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I'm just happy to hear that Chapter 2 is well-known as a hosed up chapter. I struggled super hard on it when I tried Lunatic and I thought I was just uniquely bad at this game for getting my teeth kicked in that early.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:20
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midnight lasagna posted:Will maybe weigh in on all the galeforce stuff later, but I just wanna say that my attempts to find a "reliable" solution to Chapter 2 that do not involve Frederick dodging hits ironically have involved me making lots of save states. Not to rig outcomes, but to puzzle things out move by move so I don't go insane. Or at least slow down the rate at which I go insane. I am now sitting on a savestate where I've cleared out the initial group of enemies that aggro because I really don't want to repeat that exact sequence of moves again. Truck got a HP and nothing else level but I don't care, it's part of the canon now. Incidentally, doing almost the same sequence of moves over and over again made me discover that accidentally putting someone one tile away from where you put them last attempt can change enemy movement patterns and mess up your whole strategy. I have no idea how people have the patience to figure these things out, I'd grind my lower jaw into powder after just one map!! I'm going to be fascinated to see both what's happening on the map and your solution. As for the difficulty. My suspicion is that Truck not being +Spd is really, really hurting right now (I forgot to comment on character creation but I was genuinely surprised when I saw +def), the baseline +2 points gives and prevents a lot of doubles earlygame but the additional 15% growth means that level 6 truck will on average be around 3 speed faster at this point. So Truck isn't killing things as easily as she can and is eating way more damage than she should. My other suspicion is a little more odd. I've noted that I don't think Chapter 2 is that hard and I find Chapter 1 worse. But it occurs to me that the way I used to deal with Chapter 1 might have an impact. Frederick doesn't get kills in Chapter 1 when I play. I explicitly have him sandbag as hard as possible and make the map much harder for myself so that Chrom and Truck in particular get a boost. And I think that experience difference is probably enough to tip Chapter 2 pretty significantly since you've now got three playable pieces instead of just one.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:43
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I will say I think both of my Lunatic runs were +Spd, and if one wasn't, I probably intentionally reset for good SPD levels. It's crucial at this point in the game, though doubling the enemy is a risky proposition early on. Depending on the situation, doubling the enemies is the last thing you want as it will quickly lead to death via success. That is a rather situational take and there's a lot of cases where being able to remove a threat faster helps however. In practice, I did a lot of my early work on Lunatic entirely in the enemy phase, using the player phase to heal up and wait to counter again. The significant problem is that you have 1 healer and limited vulneraries, and if a unit is holding off an enemy 1 hit from death, you need a ranged unit to clear it so they can heal themselves or you need Lissa ready. And that ties back into the discussion of Virion being secretly clutch the harder the game is. Not getting doubled by the enemy is unarguably important though, of course. That just reads instant death. I tend to do +DEF a lot on Ironman Hard as having a solidly durable unit helps a lot to offload threat. I explicitly remember having a Robin with so much DEF by the second wyvern map that she didn't even take damage from most units, and what she did was incredibly minimal. As an archer. It was like the perfect aggro sponge. On Lunatic, that DEF can be an investment that grows to be very useful later as Robin has more time to become an absolute tank, but you're always contesting the rise of enemy weaponry regardless. I don't believe if it's been mentioned, but I believe the enemy AI is also even more evil on Lunatic. I recall something about them precalculating whether or not they can kill a unit in advance, so that they'll focus their attacks to do so rather than be fooled by unarmed units or the like. If that was overblown (I can't find anything on it anymore,) they definitely give you less time to set up and they definitely think ahead. Anyways, I'm rather interested to see how this works out as well. Discussion has been really active in awaiting the dreaded Chapter 2, I suppose. Left 4 Bread fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 23:41
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A lot of replies here! Feels like a lot of what I would have responded to people with has already been said, so I won't reply to everything, I'd be here all day if I did. I am very grateful though. Oh, and as for Galeforce... Yeah my opinion of it has pretty much been summed up already. Very useful skill, the sheer grind for it makes it unappealing outside of postgame maps (or low turn count runs I guess, but IIRC the current record for that is so tight that Robin reaches level 15 as a Dark Flier literally at the last possible moment before recruiting Lucina by leveling up from the boss kill). The one other thing that makes Galeforce not really worthing grinding for imo though is the Dark Flier class, which isn't really suited to the juggernauty playstyle that Lunatic encourages - bad defenses combined with a bow weakness makes you rather fragile, plus their reliance on mixed offenses makes them kinda weak. Robin reclassing into one kills their survivability which is normally their biggest asset thanks to the huge EXP lead Veteran gives them, Sumia or Cordelia struggle somewhat with damage, being forced to rely on either Javelins or spells from their mediocre magic stats, and anybody else takes a large amount of EXP thanks to the reclassing they'll have to do. Shiny777 posted:There's also one other big advantage to the pairing in a no-grind run. Of the non-Lucina kids, Kjelle (along with Morgan, Owain and Laurent) is one of the kids whose paralogue still have a bunch of unpromoted enemies and are basically level appropriate to jump right into after Ch13 if you want, so they can grab some easy levels on their joining map and slot right in. Basically all the kids tied to moms from Sumia onward have an increasingly hard time getting up to speed in their joining maps and those maps end up as difficulty spikes if you beeline for say, Nah and have her try to play catch up in plot maps. Kmsorter posted:It’s funny to me that Virion, objectively one of the worst units in the game, becomes better the higher the difficulty is. He’s certainly not good in the long-term, but being able to chip fairly reliably at 2 range becomes a lot more important on Lunatic, where most characters are only able to take one hit or less before dying. I guess he can also contribute in chapter 7 by shooting fliers down, but that’s probably about the last time he’ll get deployed in your average run. On Hard and below, everyone else is so much more capable that he doesn’t really get a chance to contribute. I’ve also heard that he can help when dealing with Counter enemies in Lunatic+, but I’ve never even considered touching that mode, so I don’t know if that’s true. Natural 20 posted:I'm going to be fascinated to see both what's happening on the map and your solution. As frustrating as not having an avatar snowball is, I actually had some fun figuring out how to get use out of the rest of my army in Chapter 2! Or well, "fun". It was satisfying when I finally figured it out...
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Sep 27, 2023 16:41
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Chapter 2: The Battle of North Road  Before I bash my head against the hardest map in the game, let me stall things out doing the one thing I can do on the world map - viewng supports. I'm not going to transcribe the whole thing because this is not that type of LP, but you can read their support here. Or you can just try to gleam the context from the small snippet of screenshots I've posted instead. That's more fun!  Unfortunately this C support is the only one I have managed to unlock. Supports always give you gameplay benefits in FE games, but they're especially valuable in the early stages of Awakening - a C rank corresponds to extra stat points while paired up, and even Frederick's going to need every advantage he can get in the next map.   Sure would be nice to access character inventories outside of battle and swap that Elixir! What is this, FE4? Does Virion have to sell his Elixir and force Frederick to buy it off of him???  But enough stalling. I really am not exaggerating when I say this is the hardest map in the game. It's all downhill from here once we're past this, but first we must get past it.  First order of business is to introduce Truck to Chrom's personal army. This random woman has no memories, no knowledge of geography, is completely unaware of the current political situation to the point she doesn't know what country this even is, no verifiable qualifications or training, the mark of the beast on her hand, and looks like she hasn't slept in days. She's going to be our new tactician! We found her on the ground.  Okay maybe Truck is the perfect fit to lead these idiots. Sumia here won't be present in the next map, but her falling flat on her face 5 seconds after her introduction is a pretty good indicator of how usefull my non-Frederick units are going to be here.   The Vaike is also here. He's got tenure, so we can't fire him even if he forgets to bring his weapons into combat. Supposedly, Vaike's whole referring to himself in third person and "teach" thing is a somewhat more flavourful localisation of his tendency to refer to himself as "ore-sama" in Japanese, which is a fairly standard tic for fictional characters who are overly cocky or egotistical. I say "supposedly" because I do not speak or read a word of Japanese and can only parrot what I've heard online. Regardless, that means Vaike's speech patterns are a lot more unique in English than they are in Japanese, and as a result I think he's a lot more popular outside of Japan? Might explain why he's one of the few Awakening characters not to be in Heroes yet...  I really can't put this off any longer. Time to suffer! Every single map up to this point has been a rout, and this one's no different. Awakening's maps are only ever either routs or "defeat boss", but I'm still annoyed I missed this screenshot on every map before this one.  There's two new Shepards in our army, Stahl and Vaike, plus a third who will be joining next turn. You might think that all of these new units will be a boon, but this map is about to be a very helpful lesson on why lowmanning is the dominant strategy in Awakening.  As you can see here, this map is another fairly wide open field. The enemies are split into two distinct groups - all the ones you can see on this screen will aggro instantly...  While the boss's army will stay put until you put yourself in range of at least two of them at once. I'd leave a warning not to aggro these guys until necessary, but you'd honestly have to try pretty hard to fight through the horde of enemies in the initial wave to manage that in the first place.  Looking at the enemy's inventories, you'll notice a major change - they now all wield Steel weapons. Weapon weight does not exist as a mechanic in Awakening, so what this means is that they all have 3 (or 4, for steel axes) extra might and only a tiny bit less accuracy in exchange. Suddenly all of these enemies who could only tickle Frederick before will be hurting him quite badly.  And if you're not Frederick? Instant death unless you're paired up with someone who gives the relevant bonuses. Keep in mind that Sully is the "fast" cavalier and that she has weapon triangle advantage here.  The Barbarians are back, and they're a lot scarier. 26 might is enough to 3HKO a base level Frederick, and with his Silver Lance he'll be facing WTD too... Note that 10 speed however - while difficult, it is possible for Frederick to double these guys with the right setup. I'll go into exactly how later!  Oh and they can also roll Gamble as their skill because life is unfair and the game hates you. Stahl here can just barely avoid the double, but a lot of your units will outright die in one hit to these guys unless they're getting defense from a pair-up. Thankfully there's a few units in your army now who will give that.  Finally, a new enemy-only class: the Soldier. They use lances and are the bulkiest enemy type here, if also the weakest.  So let's have a look at the new blood! Stahl is the strong and bulky sword cav to Sully's fast and fragile lance cav, although both of them are stuck at E ranks in both weapon types right now. Stahl and Sully are both doubled by the same enemies here, but Stahl can at least take a hit from the Barbs, which does make him a little more useful here. Also his name is German for steel? Cool, I guess. Stahl Skills: Discipline (2x WEXP from combat) Growths: HP: 95% STR: 65% MAG: 10% SKL: 55% SPD: 50% LCK: 50% DEF: 60% RES: 15% Stats aside, the two Cavaliers will both have very similar jobs for the first few turns of this map: carrying my other units to safety. The starting area is not very defensible, and all these scrubs are going to need help escaping when the enemies rush in.  Enter the Vaike! Minus one weapon. Here's your trading items tutorial, in the form of one idiot who forgot to bring his. If Vaike has a weapon he could use it to hit decently hard, but right now all he can do is provide nice pair-up bonuses and maybe take a hit, although he'll need a partner to give him speed to prevent him from being doubled and killed. Vaike Skills: HP + 5 Growths: HP: 105% STR: 75% MAG: 10% SKL: 65% SPD: 50% LCK: 45% DEF: 50% RES: 10% That's a pretty nice skill growth for an axe fighter! His defense growth is pretty nice too, although Awakening growths are so high across the board it's sometimes a little hard to tell what's actually good or not. If you've been reading the replies, you'll know I plan on using Vaike... eventually. Right now he's not going to be doing a whole lot without his weapon.  