Cattail Prophet posted:

Byleth's charm cap is 99.

Inu posted:

I'm almost through White Clouds in my Maddening run (month 2).

Hilda (wyvern rider) and Lysithea (bishop) are destroying enemy units. Both of them have been blessed with strength and magic respectively. They're both about 3-4 points higher than average, and they're already ridiculous to begin with. Leonie (went through pegassus knight to wyvern rider) is my go-to sword deleter, and Petra handes axes, or anything really if she can get on a forest tile (Assassin with sword avoid from the dance contest).

The female students have been my best units for the most part. Also, bows are king, and half my units are using bows at least some of the time.

It's my last chance to do it, so I'm going to try the Balthus / Hapi Paralogue again and see if I can get through it this time. I've finished all of the other paralogues I had available except for Hilda and Cyril's. I might put that one off until post-timeskip if it turns out to be way hard.


Maddening is really fun. I can't believe I put it off this long. Give it a try if you haven't yet.

Amppelix posted:

I've always felt like using your dancer pick just to give an already good combat unit sword avoid was a tremendous waste. You can easily make OP units without sword avoid, but you can't get another dancer.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

So is there really no way to grind for gold/xp without just doing the first map over and over? I miss the XP/Gold map in Awakening

Walla posted:

I never really did much with dancers. I think Azura is my favorite because it's funny to make her a Spear Master in Conquest.

Deltasquid posted:

Are you doing it NG or NG+?

quote:

I've always felt like using your dancer pick just to give an already good combat unit sword avoid was a tremendous waste. You can easily make OP units without sword avoid, but you can't get another dancer.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

So is there really no way to grind for gold/xp without just doing the first map over and over? I miss the XP/Gold map in Awakening

Inu posted:

Maybe if Petra falls off in the second half of the game as a combat unit I'll use her more as a dancer.

Last Celebration posted:

She kinda fell off for me later in the second half as an Assassin (the usual assassin problem of Speed/Dex for days but not enough strength to one-round), but that’s probably partly my fault for deciding I needed a thief and not a wyvern rider with the Steal skill equipped.

Inu posted:

Uh, ok. I see where maddening chapter 13 in VW/SS/AM gets its reputation from. Holy crap this is a huge difficulty spike.

Hellioning posted:

I'm not sure if it's really that cartoony, but ok.

Teal deer:

AradoBalanga posted:

Another minor bit:

The whole reason Claude's uncle (on his mother's side) died was because of a monster attack. That was all-but-outright-stated to have been caused by Lorenz's father, Count Gloucester, in what appears to be a bid to weaken the Riegan leadership. This attack also resulted in the death of Raphael's parents, as they were joining the duke for an art appraisal or something similar. Unfortunately, this plot point doesn't get followed up on (either Claude doing something about it, Lorenz confronting his father for staging a political assassination that got innocents killed as collateral damage, or whether or not Count Gloucester did it for his own gain or on orders from others like the Argarthans) by the game once you complete Raphael and Ignatz's paralogue.

McTimmy posted:

And most importantly. The new calender year begins on month 4 for inane reasons.

Hellioning posted:

Zore posted:

I'd also add



Flayn only woke up in the last few years (nebulously at some point between when Jeralt took Byleth and ran and the present day) which really explains why Seteth is so insanely over-protective. He was watching over her for over a thousand years before she woke up and finally lacking anything else to do they joined up with Rhea. Which is also why Seteth has a lot of conflict with Rhea as he slowly learns some of the more radical things she's been up to in the intervening centuries.

Shinji117 posted:

There's a tiny bit of follow-up in the DLC Shadow Library, but only in the sense that it's basically shouting "Gloucester definitely did it" in a way that Raphael doesn't allow to happen in the paralogue.

"...son of the Alliance's leader, Oswald von Riegan, has died in an accident. This follows an incident involving the previous successor, and even the Knights of Seiros suspect it was at Count Gloucester's command, thought it seems too conspicuous. There is some concern that it could spark a war. With the Duke Riegan gravely ill, the situation is..."




I would also add some stuff to the earlier lore summary:

The reason why Nemesis got called the "King of Liberation" was because the Nabateans he killed were ruling over humanity, but humans did not at all like enjoy ruled over by Nabateans. After having been ruled by superhuman overlords, humans saw the guy who killed their overlords as having "liberated" them. Of course, Nemesis was almost certainly a shitbag who never had any such intentions to begin with, but it seems he knew the power of good PR so framed himself as a liberator, which lasted up until around the (as far as most people at the time knew) entirely human-driven War Of Heroes started and Nemesis' true colours of a powerhungry bandit were shown. This ties into why the Rhea had to present Nemesis, as per Church of Seiros doctrine, as "a blessed hero who fought the evil gods terrorizing humanity, but then later fell evil and had to be killed": humans really did see Nemesis attacking the Nabateans as a hero fighting off "wicked gods", and Rhea couldn't change how humans had seen the Nabateans, and so had to go with the narrative that the person who killed her family was a hero who only later fell once he could no longer hide his powerhungry nature under the cloak of "liberation".

Also, while after the War of Heroes the Agarthans were foiled and driven underground, the key thing is that the surviving Nabateans never managed to work out it was the Agarthan survivors despite investigating the matter. This let the Agarthans keep doing their thing, with the Church constantly trying to play catch-up but never getting any real evidence or proof about the group. Rhea and co knows that there is a group out there who is acting against them, but has no clue who they are or what their actual goals are. Rhea and Seteth only work out it was all Agarthan survivors this whole time after Hubert's postmortem letter in VW and SS.

