Ten Tips to Improve Fire Emblem # 5 - Encouraging Teamwork

                          One of the interesting things about gaming communities comes from all the little words and phrases we like to make up. Every community I’m aware of does this and the Fire Emblem community is no different. I recently learned about a new word that came up in several threads in the serenesforest.net forums. That new word is low-manning. As its name would suggest, low-manning is used whenever a player uses a small yet optimal team to beat a goal or a certain level. In the threads where I saw this word being used the complaint was that Fire Emblem as a whole encourages the player to use small teams while punishing the player for using larger ones.

                 Personally I don’t do solo runs nor do I do ltc playthroughs. I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people who will be reading this post don’t play for low turncounts in the majority of their playthroughs. I could be wrong on this and obviously this won’t apply to everyone, but that’s just the impression that I’m getting. While I don’t think that the world would end if this issue weren’t addressed in future Fire Emblem titles I do think that the next step in the evolution of the franchise would be to encourage the player to use larger teams in general. I also think that it would be in the best interest of the series if future games could not be soloed in future titles. So how can we encourage this play-style to become more relevant?

• Bring back fatigue: Yep, everybody who’s played Thracia 776 should have seen this coming from a mile away. For those of who don’t know what the fatigue system is (go play Thracia 776 and stop depriving yourself you miserable fool)   I’d encourage you to go here to learn more about the mechanic. The simplified version is that everytime a character makes an action (fighting, healing etc) their fatigue meter goes up. When their fatigue meter exceeds their maximum HP the unit cannot be deployed in the following chapter. What’s even better is the fact that even if a character did not fatigue out in one level the current amount of fatigue that they have would carry over into the next level. If done properly this can prevent soloing or low-manning because if a certain OP character gets used too much the player will be punished accordingly. This also punishes the player for grinding since fatigue applies even if a player fights in an arena or faces off against endless enemy reinforcements.

                There are a couple of things that must be done in order to increase the mechanic’s effectiveness. For starters, the enemy density needs to increase so that the chances of fatigue are significantly higher. I would also add that fatigue can be trivialized if the player can skip entire levels so things like Warp or Rescue would need to not be present in order to make fatigue more relevant. The last thing I would add is that decreasing the fatigue meter should be difficult to do, if its even done at all. Thracia 776 had S-drinks which I believe were rare, but I would take this one step further and suggest that future games with this mechanic do away with an item like this and either have fatigue decrease through inaction (i.e. not healing or fighting) or through non-deployment like how it was done in Thracia 776.   

• Lower the overall durability of the player’s units: One of the best ideas that was brought up in the forums that discussed this topic was the idea of lowering the durability of the player’s units. While I subjectively don’t like this idea I do think that there’s a lot of merit behind this line of thinking that deserves to be explored. Fire Emblem 12 is notorious for this, especially in the harder difficulty settings. In the harder difficulties everyone in the player’s army dies in 2 hits on average. Combine this with the fact that enemies have reliable hit rates and you’ve got a game that cannot be broken (or at the very least cannot be easily broken). All of a sudden the strategy of putting your OP Jeigan character on a fort doesn’t work, because that Jeigan will die in 2 hits. 
  
  
  
  
  

                     Conversely, let’s look at Gaiden. In Gaiden Alm starts the game out getting 28 Hit KO’ed by enemy units in the first level. 28 hits. Let that sink in for a moment. 99.9 % of all the Gaiden levels don’t even have 28 enemies, let alone the very first level of the game. Also, what’s even more insane is that Alm hasn’t even grown a single point in defense yet. Obviously enemy units get stronger throughout the game, but most enemies on average kill Alm in 10 hits or more. That level of durability basically screams “ALM SOLO” in capital letters. There are a handful of enemies that can kill Alm in 4 or 5 hits (wizards) but they usually don’t have the best accuracy, they drain their own HP every time they do so and Alm wrecks them hard. The point here is that really high levels of durability contribute heavily towards being able to solo the game.

              I’d also like to finish this point by quoting the person who conveyed this idea because he / she said it so much better than I can:

                 “At the lower end of the spectrum defense is not bad but it gets exponentially better(in terms of how many units a character can survive) as the stat gets higher and higher, whereas the other stats usefulness are generally more linear as they increase. Like a character with 21 HP and 15 Defense can take on 4 enemies with 20 ATK each , but a character with 21 HP and 19 defense can take on 20 of those same enemies just from an extra 4 defense, and as the stat climbs the number of enemies a  single character can survive on(especially with healing such as Nosferatu, Sol, Aether) will reach infinity.

