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I assume your contention is not with the probabilistic argument so you can pretend I cherrypicked another growth rate. You seem to think than Frederick cannot reliably help kill Raimi. That’s incorrect, Frederick reliably kills Raimi around 99.9999etc% of the time (essentially 100% if not the completely negligible chance of stuff breaking). What changes is the number of turns/real time it takes to kill Raimi, which is ultimately insignificant in the scheme of things given the few actions it takes and the animation skipping. Moreover, I can’t reconcile your argument with the following: 1. Why is your argument unique to Lunatic+? Frederick is probably your best option in Lunatic as well, and his “chances” are around the same, no? (except he can be the front unit all the time instead of some percentage of the time Raimi has Counter) Moreover, this kind of RNG thing (where you might take extra turns/real time) happens in every single FE game in different manners, in many forms. 2. Why does it matter Chrom can “reliably” hit Raimi (by your consideration he can actually “hit the broad side of a barn”), if on average he requires far more hits?

And Chrom’s Str growth is 60%. Awakening is obviously too tedious to play if you have to “gamble” everytime Chrom levels up. Let’s not even start to talk about the growth rates in other games. Point being, it doesn’t matter at all if you miss a few times. What matters is the consequence if luck doesn’t swing your way (don’t proc that Str, or don’t hit an enemy). Sometimes, it might be death and a reset. Here, it’s negligible. This is kinda interesting if it’s true but it doesn’t change that Frederick isn’t much more inaccurate than Chrom (or even stuff like Thunder magic) and does far more damage. Wrt your 2nd point, while the rank bonus doesn’t apply until afterwards (so it seems), are you sure the triangle bonus itself works differently than in previous games? Firstly, your overall chance of killing Raimi (in a given number of turns) is still likely better with Frederick than Chrom, even with lower hit rate, simply because you need less hits to actually land (especially relevant with the throne healing). Secondly, it’s completely fine if you think Lunatic+ is too tedious to play but your specific rationale wrt to probabilities seriously does not make sense.

I don’t see how it’s a gamble if there’s no chance of death. It's especially trivial since it's unnecessary to attack on player phase (for the most safety), so after Raimi's attack and your counter ends, it's already your turn again to heal/end turn. And there's skipping and such. In extreme contexts like ltc/speedrun, it’s a wash. Normal/Casual (and like every game without fixed RNG ever) has a significant random component in that case. fwiw, Frederick has triangle advantage and more Skl (Chrom does have disadvantage but Sword accuracy and Dual Strike+) and probably requires far less hits between his Str and 33 effective mt vs. 12 mt on the Rapier. Another consideration is, Frederick has Outdoor Fighter and could potentially train Axe rank quickly for the rank bonus with Discipline + Vaike's axe.

Tbh one of the best design decisions made (whether conscious or not) is that skills can’t activate on Dual Strikes, which strongly encourages the player toward the most thematic Awakening mechanic (Dual system) on the more troublesome enemies (final boss Pavise, numerous L+ skill combinations, etcetc) (Raimi does not like Hammer dual strikes) Why not? Boss specifically doesn't move. FE is RNG.

Late reply but anyways.. I agree with you wrt to the triviality of the resetting, but (to me) there remains an irrational nagging whenever it’s easier to reset/brute force a map in FE than to figure something out strategically. It’s similar for entering/exiting maps for skill distributions later. Resetting is, in my mind, traditionally considered or associated with a “loss” in FE play (probably because that’s how some of us learned to play FE with permadeath). Still, it’s acceptable that L+ was arguably designed (at least in part) to challenge these and other standard conventions. Regardless, my specific qualm more regards the stat benchmarks, combined with completing the previous chapters (which afaict can be done reliably enough even for me, but is nontrivial to figure out how each time if not bruteforcing, especially wrt to feeding the most kills to Robin for the best C2 chances). Though I’m fairly certain my standard is exceptionally strict there.

The implication is that I (and a few other SF members) have done it. >_> It is fun, however I just don’t think it’s that remarkable. If attempting such a challenge, you probably didn’t just Robin solo most of Lunatic (or at least recognize it’s nowhere near necessary), and you basically just play the same way as usual (at least I did). Robin’s primary advantage (not to belittle the actual worth of Veteran) is getting overwhelmingly strong the fastest, but most of the unpromoted cast can reach that with some more kills. It’s clearly doable in Lunatic+. But “reliably”? That depends on your standard for reliable (for example I don’t consider the current L+ C2 strat reliable, as good as it may be).

