Sacred Stones SG

[Jowy]

You guys don't know what you're asking for! The next chapter I play, the finale, would likely have to be a 40+ minute video. That is quite a bit of Fire Emblem..

[Jkaen]

To be honest i prefer the text summary to the video

[Fenn]

Chapter 19's played:


I'll have the full report up tomorrow, but this image is an accurate summary.

[Katon]

Unfortunately the image link isn't working (for me, at least).

[Jowy]

[Katon]

And now the image is working.

Glad to see you had fun!

[Fenn]

Chapter 19 - Last Hope

Before we head in, some housekeeping:
First, I used our stat boosters:
-Energy Ring went to Eirika.
-Goddess Icon went to Duessel - he had 9 Luck and some enemies in the next chapter have 10+ crit
-Speedwing went to Gilliam.
-Body Ring went to Saleh - he gains speed when wielding Excalibur now

Then, since Chapter 19 lets you deploy 17 units, promoted some of our characters to fill spaces:

L'Arachel can double slower enemies as a Mage Knight (Valkyries use Light magic which is way too heavy for her), while Knoll can heal scratches and summon disposable meatshields.


Finally we had an extra Knight Crest lying around, so Forde gets a pity promotion. Guess what he'll be doing for us
With that, let's begin:

This is what we can see at the start of the chapter; to win we need to protect the guy on the throne for 13 turns. Reinforcements trickle in from the northeast and flood the southwest. Fog of War too, for what that's worth.
Rennac and Forde will be going for the treasure chests on this map. They house a Speedwing, Runesword, Fenrir, Bolting, Fortify, and 5000 Gold. Most of those are honestly vendor trash, but the Bolting tome could be helpful.


Of course, waiting 13 turns isn't the only way to achieve victory; defeating Riev ends the map immediately and gives you his Aura tome (dead weight for our team - nobody has A rank Light). Defeating Riev here ends the map immediately (and gains you his Aura tome, but we have nobody who can use it). He's weaker than he looks, losing 8 AS to his weapon, but without using Warp it's nearly impossible to reach him. And since our best Warper has a range of just eight tiles, even that isn't trivial. My initial plan for this chapter was to ignore him completely.


Saleh, Gerik, Eirika and L'Arachel will take the north; Syrene will be joining them, and Lute will head south to reveal enemies with the Torch staff.

Innes (in the top right) will help the north team by shooting over the wall. Forde will loot the eastern treasure room, escorted by Duessel.


Everyone else is piling southwest where most of the enemies lie in wait. Amelia and Franz open hostilities by crippling the two Mercs; the NPC Knights will finish them off on enemy phase and draw away the Druids.


On the interturn, the enemy Generals took potshots at Amelia and Franz, who are equipped with Javelins and so can only scratch them in response. Now that they're all in range of our heavy hitters it'll be easy to take them out this turn. In the east a Fighter and Druid rush out of the fog and give Duessel some grief.

The reinforcements begin this turn too:

They're a cut above the usual trash, and equipped with good Silver weapons too. There are two chapters left, but this is arguably the last one in which we face strong enemies in numbers.



Duessel got nicked by this Druid last turn. No problem, he can one shot Druids. Back west we clean up the starting enemies, and Gilliam picks up the Brave Lance from one of the Generals. Now we prepare to face the real threat.


Up north, the first enemy reinforcements start filing in; most of them have 2-range so Innes, with his regular human stats, has to tread carefully. Unlike Gerik:

Most of his combats look like this.


The northern front is overall very easy even with our forces advancing constantly; enemies arrive in groups of three, and we're more than powerful enough to deal with that.


Indeed, by the end of the chapter we've made it all the way to the spawn points and Saleh has reached S-rank Anima


All of that's really just a sideshow compared to the southern front. Every turn for about eight turns, four enemies in the west and three in the east pop up. Axes, Swords, Lances, Bows and Magic are all represented. In order to kill them faster than they spawn, you'd need two units who had good enough defences to tank at least seven enemies without dying, were fast and powerful enough at 1-2 range offence to kill any of them in one round.

That's not happening.

Instead, Gilliam and Franz take up positions at the chokepoint, with Knoll's Phantom hanging around to absorb one hit; I intend for them to sit there, getting healed occasionally, and block the reinforcements until the chapter's over. This is still pretty dangerous, because they can each be attacked from two squares - more if they counterkill enemies. In retrospect I should have taken their weapons, but I wanted to farm XP for some reason.


This is the result of my bad ideas. Franz kills two Swordmasters before this Great Knight redlines him; he avoids death by sheer luck. Not giving him a Killer weapon to chew through two attackers (and face four hits in one turn) could have avoided this, but I should have had Amelia in his place anyway; Amelia has 24 Luck vs Franz's 11 and can dodge much better than him.


It's at about this point that I begin to reconsider playing fair with this chapter.


This is where I make up my mind. While Gilliam's basically invincible, Amelia can still die to a series of unlucky hits, and by this point I already have all the treasure. Neimi has a good combination of high Resistance and killing power for taking out the boss, so she and our staff-users head west to warp her next to Riev. She can attack him on player phase, and since Riev will act first, finish him off on the following enemy phase.

