How Effective Are Fire Emblem Mechanics?

[Snowy_One]

Sorry, it defeat the purpose of permadeath, or you should have bonus to makes them survive, like the ally soldier in CH E16 of FE7.

You should also have reasons not to attacks the ennemy. We have World Maps and Zombie/Monsters. use this opportunity to adda morality aspect.

Once again it have already be done before. Because, you're supposed to be the good guys and you kill other peoples without a second thought !

Because youhave no reasons, not to do it.

We already have this mechanic though in the Reinforce skill as well as the many allied units in FE10 who don't need to survive and, IIRC, the replacement units you get in Shadow Dragon (I never lose enough units to find out). So the mechanic is sort of already THERE.

I do agree that we don't want this becoming Advance Wars. For better or worse, Fire Emblem is not AW. However, by making death a little more common-place they may be able to make the perma-death actually MATTER more than a level-restart to most players by getting them mentally ready for the inevitable loss of a unit.

[Tamanoir]

From what I've heard, a good majority of characters in FE11 H5/FE12 H3/FE13 Lunatic are just flat-out unusable. So I wouldn't say that you can't screw up the game for yourself by making bad unit choices. Now, one is unlikely to jump straight to the hardest difficulty in any game without first getting a feel for the game and its characters on an easier difficulty, but still.

The real problem with most Est units is not that training them up is difficult, especially in a game like FE8. The real problem with them is that even after training, their leads over your other units are simply not significant enough to make up for the time invested in training them. Look at Franz v Amelia. Even at the end of the game, after training your characters up to 20/20, the only significant lead in a useful stat that Amelia has is +5 RES. The couple points of SKL, 1 point of SPD, and the extremely high LUK lead are irrelevant in comparison to the fact that Franz didn't require all the extra training and still has a couple points of STR and around 6 HP on her.

Well, I was taliking about normal Mode, or H1. It doesn't pose too much problem. Tier List are usefull ifypu want Hader/More efficient gameplay, but are required for the "Casual" player.

I agree that you shoud makes them really better.

Nino is really strong, but you have to waste a LOT of turn in 26x for this, with a good Tank.

I'd Say that +5 Res is pretty important actually. Not worse all the efforts, but still important.

Besides in a RNG based game, like this one, it's always some kind of gamble.

You can play safe with Seth or Duessel, or try Franz, or even Amelia, for something that may pay off in long terms.

We already have this mechanic though in the Reinforce skill as well as the many allied units in FE10 who don't need to survive and, IIRC, the replacement units you get in Shadow Dragon (I never lose enough units to find out). So the mechanic is sort of already THERE.

I do agree that we don't want this becoming Advance Wars. For better or worse, Fire Emblem is not AW. However, by making death a little more common-place they may be able to make the perma-death actually MATTER more than a level-restart to most players by getting them mentally ready for the inevitable loss of a unit.

I never played FE9/10, sorry. But in Fe8, that's diferent because they are not human, and are 1 hit wonder. FE2 have the same thing, but it's so different from usual gameplay that it's not a good ewample. And with Reinforce, are they controllable ? If you can't control them, it's different.

And I stay with the idea of adding more NPC units, or rewarding saving NPC/not killing ennemies units. Asof now, the death of the ennemies have no meaning or consequences. That contradict one of thje messages of the games. The war is between people wh all have their own motivation. That's repeated a ot in the scenarios, but in gameplay, that have generally no consequences.

[Dark Sage]

Franz also has better Con than Amelia so in practice, Amelia actually has a speed deficit when wielding a heavier weapon.

[Constable Reggie]

I think the majority of players would agree that Psycho Mantis is a fun boss battle.

Regardless of opinions, having to get up and replug your controller in it self is a flawed mechanic. There is no direct gratification from doing that. So the people who are having fun from it can't possibly be having fun just from utilizing the mechanic, but because it's unique and does something special outside of gameplay, intended by the developers.

Well, some characters have very low luck. Knoll, for instance, has 0 luck at base, and shows up at a time when most enemies have about 5 crit. Moulder also sees a lot of critical hit chances.

Those are flaws that define those characters, though. Moulder, Knoll, Lucius, etc are infamous for their low luck, because unlike SD, it's the exception, not the norm.

We already have this mechanic though in the Reinforce skill as well as the many allied units in FE10 who don't need to survive and, IIRC, the replacement units you get in Shadow Dragon (I never lose enough units to find out). So the mechanic is sort of already THERE.

How often do you casually send those pegasus knights (or the ch13 knights in fe5) to their deaths with no regard for their survival, only that they serve a purpose for your gameplay ends?

Edited December 17, 2012 by Constable Reggie

[Renall]

Speaking of growths and mechanics...