No Avatar is one of the oldest self-imposed challenges. You can do it with Robin getting 0 exp all game (and ofc not using any Veteran children, etc that would bypass the restriction).

Some strategic/tactical impressions: - Sponsor-wise. Franco-Iberia, Slavic Fed, Polystralia are top. Pan-Asia and KP are next. Then quite a gap, then Brasilia and ARC. African Union are the worst because of the health requirement as far as I can tell. - Seeding wise. Artists > Engineer/Scientist/Aristocrat > Refugee. Culture is the most scarce, expands borders, and Artists give health. The middle 3 are all nice, Aristocrats mostly for health. Not that Refugees are that bad, but midgame, in my experience it’s so hard to get positive health with the food (unless going straight for Eudaimonia). - Tectonic > Retrograde > Continental > Lifeform > Fusion. Seeing Titanium initially can be ridiculous because of +5 production. Then it’s just scouting stuff, and the reactor which is useless imo. But the first 4 are pretty similar. - Machinery > Weapons > Laboratory > Hydroponic > Raw Materials. Worker synergizes with seeing Titanium really well and is more expensive than the Soldier. Soldier can be used to scout resource pods (I usually build one if I didn’t start with that). You don’t need Pioneering that super early, but should still tech it first. So Laboratory is mainly good so you can tech Engineering for Titanium first if you didn’t go Tectonic scanners. Last 2 are just small bonuses. - I find doing all random pretty fun so you don’t do Artists, Tectonic Scanner, Machinery every time, which seems so far the best on average. I’m not going to talk too much about trade routes. Wide play is my preferred, but because of decision-making and trade-offs when building stuff (having not enough production to build everything). When nothing really matters except trade routes (and more cities for trade routes, and autoplant for trade routes), it’s just tedious and uninteresting. - The weaker trade mod does help matters, primarily because the trade-off involved when only having 1 route. The choice between boosting your cities and the international beakers (and diplo bonus) is very significant. - Even with weaker trade routes, wide play and rex is still very strong since health doesn’t matter until -20. Though at some point later you probably want to go happiness virtues/buildings/biowells to get positive, for the effective +20% Science (with Knowledge opener). - The AI seems to do slightly better on non-staggered starts, but I suspect that’s because the player gets less excavations and resource pods. It’s actually small difference overall (the AI doesn’t do well at all). Still, it’s a lot more fun to do staggered starts imo. More to explore and more interaction with the aliens. - I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not, but my last games with the mod the AI did multiple early dows on me. I had trade routes going to them and couldn’t bribe them anywhere. So that was nice. - However, while combat tactics are slightly improved, the affinity upgrade system doesn’t help them. It’s too easy to keep par or be superior on affinity, tier-wise, and defend with far less troops. The AI’s 20 Combat Rovers (aren’t upgraded until level 3) can’t do much against affinity level 1 Marines fortified (at least it’s a change from ranged units only). Timing attacks (prebuild, then get the affinity to mass upgrade) are extremely powerful with the current system, which ofc AI is notoriously bad at. - The level 4 Affinity UUs are just broken. They are extremely cheap to build and are like double to triple the strength of everything else around the same tier. They are stronger than cities. You can just mass them if you have the strategic and roll over the AI. They’re easily relevant for 100+ turns. - Prosperity to the free settler seems by far the best initial option. After that, should nearly always do a minor hybrid build in tier 1 for the free virtue, but all the other trees (or continue in Prosperity) seem viable to mess around in. I really like Might for the affinity boosts. - Wonder-wise, Ectogenesis Pod is op, and you can usually get it, but it’s still easy to win without it. Most wonders seem like placeholders. - Difficulty is even more map and land dependent. If you just get screwed with siege worms, miasma, and stations taking your expansions, you’ll fall like 50+ turns behind (still winnable). This is probably why certain mechanics are designed that way (in terms of the affinity, spies, etc), but eh. - In addition, the randomness in ruins is also very high. Getting affinity from progenitor ruins is ridiculous when it comes to early rushes (can cut like 20++ turns). Getting culture from resource pods (which can happen twice in a row) gets you like a turn 5 Prosperity settler. Contact victory can occur in like 100 turns. Etcetc. - Similarly, randomness in quests matters a lot for Autoplant trade routes, Fence for route immunity, and Institute free tech. Plus some affinity quests rely on randomness like alien nest locations/aggressiveness or certain buildings (that you’re not guaranteed the resource for), which is really relevant for the early pushes. Finally, some of the design seems like it’d make for a more competitive mp if not for lolfiraxis, lolcivmp, lolrandomness. For example, the outpost mechanic, combined with the Might tree, plus cities retaining most of their pop on capture, and halved puppet time if you choose, hinders the ics of standard play and trade route spam. Ectogenesis pod is far more risky as a world wonder and especially if others are rushing the level 4 UUs. A lot of the city hp/defense quests don’t matter in sp, but could in mp. Tl;dr, wait for patch (but you knew that, fwiw, that’s the status quo for these strategy games. >_>) late edit: To emphasize that point, based Firaxis nerfing Tradition (a bit) and buffing early warmongering in BNW today. :DD

