What makes good and bad map designs in Fire Emblem?

[Dunal]

Is your idea to make her more powerful the more aura's she has so you have to wittle her down quickly? Or does she grow progressively harder the less auras she has?

Both I suppose?

Destroying an aura affects her AI -- for the most part, in a way that makes her less threatening by herself.

... Unless you forget to clear the spirits. Since what she does after destroying an aura is more dangerous when there are spirits around. Their AI and patterns change too.

Therefore, the player needs to balance their attention on Auras or Spirits, because ignoring one them has a consequence to it. Spirits aren't exactly easy to kill either (where only Yune Micaiah can negate that somewhat) and Ashera can heal them.

I mean, the message here being, is that map design can on the serface, be great. But a lack of well designed enemy placements / AI / power can negate that, making the map design appear to be "bad" even if the structure or concept of the map is good. There are many of these maps in the series. 4-E-5 is a great concept/idea as far as FE final bosses typically go. Just the execution could have been better.

But then it depends on your definition of map design and whether enemy placement / AI actually is a part of that or not. Because that's definitely debatable.

Edited January 24, 2016 by DLuna

[Jotari]

That sounds like a pretty good change. The spirits were ultimately kind of pointless. Maybe making it so you can't counter attack against them would be a good way to make them threatening without actually buffing their states too much. That way you basically need to take them out on player turn even if they are weak because otherwise they'd eventually mob you.

Edited January 24, 2016 by Jotari