Sacred Stones SG

[Jowy]

Any tips for saving Amelia? I haven't saved her before, and I feel that "test runs" would be against the spirit of the variant, so I'll have to get it right on the first try.

[Katon]

I think all the enemies in that central corridor are set to rush you once you unlock the door, so just gather up in front of it ready to kill the non-Amelia ones with Franz or Ephraim left over to talk to her. If it's a healed Ephraim you can also just use him as part of a wall of bodies for a turn in case you can't kill them all.

This is also the point where enemies start pulling out the effective lances and reaver weapons, so keep an eye on their equipment. And leave Tana where she is so she doesn't attract the nearby mage, he's within (move+) attack range of every other square in her cell.

Fenn, do you remember any tricks to rescuing Amelia?

[Fenn]

Beyond what you said, not much. Opening the main door triggers Cavalier reinforcements from the north, which can make it tough to isolate Amelia. Like Katon said, lure her down to the entrance while sitting just outside her attack range or putting a unit with no 1-range weapons within her range. If she gets into combat with a unit that can fight back, she'll probably die.

I'd aim to recruit her (and then rescue her with a mounted unit) two turns after you open the door, so that the Cavalier reinforcements don't overtake her.

[Jowy]

Played, report tomorrow.

[Jowy]

So, I forgot. Sorry! Trying to remember to do this tomorrow (Friday).

[Jowy]

Chapter 9 - Fort Rigwald

My first real chapter without the damned fog of war, so here's a custom map I made!
Objectives: Kill the boss and seize the throne to win. Recruit Amelia. Keep Tana alive. Loot all three chests.

We had 21 level ups this map, so I'm going to condense those screenies to a neat list instead :P
Watching level ups is like crack for Fire Emblem players, but it clutters up the report, and cropping and uploading takes time.



Franz was put to sleep by the enemy cleric. Status effects are problematic, because we don't have a restore staff yet. We'll get one later in this chapter, but not before we go through this guy.
I had a fun experience with status effects on my normal mode iron man run. There's a stave called Berserk. If it hits, the unit will turn on it's allies.
I didn't bring a Restore staff, and at the time I didn't know that I could access my inventory during a chapter. In FE8 there is no Merlinus, but instead your Lord serves the same purpose.
What ended up happening was my strongest unit getting berserked, then me backtracking through the level for 5 turns before it finally wore off



Garcia was put to sleep the next turn. We moved on, letting Ephraim and Gilliam tank stuff. Franz would need to stay back anyway, because there is a Horseslayer cavalier in the mix.



Ephraim's Reginleif is super useful in this map. It's super effective against Cavaliers and Knights, and there is a constant stream of Cavaliers coming for us throughout the map.
Shaman reinforcements started spawning in. Lucius and Vanessa took care of them. Throughout the chapter, I had our weaker units finish off lured in enemies, then set up our tanks to block off the next wave.



I opened the gate, which is the cue for enemy units to start moving in. Reinforcement cavaliers from north are also on the way now.
Amelia is the highlighted unit. I need to recruit her next turn or she will reach us and throw herself at our weapons.



Well, that was really simple and easy. I'm not sure how I got her killed in my solo run, but I feel a bit dumb for asking advice when it was a complete non-issue to recruit her.
Anyway, Amelia is a Lvl1 Recruit. She's one of the three Trainee units that start BELOW regular Level 1. Once they hit Level 10, they will auto-promote to a regular starting class.
Amelia can promote to a Cavalier or a Knight. Then she can promote a second time with a promotion item to a final class. In FE8 every unit gets 2 choices of what to promote to.
I leveled up one of the other trainees in my solo run. I'd say it wasn't worth it. They need a ton of care and level ups, and the results weren't mind-blowing, at least for me.
I compared Amelia's stats as a Great Knight to a pre-promoted Great Knight we'll get later. At average she'll have much higher SPD, SKL and LCK, but other stats are at even or worse. It's nice, but she needs to be given 38 level ups to reach the level that the pre-promote starts on.
In our variant we only get to use monster battles for trainees, so we might as well train them if we have the will to grind. We've got nothing to lose except our sanity and free-time :P



Amelia was fed her first kill the next turn for novelty's sake I then rescued her out of there, and she sat on the sidelines rest of the map.
We killed the ranged units and advanced deeper into the fortress.



The next threat was the waves of cavalier reinforcements that started spawning in. I had Ephraim and Gilliam block the way south, and Franz the way northeast.
As usual, I gave kills to our lesser units, though I also used up Reginleif charges to not get overwhelmed.
Tana was freed from her prison where she had been AFK to avoid combat (she starts with no weapons).
Who's Tana? Oh yeah, she's also a new unit, a Pegasus Knight. Katon will likely tell you more.

Once the reinforcements stopped, I chose a few units to assault the boss area with. Colm had finished looting the first two chests in the west, and now he could safely get to the third.



Gilliam critted the boss with an Axereaver that we conveniently looted from an enemy just before the boss.
Lute finished the job, and we seized the throne to complete the chapter!

Four levels:
Lute.

Three levels:
Ephraim, Natasha.

Two levels:
Artur, Neimi, Gilliam.