The Internet does exist, and it's pretty trivial to find the growth rates for units online. Just put them in the game, even if just as colored bars indicating a unit's rough "affinity" for a stat. Every so often they throw a character like Donny out and have somebody offhandedly say this character "has potential" to suggest they have better-than-expected growth rates... except the player is given no in-game metric for comparison and mechanics are intentionally obfuscated. Okay, so Donny has potential... how much potential? Does Sol not have potential? How much more potential than Sol does Donny have? Or is that all a crock of shit? For example, the Best/Worst thing for Awakening is nice in the sense that you're controlling your My Unit/Avatar setup, but if you didn't look it up on a site like this you might not know that e.g. Worst Strength also has an effect on Skill and Defense. It really does not make sense to me that an RPG about stat management and tactics expects you to just "feel" your way through one of the most critical factors in distinguishing and judging between characters, or to have to play multiple times to get that information down. Might as well have no stats on weapons and just have me guess the difference between Iron, Steel, and Silver! Or not tell me how many uses a weapon has, I can learn that through experimentation right? Oh wait, all of those things would be retarded. And so is hiding growths.

Speaking of growths, I'm all for them remaining random as the primary mode in the series, but if you're going to give us Casual Mode can I also get Averages Mode for stats if I want it? And not that weird Fixed Mode... although I'm fine with that also existing as an option. Give the people who want permadeath and random stats their defaults, but I'd rather not mess with it and I think the options can only really make things more enjoyable and appeal to a wider audience; a new player who plays Casual + Averages will probably have a better time and get into the series more readily because they didn't lose anybody for rookie mistakes and didn't suffer a screwed character that they were relying on without realizing the game would throw eight out of ten crap levels in a row at them.

Oh and I am in favor of trying to balance growths out a bit overall but I couldn't tell you what the best way to do that is except that IS seems to be pretty bad at it (Leonardo's growths, hah). I'm not sure how they playtest growths or anything of the sort, or how much math they do to know things like standard deviation and how much blessage/screwage they're comfortable with. It's probably a very difficult thing to get down right (especially in a game like 2/8/13 with skirmishes and grinding options).

[CT075]

The idea is that if Dolph dies, as people should be doing in a game with permanent death, you can use Dolph instead.

can you really now? :o

also i'd always be for new ideas in fe, innovation is a great idea

[BBM]

What's the difference between Fixed Mode and this Averages mode you're talking about? If it's just that Fixed mode could still be abused via some BEXP leveling glitches, that hardly makes it different in practice, especially if BEXP isn't there.

[Renall]

What's the difference between Fixed Mode and this Averages mode you're talking about? If it's just that Fixed mode could still be abused via some BEXP leveling glitches, that hardly makes it different in practice, especially if BEXP isn't there.

FE9 Fixed Mode wasn't true averages, it was a weird point-based system that adjusted your point gain based on the weapon you were wielding, enemies you were attacking, bands you had equipped, etc. It was predictable in the sense that it was possible to know what your gains were going to be based upon the actions you had characters take, but it isn't really average growths.

Averages Mode would be something like "a 50% growth goes up +1 every other level, no exceptions," such that a character who starts at lv10 with a 10 STR base and a growth of 50% will always have exactly 15 STR at lv20. On Fixed, a character might vary slightly depending on what you did with them. I don't have a problem with Fixed, I just find keeping track of all the little bits and pieces of it annoying. I'd like to be able to go to the Average Stats tab on this site and know exactly what a unit's stats are going to be at a given level if I'm playing on Averages Mode. Not because I necessarily dislike Classic (Random) Mode growths, but because I happen to prefer predictability.

Since IS added a mode for people who don't prefer permadeath, I figure this wouldn't take all that much effort either, and I'd really enjoy it. Plus I do think Normal + Casual + Averages would be the most comfortable fit for a new player who can then decide to up difficulty and/or switch over to Classic or Random to get the more challenging experience. Or just boost difficulty alone if they like the mechanics the way they are.

[Constable Reggie]

Going back to your previous post, I think adding in viewable growth rates would be a pretty cool idea. No need to really show the exact rates, just have bars that represent them. As long as they're not horribly inaccurate (I'm looking at you League of Legends), it'd probably be a great addition.

An averages mode would be decent, though I'm not sure why people would want to play an extremely conformed version of the game. Fixed mode had at least some perceived randomness.

[Snowy_One]

Well, you would end up with characters who end up not being screwed or blessed at the same time. IMO, that's a very good thing.

Here is something that has been bothering me for a while now. Easy mode. Don't get me wrong, I think Easy Mode is a GREAT thing! It allows players who would normally be turned off by the game the chance to learn, practice, and grow in an environment that might normally drive them off and an increase in players is good for the series on the whole. What has worried me is that the difference between easy mode and hard mode may have grown so HUGE that, dialogue aside, you're basically playing a different game. Especially if player-made maps come into effect as then people would likely play through on easy mode simply because it results in the better team for custom maps. Plus, if custom maps exist, what's to stop someone from showing up to one with a maxed-out unit that was leveled in easy? Seems like it would make things unfairly hard for people playing on hard mode as their teams would be smaller, lower-leveled, and potentially just flat-out weaker (FE10) than a team made on an easy-mode run-through. I think something would need to be addressed about that.

