Ranking each game by class: Lords

[samthedigital]

1 minute ago, gnip said:

I don't fully agree here, though - I think a character can be credited if they're especially good at using a particular stat booster, or boosters in general, like FE1!Mars with his Provoke ability, FE10!Jill with her mobility, or FE6!Milady being able to double Mercenaries with an insta-promotion and a Speedwing. I do think that it's a bit silly to just assume that these units get these stat boosters, and just be compared as such vs. other characters without this kind of help. "Can use stat boosters well" is just another of those unit qualities that are hard to quantify, like "staff utility", "rescue utility", "thief utilty" and all that.

I was going to edit my last post to clarify, but this is also a good summary of my thoughts on the matter.

Quote

I do think that it's a bit silly to just assume that these units get these stat boosters, and just be compared as such vs. other characters without this kind of help.

This is something I'm conflicted about. I assume that Seliph gets a bunch of resources because it's overwhelmingly the fastest and most efficient way to beat FE4. I could even compare him to other characters given a similar level of resources and the result would be the same. The problem is that if I compare other units in this way then it wouldn't be an accurate representation of how the characters perform in a practical setting.

[Jotari]

11 hours ago, samthedigital said:

That's not exactly true. Miledy for example is a good candidate for the first pair of boots, but she isn't lacking in movement. Giving her that stat booster creates new strategies that wouldn't be possible without it; and that's the key to being a good candidate for a stat booster.

 

9 hours ago, Cysx said:

That's simplifying things a fair bit. Oftentimes, the best characters for stat boosters are the already great ones. In fact that's the primary problem of stat boosters, instead of equalizing the roster, when used practically they just make things worse.

 

 

7 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Anyway, you have a point, yes, that of course the unit who starts with "X + 2" in a given stat, is better than the one who starts with "X" in the stat, and needs the Booster to get to "X + 2". But as @gnip said, it's not always a unit who is "bad" in a certain stat who uses the Booster best. If I have a unit who's 4 damage away from one-rounding every foe on the next Rout map with a Hand Axe, then they're probably the best candidate for an Energy Drop - even if they currently have the highest Strength of any of my units. On the opposite end, if my 20-HP Dancer takes 30 damage from the Ballista, then neither a Seraph Robe nor a Dracoshield is going to save them. It's possible to be so far lacking that a few extra points makes no appreciable difference.

I can see an argument like that if we're talking about a difficult early game, where stat thresholds can be pretty precisely, or the boots specifically if it let's you really do something you couldn't otherwise, such as having fliers be able to out move ballista range, but for the most part, I think the logic of "This unit can be really good with stat boosters" is a bit self defeating for "this is a really good unit". Because anyone can be made better with stat boosters. If you give Miledy full investment of stat boosters, she'll turn out amazing. If you give Oujay full investment of stat boosters he'll also turn out really good. But that's only saying base Miledy is better than base Oujay at the end of the day. I guess, the best example of what I'm really trying to say is Tiki. In all of her non Awakening appearances, she is great candidate for the Seraph Robe. Her HP base is very low and she will get killed very easily without one. But once she gets some levels she snowballs very quickly into becoming a gamebreakingly powerful unit. So from a point of strategy I would definitely recommend investing a Seraph Robe into Tiki...but the fact that her HP is poor is a knock against her as a unit even if giving her a Seraph Robe allows her to overcome that and snowball into a really good unit.

[Dark Holy Elf]

9 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

There - I think that 10 points, distributed this way, would make a not-the-only-Seizer Roy about equivalent in value to "vanilla Roy". I evalyated based on NM, since that's the one I know best (and the one with more consistent enemy stats), but such a boost would obviously improve his HM performance as well. This is all very "touchy-feely", and I acknowledge that playing the game with said changes applied might cause me to "tweak" the dial a bit.

Interesting stuff! To me, of course, your new Roy is a clear upgrade on the old one, but I liked seeing you lay out your thought process.

9 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Well, this is another question of one's point of view. Is an "unrescuable" Roy a substantially worse unit than vanilla Roy? Or, is it the "Rescuers", who lose some of their functionality, all becoming slightly worse? I think there's a case to be made either way. Anyway, I do agree that such a change would make Roy a better Boots candidate.

