Czar_Yoshi

Stahl sounds promising, Gregor would have the least maintenance but might not have as much to offer Severa. Vaike is another possibility, and there's also Fred if you want Discipline without the earlygame exp investment to keep Stahl relevant.

It pretty much is the same thing as Shadow Dragon with warps. After the first half of the game, it's nothing but 1-turning bosses until the end.

Henry and Fred shouldn't be keeping up. They're hard supports, all they need to do is damage the foe with DSes, don't give them any lead exp. The same would go for Ricken, but he's one of the worst units in the game- Cord needs good pairup bonuses to get going, if she sunk on your last run it's his fault. I'd strongly advise finding a way not to use him, outside of an emergency Rescue range booster if needbe. If you want both Sumia and Cord to pass GF with Peg 20 promotions, they need ALL the exp from Cht.8 through 13, a little extra for Cord after that, and as much as you can give Sumia before that. Promoting them early lets you give some combat exp to others- only a little, though- but it also puts you at risk of sinking due to having underleveled main combat units. As for the staffbots, never have them support eachother. You lose healing turns, and they don't build support with eachother due to not fighting. Lissa can get strong enough to help out in combat and take some pressure off the Pegs, but Maribelle and Libra are going to want to stay behind the lines where it's safe, and not worry about level. Anna doesn't have much of a future as a long-term combat unit. If Robin lacks a place to be early on, give him Fred, or maybe give Lissa him. Neither Lon'qu nor Virion would do too well as Cord's husband, I think. They're good in Apo, but Apo optimization and Lunatic+ optimization clash quite a bit, and Lunatic+ will punish you very hard for compromising.

She can hit 69 in GK with no All+2 and General with All+2 with that support, so it's definitely doable. Unfortunately, GK will want to use the extra room for a procstack, but GKs have really bad Skl, so there's some clash there. Still worth considering as an option, especially if you want her to use Swordfaire for some reason. Sadly, General needing All+2 means you have no room for Deliverer, which combined with a +Mov support would make you very mobile. DK is for non-Apo postgame, and it's typically better than the other two there once maxed (unless Staves or flight is important) due to decent Def and the lack of any real flaws. Vengeance Snipers are really, really strong. 3-range 100% procs are worth any trouble you have in setting them up (taking an EP can be a good way to do this, if you don't get dodges or DGs). They're more valuable if you're doing a challenge run, or can get a Sage support (which Virion!Severa can easily do, thanks to Henry!Gerome and Gregor!Laurent), but even unpaired they're crazy. 1 Skl and 1 Spd count for absolutely nothing at all when you're already at 75 Spd and 100% Vengeance. That Hit and Avo should never matter. Switching to Virion isn't a loss in those stats for the same reason -Def isn't a loss as a flaw on Robin- they're stats you don't care about (anymore). On Brady, the Spd does matter slightly because with Lon'qu he can take a Valkyrie and with Virion he wants a DF or Hero, but with Severa's Wyvern all they do is let you use a Paladin if you want (and there's one good male Paladin- Inigo- and he doesn't want to be supported by a Wyvern in that class). The Spd does give you +0 Hero, but in terms of Wyverns they're functionally identical.

He's pretty good. Usually if you're going with GK Chrom, forget about Spd thresholds and procs, and just go for guaranteed 6HKOes on everything. Buh? Their Wverns are pretty much identical, unless you count .25% DS and 1.5 Hit. Outside of that, Lon'qu can take a +0 Spd support and/or go for 100% DS with Hero, while Virion can switch to magical, or aim for 100% DS with Sniper. Seeing as two out of the three good Hard Support Berserkers (Henry!Gerome and Gregor!Laurent) also make very strong Sages, that's pretty great- Lon'qu!Severa only has one partner (Hit+20 Yarne) who can compliment all her roles at once. They're pretty much on perfectly even footing, though if I had to give the edge to one it would be Virion- she's got Tomefaire for DK and Bowfaire for BK as non-Apo postgame options, and Lon'qu is more limited to doing the same things as in Apo.

Just sayin', but how are you going to make a quality LTC if you don't even know how the most important mobility feature in the game works, let alone the layout of the game? I think an RNG-manipulated run would be cool to watch, but you really should play the game normally first. Otherwise, you're kind of setting yourself up for having everyone who's actually played the game wondering why you didn't just to X.

OK, that works. The way you worded it, it sounded like a spy was reporting to someone that Basilio was felled by said villain in Valm.