The easiest/most obvious answer would be to just let units keep levels after completing custom maps assuming that they survived (cause you KNOW someone is going to eventually make a level brimming with Ashnard's), but this means that, eventually, someone will make a level that exists only for the purpose of power-leveling units. So would it just be better to auto-level everyone to 20/20 and max-out their stats upon game completion?

[Momo]

I'd say the biggest "mechanic" that Fire Emblem is most effective at is how fast everything is. Not so much going through chapters, but the way menus are nice and quick, and you can skip animations if you feel like it. I say this because Fire Emblem has spoiled me, I find every other SRPG unplayably slow because of this.

[Renall]

I'd say the biggest "mechanic" that Fire Emblem is most effective at is how fast everything is. Not so much going through chapters, but the way menus are nice and quick, and you can skip animations if you feel like it. I say this because Fire Emblem has spoiled me, I find every other SRPG unplayably slow because of this.

I find this especially true in the latest incarnations. Skip entire turns? Sure, if you want. The game might stand to be a little better at providing summary information if desired, but otherwise it's a pretty great feature to be able to speed up and even skip turns, animations, and so forth.

It is one advantage of the "my team goes, then your team goes" style of play. If it were individual initiative-based combat (like FFT or something) you'd have a much harder time skipping or accelerating enemy movements without making things jerky and strange.

[CinderSkye]

Discussion stalled out on an earlier point that I liked - it is possible to make permanent penalties for a unit dying that are less harsh than permanent death, and I don't really see an argument against incorporating these lighter penalties. The way most fans play Fire Emblems, in my experience, is that for the most part you immediately restart if you lose a unit you actually care about. I feel that that ultimately hurts the immersive aspect of being in a real war with real consequences since you can simply restart the chapter, and few chapters are so difficult that most people will suffer the loss without restarting; it also hurts the depth of strategy in Fire Emblems, because attrition is almost never a real, viable tactic. I plan to play Awakening on Lunatic Casual, for example.

Don't allow permanent saves every chapter - make them permanent every arc instead - and introduce a bleedout period where the unit can be rescued. If not rescued early enough (they might bleed out entirely, or they could get attacked again), they can suffer a significant penalty, or outright die, but they'll typically become lower priority for enemies to attack.

I think FE would also benefit significantly from adding more maps which benefit defensive strategies, particularly if it's accompanied with an increase in bow users' range. When I can't use those stationary sniper things (forget the name) or Longbows or they're not mounted bow units (ie 80% of the time) I don't see the point in using archers instead of mages.

I'd like responsive options. For example, an ambush tactical option, where you can order a unit to apparently wait and rush to a space upon an enemy doing something. Or a flee tactical option, where if you don't move during your main turn and a character is attacked, you can immediately direct them to run away, but not attack.

[Hirondelle]

(Spoilers for Thracia 776 I guess, idk if it matters but whatever)

I like what was said earlier about FE5. That game really did set a mood of minor victories and massive failures; several maps have you on the run, there's an actual fatigue system, one of your own tacticians dies, and there's even a "Near the Defeat" map theme, a unique musical aspect of the series.

As for permadeath, I want to clarify that Casual mode DOES NOT make me think that my units are expendable, or that I can just charge in recklessly. I'm glad that I can hypothetically stress to my units that if they find themselves in a pinch, they have the option of retreating, i.e. "live to fight another day." In my opinion, I still feel pretty raw about it getting to that point; they no longer can gain experience on that map, and it makes me feel like a crappy tactician.

(Remember that in the GBA series, you could view a unit's W/L record on the status screen, and even if they died and you reset, their "loss" would still be recorded. I don't know if FE13 still has that feature, but it'd be cool if it did at the end or something)

And even still, MU and Chrom still have the possibility of dying, and since I plan on using them anyway, that feeling of permadeath still exists to a certain degree.

[Snowy_One]

On the whole it's been pretty good, but there are some bigtime changes needed.

1) Speed is too valuable on the whole. It controls both doubling AND is the primary avoid stat. A level-up in speed is probably the single most important stat on the whole. Meanwhile Luck and possibly RES are just too... weak on the whole with HP also being underwhelming.

2) Better/more varied map designs. ATM Movement is OP'ed and units with low movement are weaker than they should be when compared to units with similar/slightly weaker stats but a LOT more movement. Some more defend-types would be great as well as some escorts and the such. Generally though, things where having high-movement wouldn't make you an auto-best.

3) Better weapon balance. I hear this got evened out later on, but ATM, Axes are OP'ed because they have 1-2 range, a WTA against the most common weapon type, and the most MT while swords have no 1-2 range, a WTD against lances, and overkill hit while failing in MT.

Edit: Wow. I didn't recognize this topic and thought it was a whole new/different one.

Edited January 20, 2013 by Snowy_One