A Further Look Into Conquest's Gameplay Part 2

                                     If you’re feeling bored while reading this feel free to start a drinking game and here is the rule: Take a shot whenever you read something along the lines of “I like the idea but the execution is off” or some kind of variation of that. It’ll come up a lot and for good reason. Okay, let’s get started then.

                       Skills: Conquest has a great skill system. I would argue that the Fates skill system is the best in the series. Why? Well for starters Conquest gives enemies skills and not only that, but also powerful / threatening skills. Why is this important? Well one of the problems in previous games that implemented the skill system is that the player’s units always got really good skills while enemies generally speaking wouldn’t get any, or if they did their skills would be pretty weak by comparison. For all the problems that Awakening had they at least tried to give generic enemies powerful skills. Granted, Awakening went overboard in Lunatic + but it still felt like a step in the right direction to me. Then along comes Conquest and suddenly the skills are fair again (well most of them. I’ll cover the ones that aren’t fair or just aren’t good in a minute) but still threatening. I also LOVE some of the new skills that Fates introduced or tweaked. Here are a few examples:

• Wary Fighter:  This should be the default skill for Armor Knights. Being able to prevent enemies from double attacking is a FANTASTIC idea that goes a long way toward reducing an enemy’s damage output. Slow, tanky enemies with Wary Fighter are harder to deal with because you can’t just stomp them into the ground by double attacking them. Moreover, this is a fair skill too because it doesn’t screw the player over either. This skill should definitely stay.

• Live To Serve: Again, I’m a really big fan of the idea of the healer being able to heal themselves. It always seemed tedious to heal a healer that took damage so this skill is right up my ally. I would like to see this become the default skill for healer classes.
  
  
  

• Counter: I never really liked the Awakening version of Counter. It more or less punished the player for counter attacking which there was nothing you could really do about it outside of attack them first from a distance or hope you killed the enemies first. Fates ended up fixing Counter so that it only worked when the player initiates an attack and only when the player initiates an attack up close. There are so many different ways to deal with the Fates version of Counter, but the skill is still powerful enough to force the player to pay attention which is what Counter is designed to do. Fates made Counter fair and I’m okay with this version of Counter sticking around.

• Personal Skills: This is another fantastic idea that Fates introduced that I think should also become a staple of the series. Personal skills give each individual unit their own unique flavor and normally they can be taken advantage of tactically. While there are some that seem situational (IE Selena’s personal skill) they do at least cause the player to sit back and think which I consider a good thing. Future games should work on personal skills that are more consistent and tactical, but at least it’s a really good step in the right direction.

The Negatives

                          I wish I could say that all the skills in Fates were awesome but unfortunately that is not the case. While most skills do a fantastic job at adding to the gameplay there are some skills that detract from the experience.

• Staff Savant: Staff Savant is one of those skills. The main problem with Staff Savant is that it gives enemies unlimited uses of certain staves that really should not have unlimited uses. Have you ever dealt with an enemy that had access to unlimited Freeze staves? That crap is annoying and tedious. How about infinite uses of Entrap? Or even worse….infinite uses of the Hexing Rod? Yeah this does not lend itself to good gameplay. It makes powerful staves too powerful and eliminates the balance put on them.

• Lunge, Entrap, Pass:  So why did I put these two skills and one staff here together? Well they all have something in common: They screw over player unit positioning which is bad for the game. Lunge helps the enemy out far more than it does the player since it’s most effective when large groups of units with this skill use it. Furthermore the only real solution to Lunge is either killing them first before they get a chance to use the skill or killing the Lunge user on the counterattack. In order to achieve either result in an optimal manner you have to boost your stats. In other words, Lunge promotes stats over positioning and that’s not a good thing. 
  
  
  
  
  

                           The Entrap staff is even worse since it can be used at a distance with no consequences of the user should the Entrap staff miss. Once again the optimal solutions here are either:

1. Boost your stats so that you can take a hit from the enemy hoard and kill them (For example in Chapter 26 I let my paired up Xander get in range of an Entrap maid because his stats were so high that I could kill the two sorcerers and the maid)

2. Get out of range and then kill them on your turn

3. Use the Silence staff: This is more of a temporary solution since Silence only works for one turn which means that this isn’t as reliable as the previous two solutions. Plus what happens when Silence misses?

                   So yeah, I think you get the point. The Entrap staff doesn’t do much to encourage strategy outside of “stay out of their range or kill them”. I consider Entrap to be worse than the Hexing Rod since the Entrap staff could not be solved with a Restore staff while the Hexing Rod could, plus the Entrap staff is a little too punitive.

                   The Pass skill lets enemies ignore player unit positioning which forces the player to box in weaker units or forces the weaker units to run away. It’s the least bad of these three but I still don’t think the game benefits from its existence. 

                   Overall: I really like what Fates did to the skill system. It added personal skills (which is great), it made up some new skills which added to the tactics of the game and it found a way to make enemies stronger. Now unfortunately there are still some glaring weaknesses but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives here.

                     Debuffing: Of the three Fates installments Conquest has the highest number of enemies with the power to debuff player units. Debuffing is a fantastic idea since its job is to keep your best units from steamrolling the game. This raises the question of how we deal with his. Unfortunately, the answer here is “boost your stats so high that even if you take a debuff it won’t matter”. This is something that really surprised me during my run of Conquest Lunatic mode. For most of my playthrough I just didn’t care about whether or not my units got debuffed because overall it generally didn’t affect me as much. I think this is because I started taking advantage of all the resources at my disposal which really made a difference here. Take for example this picture of my Xander.