The game shows him falling to Walhart and then coming back in Cht.23, though. Are you planning on changing Awakening canon? A villain with the resources to both take out a leader all the way in Valm and take over Ferox might be a little tricky to handle, so be careful with that. You'll need to look very closely at how they do what they do and make them no more powerful that they absolutely need to be to do that- if they're defeated too quickly for their power level, it'll break immersion and become hard to take them seriously.

Then definitely go Tact -> Merc -> Hero -> DF. The exp is there and the skills are good. You might have a little trouble in the desert chapters with restricted mobility, so if you're using Spotpass make sure to get a good Wyrmslayer to OHKO non-Pavise+ Wyverns. That'll make it significantly less of a disadvantage.

Nah, Noire and Severa, pretty much. I've got him on Yarne for 100% DS purposes, but that's not very fun. Aside from the lack of +Hit for Apo, there's also a severe lack of classes for postgame- just Barb, Fighter, and Thief. Three base classes, none of which are great by themselves, and an overlapping promotion- there are 1st gen units who have more classes than him. Vaike should be a really good dad- he's got everything a non-magical girl with GF and no proc could possibly want. Unfortunately, there isn't a single one of those, because Awakening is heavily biased toward females and all the Galegirls already have procs.

If you want Morgan to get GF, you can reliably hit it during a Chrom/Robin solo with one base reclass and one promoted reclass. It's difficult to avoid the base reclass as Robin, and avoiding the promoted reclass means going to Peg right away, which locks you to E lances for a while and could be very bad. Sumia is a great unit in Lunatic+, but waiting that long to give her a husband is going to hurt her. You'd need to have a good A support for her up until Henry comes (Fred?). Morgan has Veteran, 15 in her second promoted class is doable before too long- probably around Cht.20 with some favoritism. If you have an Arms Scroll though, she can safely go straight to Peg, which will net it a lot sooner. Promoting directly to GM works, but Rally Spectrum is good enough that you really want to stay the extra five levels for it. Bow Knight is also an option for Lucina. She keeps Falchion and 8 Mov, gives nice pairup boosts, and has Bows which are great on Lunatic+. She'll grow quickly in them thanks to Discipline, too. I'd advise either that or GK (depends a bit on Robin's class).

If you've got Golden Gaffe and are speedy, it's possible to max your Renown normally in around six hours. It's not that big of a slog, I've done it twice (and it's a luxury in the first place. 270 Renown strats cover the Second Seal, which is the most important thing there, 1000 nets you a Bullion(L) which will keep you afloat for a while and is important on high deployment, and above 30,000 returns start diminishing fast). For the top of Cht.3 (for future reference), open one door, aggro everything, then start running in circles around the map, using pairup-drops to move faster than the enemy. Slowly, as you get exactly halfway across, enemies at the back of the train will break off one by one and start charging you from the other direction, but since they're always single and never ranged, you can run them over as you go with shots from Virion, Miriel, Robin, and the Javelin, and then OHKO with Fred to bypass Counter if absolutely needed. Just keep going in circles and they'll eventually run out of dudes. The strat takes a while, but has a 0% chance of death and makes it very easy to feed exp to non-Robin units for training.

Have you considered trying to make it shorter and smaller-scale? One day of planning isn't really going to give you the material and ideas to make something that can outdo Awakening, but that's OK since from your description it looks like you're going with a smaller cast and maybe focusing on character interaction over an overarching plot. Nobody in the community will "mind" a short hack- there are only two complete, full custom full length ones out there anyway, and everyone would rather have a complete small hack than an incomplete concept for a big one. And if it turns out that hacking clicks with you and you want to keep working, you can make another hack! What if you tried five chapters, going on your idea for an overthrown Ferox? Cht.1 could be a prologue, Cht.2 could involve finding Robin, Cht.3 could be an initial confrontation with Ferox, Cht.4 could be finding Basilio and Cht.5 could be the final battle, maybe? Ten characters sounds about right- Robin, Chrom and eight others. Give that a week of decent effort, and I bet it would start looking pretty good. Think about it!