My response to your first question is "both". Being unable to be targeted by a helpful action is a weak point for a unit; if Alan could be targeted by Dance but Lance could not be, I think this would unquestionably be a valid thing to bring up in Alan's favour during a comparison of Alan and Lance as units. And conversely, every unit who becomes untargetable by an action makes the action in question (and those who use it) worse. If "can't target Lance with Dance" was a property of Larum, but Elphin could target both just fine, that would be a point in Elphin's favour when comparing the performers.

There are non-hypothetical versions of this too, of course; e.g. Hawkeye can not be rescued by promoted paladins or fliers, which is a point in favour of his competition that is (correctly, IMO) brought up in conversations. And similarly, Vaida's ability to target fewer people with Rescue than other FE7 fliers is a point against her.

But obviously we broadly agree; I just thought your tangent was an interesting one.

10 hours ago, gnip said:

I do think that it's a bit silly to just assume that these units get these stat boosters, and just be compared as such vs. other characters without this kind of help. "Can use stat boosters well" is just another of those unit qualities that are hard to quantify, like "staff utility", "rescue utility", "thief utilty" and all that. 

I definitely agree with you. It is absolutely fair to observe that some characters make better uses of stat boosters than others; that's an important conversation to have (arguably more important than which unit is better, even!). And, all other things being equal, I would even agree it is a slight point in favour or the unit who makes better use of them (so I misspoke when I earlier said the two topics were "entirely" unrelated).

That said, there is, fortunately, a very elegant solution: whenever you assume a unit receives favouritism such as a stat booster, you always compare him or her to other units receiving equal (as much as possible) favouritism. If Miredy really does make better use of Boots than [insert other unit here], it should be possible to show that in a Miredy vs. [other unit] comparison where each is assumed to receive the boots. That doesn't mean we can then turn around and compare Miredy-with-Boots to others without, though, even if the general consensus ends up being that Miredy "should" get them.

9 hours ago, samthedigital said:

This is something I'm conflicted about. I assume that Seliph gets a bunch of resources because it's overwhelmingly the fastest and most efficient way to beat FE4. I could even compare him to other characters given a similar level of resources and the result would be the same. The problem is that if I compare other units in this way then it wouldn't be an accurate representation of how the characters perform in a practical setting.

I don't see a problem, perhaps because I disagree about what counts as a practical setting. If I wanted to give all my resources to Scathach instead, I can, and I can still win. More realistically, if I spread all the resources out in essentially random ways, I can easily do so and still win, as evidenced by the fact that I suspect this is in fact closer to how most people actually play FE4. You can't argue these aren't "practical" ways to play the game. You can certainly argue they're not "optimum", but I would shy away from only comparing characters in optimum situations (even if we can agree on what optimum means, which isn't a given in a single-player game), because it easily leads to circuluar logic. Taken to its extreme you end up being unable to talk about "less optimum" units at all. "Wil is not a good unit to invest in therefore we try to avoid giving him exp therefore Wil ends up underlevelled and terrible and therefore Wil sucks" is not a valid argument.

In general I feel that the value of a unit is, in broad terms, equal to their performance relative to the investment required to achieve that performance. e.g. I think Seadall is the best unit in Engage because he doesn't take investment away from other units the way top combat units do, and even if someone could prove that [insert unit here] is the "objective" best recipient of a ton of favouritism that would make them more important to an "optimized" run than Seadall, I don't think that would make said unit nearly as good as Seadall. But this is a philosophical thing and I can see disagreeing.

[samthedigital]

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

You can't argue these aren't "practical" ways to play the game.

I'm not saying that these aren't practical ways to play the game but that in a practical setting only one unit is going to be able to get a given resource, and that makes things complicated.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

If I wanted to give all my resources to Scathach instead, I can, and I can still win. More realistically, if I spread all the resources out in essentially random ways, I can easily do so and still win, as evidenced by the fact that I suspect this is in fact closer to how most people actually play FE4.

You could do this (and rate units based on how well they carry), but it's also possible to rate units in the context where Seliph gets most of the resources. This is how I rate them.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

You can certainly argue they're not "optimum", but I would shy away from only comparing characters in optimum situations (even if we can agree on what optimum means, which isn't a given in a single-player game), because it easily leads to circuluar logic. Taken to its extreme you end up being unable to talk about "less optimum" units at all. "Wil is not a good unit to invest in therefore we try to avoid giving him exp therefore Wil ends up underlevelled and terrible and therefore Wil sucks" is not a valid argument.

