Just after the break on my NG+ Hard Casual run, and I'm a little happier with the difficulty. I'm a few levels below the recommended level for story missions (no, I will not take on your side battle quest no matter how many times you ask. Paralogues only!).
The latest mission involved being ambushed, and I would have had to rewind almost to the first turn if I was playing on Classic and wanted to avoid losses. As it was, I had to stop and think and shamelessly spam my overpowered gambits.
My hard casual run was similar right after the break, but it didn’t last... I caught up to the regular enemies’ might pretty quickly.
I’m enjoying hard permadeath for my NG+ GD run. This is my go-to airplane game so I imagine I’ll eventually do a BL run and probably try maddening. The NG+ boosts seem like they’ll notch the game into “tolerable” difficulty for me.
596... whoa.
Finished Black Eagles chapter 10! I'm ~70 hours into the game and still not up to the time skip. 
I think I'm playing slowly because of how deeply this game has engaged my perfectionism. I rarely min-max, but this time I spend minutes fiddling with every... single... variable before battle: party composition, equipment and abilities, placement, etc. I do the same before each lecture - reviewing everyone's goals and thinking about their class paths. Multiply that by the number of battles and weeks in the game and that's probably why it's taking me so long. I think the last squad-based game to engross me this deeply was XCOM, when I did my ironman classic run at launch in 2012.
It's paying off, though! My party (hard / classic) is a powerhouse, able to demolish bosses in one or two hits. And, importantly, I'm having fun. 
Eh - you can change placement? Of troops? Before battle? That would have been very, very nice to know!
Eh - you can change placement? Of troops? Before battle? That would have been very, very nice to know!
Yup. In the pre-battle radial menu when you select map, you're able to select and swap the placement of units. Well, most units. Any unit that's mandatory for that fight is typically stuck where the game has decided they should be.
Damn - That changes quite a bit. Some of the prologue battles were pretty hard, but could have been a lot easier if I changed up positions.
Razgon wrote:Eh - you can change placement? Of troops? Before battle? That would have been very, very nice to know!
Yup. In the pre-battle radial menu when you select map, you're able to select and swap the placement of units. Well, most units. Any unit that's mandatory for that fight is typically stuck where the game has decided they should be.
Holy cats. I knew you could view placement from the radial but had no idea you could change it. If nothing else, that could drastically speed up some trash fights by getting the hard hitters positioned for first-round KOs.
It also helps position your units with range to quickly go open treasure chests or take out a baddie who's spawning other baddies. A frequent tactic of mine in both of my playthroughs was to use the movement gambit on the flying / riding units in my team as they were positioned together, and then send them almost all the way across the map.
Also it should be said that this is a long standing feature in Fire Emblem games, so they don't bother explaining it in this game, because their tutorials are pretty bad.
Yeah, that makes me realize I only knew you could do that because I've played prior FE games.
So I concluded Chapter 16 of Blue Lions and am about to enter the story battle of Chapter 17. Question on encounters with other students.
It was mentioned before by someone that you can talk to other students on the battlefield and possibly recruit them to your cause, but I did not seem to have this option with Ferdinand or Lorenz. Do you need to have a high enough support level pre-split? (Which I could have sworn I managed to get Ferdinant to B, though maybe I was just working on it)
Regardless, I'm cool with them suddenly becoming enemies, but in true Fire Emblem fashion it doesn't seem to be handled the best in the actual writing. During the battle Ferdinand had no dialogue for any of my characters, and there was no response until after when Dorothea lamented his death. I imagine it might have been different if he fought someone he had potential support with, but add to that how no one reacted to Lorenz dying (insert Stele "Lorenz is awful" statement/joke here) and it feels like the whole "killing our friends" thing won't be expressed the best.
Anywho, going to see if I can finish this chapter and inch ever closer to the conclusion.
I just started Three Houses. Haven't really played a Fire Emblem game before (except FE:Heroes) but tactical strategy games and character-based stories are deeply in my wheelhouse so it was probably inevitable. I'm 14 hours in on chapter 4 in the Golden Deer route, based entirely on thinking I'll probably stick around for a second playthrough and I want to do Black Eagles second.
Is there any easy way to see character motivations levels while you're Exploring? I'd like to optimize who gets my attention.
I'm 14 hours in on chapter 4 in the Golden Deer route, based entirely on thinking I'll probably stick around for a second playthrough and I want to do Black Eagles second.
Golden Deer first, Black Eagles second is what I did/am doing too.
