What Makes Certain FEs Player Phase Focused and Others Enemy Phase Focused?

[Randoman]

So I've seen people bring up somewhat frequently that certain FEs are player phase focused and others are enemy phase focused. However, I've never actually heard specific reasons why that is, and I can't figure out the factors that make an FE player phase focused or enemy phase focused. Can someone explain it?

The only thing I can think of that'd make a game enemy phase focused is ambush enemy reinforcements. But with FE3/11 being considered a player phase focused game and FE6 being an enemy phase focused game (from what I've seen people on SF mention, anyways), and both those games having ambush enemy reinforcements, that alone can't be it.

Edited April 22, 2023 by Randoman

[Shaky Jones]

Someone else could give a more well constructed explanation, but as a jerk who always rants about enemy phase games, I'll throw my 2 cents.

Generally, that feel is based off quantity vs quality. By that, I'm referring to the strength of enemies as opposed to their numbers. Easily, the biggest thing that makes an enemy phase game is how many there are in a map, including reinforcements and enemy positioning (how close they are, can you block them?, are they frequent ambushes, are they designed to be fought off, etc).

Take for instance, FE7. It's a game where enemies spend a massive portion of the game under lvl 5 basic, but past the first few chapters, enemies appear in large waves, sometimes having reinforcements that have more enemies than the base map itself, but you can easily kill them with almost anyone. So, why bother focusing on training an army, focusing on setups for aggressive player phase strats to outrush the enemy, or feeding kills to anyone. Just get a paladin, buy 20 javs, and let them run to you on enemy phase. Its honestly more viable than going out of your way to plan ahead each turn, especially with the context of fe7 hard mode limiting the number of units you can deploy. If you can only bring 8 units, assuming you have a lord and healer, you only have so much room for variety, and you have very few reasons to use 1 range or 2 range locked units in enemy phase like games such as these, especially archers. You're only getting 1 kill a turn at most with archers usually, and because fe7 heavily leans towards enemy phase gaming with weak goombas that appear in huge drones, you'll be gaining far too little xp per guy, like 7xp. Paladin sain will get 4xp, but he can kill 4 a turn, making him earn far more in the long run, and being a much easier unit to use overall. Yeah, elitists might tell you that's every game, but then you become boring. Archers are awesome.

Personal correct takes aside, enemy phase like games are ones that don't really give you a reason to do much outside of jav emblem your way to victory, and often encourage or at least make it easy to apply steamrolling, something that many FE games try to prevent as to maintain tactical significance, so games like Conquest go off their meds and do everything in their power to make steamrolling physically impossible. You can even argue that the constant attemp to balance armors that often end up making them "bad" is to avoid easy enemy phase gaming. This is getting slightly off topic, so to return to the point, in order to avoid all that, a player phase game is typically one with enemies that hit hard.

Dsfe is often considered extremely player phase focused, at least on higher difficulties. You can't just tank and throw units to deal chip damage. You will die. Plenty of wyverns are present in the early game, so you better have been training them 2 locked player heavy archers (please use hunter cord please use hunter cord ple-). There typically aren't that many enemies per map, and should they run in large waves, its often to either encourage you to run in and kill them to regroup or to punish the player for trying to turtle too much. "General Sedgar tho". Well....crap.

Okay, SD isn't perfect, but even then, you're likely not doing chip damage gaming, since most maps in the 2nd half of the game are full of fortify users, so they go right back to full, forcing the player to use player phase strats to wipe out the enemy. Low quantity. High quality. I find fe7 to be high quantity. Low quality. Fe9 can also fall under enemy phase gaming, but enemies are a lot tangier. Sadly, that doesnt make it any less enemy phase focused. It just means you want forged javs, especially on maniac, but if you play fe9 maniac, i suggest going to an asylum.

Fe11 and fe12 have reinforcements. Ambush ones at that, but many of them are predictable. The idea for many of them isn't necessarily to appear and be killed as they spawn. They're usually there to ambush you from another direction, or to incentivize you to block first before they appear. This is especially apparent in high fe12 difficulties. Its flawed in a lot of ways, but there's only so much you can do when fe7 summons 8 enemies for 500 turns...

There's exceptions to everything. 3 Houses has tough enemies on maddening, but past the first half of the game, you can easily turn it into an enemy phase game through vantage wrath or 100 dodge builds. Ironic given that many early skills are blows that are player phase only, and gambits are player phase moves that assume you didn't just try to kill on enemy phase. Then again, gambits can be easy by having a flier dodge bait a ton of enemies to you, then you use claude's gambit to freeze them all like a young mouse trapped on glue, you monster. 

