Czar_Yoshi

Grandbell was the aggressor for all of the Augustria chapters. They could have just sat happily on their borders, but went in and took over because a) Sigurd wanted to help Eltshan and b) Reptor wanted to take over.

I'm looking at Nowi's stats and seeing no Dragonstone+? You might want to get one for her. Otherwise your team is a little spread out but otherwise in good shape. You'll want to transition as many of the second rate parents into Staff duty as possible once their kids arrive to take over as combat units to keep the exp from getting too thin, though. Nah's Paralogue sells Second Seals. Do it first if you have a shortage of them.

You're never going to get those units to make it without DLC, and with DLC anyone can make it and your pairings won't matter ingame. You've got Luna on Avatar, Morgan, Cynthia, Severa, Brady, Owain, Chrom, Sully, Kjelle and Lucina. I'd love to help more but am not sure exactly what you're after here. Context on what you're using them for is really important in determining whether and how pairings are good.

Why Regna Ferox was made is so Chrom has somewhere to get big mighty troops to fight Plegia without Emmeryn having to have an army. In FE4, your country was the aggressor who was looking for any reason to invade back and sized upon the transgression to mount a full invasion and takeover. In FE13 your country is just chilling and they come out of nowhere, and you strike back in the name of freedom and justice and whatnot. They're pretty different scenarios.

Hey, welcome to the Forest! I'm going to assume you want your pairings for a postgame/DLC setting, because during the main story, especially on Lunatic, it's very difficult to get all the children in the first place, let alone train them, so you wouldn't have any worries about getting suboptimal ones. Fortunately, Awakening has very few instances of one good pairing robbing another of potential, because a lot of effort is put into making "suboptimal" children just as good as the optimal ones, resulting in a wide variety of fathers most children can take. The only one that's really left is Kjelle vs Noire on who gets saddled with Donnel. [spoiler=Kjelle and Noire]Basically, Donnel gives Galeforce, Gaius gives Galeforce, and both of them want it so they have to choose who gets which dad. Gaius, however, gives excellent mods, and Donnel gives terrible (worst in the game) mods. Kjelle has good mods to begin with and with Gaius is easily A tier, boasting a very fast Paladin and Wyvern Lord. With Donnel, her mods are still OK, but she misses the top benchmark in Spd in pretty much every class she has, leaving her with no role she can do optimally. On the other side, Noire winds up with decent Str/Mag/Spd from Gaius, but lacks the classes and skills to put them to use: if she goes magical (Dark Flier) to capitalize on her +3 Mag, she'll lack Tomefaire, dropping her output considerably, so she has to go physical. She can make a decent Bride (DLC) or Sniper, but her physical options are pretty limited and she won't be able to properly capitalize on Gaius's mods either way. Donnel!Noire still has no Tomefaire for those magical classes, but now doesn't even have the Skl/Spd that Gaius gives. Overall, you're choosing between having a first rate Kjelle and a second rate Noire, or having both of them be second rate. Noire is hurt by Donnel, but not as much as Kjelle because she was never that good to begin with. My preferred way out of this is to just give Noire a decent father at the cost of no GF and make her into a second Nah, letting Kjelle have GF and benching Donnel. Frederick and Gregor are both good options for a non-GF Noire. As for Lon'qu, here's what those two will look like in a postgame setting. Both have plenty of other strong options, so you're not sabotaging either by not giving them Lon'qu. Severa will be a Wyvern Lord with Limit Breaker, Galeforce, Lancefaire, All+2 and Vengeance, and paired with a Berserker with Hit+20 (such as Stahl!Yarne). With all boosts applied she'll hit 75 Spd, which doubles everything in the game, and with 10 flying Mov she can reach pretty much anything. She's also so strong that it's pretty much impossible to survive her through RNG alone. Her second set is pretty similar, but swap Wyvern Lord for Hero, Lancefaire for Swordfaire and the Berserker for anything slow (usually something like a Bowfaire Warrior with no Galeforce (Stahl!Gerome, for example), or an Axefaire General with it (Fred!Inigo, maybe)). She's fast enough this way to hit that 75 Spd benchmark no matter what her pairup is, letting you give her a slow pairup for fun to use a class you normally wouldn't (she can take the lead for kills that need speed, and with her +8 pairup boost her support won't be getting doubled, at least). On the other side is Lon'qu!Brady. Brady pretty much doesn't care about his dad due to already having all the skills and classes he needs from Maribelle alone, and only wants more mods. Lon'qu delivers nicely on that front and gives him the highest possible Skl out of all his fathers. However, do keep in mind that a +2 Spd father (such as Virion) won't cause him to hit any different benchmarks, and is for all intents and purposes identical.