A C support increases the pair-up bonus of every stat your support partner's class gives you by 1, so Frederick is now getting an extra point of strength, magic, skill, and speed from Truck despite Truck not yet having a single non-HP stat at 10 or higher. While the extra stats are helpful, they're not massively useful - he's not being made fast enough to double anything he couldn't already, and it's not going to help him kill anything faster either.  Thanks to his speed level last map, Fred's current speed is 11, which unfortunately leaves him just short of being able to double the Barbarians... He can reach a speed of 15, but it requires at least two of the following: Fred gains a speed level, Fred reaches a C support with Chrom, or Chrom gains two points of speed to put him at 10. You can also achieve the same with your avatar, but due to the Tactician class giving one less point of speed via pair-up you'll need all three of those things to happen, not just one. Which is a point in favour of a +speed talent for your avatar, I guess!  There is however a third option that could also be useful - the strength Vaike gives isn't too important, but that extra defense is very nice and might help Fred survive some attacks he couldn't before. I was hoping that Truck could get her defense high enough to give Fred a boost herself, but that did not happen. Plus there's the whole thing of Vaike not bringing his weapon... He's not exactly doing anything useful right now, while leaving Truck unpaired lets her chip stuff if she needs to.  Now how the hell do I beat this thing? My usual strategy is to fish for a dodge or two on the first couple of turns - with a Bronze Sword, Frederick's got a pretty high chance of not being hit by that Barbarian, who currently presents the most danger to him. Surviving a turn or two lets him make a break for one of the forts, where he'll be much more defensive and be granted passive healing over time. It's not the most fun strategy though, and considering Fred's atrocious level from last map combined with Truck's lackluster bonuses, it might take quite a lot of luck to pull off too. For the sake of my own ego I'd rather not have to rely on that. The non-highlighted enemies can all attack Frederick in one turn without killing him, so he's going to have to end this first turn outside of the dark red zone. That limits my positioning somewhat...  As does my need to give Frederick this elixir. Virion trades it to Vaike, who will partnering up with Fred. Unfortunately this means Virion must end his turn in somewhat of an awkward spot, but there's nothing I can do about it now! A consequence of my poor planning.  I did say that Frederick can take 3 hits from these enemies, so why is he attacking and leaving himself open to a fourth hit? This "reliable" clear is the product of many, many attemps of trial and error, so I know what the enemies will do. This Barbarian's not going to attack Fred on enemy phase if I leave a juicer target in range, so I'm going to take advantage of that.  Unfortunately I have to go with Eliwood's Blade over the Silver Lance to not risk missing the Barbarian, which means this guy hurts Fred a little. more. 1% crits are not part of the plan - if Fred gets crit he's probably dead. Unfortunate! Perhaps if Fred and Chrom had earned a C support I could have Fred be fast enough to double Barbs while also receiving just enough luck to not risk a crit, but that's all hindsight.   This plan was made with the possibility of Fred not dodging a single attack in mind, so I don't mind this slightly unlucky hit. As you can see, Vaike is... helping. Honestly, it's better this way - he can't mess things up with a dual strike I didn't predict!  By blocking off that Barb, Fred opens up a single tile to the left of my starting location that Lissa can just barely reach on turn 1. She takes Truck with her and then places her down at the end of the turn - while it's generally best to keep units paired up for combat purposes, leaving units unpaired does also allow for movement shenanigans that can be helpful for keeping people away from danger and covering more ground in a single turn. It does however make things a little crowded.  Sully uses her superior movement to run to safety as well. If Virion hadn't ended his turn to give away his Elixir he'd be hitching a ride with her, but he's got to stay put for now. Did you know that if Sully were to end her turn 1 tile to the north it would change how the enemies move next turn, messing up my strategy entirely? I learned this from attempting this map over... and over... and over...  Finally, Chrom hitches a ride from Stahl and places himself just in range of the incoming Barbarian. He equips his Rapier to give himself extra accuracy and stays paired up for a little bit of extra strength. As much as I'd prefer for him to be partnered with Sully so they could build support, Sully and Stahl's fixed starting locations force my hand in terms of who can do what.   Chrom uses the tiny bit of extra strength Stahl gives him to kill the Barbarian that attacks him, eating a tiny morsel of EXP that Frederick would have gobbled up otherwise. Who says non-Fred units can't be useful here? Besides me, I think I've been saying that constantly. I'm pretty sure that dodge wasn't necessariy - there's plently of turns for Chrom to heal up before he faces combat again.   Fred takes a single hit as all the enemis starting pouring in. It only just occured to me now that the Soldier who could have attacked Fred got blocked off from attacking by the Merc's bad positioning - in fact, him standing north of Fred instead of east of him was the thing I had to position Sully precisely in order to avoid. So I guess Fred would have survived had Chrom not lured that Barb out after all. Not that that's a problem! The reason he needs to be standing where he is is so that Fred can move to the woods tile 1 tile north and 1 tile east of him next turn.  Sure is a lot of guys all rushing at once. At least the entire map doesn't aggro turn 1, otherwise it would be borderline impossible.  Oh, a new friend! A new warm body to stand around in the ever increasing danger zone and get killed. Please get off of the battlefield Miss Miriel you are not making this easier!! Did I take a screenshot of Miriel's stats when I played this map? You bet your rear end I did not. Time to load up a savestate and go do that...  Meet Miriel! She's a Mage. She casts a single spell and then dies in one hit. Thankfully she can cast spells from a distance, so she can avoid dying in one hit if she stands far away. Miriel Skills: Magic + 2 HP: 70% STR: 15% MAG: 60% SKL: 60% SPD: 60% LCK: 50% DEF: 25% RES: 40% That's where Vaike's axe went!! He can have it back as soon as there's time to give it to him. Miriel's function right now is pretty much the same as Virion's - do minor chip damage from a distance, die if she ever gets attacked. She also gives much less useful pair-up bonuses right now, so arguable she's actually worse here. I'll be doing proper writeups of every unit, their base growths, their class options, etc. at a later date. Right now I just don't want to break up the flow of these updates with giant walls of text about every unit when none of them are particularly useful right now.  Frederick positons himself onto the nearby woods tile and equips his Bronze Sword, which is where he'll be staying for a while. The slower he kills things, the less damage he'll take from new enemies rushing to fill in the gaps left by the corpses of his old ones, so he wants a weaker weapon!  He also uses his Elixir to heal himself back up to full. As tempting as it would be to place Fred on that nearby fort, it's too far away for him to reach, and there will be a constant stream of enemies standing in its way. The slight defense bonus from these woods will have to do.   Virion and Miriel have got to escape pronto, so they hitch a ride from Lissa and Truck respectively. This was quite difficult to plan - there's really not much room to manuveur around here!   Truck then plants herself just inside of the danger radius of the nearest enemy, swaps partners with Chrom, and takes Stahl's weapon to give herself some extra accuracy. Fred may be doing the bulk of the work here, but there's no reason we can't pull the occassional straggler in from his vast gravitational orbit.  I'm pretty sure none of these dual guards matter - I say pretty sure, because so much happens on this map that it's hard to keep track of. I'm pretty sure Fred could block nothing and be hit by everything and this strategy would still work!  The Mercenary is successfully lured, and Truck manages to avoid being doubled or facing a crit chance thanks to the kind support of her allies. Stahl does not help because his weapon was confiscated.  Truck then smacks him a second time for some tasty EXP. Not only does this let me distribute EXP a little more efficiently, it also keeps the heat off of Fred... These Mercs are annoying and I don't want him facing too many of them.  Truck... I do all of this for you and yet you betray me... Truck you are breaking my heart!!!  Meanwhile, Fred just barely avoids 2HKOing these Soldiers with his crappy sword. Every other enemy dies in two hits, but these ones are just bulky enough to survive an extra one.   All part of the plan, of course - by staggering out the number of new enemies that can attack Fred per turn, I can limit how much damage he takes. With the extra defense from the forest tile, he can survive just enough hits per turn... With someone in the corner to lure the enemies over, at least. I'm pretty sure the numbers all check out, anyway!!  Two enemies could potentially attack Truck from here, so I've got to make sure she's weak enough to not kill her first assailant, otherwise it'll free up room for a second. Easily doable.  Lissa and a Vulnerary get Truck back up to full HP. At least Lissa's getting a lot of EXP here... Shame she can't really do anything with it.  Sully takes Miriel off of her horse so she can sling some spells if needs be. It's getting pretty crowded in this corner!  Truck just barely avoids the KO, Stahl left weaponless so he doesn't steal the kill. This is going quite well! Definitely worth the stress of figuring it all out...  Now things look a lot more manageable. Fred's down to his last Elixir use - it's time to see how many of these last few kills we can steal from him.   Truck finishes off the Merc from safety. As much as I'd have liked someone else to get the kill it had to be a ranged attack, and I don't plan on using Virion or Miriel in the longterm.   Now it's Chrom's turn to be a lure. Virion takes off his bow to once again prevent unwanted dual strikes.  The Fred machine is still going, and oh...? Strength? Defense? More speed? Very nice. He can double things now! Fred you are way cooler than Truck.   That's just about the last of them. Now to get these two kills into the hands of those who need them.   Sully can't kill, but she can chip for some nice weapon EXP - now she just needs a D rank lance to use.  Chrom finishes off the first enemy and gets another very nice level! Maybe he should have gotten those prologue kills and not Truck, huh.   Sully equips some Frederick-shaped armour and bulks up to safely steal the last kill. A shame Chrom and Sully can't make these kills together, but this is just how it shaked out...  They're... They're all gone! Look at all these beautiful green tiles!! I thought we would never make it. The next wave won't aggro until provoked, so we can waste as much time as is needed.  Now it's time to take a look at the next obstacle - once again the boss is a guy with a ranged axe, and once again he has Gamble. This boss however can move, so unlike the Villageburner from the prologue it'll be a lot harder to use adjacency bonuses to ensure his crit rate is nullified. He and his gang of good for nothings will all start moving the moment either one of your units is within attacking range of two enemies, or you attack one of them yourself. Granted I'm not sure how you would go about doing that without also being in range of them, I'm just copying what the wiki says!   Not that there's any risk of not getting them because this is a rout and the enemies don't flee, but these two enemies both come with weapon drops - an Iron Sword and Iron Lance, two things we do not yet have. Because Lunatic mode gives them stronger weapons, they have to carry these weaker ones that they don't use specifically for the purpose of dropping them... I'd call it a dick move, but I'd rather have these iron weapons my units could actually use than some steels they cannot. The enemies not using them also means they'll drop in pristine condition!   I shall use all this downtime to heal everybody up, grab the sparkling tile, and get everyone in formation. Unfortunately with these levels Lissa is all but confirming that she will never get to be anything but a staffbot and perhaps a rallybot once she starts reclassing. A sufficiently blessed or overleveled Lissa can potentially kick a little butt as a Sage, but I don't think this one will be doing that.  Oh, I almost forgot! Here's your axe back. Hopefully Vaike will see some action in the coming chapters - even with this axe he's probably not doing a whole lot here. Doesn't help that he's competing with three other non-Fred units at the moment.   I was hoping for a Chrom/Frederick support event, but it was not meant to be... The Superior Axe is a slightly less accurate and significantly more fragile Silver Axe that also comes with an innate Axebreaker effect. Unfortunately it requires a B rank in axes with neither Frederick nor Vaike are anywhere near reaching, so into the convoy it goes! A shame, Vaike could maybe steal a boss kill with it if he could actually use it.  I'll just have Chrom eat this seed he found on the ground to boost his support rank with Frederick instead. Fred dared him to do it and he did, solidifying their masculine bond.  Lissa's only got 7 staff uses left. Sounds bad, but an enemy in the next map will be dropping a free one! I've never found staves to be in too short supply in Awakening, so I will spam them all to my heart's content. Even if Lissa never sees combat she'll still get use out of promoting and reclassing for rally skills, and she needs EXP for that.  Fred's speed level combined with Chrom as his partner lets him be just fast enough to double these Barbs - they're the scariest enemies here, so if I can have Fred clear them out I can make it a lot easier for my other guys to steal EXP.  