This isn't how an "optimum" run would talk about Wil, but in any case I don't assume optimal play. I do assume that the player is trying to beat the game quickly to be sure, and there are some instances where this means doing one specific thing. It's not always so black and white though; sometimes two mutually exclusive options are possible. Marcia vs. Jill in PoR or Fred vs. Robin in Awakening are examples where each offers unique advantages over the other and are competing for the same resources. One of them might technically be better than the other overall, but I'd consider both options because they are close enough to one another.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

In general I feel that the value of a unit is, in broad terms, equal to their performance relative to the investment required to achieve that performance. e.g. I think Seadall is the best unit in Engage because he doesn't take investment away from other units the way top combat units do, and even if someone could prove that [insert unit here] is the "objective" best recipient of a ton of favouritism that would make them more important to an "optimized" run than Seadall, I don't think that would make said unit nearly as good as Seadall. But this is a philosophical thing and I can see disagreeing.

Yeah, it's a philosophical thing, and I don't penalize a unit when they are the best use of a given resource. Seadall is a bit of an awkward example since he's a dancer, but I would note that it would be relevant to me if he can't be that most important unit and that he isn't able to make use of heavy investment.

10 hours ago, Jotari said:

I can see an argument like that if we're talking about a difficult early game, where stat thresholds can be pretty precisely, or the boots specifically if it let's you really do something you couldn't otherwise, such as having fliers be able to out move ballista range, but for the most part, I think the logic of "This unit can be really good with stat boosters" is a bit self defeating for "this is a really good unit". Because anyone can be made better with stat boosters. If you give Miledy full investment of stat boosters, she'll turn out amazing. If you give Oujay full investment of stat boosters he'll also turn out really good.

I would use the "makes good use of investment/stat boosters/etc." statement almost exclusively for a situation where it lets a unit do something unique or better than other units. I'm not sure about the Tiki comparsion; I'm not familiar with the game. Excluding boots though off the top of my head Kliff, Robin, and Jill in FE9/10 would be units that I consider to be "good investment targets" because they don't really do that well at base, but they do quickly snowball and become better than the rest of the army (even if other units in the army got the same resources instead) because of things that are unique to them with investment.

Edited October 27, 2023 by samthedigital

[Cysx]

6 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

That said, there is, fortunately, a very elegant solution: whenever you assume a unit receives favouritism such as a stat booster, you always compare him or her to other units receiving equal (as much as possible) favouritism. If Miredy really does make better use of Boots than [insert other unit here], it should be possible to show that in a Miredy vs. [other unit] comparison where each is assumed to receive the boots. That doesn't mean we can then turn around and compare Miredy-with-Boots to others without, though, even if the general consensus ends up being that Miredy "should" get them.

I don't see a problem, perhaps because I disagree about what counts as a practical setting. If I wanted to give all my resources to Scathach instead, I can, and I can still win. More realistically, if I spread all the resources out in essentially random ways, I can easily do so and still win, as evidenced by the fact that I suspect this is in fact closer to how most people actually play FE4. You can't argue these aren't "practical" ways to play the game. You can certainly argue they're not "optimum", but I would shy away from only comparing characters in optimum situations (even if we can agree on what optimum means, which isn't a given in a single-player game), because it easily leads to circuluar logic. Taken to its extreme you end up being unable to talk about "less optimum" units at all. "Wil is not a good unit to invest in therefore we try to avoid giving him exp therefore Wil ends up underlevelled and terrible and therefore Wil sucks" is not a valid argument.

This is interesting, because I think this is actually a mindset that prevents us from seeing certain problems by closing our eyes to them.

To be blunt, we're human beings. Personal experience always plays a part in our judgement, not to mention sometimes faulty memory, or miscalculations. Theorycrafting is a valuable tool but tends to only lead so far and to tunnel vision (the early Engage discourse makes this pretty clear all over again), and ideally a proper assessment is a combination of both. You can estimate what giving a booster to a different character would do to their performance, but when it comes to the thresholds they'd now reach, the new situations they could now face and the longterm ramifications in terms of growth, it's pretty difficult... for one character, that ideally you've been training. I'm not saying FE has the highest unit variety of any series out there, yet doing it for the whole cast of any given FE game, is still generally not possible. So what actually typically happens, is that... we just don't do it. Too complex.
Basically I disagree that your elegant solution even exists and find the pretense that it's completely reasonable... how should I say... misguiding.

