Redwall

If by "fashionable" you mean "accepted," then I would agree that incest may become accepted at some point in a similar way that gay marriage is becoming increasingly accepted; but dictionary.com defines fashionable differently.

Sigh. Slippery slope. You're simply making up shit: no one is advocating "new" things for the sake of being "new." Incest is not, has never been, and likely never will be "fashionable," to use your word. Your other posts are similarly embarrassing. There are two questions to be answered: 1) are most atheists against bro-sis coitus being legalized, and 2) are most atheists against bro-sis coitus in the sense that they would not themselves engage in it. My feeling is that people tend to conflate the two questions. 1) I don't have a problem if a brother and sister have consensual sex, so long as they use birth control to avoid conceiving of a messed-up fetus; for this reason, I wouldn't be opposed to seeing it legalized, albeit with required birth control or something. 2) Would most atheists themselves engage in bro-sis coitus? No; they generally have no interest in it. However, it is not my or anyone else's business to interfere in the lives of those who do engage in such actions as long as there is no lasting harm (a screwed-up fetus would be an example of lasting harm).

it's because of the forest tile, and because you probably don't yet have A-ranked lances. I had this problem too, and worked around it by having Avatar attack the Mercenary also. If the Merc has Luna+, Fred should deal the finishing blow to avoid losing a chunk of health.

the tier list assumes Paralogues are done as soon as they are available; delaying P3 for Nowi's sake may produce data that predict her tier position to be higher than it should be.

The fewer Luna+ guys there are, the better, but you should have a decent chance against a lot of randomizations due to your strong Avatar (for comparison, mine had only 10 Def and I didn't feel like my failed attempts were completely hopeless). Fred wants Vaike since with A-ranked Lance, he can OHKO Myrmidons using the Silver Lance. I don't recall there being any enemies with 9 Spd, but if there are, a no-support Chrom can team up with Avatar to double them. Otherwise, a Cav or Miriel may be a decent partner for the Avatar.

To buy yourself some time, you want to kill either the Barbarian or the Myrmidon who start near the left of the map. You want to rush your other units to the left, and make sure you've hidden to the left a unit (preferably Lissa; you can use Sully to drop her in a forest tile out of reach of the enemies) with whom Miriel can Pair Up when she arrives. Fred and Avatar should be fighting separately.

Panne ranges from so-so to lolsupportbot in Lunatic LTC depending on whether or not she gets the Second Seal, but in briskly-played Lunatic, I've only been disappointed with her in Chs 21 and 23. The other bow/Wind-saturated maps typically have something useful for her to do; for example, she can Hammer the Generals in the corner of Ch 20. She's not as dependable as the Manaketes, but her movement and high Str are really nice to have. I bring enough Rescue users to bail her out of trouble if need be; it's not a terribly huge problem in brisk play since money is not hard to come by and since you're not likely to use those deployment slots for actual combat units.

No way, dude. The theory of relativity is a lie ('cuz Andrew Schlafly said so), evilution is still evil, Lavoisier was totally wrong about phlogiston, etc.

Chrom is about to hit Lv 9, Lon'qu is Lv 9, and Fred is Lv 4.50. Probably not gonna get back to my playthrough for a while, but yeah, I might want to first hit up Paralogue 2 since Pass and Counter look nasty for Ch 6. I don't expect to get the Physic staff (it looks pretty unlikely with an earlygame team), but I figure it's worth ditching the Physic staff if feeding EXP to Chrom and Lon'qu saves me a ton of resets on Ch 6.

It's not a weak argument, just an incomplete one. Maybe we should settle this in the tiering philosophy thread. So that this post isn't off-topic, what is the rationale for putting Olivia below Say'ri? I realize Olivia isn't very useful in this playstyle, but she certainly gives you more of a boost (for example, Dancing for Avatar gives you the chance to both Rally and attack) than does Say'ri, who has two support partners (one of whom comes very late, and the other of whom shouldn't need the +Spd boost) and who should be outclassed as a combatant by your other units.

