Sacred Stones SG

[Katon]

Aaaaand done. That did not go well, to the surprise of probably nobody who's played the game before. Report to follow this evening.

[Katon]

And by “this evening” I mean now. In which the score becomes one disastrous map each:

Chapter 11: The Phantom Ship

The idea here is that we're in the middle of sailing from point A to point B when a ship full of undead beasties pulls out of the fog and tries to board, while flying monsters provide flanking support. As such, the battlefield actually changes substantially over the first few turns: turn 1 the enemy ship is trailing behind us, turn 2 it pulls level, turn 3 the planks come down, and turn 5 a pair of lunatic NPCs decide to board the enemy ship from the other side. The troubador's got an elixir and good bases, so she can survive quite a while as long as she's only getting attacked one at a time, but if the enemies on the central ship join the rightmost gargoyles then the two of them are in trouble. I've included pictures of turn 2 (clearest display of the starting enemies) and turn 5 (why is the healer closest to the enemy ship?).



The combination of fog-of-war, massive numbers of fliers hitting from all sides, and time pressure to make sure all the enemies on the ships are focusing on you rather than the NPCS makes this a common pick for the hardest map in the game. I've been lucky so far with chapter order, which is why I'm the last player to lose a unit; this is where that luck and my perfect record both stop.

Five units sit the chapter out; after the obvious Seth and Garcia, I drop Gilliam (who's far enough ahead on levels to be a bit of an XP sink without being as good an emergency button as Duessel), Colm (great vision but a combat zero) and Forde (who's ten levels ahead of Amelia and only a couple of stat points better off). The idea is for Ephraim, Franz and Kyle to push forward on the two-wide bridge while Duessel lets me forget the single bridge and the fliers get into a flier-off.



We open with Tana gulping a Pure Water and heading up north to lure out the mogalls, while Cormag lights a torch and gets ready to lure gargoyles into Neimi range. Natasha uses a Torch staff to improve our view of where the enemy ship's about to be, Vanessa gets ready for the one central gargoyle, and Turn 1 is done. Turn 2, with the boarding planks not yet down, is just a matter of cleaning up fliers. Tana's completely immune to mogalls with her resistance boosted, but Cormag's still too slow to double gargoyles and Vanessa only does five per hit, so the gargoyles are more of a problem. Turn 3 sees Tana attack a couple of mogalls who just showed up top-left, Vanessa move towards the ones showing up bottom-left, and everyone else push as far along the planks as they can without turning into a pincushion. All the ship enemies come after Kyle and Ephraim, and after a lot of dodging – Kyle could easily have died here with worse dodge luck – we're left as follows:



I suspect all the remaining enemies up top of having AI which tells them not to attack til I've entered the ship proper, so if I want to be ready for the NPCs I feel obliged to push forward this turn. Franz and Amelia attack the nearest enemies, then Duessel, Kyle (who's been healed by Natasha) and Ephraim push the line forward. At turn's end, I can only see one javelin-using skeleton who can attack someone other than the three tanks. It quickly develops that I missed a giant zombie who could also hit Amelia, but thankfully the two of them can't quite kill her (3HP short if the javelin hadn't missed).



Kyle, on the other hand, survived entirely on luck. He bore the brunt of enemy attacks again, and dodged two different 60-65% hit chances that would have killed him; the picture reflects Lute having healed him and Cormag having killed the guy tossing javelins at Amelia. If the first Kyle-kill-chance had hit it might have opened up Amelia for more ranged attacks, so I pause at this point to say a prayer of gratitude to the RNG. Prayer said, it's time to kill enemies. The problem now is that there are more mogalls up top than Tana can kill in a round, and none of my physical tanks have very good resistance, so I'm going to get mobbed by fliers who can hurt most of my units. I wind up letting Duessel take point to the north (since he has enough resistance that his huge HP tally can handle it), presenting one gargoyle with a tempting healer he can't quite kill, and hoping the NPC berserker will take care of the other. I also don't touch the enemy with a javelin so as to prevent any of my lot from becoming tempting focus-fire targets.



And then the game decides to point out that I've been MASSIVELY underestimating the number of gargoyles who show up as reinforcements. Which I really have no excuse for given that they show quite clearly on the turn 5 map with which I started this report.