It doesn't really matter what we call it, "practicality" or "optimization", ultimately the subject is what's being considered in most serious gameplay discussions, which I frankly think is much more tangible than you're letting on here regardless of variations from person to person. We can clearly establish that mid tier units or lower, outside of exceptions... don't get boosters in these exchanges, basically ever. Usually they avoid discussing stat boosts period outside of scenarios where they're demonstrably immediately useful in the short term. Aka, only amazing candidates get them when anyone does, but that's not actually the main thing.

The main thing arks back to personal experience. Because people do use stat boosters and then have to discuss the games as if they didn't, and nobody seems to see a problem there. This premise leads to the very circular logic you're denouncing here(but with a spice of unit bias added right in), except now it's even worse because no one will want to recognize it's happening. I like  to say this a lot but we didn't design the games, if stat boosters are blatantly more effective in certain places, I don't see much of a point pretending it's not the case.

Of course, discussion where we just use all the best tools and ignore the rest isn't as interesting, I agree, but that's why we now consider universal investment and what characters can individually do with that. I don't think it's impossible to work with boosters in a comparable way, but that has to be figured out, and it cannot if we just keep pretending there's nothing to even fix. I guess this means we want the same thing, but the core of my issue is that if I'm understanding correctly you seem to think it's a thing already, and boy do I really not think it is, and we're not even halfway there.

Maybe I'm not giving the community enough credit here, though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

18 hours ago, samthedigital said:

You could do this (and rate units based on how well they carry), but it's also possible to rate units in the context where Seliph gets most of the resources. This is how I rate them.

That's fair. I would only argue that in such a context, we can't actually rate Seliph himself.

18 hours ago, samthedigital said:

Yeah, it's a philosophical thing, and I don't penalize a unit when they are the best use of a given resource. Seadall is a bit of an awkward example since he's a dancer, but I would note that it would be relevant to me if he can't be that most important unit and that he isn't able to make use of heavy investment.

I think you either have to penalize them, or just be very careful about comparing them to other people with said resource, because who is the "best" recipient of a resource will always be subjective, and locking it in traps you in circular arguments.

18 hours ago, samthedigital said:

Excluding boots though off the top of my head Kliff, Robin, and Jill in FE9/10 would be units that I consider to be "good investment targets" because they don't really do that well at base, but they do quickly snowball and become better than the rest of the army (even if other units in the army got the same resources instead) because of things that are unique to them with investment

I definitely agree with you here; those units are good investment targets. To me, the parenthetical part of your statement is the proof: we can compare them to other units getting those same resources and observe they still come out ahead. "Jill with a lot of boosters" is better than "a myrmidon with a lot of boosters" because they both kill everything and don't die, but Jill does it with canto, flight, and +2 move, etc.

15 hours ago, Cysx said:

The main thing arks back to personal experience. Because people do use stat boosters and then have to discuss the games as if they didn't, and nobody seems to see a problem there. This premise leads to the very circular logic you're denouncing here(but with a spice of unit bias added right in), except now it's even worse because no one will want to recognize it's happening. I like  to say this a lot but we didn't design the games, if stat boosters are blatantly more effective in certain places, I don't see much of a point pretending it's not the case.

Of course, discussion where we just use all the best tools and ignore the rest isn't as interesting, I agree, but that's why we now consider universal investment and what characters can individually do with that. I don't think it's impossible to work with boosters in a comparable way, but that has to be figured out, and it cannot if we just keep pretending there's nothing to even fix. I guess this means we want the same thing, but the core of my issue is that if I'm understanding correctly you seem to think it's a thing already, and boy do I really not think it is, and we're not even halfway there.

Hm, well.