I'm aware that your playthrough and PKL's playthrough used different teams; my implication was that if we set up a control team for the sake of comparing Nowi v. Cordelia, and if Cord/Stahl + control team saves a turn or so relative to Nowi/Gregor + control team *without sacrificing reliability* (I specifically said this, knowing this wasn't an LTC tier list), then that might be an argument in favor of Cord/Stahl's combat prowess and possible higher ranking.

I see no reason to assume that the differences in "interaction effects" are as large as you claim them to be. For example, +Spd Pair Ups for Vaike are a dime a dozen. I'm not disagreeing with you here. I just think turn counts offer a cleaner way of looking at things than do some of the arguments I've seen in the thread. This is a game full of rout maps and assassination missions; in these levels, turn counts have a much more direct relation to combat prowess, which is significant since most of the arguments in the thread are combat-related arguments. It depends. If Cordelia (pocket Stahl) can indeed save one or two turns over Nowi *without sacrificing reliability*, then I could see a case for Cordelia over Nowi. I haven't used either on Hard mode, so I can't say anything certain on Cordelia v. Nowi, but my hunch is that reliability does go down for Cordelia due to having to dodge bows and Wind. If Pkl has anything to say on this, I'd love to see it.

Here's how I see it. Consider Vaike, Miriel, and some control team. Suppose someone playing at a brisk pace clears the game in x turns with Vaike + control team and in y turns with Miriel + control team, exerting equal effort in both cases. If x < y then Vaike should be tiered higher, and vice-versa. Although this isn't a LTC tier list, I think it's appropriate for me to use a turn-shaving argument here. Turns expose other relevant differences between the units, especially if we're looking at rout maps, in which case the link between turns and combat is readily apparent in the example: if x < y then Vaike clearly offers more as a combatant than does Miriel.

All right, after about a million attempts, I finally beat Ch 5 on Lunatic+. Gonna see how long I can go before dipping into any Renown awards/Anna shops/etc. just because I'm old-fashioned/stubborn. Though it probably won't be long since Ch 6 looks like a pain, and since Avatar has reached her level cap. I never expected to ever say this outside of a LTC setting: I wish Fred got more kills. Ch 2 with a +Def Avatar was easier than I thought it would be, certainly much easier than Ch 5; with only two points of Def from base, Avatar was durable enough to take a sufficient amount of pressure off Fred.

Have you considered simply including a surveymonkey poll in your tier lists as a way of acquiring others' stage-complexity ratings, and then editing the displayed complexity ratings in your tier list to match the averages from the survey? While obviously not as good as in vivo measurements of brain activity, it seems necessary to make the rating system work objectively.

"PIN number": self-explanatory "I could care less": this never made any sense to me. In the most extreme case of not caring, you should have someone who cares so little that he or she could *not* care any less.

Missing the point. If he reclasses before --/15 (at, say, --/10), he just puts up with bad EXP growth for an even longer time due to the Second Seal's influence on his internal level. also, what better weapons? Forged Hand Axes won't work in Fred's favor since a) they're really expensive and b) Sully, Stahl, and Panne can use them more effectively anyway. You get one Short Axe in Ch 14, and I don't recall seeing any Spears until lategame. As for Silvers, Discipline means the Cavs won't need very many chapters to use them. They'll also be dealing more damage since they actually have a noticeable rate of EXP growth and since the Master Seal gives them promotion bonuses. Str tonics are not a point in Fred's favor since Sully, Stahl, and Panne can also use them.