Enemy positioning and where you spawn reinforcements will impact each map on how much player phase is involved, but that would take a very long time to get into, so I'll just sum it as "dont put too many in one cluttered square that makes player phasing impossible". Mostly self explanatory stuff. I think dsfe does it best where you gotta kill them fast enough on player phase, or more appear and end you because you are not enemy phasing 4 literal dragon wyverns and tomahawk brigands. I guess if you want an easier fe experience, that's bad, so....play sacred stones? I dont know to how say this stuff without being arrogant. I mainly play high difficulty games because i think it turns an FE game into something more player phase focused, which I'm addicted to. Henceforth, I have an obvious bias against fe7 thats very apparent, given that it only further insulted my archer only playstyle. That said, ude Cord. Play Fe11. Embrace player phase gaming. 

[Armchair General]

For me, it's the presence of enemy skills or combat arts, the positioning and characteristics of each group of enemies, what the AI is up to, whether or not there's an thief on the field.

Stuff like SoV is more or less player-phase friendly because an lot of your options are only usable during your own turn and all the enemy does is retreat to heal or just spam some zombies. And speaking of the undead, anything with Venin Claws or the ones that immobilizes you is basically another excuse for you to attack from range.

Awakening can go either way, but it's one of those things where stuff like Galeforce or Lifetaker pushes you towards seizing the initiative.

Fates more or less punishes you if you try to enemy phase ninjas or mages with your entire team. Sure, you wait it out on certain maps and get away with being aggressive on others; but there's an limit that you need to see for yourself to know what it is.

 With 3H, I can't really speak for Maddening; but the opposition is homogenous enough on Hard that you can get away with doing an lot of weird shit if you're into grinding.

Engage at least gives you an temporary excuse for you to be more proactive with the addition of the Emblems and the occasional corrupted dragon. So far, it's an case of countering your brand of bullshit by throwing lots of warm bodies at you who can chain attack your favorite character

Edited April 22, 2023 by Armchair General

[Zapp Branniglenn]

It tends to simply mean which phase has the greatest focus based on game mechanics. I'd imagine that many would dispute which specific games are either or, and it's for that reason I'm trying to ween off this terminology. Putting games into labeled boxes is only worthwhile if the labels are commonly agreed upon. If I had to make rock hard definitions, I'd say the standout factors are:

Enemy Phase games

• low enemy strength - enemies are handily ORKOd by player units that haven't been invested into heavily, thus the threat is no longer individual enemies, but how many foes your units can take hits from before they succumb to their own power.
• Defense tanking and especially Dodge Tanking are viable with and without terrain boosts.
• Extremely viable 1-2 range weaponry
• Rout maps instead of curated objectives.
• Just moving your army in a blob of death as the enemy crashes into them like waves on enemy phase

Player Phase games

• High enemy strength - enemies that consistently require multiple player units to take out.
• Any form of Canto - though you could argue Canto's best utility is letting the player build a defensive line for the upcoming enemy phase so this is tricky to place.
• Rescue dropping and repositional skills
• Combat arts and other selectable options beyond just Attack and Item
• Map objectives that demand you to be in multiple corners of the map. 
• Thieves/brigands taking your loot if you play too slow. 

But any one of us can look at individual games and say that it has bullet points from both categories. Three Houses is a very player phase game, but it can become enemy phase if you rely on Avoid-stacking or Vantage/Wrath builds. FE6 I just finished a replay of and it feels like both. Enemy strength is very high compared to the rest of GBA era, but units like Rutger or Berserkers do their best work on enemy phase.

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

Someone else could give a more well constructed explanation, but as a jerk who always rants about enemy phase games, I'll throw my 2 cents.

this guy overstates it a bit but has fairly sound conclusions overall and i largely agree with this post

what i'll add to that is

as enemies homogenize, ep focus gets stronger. if you look at the GBA games in particular, but even beyond that, physical enemies dominate wildly. a strong defensive unit, even if we ignore the stats of 1-2 range in GBA being overtuned, would crush in those games handily with an iron axe or lance. the DS games circumvent that by just making EPing less viable through stat crunches, but for instance fates makes it less viable by having a significant number of enemy packs that you can't just wall with a single unit, whether it be through weapon triangle or def/res focus. fates has its own issues with e.g. sol master ninjas just no-selling the entire game, but the game itself tries fairly hard to encourage active rather than passive play.

i'm not quoting full posts to avoid cluttering the page but

1 hour ago, Armchair General said:

For me, it's the presence of enemy skills or combat arts, the positioning and characteristics of each group of enemies, what the AI is up to, whether or not there's an thief on the field.

i think the problem with your mental approach is that PPing is the default, and the game is not an equal contest between two minds of wit. the AI is a puzzle to be solved, and the default solution to that is PP, while EP is a fringe solution that you look for situations where you can apply it. PP is always viable, in GBA or DSFE or fates or feth or engage or feh, because it's the default state of gameplay. fates, for instance, isn't more player phase friendly on account of the debuffs, it has measures to discourage the alternative strategy of EPing units. the problem with for instance GBAFE is that the alternative solution (mass EP) works so well that you don't need any other solutions. it's a weird dichotomy that i don't think i've communicated very well, but i hope this makes sense?