Sully stands ready to intercept a single Merc while Fred lures as many enemies as he can without overextending. The red danger zone is the boss's - I'll figure out how to deal with him soon. I could potentially have Truck partnered with Fred and Chrom with Sully, but I would rather Chrom + Fred build support and Truck be left free to snipe kills with magic if needs be. Oh and my units aren't blocking those forts for any reason, this map does not have any kind of ambush spawns. If it did I think I would be picking pieces of 3DS from out of my teeth.  Oops, that crit chance could have been avoided with better positioning! That said, having them stand too close to the action makes it harder for them to flee when things get hairy. Sully is safe because she's on a horse.   Fred chews through his assiliants, KOing the axe guys and weakening the faster dudes. Without Vaike backing him up they hurt a little more, but at least he's also more evasive.  Thanks, I guess...? Could have maybe given that kill to someone else, Chrom gets a little EXP from a dual strike kill but most of it goes to Fred...  Truck can have this. Stahl's like 2 combats away from being able to use Iron Swords but I've got no plans to use him.  He didn't need it in the first place! He carried it specifically to spite us!! Or maybe it was an item of sentimental value back from before he died and became a Risen...  Here comes the boss! That range is scary. It would be nice to kill him before he becomes a problem, but counterattacking him is difficult and he's got that nasty crit chance.  That said, Frederick on a fort would have a very low chance of taking a hit from him. I'm happy to let him keep the boss distracted while I mop up the flunkies.  Yeah I officially do not expect anything from Lissa anymore. Without even a HP proc there's no way she's taking a stray hit, no matter how many extra levels she gains.  Everybody else falls back to set up another lure. I wish Vaike could do a little more, but that's just how it is! I guess he could have been a support partner for Sully, but she needs the extra speed Stahl's giving her...  Very nice! Extra speed is great, extra defense is cool, low strength can be fixed with forges. A solid level. She can survive a round of combat with every enemy except the boss now!!  Fred technically could have died here, but the chance is low enough to basically not count. I'm happy to leave him like this! Gamble might make for scary crit chances but it also tanks your hit rate.  Probably should have let him hold a vulnerary, but the fort's passive healing is keeping him alive just fine.   ...I briefly considered it. Maybe next time, Vaike.   Chrom whiffs a hit and achieves a D rank in swords, something I didn't know already. Falchion is almost an Iron Sword, it doesn't really matter. But it's nice!  Now let's lure the boss so we can dogpile him next turn. Either he attacks Truck and eats a counterattack, or he attacks Fred and achieves basically nothing. Either is fine.  This time I avoided any displayed crit! Wow, that's a clean 5HKO! Truck, you're so powerful...  Okay no for real that's actually an alright level, you are in my good books again. Might like to start seeing some speed though.   Fred bonks the boss, Sully takes a more accurate weapon...   She gets herself a beefier partner, and bonk! Boss kill to Sully.  Now let's see if I can't distract that remaining Soldier for a turn while someone grabs the sparkling tile. Virion with a Truck support should be fast enough to avoid dying in one hit, while also being a juicy target who can't kill the Soldier in retalliation...   ...but he decides he'd rather be tramped to death by a strong woman than prolong his suffering any longer. Rude.  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA!!! Okay, I'm all better now. That was hell, but at least it's over!!! That was like 10 turns of combat and 9 turns of faffing around moving my guys and healing people. You can tell this map has driven me insane because of all the consecutive exclaimation points I've been using. Editing your own posts is a great way to become acquainted with the weird and annoying quirks of your own writing, I suggest you never do it. Self awareness is part of the mortifying ordeal of being known...  You can say that again. It's all downhill from here... Good thing we're not playing Lunatic+ or else I might not be saying that - enemies would have the chance to roll Counter, Pavise+, and Aegis+ from here on out.   Sumia, who apparently was here all this time, finds a lost animal and conscripts it into the war effort. Was this her pegasus? Was she being trained as a Pegasus Knight before all of this, or was Sumia up to this moment a footlocked lance user who just reclassed? Could she have been a Villager???   Unfortunately my brain has deflated like a balloon so those implications will have to be pondered another day. Still no inventory access, but at least we got these supports!! Next Time: Chrom and friends cause an international incident midnight lasagna fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Sep 27, 2023 |
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Sep 27, 2023 16:41
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Oh wow, this a far more aggressive approach to the map than I usually use. I normally shift everyone over to the lower left, yeah, but Fred comes with us. I end up establishing a defensive wall in the trees and using the mountains to slow down the encroaching enemies trying to get behind. Fred has to take the top position as he can survive more than 1 hit. Although a notable difference is that I usually try to give Chrom some levels before this map, he's weirdly the lynchpin unit of Chapter 1. Again, this strategy is reliant on dodging though, yours is not nearly as much. Very well done  This is what my old notes say: code:Credit due to the friend that was in the voice call with me to keep me sane and help puzzle this out over who knows how many retries. This strategy isn't fully consistent and will need you to reset if dodges don't go your way, though it works very consistently on Hard if you're not running Lunatic. Oh, and I did want to note that you listed the Superior Axe as needing D rank when it's a B rank axe. Left 4 Bread fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Sep 27, 2023 |
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Sep 27, 2023 17:59
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Odd Wilson posted:Oh wow, this a far more aggressive approach to the map than I usually use. I normally shift everyone over to the lower left, yeah, but Fred comes with us. I end up establishing a defensive wall in the trees and using the mountains to slow down the encroaching enemies trying to get behind. Fred has to take the top position as he can survive more than 1 hit. Although a notable difference is that I usually try to give Chrom some levels before this map, he's weirdly the lynchpin unit of Chapter 1. quote:Oh, and I did want to note that you listed the Superior Axe as needing D rank when it's a B rank axe.  Fixed. Nobody will suspect a thing.
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Sep 27, 2023 18:44
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Neatly done! I don't think I've ever gotten past this map on Lunatic.
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Sep 27, 2023 19:48
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This map is honestly pretty badly designed for Lunatic because you simply have too few tools to work with, and the enemies are both too strong and too aggressive. All that being said, my tactic for this map is super aggressive. I actually have Fred with a Vaike pairup attack the Mercenary from below with his Silver Lance, then Robin finishes from below with Thunder. Yes, Robin is prone to missing due to attacking a target on the Forest with Thunder, but it's 1st turn, if that happens I just reset. Then Sully and Chrom stand vertically below to create the vertical line below Fred. Meanwhile, Stahl stalls the right a bit by standing in the forest to make the right barbarian run straight down to attack him. The enemy phase should have both lancers going for Fred while the mountain barb on the left attacks one of the people in the line below. Sometimes, the mountain barb likes to attack Fred from the forest above, I believe that it's sometimes a case where the targets below aren't attractive enough, I think I have someone unequip their weapon if I can't get him to stop doing that and just attack someone below instead. Meanwhile, Stahl should've pulled the right barbarian and the mercenary to the right enough that I could have enough space turn 2 to finish off the lancers and kill the barbarian. And Stahl gets away by pairing up with Miriel and them both running to the left to rejoin the group. Beyond that, it gets a lot less precise due to hits/misses and movement patterns, it's largely using the bottom-left corner for safety, sometimes using the mountain to allow units to attack while limiting risk, and I remember sometimes sending a Cavalier to the bottom right to lure some dudes away and run them in a circle if I needed to. The important points is that the close merc dies on turn 1, 2 lancers are whapped by a Silver Lance by turn 2, and the dudes on the right are pulled far enough away to allow the team to kill the 2 lancers and barb on turn 2 to allow for 4 enemy units dead by turn 2. It's been years since I've done this since I've lost track of my DS by now. But.... I still have a reasonably clear memory of this because Chapter 2 really is a hideously inappropriate difficulty spike that tones down quite a bit right after. Your tactic on this map looks a lot more normal, in that it's just using Fred to try to doom-stack the enemies away. Wasted experience, but that can be made up for later. I'm just really stubborn about actually trying to use tactics that use the army. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Sep 28, 2023 |
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Sep 28, 2023 03:27
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Chapter 3 - Great Knight Diplomacy  Truck x Chrom C Truck and Chrom finally manage to reach their C support. I'll want to be careful about how much support rank I build between the two - if Chrom doesn't S support Sully by the end of chapter 11 then there's a real risk of Chrom deviating from my planned pairings and marrying Truck of his own accord, which would be bad! Or at least it wouldn't be what I want. In terms of optimisation it might actually be good, a Lucina with avatar blood is a powerful Lucina. Incidentally, I never liked the Chrom/F!Robin suppot chain. His supports with M!Robin are all about Robin not wanting Chrom to risk his life and how important Chrom is to him and how they'd all be lost without him etc., while his F!Robin support is just "kyaaah you saw me naked, p-p-pervert!" bad anime type guff that manages to come across as much less romantic despite being the support chain that can result in a marriage.   Chrom x Frederick C This support was one I aimed for intentionally. Chrom gives Frederick a large boost to his speed which he'll need if I want him to double and KO problematic enemies. Ideally Frederick should be weakening and not killing at this stage, but sometimes things need to die. Chrom will also appriciate the stat boosts Frederick can give. Naked Chrom seems to feature in a lot of his supports, by which I mean two.   Frederick x Lissa C Healing others with staves builds support points, so it's inevitable that Lissa will start supporting the whole army at least a little. I doubt this'll be useful for much, but you never know. Maybe Fred might need the extra luck and res? Pairing up staff users with other units is generally a waste, they'd prefer to be out and about healing people and Clerics give rather mediocre stat boosts anyway.  Chapter 2 may have been the hardest map in the game, but this one can get a little hairy in its first few turns too. At least there's no Warriors in this map, despite the title. Their random chance of spawning with Counter makes them the most annoying enemy type.  That's a pretty long wall! Probably took a lot of effort to build all that. Can't be too well manned either if it's about as long as a continent, there must be large stretches of wall with little to no soldiers posted on it. The origins of Regna-Ferox are fun to speculate on, as almost all of its territory consisted of what was once wild and borderline uninhabited territory in northern Archanea, in addition to Aurelis and Khadien. Presumably someone conquered and unified all the different barbarian clans living there sometime in the last 2,000 years. Sadly the lore implications of the continent of Ylisse once being the continent of Archanea are never really explored, so interesting questions like how Altea, the land of the first Exalt, came to be a part of Plegian territory are given no answer. Back when Awakening came out I know a lot of people, myself included, were not a fan of its general lack of worldbuilding, but it feels almost silly to complain about that now that Fates and Engage exist and somehow manage to have even less.   Who cares about all that though because we can finally rearrange all of our stuff!! Perhaps the 3 ghosts of Archanean past present and future convinced my army to share their belongings during this festive weather.   Awakening's elevator music combat prepartation theme does make it hard to remain excited though. There's 8 deployment slots on this map and nine members of my army, so someone's gotta go. You might be a little surprised to see me take Miriel out on this map full of armours, especially when Virion also exists, but right now I value his better pair-up stat bonuses than I do Miriel's slightly larger ranged chip damage.  This means that Truck has free access to her Fire tome for better accuracy, as well as Lissa's Vulnerary because there's no point on her hanging onto it when she can't take a single hit regardless.  If you poke around on the chapter map a little you'll notice this green guy standing right there. I'll confess I did at first want to do an entire thing where I'd refuse to acknowledge Kellam entirely despite recruiting him and using him throughout the chapter, attributing anything he does to terrain bonuses or critical hits or misses or whater would sound vaguely plausible given the context, but it would have made it way too hard to coherently talk about strategy. I'm sure it would have been very funny though, and everybody would have laughed. Please take a second to imagine the funny joke in your head and then imagine yourself laughing at it.  As you can see by the bottom screen, this is a fairly small map split into two distinct halves by the gigantic wall running through the middle. We start on the bottom half, the boss sits at the top. The huge gate in the middle is entirely decorative.  