sine nomine

Way cool

Really nice run, it was entertaining and showcased some neat tricks.

Oh. That's lame, but also useful. I think I can work around losing Shiva and his killing edge without losing turns elsewhere, so I'll work this into future playthroughs. Thanks!

No, I don't necessarially need to recruit Shiva. However I didn't think my units were strong enough to 6-turn chapter 7 so I opted for a 7-turn tactic and picked up Shiva as a bonus. I didn't think of killing Shiva in chapter 2x, that would certainly make a 6-turn more feasible but I'll have to look into it some more because I don't want to risk death if I can help it.

Turncounts: Chapter 1: 4 turns Chapter 2: 4 turns Chapter 2x: 8 turns Chapter 3: 5 turns Chapter 4: 11 turns Chapter 5: 18 turns Chapter 6: 7 turns Chapter 7: 7 turns Chapter 8: 4 turns Chapter 9: 3 turns Chapter 10: 12 turns Chapter 11: 6 turns Chapter 12: 6 turns Chapter 12x: 10 turns Chapter 13: 5 turns Chapter 14: 10 turns Chapter 15: 2 turns Chapter 16b: 4 turns Chapter 17b: 3 turns Chapter 18: 6 turns Chapter 19: 1 turn Chapter 20: 15 turns Chapter 21: 5 turns Chapter 21x: 1 turn Chapter 22: 3 turns Chapter 23: 3 turns Chapter 24: 4 turns Final Chapter: 4 turns Total: 171 turns

I did another 0% growths warpless low turn count playthrough of FE5. The tactics are much improved from my previous run and it should be much easier to watch due to less wasted time. "0% growths" means I play on a ROM edited so characters do not gain stats on level-up (both character and scroll growths set to zero). I like playing 0% growths because it eliminates the randomness that growths cause and improves the game's balance by reducing player strength relative to the enemy; in a normal run, I find that characters become too powerful and diminish the need for tactical maneuvers. Also, movement stars are also not used when they activate. By "warpless" I mean that I do not use the warp staff (rescue staves and the self-targeting rewarp staff are permitted). I've done runs with the warp staff before and they're plenty of fun, but this warpless route involves a lot of varied and interesting tactics in chapters that the warp staff would trivialize. "Low turn count" means that I aim to complete chapters as quickly as possible. In Fire Emblem games, there are often boring and time-consuming tactics than lead to victory with little effort, but it is far more fun and entertaining to use complex tactics that lead to a faster completion. Furthermore, the game ranks you based upon the number of turns you take, so a lower turncount can be considered a better result. However, in some cases I will sacrifice speed for reliability. This is a segmented run but in the future I hope to complete a SS rank warpless ironman run; I think it is more fun to consider contingency plans and adapt tactics during a playthrough than it is to map out a singular path through the game and reset until the RNG rolls in your favour. My idea of a good tactic is as follows: if all goes well a very low turncount will be achieved, if some things go wrong a fairly low turncount will still be achieved, and in the case of extreme bad luck several turns may be lost but a game over would be avoided. However there are several chapters in this playthrough where this ideal is not achieved. One day I will improve upon this run so please suggest any improvements that come to mind. I do not attempt to recruit all characters in this playthrough. This run is played on normal mode (without increased exp gain), so EXP distribution must be considered. This does not affect turncounts. There are several chapters for which I don't have a really good plan and I could really use some suggestions. I probably won't redo this anytime soon but someday I will. Here is the youtube playlist:

Makes sense. And congratulations on the run. I hope you decide to upload it if you recorded it.

Please post the individual chapter turncounts. I'm also curious about your warp staff usage. It wasn't worth it to warp in chapter 8x?

Please do so when you get a chance.

Not exactly a hard mode, but I wish I could make a hack with a few minor edits to FE5. Here are some ideas: - Individually rebalance enemies. Overall, greatly increase stats of enemies but reduce variance. - Eliminate movement growth, make all thieves' bld growth = zero - Severely reduce most characters' growth rates. And rebalance characters so the few who aren't normally useful can be growth units. - Rework scrolls. Remove the bonus to growth rates and potentially change some to give minor stat bonuses like FE12 star shards. But make sure several of them still nullify crits. - Limit staff range based on magic, but also let unit standing on certain tiles keep unlimited range (thrones/gates, where cyas appears in 17a, various places convenient for the enemy like the silence staff users in 17b). - Keep the 1% accuracy minimum, but allow max accuracy to reach 100% - Regarding weapon durability: perhaps reduce durability of certain unique items like the king sword, hero sword, hero lance, light sword, earth sword, etc. And either reduce thunder tome durability or price so they sell for less. - I'd like to remove movement stars, but I don't want to radically alter characters. Not sure on whether or not to eliminate movement stars completely but there are some instances of enemy movement stars which force overly cautious or unsafe play and I'd get rid of those. - Some minor changes to stats and weapon ranks, such as increasing Miranda's fire rank. - Modify fatigue system; it seems to work for staff users but is negligable otherwise. Increase the stamina cost of each battle and/or have stat pentalties for fighting with somewhat high stamina? - Make PCC and support information visible on the status screen (possibly growth rates and promotion gains as well) - Modify AI of various enemies to choose not to capture (e.g. enemy galzus) - Let chapter 7 boss appear even if his spawn point is blocked - Give lategame enemies better weapons rather than hammers all the time - Let the player heal NPCs with physic (notably Fred and Olwen) - Ironman mode - A good translation

Is there a 0% growths patch which doesn't mess up Xane?

