Fire Emblem: Maiden of Darkness. Check the OP for updates I do them everytime I achieve now

Thani as an Armorslayer for Light. Equinox is the Horseslayer for Dark and Aircalibur is the Flyerslayer for Anima

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How many prf weapons will there be?
What are their affects?

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Everyone say Thank You Tequila

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Fatigue

Fatigue is a system that activates starting Chapter 10 (The beginning of the Western Isles) that has a very simple function. Each character who’s involved in a combat action has their fatigue increased by 1 (So, you have Wolt attack an enemy, this is a single combat action, this triggers ‘Second Strike’ and a second attack, which doubles, this is a single combat action. On the enemy phase, Wolt is attacked, and cannot counter, this is still a combat action. In the end, Wolt will have 3 points in his Fatigue bar) once a unit reaches 30 Fatigue, they become ‘Fatigued’ this is checked at the start of a chapter, not during.

Fatigued penalties
All stats (Including HP) Drop by 1/4th
Move drops by 1

Ways to restore Fatigue
Not deploying for a chapter
Using a Stamina Potion
Being a necessary unit upon a map (Example: Shanna and Clarine will have their fatigue wiped to 0 at the start of Chapter 11, as they can interact with Thea and Klein)
It is the Final Chapter(Still being debated)

Roy, Guinivere, Lilina and Larum are immune to Fatigue.

Why go with a stat penalty and not a unit ban?
Let us consider a hypothetical scenario, the deploy limit for two chapters in a row is 15+ Three Lords. The player has 18 units +Lords, at the end of the chapter, all 15 deployed units have become Fatigued, and they have no Stamina potions
This player is now forced to take the next chapter as 3 Lords+3 units. Impossible? No. But very difficult, and depending on the surviving units, perhaps a game ender. The thing Fire Emblem has always had a problem with, in my personal opinion, is the game grows tougher the worse you are, and easier the better you are with not much you can do to stop prevent that from being the case.

Now let’s take a look at the same scenario but with the current penalties, we’ll say… bringing a hypothetical N unit. N has 30 HP, 18 Str, 10 Skill, 15 Speed, 10 Def, 2 Res, 20 Luck and 5 movements. With the fatigue penalties, N becomes
22 HP
13 Str
7 Skill
11 Spd
7 Def
1 Res
15 Luck
4 Move

Worse? Oh god yes. Impossible to use? Hardly. Let use an earlier example for the sake of simplicity, Y has 20 HP and 8’s in all his stats Y’s HP becomes 15 and his stats all become 6. Not nearly as bad. And that’s why I like this system. This system isn’t all that punishing to low statted units they still function essentially the same, but at higher levels, the penalties start adding up. Let’s take a capped Warrior as an example.
HP 60 -> 40
Str 30 -> 22
Skl 26 -> 19
Spd 24 -> 18
Lck 30 -> 22
Def 28 -> 21
Res 20 -> 15
5 Move

A bad unit? Hardly, But a shadow of what it could do. But if you’re pushing to use a unit to fill a slot, even at end game that fills a slot. It’s basically a Fighter who almost capped everything.

So as you can see, a player who’s having a rough time, they might be forced to use a Fatigued unit, but they’ll at least have the body to use and yeah it’ll still be a rough time, but it won’t be a massively daunting experience. And since Constitution isn’t affected units can still steal, or rescue or canto away, even with reduced 5/6 movement for thieves/mounted units.

Why 1/4th and not 1/3rd

While 1/3rd is essentially a slightly harsher penalty, it finds itself lowering a unit just a little much in the later stat growths. A unit with 30 Str has 20, in fact, excluding HP, no stat can rise above 20. That means any unit suffering from Fatigue is worse than a promoted unit unless literally capped at a stat. 1/4th is just my personal feeling of kindness to the player. Ultimately it could probably be 1/3rd but I believe the extra stat drop would be too much punishment.

But why Fatigue?
Two reasons, which can be understandably disliked.
Reason 1: This game is long, it’s 37 main chapters and 7 Gaidens. At 44 Chapters long it is as long as Radiant Dawn (Counting Prt. Chapters as individual chapters) without third tier promotions or constant army switching. I could either severely nerf EXP gain which is a negative option in regards to player retention (Players who feel as if they aren’t growing tend to dislike and stagnate on games) or increase the level cap to 30/30… doable except the stat caps don’t really accommodate that. And that is a FAR more laborious task than Fatigue was. I could do it, but it’d be a last resort kind of thing, the same as making a “Tier 3” We could have 30/30 with lowered growths to accommodate, but again, this has the issue of leaving the player feeling as if they aren’t growing. I’m also a proponent that the pretty green numbers should NOT be required at the end-game for a unit to function. There were options but I had to consider the work involved with them Even “Well cut chapters” isn’t really an option as that would lend itself to rewrites more and more.

