[FEXNA (Currently In Private Beta)]

Str/Mag split isn't bad design, FE just has yet to implement it well, you're right. Personally though, I suspect it will stay that way.

Some design concepts are just tougher to pull off, and/or have smaller benefit when executed well. The weapon triangle, once implemented, was immediately relevant to the majority of classes, adding a layer of decision-making to almost every turn. For units that aren't affected by the weapon triangle, whatever, they don't have to worry about it. For the strength/magic split to actually work well, you'd need to make a significant number of classes/units have uses for both stats--every unit that doesn't need both has a wasted stat space. It's different from resistance that way, because every unit has uses for both defense and resistance, if the chapters are designed well. And of those units who use both stats, there needs to be a lot of variance in the relative levels of them. Unless you have units with much higher strength, moderately higher strength, somewhat higher strength, about the same strength, and at least most of the reverses, for example, you're much better off building a fake magic stat into the mechanics or skills.

There's nothing wrong with the strength/magic split, except that in 99% of cases it adds noise for almost no benefit. The remaining 1% of cases need to be very conscious of it throughout their entire design, and will probably need to produce a ton of assets to take advantage of it. Overall, it's just not worth adding for the general user.

One might say the same thing about the Luck skill, which rarely has any impact aside from the small minority of situations where your luck is so low that you can face a chance of being critted. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that you could remove Luck entirely from the game and just figure out another source of critical evade, or abolish the stat entirely. Another stat you could potentially remove from the game is Resistance, since most units tend to have really low resistance anyway, it would be easier to just abolish the stat and instead give traditionally high-resistance units like Clerics or Pegasi a skill that specifically reduces damage from magic attacks.

I note that FEXNA doesn't remove CON. What is it that makes CON essential and the STR/MAG split optional, given that more games feature separate str/mag stats than a dedicated CON stat? What about affinities? Or for that matter, separate Wind/Thunder/Fire/Light/Dark magic types, each with their own associated weapon rank stat? I'd consider all of these to be just as extraneous as the STR/MAG split, if not more so.

[Is it strange to enjoy Fire Emblem, but not other SRPGs?]

Advance Wars isn't really an RPG though, if non-RPG turn-based strategy games are included, I like the Civilization series.

Civilization is nothing like Advance Wars, though. It's difficult to conceive of turn-based strategy games that are more opposite in style.

Advance Wars certainly has far more in common with Fire Emblem than with Civilization. You could argue that it even has more in common with FE than FE does with Final Fantasy Tactics.

[Most Attractive Fates Character]

Hinata for males, obviously. Noone else comes close.

I picked Ophelia for females but none of the females in this game really appeal to me, I'd have left the answer blank if I could.

[What kind of changes would you make to the Fire Emblem series' gameplay?]

I would make very very heavy changes to the game. Ideally:

1. Rework miss chance. Missing is not longer a constant risk, it only occurs under certain conditions, like how in FE4, criticals could only occur when using the critical skill, next to a Bond unit, or using 50+ kill weapons.
2. Add an MP stat that is used to pay spell costs.
3. Spells now work more like other RPGs, they're active abilities that consume MP rather than just another type of weapon.
4. Spells are learned based on character and class upon levelling up. So some characters might learn unique spells, and there would be standard spells available to every unit of a particular class.
5. Rework growths to be more reliable. Level-ups will occur less often, but have a larger impact.
6. Rework experience distribution, now each chapter gives a fixed amount of experience distributed equally among all your units.
7. Weapons have unlimited durability, but can be forged when they have a certain number of kills on them. More kills with a weapon allows more advanced forging.

[What is it that you dislike about Fire Emblem?]

Missing. You can't miss in Advance Wars and that seems to work out alright.

[[Solved] Possible to implement faction specific sprites?]

Unique models can be linked to characters as well, for example Hawkeye, Lloyd, and Lucius.

