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Tower 5 - Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, a Telltale Games production

Tower 5 is where all of the hacker's little decisions meant to give the monsters a fighting chance come together and demonstrate why you need to be really careful when you fuck with enemy growth rates and such. Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of making monsters more formidable, but I hope this is ample demonstration of why this particular method isn't the way to do it.

So let's play a little game. See if you can spot the problem with this map. Go on, don't be shy.



The magic number here is 24. Because that's how much attack every single enemy on the map has at minimum. Pretty much every enemy is going to charge us at once, so we'll be surrounded on both sides with a terrible defensive position. Alternatively, we can try to plug up the corners at the end of the center corridor, but that really just ends up with everyone getting their conga-line action on, and I don't have four healers to back up four gaps that I'll never be able to actually push forward from, no thanks to the stairs by both boss entombed spitting out a revenant every turn for the first 7-8 turns. So how do we deal with a mess like this?



My first inclination was to try and close off one side, but the top is useless without a second physical fighter. Neimi isn't going to cut it, and Marisa can't possibly fend off both sides on her own.



The south is a little better off with Guy, Josh, and Priscilla all capable of holding the line on either side. Josh is sporting about a coin-flip chance of getting hit, and in the worst-case scenario, he'll take 4 or 5 hits (one of the closer revenants has a Fetid Claw) in the process of mowing them down. Assuming I can spare a healer for him, this is actually one of the better options I have available to me.



Guy is similarly safe, but his safety stems from being unable to one-round the revenants. The why doesn't really matter, only that he's only taking one guaranteed hit per turn.



The north group regroups a little further south. The goal here is to eliminate the entombed without being in range of 70 billion other revenants by retreating south until I get to the other group.



This was an idea that might have actually worked if I stuck with it enough, but Josh got ganked by every single enemy that attacked him, and died on the last possible attack. After eating four consecutive ~55% accurate attacks (~8.3% chance of happening, after running the actual numbers) I wasn't going to argue with the RNG. So let's try a different strategy.



Defensive line this time. With a healer backing up both lines and ensuring that only one zombie can attack each of my units, this should go much better.



And here we have a problem. Priscilla is strong enough to counter-kill the revenants, and that is the absolute last thing I want right now.



Unsurprisingly, she falls after taking 12 damage a shot from the revenants.



Swap a couple units out, take a new approach. Gerik has been loaded up with a full set of Elixirs, and he's going to be entrusted with basically soloing the entire northwest corner. With 18 defense, he'll take 6-8 damage from each revenant, and ~15 from the entombed, so as long he pops an Elixir the first two turns or so, he should be okay.



Marisa blocks off the northeast corner. She isn't strong enough to one-round the revanants, and she'll be backed up by Ewan and Natasha regardless, so her survivability isn't an issue.



And speaking of Ewan...







In the south, Guy has tagged out for Lyn, but otherwise it's business as usual. Erk is playing the healer, and Priscilla is backing up whoever needs it.



Gerik pops his first elixir on Turn 2.



Thanks Ewan, spectacular level.



The southeast corner is the biggest clusterfuck. There's a Steel Bow archer and Fetid Claw revenant to contend with on top of the thousand other regular revenants all ~4 spaces away. If anything is going to go horribly wrong with the plan, it'll be right here.



So here's what I came up with to avoid needing to load a savestate 15 times. First, Priscilla will kill the Fetid Claw revenant, and she must do it in a way that ensures she takes no damage (whether by critting or or the revenant missing; in this run, the former happened).



That enables Josh to kill the archer. Now, we talk about the AI. Priscilla has lower defense than Josh, so she's the default target if an enemy is in range. Three of them are in range of her, and the only way to kill her would be if all three land (roughly a 21.6% chance of happening). The remaining three revenants will attack Josh and accomplish nothing regardless of whether or not they land.



We're just on a roll here.



Naturally, it waits until the very last chance for Priscilla to dodge, but she gets the job done regardless.



Gerik picks up more speed after killing the entombed. Any danger he might have been in has now been thrown out the window.



This archer took a shot a Natasha, so Ewan puts him down.



Gerik takes his second Elixir and positions himself to take out all of the remaining revenants this turn.



And here we have our first real goodie of the tower. Starting on this floor, all chests are randomized, so you can get all kinds of goodies if the RNG is kind to you. We got really lucky on this chest because...
code:

Killing Edge  22%
Killer Lance  22%
Killer Axe    22%
Killed Bow    22%
Red Gem       8%
Blue Gem      4%



code:

Thunder        22%
Shine          22%
Luna           22%
Recover Staff  22%
Red Gem        8%
Blue Gem       4%


I actually kind of feel a little screwed by this one. A free Luna or Recover staff would have been nice, but I didn't even get the good gem.



With the southeast taken care of, Josh comes over to back up Lyn.



Not a fantastic level, but I do want to see him start picking up some more speed now that he's promoted.



Marisa gets a fantastic level in the northeast corner. After that harrowing first turn or two, we're actually almost done here.







Josh takes the lead for going in to the first boss.



Ewan, seriously, get some fucking speed. I will bench your ass if you can't keep up later.



...And then the boss attacked Josh. I wasn't expecting him to move since I was in his range before, but the revenants attacked instead, and the boss is almost always at the top of the enemy turn queue.



Certainly can't complain about the end result, though.



So! Erk being a cleric, he has access to Sage and Bishop. We'll start with Bishop: Slayer is the only reason that anyone cares about them. Making any spell effective against monsters is a nifty trick that pays off handsomely around endgame, and is the only reason Light magic is tolerable on anything ever. I guess they also have a 30-Res cap, but there are very few situations where that's going to be the make-or-break difference over the Sage's 25-Res cap. Considering that Sages have access to monster-effective magic and all four magic schools in the hack...yeah, maybe next time buddy.



Say hello to my premiere Dark magic user who can also throw out Fimbulvetr and Divine/Aura without batting an eye.



Natasha picks up an awful level before we say hello to the second boss.



And Ewan cleans up after Marisa, still failing to get speed. That finishes up Tower 5, but the update isn't quite over yet. I had a few units right near promotion, so I went ahead topped them off in another quick trip.





Two more promotions, then we're done.



This first one I'm only pointing out because it's a really nice little touch, but since Vanessa has a green color scheme (as opposed to Tana's blue), she gets a green wyvern as a Wyvern Knight instead of a blue one like Tana.



The Falcoknight promotion offers a couple more points of HP and an extra point of Def/Res, but it only gives one point of Con compared to the Wyvern Knight's four. In the interest of being able to show off the triangle attack, I have to make one of them a Falco, and Tana is already a wyvern, so thems the breaks.



Neimi's promotion options are similarly boring. You could go Sniper, but we already have Innes and Sure Shot is an awful ability.



There's basically no reason to ever not make Neimi a Ranger. She gets more Con out of the deal, a horse, real weapons, and marginally better caps.



It helps that the promotion bonuses are pretty fantastic too. Anyway, that gives us a nice squad of promoted units to unleash on the rest of the game, so I'll see you all for Chapter 13 where we can do this all again to level up Amelia this time!