Assuming the site growths of 65/50/55 Str/Spd/Def growths as a Great Knight, --/15 GK/1 Paladin Fred has 20.1 Str, 20 Spd, and 17.7 Def, all unremarkable numbers when you account also for the fact that the Second Seal further slows Fred's rate of EXP gain. Pkl conveniently omits Fred's immediate drops in Str/Def upon reclassing to Paladin. Although Fred should remain in the higher part of S tier, if not outright claiming the top spot for his earlygame contributions alone, there's no question that the EXP after the earlygame is better spent on other units. If anything, going to Paladin in a standard playthrough hurts more than it helps due to the drops in Str and Def. Chapters 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 25 are all assassination missions. When playing at a brisk pace, Fred can't come close to gaining a level in any of these maps; he no longer has enough relative strength to take on a million guys during a single enemy phase, whereas your other team members a) actually will have the necessary stats and b) gain more EXP per kill anyway. Speaking of assassination missions, those certainly favor the Pegs more than they favor Lon'qu. Although they certainly won't be doing much enemy-phase combat in bow-heavy maps like 21, the mobility provided by Sumia and Cordelia (not just for killing the boss, but also for getting the treasure in Chs 14, 16, 17, 20, and the holy weapons in 22) is preferable to the combat and dodge-tanking provided by Lon'qu. They're also great for taking out Valkyries (forged Beast Killer) in 17.

Missing the point completely.

The real-world consequences predicted by a tier list structured around complexity-weighted turn counts include, but are not limited to, the reason you, Anouleth, and Olwen place little value on Edward's 1-P contributions: it's just not an interesting chapter, as Anouleth puts it. I agree with him on that. The problem is that the tier lists, as they are presently constructed, don't describe which chapters are interesting and which are not. In a tier list structured around turn counts alone, rigorously applying the criteria would mean placing Edward in a much higher tier than the SF tier list would. The conventional argument against high-tier Edward is that all your other units in 1-P suck worse, and that he becomes, if not bad, then certainly unremarkable after a certain point. However, this line of thought and the devaluing of his contributions is not consistent with valuing turn counts. Interceptor would counter this by saying "OK, but turn counts are not the point; the playstyle is the point." But working in this line of thought would still necessitate putting Edward in a high tier, as there is no stated reason in the tier list rules to value saving 50 turns in 1-P over, say, saving two turns across each of the next 25 levels. While we can agree that Edward should not be high tier, the SF tier list's framework offers no explanation for why this is. The explanation falls outside the bounds set by the tier list's rules.

I think everyone is on the same page wrt Edward being a bad unit; the problem is that the SF tier lists justify this prediction in an ad hoc fashion, whereas the complexity idea, although somewhat flawed for reasons that I and others have brought up, at least allows a self-consistent way of predicting Edward being trash.

Prologue: send up Fred C1: Avatar with pocket Fred C2: send up Fred C3: send up Fred P1: send up Fred while having Donnel take kills C4: send up Fred C5: send up Fred to draw in Wyverns P2: Fred saves the village C6: Fred heads to Validar, killing a lot of things along the way C7: Fred goes nuts on Wyverns will respond to the other Fred stuff later.

The thrust of my argument is that both Edward and Fred should be ranked highly, and that Fred should be ranked higher than both Sully and Panne, if we work consistently within the efficient-play directive. Note that I don't disagree with the commonly accepted belief that Fred isn't a good lead-combat unit after the earlygame.

The question of what to do with Frederick seems qualitatively similar to the question of what to do with Edward's contributions in Ch 1-P of FE 10. From what I understand (I haven't actually played FE 10), both are characters who are effective early on simply because your other units suck worse; very shortly after, using either one has an ostensibly large opportunity cost. In a tier list that both cares and doesn't care about turns, the rationale for keeping Frederick and Edward low seems ad hoc to me. I don't want to derail the thread with tiering philosophy, but to me, putting Fred at the top of S tier seems like the consistent thing to do, as his earlygame contributions are unique and allow us to play much more efficiently than we would in his absence; meanwhile, everything that (say) Panne has to offer can be replicated by (say) Sully, and for this reason, kicking either Panne or Sully off the team has a minimal effect, if any, on efficiency.

The allure in that pairing is mostly main-game; the idea is that in addition to the +Str/Def boosts Stahl provides her (and +Spd to Stahl), Cordelia need not worry about bows/Wind since she can simply switch to Stahl.