Czar_Yoshi

You can stop by The Pairing Thread if you want more advice on gameplay in general. The metagame for Awakening has changed very rapidly since it came out and is still moving at quite a brisk pace, so in general you shouldn't trust anything that doesn't have someone who can give you a convincing explanation of why it's good on demand. It's part of why there are no (good) FAQs for optimization out there. Anyway, DFs have a 42/38/40/41 Str/Mag/Skl/Spd spread. Want a physical Sword user? Mag doesn't matter, and Heroes have a 42/46/42 Str/Skl/Spd set. Want a physical Axe user? Mag doesn't matter, and Hero, General and Berserker all have some stat that's at least 6 higher and another that's at least 1 higher than DF's spread. Want Tomes? Str doesn't matter, and Sage will give you 46/43/42 mag/Skl/Spd. Basically, DF is completely outclassed in single weapon type useage, and sticking to one type is pretty common postgame because of Faire skills. DF is only useful if you want to be able to switch weapon types on the fly. Since you're not doing Apo/TSON (which is what pretty much everyone here refers to when they say postgame), raw attack won't matter as much, so DF becomes a lot more appealing. Specifically, if you're playing main story with limited grinding, DF will be very helpful with its high Res, though I still recommend giving Owain a father who helps his Str if you want to be one. A Ricken!Owain has +5 Mag and -2 Str, while a Stahl!Owain has +2 Mag and +1 Str- one's clearly Mag based, the other is split and in a good position to use both weapon types. Vengeance is nice because it's very easy to get it to 100% activation. Its general playstyle is to attack something you can double while at full HP and, should you fail to get the KO before it attacks due to failed DSes, misses, or the enemy being strong in general, you'll get hit and get a Vengeance boost to help ensure the KO. If you don't get the KO and can't take an enemy phase, you'll be stuck because you whiffed Galeforce. If you got it, you can run away and are safe. You also may want to combo it with Lifetaker for extra safety, if you're worried about deaths. Astra itself is good in two cases: during non-Apo postgame, when comboed with Sol you get higher rates of getting an offensive skill to proc than you would if you were using Luna/Sol and have over 50 Skl. Also, when comboed with Luna and at very high Skl levels (80+), it reduces your chances of not proccing an offensive skill to very low levels and boosting your average damage output significantly. The one case where it's very bad is if you're fighting anything with Counter: often it'll look like you're going to get the kill (Counter doesn't activate for killing blows), then Astra will proc and you'll take two hits to kill, get hit by Counter and die. If you need any of that in layman's terms, ask away.

Nobody's recommended Wrath with VV for quite a long time. If you're not grinding, you're not going to get it reasonably, and if you are there are better skills you can run. VV in general though is for Sorcs and units with 100% Dual Strike, not DFs. With DLC on the table, pretty much anything is good for Lunatic. Using a DF definitely won't give you any problems. If you want an Owain that's decent with both Str and Mag, try Stahl!Owain.

1. Probably not, she's still got a long ways to go and Morgan can get it very quickly thanks to Veteran. But you should wait for it for Severa. 2. This is why Chrom x Olivia usually isn't recommended. You'll be able to win on Inigo's paralogue once you have at least three Galepairs who can reliably ORKO stuff. Severa's Paralogue should be doable with a similar amount of stuff, though you may only need two Galepairs + a lot of Rescue for Severa. 3. Avatar wants either Warrior or Sniper next, Chrom wants BK, Lissa wants Valkyrie or Falco, Olivia wants Falco, Lucina wants Cav (and maybe an Arms Scroll for Javelins).

As a fighter. Two Snipers would be nice, but then either Vengeance or Ignis would be wasted, as we do want to maximize GF.

I don't think Noire should be counted out. Vengeance Snipers are pretty good and she wouldn't even need GF for her role.

That happens to all non-Chrom/Avatar parents (and their spouses) in pretty much any Apo challenge run ever (except those that mandate no children). Even if this were a normal run, Donnel has one of the weakest skillsets of any gen 1 unit combined with the worst mods, so he'd be the first to go for sure. And just sayin', but you'll have to reset for average stats as well. Not as much as perfect levels, but it'll still be very tedious toward the end.

Personally I'm not using any customization whatsoever in Classic until I've cleared it on 9.0 with every character. Smash Run I tend to focus more on bases than powers, specifically in mobility- I'd rather save a minute that would otherwise be wasted traveling than have extra secondary effects (with the exception of the Glider Sword and whatever it is that makes you start at 30% and take 0.7x damage. Those are both great). Some characters, only need a very small amount of extra stuff to get incredible starts- my best Jigglypuff has no special effects on its equipment and a high score of over 210K (for reference, my GSP gains have a pretty major slowdown once I break ~150K, and a good number of my highs are still around the ~147K mark, with only Jiggs, ZSS, Falcon and D3 above 160K).

