A boss rant

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21

If you cut off enemy’s food and other supplies, it doesn’t matter if the enemy doesn’t surrender.
In that case, you can simply overpower them when they are out of food and weak from hunger.
That way, the damage to your allies will be far less than if you fight normally.

Even at the stage when the gates are breached, the enemy has three options

  1. flee
  2. surrender
  3. resist.

There are two major rationalizations for the enemy to choose option 3.
The first is when they can expect early reinforcements to arrive.
A building without walls has no defense, so if you expect reinforcements within a few days at the latest, you may resist.
// The enemy and the ally are in the opposite position, but I think FE8 ch19 Last Hope is such a stage.
// At dawn, the Loston army will come to the rescue, so you can keep it until then.

The other time is when you become a discarded pawn to give the king time to escape.
If you can hold out for even a few hours, if you can get the king to flee farther, those who have sworn absolute loyalty will resist, even at the cost of their own lives.

However, FE’s castle battles are often neither.
That’s why they seem unnatural.
Most of those battles are pointless.

Even if the protagonist is young, if there is a character playing the role of a military strategist, it is unnatural not to suggest this.

On the other hand, if you look at it as a game, the maze-like castle battles in the enemy’s stronghold make the game more fun.
Bandit races to steal treasure chests hidden by the enemy entertain the player.

Besides, the final battle lays siege to the enemy and waits for 100 turns.
And a game where you have to Defeat Zephyr and Ashnard, who are ration by hungry, weak and unable to move, will not sell without appeal.

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22

I don’t necessarily agree with this, most FE games have you play as the leader of an small elite group of soldiers, not an entire army like the games seem to imply, essentially you’re comparing a small group invading a castle to an entire army occupying it.

The only games that I could see this being true is in FE4 and FE2/15 where you either control your entire force at once, or it’s highly implied that a large army is rallying behind the main character. Even then FE4 does this concept right and FE2/15 rarely has a true castle siege.

23

If you are not fighting with a large army like in FE6 or FE8, but with a small unit like in FE7, you may want to have missions to invade the enemy’s castle.

The story of a large army and a small one is completely different.
In the first place, with a small force, you can’t do siege attacks because there are too few of them.
You can’t fight like a decisive battle, so fights like guerrilla warfare will be mainstream.

// Looking at FE7 alone, the Black Fang seem like a strange group with an army that could rival a country’s, but that’s only because the protagonists are acting in small numbers.
// In fact, the battles in FE7 are very small-scale battles, not large-scale ones like an all-out war between countries.

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