C17 is the more obvious one since it's the first where all enemies are promoted and get Hit+10. C18 has higher enemy density, though. Still if you handled the enemy stats in C17, it's just a matter of blocking and positioning with the right weapon types (I think only the Griffons fly?)

It’s fun, though (so far) seems way (way) too easy. Not that BNW Deity is hard, but Apollo is the new King. >_> (I haven’t actually played King in a while) First game was all standard Apollo (random'd Kavithan, picked Artists, Tectonic, Machinery) but I quit when my 8 cities each had comparable/more pop than the AI caps (and some had like 2 cities) and my cap had like double the pop. Tbh had no idea what I was doing beyond picking the seeding, observing the trade route yields, and "ooh that looks cool". And many things went wrong in terms of like 3 siege worms pillaging and killing my stuff, plus losing explorers and workers to miasma by accident. Second game was all random (Brasilia, Aristocrats, Retrograde, Machinery) and I did a CNDR push and messed it up pretty badly timing wise. Yet it was still pretty fun squishing 1st tier units in 1 hit. <_< But I’m still playing. Looking into ways to make it harder; probably non-staggered starts and the trade route mod to start. Re: factions. I think the idea is each Civ is effectively a combination of Sponsors + Seeding. In the far future, given present globalization trends, you would expect (mostly) homogeneous Earth cultures (ofc ymmv). I expect there will still be additions in the future though, plus endless mods. Re: terrain, etc: imo atmosphere and music is pretty top notch. UI (if coming from BNW EUI) is quite annoying though.

There’s a few ways to do it reliably without Rescue iirc (in Lunatic). With a tanky unpaired unit (Can be Frederick. Can be paired initially, then have the partner transferred away. Can also use chip) and Sumia unpaired elsewhere on the cliff, you can save them both without Rescue and turtle up. Alternatively, a very aggressive push lets you save them by forcing units to aggro and be bottled up the middle (Frederick+Sumia can do it without much exp investment, although non-Javelin 1-2 range weapons are nice since lances against Barbs = not fun). Maribelle/Ricken can then sneak by. Obviously it’s even more lenient if other units have been trained. (don't know if that's what you specifically were referring to >_>) You don't have to feed all the kills to Robin, resetting if Fred accidentally gets an extra one. You don't have to do the water trick and risk the mage crit. You can reduce critical chances to negligible amounts by giving Frederick a Sword against the Barbs and ohko-ing the mages, switching weapons around. It's on you to accept the risk of the strategy you choose, or adapt and approach the chapter another way. Regular Lunatic requires very little RNG. You are heavily favored, unless you make mistakes (such as by adopting risky positioning). If we account for how quick resets and enemy phases can go in Awakening, even Lunatic+ probably has comparable "risk" (of time wasted resetting) to a few previous FEs.

You can lean on Frederick alone for C2 and start training others after that, if you don't want to restart. Still, it's generally recommended to try to use someone else so you can drop Frederick faster (because you do eventually want to drop him) and because the early chapters are short anyways. Generally you save the rest by watching the enemy ranges and moving them strategically to the bottom left corner. There's a few positioning tricks (between pair up, transfers, switch, separate) you can do to greatly improve your reliability here. There's guides floating out there if you want the answer, but imo that's part of the challenge and you should give it an honest attempt (or few) first.

