Ten Tips to Improve Fire Emblem # 3: Map Design

                  So before I begin I highly recommend that everybody see Mangs’ video about map design. It’s very well put together and it brings up a lot of good points that go into making a map:

                  For those of you who read my post titled “Extra Thoughts and listed 3 maps with good map design and 3 maps with bad design I thank you very much for that. My intention is to look at the top 3 games which in my opinion have the best map design and the worst map design. Hopefully by analyzing what previous games have done right and wrong we can learn from them as we move forward when it comes towards making better maps.

Top 3 Games with the Best Map Designs

               Fire Emblem 3 / 12: Mystery & New Mystery of the Emblem

   Fire Emblem Thracia 776

         Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn  

Top 3 Games with the Worst Map Designs

   Fire Emblem 2: Gaiden

                                             Fire Emblem Genealogy of the Holy War

     Fire Emblem Awakening

What Fire Emblem 3 / 12 Got Right

• Best enemy placement in the series. (Especially FE 12)

• FE 12 has the best Enemy A.I. in the series.

• Reinforcements are implemented well and encourage the player to keep moving forward
• Choke-points and terrain are implemented well
• Side objectives are executed creatively
• Both games had unique gimmicks and ideas (like the usage of Gra and Archanea’s troops in Chapter 17)
• Fire Emblem 3 added dismounting, which helped to keep mounted units from totally dominating the game
  
  

  

  
  

  
  

What Thracia 776 got right

• Ballista placement is excellent. Since ballistae are powerful and accurate you actually have to worry about them.
• Best Escape chapters in the entire series.
• Terrain is well implemented
• Thracia also used the dismounting system that Fire Emblem 3 invented.
• Multiple maps give alternative routes to victory
• Side objectives are well implemented
• Chapter 14 is one of the best defense chapters in the game
• The maps gave a fantastic feeling that you were commanding a small, underfunded army that was going up against a better disciplined, better organized and better funded empire that was hell-bent on destroying you
  
  

  
  

  

What Radiant Dawn got right

• Different victory conditions ensured varied strategies
• Elevated terrain had interesting implications and helped the player put thought into his / her positioning
• Elincia’s Gambit rivals Chapter 14 of Thracia 776 in terms of “Best Defense Level” in the series. 3 - 13 is also really good too
• The game gives the player that feeling that they’re fighting in an epic war.
• The player is often pulled in multiple directions
• Decent enemy formations

Can anyone guess which map this is?

What Gaiden got wrong

• Having rout be the game’s only objective means that the strategy is watered down and super simplified requiring significantly less thought from the player.
• Terrain is rarely used in any of the maps. In the few maps that do use it, terrain rarely makes a meaningful impact on the strategy of the level
• Lots of big, open, empty fields
• Low enemy density in a game where weaksauce enemies are the norm
• Game does not punish turtling
• Game does not provide secondary objectives at all
• There are two mazes near the end of the game that are frustrating to navigate and both are a colossal pain in the butt.
• No interesting gimmicks are implemented in any of the levels.
• Game does not provide any side objectives whatsoever 
  
  

  

  
  

What Holy War got wrong

• Gigantic maps exacerbate the dominance that mounted and flying units have over unmounted units earning this game the nickname of “Genealogy of the Horsey War”
• Poor implementation of terrain
• Having the same objective waters down and simplifies the strategy of the game requiring little thought of the player.
• The closest thing the game comes to having meaningful side objectives include sending fliers over to random villages or pulling a Hail Mary to get to a certain enemy. In essence, they require little thought on the part of the player.
• Silesia and the Augustria chapters force the player to do an unholy amount of backtracking that’s tedious and irritating to deal with. 
  