And that the 3d slider is all the way up, but the effect is neither present nor is the 3d light on.

Honestly, I'm not sure whether the reason I've stuck with Awakening so long is more because it's so nice for casual play or because there's so much depth to postgame customization. What I do know is that Awakening is on my (two long) list of games that have managed to defy the rose-tinted glasses on subsequent "aesthetic" playthroughs, which is saying quite a lot.

Awakening doesn't suffer from the past being extremely different from the present (if anything, the past and present are fairly similar- heroes with legendary swords sealing evil dragons were and still are the status quo, and the main continent at least seems to have had no political shakeups for the last thousand years or so), it suffers from its lore not matching up to how we know the past (or at least other FEs) to be, which in turn implies that its past may not be any of the other FEs. To use your Rome analogy (applied to Cht.18 here), it would be as if an ancient Roman obtained the power of time travel, jumped 2,000 years into the future, and discovered that in the future the ruins of Rome were somehow on the opposite side of the continent that Rome used to be on, despite there being no plausible explanation for how it moved and nobody who thinks anything other than that Rome was always there.

Dark Flier for sure.

A personal observation on the Marth/Lucina "skill" difference: I've seen a lot more Lucinas from people with bad internet connections, probably because since she's got decently large, even and fast hitboxes she's one of the characters least hurt by lag. That's definitely not the whole story, but I feel it's worth noting.

I'd say it's actually because that Cordelia x Maribelle Scramble convo could take on a whole new meaning... I'm reasonably sure that coding same-gender pairings would actually take less work than opposite-gender ones, so this isn't really an issue. Forget marrying them, I just want Chrom to be able to support his granddaughter.

There really isn't any evidence directly disputing it. What I'm saying is that the evidence that does link it to Archanea is both barely anything more than any evidence linking it to the rest of the FEs, and it's certainly less than all the unexplained differences between this continent and Archanea. And for what it's worth, that Tiki/Flavia convo was added in DLC released after the game was, so it's possible IS made up their minds in between when the game was released and when it was.

I wonder what a run of Apo where LB and Rallies are the only skills allowed would look like. Banning DLC... If that included no Katarina, that would be a serious drag on the run. It wouldn't exactly be no DLC/Rally with extra skill restrictions, but with the added headache of having lots of 6 Mov Rallybots with no more than two Rallies each, it would be pretty close. I'm not AC but I'm fairly sure Second Seals would not be allowed for preparing skills to pass down (you could do whatever you want with them once you've recruited the child, though). You could, yes. But in a completely optimal setting, you'd have everyone getting perfect levelups, and then adding statboosters on top of that to get your stats even higher. Donnel would be nice for shaving off resets during preparation, yes. However, Aptitude wouldn't actually increase the maximum amount of stats it's possible to get unless it makes any of your growths break 100 (which, in my experience, it never does outside of HP), and since Donnel both has tiny caps and only 30 levels, he'll pass much worse bases than any other father, and thus have a worse best-case scenario than most of the other fathers. I'd like to propose a compromise on the statboosters: how about we do some math to figure out what stats the children would have if everyone always got perfect levelups, then use farmed boosters to get them that high (and only that high), setting aside the number of boosters normally obtainable in the game for further use? It would cut down on the resets involved in preparation, but wouldn't change any of the actual Apo play.

Is Valm/Valencia ever stated to be to the west of Archanea though? For all we know, Archanea could be further west of Valm. Awakening also sets a precedent for past Lords traveling to separate worlds where their descendants now live with Priam, so Marth's descendants living on another continent wouldn't be too implausible... Except that Chrom is a descendant of the First Exalt, not Marth (no, they're not the same). There have already been multiple Falchions (Gaiden), and Naga is confirmed in FE4 to be a world hopper, so there's really nothing tying Archanea to Awakening's continent. Now, I'm not saying any of this confirms that Awakening's continent isn't Archanea. My personal opinion on the matter is that the devs tried deliberately to make a continent that, should Awakening be the last FE, would be assumed by all to be Archanea and end the series by "going back to its roots", so to speak, but if it was a success and the series continued, they'd be able to make a sequel in which they could freely expand on the new continent's lore without having to retcon anything.

