Othin

I agree. There's no reason to have Aid and stat caps differ with gender.

Personally, I find that random variables greatly increase replay value, such as the possibility of having a character be RNG blessed or RNG screwed. Making every playthrough predictable seems boring. On that note, there's one feature of Berwick Saga I don't like so much, and I'm curious what you think about it. Rather than having growths be completely random, the game calculates the expected number of times a character's growth would have increased (growth x level) and constrains their stats to somewhere near that value, rounded down. Some characters can only have their overall growths within 1 point of the expected number of increases, while other characters can have their growths 2-3 points away, depending on the stat. (Two characters are exempt from the system.) I personally prefer the random element, although Berwick Saga makes up for it in other ways. But if you prefer less randomness, would you prefer this system? That said, I do agree with Anouleth that completely random Bld growths can be less preferable, as a stat where even increasing it can cause problems. Having characters get to 20 Bld and be completely unable to be rescued by any character is just annoying, but at least it doesn't decrease mounted units' Aid.

You honestly believe that someone whose family is so impoverished that they have to drop out of school in order to survive has the same opportunity as someone born into even a middle-class family? If your choir teacher completed high school, he's an insufficient example. If not, give me some more details and I'm sure I can find some instances of considerable luck quite easily.

In FE10, other units don't get slowed down by just about anything they choose to equip. In Berwick Saga, Mages still have more AS than most other units. As for offense, the spells they have access to make that not so much of an issue. And not having to compete so much with throwing weapons also helps.

You're assuming equal opportunity, which is completely false. If someone is born into poverty, they'll typically wind up having to start working while still in school to help support their family, and depending on the work, that can be enough to impact their grades or force them to drop out. And then the cycle just continues. There are ways out, but they invariably require luck of some sort or another. People cannot be expected to drag themselves out of such a situation, and that is why they and others are complaining.

The entire point of Weight is to make it so that units will get AS loss much of the time, so that Weight actually matters. Using FE11 Wt would utterly fail that goal. It worked great in FE5 with weapon Wt running off of Bld (with a growth) and in FE9 with magic Wt running off of Str (with low but existing growths, as opposed to FE10/11 growths), so I agree that a system combining the two for the different weapon groups would work best. However, like in most discussions, I feel it is worth it to bring up the Berwick Saga system for consideration. For physical weapons, Str/2 is used to determine slowdown. It is typically less than the weapon's Wt, so slowdown typically exists and weapon Wt indeed matters, but weapon Wt is adjusted as well, so Str/2 is not so much less that units will often be crippled by the Wt of a weapon not meant to be absurdly heavy. It also means that adding a point of Str does not simply outclass adding a point of Spd. Shields also factor into the equation, having their Wt added on top of the weapon's Wt and almost always resulting in a substantial cost in AS in exchange for the defensive bonus. I think this is a particularly good alternative system to a Bld stat; I wouldn't call either one necessarily better than the other. Magic, strangely enough, has no Wt at all, but mages have lower Spd to compensate. I'm not sure this is a particularly good system, but it does make sense and represents mages' lesser physical ability in another way. I don't like the loss of the factor to differentiate different spells, but mages only have access to a few different spells anyway and they're all quite distinct from each other. It would certainly help to make Fire magic less overpowered, but other factors, particularly the low availability of any given spell, help to balance that out.

Yeah, +5. Worth noting that it's only if he's paired. And only if he goes out of the way to the event location, when he has enough trouble keeping up as is. If he gets the bonus, you're going to have to slow down a lot to get him to use it in a real battle even once. But it affects passing down base stats, so that's something. It turns into an extra +1 base Skl for his son and +0.5 for his daughter... which would be a nice bonus in other stats, but not so significant for Skl.

The armor knight who joins sitting on your castle.

Knowing what you're talking about leaves little need for hostility, as it gives you better ways to get your point across. Granted, this is easier said than done.

Pretty much. Distances tend to be shorter in Berwick Saga in general because the same distance covers a much wider area on a hex grid than on a square grid. 2-3 range can reach 20 squares, but 30 hexes, while 1-2 range covers 12 squares, but 18 hexes. So it's mostly compensating for that. There are a few other implications. In particular, bow units can attack enemies while adjacent, and if they're attacked by an adjacent enemy with magic or a crossbow, it's still counted as a ranged attack and they can potentially counter. Actually, probably the biggest implication is that while melee weapon types have ways to fight indirectly at range 1, that's the farthest they can reach; you need bows or certain magic in order to attack at range 2 at all. And exclusive access to range 2 is much more significant than exclusive access to range 3.

