Astaroth records (crappy video) strategies for beating Eligor's Spear maps

Continuing the discussion from [FE 8 The Eligor's Spear v.1.0 release]([FE 8](Full-Length) The Eligor's Spear v.1.0 release):

This isn’t really intended as a let’s play or anything, mostly just me wanting to give potential feedback & also get these strats down on video before I forget them.

I’ve got a feeling that I’m going to restart my actual playthrough of this hack and I don’t want to have to come up with the strats again.

 
Anyway, here’s 4 fairly short (5-10 min each) videos on the Prologue chapter.

Oh and quick note, the quality is probably pretty bad + I forgot sound on the first vid. And if you want to not waste time I’d recommend just watching the 2nd and 4th videos as the 1st and 3rd don’t add much as I’m basically using the same strategy with minor variations.

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Ok so I’m finally done with Chapter 1 Nightfall Ambush.

Huge disclaimer: I watched Shvico play this chapter on Eligor’s Spear v1.1 (and maybe the 1.3 version as well~~?~~) 2 days ago, and while I haven’t rewatched it yet (I’ll do that now, and hopefully I didn’t just end straight up copying him other than using rescue to make Agnessa run away with Grismond) I most definitely got influenced by it.

At least I haven’t watched his Karkos Mountains (well actually I did watch the beginning before I realized I shouldn’t be doing that) and while I did watch the Pirate Map my strategy is thankfully quite different (not sure how much is because of the different game versions though). So at least there should be better/more original strategies shown for the following chapters (when I get around to recording them that is).
 

Anyway… here’s Part 1 (Recorded Yesterday) Note that only the final attempt in Part 2 and none in Part 1 show me actually winning. Don’t watch Part 1 if you’re someone looking for a guide on how to beat the map, watch Part 2.

And here’s Part 2 ( Recorded Today/Just before making this post).

I put some notes in the video descriptions, but I don’t have much to say besides that the 1st attempt was me trying to showcase the rough idea of how I beat the map the first time while missing the red gem (and I failed spectacularly this time) while the following attempts are how I tried to beat it with all objectives.

Most notable in Part 1 is that I really struggled with the Archer, Skylar can easily dodge tank all the Axe dudes, but not the Archer. So I tried to use Agnessa’s 2 range to deal with him, which meant that she couldn’t get to the right side to help Francis as quickly, and that just leads to constantly being 1 turn behind where they should be.

Besides that I also tried to get Skylar to rescue Grismond (I think I copied that part as well?) but it just didn’t work out, instead in Part 2 I just settled for having Agnessa return earlier and Skylar running back to the starting area after stealing the red gem (which I didn’t actually do because of unlucky crit killing the pirate).
 

Edit: Now that I was finally done with this chapter and rewatched Shvico’s video (Chapter 1 Night Ambush Eligor’s Spear 1.31 I most definitely copied him, at least enough to ‘rediscover’ the same things even on the parts I didn’t directly copy.

I did end up making some improvements though (At the very least I remembered to get some free Steal EXP turn 1), and I think what I ended with is more reliable(?), and the strategies diverge more from turn 3+. So thankfully at least there’s worth to seeing both instead of me just skipping this chapter.

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Chapter 2:

Notes: I’m not actually using the save shown in the “successful” Chapter 1 video , because Skylar critted the Pirate with the Red Gem, so to get it I replayed the 1st chapter again later. Naturally I replayed it the same way, except this time Skylar didn’t get a “lucky” crit, but this also means that unit stats gained from level ups might differ.

Also, I haven’t really been showing player unit stats, because most units have had their bases and not much else, but now there’s been some level ups and there can be a few break points. (Though I don’t actually remember if I showed stats in Part 5, but you can just quickly check the beginning of part 1 since the savefile is the same.)

Things that immediately come to mind: If Camian has gotten to 10 Speed he won’t get doubled by the Archers.

A Francis without any defensive level ups can get killed by the Steel Axe Fighter + Monk on turn 1 enemy phase, depending on their stat variance.

You can kill the Monk with Francis on Enemy Phase if Avanni or Francis got better STR/MAG level ups, or if you use stat booster. You’d need +1 or +2 depending on enemy stat variance.

 
p.s. there’s some more Chapter 2 videos in the playlist (but I didn’t bother to directly link to them here), because I kept making mistakes.

I originally thought I’d basically beat this chapter in one or two tries since I was pretty sure I had my strategy down, so I initially stopped recording when I’d mess up with some item management stuff and the like.

But then it turned out that I really didn’t know what to do at the end, and tbh even with the successful part 4 run I still feel like I’m not using every unit as optimally as I could at the last stretch.

It might be better to just kite the reinforcements coming from the the ship and have most of the fighting force up top.

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While I was remaking the strat for Chapter 3 Karkos Mountain I started to notice some odd enemy AI behavior, mostly thanks to save states that I’ve started to use (I started resetting whenever Agnessa would crit, but she does that quite often thanks to her 25%+ crit so it’s just not realistic to completely start over, and therefore I decided to just use save states and burn some RNs whenever she’d crit to make her never crit.)

The enemy Mage decided between attacking Agnessa or the healer (forgot his name sry bud) depending on whether Francis stood in front of Skylar or not.

And that’s really strange since both of them are outside the Mage’s range regardless so it shouldn’t have any affect.

In fact it was pretty strange that the Mage attacked Agnessa instead of the healer, as while Agnessa has lower Res she can retaliate while the healer can’t.

 
p.s. video might look extra crappy cause I finally figured out how to use some video editing tool, so I could at least split up the otherwise over-an-hour-long video into just the relevant part. But it all became a lot darker for some reason.

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Maybe there are some intricacies to Target Priority that’d explain the behavior, but I’ll take the easy way out and blame it on emulator mishaps instead, lol.

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Now I’ve tried it with No&GBA as well and it’s still the same, though I guess since the save file was originally from VBA it could still be VBA’s fault somehow. Haven’t tried it with any other emulator besides these two since I only have these two installed.

I did notice something though, the Mage has 2% crit against Francis who has only 8 luck (Avanni has 9 and Camian 7, everyone else should have 0% crit against them) so maybe that had something to do with it.

 
Oh and by the way, I did check with FEBuilder and the Mage’s AI2 is set to “If possible to attack in 2 turns, move towards enemy”, which perfectly lines up with the tiles that change whether the Mage attacks Agnessa or Nigel.

Whenever Francis is within movement rage x2 + attack range the Mage attacks Agnessa (who retaliates) but when he’s not it goes for Nigel instead.

Though in the end it doesn’t seem like the crit had anything to do with it, because I eventually ended up cheating with febuilder to give francis a hoplon guard for comparison. So maybe it is in fact a VBA issue after all.

Also, unrelated to this weird AI bug(?), and also a bit late… but I rewatched Shivco’s Chapter 1 Nightfall Ambush video and noticed he got all the talk conversations, which I didn’t really care about cause I don’t really read dialog… But do they have some gameplay relevancy? Maybe build supports faster? (Though I don’t think Skylar & Grismond can build support…)

 
EDIT: After having read this [FE7] The Official AI Documentation Thread, the “[6] Penalty: Range and attack power of opponents (080391E4)” section in particular, I see that this behavior was not a bug.

Turns out the GBA AI is a lot more complicated than I thought, and whether or not Francis would be in range to attack was in fact taken into account.

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Nope, no gameplay relevancy at all. They’re there for flavor if you will.

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