Is Conquest a "fair" game?

[SnowFire]

I think Conquest is pretty fair overall, for the reasons described.  No ninja reinforcements, % chance trigger enemy skills are rare, no fog of war, and having Dragon Veins always trigger at the end of the enemy phase so that there's a chance to react first.

I do think that Fates in general requires a few too many "big brain" moments to properly understand the threat level a unit will face, especially if not in a dual guard pair-up.  Fates very clearly wanted to avoid FE7-style "send overlevel Kent with a Javelin forward, watch him eat 8 reinforcing attackers in a single enemy phase" strategies, with mechanics that punish that very harshly.  But the cure was sometimes worse than the disease: when it's too hard to understand what might happen on enemy phase, this favors playing it safe with the ubertankiest units even more, arguably (the Xander/Benny/Effie/Ignatiuses of the world), who at least stand a chance to survive after being Lunge-chained off to who knows where and hit with Seal Defense.  Playing loose and aggressively can cause the wheels to fly off fast if there's a key miss or an enemy pair-up does something surprising or there's some sort of buff / debuff you didn't take into your calculations.

For CQ specifically, I'd argue that some of the map designs favor cheesing them a little too hard.  Cheese isn't always bad, it's something different, but on Lunatic it can just get silly.  Confession, I still haven't finished my Lunatic CQ run, but stuff like the Kitsune map / Ryoma's map / Endgame seem like they'd be nightmarish to play "fair", which heavily favors the known cheeses for those maps.  (That and the Kitsune's gimmick is dumb and unfun.)  Maybe making them a little easier to play "normally" would reduce the temptation to use fliers / win the duel / use Pass & Rescue for some cheesy victory.

[Eltosian Kadath]

On 12/2/2021 at 11:50 AM, lenticular said:

 

Do you disagree? Do you think that I made fundamental mistakes and that I should have known better? And not just that I could have known better but that I should have done. Maybe I could have figured out that since there weren't any turn-based reinforcements that there must be tripwire reinforcements instead, but I don't think that's something that is reasonable to expect of the player.

I think its reasonable to expect tripwire reinforcements given that all of the reinforcements you have seen in previous chapters (from chapter 3, and chapter 5) have been tripwire reinforcements (barring the ones that spawn when a spearman visit the villages in chapter 8, but the game makes it clear that this is a special exception and not the norm), and there is terrain that is clearly indicating that enemies can appear from them. The first turn based reinforcements in Conquest are in chapter 10, and a majority of unique enemy reinforcements (phrased as such to avoid people saying the infinite reinforcements of chapter 21 are the only ones that matter...) in Conquest are tripwire reinforcements...

 

On 12/1/2021 at 12:59 AM, Imuabicus said:

 

This plays into stuff like chapter 10/Hinoka - you aren´t made aware that yes, the enemy royals can and will in fact use Dragon Veins - that seems almost intelligent for the enemy AI programmed to do it as they may be. 

...Literally one of the first things you see in this game, in the tutorial dream sequence, is an enemy Camilla use a Dragon Vein to evaporate a river. There is even some dialogue about the enemy royals using the dragon veins.

 

On 12/2/2021 at 11:50 AM, lenticular said:

 

I'm not saying that Conquest isn't fairer than any other Fire Emblem game. It probably is. It's certainly fairer than nonsense chapters like Foreign Land and Sky or One Survives. My point is that "fairer than other FE games" is a low bar and that doesn't make it fair on an absolute level.

Is there some bar for fairness you can set to deem it fair, or must it be compared to some unreachable Platonian Form of fairness?

 

On 12/2/2021 at 11:50 AM, lenticular said:

I'll also add that there's a discrepancy between our DV uses and enemy DV uses in these chapters. All game, we have only ever been able to use each Dragon Vein once. Hinoka and Sakura get to use theirs indefinitely.

...Can Sakura use her DV indefinitely? I have only ever seen her use it once per instance of the map.