There existed numerous ways to beat Prologue (and Lunatic) before we turtled on the water. Even Frederick taking the Myrms/Mage kills and Chrom the rest typically gives him the stats to tank C1 on the fort, and then most of C2 on the mountain. As mentioned, there's also ways to use Chrom's waterwalking. Robin is the best, but not the only way to approach Lunatic. I would use Paralogue 1 to try and train either Chrom or Lon’qu. Just bait enemies a few at a time and use the narrow hallways. For Chapter 5, try to figure out a way to get a strong fighter (ideally with Swords to deal with the Barbs/Wyvern swarm. But needs at least some Def for the Myrms.) on the fort in the middle level. Use the Rescue Staff to save Maribelle+Ricken, or take advantage of Sumia’s flight. Hold off the left enemies with a dodgy unit, or the rest of your team together. Re: training units: Lon’qu can fight Dark mages (lacking Anathema/Hex) and Axe users from base, pretty much, though he likes favorable terrain. I’ve also trained both Sully and Stahl primarily during C3/P1, and they did the majority of the fighting in C5 (by sitting on that middle fort for a few turns). So I see it as train 1 of Chrom or Robin in Pro+C1 to fight in C2. Use C3/P1 to train another unit (probably one of sword-users) to help in Chapter 5. Then people like Panne join with already nearly workable bases and the team can grow from there.

A lot of the specialized weapons like Longbows and effective weaponry are forged to a greater extent earlier (forged when most stuff isn't, hacked forged when most stuff is the normal forge). They show up en masse C21 though iirc.

You can also use Chrom if you feed him all the kills instead of Robin. That's everyone but Sully. You could reclass Miriel to Dark Mage and use Tharja's Nosferatu. Or promote if you have a spare Master Seal. Another good tip for C12 is to forge the Beastkiller from Renown if you have it. Or at least plan how to take advantage of the one that drops in the chapter. Chapter 3 has a chokepoint to train and you can kite in a circle. Paralogue 1 also has passive enemies and chokepoints (after surviving the initial wave). You can usually get one of Lon'qu/Sully/Stahl more competent to fight well in C5. After that the chapters don't really increase in difficulty until C11 or so (C9 maybe the first time you play on Lunatic) so it's fairly straightforward to train a few units.

Fair enough, but sometimes the AI just doesn't want your open borders. They will offer their OB for your OB and 2 gpt, but you can take out your OB from the deal. Also otoh later you need to get their OB somehow before they realize you're going for Culture victory. I suppose it’s partially habit for me. There’s 7 other people in a standard game and if they are all exotic/familiar on you, it still hurts happiness wise (especially if you picked ideology first and they picked differently). It’ll slow down your games in other victories, particularly domination. You want at least the same against them without increasing their tourism against you (not that hard to match with exotic, even in non-culture games). You don't want to buy OB for no reason, as that's 14 gpt down the drain, but usually want to consider it for select AIs after looking at their culture/tourism. And you never really want to neglect culture output, even in other victories. At least Writer/Artist Guild should be stocked asap to greatly improve your early culture (6 culture when you have like 14ish from 4 cities is like +40%) and give GW or Treatises/Golden Ages (well, technically shouldn’t detour from Philo/Education and should try to avoid too many extra policies before Renaissance, but I find many people build and staff them later than they should. Also not always possible/worth it for non-Babylon civs.) and Cultural city states are probably the highest priority to ally (Faith also, in some games). Getting Secularism fast is one of the things that improves your mid/lategame the most (it’s like a 20-30% Sci boost. A real percentage boost, not mitigated by additive scaling). For all victories except super-early domination. In rare cases, it’s not impossible for a runaway Brazil or something to win sub turn 270 standard if you’re not aware and careful about these things.