That's one specific subset of groups, not cult mentality in general. Grima having an agenda other than world destruction is a premise that would have merit for (well-written) fanfiction and other retellings of the story, but there's no way the Devs had it in mind for Awakening itself.

If that's what Validar was after, he should have said so.

Someone doing terrible things for unknown (different from no) reasons is indeed unsettling. But let's look at exactly what Grima managed to accomplish: -Fought Naga in the past and lost. Big deal. -Revived Validar, who is a jerk. -Absorbed thousands of Plegians to resurrect. Considering that they're bad guys, this is a good thing. -Makes Risen run around everywhere, but all they do is kill Phila and some of her pegs (under Gangrel's command, so it's his fault) and a few suicidal Villagers. -Ruined lots of buildings in the future. If we include the Future Past DLC, he also kills Naga and Tiki, and threatens to grind Lucina's bones in a certain convo. However FP Grima acts pretty different from ingame Grima in general so I'm hesitant to lump them together (especially since he's actually possessing someone different). So overall Grima never really does anything despicable to be mysterious about. His badness is generally limited to being a jerk and passively summoning monsters who other villains use as teleporting mooks. One could say that, as the bigger bad, it's not his job to (the task should fall to Validar instead), but he's even worse at it than Grima.

Lon'qu x Cordelia will turn out very well rounded if you do make him a Wyvern, just those first two chapters will be iffy. Fred is mostly recommended because he's a good +Str/Mov support who opens up right around the time when his old supportees outgrow him, and he's got a good chance of having Luna in time for Severa (yours already has it), which she can make good use of. Chrom x Olivia is good if you're patient enough to spam Olivia up to Lv.30 so Lucina and Inigo's bases don't stink and great if you go the extra mile and manage to get her to DF Lv.15 in time for them (which is possible with some care- a reclass after Cht.11, Arms Scroll + forged Beastkiller for Cht.12, and maybe a saved Paralogue 4 for exp). She also has the unusual benefit of making Chrom and Robin's children not consist of four girls, which is extremely annoying to deal with when making pairs for lategame.

Correction: it's an irrational excuse. It may not make sense from a sensible standpoint, but it still happens a lot in real life and that's a good enough reason for it to work in fiction. I still don't get how Emmeryn and Nyna are related other than both being female leaders of the main good country... Yes, they both don't want to fight, but for completely different reasons.

If you want to use Chrom x Sumia, you'll need to train her. She'll be really weak if she hasn't gotten any exp yet, but should still be able to beat non-Arcwind Mages in Cht.8 for training depending on what her support with Chrom looks like (ideally it should be to S right now, if you're willing to reset spam B will be enough to reasonably get the job done). Chrom's level is about where it should be- he won't be frontlining much but also is keeping up enough to be useful. That's some really nice Str on your Avatar, though. Did you use the Renown boosters on it? Ricken is massively outclassed on Lunatic(+) by Miriel, but I'll be interested to see how he turns out. Nowi is a good choice yeah. Make sure to save her a Seraph Robe and but a Dragonstone+ from Tiki's Spotpass team before recruiting her, as together they allow her to mostly skip her hump and start training right away with mere heavy favoritism (as opposed to outright babying). If you do it right she'll take off around Cht.10. I also see more dudebros than women in your team, which is odd because females are usually better. You may want to consider adding Cord as a wife for Fred if you want to keep both Ricken and Lon'qu around. Lon'qu, by the way, would appreciate a Second Seal to Wyvern if you get a spare. I don't like Wyvern Fred- he's basically the same as GK but without the +Mov pairup bonus. Lon'qu can make a good husband for Cord as well, but she comes with plenty of Spd and wants more Str to ORKO stuff so he won't give what she wants unless he's a Wyvern (then it's a good move). If using er you should also consider investing in a Short Spear from Spotpass for her, and having a Str tonic on hand- enough boosts and she can ORKO stuff in Cht.8.

I'm not aware of any artbooks claiming Grima cares about anything except grinding bones and eating despair and whatnot. But it takes more than one dud to jump a shark (and Awakening's not necessarily a dud, it's just lacking a lot of depth. It was polished in other ways, and the amount of people who loved the story on first play (and still do, having not given too much thought to it- or even after thought, such as myself) are a testament to that). But yeah as a rule of thumb if you find a cult, they might be irrational, delusional or insane. It's totally plausible for tons of people to get swept up in a mob mentality, especially if it's state sponsored and in retaliation to aggression from an outside state (Awakening does overlook this bit though, as Plegia's most recent mass memory of Ylisse should be, according to in-game canon, Emmeryn's noble sacrifice and how bad fighting and hatred are). To quote Madagascar, "Hurry, before we all come to our senses!" Their Dark Dragon didn't want to destroy the world, he wanted to make a caste-based theocracy with him at the top.