The door keys the enemies hold will instead allow us to slip through one of two smaller doors on either side and on top of the battlements. These Archers make a return after being absent in Chapter 2, and they're about the same as they were in Chapter 1.  New among the enemies are these Knights - hard to take down physically, but incredibly slow... and incredibly strong. You'd think Miriel would be effective against them, but she's slow enough that she can't double them without help from a very fast partner. Their physical defense is not entirely insurmountable however, and Fred with his Silver Lance or Chrom with his Rapier will be able to punch through them to a decent extent. Awakening follows the same general enemy stat philosophy as the DSFE games where hard modes make units considerably more powerful but not all that more bulky.  The other side is very similar, just with one more enemy and a slightly different configuration of units. This Knight drops a Heal staff which Lissa sorely needs, hers is almost busted.  The boss does not move at all and her cronies will not aggro until the doors are opened and they have been provoked. She can be safely ignored for now.  Finally, my positioning - everybody's going to go left initially since that side has less enemies and both sides will be rushing us at once, so it makes sense to establish one half of the map as a safe haven. Fred will lead the charge while the rest of my army mills about behind him, stealing a kill or chip EXP if they can.  ...all of this combat prep took place before the enemies turned aggressive, of course. I doubt Chrom can actually see who's manning this fort from down there, so the best he can do is scream "KHAAANS!" and hope there's a Khan listening. There's two of them in total but Regna Ferox is also very large, so I'm not sure if the likelyhood of at least one leader being in any location at one time is more or less than it would be back in Ylisse.   Obviously this random imbecile can't be a real prince so the best course of action is to kill him and his friends. Raimi's kind of a cool generic - I think she's one of at least two different generic female bosses in this game, which is two more than the standard fair. She has a rather unique face portrait among the cast on account of her lack of recruitability or importance meaning she's allowed to not be generically cutesy looking.  Having failed to observe the proper diplomatic protocol, Chrom was promptly killed. Regna-Ferox was forced to hastily blame his disappearence on a bandit attack within their borders after news of the missing prince reached the capital, and the Regna-Ferox / Ylissian alliance never came to be. Plegia soon made a successful invasion of Ylisse and exinguished the Exhalted bloodline, leaving nobody left alive who could slay the newly resurrected Fell Dragon. Emperor Walhart launched his invasion of the Ylissian continent just in time to find nothing but a burning wasteland and a very hungry dragon-god who proceeded to eat him and all 1 million of his men.   Just kidding. Here to the rescue is a slightly cross-eyed Sumia, carrying a very cross-eyed Chrom on the back of a pegasus she met like a day ago. Localisation trivia - this cutscene is called "Lovebirds" in US, but the PAL English version gives it the much more platonic title of "The Rescue". Sumia may be shown as Chrom's bridge in the opening cutscene, but I guess they wanted to avoid pushing her too hard as Chrom's love interest.  Time to defend ourselves. The objective may be Defeat Commander but you better believe everybody here is getting bonked in the name of self defense and EXP.   Sumia makes her appearence in what is imo a fairly dubious first map for showing off the potential usefulness of pegasi - there's very little in the way of terrain for her to fly over, and these cramped quarters make her movement advantage a lot less significant. The game is at least kind enough to point out her class's innate weakness to Archers though, so it's not going to be a sudden surprise when she drops dead to a single arrow. Sumia Skills: Speed + 2 Growths: HP: 75% STR: 45% MAG: 25% SKL: 70% SPD: 70% LCK: 60% DEF: 30% RES: 40% Sumia! She's fast, speedy, agile, and she moves at a considerable pace. In terms of other stats, she doesn't really have any... Pegasus Knights are very useful for carrying your slower, non-flying units across the map quickly, but Sumia will find herself hard pressed to do much of anything on her own. Her weak bases and mediocre growths in non-speed (or skill or luck) stats mean she'll struggle to deal damage or take hits, greatly limiting her potential to earn EXP and snowball in these early maps. That said, I'm still planning on using her - I've got a bit of a soft spot for her as a character. She won't be doing much this map though. Also for some reason her support pool is incredibly small? Chrom's got a limited number of partners to lower the amount of variable pairing-based dialogue the writers had to include in the game's story, but there's no reason they had to give Sumia the same restriction. Perhaps she was originally Chrom's sole potential love interest and the decision to allow her to marry other units was added fairly late into developlent, who really knows. The point is she can't marry Vaike and that's a little inconvenient, he would really appreciate the boosts!  As much as I'd like her to start earning EXP right away, her most useful function right now will be to make Fred a little faster without taking away Chrom's ability to participate in combat. I'm not planning on marrying her and Fred - this is just a temporary arrangement. She does make a very nice pair-up partner for Fred though.  I'm not wasting Fred's Silver Lance on these chumps, he can borrow Sumia's weaker and cheaper weapon for now. No dual attack EXP for her! No precious useless 5 EXP per combat she'll only have like a 30% chance of getting.  Sumia's bonus to speed is just enough to let Fred double these Archers. Giving Fred kills is a little bit of a waste, but not having these 2 range attackers wandering around is a big help for letting me get my weaklings closer to the action without having to worry as much about keeping them safe. Fred wouldn't be able to weaken them during his turn anyway.   This level is good! And rather meaningful, because it now means Fred can double Soldiers with Sumia's help. Do I want this? ...maybe not, I'd rather he not kill everybody on the map before anyone else gets the chance to. Thankfully I can lure the closest Soldier away from him this turn without disturbing anybody else.  Kellam's just standing here out in the cold all by his lonesome, so let's go grab him. There's no real urgency to this - the enemies will straight up ignore him - but it's useful to have an extra pair of hands during these initial turns.   Kellam's personality gimmick is that he is so forgettable that nobody ever notices he's there. It is very funny... in his recruitment conversation. Not so much after you start reading his supports and realise it's like 90% of his personality. Gimmicks like this do get a little grating when they're all you really have to flesh out like 10 different conversation chains a character can have, all of which have to take place divorced of any real situational circumstances or context.  Unitwise, Kellam is all the things Sumia is not... Except for being a good pair-up bot. Both Kellam and Sumia are very good at that! Let's check him out. Kellam Skills: Defense + 2 Growths: HP: 100% STR: 65% MAG: 15% SKL: 55% SPD: 45% LCK: 35% DEF: 75% RES: 35% In a vacuum you'd think those growths were amazing for a Knight, especially the surprisingly high speed. Unfortunately this is Awakening and everybody's growths are absolutely jacked, plus Kellam has his rather bad bases to contend with. His good bulk is undermined by his atrocious HP, and his bad speed means he's going to get doubled by just about everything in lunatic, which is a death sentence even with his good defense. Unfortunately and rather fittingly for Kellam his best place is on the sidelines - the whopping 5 defense he gives whoever he supports will most likely let them be a far better tank than he is.   Chrom can pair up with Kellam at the same time as talking to him, allowing Kellam to carry him back to safety in the same turn. Here, Truck, have this suit of armour - it's worth +5 defense! It might be haunted though, sometimes you can hear voices coming from within...  Armed with her new imaginary friend, Truck stands just in range of that one Soldier but not anybody else on the map. Everybody else shuffles as far forward as they can without being exposed to danger.   Fred might only have an Iron Lance compared to their Steel, but it's still somewhat scary to see that he's doing the same amount of damage per hit as he's taking in return.   Truck however cannot achieve the same feat even when using magic and with her partner giving her 5 extra defense. At least Kellam's here to take charge and deal a surprisingly large amount of damage with his dual strike. Thanks, Kellam!  Two attacks was enough to put Fred down to less than half of his health - he's actually quite vulnerable without a defense boosting pair up against these enemies. It's only going to get worse when we start seeing Silver weapons on regular enemies in 3 or so chapter's time.  This conversation at the end of turn 1 is the trigger point for unlocking the ability to pair up if you're playing on normal mode's forced tutorial. Imagine trying to beat lunatic without it! I remember being very confused the first time I tried playing the full game and could not pair up my units despite being able to do so right from the get go in the demo version. I also remember being disappointed that Conquest wasn't the standard map theme outside of the demo version... It's too good a song to be wasted on skirmishes that I'll never do.  The 5 guys on the right side of the map are all making their approach, and if we don't get rid of the ones on the left now then my units will be sandwiched to death. Given how badly Fred got beat up just from facing two enemies, I'll need a different approach to before if I want him to keep these ones busy.  I don't know if Kellam's dual strike here was necessary or not, but it sure has made taking this guy out a little less of a headache. If nothing else, Virion is at least accurate!  ...the same cannot be said about Vaike. He's really not making much of a case for himself right now.   This is a little better. I don't even know if I gave Stahl a weapon, I've just been using him as a highly mobile stat booster. The Cavalier suite of pair up bonuses is very helpful.   And thus begins the slow process of raising Vaike. Can I spread enough EXP around to raise Chrom, Truck, Sully, Vaike, and Sumia all at the same time? I hope so.   Fred's got to be the one dealing the finishing blow to this Archer, but everybody should be stealing chip EXP where possible. This is pretty much the same level she got last time and I'm still very glad to see it. I'll unlock the ability to forge next chapter, bad strength is fixable...  Chrom doubling with his Rapier can take over half of a Knight's health off in one combat but wow he sure does die in exactly one hit in return! That's brutal. Good thing he dodged all four of those lances that were thrown at him in that cutscene then.   That's the left side cleared out. We could open those fortress doors but then we'd be caught between even more enemies, so let's not do that just yet. Aren't we still on the defensive trying to prove we aren't bandits? Actively scaling the walls to start killing people feels like an unnecessary provocation that would only make things worse. Then again, only a dumb noble would stand still and expose themselves to danger unlocking a fortress door when they could simply bash it down instead.   Speed mode Fred has taken out all the problematic targets he needed to, time to switch to defense mode. He takes Kellam from Truck and helps himself to a Javelin, turning him into a slow but very defensible wall.  Now he can sit here doing chip damage from range and not dying while the rest of the crew slowly steal his kills as usual.  Kellam's boosts are enough to turn 3HKOs until 6HKOs, so all Fred needs is a Vulnerary and he can tank 5 enemies for multiple turns without risk. The occassional dodge helps too.  Frederick's Discipline has powerlevel his lance rank to the maximum already. I might not have any A rank lances in my convoy, but a lance rank of A gives him 2 extra might and 5 extra hit in combat so long as he's not facing weapon triangle disadvantage. Every single generic enemy on lunatic mode already has an A rank in everything of course.   I'd prefer if the weaker enemies were the ones closest to my army, but this'll have to do. Chrom's been rather starved on the EXP front, I'll let him bait this merc instead of Sully for a change.   I let my greed take the better of me and regress to mid 2000s era GameFAQs type strategies by unequipping my jeigan so he doesn't steal EXP. Fred will bear this humiliation with quiet dignity.  ...my plan to move Fred closer to my group to also lure the enemies closer may have been ill advised, as they are now too close. How do I kill this Mercenary without also putting whoever kills him in danger?   I want to continue to weaken these enemies without killing them, but Kellam can't survive even with Fred's help and Fred is too strong for any form of "weakening". In the end it's going to be kill or be killed so I just have Fred take out an Archer to free up some room.  Meanwhile, a misclick on my part leads to this... interesting formation. Truck can survive two hits and Virion's partner allows him to just barely avoid being doubled, it works!!   That's 4 enemies dead at the hands of Fred now. Not ideal, but better than a dead ally.  There was a brief moment of fear when I realised I had forgotten to check if Virion could actually survive a single hit from a Soldier. I'm legitimately surprised he could.   Everybody chips in to finish off the remaining enemies, and I realise that for some reason Sully has been getting the lion's share of EXP ever since Chapter 2. At least she's making use of it, unlike some people.   Everybody on this side of the doors is dead, time for a wellness break. Lissa should get a nice level or two out of this.   I guess these are nice levels by the standards she's been setting. With 20 max HP and 7 speed she can now survive a round of combat with an Archer and live at 1HP!! Everything else on this map either kills her in one hit or doubles her to death.  