Regarding personal experience, the beautiful thing about having lots of people weigh in is we have a huge amount of personal experience to work with. People play without stat boosters all the time, or just give them preferentially to favourites. Combining the experiences of lots of people and a bit of theorycraft, I do think we can figure out how a lot of units perform at different levels of investment pretty well. That doesn't mean we're perfect at it and certainly things get missed, but we can get pretty good. And to the extent that we're not better at it, I'm not as bothered by this as you seem to be. Ultimately these discussions are just thought experiments to stretch our brains.

And just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your assessment that stat boosters are blatantly more effective on some units than others. I just disagree with using that information to then compare units at different levels of investment.

[samthedigital]

18 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I think you either have to penalize them, or just be very careful about comparing them to other people with said resource, because who is the "best" recipient of a resource will always be subjective, and locking it in traps you in circular arguments.

It's not subjective, but maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. If I tiered units based on how much time they save over the course of a speedrun then the best way to allocate resources would the one that results in the fastest time. For example Marcia in FE9 is the best recipient of the early game bexp and Seraph Robe because this is what we do if we want to beat the game as fast as possible. I would rate her as one of if not the best unit in the game in this context. We're not giving Soren this same preferential treatment when rating him simply because that's not what we're measuring.

3 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I definitely agree with you here; those units are good investment targets. To me, the parenthetical part of your statement is the proof: we can compare them to other units getting those same resources and observe they still come out ahead. "Jill with a lot of boosters" is better than "a myrmidon with a lot of boosters" because they both kill everything and don't die, but Jill does it with canto, flight, and +2 move, etc.

I don't have as stringent a rating system as a speedrun that I mentioned above, but the problem then is how to compare units when not as many things are guaranteed.

[ping]

On 10/26/2023 at 7:05 PM, Cysx said:

The other side of that coin, which is also true for Roy, is that their additional utility limits how much combat they get to see. FE11 Marth struggles to gain levels and justify a forged Rapier because he's so often away from the action. In other words, him being the only unit that can visit villages and seize significantly hurts his combat.

As for Roy, well he tends to spend his time rescued, which obviously poses the same issue, though of course his combat has a pretty low ceiling for most of the game regardless.

For Roy, I find that this isn't as much of a problem, honestly. It might just be my personal playstyle, but I don't have him rescued all the time - when there's enemies around, that would take away both his and (effectively) his recuer's ability to contribute to the fight, so I prefer to have everybody "dropped" in that situation. And since Roy almost always has to go towards the throne, exceptions being the odd recruitment convo like Cath's first one, he tends to be on the path of most resistance.

It does cost more actions in total, of course, to repeatedly click Rescue and Take/Give and Drop, but since you have more freedom in when to use them, I find that it works out better this way.

For Marth, I think your argument holds more weigh, though. Villages are often varying degrees of out of the way, so Marth tends to have to take some detours during a map, leading him away from the enemies guarding the path to the throne.

--

About the problem with stat boosters when comparing units: I tend to visualise this as "ranges" of unit value, with statboosters (or other forms of investment) moving a unit up away from the minimum to varying degrees. For example, Milady without statboosters is S+, but Milady with insta-promotion and the Speedwings is S++ because she can also kick all kinds of arse on the desert map with little long-term downsides. Or FE9!Fill, who might just be an A-tier unit if you give Marcia a big BEXP dump, but who's easily S-tier if she gets that big initial investment.

To a degree, the same principle works (well, for me, at least) for different amount of unit usage. Like, Seth stops being an S-tier unit if you fall into the noob trap of not using him because he's overleveled and then wondering why everybody thinks he's the shit when you put him back on the team on the penultimate map. Or, conversely, Marcus arguably becomes worse if you insist on using him to kill all of BinBla's lategame bosses like an idiot, because he sucks up a lot of resources that other units would've made much better use of, becoming more of a millstone than anything else.

All of that can't really be easily visualised in a tier list, of course, but that's a general limitation of a format that reduces a lot of assumptions and calculations into just one letter or number.

[Dark Holy Elf]

9 hours ago, samthedigital said:

It's not subjective, but maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. If I tiered units based on how much time they save over the course of a speedrun then the best way to allocate resources would the one that results in the fastest time

I think that's the difference. I'm not talking about (or particularly interested in talking about) tiering units based on a speedrun. I will readily concede that such a discussion has objective criteria, but it's not one I'm interested in. At that point you reduce discussions to a solvable problem; someone will figure out the strategy that achieves the fastest time and that's that. (Said someone will also be a person who actually attempts or cares deeply about speedruns, and neither of those descriptors applies to me, or I suspect to many other people in this thread.)