[FE11 H5 0% growths, with commentary (complete)]

Note that in SD you can simply determine enemy AS by looking at their avoid stat, since their avoid is always equal to their AS. So you can tell that Manakete has 26AS because he has 26 avoid.

[A Strawpoll Concerning Mounts (and some discussion, too.)]

No, horses are the best.

[Opinions on Knights?]

I don't understand why they don't just give knights 5 move already, it's a big nerf on a class that is pretty mediocre to begin with.

Because having every member of the cast be exactly the same is not the goal. If every character in the game was a Cavalier with identical stats, no doubt the game would be more "balanced", but it would come at the cost of removing any variety among units and totally eliminating the element of player choice. Good balance is not just about different units having a similar overall power level, but having distinct strengths and weaknesses.

[FE Archers]

Klein or Igrene, probably.

[[FE8] Sacred Stones Advanced]

Rain is horrible. Please don't put rain in this hack.

[So what is freedom?]

Citizens should not have control over the police force. For a very good reason. The whims and wills of civilians can change frequently and leap to bizarre and strange conclusions in boughts of mass hysteria.

Whereas American police officers are enlightened sages that always act perfectly rationally and calmly to uphold the law, and never collude to give themselves enhanced rights, or shoot innocent people without adequate justification, or abuse forfeiture laws to line their pockets, or blatantly lie in court.

Citizens and voters are fallible human beings, with all the accompanying vices and virtues, and so are the police, but the fact is that we must build our institutions from those fallible, flawed beings of flesh and blood, since they are all we have. The best way to do that is to establish a rule of law whom nobody is above, and I'm telling you that right now, US police officers see themselves as above the law. They kill and steal and lie with impunity, and as a result, hundreds of people are dead, and thousands upon thousands are in prison.

That's not saying that the civilians shouldn't have a voice or the government is always right (far from it), but when you take a force like the military or police and make Jo the supermarket sales clerk their 'oversight' despite little to no actual experience, or even knowledge, of what the police and military face; you're begging for trouble. The civilians should work to make and refine the laws, but its the job of the police and military to keep those laws in place.

They're not doing their job right. They're doing their job terribly, by any objective measure of the term. You know how many people have been killed by British police? 33. In the past twenty years. I'm not going to count how many have died at the hands of your police in the past year, but it's a lot. So forgive me if I have more faith in Jo the sales clerk to do a better job.

How would it work though? Obviously someone would have to be paying the police, and that would probably be whoever is rich. Thus, the police would be loyal not to normal people, but to whoever is rich enough to afford them.

You know, civilian oversight committees have existed in the United States for over eighty years now, albeit in a relatively toothless form. So I don't feel any need to explain to you how they work.

[Worat Character Supports]

I actually really like Vaida's supports. Plus they gave us this comic.

[Good units you avoid using]

yeah, because of warp. The sage magic cap is higher than mage knight's and that's the difference between 2 and 1 turning at least one map, while mage knight doesn't really help you save any turn anywhere else. Sage Lute is also way better in the desert chapter.

Lute doesn't realistically hit her magic cap in a draft. In order for her to have the staff rank to use Warp in relevant chapters (all of them after C15), she needs to promote at level 10, but whether she promotes to Sage or Mage Knight, she has 25 magic either way at level 10/20. I guess Sage Lute has the potential to get higher magic, but Mage Knight Lute is less likely to fail to reach 25 magic at that point too. And that's proceeding under the questionable assumption that Lute can even hit level 10/20 in a reasonable timeframe. If she doesn't then she won't get close to the Mage Knight cap.

I don't know much about saving specific turns, but I find it a little hard to believe that less movement in the desert is more significant than having less move in literally every other chapter from Chapter 10 onwards.

[Good units you avoid using]

Sage Lute is better than Mage Knight Lute if you're on a draft and didn't get Artur or Saleh (and I honestly don't see someone picking both Lute and Artur or Saleh).

The only advantage I can see of Sage is that you can eventually build enough rank to use Purge. But is that really worth giving up 1 move, canto, better Magic, better CON, and the ability to contribute to rescue-drops?

