Czar_Yoshi

If you have the resources to get all the children and a task where having all of them helps out, it's generally assumed that you grind them until all of their important stats are capped (hence "minmaxing"). Thus, growths don't matter. For ingame it's not viable to get/train all the children at once, so just save the ones that need more help (Inigo) for postgame grinding. If you do want to make Noire work ingame, reclass her to something with better HP/Def growths. Also, offense always trumps defense in higher DLC maps and Streetpass. Would you rather kill something on player phase and escape to safety with Galeforce, or damage something and then sit around on EP eating a bunch of hits? Pairs without Galeforce generally get benched because they need a Staffbot to rescue them after every turn. edit- Oh wow, I just got stp ninja'd twice in the last hour. Nightmare Sniper can be dropped to 0% hit, and I'm pretty sure 100% Miracle and 100% Aegis will stop him too. Though it's true that he can't be stopped with raw Def...

No, I'm pretty sure Secret Apo has been cleared several times before using only one offensive pair. Secret can be cleared with only gen 1 units, only A rank supports and any asset/flaw (or no Avatar) so killing all your characters is really the only way to completely mess up your ability to clear Apo. Even then, it's probably possible to clear it with only Chrom and spotpass units (though I haven't tried myself) so even that couldn't stop you if you knew what you were doing. That said, having even one optimal pairing helps a lot.

Inigo needs an offensive proc not named Astra, something Virion does not have to offer.

Poor +Mag/Spd options? Trickster!Gaius, Dark Flier!Sumia/Cordelia, Tactician!Avatar and Anna are all obtainable earlygame and raise Mag and Spd. For +Mag/Def, Miriel, Ricken, Tharja and Henry can all promote to Dark Knight (the latter two also give good +Mag/Def unpromoted or as Sorcerer), Nowi gives it as well (and can even reclass to DK if you like). All of those options also give +Res except the Dark Mages.

Levin is cheaper than C tomes. That's cheap enough for me. They're important because they give sword users a ranged weapon, and even if your Mag is bad they'll still do good damage earlygame because enemy res (especially Barbarians, the axeguys you want to dodge) is bad and they have high mt. Also, the primary user of them is Avatar, who is likely to want them due to being in Merc and be able to use them well thanks to high Mag.

The big ones that they don't sell are Rescue and Second Seals, but there's enough out there that you could fill a whole Streetpass team with stuff you can't buy from Spotpass but isn't banned. However everything they don't sell can either be obtained from Merchants or Event Tiles, so if you absolutely must have something early it's still possible to get it that way. Though I definitely would count farming more than two Merchants for a specific item as grinding...

That ain't Morgan. His mug isn't derpy enough. Imposter Morgan-F works much better.

Except you can't buy Rescue Staves from Spotpass. You'd either need to Streetpass yourself 20 times or make do with heal staves (an infinite source of damage can come from a Revenant's Blighted Claws, or breaking a Counter enemy's weapon on a fort and hitting it with Falchion over and over). The thing about dancing Olivia is that it's completely unnecessary and there's no reason to do it. Even if you get to Lv.30, reclass to Dark Flier, and give her every single enemy in Cht.12 and 13, she won't get Galeforce in time to pass it to Lucina, so the only reason you'd do it is for stats. But her stats don't help Lucina that much- she can get well off the ground in Cht.14 even with a Maiden mother thanks to having a good, ready support (Avatar), an HP-restoring proc, and the ability to reclass into a Cav right off the bat which gives her Def and is great for her weapon ranks. Low Str isn't a problem thanks to her 12-mt unbreaking prf sword, and she effectively has an infinite use Concoction in case she does take too much damage. Combine that with a very good turtling spot in Cht.14 and dance spam doesn't make a difference. I suppose it is more grindey than exp funneling though, if only because the time:payoff is so bad and it can be done infinitely.

I doubt normal html works, but there is a code tag you can use like this. That's done with code and /code in brackets, and makes your font perfectly spaced for everyone so you could make a pseudo-table that way.