Generally in threads discussing unit or class worth like this one, there isn't such clear criteria. We're just generally talking about what we find most effective overall. That can mean different things for different people, of course, hence the subjectivity.

9 hours ago, samthedigital said:

I don't have as stringent a rating system as a speedrun that I mentioned above, but the problem then is how to compare units when not as many things are guaranteed.

I certainly think comparisons are still possible, as years of rich discussion threads show. What's less possible is achieving 100% agreement among all participants, but I think that limitation is perfectly fine, and even desirable.

[Whisky]

14 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

At that point you reduce discussions to a solvable problem; someone will figure out the strategy that achieves the fastest time and that's that.

Slight disagreement with this part. Maybe it’s just the wording. But new strategies for speedruns are discovered years after games came out, the world records for many games are relatively recent records. I think there’s almost always room for improvement, it’s not just solve the problem and you’re done. Sometimes units have surprising uses in LTCs that most people wouldn’t think of. Speedrunners or LTCers need to be open minded to new ideas and strategies being discovered.

14 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I certainly think comparisons are still possible, as years of rich discussion threads show. What's less possible is achieving 100% agreement among all participants, but I think that limitation is perfectly fine, and even desirable.

I mostly agree. I’d argue that it’s combination of both objective and subjective, and that unit analysis should always strive to be as unbiased as possible. When we compare units’ stats and other qualities, those are objective qualities of the units, but the value of how much something matters is the subjective part.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Whisky

[samthedigital]

3 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I think that's the difference. I'm not talking about (or particularly interested in talking about) tiering units based on a speedrun.

I am free to rank units based on how much time they save in a speedrun if I like though since I am allowed to use any criteria that I want. For example I could say that Sigurd and Seliph save the most time out of anyone relative to the other units in their cast and they are therefore the best lords. That being said I didn't say that I was interested in ranking units this way; my original post here had little to do with a speedrunning mindset. You might find that a speedrunner wouldn't be interested ranking units that way either. The point was to show that there is an objective best use of a resource in a given type of playthrough.

5 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I certainly think comparisons are still possible, as years of rich discussion threads show. What's less possible is achieving 100% agreement among all participants, but I think that limitation is perfectly fine, and even desirable.

I'm not trying to use a more generalized approach; the problems I have are specific to my rating system. gnip summarized the problem and his solutions to it in his post, my solution isn't necessarily the same, but there are also some other complications because it's my ranking system isn't strictly defined.

7 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Generally in threads discussing unit or class worth like this one, there isn't such clear criteria. We're just generally talking about what we find most effective overall. That can mean different things for different people, of course, hence the subjectivity.

If you mean that the rating system someone uses is subjective then yes, I agree. What I was saying was that a statement made within that system is not subjective. I would assume that people aren't making broad assumptions that should be applied to everyone ranking units, though.

7 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

At that point you reduce discussions to a solvable problem; someone will figure out the strategy that achieves the fastest time and that's that.

I agree with Whisky here. There's a lot of interesting discussion to be had even if it's a solvable problem as long as the problem is complicated enough.

[Dark Holy Elf]

 

1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

I am free to rank units based on how much time they save in a speedrun if I like though since I am allowed to use any criteria that I want. For example I could say that Sigurd and Seliph save the most time out of anyone relative to the other units in their cast and they are therefore the best lords. That being said I didn't say that I was interested in ranking units this way; my original post here had little to do with a speedrunning mindset. You might find that a speedrunner wouldn't be interested ranking units that way either. The point was to show that there is an objective best use of a resource in a given type of playthrough.

I agree with your opening sentence, of course.

That said I disagree with the last, I think? At least if you mean "any given type of playthrough" and not just that specific one. (Apologies if I misunderstood.) Sure, a speedrun always (or almost always?) has an objective best use of a resource, because it has extremely well-defined criteria: there is one particular variable you're trying to get as low as possible (maybe with a slight second variable of reliability depending on if we're doing a one-time race or trying for a world record). I would argue that most other types of playthroughs, and most methods people use for rating units/classes/etc., use far vaguer criteria than that; there are basically always multiple variables to consider and their balance is not strictly defined. Now of course there are times when I still feel there is a clear choice for a given resource, but there are others where I think the choice is unclear. (As an easy example since it's on my mind, I do not consider "which unit (or units) get Emblem Lyn" to be a clear choice in the slightest, and I can't imagine I ever will.)