Really high defense is only really being stopped by things that ignore defense(and also resistance), enemies having an overwhelming amount of attack(which is in some games like FE12 H3, FE13 Lunatic,Lunatic+ but leads to some characters just being so weak they can't be used in other difficulty settings with the enemy offense almost balanced round those with the best durability and even then those best characters have methods to still outpace the enemy offense).” (Source: Arvilino - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?s=67fa3fc1e54982d90dc57c67c30da9a0&showtopic=41176&page=2)

• Increasing the number of utilities and roles available to playable units: So one idea I’ve had a lot of fun toying around with is the idea of expanding the type of things that a playable unit can do. As it stands there are three ways in which a playable unit can have worth in a Fire Emblem game:

You become a combat god

You abuse the warp staff

You become a dancer

             

                     There’s not a lot of room for a cast of 40 - 70 characters to have unique and meaningful contributions when all three of these functions can be easily performed by 3 or 4 different units. If we increase the number of utilities that a unit has access to, it could lead to team-work. For example:

                 - What if we had a character that made super useful items for the player?

                 - What if we took Tanith’s Reinforce skill and expanded on that?

                 - What if we had a character whose primary function was to act as a Rally-bot or whose purpose was to boost stats in meaningful ways? Or just a character who had a higher than average number of supports so that they could act as a support bot?

                 - What if we took the Dragon’s Vein concept from Fates and expanded on that? I think it would be pretty cool to have a mage whose sole purpose would be to alter the terrain of the map in ways that would benefit the player.

                  You see where I’m going with this? If we could come up with ways for playable units to be unique or useful without having to be combat gods I think that would go a long way towards providing interesting Fire Emblem games. Heck, I’m getting excited just THINKING about the possibilities that could stem from this idea.

• Lowering experience gains for overleveled units: Pretty self-explanatory. From what I’ve heard Fates has already done a pretty good job at doing this. If this turns out to be true then I would say that future games should just keep on doing this. 
  
  
  
  
  

• Get rid of the Ests: Yeah I said it. Underleveled weakling scrubs like Rolf, Nino, Wendy or a considerable chunk of the FE 11 & 12 casts do nothing to help the game. It’s bad enough to have OP combat gods that can destroy everything in their path but it’s even worse when you get scrubs that have little to no redeeming qualities to them. A game that encourages teamwork should in theory give the player units that have a good mixture of flaws and strengths. Every character, in my opinion, should join the player ready to use from the word ‘go’. 
   

                            Also, it doesn’t count if the unit can be buffed up by hours upon hours of grinding or pouring tons of stat-boosters into them. It also doesn’t count if you purposefully chip away at the enemy so that they can get the kill either. All of those things could make anyone good and it speaks more about the grinding / stat-booster dump than it does about the character. In short, in order for a character to be considered necessary and useable they should be able to contribute WITHOUT having to need these things. Every unit should give the player a viable to reason to use them. Underleveled weakling units do not provide adequate incentives for this to happen.

• Increase the relevance of stat buffs and debuffs: Judging from what I’ve seen and read, this is basically what Fates does. The best example of this are the Hidden Weapons. Hidden Weapons are basically kunais and shurikens that have consistent 1 - 2 range and they all come with the ability to inflict stat penalties on enemy units. This has a lot of wonderful implications for the game (I’m making assumptions here so any Fates player that reads this should feel free to confirm or deny this). For example, let’s say that Seth or Sigurd got hit with 2 Steel Kunai. Assuming that the debuffs can stack (they can in some circumstances if my information is correct) 2 different attacks in 2 different rounds with a Steel Kunai means that Seth and Sigurd just lost 6 strength and 8 defense and resistance. That’s a pretty big drop right there. It’s going to be a lot more difficult to solo the game when your durability takes a major hit.

                      This also means that playable thieves don’t need to kill in order to be useful. Assuming that enemy units are legitimately difficult (which I believe that they are in Conquest) those stat debuffs could really come in handy. Other methods of buffs and debuffs come via the personal skill system, which I also happen to be a big fan of. Being able to influence the game by making yourself stronger and enemies weaker gives each character their own unique flair. When done properly personal skills can serve to either help the character support other characters by giving them nice little stat boosts or it can make that individual unit that much better, which would hopefully increase their usability. 

                  So to sum it all up, by doing all of the above suggestions I hope that future Fire Emblem installments can start encouraging more team efforts on the part of the player. By encouraging the player to use bigger teams, I believe that the strategical aspects of the game would be greatly enhanced and that Fire Emblem would be taken to the next level.