Toggle Background Color
Chapter 6: The Empire cheats at Fog of War
I'm not bitter. I love Fog of War maps. Love them. Yes. Love.
So yeah, the title kind of says it all. Fog of War is an easy way to add challenge to a map, but there's a minor sticking point with regards to it. Namely, the AI cheats like a motherfucker. It always knows where all of your units are and can attack you even if it shouldn't be able to (due to not having a unit in visual range), though this isn't quite as egregious as some other Fire Emblem games. *coughFE6Chp17Bcough*
So obviously, visibility is king on these kinds of map, especially when a cavalier or two can roll up out nowhere and completely fuck up your run. A thief would be ideal, but Colm is kind of awful, so instead we're rolling with these. This is a Torch staff, which does exactly it sounds like, and its primary benefit over a traditional torch (aside from free experience for your healer) is that you can fire it from range.
Like so. This allows us to reveal the area we're about to head into ahead of time rather than by sending Colm into the middle of it.
This reveals our first enemy cavaliers. As Forde demonstrated last chapter, cavs are fucking assholes. They're fast enough to avoid being doubled for the most part, hit reasonably hard, have good defense and insane resistance, and an uncomfortably large amount of HP to whittle down.
The south side doesn't have any cavaliers, but makes up for it with numbers. Soldiers are still ludicrous assholes and will fuck up basically everyone in the south team, so naturally there's four or five of them floating around down here.
Of course, the AI can't stand not fucking with a good plan, so the merc attacks Lyn instead of the soldier like my first three runs.
This guy in the north is a special kind of asshole. On top of being a cavalier, he has an Iron Blade with 15 strength and speed. Admittedly, the blade drags him down to ~12 AS, but he will wreck your shit if you're not using someone like Seth to draw him out.
Unlike cavs, paladins are capable of going on to mountain tiles (for a ridiculous movement cost of 6 per tile). It almost never really matters, but it's nice to know.
The merc coming in first kind of messes with my plans, so let's improvise a little. We're not actually attacking the soldier, I'm just putting up the numbers to say why. No one but Lyn is taking two hits, and if I attack here, odds are better than not she's going to land twice normally. This means she has to take a second hit from the soldier before killing him, and the fighter gets to come in and possibly kill her.
The soldier ends up going after Nino instead, and the fighter doesn't move under normal circumstances so nothing done this turn.
In the north, we have a problem. Josh must get two crits to kill this cav, which is pretty unlikely. With his iron lance, he'll do 12 damage to Neimi - exactly enough to kill her after the archer's hit. The archer is a non-factor thanks to Seth, but someone has to eat the cav's hit. After running the math, I work out that I can have Neimi survive the turn by moving Seth down off the mountain and putting her on it. She'll have 1 HP, but it'll get us through the turn at least.
I also have her use the Beacon Bow to attack the troubadour. It would only do 2 damage, but the fact that she can counter-attack means the cavalier should go after Erk instead. Josh performs as expected, so Erk heals him up.
Natasha patches up Guy in the south. Our target this turn is the soldier directly east of the fort, and if we can tempt the fighter at the bottom, all the better.
Lyn performs her job admirably against the fighter, though I'm not sure what made him decide to attack this turn but not the last one.
Guy saves me a lot of headaches by dodging both attacks thrown his way.
The screen panning to the left means that our cavalier friends have shown up. Eirika's group is far enough out that the forests will block them from following, assuming I can get some bait in range this turn.
Naturally, Josh misses this guy twice and eats another lance to the face.
That ought to do for bait. Neimi is still stuck on that mountain
So let's talk about shamans for a second. They are, as always, the bulkiest of the mage types and Dark magic hits the hardest. However, there was a very interesting change made to Flux (and only Flux, as much as I would love a buffed Luna) - namely, it is now effective against monsters. And this is good, actually. Aside from Luna in FE7, dark magic really hasn't ever had a whole lot going for it in comparison to Light and Anima (Nosferatu is a Light tome in all the non-GBA games before you object). There's only one problem with this.
The hack uses a very...liberal, shall we say, definition of monster.
Nino and Priscilla pick off the soldier, Nino gets more speed. Guy deals with our magical friend.
In the enemy phase, a knight comes to play and Guy gets a fantastic level, capping skill.
With a little help from Neimi, Josh can definitely dispatch our cavalier friend now. He gets a very non-myrmidon level for it.
We're on the home stretch now, Novala is hanging out one tile SE of the mage.
Guy's got a bit of a trial ahead of him, but the defense and avoid bonuses from the fortress should mean he'll be okay. Lyn is a little lower, to try and keep as few soldiers going after him as possible.
He racks up a pretty impressive body count, and maxes speed while he's at it.
And that cleans up the south part of the map.
And here comes the spider. We've got two turns to finish this up.
There you are. The mage is pretty inconsequential and I'm basically going to ignore him. He'll go after Erk, but he can't kill him, and Josh will be taking care of Novala next turn.
Standard shaman fare. Hits pretty hard, not fast enough to be really dangerous. Just don't bring in Priscilla.
Let's do a little cleanup before we take out Novala. Natasha starts by healing up Nino after she was bait for a soldier.
With a little help, this sets up Eirika to kill the soldier.
This is a bit of a longshot, but the mage can't kill Neimi in response, so why the hell not?
And that'll be the end of this chapter. See you at Renvall.