Generally you want all the wonders in one city (usually your capital) so that they are all boosted by the National Visitor Center. So at minimum you can usually have Lourve (4 GW + 8 theming), Hermitage (3 GW + 6 theming), Oxford (2 GW + 4 theming), Museum (2 GW + 4 theming), Amphitheater (1 GW), National Epic (1 GW), Heroic Epic (1 GW). The only World Wonder there is Lourve which usually isn’t that contested. Uffizi and Sistine are okay, but they only fit Great Works of Arts which are hard to get enough Great Artists for the theming. Broadway is good, but Musicians can be better used for bombs. There’s 2 main ways to handle this. Either build the Musician’s Guild early and fill all your Opera Houses and Broadway, or don’t build the Musician’s Guild until Tourism is otherwise maxed out. Tile-based culture such as Landmarks and from the Historical Landmarks resolution is also converted to tourism (partially why Brazil, Polynesia, and France are so good, less tourism capped). So is the culture from Wonders, but this usually isn’t significant unless Cultural Heritage Sites gets passed. That stuff plus Arts Funding and International Games is why Gold is so important for Culture games, to control the Congress. Trade Routes, Open Borders (buy for 2 gpt), Shared Religion are each +40% after the Aesthetics policy. Different ideology is -34%, but you can get +25% from a Diplomat there.

What were the issues you were finding? The trick to Culture is realizing it's in large part a science game (the 2 things that boost tourism by far the most are the National Visitor Center and the Internet tech). Other than that, build guilds asap and staff them (send food trade routes if needed). Build landmarks where your cities can work them and artifacts elsewhere. Do all the theming bonuses and other stuff like trade routes, open borders, shared religion, world religion. Sacred Sites the reformation policy can also be very strong on those difficulties. It's challenging because you do ultimately need to balance all the yields in food, production, gold, science and culture, but that's the fun. ^_^

Culture Victory turn 278. Could have been ~255 I think, could have had 4-5 Musicians by then. 2 natural, 2 Faith, 1 Broadway. Faith was the limiter if I had bothered to time things (could be even faster if I saved Jerusalem somehow during the Arabia war). Possibly sub 240ish if I tried to win the international games the first time around instead of voting it down, built less labs and went straight into culture stuff (4 musicians was enough, ultimately. Enough faith leftover to engineer Broadway, instead of hardbuild and buy a 2nd Musician). Sub 250 Science was also probably possible if I bought GS and went Rationalism finisher first + buy Spaceship parts instead (almost certainly so if I didn’t devote resources to war, it was turn 150ish Sci Theory). Kinda (really) overkilled the Science. At some point while building Research Labs, I suddenly realized I only needed like 2-3 bulbs to the internet (had like 5 GS saved, plus Porcelain Tower unbuilt. Note I “wasted” some bulbs on Radio and Refrigeration too) and still had Oxford and the rationalism finisher free. I ended up bulbing all the way to Hubble and then X-com for fun. As a result I completely mistimed all the Tourism stuff. Didn’t have Musician’ Guild, Broadcast Towers, Hotels, National Visitors Center, etc built and was already at the Internet. It’s actually pretty sad actually how badly played that was… I kinda get lazy after leading in all demos. Anyways, Arabia dow’d to no-one’s surprise, but was easy to defend with Artillery and Subs. He did manage to kill a few of my city states. Actually was a “sneaky” backstab, since he was friendly with trades and such. Later made white peace. [spoiler=civ diplomacy] Managed to vote down International Games with some coups and the vote split with World Ideology- Freedom, and proposed it for the next time. Eventually got all the culture stuff online for that when it came around. Tourism wasn’t amazing because of the lack of landmarks, but sufficient (I did get the Lourve). Didn’t need to max it out with Airports either. Just spammed units after a while. [spoiler=overkill] The AI just didn’t have enough cities (not enough space to?). Obviously this would be better optimized if I put less hammers in. Though I didn’t go max, max hammers either, with all production tiles and Statue of Liberty Specialists and overflow. [spoiler=I find the death quotes pretty amusing. Rare because of warmonger penalty tho.] Later killed Inca completely (in 1 turn, rocket artillery op), each city had like 7 more GW, but I didn’t need them so gave some more cities back to Persia (happiness considerations). [spoiler=international games just ended btw] Toured Arabia and Celts with 2 musicians each. 1 natural musician (the first one, kinda defeats the whole purpose of not building the guild early… >_>), 2 Faith-bought, 1 from Broadway (lol). By then, Celts were actually down to 1 city, courtesy of Harun. If Arabia actually eliminated them instead of making peace it would have expedited things as well. Could have sold Celts a city to concert tour easier them but eh. Too busy preparing to drop 15 X-coms on them I guess. >_> Other retrospective: - Okay start with the mountain capital and relative isolation. Pathfinders help boost that a bit. Still, no coast, no religion, fairly short river system (and only in 1 city). - The 2nd city had great production early/midgame for a satellite but food was a small early issue with little fresh water. - 3rd city took a while to get going because of the late settlement and low food/production but eventually generated some nice science with the jungles. - In general, though, my cities didn’t grow that tall. Still hit Education and Scientific Theory with good timing. - Incan lands+wonders were nice, even if we killed all their sciency stuff. D: - Ended with 20 wonders total spread out across the empire. Not much competition for the later ones. - Small maps are small. - Inca: was the leader for much of the game, was just about to really runaway after killing Persia. ;) Tradition + Terrace farms probably gave them the food+production necessary to take that lead. - Persia: From what I saw, fought well with an Immortal and then Pike-based army, but eventually lacked the population to keep up and ran out of steam. Piety start probably didn’t help matters. They’re usually stronger than this as an AI, especially if they get to a long golden age lategame. - China: Had a very strong capital (30+ pop quite early), but got teamed into oblivion by Arabia + Celts. - Celts: Most notable for getting completely run over in like 10 turns by Harun, even if they were about equal population and land-wise before then. Don’t know what they were doing. - Arabia: Did extremely well, even with a Piety start. I think they went a Patronage mix which certainly helped since other AIs mostly ignored city states. It seems they may have some extra bias toward the oil-based units from their UA so they were a bit more effective at lategame war. - No AI was very close to victory, even by turn 280ish. No one had built Apollo, even. In the next 20 turns of so Arabia might have picked it up but they were too busy buying Shoshone blue jeans and listening to pop music. ^_^ Was pretty fun overall; I'll try to join if we ever do this again in Civ 5 (probably a less standard strat) or perhaps Beyond Earth.