Is there any easy way to see character motivations levels while you're Exploring? I'd like to optimize who gets my attention.
Open the menu and select Goals, and you will see them.
So I concluded Chapter 16 of Blue Lions and am about to enter the story battle of Chapter 17. Question on encounters with other students.
Spoiler:It was mentioned before by someone that you can talk to other students on the battlefield and possibly recruit them to your cause, but I did not seem to have this option with Ferdinand or Lorenz. Do you need to have a high enough support level pre-split? (Which I could have sworn I managed to get Ferdinant to B, though maybe I was just working on it)
Regardless, I'm cool with them suddenly becoming enemies, but in true Fire Emblem fashion it doesn't seem to be handled the best in the actual writing. During the battle Ferdinand had no dialogue for any of my characters, and there was no response until after when Dorothea lamented his death. I imagine it might have been different if he fought someone he had potential support with, but add to that how no one reacted to Lorenz dying (insert Stele "Lorenz is awful" statement/joke here) and it feels like the whole "killing our friends" thing won't be expressed the best.
Anywho, going to see if I can finish this chapter and inch ever closer to the conclusion.
You are right, and sometimes it is house specific. I am not exactly sure about those characters and the house you are playing in.
But just kill Lorenz. You will feel better.
Heh. Well, I did. 
Anyway, did Chapter 17, which involved all three factions in one battlefield again.
Blue Lions route, Chapter 17 is "Blood of Eagle and Lion". It actually kind of irritated me. I wanted to avoid fighting Golden Deer/Claude because I wanted him as an ally or something. I rewound time a couple times because at some point Golden Deer would trigger. If you head to the middle of the field to knock out the balista, Claude charges in uncertain if there's an ally. "Okay, I'm gonna just stick to the left side of the field and ignore Bernadetta". I even tried to avoid Petra, who I know I had B support with. No option to talk to 'em. Had to defeat 'em. Maybe once you defeat Hubert, who has it coming, that's it, but there were no options to talk from the get go. After some finnagling of the built-in save-scum, I managed to... watch one of Edelgard's units beeline into Claude's territory and aggro him.
Fortunately I was able to avoid killing anyone on Golden Deer, though I watched them kill poor Bernadette. Still, despite how vicious Dimitri had gotten, I was hoping to try and save select Black Eagle units when I could, not fight the Golden Deer, and just focus on Edelgard. The idea of killing your former students seems to best match one of the Black Eagle runs, probably the one where you back Edelgard. Do what must be done no matter the cost. But it seems like I have no choice but to kill people.
Regardless, hoping to clear Chapter 18 tonight. 70 hours and counting.
Question for the folks who've finished:
How much should I worry about preparing for difficulty spikes later in the game?
My core party (the original Black Eagles plus Ingrid, Mercedes, Lysithea and Shamir) is already overleveled. Since I've recruited almost every possible character, I also have a bench of less used or unused characters, with a handful (Felix) who might graduate to the core party. Can I safely use them in side battles for variety? Or do I need the core party to be overleveled for later?
Question for the folks who've finished:
How much should I worry about preparing for difficulty spikes later in the game?
My core party (the original Black Eagles plus Ingrid, Mercedes, Lysithea and Shamir) is already overleveled. Since I've recruited almost every possible character, I also have a bench of less used or unused characters, with a handful (Felix) who might graduate to the core party. Can I safely use them in side battles for variety? Or do I need the core party to be overleveled for later?
I did. I found the game fairly easy on Normal and fairly easy on Hard. In fact, if I didn't use some of the non-core members my party would have been even more overleveled.
Mind Elemental wrote:Question for the folks who've finished:
How much should I worry about preparing for difficulty spikes later in the game?
My core party (the original Black Eagles plus Ingrid, Mercedes, Lysithea and Shamir) is already overleveled. Since I've recruited almost every possible character, I also have a bench of less used or unused characters, with a handful (Felix) who might graduate to the core party. Can I safely use them in side battles for variety? Or do I need the core party to be overleveled for later?
I did. I found the game fairly easy on Normal and fairly easy on Hard. In fact, if I didn't use some of the non-core members my party would have been even more overleveled.
Normal was trivially easy. For what it's worth, at no point does the game radically increase the number of units you have to field in a battle. I lost 3-4 characters over the course of the game, didn't really min-max the number of characters I recruited and breezed through. Final battle was a cakewalk.
Question for the folks who've finished:
How much should I worry about preparing for difficulty spikes later in the game?
