Xenologue Maddening Strategies

[Raphael]

For anyone else who is enough of a Griss to attempt this how far did you get and what units were you using? I was only able to clear through chapter 2 and figured I'd share my strategy and see if anyone found something that worked for Ch 3. 

Chapter 1 Setup:

Spoiler

Alear - Lucina for Bonded shield to support Louis with the mages
Nil - Byleth for dancing/instruct
Nel - Corrin for fire and ice veins
Louis - Tiki is enough defense to take 0 damage from the wolves (and they still attack anyone). Tail smash was a 100% accuracy 1 shot with rally buffs and Ice breath is useful for taking out multiple units a turn and freezing the elite wolf/boss when they start to move. 
Pandreo - Chrom for damage and rally buffs. 

Mostly I turtled in the top left and funneled wolves into Louis who took 0 damage. The real threats are the few mages that spawn with elfire that can double and kill Louis. Louis can safely 1v1 the boss while the rest of the party cheers from the corner. 

 

Chapter 2 Setup: 

Spoiler

Top side
Alear: Lucina for bonded shield support to help Louis and Zelestia against mages/archers
Seadall: Dancing
Zelestia: With Ike and a levin sword from Celine can reach some 1 round thresholds (iirc). Overall she's probably the strongest unit for this map and doesn't instantly die to the archers if you engage with Ike
Louis: Tiki again, he can handle the top corner with backup from seadall. 

Bot side
Nil: Corrin as I ended up swapping with his twin. You can AI manipulate the group of enemies in the bottom-middle with the fire vein to funneling them north or deal a lot of passive damage while kiting back.
Nel: Byleth for dancing
Pandreo: I was able to Soren drain tank turn 1 to clear the enemies immediately close to him. 
Anna: Chrom bot for the chapter since I had chrom bond leveled up on her. She can still 1 round some of the armors while engaged which is nice. Otherwise Ivy probably would have been more useful?

Chapter 3 Setup:

Spoiler

The amount of flier spawns are rough to deal with and I don't think any of the archers reach 1-round potential. Maybe if I waited until I got Roy again the strength boost might help? Griss can 1-round with Elwind + Chrom engage boost but his accuracy is really shaky. Amber + Failnaught and Alear + Parthia works but they struggled to sustain engage uptime. There are 2 waves of reinforcements that spawn on the immediate flanks totaling 6 more wyverns and 6 griffin knights.

Zelestia + Ike was able to kill one of the cannoneers on the left side and survive against the archer with Ike. 

I ended up quitting out of the map after another 6x2 fliers spawned past the cannoneer platform. Louis had begun to fall off too and couldn't reliably have a safe enemy phase into all of the griffin knights. If I retry it I might run Jade as well but they can't really stall the flying units for more than 1 turn given the enemy mobility and space constraints on this map. 

 

[psy_wombats]

I've also only cleared through xenologue Ch3 on my maddening run around ch21. I'm not using the DLC in the maingame run. So far it's not been much fun at all to the extent that I'm taking a break from the game for a bit. But my notes anyway:

General:

Spoiler

 - Nil is an active liability. While DLC emblems could work better, I don't have them, so I've stuck him with Micaiah. Corrin could work for dragon veins but I think Corrin is best on units with 3 range or canto so that they can paralyze big globs of enemies, and the best Nil can do is trade for a tomahawk for him to miss with.
 - Nel and Alear are... not fantastic. They are probably best relegated to support duty. One of them should likely have Lucina.
 - The tedium of unequipping every single unit in the battle prep screen is worth it and basically mandatory. Should only need one staff user ever because of this (they can spam Fortify forever)
 - Speedtaker is, as always, very good. It shines here especially because you'll only have a handful of customized units that will be able to do anything (as the force deploys are all underpowered), and it's not possible to hit doubling thresholds via leveling or statboosters.
 - Seadall and Byleth should be deployed every chapter as the limit on useful units makes dancing even more valuable.

Ch1: Lategame prepromoted units make the map easy enough. Thinking about doing this map early gives me a headache.

Ch2:

Spoiler

 - Zelestia doesn't need Ike to tank an archer hit -- she has (barely) enough bulk to do without
 - Fliers with Canto can basically do whatever they want here, as usual
 - Not so much hard as much as a slog
 - As pointed out above, throwing flame veins at the enchanter squads is very funny
 - The top side has a harder go of it than the bottom. On my run, Pandreo+Corrin solo'd the bottom.

Ch3:

Spoiler

 - I needed to retry this map. It sucks. I think it's played best going slowly and positioning units to bait out flying reins and hit 1-2 of them hard on enemy phase.
 - Saphir can oneshot pegknights with her bow if she gets a point or two of strength from somewhere (I used Ike)
 - Sages engaged with Byleth can help kill those stupid side cannoneers. Otherwise at least one of Hortensia/Ivy highly recommended as it takes Zelestia on her own like 4 turns to Elthunder those bastards.
 - Basically every unit brought in here should be kitted to kill fliers. High strength units with Lyn/Lucina/Edelgard qualify. The natural archers suck in the xenologue though, not recommended. Casters without Elwind should get it traded to them. I had Pandreo with speedtaker to make things a lot easier.
 - Alear has a Wyrmslayer. I gave it to Kagetsu to double the wyverns. Alear still only does chip with it. Sad.
- There are a bunch of eff:Dragon engage weapons that might actually be useful here but I didn't have the bond levels for them really.

I'll probably post more when I get back to this, but, I think this xenologue just kind of epitomizes the bad parts of Engage -- significantly easier if you interact with it at the "right" time, encourages creating 2-3 favorites and neglecting the rest, maps are 3hr slogs with spam reins

Edited April 7, 2023 by psy_wombats

[Technoweirdo]

Still going through it (Playing a post-game file, cleared Xenologue 3 on Maddening recently), but to share a few stray thoughts...:

• Nil is saved by the fact that he's a Dragon and thus can use certain Emblems really well even at Bond Level 1. Have him with Byleth currently, but I can see Corrin and Camilla giving him utility thanks to Dragon Vein. Veronica's also good since summoning doesn't care about his stats.
• By virtue of being a Dragon, Nel too is usable. More usable thanks to having actual stats, but I don't see her having amazing combat outside of Engaging with Tiki.
• Soren's the MVP of XL3. Not because he has Rexcalibur (I gave him to Gregory who can't get it without Bond Levels), but because he has Assign Decoy for messing with flier / cannon targeting.
• Zelestia's very competent. Power of flying magic, yo. Boosted more by Chrom.

[BloodRonin]

Make use of the tiki and the free hp bar on Nil since he is so weak.

[Skyteppelin]

I'm currently on fell 6 on maddening is anyone else on it or has beat and would like to share ideas? I doing this before chapter 16 so I don't have corrion or seadell well my life be a lot easier if I get them?

Edited April 9, 2023 by Skyteppelin

[BloodRonin]

13 hours ago, Skyteppelin said:

I'm currently on fell 6 on maddening is anyone else on it or has beat and would like to share ideas? I doing this before chapter 16 so I don't have corrion or seadell well my life be a lot easier if I get them?

Having a dancer makes a world of a difference. 

[Speedy]

Here is something I would not recommend on Xenologue 5, thought it might be bit of a cheese but it actually made things more difficult.

1st, dont give Nel Veronica Emblem, rather dont summon and attack the "boss" with it, the game will think you cought up with those two and start summoning extra reinforcements

2nd Dont use Celica ring on Nel, I tried teleporting her out of there to my group. It worked, and the nice thing is that the "boss" starts moving towards you, but so does the rest of map and all the extra reinforcements. Which means that dragon on top that complicates things a bit.