  

  

What Awakening does wrong

• Despite more objectives than Holy War or Gaiden the strategy is mostly the same for the entire game, requiring little thought on the part of the player (there’s a reason why I keep using this phrase over and over again. Can you see what I’m getting at here?)
• Lots of big, open, empty fields.
• Lack of meaningful side objectives for the majority of the game.
• The AI in this game makes enemies act like zombies. They will rush at you with no regard for their safety which make them predictable and in some cases kind of stupid.
• Rarely is the player punished for turtling
  
  

  
  

  

            So as you probably noticed, I repeated myself a lot when talking about what these games did right and did wrong. This should give you a good idea about what goes into making a good map. There are multiple elements that go into a good map, and good maps come in different shapes and sizes. The important thing here is to ask yourself how certain choices affect the player’s strategy. What are the components of well designed map you may ask? Well….

                For starters, there needs to be thoughtful enemy positioning. Something that FE 12 does really well is having multiple enemy units be in range of each other. If you attack one enemy unit chances are you’ll be in another enemy’s range so instead of having to fight against one enemy unit you now have to fight against 2 or 3. This forces the player to consider the consequences of each of their moves because it’s very easy to mess up in the harder difficulties of Fire Emblem 12. Long range enemy weapons like ballista, status staves and siege tomes when utilized properly can help to act as a deterrent to the player’s advancement. Flying units (especially wyvern knights) can successfully serve this purpose too.

                   Another element of enemy positioning involves placing them in groups or formations that the player has to deal with. It’s easy to take out a small handful of enemies, but an actual army on the other hand is a different story altogether. It’s also important to think about what units make up this army or formation that the player has to break. If a group of pegasus knights charges at you, you could deal with them using armor knights, paladins or you could bait them out and then snipe them out of the sky with archers. By contrast, if this formation consists of pegasus knights, swordmasters and a few mages then that’s an entirely different story altogether. Enemies in general are a lot more difficult to deal with when they travel in tight formations or straight-up armies.

              Another defining characteristic of map design comes in the form of secondary objectives. Secondary objectives are when the game designer provides additional goals for the player to achieve that aren’t necessary toward completing the game, but they do add spice and creativity to a map. When done properly they provide incentives for the player to act in a certain way. Examples of secondary objectives are:

1. Treasure chests / villages: Sure they’re usually not crucial toward beating the game, but who the heck wants to skip out on that? They usually provide the player with sweet weapons, stat-boosters and in the case of villages they can often provide recruitable characters. It works even better when the map places a thief or a brigand in a hard to get to spot in the map which is a critical component of doing this right. YOU NEED TO PROVIDE AN OBSTACLE TO THE PLAYER! If you don’t do this then there’s no incentive to rush and the purpose behind placing the treasure chest is all but completely lost.
   
   

   

 

2. Recruitable characters: Everybody with a heart and soul (a.k.a. not yours truly since I am an evil Sith Emperor who has no qualms killing off worthless scrubs like Matthis. Mua! Ha! Ha! Ha!) wants to recruit every playable character in the game. This can provide a nice tricky element to the game since you can’t kill these units off and yet at the same time you don’t want to be killed off by them either. One prevalent example that comes to mind is when trying to recruit Ayra in Fire Emblem 4. Recruiting Ayra is a tricky business since you have to lure her away from the castle without killing, or being killed by, her while also conquering the castle. Many new players (including myself a long time ago) found this process difficult. That being said, you don’t want to make the recruitable characters’ requirement too convoluted otherwise you just get Xavier from FE 5 who’s recruitment is so frustrating and rage-inducing that most players don’t even bother trying to recruit him.
   
   

   

3. Rescuing NPCs: Another way to create a good side objective is to have the player rescue a poor, helpless NPC. In order to do this properly you need to give the player a proper incentive to rescue them. Holy War executes this concept the best since rescuing NPCs gave the rescuer a free level-up. A poor way to do this is to have the NPCs run towards enemy units like Paralogue 3 in Awakening. What’s even worse is that if you save a second and a third villager all you get is a log and a ladle respectively. Are you kidding me? That’s what I get for risking my butt to rescue those imbeciles? Well screw that nonsense! Those pot-heads can go ahead and kill themselves for all I care.