                                That Xander has + 14 Speed in addition to being fed 3 Speedwings prior that particular level. That’s insane! I had absolutely zero problem with Xander getting a speed debuff because he’d still be fast enough to double attack virtually every enemy on the map. When I initially uploaded this picture onto my Facebook profile people were pointing out that there were still other things I could do to boost Xander’s speed which further proves my point at how ridiculously easy it is in Fates to boost one’s stats.

                              

                                Once you figure out how to properly boost your character’s stats debuffing loses most of it’s bite. In other words, instead of debuffing preventing stat-stacking it encourages it because the game provides no other alternatives to dealing with it. I would still prefer to keep debuffing in future installments, but it’s in serious need of some polishing.

• The first thing I would do is give debuffs the power to instantly nullify stat boosts. Going back to the example of my Xander, if he gets hit by a Seal skill or any Hidden Weapon his + 14 speed, along with all his other stats boosts, should vanish and instead be replaced with whatever the debuff was supposed to be. This would do a better job of “juggernaut prevention” since boosting your best character’s stats would no longer be a guarantee to victory.

• The second thing I would do is make the debuffs effect last for a shorter period of time. Maybe instead of recovering by 1 per turn you could recover by 2 per turn. Another idea would be to make them only last for one phase. This would still make their effect sting, but it wouldn’t screw you over forever.

• The last thing I would do is provide skills and items that undid the effects of debuffs. Giving some units access to skills that make them immune to debuffs give them a niche since debuffing would be something you’d rather avoid. How about a staff that undoes the effects of debuffing? That would encourage the player to continue moving forward.
  
  
  
  
  

                             Overall: Debuffs are a cool idea that have a lot of potential, but their current execution in Fates leaves room to be desired. With a few tweaks and some extra polish I think that debuffing could live up to its full potential.

                            Weapons: The last thing I wanted to bring up here is the weapon system. Fates made some bold changes to the weapon system and I think it’s worth talking about to see if these changes helped or hurt the game. First, the positives:

1. Hand Axes & Javelins got nerfed: Hand Axes and Javelins have had this coming for a long time now. 1 - 2 range weapons are really good. They can dish out free damage without fear of a counterattack and they also let the player defend themselves during the Enemy Phase. Fates came along and gave the player a sufficient reason to NOT use these weapons. It’s about time.
2. Bows don’t suck: Another problem with having 1 - 2 range weaponry is that they  trivialized bows since they had the same range as bows without the drawback of them. Well now javelins and hand axes have HUGE drawbacks that bows don’t have. For starters you can actually double attack with bows. It’s a really nice change of pace

3. Weapon effects: The biggest change to the Fates system of handling weapons is that the usefulness of a weapon is determined by what kind of effect it has. This forces the player to put in more thought and effort outside of “should I use a weapon now or wait until later to use it”? It opens the door to a lot of new possibilities and I think it’s a great idea.

                                                                              

          

The Negatives:

1. Lack of an incentive to use a higher rank weapon: One particular habit that I have across all three Fates installments is that I rarely use a weapon whose rank is higher than a C rank. Why? Well most weapons with higher ranks come with severe drawbacks. Here’s a small list of examples:

• Silver weapon debuffs stack continuously and it takes a while for the player to recover.

• Some A or S rank weapons literally halve your strength / magic which means that your usage of these weapons is extremely limited. The strengths that they offer usually don’t counterbalance this.

• Wakizashi / Spear / Tomahawk: 2 range, can’t double attack and they make it easier for the enemy to double attack you. Why should I use them again?

• Excalibur / Pursuer: Both of these weapons come with the “follow up attack speed +5, enemy’s follow up attack speed +5”. What exactly is the point of that? It doesn’t help you double attack since the enemy gains the exact same advantage that you do. In fact, I still don’t understand why Fates chose to change the way double attacks are done. Was there something wrong with the old way of doing things? If there is I’m not seeing it.

                   I could keep on listing examples here but I won’t. Needless to say some weapons go overboard in providing disadvantages to the wielder. Sadly some of them are C rank or lower. 

• Lack of a disincentive to use Iron, Killer and Prf Rank Weapons: Iron and Killer weapons have no debuffs. This means that you can keep on using them however many times that you want and there’s no drawback. I know which weapons I’m using. Not only that but Killer weapons come with the added bonus of dealing x 4 damage when a crit activates. That’s insane! X 3 is already powerful enough, but x 4 more or less ensures that whatever you’re trying to kill will die. Then we have Prf rank weapons which boost stats AND provide 1 - 2 range without any penalties. This basically means that these units almost never have a reason to use any other weapon. Fortunately theseI s are pretty few and far in-between but still.

• Forging exists in a game where weapon durability does not: I know that the game tries to balance this out by making the forging system convoluted but it still bugs me that I can forge an Iron weapon or a Killer Weapon and that weapon will pretty much laugh at over 90 % of all the other weapons that Fates offers to you. Not going to lie, I’m not a fan of the forging system in any of the games where they exist since forging just lets your powerful units become all the more powerful. What’s worse is that in games like Shadow Dragon or Awakening you can forge Brave Weapons and weapons that deal effective damage (like the Wing Spear) and then you get to watch your units cheese entire maps because of it. 
  
  
  
  
  

                                        Overall: I like weapon effects, but the execution here needs polishing. I think John Barkmeyer’s idea of making different weapons perform different functions and be good at different tasks is a better way to accomplish this. I also think that debuffs should never be powerful enough to completely disincentivize a weapon from being used.

                                    Something I’d like to point out is that the successful elements of the Fates weapon system have more to do with weapon effects than the lack of weapon durability. Theoretically speaking you can have weapon durability and weapon effects going on at the same time. I wonder what a hybrid system would look like.