 

1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

It tends to simply mean which phase has the greatest focus based on game mechanics.

just taking this as an example line, i read the entire post and am not just gotchaing you on this single sentence. the mechanics themselves almost never push either phase, that's one of the beautiful things of FE as a franchise. you kind of hit on it in the rest of the post, though you overexplained it, but the numbers are the only thing that dictates whether a game is EP focused or not. i'll tackle a big bullet point in a moment, but it all points down to how well can you build juggernaut units who are unlikely to die to N units that they have to counter? this is almost entirely down to numerical balance - all of unit, enemy, and weapon numbers factor into it. a good game and, hell, most games in the franchise are pretty balanced as to allowing limited EP value but not really letting you just focus on getting a juggernaut to take the whole enemy force down, but the problem is that fire emblems about 6 through 9 and 13 did, and that's where a shitload of the playerbase got into the franchise comparatively, so there's a discussion about 'enemy phase games' here.

1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Map objectives that demand you to be in multiple corners of the map. 

1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

• Rout maps instead of curated objectives.

 

multiple front objectives actually strongly encourage EP play, not discourage it at all; and non-rout objectives have literally zero impact on whether EP or PP is favored. FE9 has a wide 'variety of objectives' and EP reigns supreme throughout the entire game, for instance. the stated objective of the map is often given far too much weight compared to how the map is actually played - see for instance the great wall of takumi in conquest, which is a 'seize' map but, practically, you have to go through every single enemy on the map to get to that seize unless you do some foreknown bullshit.

 

E: i think i walked too far from the direct point, being that when your guys outstrip their guys to a sufficient degree, it becomes an EP game. it's a simple numbers game, and any justification given for any game is just cloaking the fact that the mechanics make the numbers work such that your guys outstrip their guys by a sufficient degree.

Edited April 23, 2023 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

I'll add to this, 'strong enemies' goes both ways; greater offensive potential does not necessarily match greater defensive potential. On the one hand you've got, hypothetically, a group of three fighters, but one of them has a hammer. The hammer guy's going to go down even easier than the others, if you can catch him out, but you aren't going to want to lure him with an armour. If he's got a handaxe instead, by contrast, he'll likely strike from a distance for less damage, but be more irritating to take down, either requiring player phase action or just demanding you the player make sure you have a 1-2 weapon in hand, which in theory is weaker. Then on the other hand you have, at an extreme, FE12 H3 enemies with capped strength and speed, a forged silver, and like 3 defence. In theory, the weakness there discourages enemy-phase reliance more. If three strong and tough enemies crash into a three-wide line of your guys, each is probably going to strike, get struck, and survive. If they're still hitting hard but get one-shot in retaliation, you get, well...

So it feeds into Integrity's greater point. Even superficially weak enemies absolutely can pose a threat, provided they have enough teeth to force the player to switch up. There's a reason that one halberd guy in the fog, in Novala's chapter, is notorious as the one dude who actually poses a threat to Seth. And both will improve the value of 'traditionally' weak -- aka, bad in FE7/8, where the headspace of the Western grognard fanbase permanently resides -- units. Archers are most useful where avoiding melee damage is useful, and where you're going to require multiple angles of attack to take down enemies.

[Integrity]

2 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

The hammer guy's going to go down even easier than the others, if you can catch him out,

as in, if you can sufficiently outnumber him

2 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

but you aren't going to want to lure him with an armour.

because being an armor tweaks the numbers such that it no longer works

3 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

There's a reason that one halberd guy in the fog, in Novala's chapter, is notorious as the one dude who actually poses a threat to Seth.

the reason being that he makes the numbers which have always worked stop working, and now seth is no longer sufficiently outnumbering

i am, as always, a genius

[Armchair General]

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

it has measures to discourage the alternative strategy of EPing units. the problem with for instance GBAFE is that the alternative solution (mass EP) works so well that you don't need any other solutions. it's a weird dichotomy that i don't think i've communicated very well, but i hope this makes sense?

Yeah, it does make sense that the newer games just gave  you more reasons not to camp by either adding new mechanics or adding an few side objectives. Only bit that I disagree with is this

 

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

the mechanics themselves almost never push either phase

Well, Engage gives you reason to quickly kill off the infantry or pay closer attention to your positioning  because of the chain attack spam. Of course, you'll probably do the same to bosses.