 

On 12/2/2021 at 12:14 PM, Father Shrimpas said:

 

Thracia has a map with 30+ turn reinforcements that keep spwaning, for example. I only know that because i kept grinding them for 35 or so turns.

Chapter 4 has some that can come as late as turn 60...

 

On 12/2/2021 at 12:14 PM, Father Shrimpas said:

Fates is the one game where you shouldn't really fuck with the weapon triangle. It isn't useless unlike most other games. While i do agree the Weapon Rank bonuses and triangle advantage/disadvantage should be explicitly visible, the weapon rank bonuses are already calculated in the battle stats (you will notice that Weapon MT + STR/MAG isn't equal to your atk stat, that's because Weapon Rank Bonuses) and the weapon trianlge in the battle calculation, so you should've learned earlier that weapon triangle deals bonus damage.

? but its basically the same system used in Awakening and the DS games.

 

On 12/2/2021 at 9:24 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

and I'd argue that letting enemies pile up in a defence map is a bad position, even if you might get away with it in easier ones

The exception that proves the rule has got to be the first true defense map in the series, Thracia 776 chapter 14, as there is a good reason to hold off from killing enemies on that map, despite the notoriety of Thracia's difficulty; there are just under 40 enemies at the start, with 10 reinforcements arriving every turn, but an enemy limit of 50, so holding off from killing for a few turns can greatly reduce the number of enemies you have to deal with overall. Admittedly the very point of the map is that you are in a bad position...

[Armchair General]

5 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Is there some bar for fairness you can set to deem it fair, or must it be compared to some unreachable Platonian Form of fairness?

There's no such thing as an "fair" fight in Fire Emblem when it comes to combat. Everything is designed to die within 2 to 5 hits and you're constantly manipulating the odds so that the enemy will be less likely to touch you. But no matter what you do, those guys only have to get lucky once while you're praying to the Random Number God each time that you face a boss on a throne...Or in a forest.

In fact, I actually hate the RNG a little bit more than the reinforcements, which isn't a lot of hate, to begin with.

 

But most of the time, the scales are tipped in your favor; it's just not to the point where it's consistently a guaranteed win.

[lenticular]

On 12/5/2021 at 3:46 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

I'm obviously biased in that despite losing in part because of it, I loved the water drain tactic. It was in line with what we had been told to expect from dragon veins and felt like a brilliant way to up the challenge of the map in a way which was much more organic and interesting than the usual FE method of just throwing in extra reinforcements.

What I wished they'd done with the level is have the Dragon Vein on one side of the map but have Takumi start on the opposite side and steadily make his way over to it, using it as soon as he reached. This would -- I think -- retain most (or all?) of what people like about the level, but would also give more advance warning to prevent the possibility of gotcha momentsand have a very obvious and ominous ticking clock as he got closer to the Dragon Vein. I think it would have been better from a story perspective as well, since it makes Takumi seem like the world's most incompetent military leader to have him sit on a Dragon Vein twiddling his thumbs for half a dozen turns while his soldiers Charge of the Light Brigade their way into well-defended enemy choke points.

On 12/5/2021 at 3:46 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

Yeah, I'd absolutely agree. And of course this means that any unexpected development has the potential to overwhelm you and lead to a loss. From that standpoint, you can argue that every single unexpected development (e.g. reinforcements of any flavour) is a form of unfairness. I guess my point of view is that there's a certain amount of unfairness in a SRPG I find acceptable, to keep you off balance a bit. But we can quibble over where that line is, what forms of "unfairness" are acceptable, and even if they should exist at all.