You may not care, but those NPCs and recruitables very definitely do. Anna and Libra have no interest in self-preservation and will make you pay if you even think about dawdling, to the point of attacking Counter guys on turn one AP and exploding. Counter: also worth nothing that ranged enemies always attack at range when possible (except against Bows), so them having Counter might as well not matter. Throwing yourself into a clump of enemies with some of them in is just extra HP.

Yes, Ricken's Mag will go back up upon reclassing if it fell when you left that class. There's not much of a point in minmaxing the 1st gen units, though (unless it's just for completion's sake, in which just go get every single skill they can have...). You'd be better off spending time on Chrom, Avatar, their families and the children.

If you do, don't start until Cht.3. There are lots of opportunities there to funnel exp into anyone with a ranged weapon and you can get ~4 levels onto Miriel/Sumia there without too much risk, which is enough to get them going. You'd think all the earlygame Hammers would serve as a sufficient warning that using Fred is bad news later... You're in a base class on Cht.23? Yeah you might want to think about promoting. Letting the enemies have 20+ in every stat on you is probably not a good idea and frankly I'm amazed you've managed to make it this far like that.

*Pokes Gregor*

I've seen enough bad guides out there to not get mad over silly things like them not knowing what Luna does, using the simplified version of the bottom screen that doesn't show enemy stats (seriously, they don't know how to play the game), or relying on getting weapons from Event Tiles (and not telling people it matters until two chapters after the fact), let alone thinking that Fred spam is a good idea. The game has been out for less than a month at the point they made that, and it's their jobs to play tons and tons of different games. They don't have time to master everything, and Awakening doesn't have any good guides anyway so it was a niche that needs to be filled (even though they failed miserably). And it's far from the worst (factually) I've seen- that title goes to Endgame's guide on GameFAQs. But this... This isn't a guide. It's a commercial for the DLC, and it's not even complete. They spend more time talking about how you should buy the DLC than strategy, and they don't even give you enough of that- with good RNG- to get that far, since your Silver Lance is broken and you've still got Cht.3 to contend with. That's just unprofessional.

Ricken is very bad, Miriel is very good. The former can do chip damage in one chapter at best, but the latter has many opportunities for early chip exp due to being ranged, can rack up many kills in Cht.3 if not training Sumia due to Avatar x Chrom, and is generally ready to step into the role of magical powerhouse right about when Avatar wants to leave. Thanks to the Bonus Box she'll have a complete monopoly on lots of rare and powerful Tomes that it might take Ricken 'til Valm to be able to use (and with less Mag to back them up). She also gives Laurent, who is a huge boss in Lunatic+.

I'm not familiar with that tutorial but judging by your Avatar's level it's not doing its job. She should be ~Lv.15 by now. She at least looks like she's got the stats to take a single Hammer hit at full HP, though (he's got 27 Atk, you've got 20 HP and 8 Def), even with no pairup- give Fred Vaike for the kill. Alternately, just give her the kill if you can manage it- she might be unsalvageable without DLC, but there's no harm in trying. Getting her to D Swords so she can use a Wyrmslayer would help a lot. Chrom can probably take a hit too, and maybe hit back harder than she can.

Enemies in the Prologue can't swim. Chrom and Robin can. Solution: hide on the water and kill everything at range with Thunder for insane amounts of exp (reaching Lv.8 and C Tomes is possible with good RNG).

Yeah Stahl has a lot of really good earlygame girls to compete with for exp. He also runs a decent risk of being Spd screwed, and if that happens it's going to take forever to get him ahead of the curve. Most people just don't bother. Those that do (and get him going) generally have good experiences, though. Personally I think if he came five chapters later with some extra levels, weapon ranks and bases, he'd be really good (Awakening has a lot more good females than good males ingame and he's a good father, so he's got that going for him as well). He also does have a bit of an issue in being a more underwhelming swordguy at base than Avatar, Chrom, and even Bronze Sword Fred, so he's very outclassed there as well. E weapons without Discipline is pretty much never something you want to take that late into the game. She doesn't even have a Str stat to help make up for the low power Bronzes (though this affects all non-Virion Archers, it's also worth noting that the game does not give you any E-rank Bows and they're only buyable from one shop, so Risen can easily ruin your day).

Odds of a FE-themed new 3ds? Pretty good. Odds of you actually getting one for less than $500 on ebay? None. Nintendo has a scalping problem and it's not going away.

I know pretty much nothing about Double Duel. Ingame you won't have LB or time to make a full set, so just roll with the skills you get (Sol/AT, most likely). Apo, you'll mostly want to stick to Axefaire/Vengeance as a hard lead Hero.

I think someone already did.

Sounds OK, but what are you using her for? Ingame? Postgame? Apo?