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The big differences with Advanced Wars are unlimited units (given sufficient resources to create them) and damage scaled to HP. A unit at 2/10 HP only does roughly 20% damage, for example. So combats are largely about getting the first hit. There's not much counterkilling in Advanced Wars unless you have a giant tank and they have crappy infantry. And in that case, they likely won't attack you at all.
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Mar 11, 2015 04:31
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I stupidly posted:You can't elect not to attack I should have said "on a fight-by-fight basis". You can't, say, order Kent not to counterattack that specific bandit but otherwise counterattack. That just by itself cuts off a lot of interesting trade-off based special attacks and weapon concepts.
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Mar 11, 2015 06:06
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I think the guys in the northeast are there to oppose you if you drive north along the plains tiles before moving west into the desert.
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Mar 11, 2015 15:49
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Zero-requirement chapters are a glitch, right? They were meant to have requirements, and thus have tolerances? I wonder how the desert map would feel if your buffer wasn't being eaten up by all the zero-requirement chapters.
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Mar 11, 2015 22:09
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There's a similar custom in certain traditional, old-school Chinese cultures. It can start out with using the Mandarin for "older brother" as an honorific for a male of higher standing, but the title will climb up the family tree as the level of deference increases. If you watch Chinese period pieces with overly-literal English subtitles on, this can lead to moments like a new bride calling her husband "grandfather".
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Mar 12, 2015 00:28
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quote:If Target is 2 levels higher, Dorcas will instead gain 11 [exp for doing non-lethal damage]. If Dorcas is 2 levels lower, he’ll gain 9. If Target is 5 levels higher, Dorcas will gain 12 XP, etc. Added bold to a bit that looks backward. I think that should be either "Target 2 levels lower" or "Dorcas 2 levels higher". It's not a hard typo to parse, but only if you already understand the concept.
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Mar 12, 2015 16:41
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Some of it's also map design. There's this trend in Fire Emblem where early game maps, for whatever reason, emphasize mobility a bit more. You get more running battles or high-speed charges early on; late-game fights tend to be pitched battles in which you'll often move your army less distance than you could. I reckon Melth cares less about that one for the purposes of the ranked run, what with turn limits. But in general. Sorites fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 05:00
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I think the point of the 'every weapon in storage' comment was scrounging for spare weapons if you're running low. If you're low on hand axes but full of javelins, Sain won't care but Raven will be sad.
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Mar 13, 2015 08:08
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MightyPretenders posted:So if Louise's family was so far down the noble pecking order, why was Hellene high enough in it that even the King of Bern couldn't just refuse her? Cadet branches. *gestures broadly and meaninglessly with arms* *pushes glasses up on nose* *nods confidently* Cadet branches.
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Mar 13, 2015 19:54
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Why is lake harder to traverse than ocean? I don't understand that at all. It's such a weird design decision.
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Mar 15, 2015 03:09
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Is anyone else shocked to learn how late into the game you can use low-level characters? I would never have imagined a Level 9 Guy dominating a segment of a map on Chapter 25, even with all circumstances rigged his way. That's one of the biggest surprises I've had this LP.
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Mar 15, 2015 03:22
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Me, I use the "aw, come on" rule. If it makes me want to say "aw, come on", it's probably fishy. I am not a scientist. For example, those Pokemon speed runs that use buffer overruns (coding errors) to forcibly trigger the credits sequence. The speed runners will call that winning the game in like three minutes. And in their defence, they don't do anything outside the game and you can reproduce their results even using just a big grey Game Boy. I say, come on. Sorites fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 19:48
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Just because it's interesting to think about: Using the Mine Glitch in the 'standard' way, making everyone disarm, might be super unproductive in a ranking run. It's so much slower running around murdering everyone during Player Phase. I reckon Mine Glitching in a ranking run would mostly involve positioning enemies to reach your meat-grinder units faster, while keeping them armed so they incur counters. Manipulating drops (notably the Uber Spear) would be something else altogether. Does the Uber Spear have a value?
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Mar 16, 2015 21:21
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I think the lesson here is that everyone defines 'cheating' slightly differently, and there's a lot of variance between the most restrictive and most generous definitions. People call arena abuse 'cheating' because it's not 'in the spirit of the game'. I think that means it changes the game from one kind of skill test to another. Fire Emblem, at its most basic, is about positioning, resource management, and valuation ("Is an opportunity to advance to the chokepoint one turn faster worth an 18% chance of losing the mission?"). But if you use the Arena to get, say, a 20/20 Canas in Port of Badon and amass a million gold, those skills no longer matter. You can just load up Merlinus with Flux tomes and let Canas solo everything. You don't have to use good positioning or manage resources, and the valuation problem can just be solved by throwing enormous stats/money at any situation. Instead, the game boils down to a one-time skill test: Are you good enough at managing the Arena minigame, or will you lose Canas and have to retry? So arena abuse rips the skill test out of the game by just giving you so much raw power that it doesn't matter. Some folks view that as 'not what the game is about'. And because cheating is one of the worst-defined words in gaming, it gets slapped on.