Tana could've survived if I'd kept her out of range of the javelin on the ship – killing the same mogall she just killed from the left instead of from below would have done it - so that's just a really annoying tactical mistake. On the other hand, sending Vanessa off on her own where those reinforcements were about to appear was a giant and unforced strategic error. In the immediate future, Tana's death makes it hard to figure out how to handle the north – there are three mogalls plus a gargoyle still there, and Duessel's the only unit who can survive being pounded on to that extent. In hindsight, I could have completely abandoned the top half of the ship and traded space for only the enemies currently on the ship being able to attack this turn, but I didn't think of that, so we attack the ship enemies instead.



Unfortunately, Duessel misses the kill-shot on the javelin skeleton, so I need to decide whether to drag Cormag in and reduce the number of enemies at the cost of putting our only remaining flier in real danger of getting Evil Eyed to death. If he can hit with a javelin from down-left, he's in a position where all three mogalls can't go after him simultaneously, and they might well prefer targets like Duessel and Franz who can't counterattack; this is a seductive enough outcome to lure me into trying a ~67% kill chance.



I could have avoided taking that risk in a couple of ways, but even with the mistakes I made Cormag still could've lived if that skeleton hadn't borrowed Kyle's dodge luck. After the mogalls have been lured into a position where Lute and Neimi can shoot them, it's just a matter of mopping up while using Torch to prevent getting completely swarmed from the fog. Everyone gets a couple of kills, Neimi dodges the one possible swarm-to-death, and Lute softens up the boss so Kyle can get the last in a series of truly terrible levels.

Post-mortem: I made a positioning error to kill Tana and was being very aggressive to give the RNG a chance to kill Cormag, but the main thing that would change if Iron Man didn't prevent me from practicing beforehand would be that I'd have sent Vanessa north with Tana, rather than south. Feeding Tana the starting mogalls was the right move and the best chance to get her safely caught up on levels, but if I'd understood how dangerous the top-center and left of the map were going to be once gargoyle reinforcements started showing up I'd have had them sticking together in a pair. Even if I made the same mistake with Tana and the enemies still focused on her with Vanessa around, that change would've prevented both Vanessa and Cormag's deaths, as adding Vanessa to that mess lets me kill enough enemies on my turn to make the aggressive strategy work safely. There would've been a couple more fliers coming from down and left, but they showed up late enough and the Torch staff gave enough warning that that would've been a manageable problem.

Next time: Back to town, another recruit, and another recruitable enemy.

[Fenn]

Well, I can't say I've tried a no-flier run of SS before...this could make my next chapter very interesting. No shame in losing units in this one; I'm most surprised by the fact that Neimi of all people lived through it. Did she get any good levels at least?

The Gargoyle reinforcements - and especially the Deathgoyle boss - are probably the nastiest part of the map by far. The NPCs are honestly pretty easy to save since they start on the opposite end of the map from Gargomania.

[Katon]

Neimi continues her quest to be the best Strength 6 archer in Fire Emblem history. Decent if unexciting levels out of context, but no help where she needs it.

New unit introductions:

L'Arachel the troubadour is, when caught up on levels, the best healer in the game. Great bases by healer standards, good growths which are better-balanced than Natasha or Moulder, the extra mobility from her horse is always nice, and I think she's the only character in the entire GBA bit of the series who consistently hits 30 luck by 20/20. The problem is that she joins at level 3, which in our run is multiple levels behind Natasha and even Moulder despite Moulder having spent half the campaign dead. "Standout unit if they can catch up from a slow start" hasn't treated Tana or Ross well, but healers stay far enough back from the front lines that L'Arachel might have better fortune.

Dozla is the berserker as sack of HP. He's got a ton of health, good strength, the usual berserker crit bonus . . . and 9 speed as a promoted unit. If Ross makes it to level 1 Berserker, he expects to be better in every single stat apart from HP; for that matter, even Garcia is going to have better stats across the board until Dozla's speed catches up around level 6-8 promoted. Dozla can land one hard hit with decent crit chance, but that's all he's doing without support. One of the worse characters in the game, for my money. Give the legendary axe to Ross if he made it to promotion or Duessel if you want a no-effort prepromote.

[El Grillo]

Yikes, that was a nasty chapter indeed. No more fog for a while though, right?

[Jowy]

My money is on the Gargoyles sniping off someone. Maybe Vanessa or Tana.

That was eerily accurate. All 3 fliers gone

Got the save. Next chapter should be death-free, but it isn't a cakewalk by any means. We're still on a boat and getting swarmed at the planks and ambushed by fliers.