Mr. Pool posted:

One of the confusing bits of all the ancient history dumps is that its always light on what "humans" whatever that means, are doing. In the first war between Nabateans and Agarthans (first humans?) Sothis and Nabateans win and they go underground. Should we assume some humans didn't go underground and instead stuck around to be perma-medieval under the leadership of Seiros et al? There have to be right, because the next mention of them is that during the next war they get Nemesis, a "bandit" , who we assume is neither a Nabatean nor Agarthan to do their dirty work, along with his friends. It would be *really* confusing if there were humans who were underground with Agarthans but not Agarthans.

Other questions:

1) the Agarthan record in the Shadow Library calls Sothis (we assume) the "False God" . We know that Sothis is also analogous to an alien: came here on a meteor, started taking poo poo over and reproduces asexually (although they are no where near as powerful as her?) . Does this mean there are True Gods? Do Agarthans have other Gods at all?

2) Do Nabateans reproduce at all? The only evidence of this is Seteth and Flayn who he says is his daughter, or is that just another analogy to get along with humans and they actually all are children of Sothis who don't age?
Can Nabateans and humans reproduce? Is that what Flayn is? Is that what Sitri is?

2) Is there a name for the world? Bc Fodlan is just the main continent right?
3) Petra's supports talk about other people being inhabited by spirits and divine beings which gives them powers, something that she is familiar with back in Brigid. Do Dagda/Almyra/Morfis/??? have their own Gods?
4) Fodlan is perma medieval because the Church of Seiros outlaws basically anything too scientific, why haven't the other continents lapped them then? Is Dagda gonna roll up with aircraft carriers soon?
5) What was going on with the Western Church/Lonato/Catherine? If the answer to this one is "play Azure Moon" thats fine, I've only done VW and most of SS so far.
6) Are there any examples of crest bearers no aging? Like even Gen 1 crest havers? Jeralt's side effects of getting Seiros' blood are confusing
7) Why wouldn't Agarthans just leave Fodlan, as far as we know its the only continent to ever have Sothis/Nabateans. Don't tell me it was easier for them to build ICBM bunkers than boats lol

Hellioning posted:

Yeah, only the ringleaders of the rebellion were driven underground. There were humans on Sothis' side too.


1) We don't know very much about Agarthians. I think the 'false god' thing is just Agarthians being mad that people worship the person they hate the least.
2) They do. Flayn is literally Seteth's daughter. We don't know for certain if her mother was human or not, but I think it's implied that she is.
3) Fodlan is just the main continent, yes. We don't have a name for the whole world.
4) We don't know very much about the outside world, but probably.
5) I think this is just normal Fire Emblem tech stuff, like how Awakening isn't that much more advanced than Marth's games despite taking place centuries later.
6) This is more of a 'read Catherine and Ashe's support chain'. If you want to know, The Western Church were convinced by the slitherins that Rhea was evil and not doing the Goddess' will, so they tried to depose her. Ashe's brother, Christoph, bought into it too, and was part of the scheme. The Plot was discovered, but Rhea didn't want to admit that there was an assassination plot against her for...reasons. So instead they claimed that Christoph (and the other members of the plot probably) were partly responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur instead. This is why Lonato is so mad; he knows that his son was executed on false pretenses (I'm not sure if he knows Christoph actually was responsible for an assassination plot on Rhea or not). Catherine was Christoph's friend/girlfriend, but helped turn him in and was complicit in the false reasoning for his execution, because she was also loyal to Rhea. This is also basically why Catherine stopped coming up with her own morals and just listened to Rhea.
7) Not that I know of, beyond maybe Byleth, but Byleth is about five million special cases wrapped into one person.
8) Because this is their land dammit and they're not going to let any lizards defile it.

quote:

"Much time has passed since the Imperial calendar was adopted. In the prior calendar, the year began with what we now call the Guardian Moon and ended with Ethereal Moon. Back then, the 12 lunar phases were exclusively referred to as months. They came to be known as moons with our current calendar system.

Though the prior names of the months are lost, it is known that the Guardian Moon was often shortened to the number one, Pegasus to the number two, and so on until Ethereal Moon, the twelth and final month. Though inelegant, this was a practical system that apparently served the people of the time well.

There is no way of knowing when the old calendar was created. Any attempts to trace its origins lead to the era of the gods and more unanswered questions. All we know for certains is that the calendar has existed for a nearly incomprehensible length of time.

To change a civilization's calendar would inevitably cause great confusion and unrest. Why, then, did Emperor Wilhelm__the first leader of Adrestia__choose to abandon the original calendar in favor of the Imperial calendar? Historians have identified several possible reasons for such a dramatic measure.

1. The Influence of the Church of Seiros

The names of the Imperial calendar's moons, and the associated lore behind them, are intimately related to the tenets and saint of the Church of Seiros. It is highly probable that basing the new calendar on the teachings of Seiros was Emperor Wilhelm's attempt to spread those beliefs in a much wider scale and help legitimize the church.

If this is the case, it is further proof that the Adrestian Empire had close ties to the Church of Seiros from the very moment of its conception. Alternatively, it has been posited that the goddess herself wished to change the calendar and voiced this desire through the prophet Seiros. This would mean that Emperor Wilhelm simply implemented the change rather than originating it.

2. Asserting authority

Calendars represent the flow of time, and so creating a new one is akin to claiming dominion over time iself. Shortly after its founding, the Empire used its influence to establish a new calendar and retroactively proclaim its founding year as Year 1. Amid the unification of Fódlan, this move increased Imperial authority and heralded the start of a new era"

Eimi posted:

Oh another thing, based off stuff Petra and Shamir say, it might only be in Fodlan that people even have magic. If this got clarified elsewhere, feel free to say so, and it's not 100% as non crested units can have magic/start with it like Dorothea, but I think it's related to potential.