Awakening's continent has a similar layout to Archanea as well, but is it ever stated to be Archanea? It certainly has none of the lore and none of the location names, which leaves it with just as strong ties to Archanea as any other continent.

It could also give you trouble if you've never played an Srpg before. Normal really is "learn to play" difficulty- I've found that with a large team with sporadic supports, the game gives you a mistake tolerance of roughly 2-3 before you die- going down a lot if you try to use units you haven't been training for a long time in later chapters. For reference, in my first playthrough of the game, I had an accidental Sully!Lucina whose mom had about one level. Lucina had gotten maybe three levels herself and an early promotion to GL, and she still managed (with an unranked support) to take two consecutive EPs on Cht.23 without dying on the first try. She barely hung on, but she did. Honestly, the greatest threat of resetting in Normal is to not have Anna (for whatever reason- maybe you're not touching the Paralogues or something), not level Gaius, and then get him sniped in Chapters 17, 18, 20 or 21 before opening all the chests, forcing either a reset or a loss of loot (I did have this problem, leading me to immediately reclass Morgan to Thief on my second playthrough).

Yes, Avatar-F does give one more total GF. Most arguments in favor of Avatar-M x 2nd gen for Apo are either incredibly situational or could count as picking straws, but I've also yet to run into anything you can -only- do with an Avatar-F that isn't equally situational, so which one to use is really almost a matter of opinion- I'd say they're equally good. If you asked me for an example of why Avatar-M would be chosen over F, the most solid one I can supply is (what I assume to be) the logic behind Airship's choice to use M for his no DLC/Rally run: since males tend toward support roles and females tend toward lead roles, using a +Spd Avatar-M gives a more useful Spd pool (Morgan-F as a lead has +9, Avatar-F as a lead would have +4), and Spd was very tight in his run. What with stats being 20-22 lower across the board in his run, this was a really big deal. Personally, I prefer Avatar-M. I don't doubt it. Awakening is kind of a lawnmower simulator in which anyone can get ahead of the curve and mash stuff with enough attention. But your personal experience is based on how Morgan stacks up to the enemies she's fighting, and not on how she stacks up to other Morgans. And since everyone can take down enemies with ease, that's not a very useful comparison.

I nominate Sonic, Fox and Falco for below bottom simply due to how far they've fallen. ...Does anyone know who the space animals' new VAs are?

Do keep in mind that Apo never spawns enemies adjacent to eachother- they're always two spaces apart. You'll need an even mix of units who can hit at 2 range and ones that can hit at 1 range to make position-based DSes work.

You can, but you're effectively: -Losing your free 2nd gen 100% DS pair, -Giving Avatar a wife with only four skillslots, -Giving Morgan bad mods. All for one more double Galepair. Now, I've actually done this before and it's not exactly a bad course of action, but it's not one that I can say is superior to the rest.

If it's just "get a listed turn count for clearing Apo", you could exit after wave 0. Your Avatar will also be getting Rally Mov, most likely.

Use Vantage on a Tome class. You won't lose very much crit, but she won't be able to stomp you by outranging Sol Katti. It only takes 124 Atk to OHKO her, which isn't that hard to reach. By the way, this is nothing. I've 1-shotted Lunatic+ Grima both through Pavise+ and with Mire before. Oh... And I'd also like to try doing this (100% crit with enough Atk to OHKO) without LB, Morgan, or a pile of nearby units. One stat worth of Barracks, no Throne and a DG/miss will be required, but that's not too bad. +Mag/+Skl Gaius!Laurent@Sage@3/15 Wilderwind (Vengeance/Wrath/Focus/Gamble/Zeal) x Avatar-F@Sage (Solidarity/Anathema/DS+) Anna's thresholds when on the Throne: 121 Atk needed to OHKO (121 -55 /2 *3 =99), 165 crit needed for 100%. Laurent's Atk: 46(base) +3(mods) +10(Rally) +9(pairup) +2(tonic) +42(Vengeance) +7(WW) +2(S.Dance) =121 (if Barracks were used on top of this, he could take her on the Throne as well). Laurent's Skl: 43(base) +4(mods) +10(Rally) +7(pairup) +2(tonic) +4(Barracks) =70 Laurent's crit: 35(base) +50(WW) +20(Wrath) +15(DSp+) +10(Focus) +10(Gamble) +10(Anathema) +10(Solidarity) +5(Zeal) =165, success!

Short version: marrying first gen gives you seven children girls and six boys, so one girl can't marry and her Galeforce will be wasted. Thus, you lose out on any advantage you gain from marrying Nowi and only get the bad parts.