Othin

It's situations like this that make differences in mere statistical details so irrelevant. Statistical differences should not be relied upon unless they completely change the way a character is played; there are other ways characters can and should be differentiated, and those ways can very much make foot units make up the differences. And the above makes the relevance of this "better 2-range combat" highly suspect. I'm saying 8 squares instead of 4 isn't relevant to theory or fact except for its impact on how likely an enemy is to attack from one of those squares. Characters reliant on range 1 matter as much as they exist, which isn't much. And what I am saying is by no means limited to addressing what you were saying personally; don't get the idea that it's all about you.

Number of squares a character can counterattack isn't what what matters; it's the likelihood that an enemy will attack from one of those squares. The problems are, as Q_K noted above, that enemies with bows are uncommon (and enemies particularly effective with them even more so), and that Javelins and Hand Axes dominate many FE games, leading to an expectation of not 1 range, but 1-2 range. I maintain my earlier stance that melee weapons should not have common 1-2 range options, ever.

Hell yes.

Except when you can just walk past them. Or when you want them to at least appear threatening to the characters you control rather than to your turncount. Such a change would obliterate any worth the series has both in terms of having a moderately believable story and in terms of having gameplay of any worth outside of LTC. If you had little or no risk of taking attacks except when you choose to allow it, the game wouldn't be "frustratingly difficult" in the slightest; all it would be is an easy and non-strategic but frustrating game based around a completely absurd conflict. I would not waste even a second of my life playing such a terrible game as to make that change anywhere outside of extremely specialized and well-justified circumstances. Your suggestion is simply a response to a different problem: when enemies attack one of your characters, it more often benefits the player than the enemy. There are much better solutions to simply ensure that the attacker can gain an upper hand in combat. At present, outside of specialized circumstances, the only time it matters which character initiates combat is when they kill the enemy before they can counterattack. There are many ways to limit or weaken counterattacks to solve this problem, to make it so that an enemy attacking one of your characters is the danger it should be rather than the convenience it is.

I've played little of H5 and Lunatic (and FE11/12 in general), but it seems to me that when enemies are so powerful as to match or surpass your own units (or close), it severely limits your options. I can't imagine reasonably fighting enemies like that with them also having skills like Wrath or Shooter. Indeed, the point of my suggestion of sub-bosses is that there should be a few enemies per map stronger than your own characters, but not so many as to force reliance on luck abuse, excessively slow progress, warp skips, or other such things. I don't know to what extent this is true for the hardest difficulties of the DS games, but it's those extreme forms of the application that I take opposition to. Enemies should be able to put up a fight, but they shouldn't have such raw power as to limit players to such often less preferred strategies, and that ability should not be all they have.

There are other solutions. Tactical skills, sub-bosses, varying objectives, etc.

FE13 does seem to be going down the FE2/FE8/TRS system with monsters and a world map, which seems particularly interesting in what changes it might have. But now that I think about it, those similarities also included multiple Lords with split routes in all three of the other games with the system. Perhaps we'll see the same thing in FE13.

Now there's a great idea I agree with wholeheartedly. There's a lot that can change on a Hard Mode rather than just enemies and Exp formulas.

In a real war, if a country is under serious military threat, it's going to need every bit of money it has and probably still won't have enough to buy everything it wants. There have been times when a desperate country has sent out soldiers without proper equipment and expected them to just pick up whatever they can along the way. And that sort of desperate situation is precisely what a video game should have to make for a good story. In FE9, you were drowning in funds by the end because you had an alliance of several countries against a single country with nowhere near enough power to stand against the alliance, let alone Begnion alone. That weakened the story due to a serious lack of tension at the end, and it is something that should be avoided. Again, I must suggest a comparison to Berwick Saga. The Raze Empire spends most of the game ripping the Berwick Alliance apart, so the Berwick Alliance spends whatever money it has on the war. As a result, Reese gets a lot of funding, but far from enough to simply buy everything he wants because the funds to do that just don't exist or are being spent otherwise. So he takes whatever he can from enemies using the (substantially different) Capture system to have somewhat more reasonable equipment for his soldiers.

The key word here is "unlimited". FE10's Bargain shop is a limited shop, which can potentially solve the issue entirely, but in its actual implementation, it failed to take over much of the unlimited shops' role in supplying relevant equipment. If it had kept the Steel Great-class weapons to the Bargain shop and left most of the other items it stocked such as skill scrolls as content in the maps themselves (something FE10 was seriously lacking), it would have been much closer to an ideal system.

The other games give you too much money and too many good items available for unlimited purchase in shops, period. That's something that should be fixed no matter what, so the alternative is no reason to keep capturing out of a better-designed game.

Capturing isn't just any old mechanic; I would argue that it's one of the best mechanics in the series, if not the best. Certainly, it doesn't have to happen exactly the way it did in FE5, and I'd say any other adjustments necessary to make capturing fit well into an FE game would be worth it more often than not.

Not for all characters, but it had a system with buying mounts which would have limited HP and sometimes special effects like stat bonuses. Although I personally favor the hypothetical version where mounts are accessible to all characters. I was working with Banzai a while ago on specifications for a game that included mounting as a rank that any character could learn and improve, although I don't think we ever came up with much in the way of details.

Some stat changes have substantial impact on strategy. Some don't.

That is one form of "best strategy". It is one where there is one relatively simple "right answer" to a given situation, leaving little room for other interesting "best" options once it has been found. It is one that optimizes for one or more relevant factors, but it is clearly not optimized for minimum resets, which I would call a damn good secondary factor to optimize for. You might call strategies like those the best strategies, but I never would. We will have to agree to disagree both about that and about how to define a "small" chance.