My core party (the original Black Eagles plus Ingrid, Mercedes, Lysithea and Shamir) is already overleveled. Since I've recruited almost every possible character, I also have a bench of less used or unused characters, with a handful (Felix) who might graduate to the core party. Can I safely use them in side battles for variety? Or do I need the core party to be overleveled for later?
I’ll only speak to hard mode, since that’s what I played. The only significant spike was around the time skip when the enemies start packing silver weapons, especially the Pegasus knights. That said, I don’t think I used through more than 15 characters. 12 is the maximum number you can field in a map so those made up my core team, and 3 adjutants which I was cycling around for supports. I farmed supports pretty hard.
The last couple of maps in Black Eagle do get hardish, which is why you don’t want to spread the experience too thin. And when you’re up against high level bosses, the level advantage disappears pretty quick.
Mind Elemental wrote:Question for the folks who've finished:
How much should I worry about preparing for difficulty spikes later in the game?
My core party (the original Black Eagles plus Ingrid, Mercedes, Lysithea and Shamir) is already overleveled. Since I've recruited almost every possible character, I also have a bench of less used or unused characters, with a handful (Felix) who might graduate to the core party. Can I safely use them in side battles for variety? Or do I need the core party to be overleveled for later?
I’ll only speak to hard mode, since that’s what I played. The only significant spike was around the time skip when the enemies start packing silver weapons, especially the Pegasus knights. That said, I don’t think I used through more than 15 characters. 12 is the maximum number you can field in a map so those made up my core team, and 3 adjutants which I was cycling around for supports. I farmed supports pretty hard.
The last couple of maps in Black Eagle do get hardish, which is why you don’t want to spread the experience too thin. And when you’re up against high level bosses, the level advantage disappears pretty quick.
This was more consistent with my experience. My first run was BE, hard, casual. I'm very familiar with isometric tactics games (hundreds of XCom hours) but this was my first FE. So I didn't really grok the support and recruitment mechanics during the first few months and ended up with only a handful recruits aside from the core BEs, plus the other teachers, who are trivially easy to recruit.
The last fight was much more interesting than the others due to map layout, volume/type/placement of enemies, etc. So it required more thoughtful movements and a few divine pulses. But I don't think I'd have been any less prepared for that fight if I had spent more time leveling some of the ancillary characters. In fact now that I'm nearing the timeskip on my GD NG+ hard/permadeath run, I'm going out of my way to recruit almost everyone and keep most of them equally leveled. I still have 5-7 mains to crank out maximum damage, healing, and taking, but otherwise it's been fun to use all the extra side-battle opportunities to run a bunch of different rosters and see which characters get the best RNG luck as they progress. I'm not AT ALL concerned that we'll be underpowered in late game.
As others have noted, there is a brief but pretty substantial (and fun!) difficulty spike after the time jump. My only real complaint about this game is that I'd really like a difficulty between hard and maddening... something equivalent to XCom's "commander," since X's "rookie" maps to FE's "easy" (i.e. you don't know what you're doing and need a lot of battle forgiveness), "veteran" to "hard" (i.e. you'll learn strategy but whiz through most battles easily if you stay disciplined) and "legend" to "maddening" (i.e. you need to be prepared for lots of bad luck and build a team that can survive long-term with multiple deaths of key characters). In XCom, "commander" is my sweet spot: you need to be really thoughtful and deliberate and will STILL get some bad beats and frustrating deaths, but you're also not completely reliant on multiple lucky breaks per mission in order to just survive.
I'm not very far in, but I'm playing on Hard Classic. I'm more comfortable with the permadeath than in XCom: XCom has a tendency to have one shot go horribly wrong and cascade down into complete campaign meltdown, whereas in FE I can rewind time to compensate for those rare but fatal miscalculations. I guess I'll find out if my assumptions hold up throughout the game, or if it gets too hard or too easy.
I'm on Normal Classic and am completely over-leveled with my main group. I've started taking under-leveled people out on missions and sometimes they get killed and I just roll with it. I COULD rewind time to save them, but I'd rather just finish the mission move towards the end as soon as I can at this point.
I keep my group in rotation, so they're technically "over-leveled", but not so much that things aren't a tad of a challenge. At the same time, I can tell that, especially with the rewind mechanic, I'm permitted a lot of room for mistakes and am not using things like Gambit as often as I might otherwise on a higher difficulty.
Still, I'm enjoying it. I did a quick Google to see how much more I have, and I'm predicting I will not be finished with Fire Emblem this week unless I truly marathon it.