[Jowy]

Played. Report inc at some point.

[Jowy]

Chapter 12 - Landing at Taizel

Here's the map. On Turn 1 a ton of monsters are spawned in, and the boss gets swapped. I've already taken a week on this so I'll refrain from making a new map with all the monsters in it :P
We need to kill everyone, recruit Ewan (red roof house) and Marisa (myrmidon near the boss).



The reality of losing 5 units hit in when I got to choose my units. With Seth banned and Colm too weak for combat, we only had to bench one unit. I chose Forde because we have so many cavaliers already. I still have faith that we can get some use out of Garcia.
L'Arachel was recruited with a White Gem in her inventory that sold for 10k. I bought some healing tomes.



I was prepared for the flier spawn. Neimi and Dozla killed one each. The third was unreachable, but not a threat without his friends.
That was pretty much it for this side. There are a few more enemies, but I can just lure them out one by one.



On the other side of the ship, a ton of enemies are marching in. I had a lot of trouble here on my casual run, so the plan is to hold out in the ship and play defensively.



No trouble yet.



Or so I thought. Odds were in our favor, but still not a good idea to let a 29% roll decide the fate of a character



Mages and monsters are next in line. Both of em hit like a truck. I did some chain rescuing to heal Gilliam without putting healers under ranged attack risk.



Gilliam could be in trouble if not for the fact that he never kills enemies in 1-shot. Low speed is sometimes good..



Everyone survived. Now it's just a matter of cleaning up.



A few turns later I advanced to the pier. Duessel tanked two shaman hits just before the pic, taking him to half HP. With Artur, Vanessa and Tana dead, we don't really have anyone good to deal with the shamans here. Lute perhaps, but she was needed on the other side.



We got through the hardest part, but the boss area looks like this. We're going to slowplay this and let the moving enemies come to us. Then we'll lure in the rest one by one. Safe and easy.



Lute & Co are way ahead as they had the easier route. They'll kill the last enemy, recruit Ewan from the village, and visit the shop (nothing worthwhile there, as it turns out). They'll also take out those mages so they won't attack the other group over the wall.



It's time to commence operation Save Marisa. The best method I came up with was to strip Duessel of all his weapons and send him in range of her to lure her out, then recruit her with Ewan. It worked well and we have a new Myrmidon in our group!

We had just the boss left. He's tough, but he doesn't move, so all we needed to do was to kill everyone else first, then kill the boss in 1 turn with as many units as it'd take. Turns out it only took two, as Duessel critted and stole all the EXP. At least he got a full 100 from it!



We got some other levels up too
Neimi x2, Gilliam x2, Natasha x2, Franz x2, Garcia x2, Kyle, Lute, Dozla, L'Arachel, Duessel.

Save:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/7vit1n...285%29.SAV

Next time: Bolting Roulette! With our high res units dead!

[Fenn]

Nicely done. Now I have to figure out how to negotiate the next chapter safely. It's another chapter where you have to hurry, and this time the boss with Bolting is here to stay. In the meantime:

Here we are again with Seth in Valni. Ewan almost eats through a whole Fire tome roasting zombies, but the results prove to be unsatisfying:


He can promote to Mage or Shaman, but with stats like these I think the choice is just academic.


In other news, Gilliam receives a long-awaited promotion to General for the next chapter, gaining Swords and Axes. Great Knight would give him six movement instead of five, but the other stat gains are lower (particularly in Speed and Res) and we'll have up to three other candidates for the class anyway.

[Katon]

New units:

Ewan is the third trainee; like the other two, he gets a ton of luck, has meh growths otherwise to compensate for the extra level-up chances, and will probably turn out fairly well if he can get caught up. Unfortunately, he's the last to join, so with the variant rules banning grinding while he's still 10+ levels behind half the party and our version starting out a bit slowly, it's really not clear how he's going to catch up. He's not far enough behind his averages to kick him out the party if we had a good way to level him, but since we don't . . .

Marisa is the game's second swordmaster. Better luck and resistance than Joshua, but worse HP, strength, and constitution and she joins at the same level despite appearing seven chapters later; he pretty clearly gets the better end of that tradeoff. On the other hand, she's going to dodge and crit like crazy, so as long as she gets enough strength she's a perfectly solid unit. At the rate we're going through people, that's a good thing.

Best of luck with the Bolting, Fenn; do we still have Pure Waters lying around somewhere?