lysander

Do we know if they've updated calculations at all? I've heard that the AS formula is the same as gaiden but is magical avoid, effectiveness and critical hit rate all the same formula? Yeah, it's odd that that review both critisized skills for not really being useful due to not being able to double while both complaining about not being able to double as much and having low hit-rates. I dunno, but maybe the game wanted you to use skills then? Just glancing at enemy stats it looks like you want to be using forges and effective skills. Most of the stuff with real HP/DEF bloat can be hit by hard by weapons with passive effectiveness versus or by skill activations that grant it. Unless the effectiveness formula was changed from original gaiden? But even if it is a modern formula forges should make it good. Either way, dread fighters still have base 18 speed and that still nets them the ability to double anything that isn't an enemy Dread Fighter even with 0 speed gains before or after promotion--promoting ASAP still seems good. All of your lance classes should be able to take care of both Gold Knights and Barons via skill activations. Most of the really fast stuff also seems to have low-ish attack values so Barons should still be as good at taking hits as they were in Gaiden even with enemy speed buffs--in particular they seem like they'd have a handle on enemy Dread Fighters who have at most low 20s attack versus Baron base of 18 defense minimum. They kept enemy ranged units generally slow so they weren't nerfed by that either, not to mention their halving arrow damage. On offense, activations really help their base skill out and they weren't doubling anyway.

Yeah, my main complaint is Faye and Conrad and that's just based on endings and what I've seen of the supports. Hopefully there are good pre-chapter, village and base conversations involving them. Faye's story could be helped immensely by just a conversation between her and Claire. As it stands their epilogues are basically a complement so hearing both characters weigh in on exactly why, when confronted with the same issue, they each made different decisions would be great.

Huh, that just makes the spell learn lists all the more confusing--you'd think they'd have cleaned those up at the very least if they decided to remove the item to make sense of them. DLC or moving it to a village/base/something menu would seem more likely.

Kliff is still good as a mage thanks to his spell learn list and good as the other classes thanks to his base luck+resistance combo. The rest of his base stats also still gain the most from the initial class change, even moreso now that the other characters have better growths too. Harder to say who the best is or if Kliff was even the best in original. They all seem good this time around though whereas before Tobin was kind of lacking in staying power.

It's also important to remember that over the course of 20 levels a growth increase of 20% is only going to net you an average of 4 more points in a stat. 10% is only an average of 2. Unless they drastically changed how many levels you can expect to gain before endgame without grinding these increases really will amount to only small balance tweaks to account for skills somewhat. The lords got bigger boosts overall and in more places, but that's likely to account for fatigue and forced deployment. Early game you might see some drastic differences I guess, since you'd be more likely to proc each stat on an early level than in original gaiden which can be huge. But, as the game progresses they should matter less and less. If they're increasing stats over original gaiden by a constant amount the later you get in the game the harder it should actually become compared to original.

The increased growths, especially in defense, are fine thanks to the skill system meaning you'll be draining HP fairly regularly and the enemy will be gaining 1-8mt per action on enemy phase. Since player skills give +hit they'd want to increase enemy speed somewhat, beyond probably also wanting to balance out speed in general. But, since enemies can use skills to give +hit they'd probably want to slightly increase player speed growths as well, especially on characters meant to be fast, in order to not nerf player avoid too much. Since enemies will be draining HP they likely increased enemy defenses slightly which means increasing your unit power slightly. Basically, I think the increased growths are a combination of balancing and adjusting original gaiden for the addition of skills. From one perspective the promotion system did take a hit from this--perhaps on purpose--but from another it's still fine, just backwards from before. With the villager fork you can reclass effectively anybody and while most characters won't be gaining much in the way of stats from this it is a way to essentially push their stats onto another class. An example would be Clive, who gains nothing from villager fork->archer but does then become arguably the archer with the best stat spread. That nets you an archer while potentially letting you change more villagers to "good enough" cavaliers. Similarly, now you're probably more free to make Atlas a mercenary on Celica's route since your default mercenaries can make fine archers/cavaliers.

At the moment, their only passive appears to be at the Baron level and it's "Halve damage from bows". Could be useful, but again if they increased enemy archer AS enough you'd be at-best matching gaiden level of defensive performance against them.

By stamina he means fatigue. I'm iffy on this unless classes provide further growth modifiers (including negatives for def on other classes) or fatigue modifiers. Everybody had their def growths buffed over original gaiden so class bases/character bases are slightly less important than in original and beyond that until Baron the defense base of the armoured classes just aren't that much higher than their same-tier counterparts, if higher at all in the case of soldier. There are also armourslaying skills now and one of them is on something that should be fairly common in enemy hands--the steel lance. As well, enemies appear to have had their speed stat buffed on hard and likely even further on lunatic making AS thresholds harsher for the slower armours, hurting their defensive value greatly. I don't think they'll be useless or anything, just maybe not quite as obviously and easily useful as they were in the original. Shove certainly helps them and other foot units, but outside of that I'm not seeing any changes in their favour compared to changes against their favour.

As an archer he'd have 3 skill at level 10 and bows have an even lower hit-rate than in original. Using an Iron Bow and Aiming he'd maybe be able to hit something? Mage would work better if only because it better allows him to ignore his abysmal skill stat. Mercenary is just going to be the best way to make him more usable, due to patching up his speed and skill. It's possible that the other Celica route mercenaries would be better served using a villager fork to go to cavalier or archer or mages themselves. Surprisingly, Saber's magic list seems decent for instance, with angel and physic access. Jesse gets Excalibur access and could also work well as an Archer. edit: Right and they'd all make fine Cavaliers.

Those are generally for the devs, so they can better gauge where players may have stopped playing or how long it took them to get to certain things. If 40% of your customers failed to get past CH1 that's an important thing to know and just checking achievement completion is an easy way to do that. Similarly it's good to know if players tended to blitz through the "start the game" and the "middle of the game" trophy in a week of play but then take like a month or two to get around to the "finish the game" trophy. Could suggest that you had a pacing problem.

I hope Alm's Falchion model also looks like his head there. Black and nose to his eyes would be the blade, red gem set in the middle and the weird eyebrow blades as the guard.

Wonder if Rudolf will have the Emperor's Lance and user Mercy on Alm rather than not attack him at all. That'd certainly make the map more interesting. Though, then I wonder why/when he'd use Lionheart's Stance. Maybe on any other unit in range?

Oh, right, should've noticed Alm's class name is Warrior in the files and the name/bow+swords on Hero. I think that remains to be seen, really. There's more to good map design than the maps themselves and while you're right that things are looking just as plain as the original gaiden so far the inclusion of skills and a fatigue mechanic should really shake things up. The issue with Gaiden's map design was less the maps themselves and more the lack of anything to make your strategy or the units you used differ on each map. Some of the awkward enemy placement should have also been cleaned up, I imagine, the same way they seem to have altered how Zeke's map plays out.

Seems to be enemy only, same as Brigand. Neither Warrior nor Brigand promote to or from anything in the data and none of the playable cast seems to start as either. edit: Wait, Warrior seems to promote to Hero but still don't see any playable characters with the class. Guess it's possible an item could swap somebody onto the warrior/hero branch. Could also just be for invoke.

One Chapter of Gaiden is generally around 10 maps but could realistically be however many--one chapter in particular had either 15 or 16 in the original, I forget.