Yeah. Some amount of unfairness is pretty much inevitable in a TRPG. At least, I'm having a hard time imagining how one could work that was completely fair while still retaining the core essence that made it identifiable as a TRPG. A better question for me to ask might have been "to what extent is Conquest an unfair game, and is it enough to matter?" As to the second part of that question, that's going to depend on personal preference, on how often the person in question runs into potentially unfair situations, but also on managing expectations. I think a large part of my disappointment with Conquest was that I'd heard people talk up how scrupulously fair it is before I played it. If I hadn't had that level of expectation, I'd probably have been more inclined to see it favourably and forgive its flaws. (And in fairness to the game, it isn't its fault that I had my expectations set too high. It never advertised itself as being a perfectly fair game.)

On 12/5/2021 at 10:16 PM, SnowFire said:

For CQ specifically, I'd argue that some of the map designs favor cheesing them a little too hard.  Cheese isn't always bad, it's something different, but on Lunatic it can just get silly.  Confession, I still haven't finished my Lunatic CQ run, but stuff like the Kitsune map / Ryoma's map / Endgame seem like they'd be nightmarish to play "fair", which heavily favors the known cheeses for those maps.  (That and the Kitsune's gimmick is dumb and unfun.)  Maybe making them a little easier to play "normally" would reduce the temptation to use fliers / win the duel / use Pass & Rescue for some cheesy victory.

That also matches my experience. In my sole playthrough of Conquest (started on Lunatic, finished on Hard), I ended up basically soloing the last half dozen chapters with Corrin because playing it properly felt like too much of a chore.

16 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I think its reasonable to expect tripwire reinforcements given that all of the reinforcements you have seen in previous chapters (from chapter 3, and chapter 5) have been tripwire reinforcements (barring the ones that spawn when a spearman visit the villages in chapter 8, but the game makes it clear that this is a special exception and not the norm), and there is terrain that is clearly indicating that enemies can appear from them. The first turn based reinforcements in Conquest are in chapter 10, and a majority of unique enemy reinforcements (phrased as such to avoid people saying the infinite reinforcements of chapter 21 are the only ones that matter...) in Conquest are tripwire reinforcements...

That's a reasonable point, certainly. It's a bit of an odd situation whereby if you've played enough Fire Emblem to recognise the significance of the stairs then you've probably also played enough Fire Emblem to see turn-based reinforcements as the norm, but I'll definitely concede that it was at least possible to predict that tripwire reinforcements could be a thing there.

16 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Is there some bar for fairness you can set to deem it fair, or must it be compared to some unreachable Platonian Form of fairness?

For me, the platonic ideal for fairness is a game of perfect information with no chance or random element. As I mentioned, though, I'm not sure it would be possible to make a TRPG that meets these criteria, though many other games, (tabletop games and video games both) do so. And of course, being fair is completely independent from being good, fun, or interesting. Noughts and crosses (aka tic-tac-toe) has perfect information and no random chance, but it's unlikely to hold the interest of anyone over the age of seven.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

On 12/2/2021 at 3:24 AM, Father Shrimpas said:

Enemy Royals do have the Crown sign tho signaling they can use Dragon Veins, just like player royals have those signs. And in the Hinoka and Sakura chapters the game clearly states ''But if Hinoka/Sakura uses it...''

That´s a smol crown tho - not saying it doesn´t exist, but I forgot it does and was wondering what the lil thing besider Azuras name meant. 

On 12/2/2021 at 8:50 PM, lenticular said:

I apologise. It was absolutely unfair of me to lump a bronze sword in with a pile of cabbages. If you need me for the next three hours, I'll be giving penance for my disrespect to the glory of bronze weapons.

Good, good. Now that you have paid the price you may hit a 90%.

If you´d like to improve your hitrates, please head on over to the IS online store and purchase the HitRate+ package for just 20$ and never worry about hitrates again.

On a more serious note, the lottery is something that you have to go out of your way to get, and it´s pretty clear that doing so mean one should embrace the RNG. Never know when a cabbage saves the day.