And of course in regards to discussions which take on a more debate-like quality: even when a resource use is clear by my standards, I have to accept that other people will use different standards than me, and thus might come to a different conclusion about the rightful use of resources, so I generally find it more convincing to make arguments not based on my own assumptions of resource allocation when possible, and I feel similarly when reading arguments made by others.

9 hours ago, Whisky said:

Slight disagreement with this part. Maybe it’s just the wording. But new strategies for speedruns are discovered years after games came out, the world records for many games are relatively recent records. I think there’s almost always room for improvement, it’s not just solve the problem and you’re done. Sometimes units have surprising uses in LTCs that most people wouldn’t think of. Speedrunners or LTCers need to be open minded to new ideas and strategies being discovered.

Yeah, that's totally fair! Certainly I agree with everything you say here, so perhaps I did misword things. I'll admit I don't pay much attention to speedruns so it's very possible I overestimated in my head how fixed the broad strategies are. (Obviously world records can still improve as people make various small optimizations, both in terms of small strategy adjustments and execution.)

Edited October 29, 2023 by Dark Holy Elf

[samthedigital]

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

That said I disagree with the last, I think? At least if you mean "any given type of playthrough" and not just that specific one.

I wouldn't say any given type of playthrough exactly, but if the metric we use to rate units is well defined there is an answer to that question.

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I would argue that most other types of playthroughs, and most methods people use for rating units/classes/etc., use far vaguer criteria than that; there are basically always multiple variables to consider and their balance is not strictly defined.

If the criteria used is vague enough then I'd say that there isn't a lot to take away from rankings (or debates for that matter) in the first place.

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

As an easy example since it's on my mind, I do not consider "which unit (or units) get Emblem Lyn" to be a clear choice in the slightest, and I can't imagine I ever will.

Engage complicates things by making emblems more of a focus than units themselves, and there are a lot of options to replicate Lyn's doubling utility with another emblem, so this is fair. I don't always have an exact unit in mind either.

3 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

And of course in regards to discussions which take on a more debate-like quality: even when a resource use is clear by my standards, I have to accept that other people will use different standards than me, and thus might come to a different conclusion about the rightful use of resources, so I generally find it more convincing to make arguments not based on my own assumptions of resource allocation when possible, and I feel similarly when reading arguments made by others.

It depends on what the debate/argument is to be sure, but I actually wouldn't find an argument a unit to be very compelling unless it's within a specific context (unless they're talking about easily reachable benchmarks or something to that effect; I'm not saying that there is nothing to gain). If someone has a different idea about where to allocate their resources then I'm just not going to be able to have a proper discussion about how to use Seliph (admittedly this one isn't very interesting or difficult, it's just an example that's topical) for example since they're using him completely differently. It might affect discussion of every other character in the cast too because it changes quite a lot. That's a limitation of that kind of discussion; I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but it is what it is.

[Cysx]

On 10/28/2023 at 5:18 AM, Dark Holy Elf said:

Hm, well.

Regarding personal experience, the beautiful thing about having lots of people weigh in is we have a huge amount of personal experience to work with. People play without stat boosters all the time, or just give them preferentially to favourites. Combining the experiences of lots of people and a bit of theorycraft, I do think we can figure out how a lot of units perform at different levels of investment pretty well. That doesn't mean we're perfect at it and certainly things get missed, but we can get pretty good. And to the extent that we're not better at it, I'm not as bothered by this as you seem to be. Ultimately these discussions are just thought experiments to stretch our brains.

And just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your assessment that stat boosters are blatantly more effective on some units than others. I just disagree with using that information to then compare units at different levels of investment.

I will admit, it bothers me a good deal more than reasonable how potentially fallacious our system in place is. Not that I like the idea of assuming boosters go to the best either at face value, it's more that I want change and I see it as the most direct first step. Facing the facts, realizing that they're not conducive to entertaining conversation and finding solutions.

It's whatever, though. I just felt like talking about it.