The funny part is that it was almost too late to do this; even with our blockers killing as enemies per turn as they could, the reinforcements have managed to clog almost every space near the boss.


Fortunately that one free space is plenty. Neimi takes a Barrier charge and faces off against Riev. She only needed one critical hit out of four attacks to succeed here, and fortunately her second one is a winner.


Playing the odds like that was rather unecessary, but sticking around would have been pretty risky in and of itself.

That's that for Chapter 19, and my role in this SG! I was able to avoid death to a surprising extent even allowing for my good luck making up for some tactical errors, but the knowledge that any death can't be undone greatly changes the way I approached chapters; I tried to come up with plans that minimized risk whenever possible, which is a level of caution I normally wouldn't go for.

[Jowy]

Cool trick

How many more turns would you have had to hold the line if you didn't kill Riev?

[Fenn]

About 5 turns IIRC. It would have been easy to do by just taking away Gilliam/Amelia's weapons and doing nothing, but that's boring.

I forgot to include the save file, here it is.

[Katon]

And 'tis done, if not done entirely well.

The good news about this map is that there's no rush to finish it, and no pressure to spread the party too thin; the forest south of the mountains is impassable to ground units, so the initial fighting is all on a single front. The bad news is that the enemy gets a metric ton of reinforcements – enough that the game might hit the enemy unit cap of 50 if I don't kill them fast enough. Some start appearing after I cross particular lines, some will show up whenever they're ready regardless. Oh, and Riev's back for another round despite Neimi assassinating him. The win condition is to seize the central temple, which has a dragon zombie (enemy equivalent of Myrrh) sitting on it.



I feed Natasha our Speedwing to help take some of the edge off her over-heavy tomes, shuffle items around a bit, and prepare to attack. We can deploy eighteen units, which is enough for all our regulars plus Myrrh, Forde, Knoll('s skeleton summon), and Rennac. The first couple of turns are fairly straightforward, as I'm not even trying to stay out of box 1; the most interesting thing to happen is Myrrh introducing herself with a ridiculous level. By now our party's strong enough that even having two cyclopes and three gargoyles show up per turn is not a serious threat – though it takes a while to kill them.



It takes two turns to kill everything in the above-left screenshot, then it's off to trigger Zone 3 and the top-left enemies. There's a big pile here (see above-right) that I don't want to trigger all at once, so I spend a turn holding the two forests, clear away the nearby enemies and the first wave of deathgoyles, and only then lure out the centaurs. That done, it's back to inching ahead, luring out one or two new enemies every turn and whacking the deathgoyles as they appear . . . at least, until I accidentally wake up Riev.



The crit on Riev's Aura spell is very scary, so he's the first thing all map to justify breaking out one of the legendary weapons. Saleh softens him up with Excalibur, Gerik pulls out Audhulma, and he's toast. This does have the disadvantage of putting Gerik somewhere six enemies can theoretically reach him, but he's tough as nails and I stick a skeletal summon next to him to eat one attack. As it turns out, the enemies don't focus their fire, and we survive easily, but the reinforcements keep coming, and a couple of Arch-Mogalls are throwing long-distance attacks from the far left side. We don't need extra XP nearly enough to be worth the weapon charges and risk of a caster getting dogpiled, so I push straight for the temple.



Pictured above: the mess I didn't want to have to deal with three times over. Unfortunately, I did have to deal with it once, but aggressive play managed to squish the spiders while forcing the centaurs to focus their fire entirely on the relatively expendable Lute if they wanted a kill (first one to try missed, his friends scattered all over the place). More unfortunately, Syrene took a hit from an incoming gargoyle which left her injured enough for other gargoyles or the Arch-Mogalls to kill her in one blow. I dragged her away from the surviving gargoyle, completely forgot to heal her, and watched the first Arch-Mogall murder her at a 53% hit chance. In a fit of even greater competence, I managed to position Ephraim far enough away from the temple that I had to survive a second wave, during which Saleh got swarmed by gargoyles.



Now that I was done flaking out, it was onto the boss. This guy can be nasty, as he has a 1-2 range defense-ignoring attack with high hit and 37 damage. Natasha, Myrrh, and Saleh (RIP) would all die if they attacked him, and he's got 66 HP and high defences . . . but nothing Gerik can't cut through in a single double-Audhulma attack. Kill what enemies I can for experience, kick myself again over Saleh, and Ephraim claims the temple to end the map.

The last chapter should still be winnable – Jowy will have a full party of solid units, and Ephraim, Myrrh, and Gerik are all absolute wrecking balls – but Saleh's death in particular was completely avoidable and I'm still feeling cranky with myself for it.

That makes a decent segue into my take on the SG as a whole, now that my part's done. Playing iron-man without having played the campaign recently really pushes tactical execution; I usually had a decent idea of what was going on with any given map from reading guides, but not nearly as good as last time around when I was replaying the hard ones dozens of times, and escaping casualty-free with a good-but-not-great understanding of the strategic picture requires that your tactical play be spot-on. That made for good practice, but I kept dropping it on the hardest maps, and by the end it was getting more stressful than I really enjoy in my Fire Emblem. Good variant to try once, not sure I'll be playing it again in the near future.