FE5 is extremely "fair" as it gives you the tools to achieve victory with extremely high reliability; many players may complain that they rely on variable RNG, but that is only because they neglect various gameplay mechanics. E.g. there's no reason you should ever risk being criticaled in FE5. The only thing I dislike is the 99% accuracy cap (the 1% minimum is totally fine). By the way, although there are plenty of surprises in store for first-time players, I find the game offers time and resources to allow the player to scramble and adapt even in a blind playthrough. I think a lot of the people who find FE5 hard and claim it's unfair (or whatever) are people who aren't really interested in tactics and just want their army to crush through the opposing forces with minimal thought required. Perhaps that sort of strategy doesn't work as well in FE5 than in other games. So maybe FE5 is difficult in the sense that it punishes the player for having no idea what they're doing. I'd say FE5 is difficult in the sense that the game requires more thought to figure out optimal tactics for each chapter than other FE games. Because of the wide variety of missions and numerous game mechanics in FE5, there's many options to cover. You might not restart at all in a blind FE5 playthrough and restart several times in (for example) a blind FE13 lunatic+ playthrough, but I don't FE13 lunatic+ to be very tactically challenging; optimal solutions are relatively simple to discern. Rather than saying FE5 is 'difficult' every time it's brought up, I'd prefer if people talked about how the level design is amazing.

I find Tina is a great candidate for the elite manual. However, scrolls and skill manuals really aren't a big deal since the enemies in FE5 are very weak and the game gives you more than enough resources to breeze through. Just give skills to whichever units you happen to like, particularly if they don't already have something which makes them good. Even subpar units will become incredibly overpowered after a few level ups. Like in most FE games, I find players usually have trouble when they handicap themselves by not using the powerful units the game gives you (e.g. Dagda and Dean), by delaying their units' promotions, and by hoarding good weapons and staves. Aside from that it helps to understand how the game's mechanics work. It's very unlikely that you'll find youself sufferring from a lack of stats or skills and there's usually several possible solutions to any problems you may encounter.

I'm glad you enjoyed the run. - Yep, sending unarmed little girls as capture bait then catching enemies with their pants down is a very effective tactic. I kind of wish that enemies didn't capture your units so easily, it's way too overpowered since it not only protects you by making the enemy waste their turn, it also severely weakens them. - Agreed, I think FE5 is perfectly suited for 0% growths because the levels involve a lot of different challenges aside from simply throwing enemies with big stats at you and because the mechanics allow for a ton of varied approaches. I actually needed to promote Selfina for her to be useful in the final chapter but yeah, fairly weak units could hold their own in late chapters with the right weapons and staves. - I may have lost a couple turns due to 0%ing, possibly in 4, 5, 7 (kill shiva), 9 (skip elite sword), 10, and later chapters where a powerful rewarper could help. At the same time, 0%ing is nice since my tactics don't get ruined if characters have the wrong amount of build. Check out this thread, he's imposed a bunch of additional rules on his challenge so it's rather different but there will probably be some interesting warpless tactics that hinge on growths: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=54483 - Dean IS a freaking god. He's the only unit to recieve a total 30% support bonus, his PCC is 3 so he'll virtually always crit when fully supported, he can fly, his stats are great, he can use awesome lances outdoors and has A rank swords. What more could you ask for? - Yeah, I think it's really nice how so many units can manage to kill stuff with just their promoted stats, while nobody is overpowered enough to become a one-man-army. - Glade has a leadership star so he's always useful, but his combat also isn't too shabby. In this run I don't think he did all that much, but he's pretty good with Selphina support (20%) and a master lance. - I considered banning rewarp+rescue, but it would be a pretty arbitrary ban so I decided against it. It might make a warpless run more repetetive if played with growths (with an invincible Salem or something), but in this run rewarp+rescue was used on (Eda carrying) Leaf only once so it actually added to variety. Otherwise I'd have Dean fly Leaf to ch17b's gate. - Yeah you can thief staff anything. I used it instead of sleep to disable ballistae since the thief staff has more uses (one repair goes further), Tina needs exp, and I even get some funds out of it. - Chapter 22 was kind of amusing since Reinhardt went crazy. If he happens to die before he can slaughter his troops, the mage knights will actually flee because I rewarped Safy close enough to trigger them (otherwise they'll stick around and ruin everything; note that putting him to sleep isn't enough). I also had a spare sleep staff ready in case things didn't work out so perfectly. I think the chapter is even more amusing in an elite mode run with warpkipping allowed; all Tina needs to do is to thief his master lance, then you can capture him and seize on turn 1 without a fight. In this run I needed to thief his berserk staff and blizzard tome so I could actually get there. - Yeah, my videos suck. Especially the earlier ones since I didn't even think of uploading it until I was partway through. The problem is that I forget I'm recording and I double check stats and ranges and stuff.

Yeah, that's me. I'd encourage you to play the game yourself before watching anyone else's playthroughs so you can experience the game's surprises as you play through it; these videos will still be here once you've finished your first playthrough. I'm sure you'll pick up a couple tips from watching a playthrough, and that might spoil your experience because you'll miss out on the satisfaction you get from figuring stuff out on your own. But it's up to you. Anyway, good luck on your run and hope you enjoy watching.