difficulty locked behind the japanese version, which sucks, and I'll admit Maniac Mode is not perfect, but it's better than RD Hard Mode. PoR Maniac Mode is more difficult than RD Hard Mode because the endgame is honestly a lot tougher and you don't have so many busted prepromotes that start with stellar bases and clear maps by themselves with no investment. Maniac Mode requires training lots of growth units and investing resources efficiently so that you have a team strong enough to clear the final chapters. It also thankfully keeps the enemy range overlay and weapon triangle. 8. Skills PoR had skills which were unique to the units they came with, and removing those skills caused them to be removed forever. I prefer this over RD's system of being able to swap in and out skills for everyone, because it again encourages you to find unique use cases for unconventional units or units that require a lot of investment. RD has a pattern of punishing the player for trying to invest in any unit that isn't good from the very start. Also they butchered the mastery skills by making them all basically the same 3-5x damage with 1/2 skill proc rate. It's so boring. PoR didn't have perfect skills but there was at least a little variety compared to RD skills which are basically random 1-hit KO events. 9. Biorhythm This was my least favorite part of PoR and RD doubles down on it. Now biorhythm has an even bigger impact on hit/avoid rates and is much more frequently changing. I don't like this element of randomness to my gameplay and I think the mechanic has no place in the game. I shouldn't be expected to withdraw certain units because conditions totally outside of my control arbitrarily took them out of commission. Thankfully in this game the 3rd tier promotions made the hit/avoid rates so high than +10/-10 still isn't that big of a deal. 10. Bonus Experience/3rd Tier Promotions/Caps 3rd tier promotions in and of themselves are not a bad thing, promotions are fun and more of them isn't such a bad thing. However, in this game, combined with BEXP and the weird caps that units get, these promotions pretty much guarantee that all of your units that you trained will hit their caps or get very close. Growth rates in this game are more of a suggestion than a rule because promotional gains + caps + BEXP means that you can cheese the game to engineer whatever unit you want regardless of their growths. This makes the differences between the several dozen units you get in this game seem too insignificant. Supports are a free for all, skills are free for all, and basically stats are a free for all, so the units you should bother deploying are generally the ones that require the least time/investment to get moving. PoR once again had growth rates which really mattered and would often shape/mold units around a specific archetype that wasn't defined purely by their caps. Admittedly you did have the Knight Ward which could be abused to give speed to everyone, but that's only 1 stat for a few classes. You do get growth rate bands in NG+, but those only impact growths by 5% most of the time. Generally, I had variety within each class type based on growth rates and I found that much more appealing than every unit ending up basically the same by the end. ~Conclusion~ This is obviously a biased thread specifically designed to highlight the negative aspects of RD compared to PoR. This is not a comprehensive comparison, and I don't claim that it's a fair assessment of either game in its totality. It's just a list of the major reasons why I find PoR to be a more solid and overall enjoyable experience compared to RD.

You sound kind of angry here, did I offend you in some way? To answer your question, I include a lot of underleveled units on my team because my experience with maniac mode tells me that I need to prepare for the endgame to have a realistic chance of clearing the game in an ironman run. If I don't build the strongest units I can, I increase the risk of losing members of my main group and not being able the clear the final few maps. The early game is challenging but that's what Titania is there for, and the mid-game to me is the easiest part of the difficulty, so favoring units that start out better but fall off towards the end simply is not optimal from my perspective. I used to agree with you about Ike/Oscar vs Ike/Soren, but I have two things that changed my mind: 1. Kieran/Oscar A is better than Ike/Oscar A because Kieran overall is a better unit than Ike for a majority of the game. 2. Ike/Soren A is OP when Ike has Resolve + Savior. Ike can't carry Oscar around with him in the final chapters, but he can carry Soren. His avoid with resolve speed and that support combined makes him nearly unkillable. Well if I gave Oscar savior, I couldn't give him Sol, which I think ultimately is better for him, since he really benefits from it throughout the game, particularly in Clash. Also, I can't guarantee Oscar's safety in the final map even with Ike's support. The reason why Resolve Ike works is because his luck, speed, and supports stacked on top of resolve gives him so much avoid that it doesn't really matter that he's below half hp. He simply does not get hit. He can even take 1-2 hits due to the defense bonus of the Ragnell. The savior strat just seals the deal and makes it so even the most accurate enemies only have like 10% chance to hit on the final map. I have used this strat twice, and I have even tried it where Ike and Soren are the only units deployed on the map. Ike and Soren alone are able to clear the final map in Maniac Mode using this strat. Unfortunately, you don't get the Fortify staff until Chapter 27. Elincia starts with an A rank in staves, but you don't have the staff until the next map. I really wish we could have gotten that staff in Ch. 26, because as you point out that would be super useful, especially for me because my strat is to rout clash. Even still, you could choose to field Elincia on the final map with Fortify, however I have never done that because it's just too dangerous in an ironman to bank on Elincia's survival. I will admit that I have lost a lot of runs in the early game due to not using Titania enough, and attempting to feed too many kills to my trainees. However, I don't think that justifies putting her on the main team for the whole game, it just means I need to use her more when I need her, and never more than that. I find that I bench Titania after Chapter 13, because that's the final map where you really need to secure some really good loot and have some dangerous hurdles to get over in order to secure it. By that point, Oscar has pretty much already eclipsed her and can take over her job. Basically, I don't agree with the idea that any chapter can realistically spell the run's end, I think there are parts of the game that are very difficult to get through, and some parts that you can coast through if you know what to expect. I can use the easier chapters of this game to train the units that will be very strong in the endgame. Every kill I feed to Titania past a certain point from my perspective is syphoning experience from a unit that I can use in the last few chapters to get me through my run. Using her just because she is the strongest at that exact moment is a pitfall, because you don't need to her to be so strong now, you need her to be strong later, and statistically she won't be strong later.

I based this list on the premise that your team will be in line with their average stats, which is something you can achieve consistently by going with fixed mode. The units in my list statistically are the most likely to be the strongest with investment by the end of the game. Obviously I agree that if I have atrocious Makalov level ups I'll go with Astrid instead, but I plan based on what I can generally expect from my team as a whole. I like to give BEXP to any unit that can use the Knight Ward, since they get more speed growths that way. I actually have a strat where I give Savior to Ike. I use this so he can carry Soren with him and enjoy the benefit of their A support without putting Soren in any danger. I find the extra 22 avoid makes a massive difference when paired with his resolve-boosted speed. It ends up taking units that have a 30% chance to hit down to just 10%, and those with less to have no chance to hit at all. Even Ashnard ends up with like 40-50% chance to hit. I agree with not fielding Elincia, although I will say her being able to use Fortify at base is nice.

I think it's fine the way it is, sages have no conceptual relationship with knives thematically, so I see no need to make knives work with them. I would remove the trap of promoting with knives by simply removing the option and trainees get staves automatically when promoting. But for the hell of it, if I was in a mood to try and make it work... Add an "enchanting" mechanic that allows you to imbue your knife with magic with the tome of your choice. Your magic stat and strength stat both add to the might of the weapon, but it all counts as magical damage. Enchanting with wind makes it effective against flyers (also adds 20hit), enchanting with thunder makes it effective against dragons(adds 10 crit), enchanting with fire makes it effective against beast laguz (+3 defense while equipped). Enchanted knives can have 1-2 range. Enchanting the knife will destroy it after 1 round of combat (you can double), it ends your movement (like trading/talking), and only knife sages can use enchanted knives. Could also add a little extra base might to knives to make this more competitive. It's basically like making a hyper-powerful tome to kill 1 unit. Still probably better to go with staves, but at least now knives aren't totally useless.