I find 2 city Tradition NC works extremely well with how things are timed. Like you can granary+caravan boost the first satellite (and still have an international caravan if you want to detour to sailing), then when it finishes a granary is about when the route ends and you can boost the capital. But you can always expand afterwards (and usually should, more cities is generally a stronger game). If you want to experiment with more cities early (it is a bit harder on small maps), then you can try 4 cities pre-NC Liberty. Add more cities after. Synergizes well with early war (make your additional cities an enemy capital. ;D). The thing with how BNW is that there really not much reason to grab land early pre-NC, unless it’s incredible land you want now (Faith NW or something) or you’ll be blocked off from it later (because the AI does eventually want it). Even 1 city pre-NC works on Deity and you can win with 2-3 cities total fairly easily.

I'm hype. Sometimes peaceful culture victory is just (nearly) impossible (on Deity, at least). You need too much food/science/production to be competitive for wonders and you need multiple AIs to not runaway. Forced OCC as Venice doesn't help. Build an army or bail as Sci/Diplo. >_>

It’s not so bad with aluminum since by the time you really need it (parts), the AI/City-states are sure to have some which you can cheaply buy. Plus recycling. Coal and Oil are worse because you’d like them immediately for ideology (why it’s safer to go Modern) and war, respectively. Uranium too, but you don’t need nukes that much (except in mp). No iron on water maps also sometimes sucks because you need a lot for efficient conquests.

Basically this sums up the rest of my game. >_> [spoiler=oops] (actual writeup coming)

Portugal: Fairly efficient conversion of hammers to gold via Naus (can gift them to city-states after, better with the Freedom tenet). UA directly benefits gold. Coastal bias is also generally more gold. Poland: Can fill Commerce for essentially free. A lot of mod civs from the larger civfanatics threads are pretty fun and cleverly designed/coded. Balanced? Meh, but neither are the vanilla civs.

Obviously not that strong compared to the good civs but I like their UB. Essentially +2 Gold and +2 Culture. Can be fun to go Piety with them (mix with Liberty or something, usually). Their UU is a bit cheaper than Knights, but they can't really fight Castle'd cities, even without the penalty, so meh.