On 12/6/2021 at 12:42 PM, Eltosian Kadath said:

...Literally one of the first things you see in this game, in the tutorial dream sequence, is an enemy Camilla use a Dragon Vein to evaporate a river. There is even some dialogue about the enemy royals using the dragon veins.

presses start to skip

[SumG]

This may be an unpopular opinion, but having been replaying some of the Fates games recently and thinking on this topic.  And what I've settled on is the biggest problems with the games are Ryoma and Xander.  I understand the intention of the design is to make the characters seem awesome and powerful, appropriate for the crown prince of each kingdom.  But from a gameplay perspective, I think they really warp of the level design of their respective routes in a bad way, particularly when you first recruit them.

It's one thing for them to be powerful, it's another thing for them to be so much more powerful than any unit you are liable to have at the point of the game you recruit them.  And not only are their stat profiles pushed, but they also have ranged Divine Weapons that are incredibly strong (and provide stat boosts), are in classes that are incredibly strong, and they are liable to be higher level than the rest of your army when recruited.

Why is this a problem?  Because at this point, the devs have two options in terms of level design.  They can either devise scenarios that are threatening to Ryoma/Xander, scenarios that if the majority of the rest of your party attempted they would be torn to shreds, or they can devise scenarios more appropriate for the rest of the army and allow Ryoma/Xander to run roughshod over the maps on their own.

I think this decision is what leads to many (but not all) of the other complaints here.  There are some complaints about congested/circuitous map design forcing players into chokepoints, but realistically that type of map is the only way the devs are going to be able to get a large number of enemies to attack Ryoma/Xander all at once, posing the type threat that might actually kill them.  Similarly, by having huge numbers of enemies, including many units with shurikens/knives and no means to heal negative statuses, Ryoma/Xander can be debuffed enough to bring their stats in range of where the enemies can threaten them.  But it also means that if an average unit attempts to tank those sections, they will be torn to shreds.

I understand that by the endgame some units in the party can narrow the gap to Ryoma/Xander, but that's not until very late in the game.  And from the time you get Ryoma/Xander until maybe the last handful of chapters, a large portion of the strategy of these maps can boil down to "Buddy up your crown prince and let them tank hits".

Is this fair?  Ehhh, I don't know.  I get the argument that everything is available for the player to see, and I appreciate that there are no ambush spawns.  I also don't mind the map design as much as some people do, despite my complaints.  But I do think the huge range in unit quality, exacerbated by the fact it's very easy for units to fall behind in terms of experience, does severely limit turn to turn strategies for the game.  That's not great, but I'm not sure it's unfair.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I think you're really overrating Ryoma and especially Xander here. Ryoma is probably the best unit on Birthright, but he's not invincible, and to a certain extent his contributions can be mirrored by other PCs. He's good but not Sigurd/Seth/Titania good. Xander isn't generally even considered the best unit in Conquest.

I think this criticism is much more true of games with powerful jeigans. Using Frederick as an example, earlygame Frederick is so powerful that not using him is almost unthinkable, and I can't even imagine how you would survive Lunatic+ Chapter 2 if you lose Frederick in Chapter 1. This is obviously bad design and is a product of the game trying to devise maps which are threatening to Frederick. Conversely, in games with easier hard modes (such as Sacred Stones), you run into a problem where early maps are only as hard as you make them because Seth can just stomp everything into oblivion.

To the extent that this is a problem, I think Fates (and particularly Conquest) has less of an issue here than most games in the series.

[Codename Shrimp]

Xander especially in Lunatic later on can't tank anything due to combination of Debuffs and Inevitable end/Poison Strike/Grisly Wond.

2 Ninjas and he is down to 1 HP, and the debuff'd defence will make him die.

Also he still dies to mages in like, one dual attack

[plat3009]

I think the game is pretty fair for the most part. Most of the time you lose it's because of something you, the player, didn't pay attention to (enemy dragon veins, weapons, skills, etc.). Also no dumb ambush reinforcements makes them a bit more manageable.

 

I think the most unfair part is the game putting dodgy Hoshidan boss units on throne tiles, like PLEASE STOP