It takes both availability and battle stats, really. FE10's Double Bow has 1-2 range, but it wasn't broken because it was a one-of-a-kind item, and only available at the end of the game for that matter. Meanwhile, it also had Crossbows, which were common enough later in the game, but at the times they were available, they didn't have the power to stand out. Archers would be more broken with a 1-2 range weapon both as common as Hand Axes and Javelins and more effective in battle, but I don't think anyone's really advocating it, and I certainly wouldn't expect to see one in an actual FE game. (At least, with the classic FE range system, as opposed to the Berwick Saga system where bows do have range 1-2 but still don't work in melee because it's relegated to range 0. But that's not too relevant... or is it?)

Archers with 1-2 range wouldn't necessarily be any more broken than any other physical unit with 1-2 range. But honestly, just about any durable unit with effective and easily available 1-2 range could probably be considered broken anyway.

Or you could, again, make range 2 combat important and not totally dominated by thrown weapons and magic. I think FE12 did well with this, actually, with enemies that can pose a real threat in melee on the harder difficulties and making thrown weapons less effective so archers aren't instantly outclassed by them.

Ah, I see. Then I guess we're in agreement that we just want it to tend more towards the FE5 take on archetypes than the FE6 take on them.

Strict archetypes like in FE6 can make the game boring, but I'd say FE5 is certainly an example of a game that did enough with making the characters different.

I think it's more prudent to let Reikken's math work its magic rather than turning this into unnecessary hostilities just because he had the misfortune to not have been exposed to it before. It's been a few years, so I'm not certain, but I think it was that exact same explanation that persuaded me to abandon a similar mindset back in 2007. It's truly a work of art, and he deserves a chance to reconsider his stance having seen it.

I don't think this will convince him.

Because people here are too obsessed with turn-efficiency to look at anything else. That's precisely the problem I'm trying to help you escape.

Well, that just sounds painful.

I choose to emphasize alternatives. But of course, how dare I speak the slightest words of praise for a playstyle other than the one Black*Rock Shooter chooses to use? Also, I like how you continue to insist on parading turn-efficiency tier players as the only "tier players". It is to statements like this that I simply advocate awareness of a broader reality. I should mention that I have nothing against LTC; I've enjoyed my brief experiences with it. What I object to is simply the apparent unwillingness to look at much else.

Efficiency is great. It's a way of measuring how well you preform based on absolutely any factor you choose - you can be time-efficient, luck-efficient, money-efficient, rank-efficient, turn-efficient, or any combination of them and whatever others you can think of. The way many people here have twisted the word "efficiency" to refer to only their preferred kind of efficiency, turn-efficiency, is not so great. Furthermore, when considering just how much content that particular kind of efficiency cuts out of the game, it in particular is far from representative of the game's overall content. If people want to play and analyze the game from a turn-efficiency perspective, that's all fine, but the games have much more to them than that. It is simply those other perspectives that we endeavor to draw attention to, seeing how underrepresented they are here. There is nothing, at present, to take as an insult, so there's no need to be hurling around such accusations.

There are none. You only get one Axefighter (potentially), and he doesn't really fit with anything. Continue is indeed identical except for the activation rate, (AS+20)%.

Indeed. I'm thinking a good way to manage it would be to give some sort of horseslaying capability to, say, 2-5 enemies in a typical chapter, whatever that capability is.

I can't imagine mounted units ever being obsolete just from one terrible matchup, as long as the enemies aren't everywhere. And such a terrible matchup as being OHKOed tends to impact strategies far more than a matchup that just determines a few points of damage or accuracy. What would probably work best to implement this could be to have a skill that gives characters an effective bonus against mounted foes with any weapon (much like FE10's trio of Laguz Foe skills), and just have the skill be used primarily or entirely by generic enemies. FE games need more tactical skills for generic enemies in general; it adds much more to think about.

I guess that's the main advantage of Elite Mode. With the Elite Manual on top of that, I just had Saphy heal and dodge a lot in Ch8 and promoted her that chapter to jump straight to A rank. 8x took a lot of luck to get in 2 turns. I think I warped Othin carrying Asvel into the room with the Leg Ring and had him drop Asvel, then next turn opened the chest with Othin, had Asvel kill the boss, and warped Leaf to have him seize. I think it took luck with movement stars to get the door open while doing all that. For 21x, I left behind two characters in 9 and another six in 19 to copy YayMarsha's method (in turn copied from ChinaFE, I believe, like most of both of our runs) with using Rescue four times to get out the eight characters. I have to say, I'm really interested in how you managed to clear 9 and 13 so fast without leaving Karin or Saphy behind.