She also gains a C rank in staves, something that's not really helpful or significant right now. A C rank does at least grant her 1 extra point of healing per heal, which is... somthing.  Sully and Chrom stand on a sparkly tile together, unfortunately to very little effect. A boost to weapon ranks is somewhat nice for Sully considering she's got two ranks that need boosting, but I would really prefer an item or a support increase right about now.  Now that they're the next obstacle, let's have a look at the top guys. Unlike the last two bosses Raimi will stay put until we wish to engage her, and statwise she's not much different from a regular Knight. I'm not sure if her Indoor Fighter skill will give her bonuses here, but considering they went out of their way to program her with it I assume it does. Indoor/outdoor Fighter skills are tile based rather than map based, so it depends on whether or not a gate tile counts as "indoors".   An almost entirely symmetrical group of enemies waits either side of her, the only difference between the two halves being that one Fighter has a Hammer and the other one doesn't. This hammer is present on all difficulties, so the enemy holding it will drop it. Both Vaike and Frederick can use it at base, and with no weapon weight present in this game they won't have to worry about it slowing them down.  If turn count were at all a concern it would make sense to spread out and thin out the number of enemies, but there's nothing stopping me from piling up all my units on the right. I decide to go with this side first so I can take out the Hammer guy sooner. It may be easier to share EXP between multiple units with a split army, but Frederick can only be in once place at once and I'd rather have him available to bail everyone out if needed.   The first Knight aggros against Truck, while the other units... stay put? Looks like I misread the enemy AI on the wiki, these Knights do not aggro the northern group at all. If I really wanted to cheese things I could go all away around to the other side to aggro the other Knight safely and separately too, but that would waste a little too much time for my liking.   Still though, there's no harm in farming this one lone enemy for as much combat EXP as possible. Things like abusing bosses on heal tiles I would not consider kosher for this run, but I certainly do not care about playing fast. Going for impressive turn counts would only result in all of my EXP being piled onto Frederick or Truck anyway.  Lissa certainly appreciates my slow playstyle right now anyway. Is that magic she just gained? Single points of magic may not make all that much difference when it comes to the potency of healing staves, but every two points she gains will contribute to an extra tile of range with the Rescue staff later on. If you know what's coming in Chapter 5 I'm sure you'll understand why that's important.   Vaike deals the finishing blow and earns himself a satisfactory level. The lack of speed is a little worrying considering how frequently he gets doubled, but I appreciate the strength and the skill gain especially. Those are the two most important stats for killing and therefore earning more EXP.  Every remaining enemy will start moving once these enemies are aggro'd, but the corridor we just came through makes for a very easy to hold chokepoint. Or at least it does outside of Lunatic+ difficulty, where enemies can spawn with Pass.   Sumia very helpfully decides to chip in with a dual strike against the Mercenary, while leaving the Archer alone with exactly 1 HP remaining so that someone else may take the kill. The lion's share of the EXP from a dual strike kill goes to the unit in front, so Sumia would only have earned 10EXP had she killed that Archer.  Here comes everybody else to defend their friend. Splitting your army is rarely helpful in Fire Emblem games unless you have timed objectives on either side you need to rush towards, so symmetrical maps like this only serve to look aesthetically pleasing. Awakening has a few too many of them.  A full health Frederick could survive a single hit from this guy to kill him, but I'd rather that EXP go to someone else. Time to fall back!   Truck with Fred supporting her is almost as defensive as he is, if nowhere near as good at killing things. This is a perfectly fine level, I really have no cause to complain, and yet... Defense...   ...thanks Sumia. Fitting for her apparent clumsiness, at least! Actually, this slight misfortune aside, why are Sumia's skill and luck stats so good if clumsiness is one of her defining traits? Surely she should be the less skilled and lucky but also bulkier of the two Pegasus Knights, not Cordelia... Like if she's constantly falling on her face and getting back up again she should have some innate bulk.  It's okay, Chrom's here to help her out. No wonder she has such a crush on him. If only that intro cutscene was canon for this playthrough! She's probably going to be stuck marrying some crazy Dark Mage from a creepy island out in the middle of nowhere.  Up until this point I've been rather obsessing documenting most of the combat that takes place, but there's not going to be much point in doing that for the rest of this map. Kill the enemy in front, put someone who can take a hit or two where that enemy used to be, rinse and repeat. At least it'e exciting for me, I like seeing what levels people gain!   You can also just... do this in front of an Archer, and they won't move. Awakening gives diminishing returns on EXP the more times you face a single enemy, eventually stopping you from gaining any at all, so you can't keep this up forever even if the enemy is on a healing tile. Still though, I won't complain. If random generics are going to be capable of one-shotting my lord then I'm going to stand in front of bow users who are too dumb to move out the way.   That's the first crit of the run! I sure am glad this happened now and not when I wanted Frederick to weaken someone, or during all those times I faced an enemy with a 1% displayed crit chance. In retrospect I'm not sure why Chrom was using his Rapier here, and I don't think he would have been able to crit if he were not using it.  A cool crit for a cool level. If he and Sully can reach a C support then he'll be giving her +5 speed when paired up with her now, while he'll be getting +3 speed and +3 defense in return, in addition to other stats.   Lissa takes another mediocre level, but at least she got HP. Truck finally gets another point of defense, bringing her a little closer to being able to take on large groups of enemies at once and start snowballing.   Meanwhile Sumia and Sully both gain a somewhat uncharacteristic point of strength each. I'm a little disappointed to see Sumia miss out on her sky-high speed growth - sure she's already fast, but she's not at the point of doubling consistently yet. Better strength than speed for her regardless though.   Sully reaches C lances, granting her an extra point of damage while using them, and Chrom secures the last kill before the boss. Good job all around, guys! It's very easy to feed weaklings EXP when you're not stuck in a big open field with nothing to hide behind.  Once again there's nothing left to do but heal up and grab the sparkling tile on the opposite side of the map. Going out of my way to do this probably adds more turns to this clear than that 1 tile chokepoint did.  Another weapon rank increase, boo. Sully is 1 WEXP away from reaching D swords and unfortunately a boost from a sparkling tile cannot push her over to the next rank no matter how little she needs.   Lissa gains another level and a little extra HP. Healtouch increases the amount of HP heal staves restore by 10 - it's a skill Clerics get that Troubadours don't, so it gives non-mounted healers a slight edge over their ahorsed counterparts. As a side effect it'll also make it much easier for Lissa to heal someone to full HP in one go, meaning she'll get less EXP from these heal staff grind fests.  Time to put that Hammer to good use!!! Or not. Raimi's avoid bonus from her gate tile plus her Indoor Fighter skill make her rather hard to hit, despite her awful speed stat.   I'll have Chrom whittle her down with his Rapier, hoping for a dual strike from Sully to get her to D swords in the process. Truck can stand here to give Chrom adjacency bonuses to help with his hit rates and avoiding crits, she doesn't have to actually attack.   One heal from Lissa later and she goes down the turn after. Only Lords can wield Rapiers, so hitting her with one is all the proof Chrom needs of his identity.  Then again, would a real Lord gain a level like this? The likes of Roy and Eliwood couldn't gain strength and speed in one level even if you held them at gunpoint.  34 turns... Turncounts don't matter, but I still feel a little bit of shame. Even if 12 or so of those turns were just me moving my units from one location to the next while Lissa healed them. I didn't boss abuse, and the only enemy I really "farmed" was that one Knight who aggro'd without any of his friends, so I wouldn't say I played too slowly... But as I said, the game does not judge on turn counts, turn counts do not reward you anything, arguments of people online who make tier lists be damned. A good turn count on this map would have involved me demolishing most enemies on the map with Frederick while Truck stole a kill or two, and that would have been boring! ...I'm feeling really defensive about this and I don't know why. One of you out there is judging me for this 34 turn clear... I can feel your dark thoughts poisoning my mind... Leave me be!!!   Raimi's her friend now that we beat her up, so she can take us to the capital. If this were New Mystery, Frederick would follow up that observation on strength with an appraisal of Truck's strength stat, just like Jagen does with Kris.  The wifi signal in Regna Ferox is much better than it is in Ylisse, so clearing this chapter unlocks (almost) all the extra features on the overworld map! Renown awards, DLC, trading between units... A shame Nintendo are cutting online support for all of their 3DS games in April 2024.  Just as the menu opens up, so does this (very minor) route split. I can tackle this optional paralogue whenever I want. I won't be training Donnel up at all besides the 1 level he needs to be recruited in his joining chapter, so I'll likely be putting off my visit to the Farfort for a little while. But before I finish up, let's have a look at our stats! Every single unit I plan on training has managed to gain at least a single level, so I think it's worth showing off how their stats look.  Chrom's done very well on the speed and strength front, having not missed a single level in either. My only complaint is that he's also refused to gain a single point of defense or resistance. He'll be my best weapon against Wyvern Riders in the upcoming maps, so hopefully he can get a little harder to kill before then.  The sheer quantity of levels Truck's Veteran skill has given her have done a lot for her stats, even if the quality of her stat gains has been inconsistent. She's still not going to be one-rounding anything, but so long as she can stick herself on a defensive tile and survive a few rounds with Frederick backing her up she should be able to find an oppurtunity to start snowballing. A shame about her magic stat though.  : In Ferox, strength speaks louder than words. Incidentally, Truck... Your strength stat is quite impressive. Even the Khans might buckle against your overwhelming might. Keep up the good work.Thanks Frederick. Her strength is weirdly high.  Lissa's levels have been pretty garbage overall, but quantity is a decent enough substitute for quality. She really is a little overleveled, I'll admit. Maybe I should start slowing down her staff usage for the sake of money if anything else, she's reached promotion level now and won't really gain much from continuing to heal every turn now save for an extra point of HP or two to help her not die.  2 out of 3 of Fred's levels have been amazing, and his sword rank has gotten very high too. He's going to fall behind and retire to a life of granting pair-up bonuses eventually, but those days should be at least 10 or so maps away.  Sully has been doing excellently, and her good luck with defensive level ups has put her days of being one shot behind her. Keeping her constantly paired up with Chrom would be a waste of two decent combat units, but I would like them to be building support all the same. Can she get that one point of sword EXP next map?   Vaike and Sumia meanwhile have gained exactly one level each and are very much in the "just hanging around to steal EXP" level of usefulness. They're both good as pair-up partners, but they won't level up much at all if they end up doing nothing but that. Maybe I can forge Vaike an axe for next map? It's either an axe for Vaike, or a lance for Sully and Sumia to share... Hmmm. Next Time: "Marth"
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Oct 4, 2023 18:35
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A fun note about Frederick falling off - last week I was watching Kirbymastah (a well known FE speedrunner) doing Frederick Emblem on Lunatic, just using Fred the whole run and funneling everything into him. It turns out, if you do this, he just doesn't fall off. It was one of the easiest runs he'd done.  Yes, yes, Awakening juggernauting etc etc, but it's pretty funny that even Frederick is perfectly good at it and can basically solo the game glued to Chrom, for all the conventional wisdom about him falling off.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:08
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Kellam serves the important role of giving a certain later character a support chain that's heartwarming and not about either of their gimmicks. While I like Awakening a lot, I do feel that the game struggles pretty badly with making characters revolve around a personality gimmick.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:11
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Honestly I was never that bothered about most of Awakening's characters being supposedly one-note, but Kellam truly is just his gimmick 99% of the time.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:15
