So I played a pretty crazy hack recently, and it’s lord has consistently shone bright in a way I don’t often get to see.
Spoilered for being Long 
Search For Seiso (Amelia Watson)
S4S or: how I learned to defeat evil by standing next to a guy with a gun real good
Often in talks of lord design, I’ll see people push towards very capable and self-reliant lords. For obvious reasons, they’re the one certainty you’ll always have, it cushions negative sentiment (jobbing in gameplay can lead to negative unit opinion elsewhere), and avoids frustration of a walking lose condition.
But what if, someone tried to risk all the above concerns, and give you a lord who wasn’t very capable in a fight? Someone notable for what she does for others in combat rather than herself?
Well, you’d have Search for Seiso’s very own lord, Amelia Watson.
To demonstrate her weakness in action, let’s compare her to a unit who joins one map after the game starts.
Plainly, she’s frailer, weaker, and slower than even the earliest competition. With the smallest of leads on skill and luck. With this gap in speed notably making a huge difference in kill power on all but the slowest foes on a map.
But you aren’t “tricked” into thinking she’ll be good, per-se. The very first map tells you most of what you need to understand about her combat capabilities.
- Even against a generally weak enemy type, Amelia struggles to clear the damage threshold needed to win in one fight.
- She needs to be placed carefully, because even weak foes quickly bring her low.
- If you want her to kill quickly, it requires some level of setup before she can get it done, or good fortune.
You may be wondering about that third statement, exactly what setup is there for her to do right now? Well, it’s in her inventory.
This needle full of mysteries will, on use, at the cost of hurting her for 5 damage, grant +10 attack for 5 turns. Making her already anemic bulk even lower, but with a notable boost in damage.
With all this in mind, it may seem like there’s not too much hope. She’s expending limited resources to fight better in a game where enemies have some level of threat, it’s almost a zero-sum game. So what’s one to do? Give up on her, and leave her in the back for relative safety?
That would be the case if not for one yet mentioned section of her statsheet.
Enemies in Seiso often do have a good chunk of bulk to them. Enough that such a boost to damage is very helpful at any stage of the game. Alongside many, and I do mean many, tempting capture targets. Something which this skill circumvents the usual STR/MAG halving of through directly adding the damage.
It’s applications in both player and enemy phase are apparent enough, more damage on player phase for troublesome foes, nuking bosses, or solid positioning better letting someone handle a swarm of foes on enemy phase.
Nice Thighs, meanwhile, may seem like a gag skill, but as units come in with beneficial synergy skills (like hit/atk boosts, or a once-per-turn self refresh while adjacent to such a unit) what was useless now becomes all more of a reason to put her into the fray as a powerful supportive unit.
This is where her weaknesses show their true form, these engaging wrinkles in how and where you place her. Making you consider what can she survive, what narrow margins can you take, and what foe do you most want dead compared to those risks?
All of this as part of a balancing act between getting the large benefit of added damage. While judging where and when she can be placed to best benefit the team and make more headway against a notable issue on the map.
Once you realize all this, a central question starts to form each turn when using her:
“Where can she go to solve the biggest current issue?”
This question lets her serve as a great jumping off point for each turn. Especially as maps get more complicated, she can be put towards an issue and naturally have others gravitate towards her in turn. All in all, keeping some of the burden of overhead off the player by having someone to rely on taking that first step.
In terms of combat, she’s far from the strongest lord I’ve seen (exacerbated by my wonderfully, wonderfully strength-screwed, if still helpful, one). But as an engaging support unit? She leaves an impression that always leaves you aiming to achieve more with her with each step along the way.
She shows the sometimes unused depth to a iffy combat, supportive lord, and how in quite a few ways they can be more memorable than their more powerful variants. It largely just takes the same parts as some of the ones used in making a engaging fe game. Give compelling moment-to-moment questions of what to do, and make those questions impact flow meaningfully. If there’s any lesson Seiso can impart design-wise, it’s that. With Amelia being the most shining example of this lesson that the game executes throughout many other parts of the game.