Here's a question: did folks leave Shamir as a Sniper? I thought about making her a Bow Knight but she'd actually drop in some of her stats, and she may lose some of her range, even. I'm wondering if it'd be better to leave her a Sniper and make Ashe the Bow Knight.
Here's a question: did folks leave Shamir as a Sniper? I thought about making her a Bow Knight but she'd actually drop in some of her stats, and she may lose some of her range, even. I'm wondering if it'd be better to leave her a Sniper and make Ashe the Bow Knight.
Bow Knight.
Drop in range is counterbalanced by increase in movement.
I definitely turned my snipers into bow knights. The mobility offered (both movement range plus the option to move after attacking) by bow knights was generally more valuable than extra bow range you get from being sniper.
That said, I think the only units I didn't move to a master class by the end were bishops (and only if it was Linhardt, all the female mages got turned into Gremories).
Thanks! It really does seem like the further you get, the more they want you to put everyone on a horse or something. Unless they cast spells, which basically means I constantly have the same mages in my party as they are rarely as capable of earning the same experience. It seems like their power early on is especially strong, but as the game progresses they're more vulnerable and struggle a bit more. Makes me wonder how many Dark Knights, Holy Knights, or Mortal Savants you're supposed to have.
In any event, also wanted to note that this game feels so much like what I was hoping Fates would be. I was a bit worried that Fates would mark a permanent shift to Pokemon-style separation of game carts combined with three separate campaigns that aren't all very good. It was quite a slog, and as has been documented, the increase of Otaku bait and pandering made the characters far more two-dimensional. Three Houses has managed to build a whole lot of lore in the game's background, and I'm pretty sure at some point I need to save some time to actually read everything in the library. Probably my second playthrough, in some mysterious point of the future.
But having played nearly all of Blue Lions, it has me genuinely curious what the other routes are and what additional story details I'll unlock. Still a bit curious that so much of the core plot relies on Blue Lions and Black Eagles, leaving Golden Deer as a sort of observer or outsider. I think, following this, I'll do one Black Eagles route, one Golden Deer route, and then come back and do another Black Eagles route. On the other hand, by time I was playing the third route of Fire Emblem Fates, it was sort of just to beat it. I enjoyed Conquest well enough, but after Birthright and... Revelations? it just felt like such a slog with the same shallow characters.
I definitely turned my snipers into bow knights. The mobility offered (both movement range plus the option to move after attacking) by bow knights was generally more valuable than extra bow range you get from being sniper.
I don't think there's any penalty for doing this, really. Outside of the maps where mounted units are slowed down.
Sundown wrote:I definitely turned my snipers into bow knights. The mobility offered (both movement range plus the option to move after attacking) by bow knights was generally more valuable than extra bow range you get from being sniper.
I don't think there's any penalty for doing this, really. Outside of the maps where mounted units are slowed down.
And on them, you can use the Dismount option to run through the trees, then get back on your horse.
Sundown wrote:I definitely turned my snipers into bow knights. The mobility offered (both movement range plus the option to move after attacking) by bow knights was generally more valuable than extra bow range you get from being sniper.
I don't think there's any penalty for doing this, really. Outside of the maps where mounted units are slowed down.
I was thinking of a late game map where the ground was on fire that caused problems with splitting my team up a lot that really messed up my formations. That's the only place where I would say the horse mounted units were at a disadvantage. The rest of the time, it's not close. And you can still have them get off the horses as well if really necessary.
Finally finished my Blue Lions run last week after 122 hours. I enjoyed my time with the game, but I did hit that 90 hours, "I wish this was over. I really need to spend less time min-maxing." The game was incredibly easy on Normal/Perma-death, only forced to Divine Pulse once because I had Dimitri try to solo the Death Knight early on. Really wish I could have jumped it up to Hard. I plan on doing a Golden Deer Hard sometime soon. I kind of want to try using a full Seiros (teachers, Flayn, etc.) team at some point and just ignore all the students to see how that pans out. Hopefully since I have seen most of the support conversations and will have the increased professor level from the start it will go faster.
As for character pairings, I did not get a single one I wanted other than Byleth (which you get to choose). I thought I had set things up in such a way to at least get a couple, but was really surprised when they gave me the Felix/Sylvain pairing. I thought for sure one of them was going to be with Annette or Mercedes, or Sylvain get paired with Ingrid. I will have to look up how to force relationship endings for the next playthrough. May have to try and speed through another BL to get the Dimitri/Catherine pairing I wanted (or I could probably look it up).
Pages