[Which GBA Fighter/Warrior is your favorite?]

I like Wade, he has good hair?

[Good units you avoid using]

I'm not sure it's as clear cut.

Lute can become a Sage and have amazing raw power over most ennemy units (Bishop!Arthur still have the advantage against monster), or be a Mage Knight and have higher move.

They're both excellent units, and you don't have to chose one over the other. Your team will benfits greatly with both.

Sage!Lute is generally bad, Light magic is quite weak in FE8. Mage Knight is always preferred for the extra movement.

[Opinions on Knights?]

Knights are so so so bad. Moving is more important than fighting, and usually Knights suck at both of them.

I'm cynical about Effie and Benoit. Every a new Fire Emblem comes out, people say "Knights are finally good! They have Great Knight promotion/Knight Ward/good speed growths/reclass/Pair Up/Defensive Formation that solves all their problems", and then we actually play the game and hey... they're still bad. So I'll believe it when I see it.

[Should Growth Rates be Shown?]

Difficulty should never be created by arbitrarily withholding information. We should all agree that the game would be negatively affected if you couldn't view a unit's bases, or the stats of enemy units, so there is no good reason not to inform the player of growth rates. Even just a rough approximation should be fine.

[Staves III - Do you like to see more status staves?]

I would love to see more status staves and I'm happy to see them experimenting with status effects other than direct disables like Sleep/Berserk/Stone. They add difficulty to the game, not just because they're usually very strong when used by the enemy, but because it requires skill and planning to make effective use of them for yourself.

I feel like Sleep/Berserk/Stone were problematic because they were such hard disables that lasted for a long long time. It basically meant that you could never allow a unit to end their turn under their effect and just had to restore them immediately or resign yourself to playing the rest of the chapter without them (because they would fall behind the rest of your units). So work needs to be done to create statuses that are interesting and offer some interaction other than "use Restore immediately".

[Hardest chapter of each game on the SNES?]

Evel can take care of all enemies untill a certain cut-scene, although you want to take away the fire sword before that cutscene or you lose it. You can't dally TOO long, because the game spawns an OP enemy after quite a few turns as a soft time limit.

Even if Galzus spawns, he still can't kill Eyvel; nothing can. And he despawns when the door is opened anyway. The only risk is that that Eyvel will counterattack and kill him.

[our favorite games and the bad things about them?]

Advance Wars 4 is an amazing game that really takes the gameplay to the next level and implemented online play (although sadly the servers are now defunct). There was one problem, though; the map list used for online play is terrible. While some maps are decent, there were also some ludicrously unbalanced maps such as Swan Cove and Fist Peninsula.

[Cutest Manakete?]

Nils, because loli manaketes are overrepresented and we need more shotas.

[Hardest chapter of each game on the SNES?]

Only completed FE5.

For a first time player: 24x (easy, if you know how to warpskip)

For someone with preknowledge: 5 (the swordmaster and the warrior in the "arena" have extreme high stats; can double or oneshot you).

22 is also very difficult because of the tons of leadership stars of the enemies.

Just so you know, the swordmaster and warrior can easily be taken care of by Eyvel. It's literally impossible for Eyvel to die. The only enemies you don't want Eyvel to kill are Mareeta and Galzus, but Eyvel will not counterattack Mareeta and by the time Galzus spawns, you should be in position to open the entrance to the coliseum, which will despawn Mareeta and Galzus.

[How to screw up the plans of LTC players]

FE12 is pretty good about punishing turtles in some maps, though not all of them. Nearly every map has a rush objective, and the higher difficulties punish overly aggressive play because of the insane damage and accuracy the enemies have. So you have to find just the right balance.

I think the strength there is the optional objectives you need to complete for the "true" ending; collecting all the Starsphere shards and the other orbs. FE6 did something similar with the Divine Weapons that frequently came attached to turn limits, although they're usually quite easy to fulfill.