I'm actually working on such a guide already (just for fun), but progress is slow because I'm also working on stunts for Lunatic+ and Secret Apo and just got Tropical Freeze. If I ever finish it, I might even add a section detailing specific uses for each and every Spotpass character. That would be interesting.

Well... A typical Berserker kit is LB/Agg/Axefaire/All+2/Str+2 or Swordbreaker. Gerome can get Berserker from Vaike, and Yarne already has it. Gerome also already has Str+2 and Swordbreaker, and Yarne can get one (or both from Fred). Axefaire comes with Berserker. Agg/LB and All+2 are free. Mods? Gerome loses 1 Str with Vaike (.5 damage per swing in Apo) and Yarne loses 1 (with Fred). Considering as they're already overkill for killing anything as is, even with minimal help from the lead unit, that's not a standout contribution. Laurent works well as a support Sage, and he comes with LB, Agg, Tomefaire, Anathema, and one of DS+ or Hex. He has more to gain from Avatar modwise because Libra and Ricken are in high demand and a long way off from giving +4 Mag, but Laurent only needs one more skill and the only thing Avatar has to offer that stands out from other fathers is Solidarity, which stacks nicely with Anathema and a +crit forge on the lead unit. So while none of them are worse, they're all intangibly better- as in, it won't make a difference. Hence why they're lumped in with those without children or Galeforce.

If I was just talking about Olivia I'd call it dance spam, not abuse in general. I'm also talking about things like staff spam, exp funneling, killing reinforcements, etc- anything you can do within a map to squeeze out more exp. -And I do use DLC maps- some of the time, which is why I feel like drawing a distinction.

Abuse doesn't raise the number of maps you've played, grinding does. At least, that's how I see the difference. And it's a somewhat important distinction because if there's a limit on what you can do within a map to have it count as grinding or not, it becomes very hairy to define a no-grind run that isn't either an LTC, a Speedrun or a Pacifist run. And then grinding can also be divided into Risen, Spotpass and DLC.

Of note, that's only true for Avatar-M. Avatar-F can do 7:3 or 6:4 if marrying second gen.

Do note that while Lunatic enemies do eventually get incredible hitrates, their weapons increase in ranks much quicker than in Normal/Hard and less accurate weapons really lowers the gap at the start (iirc some enemies in the first few chapters actually have lower hitrates than on hard). That and Mercenary is a strong starting class in Lunatic(+) and it gives a +Hit/Avo skill that's basically always active on a Sword class with decent Spd. Additionally, in the first few chapters there's much more exp to go around and that IL cap hasn't kicked in yet so you're likely to have a lot more Spd on your main units. Generals: Their Skl isn't great for procs, but it does make a big difference on their hitrate. Generals are good any time you want that 50 Str and care about Lances or useable Skl over Spd. And a fun fact about Villager: their pairup boosts give the most Hit out of any class in the game (+3Skl/Lck). It doesn't matter, but it technically is a perk. Anyhow, tier lists are incredibly subject to what you're doing at the time (difficulty, maingame/postgame, or even what map you're playing), so I'd prefer one in the format that doesn't rank classes/units against eachother and instead focuses on the greatest strengths each class has. But that would be a class/character guide, not a tier list, so oh well.

If you're going to make Brady physical, go Hero, Warrior or Berserker, not Monk. Healtouch has no place on offensive units, swap it for LB (and swap Renewal for Sol if you want self healing and Luna otherwise). Anything is viable in Awakening to an extend due to high caps and potential for customization/grinding, but I wouldn't rank physical Brady anywhere near the top of the list, both because his mods are so against it, because magic is better than physical, and because if you want to scramble to make a magic boy be physical it should be Owain and his Sword Hand.

Or you could go the FE4 route and add more villages/thieves that encourage you to rush and spread your forces out to save all the treasure. I'd still welcome that idea, though.