It's so standard, you're generally regarded as insane if you try to do it without (though it is possible, even on L+). For Cht.6, you'll need to break the map up into priorities. Above all else, Emm needs to stay alive, because if she dies, you lose. Her room has a single side access, and a two-wide door that Thieves can open. The door is very hard to protect once open, the gap is very easy, especially on vanilla where there's no Pass, so your secondary objective is to kill all of the Thieves as fast as possible, then retreat. An additional objective is to recruit Gaius, and this usually must be met as well. Generally, the best setup for this is to start Fred x Kellam (and only those two) on the right, Robin and a strong pairup (Vaike, a Cav, maybe Miriel) in the middle, and Chrom and any other god fighters you have on the left. Fred should fight a Thief on EP, OHKOing with the Silver Lance, and take one Cav battle along with that, iirc, then run back on turn 2 to the rest of the group. Robin needs to fight in the 1-wide staircase in the middle- there should be two Thieves there to mop up, and you can get one on EP. If you have the military to push to Gaius on the left, do so, otherwise have Chrom stand as close to his range as possible, let him move toward Chrom on EP, recruit him next turn and pair Chrom up with him, then have Gaius run them to safety (similar to what's done for Kellam on Cht.3). That should handle all the Thieves, so fall back and turtle (and optionally Rescue Marth). Don't be afraid of Marth doing a little fighting if you're under pressure, without Lunatic+ skills she can last a round or two and mauls Fighters. Panne is pretty strong at base as well and can help out by holding a choke for a turn, she matches up favorably in combat vs a single Fighter.

No Galeforce? Lucina always goes LB/GF/Aether/Luna/DSt+ outside of threshold builds. She'd make a good Bride, if you want to use one, or a GL if not (Berserkers for both). In terms of 8 Mov classes, she can use Bow Knight (a good place for a Warrior/Sage). You could also try Dark Flier or Sage, but there are no magical male +3 Spd classes, which really limits those as options.

She can do Falco, yeah. Between DSt+ and Luna, she's got more than enough killing power already. In that case, I think I'll just switch out the first two, and leave the last four. Thanks!

Well, regardless of what classes you put them in, they're going to reek due to missing GF. I was just checking your calcs, if it was my team I'd bench them for more Staffbot room. Chrom and Sumia will be awesome no matter how you class them. Chrom usually goes GK or BK for Hard Support roles and Sniper as a non-GF lead, Sumia goes with anything with high Mov. DF x BK definitely works. Also, I've got a question for all you guys: does anyone actually use the links in my sig? There's a limit on how many you can put in there, and since most of that stuff isn't too hard to find normally I'm considering replacing some of them with rarer resources and plugs (such as Int's threads).

Are you going to grind using DLC? Because Lunatic+ is hard enough as it is without trying to get all the children in a nogrind setting, that requires insane amounts of precision in support/exp distribution and timings, and will be 100% impossible in a more-or-less blind first run. For Cht.3, though, you'll want to use Interceptor's strat (though it looks like you've already been looking for that), it has pretty low requirements for remaining weapons and Robin thresholds, and there are only three particular skills you need not to spawn in a certain place. After that, if you want more advice in a nogrind context, we'll need your Avatar's gender and the levels of all units you have and plan on training, as well as any specifics you plan on doing (eg pairs, overall build strategy (bows, GF) etc).

It had a three hour delay? Wow. Derp.

Oh, Ricken!Gerome makes a very nice mixed support too, he's just a little more flexible and and slightly less strong. He has Bowfaire BK as a +3 Spd support, Sage as a magical support, and BF/Hit+20 Warrior for physical (and I'm using him as a Sniper too for 100% DS). Overall, Henry is better at what he does, though (Hex/Anathema Berserker). You could go either way, I'd lean toward Henry!Gerome not knowing your other pairs. VV is a bad idea in Apo, by the way. As a rule of thumb, never use it unless you do some battle calcs to figure out a) exactly what you need it for, and b) why VV is the best answer for that situation (or at least why you want to use it). Careless VV use is one of the easiest ways to die in Apo, and no matter how deeply ingrained in the community's memory it is, it's not a toy. Gerome is a high Str +0 support, and Hero Lon'qu!Severa is pretty much ran exclusively for that, so that's a must have. Make sure to put All+2 on Severa. Sadly, you seem to be 1 Skl short of having a backup option of 100% DS Hero x Sniper (unless you were to use Assassin, which is inefficient), so swapping Stahl and Virion is a consideration. Since you're not running Yarne with the intent to do 100% DS, the -1 Skl likely won't be a huge loss. Noire next, since she's not no GF and needs dibs on a Galeboy. Brady and Owain seem to be your only choices; neither will be fast enough to make a difference so you may as well use Owain for the Mov. Unfortunately, this will be a pair where neither side can double Thronie (unless Noire has All+2 and a DF Owain support)- in fact, Noire will need All+2 to avoid being doubled by Anna (Owain should just barely scrape by without it). You might not be seeing much mileage out of them. Now that that's done, taking quick stock of your +Hit Berserkers, and you have two. Cynthia doesn't need one, Lucina might like one (but is also cool with DF Owain, if Noire gets Brady instead), Kjelle can go with one or a +0. You don't actually have any +0s left though, so might as well give Kjelle one (she'll be a procstack Wyvern with no All+2). The other and Owain (if not with Noire) can be split with Cynthia and Lucina- if it's Brady, he'll need to go with Cynthia. Thus... Severa x Gerome Noire x Owain(either)/Brady Lucina x Owain(DF)/Laurent/Yarne Cynthia x Owain(either)/Brady/Laurent/Yarne Kjelle x Laurent/Yarne If you wind up with Cynthia x Yarne, All+2 on Falco Cynthia and All+2/Skl+2 Sniper Stahl!Yarne can hit 100% DS, so consider doing that over Hit+20 Berserker.