One level:
Colm, Vanessa, Joshua, Garcia, Franz.

Save:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/i02d9o...284%29.SAV

Next time: Expect deaths!

[Katon]

New units! Today's theme is lance-wielders who really wish we were allowed to grind monsters a little more.

Tana joins Vanessa in our pegasus corps. If they're at equal levels, Tana's a better unit; noticeably more HP, strength, and luck, and Vanessa's only big advantage is skill. The problem is, Tana just spent her entire debut map sitting unarmed in a jail cell at level 4. Meanwhile, Vanessa's somewhere around level 9. Peg knights are fragile enough to make catching Tana up on iron man with no monster maps a less-than-thrilling prospect, even on the Eirika route where she joins with equipment and a good map location. Still, you can never have too many good fliers, and "best peg knight in the game" is a payoff that's worth trying for.

Amelia is the second trainee, starting out with a lance she can barely carry and then promoting to a knight (like Gilliam) or cavalier (Franz/Forde/Kyle). Like the other trainees, she's one of the best units in her class if you can get her caught up; the problem is that she shows up massively overmatched in the middle of a nasty run of maps, especially on Ephraim's route. Without access to random maps after she's promoted, I'm not sure how we're going to get her strong enough to survive serious combat, and given that her competition's doing fairly well I'm not sure how much effort she's worth. Hypothetical Caught-Up-On-Levels Amelia is legitimately nice, though. If she goes the path of the knight, she spots Gilliam large chunks of HP and Def along with a couple points of strength in return for being massively faster (even after docking her for constitution), more accurate, and luckier; she's the one general on the series who can actually dodge-tank. As a cavalier, she's basically a swordsmaster with horse and lance access, slicing everything to death two weak hits at a time and dodging like crazy. She's also the most magic-resistant cav, for whatever that's worth.

Since Jowy commented on the trainees overall: I think all three of them, if leveled up to match the rest of the party, can expect to come out with real cases for best-in-class but without being brokenly good. The problem is, it's a decent amount of work to level them and for the latter two it's not clear whether it's worth the effort. Ross shows up early enough to need less handholding and is the only good pre-promotion axe-user in the game, so it's reasonable to hand him axe duties for a while and by the time his prepromoted competition shows up you should have an idea whether he's worth using. Amelia is going to be maybe 10% better than Franz/Gilliam (delete as appropriate) if you like dodge tanks, while taking easily twice the effort to level. The third trainee is either competing with Lute/Artur or heading off to use dark magic, which has gotten a lot less fun since they realized how broken FE7 Luna was.

[Fenn]

Good work on Chapter 9! Now that we've recruited Amelia, it's time to put her through a training regimen so she can have a hope of appearing on our team:

Because with stats like these, she gets ORKO'd by most generics. We'll be visiting the Tower of Valni, an 8-level bonus dungeon whose first floor opens up after beating Chapter 8; subsequent floors are unlocked by clearing storyline chapters. We probably won't be seeing the whole thing until after the main story's done, though. In keeping with the rules, I'm only taking her to Level 1 in her base class.


Amelia and Seth are going to become very familiar with this floor. In order to safely level up, Amelia can only kill one or two enemies before we have to exit Valni and re-enter. Especially when we run into an Entombed as pictured - they can one-shot her at base level.


Eventually Amelia reaches level 10, and I elect to promote her to Cavalier. Promoting to Knight would give +2 Defence, which would go nicely with the 9(!) she already has, but Cavalier's higher movement and Swords access is more important because it lets her keep up with the rest of the army, giving her more opportunites to gain EXP. Many of our units are already surpassing Level 10 and thinking of a promotion - as a level 1 Knight, I feel she'd only fall behind. Plus she gets a unique sprite as a Cavalier!

Chapter 10 preamble:

Chapter 10 is a rescue mission; we have to keep Duessel alive for ten full turns, and unlike most defence maps we have to move quickly to accomplish our objectives. Duessel can handle himself, but we also want to protect his generic friends: we get a Knight's Crest at the end of the chapter if they all survive. The Pirates will rush them immediately, and Mercenary reinforcements will flood in from the forts to the east as well. Fortunately, Duessel's soldiers all carry Vulneraries and aren't shy about using them, so they're fairly easy to keep alive so long as we can make it to them soon enough.

We also need to recruit Cormag, the Wyvern Rider to the southeast. To do so, we must talk to him with either Tana, or Duessel - who himself would need to be talked to by Ephraim first. And since Tana flies and Duessel doesn't, we'll be taking her underleveled self along.


Finally, we'll need to be careful around these boats - they're carrying Ballistas, and they move. It's only one tile at a time, but it adds another wrinkle to our strategy. There's not much room for error or misfortune on this map; a single mistake can easily spiral out of control.

[Fenn]

One more thing...


Lute is, bizarrely, a speed demon at level 14. I'm thinking of promoting her to help with Chapter 10, the extra Move and durability will help her be more aggressive, along with giving us another staff user. What do you guys think?

[BRickAstley]

A quick aside: Chapter 10 here was THE hardest map in my playthrough of Solo Seth Hard Mode; Recruiting Duessel and Cormag and getting both the village items? Not fun.