Bases or Growths?

Hi there, I’ve been playing a lot of randomized FE games and mainly the GBA ones because it’s where most hacks are made.
Note that the settings for my randomized plays are nearly untouched from the vanilla,
just randomized the units class and they keep their bases untouched.

In my FE8 Randomized I got a crappy trainee Eirika with her bases and boy oh boy, she’s bad… as a unit. No need to touch the bases, Eirika at base only has 5 Luck, that’s it.

Seth got randomized as a Sage, and it’s not that bad, comparable stats and 10 Con, but 9 base speed is not that good for the mid to late game.

The only good units I was given in the game were 20.
All of them got Base screwed due to their class or got blessed due to their bases and class.

What do you think is more important on any unit? Bases or Growths?

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You can complete any FE game with 0% growths. You cannot, however, do that with all 0 bases (at least without absurd RNG manipulation)

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Both are important.

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bases are pretty much always important, while the importance of growths vary wildly between games - fe3 0% can be cleared at the same speed as growth runs; meanwhile, it took the community until very recently to route fe13 0% lunatic (and L+), and those runs took…liberties when it came to ruleset and speed.

growths aren’t as important functionally as bases, but i think that it’s probably as important (if not more) to the series’ identity as them. personally i wouldn’t complain if, for whatever reason, the next FE game decided to remove growths entirely, but i don’t think that’d be the case for the vast, vast majority of players.

Indeed. Why not have both?

Portrait_beta_seth_fe08

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I would say that growths matter more to my enjoyment of Fire Emblem games. Getting something out of leveling up a character is one of the ways that the games give the player feedback for his actions. In most Fire Emblem games this takes the form of getting more stat increases on units who might be difficult to get kills with than units who can easily get kills (Jagens). Levelling up my units and watching them get stronger is a big part of the fun of the game for me, and because of that, I would probably find a 0% growth run kind of stale and boring, even if it is possible.

It kind of ties into how I’ve never been able to get into Advance Wars. All of the units have a flat base strength, and they’ll be the same throughout the game regardless of how the player plays (outside of adjustments for the CO).

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It depends IMO:

If it’s a Jagen archetype unit bases matter.

If it’s an Oifey archetype unit both matter.

if it’s any other unit mostly growths matter but they have to have average or higher bases.

Bases get you through the start of a character, growths carry your character beyond that point however if the bases are good enough they won’t need growths. Essentially a character with bad growths can still function if they have good enough bases because they’re able to get kills and because the level curve in fire emblem is not very steep.
By contrast, a unit with poor bases but good growths can only function very early game and even then they need to be unique enough to be worth training other than their (most of the time) better growths.

so bases are obviously more important if you want a unit to be good for a longer period of time

I suppose growths for me because I enjoy growth units.

I personally like growths more, but weirdly enough i hate high growths, because hearing lots of those ding sounds each level is not nearly as satisfying as not knowing whether you’ll get one, and then getting lucky and getting a perfect level.

Bases however are more important overall, did you know that Geese promoted at base can take on the wyverns in the murdoch chapter of fe6 in a mountain? Sure, he’ll get doubled, but with a 10-20% chance of getting hit he can hold them off for a while. FE6 and FE11 mostly have perfectly balanced growths and bases

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I usually tend to like bases more than growths, as bases let you have greater control whereas growths are, by nature, random. You can always count on Marcus being good for at least the first 10/15 chapters of The Blazing Blade, but will Nino turn out to be good during the latter ones? I do however acknowledge that growths are far more exciting, especially in older games: hearing that ping and seeing your stats rising is great, especially when you get those points in the stats you really wanted.

Its more a case of short term vs long term.
In a game with adequate exp to pass around and opportunities to set up valuable exp pinatas for new or lagging units, your going to see better long term gains and perhaps a more enjoyable experience out of growth units, with the big glowing asterisk of provided the dice rolls don’t hate you because even a 90% misses at least 1 time out of 10. In a scenario where we are talking ove3r 100%, then that is a non-factor

Bases represents a safe guarantee; This is doubly so for Hard mode bonuses, as FE6 makes a great case study for- while there aren’t too many great growth units (except arguably someone like Liliana), basically every enemy recruit can carry the game on hard mode because having zero chance to have less then X spd/str/def, and enough values in any of those stats that hitting the coveted caps that growth units enjoy isn’t difficult with a similair 5-10 range of levels to grow

So it ultimately comes down to how the game handles bases, how characters of each type are handed out, and what the incentive for choosing one over the other is (ie, proficiencies, skills, personal weapons, supports and affinities, weapon coverage, class, etc etc)