Using that analogy, it's more of a case of not using units not suited to the situation. In Age of Empires 2, you can very well try to rush with Spearmen because they're the unit you want to use, but you'll get wrecked for it because they're not meant for that. Chrom is in exactly the same situation- he's not meant for fighting the Prologue Boss. That doesn't mean he doesn't have his uses (just like Spearmen)- he's a great support, and his weapon lets him shrug off earlygame neglect and catch up later very easily. There is nothing wrong with a difficulty that makes certain units better able to handle certain situations than others, but there would definitely be a problem if unit choice didn't matter and you could use anything you want with perfectly good results. Continuing on that analogy, say unit A is indeed capable of taking down the enemy by themselves- but they also only cost a certain type of resource. You have additional stuff not needed to make unit A that you could be using to make other unit types (that compliment unit A), and if you don't like using just unit A, there's not much reason not to. I have no problems with people not liking anything, I've said several times that Lunatic(+) aren't for everyone. You play what you like, I play what I like, we're all happy. My issue is that you're basically asking for Lunatic to be a difficulty where you can make any unit good at everything with a little effort. Seeing as there's already a perfectly fine Hard mode that does that already, taking away what sets Lunatic(+) apart as difficulties- teambuilding that actually matters- it feels a little like you're stepping on the modes I like and saying you want the whole game to be the way you like it, instead of using different difficulty types that appeal to different audiences. Now, me and my preferences aside, that's not even good game design- the whole point of Awakening is to have as broad of appeal as possible, and I think the difficulty design did a pretty good job of making sure there's something for everyone (as evident by the point of this thread). Homogenizing it and making every difficulty play similar to the first two (harder, maybe, but with the same principles) lowers the amount of people the difficulty can appease, and that's not a good thing. As for why I'm "trying to explain things" to you... Explaining stuff is pretty much all I ever do on SF. It's like my job here, I do it all the time. What did you expect?

Having lots of player phase offense can be very helpful, especially on higher difficulties, but if you try to have too many leads then you run into issues with there not being enough exp. Support units only need to be strong enough to provide decent DSes, not to survive enemy phases, so they can get away with being a lot weaker- if you want to field a lot of units, it's definitely the way to go (and, of course, ferrying). You should also mess around with the Transfer and Drop commands. When used well, you can extend the movement range of your units by a huge amount, especially in Deserts where single tiles count for more. The Ricken bit? Thanks! It's from KuroiTusbasaTenshi's stream, if you're curious- Awakening Lunatic+ resetless on Fridays at 7pm PST. The runs go on pretty long at night, and often we get bored and stuff like that happens.

But then why try to spread exp around? Just for fun? Lunatic(+) require you to play by the game's rules, or do poorly. Normal/Hard let you do whatever you want, for fun, and get away with it. If you want to play by your own rules, regardless of tactics, do it there, it's what they're for. If Lunatic(+) let you do whatever you want and get away with it, they'd be pretty pathetic difficulties. It's a shame that the highest difficulties aren't designed to be appealing to everyone, maybe, but I'd much rather have that than them not fulfill their roles of being difficult. Again, nothing against anyone who doesn't like them, they're not for everyone. And I don't think they should be. I'd be mad if they let you get away with whatever, a lot of people would be mad if Normal/Hard didn't.

Use the Rescue staff from Par.1 to save Libra. Unless you're on Lunatic(+) though, he should be able to hold his own for a while. Focus on using fliers and mages, and target the Archers first so they don't kill you. Don't use anyone who can't use the sand to their advantage/hide behind someone who can- the terrain can easily work in your favor too.

No, Maribelle can fight well with a Chrom S support, and Robin x Lissa isn't really bad.