Oh, I am well familiar with Sand Veil - and Smogon in general, in spite of Dondon's imprudent jumping to the contrary conclusion. Before Smogon banned Garchomp in Gen 5, I spent quite a bit of time there attempting to rally support for a ban that would remove Sand Veil's practical uses, for the reason of it being uncompetitive. And this highlights the difference between these situations. No one wants an unavoidable miss to decide a competition, but FE is no such thing; nothing can be uncompetitive in a single-player game. If your luck happens to be so bad as to foil a reasonably stable strategy in a single-player game, such as FE, you can simply try again. Otherwise, sure, you'll miss sometimes. You don't need a chance to miss to be so small that it never happens; you simply need it to be small enough that it's unlikely to happen when you need it to happen. If you're using such flimsy strategies that you absolutely need everything to work out right all the time, then, again, use better strategies. It's not necessarily an option in Pokemon or in Dondon's hypothetical 20% chess game, but it is in FE.

That doesn't sound strange at all. What is there to complain about? Sounds like in a lot of situations, it's not enough, but in some, it is. Indeed, getting 80% real Hit just requires 68% displayed Hit, which will be an issue against some enemies, but it's quite reasonable against others. Hit rates don't apply to moving, just attacks. If chess has a 20% chance that any attempt to capture a piece would fail, that would be damn interesting. It's not a change I would advocate, as chess has been notable for never involving any chance, but FE is not that way, unless you want hit rates removed entirely. And I have to say, I like playing FE more than I like playing chess. But more relevantly, a 20% chance of failing is notable, but it is small. You can expect it to work quite a bit more often than not; if failing that chance would be that damaging to your strategy, I suggest coming up with better strategies.

First of all, battle accuracy in Berwick Saga with a standard weapon and no skills in effect tends to range from 60-80%, keeping in mind that this is using a 1 RN system. Rarer and more effective weapons tend to be more accurate, while skills can help with accuracy: 9 skills reliably increase accuracy, in certain situations. Weapons and skills can also grant additional hits, which can make up for the lack of accuracy. Second, I did not say you can do everything perfectly on a reliable basis. There is, as I noted, an element of luck present that must be managed rather than removed, and checkpoints reasonably limit the progress that can be undone by particularly bad luck. Anyway, my time is better spent playing Berwick Saga than arguing about it. And the same goes for you. Don't take my word for it or your impressions; play it and find out for yourself what you think. 80% real hit is precisely what I would call reliable for any reasonable purpose. But FE6 has 2 RNs, making it 92.2% real hit, more than enough. Perhaps you're expecting too much out of an already overpowered weapon at too little cost, hm?

Option four: You have enemies that are competent, but you deal with them using limited but effective weapons and skills.

In that case, I won't play FE6 Hard Mode, as it sounds like a case of low accuracy being implemented poorly. The question is, can low accuracy be implemented well? The answer is yes, as demonstrated in - as I'm sure you've guessed by now - Berwick Saga.

Building a strategy that will allow you to not get slaughtered on the enemy phase even if you miss a few times on the player phase is also determined by what you do. The difference is, it's not as simple. Doing the right thing is easy if there's a clear right answer rather than luck you need to manage. Deciding when to use limited accurate weapons to ensure or simply increase the probability of a hit? That takes much more strategy.

That's precisely what the 50 starting growth points Anouleth proposed would do. They would serve the effect of increasing the stat by .5, so instead of increasing at .5, the stat would increase at 1.0, and the stats would follow precisely the same progression. The only difference would be the coin toss at .5, which doesn't seem particularly meaningful and is not how rounding typically works anyway. Let's use FE9 Mia as an example. Her base Speed is 13, and her growth is 60%. Your system: LV6: 13 (13) LV7: 14 (13.6) LV8: 14 (14.2) LV9: 15 (14.8) LV10: 15 (15.4) LV11: 16 (16.0) Fixed system: LV6: 13 (50) LV7: 14 (10) LV8: 14 (70) LV9: 15 (30) LV10: 15 (90) LV11: 16 (50) As you can see, the results are precisely the same.

Missing is an obstacle to overcome to seize victory with strategy. For that matter, having characters die is much the same way. It's not fun when it happens, but the threat of it is what forces us to improve our strategies, making victory more satisfying than it would be if it's little or no threat. Whether through the weapons, the formulas, or the number of RNs used, the threat is an important part of managing strategy and risk management. And if Hit doesn't often go above 100, calculating Crit based on that instead of based on Skl/2 only serves to devalue Skl. Could be made much more feasible with multiple classes of personal weapons, so that only some would be involved, while specifically story-based weapons would remain restricted. So, say, Mia would be able to use Ettard, Caladbolg, and Florete, but not Ragnell. Although making it an item that could be used by any character seems a bit odd, rather than just having it be dependent on the character's own merits. Using the FE11/12 system for Aura/Excalibur could be enough: making such weapons considered particularly high rank for other characters (more so than B, perhaps), but a lower rank for the characters that have them as personal weapons.

I haven't played much of FE6, but that's just another way to balance out axes' power. As long as characters can get a reasonable Hit like 60+%, which is perfectly feasible with an adjusted system, there shouldn't be any issues. Where there is luck, there is luck management, and that takes much more strategy than simply setting up enough damage.

Anouleth's idea could be a good one, but it seems like it's just a symptom of accuracy being too high to matter otherwise most of the time.