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This is definitely some more interesting diversions from how my runs usually look. Miriel's usually picked up a level or two and thus can double the Knights, making her a guaranteed take here. I think I usually bench Stahl here, as Vaike's STR bonus as a stat pack is helpful. I use Miriel in nearly every run as long as her growths don't fail me (which has happened), our next mage has too poor a base SPD for me to ever really make use of. I think Citrinne in Engage is the first time I've ever preferred the high MAG lower SPD mage over the high SPD one. The biggest difference on Lunatic is that I don't recruit Kellam until I've completed the entire area before the doors. The gimmick of him being unnoticeable goes as far as to him not attacking any enemies, and all enemies ignoring him while he's green. This gives me an extra wall to turtle with and make it so that only two units are needed to be on the frontline here. You have a little bit of time before the other pack of enemies move in, so it's good enough to arrange for some EXP on your lesser units. Sumia coming on this map of all maps has always been strange. At the very least most enemies are lance users so she's not facing a big disadvantage on a classic axe bandit map, but she'd have been a lot more useful on the previous map instead of this one. Still, she usually snowballs pretty well for me until she ends up falling off from frontline use until much later. Cordelia almost always turns out mediocre compared to Sumia in pretty much every run I've done.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:40
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theshim posted:Honestly I was never that bothered about most of Awakening's characters being supposedly one-note, but Kellam truly is just his gimmick 99% of the time. Most aren't, the C supports are a little annoying because often they establish a gimmick but there's usually just a lot more going on for everyone from B onward. Anyway, I'm sad we're not going to see Donnel, God of War. I almost always immediately beeline to get him asap so I can get him to level 10 on these early low level maps.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:53
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theshim posted:A fun note about Frederick falling off - last week I was watching Kirbymastah (a well known FE speedrunner) doing Frederick Emblem on Lunatic, just using Fred the whole run and funneling everything into him. Cythereal posted:Kellam serves the important role of giving a certain later character a support chain that's heartwarming and not about either of their gimmicks. Odd Wilson posted:This is definitely some more interesting diversions from how my runs usually look. Miriel's usually picked up a level or two and thus can double the Knights, making her a guaranteed take here. I think I usually bench Stahl here, as Vaike's STR bonus as a stat pack is helpful. I use Miriel in nearly every run as long as her growths don't fail me (which has happened), our next mage has too poor a base SPD for me to ever really make use of. I think Citrinne in Engage is the first time I've ever preferred the high MAG lower SPD mage over the high SPD one. No surprises that you prefer Citrinne over mister 10% base magic growth. Although my first ever maddening run of that game did have the first master seal go to Clanne and he did kinda kick rear end as a Mage Knight a little, at least until the enemies started having resistance stats. I did briefly wonder how effective Kellam would be as a wall in this map. I'm glad to know he does kind of work as one, that's pretty funny. Natural 20 posted:Anyway, I'm sad we're not going to see Donnel, God of War. I almost always immediately beeline to get him asap so I can get him to level 10 on these early low level maps.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:21
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midnight lasagna posted:Cordelia? I vaguely remember his support with her being one of the few genuinely sweet ones that does not mention Chrom at all. He and Cordelia does feel like a very fitting pairing, actually. Yup. One of my standard pairings in this game, I think it's a cute support chain that doesn't touch on either character's gimmick.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:25
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midnight lasagna posted:Oh, interesting... I was kinda wondering if doing that with Fred would be possible, but I assumed at some point his EXP gain would be too low and that he'd be a little screwed by his inability to reclass into anything that doesn't have at least one weakness to some kind of effective weaponry. Shame there isn't a youtube VOD of it that I can find. https://twitch.tv/videos/1936775640 https://twitch.tv/videos/1937614233
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Oct 4, 2023 21:29
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midnight lasagna posted:Donnel is fun but I've never thought him worth the investment on lunatic, it's too much of a pain to feed him the kills he needs when so much of my army needs their kills to be spoonfed to them too. That and if I did manage to train him up it would very, very hard not to have the run descend into a Donnel solo. As soon as I saw Sol Armsthrift Donnel in my deployment slots I'd be undeploying everybody but him and Chrom on instinct. I generally find that it's quite easy on his home map to set up an archer trap, even on Lunatic, and get him to 3/4. Then 5-10 isn't particularly hard. Also since the next map is a rout, you can also just pile Vulneries on a Donnel you've deployed, sit him next to a knight and have them wail on him for hours for delicious experience points. (Bonus if you pair him up with Kellam to up his defense by 4) And as for Cordelia stuff. I'll get to her when we get to her because unfortunately she's going to lose out pretty badly on this run.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:30
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midnight lasagna posted:Miriel is for some reason one of those units I pretty much never use... I'm not really sure why, honestly! Maybe I just hate her son's paralogue that much. I don't use Ricken either but that's because Ricken sucks so there's no mystery there. I've done Laurent's paralogue exactly once, and that was on my first Lunatic run I believe, and I did it near at the end of the game for the hell of it. This is the point at which I mention I've never even recruited Gerome once and Cherche's my favorite Awakening character. Most runs of mine that see Miriel getting used see Laurent's paralogue completely ignored. I had no idea Clanne had 10% MAG growth, but it explains a lot. I assumed his stats just leaned hard into SPD over power and I kept getting skewed results. I've refrained from looking at any stats or data about Engage and have stuck to playing it completely unaware of the behind the scenes numbers. Been pretty fun, honestly. As part of my current Ironman + No Rewind run I'm preferring Citrinne over Celine anyways as I can get safer use out of chunky thunder spells. Haven't got around to Maddening yet, just occasionally picking the game up to do a map or two. There's so much between map management in that game and it's exhausting. For me, Donnel will absolutely give you a return on investment with Lunatic. He's one of the few characters I can leave wandering about on his own even without a pair-up partner near the endgame, and him being around means you'll get a busted kid to make up for another slot in the army. That said, I always wait until after Arena Ferox to pick him up because Lon'qu is fantastic for cutting through his paralogue. In the end whether or not that return is worth said investment depends on your long term plans. His use guarantees that other units will have to fall behind and the game will be harder for quite a while in exchange for getting easier later. My usual planning revolves around making busted 2nd gen units and retiring most 1st gens to being stat backpacks and both of my Lunatic runs were undeniably carried by Donny's kid and Donny himself. Everyone I'm actually using on my team for combat will have gone through at least an extra 10 levels from a Second Seal. (This is all from the perspective of someone who deploys a full team 99% of the time in this game regardless. One of the only times I can recall underdeploying was in my last Ironman where I just undeployed my healers midway through Valm since nobody was taking damage anyways and it wasn't an interesting challenge to micromanage their movement.) Anyways, that's me writing a whole block of text about FE. I guess talking challenge run stuff is always going to get my mouth running.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:54
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No Donny? Voted 1, sent a disparaging voice mail to your loved ones.
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Oct 4, 2023 23:20
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theshim posted:A fun note about Frederick falling off - last week I was watching Kirbymastah (a well known FE speedrunner) doing Frederick Emblem on Lunatic, just using Fred the whole run and funneling everything into him. I don't think that was ever really in any doubt; he gains exp slower yes, but his growths are good enough that if he gets entire maps' worth of exp he'll make them work, and he's got good enough classes. Someone like Virion would be harder; his best bet is to go Wyvern and pray for no archers.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:02
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I like Kellam, like, within the game's writing, but I think people keep trying to make their own jokes about him... while also not realizing what the joke with him is. "Kellam who?" is the wrong joke!  I wish he were a Fates-onward character so he could have a funny personal skill, but I guess the Thief reclass will have to do. At risk of an Engage derail, Clanne is definitely meant to be a Mage Knight; boosted Bld, the class skill, and his high speed offset heavy tomes which make up for low magic, and his strength is actually useful. I've never had him not be at least okay there. I tried Frederick Emblem once but I got stuck on Chapter 6. I'm also not good at Fire Emblem though so, uh, skill issue I guess
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Oct 5, 2023 05:24
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Clanne is one of the characters in Engage who arguably starts in the wrong class, having great physical growths in a mage class, and the only one out of them who might be worth investing in.
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Oct 5, 2023 11:14
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Exploring The World Map Here's a short little extra something that I originally wanted to do at the start of Chapter 4, but decided should be its own thing so I don't bury actual gameplay under like 30 images of screwing around. The world is pretty much open to us now - what should we do? Speaking of extra content, I will at some point make some more detailed writeups on individual members of the cast featuring their base growths, available skills and classes, etc. I'd been putting it off mostly because I wasn't sure what else to include in my writeups - unlike Fates I don't feel like I know about the Awakening cast to make big lengthy walls of text about their use in terms of gameplay, so I might just stick to purely objective info on their stats. And maybe a little bit of waffle on whether or not I like them as characters.  In addition to now having full access to the inventories of all of our units, we can now buy items on the world map, such as these stat boosting tonics. Or we could, if these random skirmishes weren't blocking them. Given how absurdly difficult skirmishes are on lunatic mode (and that my ruleset prevents me from doing them anyway), all you can really do if one spawns on top of a shop you want is to wait for it to despawn. Most weapons and basic items are available from many shops, but certain things like these tonics are only available in one place. It's very annoying, because sometimes the +2 temporary stat boost from a tonic might be what you need to win a map...  At least this Secret Shop has spawned on the map unaccompanied by invincible zombies. I'm not used to buying from these - I usually try to play without random events like these. That Master Seal might cost half of my gold, but an early promotion could be very useful...   Sure, why not? The first one of these we'll be seeing otherwise will be all the way in Chapter 8. I'll take a Heal too, Lissa's only got 3 uses of hers left thanks to my somewhat obsessive staff spamming in Chapter 3.   Surprise, I'm promoting Lissa right now! She's my only non-promoted unit to have reached level 10, so she's my only valid candidate for it. Truck is currently at level 9 and could promote after one level if I were to wait, and in all honestly if I just wanted to beat the game then giving it to her might be the best option, as the stat gains from her promoted class would allow her to face more enemies at once and thus snowball faster... But I don't want to do that. I'd rather my combat units all grow at roughly the same pace, at least for now. Promoted units in Awakening gain EXP at the same rate no matter what level they were promoted at, unlike in Fates where early promoted units level up faster. This does make promoting characters super early a little inefficient in terms of EXP, but with Second Seals I could theoretically keep reseting Lissa's level back to 0 and allow her to level up indefinitely if I wanted to. I care much more about Lissa unlocking skills through leveling up in new classes than I do about her stat gains, so promoting her ASAP seems like the obvious choice. Plus it'll let her do stuff in combat besides die! Which leads to the question of which promotion? War Cleric offers her better bulk both physically and magically and a large increase in strength with which she can use Axes, Sage gives her Tomes in addition to a boost to magic and speed with which to use them. But as fun as the War Cleric class is, it's also... not very good. Aside from the one prepromote who starts in that class already (or if you really want to reclass one of your axe users so they can use rescue?) War Cleric may as well be a joke class, E rank axes are not very good and neither of your first gen units who can promote into it have the strength to justify using them, while tomes are the best weapon type in the game and your healers will most likely have a decent magic stat with which to use them already. Even a Lissa who slogs all the way through the lower axe ranks is likely going to end up doing much less damage than a Sage throwing around basic E rank tomes. I did say that I primarily wanted to use Lissa for her skills though, so the actual question is Rally Luck or Rally Magic? ...Sages still win out in that case, because boosting an offensive stat will most likely help you out much more than what is effectively a tiny boost to accuracy, avoid, and crit avoid. Lissa does have enough skill slots for 4 different rallies plus Healtouch, so I could swing back into War Cleric and grab it eventually if I really wanted. I doubt she'll be earning enough EXP to do that, though.  