Chrom (to Inigo): "Seems like you haven't a care in the world past whose bed you'll be sharing tonight." So yeah, I wouldn't put it past him.

Agreed. Assuming you're talking about most popular non-main, that is.

The problem with that is that Chrom gets Bow Knight, and in a game so heavily biased toward lowmanning, giving Galeforce to the one unit who's always force-deployed, in a class that doesn't cause him to lose his weapon rank, seems like it would just make the problem worse. Of course, I'm not saying that Awakening couldn't use some balancing of what classes get what skills, but there will always be broken classes and useless classes somewhere.

The costume and Awakening's track record with fanservice are reasons enough for me. Assuming that wasn't an issue, however, I would quite enjoy Berserker x Berserker pairs... One random suggestion: Troubadour should promote into Falco instead of War Cleric. That would expand passdown options for some units and generally make more sense.

While it's very true that time constraints are everywhere, I think you're getting a few different tasks confused. First off, the cutscenes: it's very difficult (not to mention a bad idea and waste of resources) to animate a CGI cutscene before you even know the story context it's taking place in, let alone the actual lines. There's also a difference between writing the story and writing the lines- the lines, as you said, are mostly done later on, but the story is worked on all the way from the beginning. Yes, perhaps Awakening is based on the concept of future children- but who came up with that, coders or storyboarders? There are other non-story things that can be held up by the story as well, namely map design. The storyboarders are generally at work from the beginning, and while they can be pushed around by the coders/designers to a degree (which characters to and not to include- see KoI, there's a ton of units in the class artwork section that look like they could have once been intended to be playable), they do have control over things like the setting. The dialogue writers are the ones who are really pinched by this, they can try and try to make a good support list but there's nothing they can do if someone cuts a character and they have to trash a whole list of supports. The main thing that happened during the storyboarding that messed up Awakening's story wasn't specifically time constraints- it was that Awakening was in danger of being the last Fire Emblem, they had multiple ideas for multiple games, and tried to do too much at once. Then they got hit by time constraints and couldn't make a 50-chapter game to properly expand upon all the elements, and it turned into the quantity-over-quality fest you see today.

Few new art assets is very different from no new art assets, because one requires an artist and one doesn't. In any case, my point wasn't that the art itself takes a lot of work, it's that so many things go into making something seemingly insignificant that often go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Hoo, that's a massive post. Shifting resources from one part of development to the next: No, Interceptor's right. You try telling your coders to add a new feature, and they'll do it and do it well. You try telling them to write some more story, and you get something like what Awakening has now. Start button to win: In lower difficulties that's already kind of a thing...

Here's the thing: turn limits, deployment limits including fatigue), and restricting items are all things that can be self-imposed challenges (although low deployment caps would actually make no difference on Lunatic because lowmanning is the best strategy), but there's simply no way to simulate randomly generated skills. Fog of War, new objectives and Ballistae (if included, which I'd like) should be on all difficulties as well. Happily, that's what this topic was about in the first place. Continuing on with suggestions (even though I'm pretty sure I've already posted mine): I want a branching story. Separate routes like FE6/7 at a minimum, but ideally they would change the rest of the game to some extent, possibly even with different endings. These could be based on text options, but certain pairings could also be sources of change (imagine if the first few couples you paired up were given a greater role in the overall plot). I'd also like to see another difficulty mode (not Lunatic+) that's based more around using enemies to block you than to kill you. Individual enemies would not be random and would have significantly less Str, instead being strategically placed with exotic skills designed to mess with your objective to complete the map (some examples would be a skill that doubles both of your defenses at the cost of 50% of your Mov, a skill that halves your defenses and doubles your Mov, a skill that causes you to automatically dual guard an adjacent ally under 50% HP, a skill that always makes the RNG roll in your favor...). This would need to be combined with better maps and more objectives to work. Finally, I'd replace the Barracks, shops and maybe some other stuff with a hub town, Mystery Dungeon style. Support conversations could be activated by talking to units, and the hub would change based on where in the story you are.