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Mar 16, 2015 23:43
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People also don't like "soft" rules. If arena abuse is "perfectly fine", a large (or at least vocal; it's hard to tell) portion of the community will say: "Then the point of the game is just to reach Port of Badon. After that chapter you can't lose, so the credits might as well roll." This is arguably true, if you take a team and grind it all to 20/20 (with your Lord just going to 20, of course). For the game to stay fun and challenging, there has to be a limit on arena use. Nobody can really agree on an appropriate amount of Arena use. If it's 7, why not 8? Or 6? There are no arguments to make. And almost nobody will rally behind the idea of "a reasonable amount of Arena use", because what does that mean? So the community kind of threw up its hands and went "Okay, we'll just say no Arena use. That's the simplest hard-and-fast rule most of us can agree to." Of course, 0 is as arbitrary as 7 or 8 or 6 or 311. But nobody seems to view it that way. Sorites fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 00:00
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Say, can you Hammerne Ninian's rings? I get that you normally wouldn't want to, but it occurs to me that I don't know whether they're "weapons", "items", or "staves" mechanically.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:21
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When people talk about Awakening, they generally mean all of Awakening. Cherry-picking chapters to not count doesn't really get us anywhere.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:44
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Chapters are a much bigger thing than tiles.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:48
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And at least one game mode - arguably two - devolve into a virtual solo ('Frederick Emblem') without the DLCs. So it's much harder to justify calling them "a separate thing from Awakening" that doesn't factor into the discussion.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:53
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quote:Efficiency is defined as completing the game with everything as fast as possible disregarding ranks. Think of it like a 100% speed run. except the ranking is based on turns not real-time. What's the difference between Efficiency and LTC?
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Mar 18, 2015 04:08
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quote:Seeing as, despite all he’s been through, he’s still pretty incredibly lucky and privileged compared to like… everyone else in the world, he comes across as kind of whiny to me and I’m not too fond of him. This is one of the first times I've seriously disagreed with you about anything all thread. Privilege and trauma aren't related. You can take the most privileged people in the world and put them through awful events, and they're still at risk to develop a sackful of issues. That's normal. They might have access to more resources for recovery, and they're less likely to suffer compounding trauma, but there's going to be a period before those factors kick in*. Someone like Harken gets to be just as messed up as Geitz would be in the same situation. *and even if they don't recover any better, that's still their prerogative. They aren't required to heal faster because they've got advantages. Sorites fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 19:51
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Edit: Speaking to Melth's latest post, not Silver Falcon. Right, but empirically speaking that's not how people work. Overall fortunate circumstances don't do much to shield someone from an acute crisis, and what counts as a 'crisis' is entirely personal. Chris Rock had a line that if Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out a window and slit his throat on the way down. That's a joke, but it gets at something: Life events are relevant in the context of that person's life, not in the context of the rest of the world. Harken had a great life, and an awful thing happened to him, and now he's crushed. You mention survivor's guilt in Harken's character breakdown. Let's run with that. Imagine your favourite example of a modern person with B+ to A- level privilege. Now imagine that person watches most of their friends die, all at once, and can't do anything about it. Classic survivor's guilt set-up. Could you bring yourself to say, "You're still better off than 99.99% of the world's population; in the grand scheme of things, your problems are small"? That's just not how people are. Expecting otherwise runs into an ought-implies-can problem. Sorites fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 22:02
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Melth posted:I mean, to a significant extent it IS how people are, since much happiness seems to be based on one's relative position in one's own society. Nope. Just, well...nope. Happiness is complex, and doesn't fit neatly at all with power or advantage. And even if it did under baseline conditions, that wouldn't speak to depression or trauma at all. quote:The other thing is that Harken didn't just a day or a week or a month ago lose Elbert and the other knights- this isn't some acute trauma he just suffered. He's had more than six months to begin to come to terms with his grief and start putting it in perspective and remember that he still owes fealty to young Eliwood and is betrothed to Isadora and shouldn't just abandon them. Shirking those responsibilities and ignoring the vows he swore to each of them when he's actually had time to think about what he's doing is just not something I can respect. This attitude became outdated in or around 1915. I can give you a fairly specific year on that because 1915 is when the Triple Entente powers started executing people for displaying symptoms of shell shock - now called PTSD. They didn't understand that powerlessly watching your friends and comrades die will straight-up break people, no matter who they are. A bunch of soldiers were sent to firing squads for treason or cowardice. The armies eventually figured this out, and put in a system of rotating people away from the trenches to preserve their mental health. That doesn't speak to your six-month point, but this does: Even twenty-five years later some of those traumatized soldiers couldn't think straight, let alone enlist again for World War II. I mean, some could. But some couldn't - and there's nothing wrong with that. You can't tell people to honour-and-duty their way out of mental illness. Sorites fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 22:22
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Let's pivot away from Harken. We've all made our views clear, and we're about two exchanges away from an argument I don't want to have. --- I'm really interested by the idea of zero-growth runs. I love that it's possible because it does show that the game's final threshold of unwinnability is much later than I'd assumed. I figured, for example, that losing your A-team in one chapter and your B-team in another would be a dead end. But if you can clear the endgame with base stats and Athos, that's resilient design. Of course, anyone who'd find themself losing grown units en masse is probably not going to win Light with the replacements. But it's interesting to know about. Are there any good zero-growth LPs that demonstrate the strategy? I don't remember one from this forum, but maybe some after-action reports on Serenes Forest or something? Sorites fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 22:41
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I guess you can use it to take one last shot at the money-doubling effect of the Silver Card. Plus there's Melth's every-chapter rule.