Tada! Lissa, you look... almost completely obscured by sparkles and text boxes, sorry. If those weren't there you would be able to see that she's wearing her big sister's outfit, which is pretty cool. I always thought of War Cleric as her "canon" class, but it's nice that they put in this little detail too. With her high magic and speed plus her competent bulk, she should be decently useful as a combat unit, so Lissa might be fighting on the front lines to weaken enemies for my other guys. As a War Cleric she could also do that to some extent, but even with higher bulk she'd be stuck doing single digit damage against most foes with crappy Bronze Axe attacks. Also I would have to buy her a Bronze Axe. Her new growths as a Sage are as follows: HP: 70% STR: 25% (-5%) MAG: 55% (+5%) SKL: 50% (+5%) SPD: 55% (+5%) LCK: 65% DEF: 20% RES: 50% (-5%) Changes of 5% are basically meaningless in a game with infinite leveling and incredibly high growths all around, but it's nice to see Lissa's growths be slightly more optimised for magical combat all the same.   Chrom x Sully C I've got some supports to go through too. Sully is not like most girls. Wouldn't it be so strange and whimsical if a girl wasn't very good at cooking? I wonder if any Japanese media has made a joke about that before. I do like Chrom's response here though, he is occassionally kind of witty and charming. I don't remember much of his support with Sully but I do recall liking it better than his other potential options. Getting a C rank between them will be very useful - not just for their future marriage, but also for boosting their stats when paired up together. In fact, I think this should be enough to let them double a fair number of the enemies in the next map when paired up...   Chrom x Sumia C Also supporting one another are Chrom and Sumia. This is why Frederick picks up all those pebbles, Chrom's really vulnerable to Stealth Rock. Just like with Chrom and Truck, I'll have to be careful with him and Sumia - if their support level together is equal or higher than his and Sully's, they'll automatically marry one another at the end of Chapter 11 and that would be bad. Truck's marriage priority is very low though, so Chrom will never pick her over anyone else unless their support rank is at least one level higher.   Truck x Lissa C Lissa pinches Truck's nose while she's sleeping, causing her to hallucinate an ironman run of Engage all the way up to that awful fog of war map where Timerra joins. Seriously, I hate those wolves and I don't even think they're the worst thing in that map!! I doubt I'm ever going to be pairing the two up, but Lissa will boost both Truck's magic and speed a little so it could maybe be useful...   Lissa x Vaike C Vaike will appreciate the magic from being paired with Lissa even less, but would you believe that Lissa x Vaike is one of the pairings I currently have planned? Sure Cordelia would most likely be a much better partner for him, but Cordelia was also a last minute addition and I feel too stubborn to change it. Plus my eventual plan is to have Lissa end up as a Falcoknight, so she can pair with Vaike to give him huge boosts to his speed skill and resistance whenever she's not out and about healing and rallying people.  There's very little in the wireless menu my ruleset will allow me to use besides these renown awards. I'm starting over from an entirely fresh game cart, so no renown banked up from previous runs for me. You get 10 renown awarded from every map you complete, with all other sources being off limits to me thanks to my rules. The first reward will become available after one more map... What could it be? It's a Glass Sword and that's kind of okay I guess.  Unfortunately my legitimate copy of Fire Emblem: Awakening for the Nintendo 3DS does not let me do anything with my streetpass team besides give it a funny name. It's a good thing too, because it's 1,000 years too early for any of you weak fools to challenge my streetpass team........... I mean they all have weapons for one thing, most people's streetpass teams will consist mostly of units they unequipped and benched.  Seeing as I need to justify this being its own update, how about we check out what Lunatic mode skirmishes look like? Don't worry, I'm not going to save anything that happens here. Which is good, because what happens here will be everybody dying.  Skirmishes have this special deep red filter over the normal new chapter background. It kind of reminds me of how the different routes of Fates have their own special hue. This blood crimson backdrop must be what you get for the fourth creepypasta route where Corrin sides with Anankos and kills both sides of their family, only found on cartridges bought second hand from bereaved parents selling the game after the child who originally owned the copy died in mysterious circumstances. I don't think anybody has LP'd that route yet.   You'll definitely be cleaning hyperrealistic blood off of your 3DS if you try doing one of these skirmishes yourself because what the hell are these enemy stats??? Rather than scaling based off of the original difficulty of the story map in their respective locations, lunatic mode skirmishes scale very harshly with the level of your army, in addition to the number of battles you have won and your progress through the game's story. It is pretty obvious that you are not meant to do them - they're made this way presumably both to enhance the difficulty of the game's hardest mode by preventing grinding... and to encourage players to spend real life currency on the game's grind map DLC.  If I were to somehow beat this then my reward would be this very cool B rank tome the boss drops. That's 30 effective might against flying enemies! Sure would be handy in the coming maps.  Unfortunately I do not think that will ever happen when even these generic Mages can outright one-shot Chrom. Although I guess the Knights from the last map could do the same thing too...   They are worth some good EXP for whoever kills them though. I'm actually surprised to see them giving any - I could have sworn enemies in skirmishes on lunatic mode only ever gave 1 EXP per kill. What am I thinking of, then...?  But nearly half a level's worth of EXP means nothing when you die immediately after. These skirmish maps are especially hard not only because the enemies are tough, but because they aggro all at once. I feel like Fire Emblem games have a habit of making their optional grinding maps really brutal like this and I don't know why! Kind of defeats the point, really.  There's one last thing to discuss, and it involves audience participation!! Along with the ability to buy things we have also unlocked the ability to forge our existing weapons, which will be very helpful. Unfortunately doing so costs a lot of money, and I spent over half of mine making Lissa into a Sage. I don't really know what to forge though - normally when forging weapons the best thing to aim for are weapons that can help you reach OHKO or one round KO thresholds to speed up maps or make certain enemy types less scary, but my focus right now is just on getting EXP on my weaker dudes. So which weaker dude should get the help? Just remember - you can forge weapons, but you cannot forge the Vaike. He's made of flesh and bone rather than iron or steal and I don't have any Meaty Ores.  So do I want a more accurate axe for Vaike so he can steal kills without missing and getting doubled and crit in return...  Or a more premium poker for Sumia so she can do higher amounts of damage than 0? Don't worry about that 60 extra gold, I have a Door Key from the last chapter to sell. I wonder if the shopkeeper will melt it down for scrap or if he'll just go around trying it on random doors... Please vote on whatever you want, I genuinely cannot decide.
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Oct 5, 2023 22:10
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You just inspired me to bust out my own copy of Awakening and see how much Renown I actually had. Looks like I hit 12290 on my most played save file. Still not enough for whatever the final 3 rewards were, but not bad, clearly. Also, uh... I'm gonna vote for Sumia's lance to get bolstered. It's always a terrible feeling for your pegasus knights to double for only 1 or 2 damage.
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Oct 5, 2023 22:46
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Dance Officer posted:Clanne is one of the characters in Engage who arguably starts in the wrong class, having great physical growths in a mage class, and the only one out of them who might be worth investing in. I think he's a callback to that FE3 Remake Mage who has the same problem.... only that game had completely free reclassing and you were able to do it immediately upon getting said mage rather than being stuck waiting like 10 chapters for the reclass seal. As for the update, yeah the scumminess to create the problem of stupidly difficult grind maps, and then sell the solution in buying grind DLC is very much in line with how FE DLC works. This was my first major mark of distaste with FE DLC, and it basically left an indelible bad taste in my mouth regarding it as a whole.
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Oct 5, 2023 22:59
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midnight lasagna posted:
I swear, in like three years when Gay Fates is over if you post this in the LP request thread... well, I might remember to make a joke LP out of it. War Cleric is a class I've always wondered about getting Robin into early enough, as they're one of the few characters with the stat spread to do anything with it. Libra does his job in the class though, and Sage Lissa is generally just the better choice when it comes to her. One of my ironman runs had an interesting nosedive and caused me to lose any leveled healers, and among other things Cherche had been doing as MVP that run, she made a surprisingly good War Cleric to carry us to the end of the game in the sense she was decently durable. As for weapon vote, a premium Pega-poker for Sumia is what I'd personally argue for. There's more than a few pesky mages in the coming maps that it should help with. This LP has been giving me the urge to pick up Awakening for a No Robin, Guys only run and a No Robin, Gals only run. Although this might be in part due to my current "gotta burn some time ironman" on Sacred Stones just having lost my awesome Moulder just before he got a chance to promote. It was gonna be the next map... (My Engage run is still live, coincidentally left just after the mentioned Timerra map, but that game takes too long sometimes to be a quick pick-up sort of thing.)
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Oct 5, 2023 23:20
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I request an extra-accurate Vaike axe.
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Oct 5, 2023 23:21
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we're here to play fire emblem: avaikening and by god we're gonna vaike it til we make it
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Oct 6, 2023 00:15
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forge an axe for vaike, so that we can give teach Tenure.
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Oct 6, 2023 01:32
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ungulateman posted:forge an axe for vaike, so that we can give teach Tenure. I feel this is the only right choice.
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Oct 6, 2023 02:02
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I remember in one run I had a strangely STR and DEF-blessed Lissa, so I figured, why not, let's give her War Cleric. She then proceeded to refuse to gain STR after that and had to really limp through Bronze Axes for a long time, just kind of taking her out of combat roles. So yeah, it's a nice idea but Sage is miles better. I think the only unit that's really made War Cleric feel right for me is Azama in Fates, because his STR growth is absurd and he becomes fairly tanky, too. You could try War Cleric to give Owain better physical stats, but... eh....
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Oct 6, 2023 02:42
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We've got to give Teach Tenure.
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Oct 6, 2023 07:26
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NeoRonTheNeuron posted:We've got to give Teach Tenure. Not empty quoting
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Oct 6, 2023 11:26
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NeoRonTheNeuron posted:We've got to give Teach Tenure.
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Oct 6, 2023 13:09
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Jumping on the Vaike bandwagon. Also wanted to throw out there that I always marry Frederick to Sumia so they can lust after Chrom together.
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Oct 8, 2023 06:06
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Left 4 Bread posted:I swear, in like three years when Gay Fates is over if you post this in the LP request thread... well, I might remember to make a joke LP out of it. Nothing ever came of it, but after watching a load of those goofy piracy protection creepypasta videos I did once try to think of my own idea for Shadow Dragon. Besides forcing the player to start with the prologue the game would play normally, but once you reach the decoy Marth scene in the fourth chapter the map would immediately end, cutting to the perspective of the decoy. The player would be given full control of the decoy unit but could do nothing but futilely run around until they are ultimately killed by either Jiol or one of his soldiers, who would then examine the body and angrily declare that they had been fooled by a "fake copy of Marth." The game would then cut to a message telling you that if you want to continue the adventures of the real Prince Marth then you should buy a real copy of the game. ...I really should get up to date on your gay fates LP considering I did request it and all. I'm a terrible person!!!