The pair up system in Fates is kind of weird, though. Like, it actively helps cheese an deadly attack or getting some extra damage in. But it's more game breaking to set it to defensive to squeeze an little bit more survivability out of your dudes.

 

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

multiple front objectives actually strongly encourage EP play,

Yeah, you're right about the seize objective being an inconsequential murderfest; but I always found myself camping on an siege level. Like, eating an wave or two of grunts before it gets "safe" enough to explore. But that's essentially 3 (technically 6, but the ones in 3H barely have any means of failure) levels that I've seen. I mean, as long as there aren't anything worth getting on the map and the enemy is filled with an generic stat spread, why should I rush?

[Windshipping]

This topic is interesting!

My most replayed game is FE7 and I hate enemy phase, so the first reply was really fun to read for me. Most of my friends "play" the game by letting everyone crush on Oswin or Hector, and I spend most of my time clearing it with the pegasus sisters, mages and Priscilla. I hate armors, not enough movement, also they're not cute, Florina is.

There are certainly mechanics that will put the balance in favor of player or enemy, the skills are an obvious reason (try an "enemy phase" playstyle when all the enemy units have the ability to pass through units like that unholy map with kitsunes in Conquest...) as well as positioning and the overall durability of your units (and of weapons, for that matter, no durability on weapon does encourage enemy phase if you ask me). But ultimately, it's heavily dependent on one playstyle. I have a more aggressive playstyle in chess as well and played against players who were all about setting traps. You can do most FE with either one or the other playstyle, really.

I'm surprised no one is talking about turn limit though, as it's actually a good incentive to break the usual "let enemy waves crush on my armors like on the wild coast". Fog map, on the other hand, will force you to play enemy phase whether you like it or not (and I really didn't like fog maps for that reason...)

Edited April 23, 2023 by Windshipping

[lenticular]

This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer, but: if I like the game then it's player phase; if I don't like it then it's enemy phase.

Pretty much every Fire Emblem game can be played either predominantly on player phase or predominantly on player phase. Maybe not on the hardest difficulty settings, but up to Hard (or its equivalent), it's typically possible to find some combination of character, weapon, skills, etc. that lets you break the game wide open and do whatever you want with it.

Personally, I tend to find player phase tactics more fun, so if I am choosing to play mostly on enemy phase then that's not a good sign. It means that I've mentally checked out from the game, don't really care any more, am only carrying on out of stubbornness, and just want to get it over with. So, I didn't like Conquest so I ended up enemy phasing a bunch of it. Whereas I do like Path of Radiance so I will player phase as much of it as I possibly can. So, while Path of Radiance is objectively a far easier game to enemy phase than Conquest, that's not how they actually play for me.

All of which is to say, there are a lot of game-mechanical reasons which move things along the scale of how easy/hard they are to play on player/enemy phase, but what matters more than anything else is how the player chooses to approach the game.

[Randoman]

Wow... so many thorough and in-depth explanations and examples... thanks everyone! I think I get the gist of it now.

Though people are more than welcome to keep posting their explanations and thoughts on player phase focused games compared to enemy phase focused games.

[Shadow Mir]

On 4/22/2023 at 4:46 PM, Randoman said:

FE6 being an enemy phase focused game

I'm not sure I'd agree - largely because in Enemy Phase focused games, hand axes and javelins are good. Binding Blade has them plagued by power and accuracy problems, and that's before the fact that enemy stats make it such that you can't just plant someone with one of those in the middle of a bunch of enemies and (consistently) expect them to clear the field of everything that can attack them. Contrast Blazing Blade, where enemies are pathetic to the point that you could actually expect enemies to get slaughtered on enemy phase.

Anyway, I'd say the waters are muddied by the fact that even in supposedly player phase oriented games, you'd still need to lure in enemies eventually. See: Fates. Birthright has a lategame level with mostly mounted units, which can attack units from anywhere from 8 (Great Knights) up to 10 (Bow Knight, Malig Knight, Strategist, Dark Knight) spaces away. You generally aren't getting first hit on those unless they have moved into your range beforehand, even with your own mounted units.

EDIT:

On 4/22/2023 at 8:01 PM, Integrity said:

fates has its own issues with e.g. sol master ninjas just no-selling the entire game

I'm not sure I'd agree with this. Honestly, I think the Sol Master Ninja build is overrated. It sounds like some recipe for immortality on paper, but in practice, you're only walking a really really dangerous RNG tightrope, where if you don't constantly win the RNG lottery, you're at risk of death. This means that any situation where I COULD rely on a Sol Master Ninja to stay alive is one where a bunch of other units could feasibly survive....

Edited April 26, 2023 by Shadow Mir