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Mar 18, 2015 23:54
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I vaguely recall reading about someone using thief-torch vision to get eyes on that fighter and using the Sleep staff, but I may be misremembering some or all of that.
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Mar 19, 2015 16:05
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There's one thing that could have improved Jaffar's demonstration. If there were some high-defence enemies he couldn't instant kill even with crits, just to show a first-time player how Lethality works. --- I've also been replaying FE9 and FE10 with a view to turn count. My rough objective is to get all the bonus EXP without sacrificing combat opportunities or treasure, so it's often fairly hectic. It's a really fun playstyle, I see why people try to push it further and further.
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Mar 20, 2015 04:23
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Yeah. For Japanese audiences who saw FE6 first, the plot twist isn't that Zephiel turns out bad; the plot twist is that Zephiel starts out good. It seems like it would work quite well. Then again, that's basically Kid Anakin Skywalker.
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Mar 20, 2015 17:44
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Zephiel growing up into the ultimate pessimist makes sense to me. Even after all these Power of Love and Friendship speeches from various noble figures, his life stays terrible because his father never gets over hating him. Lesson: No matter what anyone says, the world is a massive turd and so is everyone in it. --- As for a next LP, I'd love to see you take on Advance Wars. My favourite parts of this LP have been the War Room breakdowns and the occasional  turns where this massive set-up all pays off at once. I reckon AW has the potential for tons of both.
Sorites fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Mar 21, 2015 |
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Mar 21, 2015 04:11
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I think FE7 has a pretty good overall plot, except that the emotional high point is about halfway in (in terms of gameplay hours, not chapters). But it does fall down in the details. Why does it snow for a few seconds, then stop for a few seconds, then snow for a few seconds, then stop for a few seconds? Can Nergal do that? Why doesn't he ever do it again? Or is that how weather works on Elibe? You get a lot of one-note characters too, though none quite as bad as (say) Ilyana. And you get a lot of the same wall-punching contrivances that only happen because they happen. The teleporting assassin army that never use this ability to actually assassinate people is dumber than the Disciples of Order. --- Reinforcing my idea about a good big picture with weak details: Have you noticed that this LP, with probably the most positive attitude we've seen about a Fire Emblem game's plot, is also the first not to transcribe everything? Almost every other FE LP has spent considerable time poking fun at dumb cutscene moments and goofy contrivances. Sorites fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Mar 21, 2015 |
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Mar 21, 2015 16:21
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For what my opinion's worth, the "Okay, fine, here's how you cope with these anchors around your neck" updates fit better outside the main run. The keyword all this time has been optimizing, and deviating from that seems like a side thing.
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Mar 24, 2015 23:48
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I feel like Night of Farewells is really hurt by the programming oversight that gave us 0-requirement chapters. If you didn't need to build up such a massive turn surplus, you could tackle this chapter at a more reasonable pace and have it feel less like clumsy juggling.
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Apr 12, 2015 04:10
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I single out Night of Farewells because it's apparently got this vision of you taking it slow, almost-filling the turn quota, and having a cleaner strategy for it. Instead it's this stupid plate-spinning act. So the need for a buffer really changes the feel of the map. Contrast Whereabouts Unknown. That's meant to be frantically storming a castle, and now it's super-frantically storming a castle.
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Apr 13, 2015 22:50
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Yeah, Bloodborne sure is a game.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:01
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