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Oct 12, 2023 09:21
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Chapter 4: Tournament Arc Despite a couple of initial votes for Sumia, Vaike wins in a landslide victory! Looks like Teach will be getting Tenure while Sumia's academic research must find funding elsewhere. Hopefully the custom grip handle won't slip out from his fingers.  That is however pretty much all of the army's funds gone. Neither Chapter 4 or Donnel's paralogue feature any monetary rewards, so we'll have to wait until the end of Chapter 5 before we can afford anything else.  Which is maybe for the best, because these inconsiderate undead are still sat on the one shop selling tonics. Generally I don't end up buying tonics until I've already failed a difficult map once or twice, but an extra +2 in strength or defense could potentially be very helpful.  Seeing as I'm not using Donnel, I'd rather do what I believe to be the easier map first. Even if I was using Donnel he wouldn't be any help here anyway, definitely not worth wasting a deployment slot on. Can Chrom dual-wield Falchions? This series has done dual wielding a few times but only ever for aesthetic purposes.  The traditional way to summon the Khan is to scream "KHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!" like in Star Trek. I made this joke last chapter but I didn't make it very well so I'm making it again.  There she is! Flavia is cool, and also not joining our party for a long, long time. As a random aside, I remember seeing prerelease screenshots of Awakening, one of which included Flavia, and loving her design... But when I actually played the game and reached Chapter 2 I saw Vaike and because he also had dark skin and a blonde ponytail I assumed his portrait was in fact the one I had seen and was sad because I thought I just imagined a cool girl out of wishful thinking.   To secure military aid we must fight in this foreign tournament. A little contrived maybe, but also a fun excuse for a slightly unconventional map. A shame we're not actually going to get paid for this... Moneywise, at least. Regna-Ferox supplying Ylisse with soldiers does nothing for me, the player. I want gold! No armies in this game exist besides the 8-12 dudes I happen to be controlling at any one moment.  Tournament time! This map is a big empty field with enemies thrown about haphazardly in an almost entirely symmetrical formation, so no wonder it was chosen to represent Awakening not once but twice. "Marth" is in the center with squads of 4 identical goons on either side. They're exactly 1 level higher than the generic opponents in Donnel's paralogue, but there's also a lot less of them and no missable side objectives to worry about.   "Marth" is an especially tough customer with his own cooler Falchion that comes with a healing effect and is effective against fell dragons, unlike Chrom's. Thankfully a certain someone in our army does not count as a fell dragon for effective damage purposes... I've also never seen Marth heal himself with his sword? I'm also not sure why I'm still calling this guy Marth as if everybody reading doesn't know it's Lucina. Regardless, Marth's fast, tough, and has a pretty good chance of critting you to death if you're not careful. Ganging up on him with ranged attacks and weakening him with Frederick is definitely the way to go.   The Knights are the same deal as last map, but these Fighters are the first generic enemies to be carrying 1-2 ranged weapons. A little annoying, as none of my units are particularly effective at fighting from that range.  Mages are also making a comeback for the first time since the Prologue. Focus is an extremely annoying skill - a 10% crit rate increase for your own units is generally meaningless, especially since Mages don't have any Killer weapon equivalents to get their crit rates high enough to be reliable, but in the hands of the enemy it's a 5-10%ish chance that one of your guys just dies instantly if you're not paying attention. You can lure the enemies around them near to counter its effects, but this map is a little sparse so that can be difficult. Enemy skills refresh every time you see the prep screen and neither mage rolled this skill on my successful clear so it's all fine though : )  For some reason Marth gets to have more units than we do, maybe because he's fighting for the reigning Khan. Unfortunately these tight deployment slots mean one unit of mine has to hit the bench... And who more fitting than the loser of the last poll? At first I wanted to not bring Fred but then I realised that would be unfeasible even before trying the map without him, so instead I went with Lissa and gave as many frontliners Vulneraries as possible. Unfortunately all attempts made this way ended up with me wasting too many turns running from the enemy to heal, and eventually getting overwhelmed. So in the end the loser is the one unit who can't build support ranks with her future spouse or contribute much in the way of combat. ...you can infer from that future spouse comment that Truck is marrying Frederick. That's the plan for now, at least.  My original strategy for this map was to have 3 units handle the left side and 3 the right, but I think it's much better than 5 handle one side and Frederick, the human equivalent of 5 units, handle the other. Just to slow enemies down, not necessarily to kill them all.  This map is a rout too. As the most dangerous and far away foe as well as the one who aggroes last, Marth's going to be the last to die anyway, so the objective doesn't really matter.  Let us fight to the death! Which I assume we must be doing, these being actual lethal weapons we're using and all. Come to think of it, why is Lucina even here? I mean I know the real answer and that's "because it's cool", but neither killing her dad or getting killed by her dad on accident would be helpful to her cause. Unless she got herself chosen as Basilio's champion just so she could lose on purpose to help Chrom...? But presumably he also lost in the future she's from, so there'd be no need... Hmm.  A proper LP of this game would have this sequence shown either in gif or video form in its entirity, but I think it's much funnier to show this one screenshot and ask the reader to explain what on earth is happening here or Chrom managed to end up 5 feet in the air feet above his head in a one-on-one sword duel. I think this spinning midair lunge is a move from Sonic and the Black Knight?  Despite being a rout map, in a way this map plays more like a Survive objective: the enemies each approach in waves, and we have to tough them out one by one. The Fighters at the bottom and the Mages move on turn 1, and the other enemies aggro one pair at a time each turn starting with the Knights, then the Fighters, then Marth. Entering an enemy's range will also aggro them, but not necessarily their counterpart on the other half of the map. Keeping certain enemy ranges highlighted makes it pretty easy to avoid aggroing anybody early.   Chrom and Sully both have the same speed stat, but the extra points Chrom gives Sully mean only she can double all the non-Marth enemies on this map when she's in the lead.   I have them both move to bait out the bottom right Fighter while also grabbing a sparkling tile. I don't even remember where the other tile was on this map - I assume I never grabbed it!   Wow this sure is a weapon that's stronger than both Eliwood's Blade and the Silver Lance! What an absurdly lucky find. Only Frederick can use it right now, but that's fine. I actually feel a little bad about finding it - I saw a lot of different outcomes from this tile on my various attempts, and only this one was anywhere near this good. It feels almost like cheating to accept it. Perhaps this is one of the dual Fachions the chapter title referred to.   Frderick moves to the left to bait the other Fighter, and everybody else piles up near the action to potentially steal a kill next turn.  Fred is... mostly fine on his own. Unlike past attempts I had nobody stood next to Frederick and give him adjacency bonuses this time, and I never saw him face a crit chance until now. He's not invincible, I guess!   Sully loses almost all her health from one very painful attack, but Chrom comes to the rescue with two separate dual strikes, which is just enough to one round the attacking Fighter. He'd have survived had Chrom not attacked both times - dual strikes and guards really do add a lot of variance to how an individual turn can play out, it makes it quite hard to plan things. I might have prefered to feed that kill to someone else...  At least Sully's no longer stuck with her crappy Bronze Sword. Now she can use iron weapons and Truck can have her sword back. Actually, I think Stahl might still have a sword that Truck should have taken...  Clearly I sent all my kill stealers to the wrong side, there's no kills they can steal here. There's one tile south of the Mage from which I can take him out without luring in the other Fighter a turn early.   A task made much easier thanks to me not benching Lissa this time. Sully cleanly 2HKOs this guy with her Iron Lance.   Free reading material! Truck or Lissa can have this, although neither one is close to running out of magic uses just yet. Truck having so many tome uses might be a sign that I've not been giving her enough EXP.  Let's see if I can't get Truck a little extra EXP now. Frederick could have advanced further to OHKO the Mage with his Silver Lance, but then he'd lure in the other Fighter since the left Mage's positioning isn't as fortunate as the right one.   Perhaps I need to be more proactive in unequipping my units so they don't steal kills when I don't want them too. Truck EXP is what I wanted, but I also wanted Vaike to be the one to make the kill here.  Now these next enemies he should be able to handle. He can't double them without help, but two Hammer hits will easily kill one Knight.  I'd rather just have this guy gone than worry about letting someone else have the kill. One shotting Mages, just like the prologue...  It's always very satisfying. Nobody likes wizards!  That's two A ranks Fred has under his belt now. Ideally I'd have him start building axe rank too, but I only have 2 different axes and they're both Vaike's. Maybe if I sell that Door Key he can buy a spare?   The first kill he'll be getting all map and it's not even with his new axe. Forging him a Hammer might have been fun but I don't think we'll see another armoured unit until Chapter 9 at the earliest.  Bonk! He's worryingly inaccurate for how slow these foes are. But would I waste a skill or luck stat booster on him, or would I just sell them to forge more accurate weapons? I'm not sure when exactly stat boosters start showing up.  The Short Axe ranged attackers move in while Marth just sits there, content to chill. You'd think Marth had seen enough of his friends dying around him already... I mean, Lucina. I'm going to call her Lucina from now on.  Standing in range of enemy units and hitting heal or end turn is thrilling gameplay, I know. I have backed my army into somewhat of a corner here, but the map is almost over...   Thank you Chrom, I'm sure your attack was the deciding factor in that battle. At least he earns EXP from this.   Frederick's contribution is a lot more helpful, leaving this Fighter on very low health for anyone to swoop in and finish up the job. How would this map have gone if he had not helped weaken this guy? I'm not sure!  Even Lissa can help lure and weaken enemies a little now. She's not survivng much, but she can survive something. And she couldn't have countered this as a War Cleric!  Lucina's on her way, best finish up those two guys before this becomes a mosh pit. Hmm, if I'd have kept calling her Marth I could have made a Final Destination or Marth's grab range joke here...   Vaike takes advantage of the foe Fred weakened and finishes him off. All portraitless units off the battlefield, please! This is a very nice level - skill for hitting, HP and defense for bulk, speed for being doubled slightly less. Vaike is one of those units who always, always got RNG screwed for me, so I'm very happy to see he's averting that fate this time around.  Nobody is on screen right now, but you can see their ranges lurking in the distance. I'll probably be pairing Chrom and Sully back up as soon as they enter combat again, but I want as many units free as possible just in case.  Lucina and friend approach, and now I'll have to end this map this turn or else someone's getting killed. Might be a little difficult to whittle her down when she's this powerful, however...  Even Fred faces a slight crit chance that could kill him if he uses the wrong weapon. Let's think about this sensibly...   Vaike's not doing anything against Lucina, so he can finish this guy off unpaired. Truck standing next to him helps make him that little bit more accurate.   Lissa attacks from a distance, both to weaken and to set up adjacency bonuses for future attackers. Please don't kill your aunt, Lucina, that would not help make the future any better.   Sully could weaken her and safely take a hit in return... Chrom could also do it, but he's not as accurate. It would be much cooler though, plus he needs the EXP more if he's going to start doubling Fighters in the future.   Fred attacking with his Silver Lance lets one of the happy couple make the killing blow, so let's do that. He's no longer facing any crit thanks to Lissa, but he wouldn't die from one anyway. Truck also has her book confiscated just in case she gets any funny ideas about kill stealing.   Kneel before Frederick, knave! The only reason they didn't send a second Frederick back in time was because the future one died before it was possible.  I wonder? If I were using the gay patch then the answer to this question might still be up in the air. Maybe it is Frederick.   Sometimes you have to gamble the map on a 90% hit because the alternative wouldn't be as fun. This level is... adequate. Chrom's defense is making me a little uneasy though, eventually I would like him to be able to survive more than one attack at a time.  6 turns! This map is never taking more than 7, really. Waiting it out for EXP purposes would be too risky when Lucina starts attacking people.   Having robbed the west Khan of his power, Flavia is now free to help us and also do whatever other stuff she wanted to do. Will this be good for Regna-Ferox? Who cares! I just want to have their soldiers.   All he has to offer us is the previous champion Lucina time-dunked on. Do we really want him? I mean, he lost to someone we just beat. That makes him a double loser!  Like all true gamers, Lon'qu is terrified of women. Basilio's just pawning him off on us because he's no longer allowed in Arena Ferox after a heated gaming moment.  Cutting things off here would be good for the flow of the update but I just wanted to show that Lissa and Emmeryn do in fact have the exact same outfit. Look at them! Meanwhile, Lucina's watching this from offscreen and wondering if a simple body double ploy might be all she needs to stop Emmeryn's future assassination.  I'm also obligated to show you this. To explain, my workflow with these LPs is I take screenshots as I play, naming them in the moment so I know why I took them and what basic commentary I had in mind when I took them, as well as giving them a number so their order doesn't get mixed up. When I was mashing through all my screenshots in file explorer with the arrow keys, I noticed that these two kind of look like a dance if you rapidly alternate between the two of them. I'd passed up the oppurunity to make something similar into a gif before, so in the moment I renamed the second screenshot to "92 make this into lovely gif dont chicken out tomorrow you gotta do it.png" to force my future self to do it because I knew I would stop thinking it was funny the day after when I actually had to make the update. So there you go.  This seems like a suitable hook on which to end. Next time: We do something! (ignore maribelle to go save some random farm boy on some lovely island somewhere)
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Oct 12, 2023 09:23
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| # ? May 6, 2024 04:39 |
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midnight lasagna posted:
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Oct 12, 2023 14:46
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