Fatigue gets around this in a rather simple method. If your squad is 15+3, and you have 30 units, then 15 in one chapter, 15 in the other, a rota of A and B teams that slowly grow together and keep pace with the enemy. Can you forgo this and just deploy the Percybomb relentlessly? Sure, he’s not going to be much of a bomb when stat dropped.

Reason 2: I like to discourage “Low-manning” that is the tendency to grab a single ‘God’ Unit and just charge the enemy into them and watch the enemy melt like so much cheese in a microwave. It’s not that there aren’t good units, but I like to provide multiple objectives on a map, multiple fronts to fight on and encourage the player to make use of their whole team. That doesn’t prevent a player from completing a map by just ramming a single powerful unit into the enemy, but maybe it stops them getting all the villages, or it prevents them from recruiting someone, or they lose chests. One of the reasons I really like Chapter 11A of FE6 is because the entire map comes into play. There are issues with it, but they’re so minor in comparison to the knowledge that to best handle the map, you should spread out and form teams to tackle the objectives. Again, nothing stops you from charging Dieck into No Mans Land to end the map before Echidna even spawns but that’s a lot of treasure you’re not getting. And in the end, Dieck’s not going to be so great on the next map, and your other units missed a chance to grow levels. Not every map has to span multiple objectives and have you running to all corners to get everything, but those are my favorite, and I enjoy encouraging the player to try out the various units they have.

Some like to say that this reduces one of the parts of Fire Emblem, namely feeling like you can go through the game and explore different party configs, but that’s the beauty of FE6, even if every map is 15+3 and forcing you to deploy 30 units to never get caught off by Fatigue… There’s still 30 more units in the game, each with minimum 5 supports, unique skills, and base conversations for you to get to know them and want to try them out. Maybe you want to build “Team Aura” and thus you use every character that buffs other characters to move as a death ball, grand, you can find all new, wacky ways for units to get more use. Sure, the Professional Motherfuckers don’t get their skill bonus without the other by their side, but skills like that are far and few between. then when you consider the Skill Badge system (Hold items that bestow a skill upon a unit) and the various weapons, the Anna Shops, the Arena (Which you can’t die in, to be clear. Limited fights, each fight costs cash, but you cannot die) there’s way more content to explore and consider. And I guess this is a way for me to push players and go “That unit that you considered trash before? Give em a swing.”

I plan for Fatigue to be an option when you start the game on normal mode (Forced on hard) but I would ask people to give it a try and see for themselves how it feels. I consider the games curve balanced around having it on, however.

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Honestly I like it. Thracia Fatigue always annoyed me tbqh, because it essentially meant you no longer could use that unit for the following chapter. Which depending on who it is, and the chapter, could screw you. It annoyed me that an option like this(deploying with a stat decrease) wasn’t an option. So I’m glad to see it in.

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I’d like to bring up Yeti’s idea of fatigue here, and it comes from a conversation the FEXNA server had about World of Warcraft.

Quick backstory: WoW had a system for EXP where if you played for a long time, you were given an EXP penalty after, say, five back to back days of non-stop playing. This was to give the players who didn’t play much a chance to catch up with the other players.

Problem: Everyone hated it. It felt like a punishment for investing time in the game.
Solution: Keep the exact same system, but flip the numbers. Thus spawned the Well-Rested system.

Yeti’s idea for Fatigue is pretty simple. Don’t penalize units for being in too many chapters, give bonuses to units for not being in many chapters. Maybe for every two chapters a unit isn’t deployed, they get +1 in all stats up to a cap. When you deploy them finally, those stats last until the end of the chapter, at which point they’ve been boosted up enough they can hold their own and maybe get a bunch of levels.

Just a thought. Nobody’s tried it yet, but I personally don’t like the idea of penalizing the player for playing the way they want.

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Nice alternative, but I’d need to see it in action before deciding if it’s a good or not.

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It’s not really like we can see the alternative in action either though(with FE5 being the only current example, and we can all agree that it was done poorly); the idea of rewarding a player vs punishing one for something that doesn’t really matter. There’s also an innate problem because the units you haven’t been using… are not trained. So, using these untrained units is going to make chapters more difficult, and using the fatigued units will do the same, which feels unfair to the player because they’re literally just playing. However, making the untrained units have a small boost makes trying out these units more enticing and doesn’t make the chapter more difficult.

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You also have to ask what your goal is with fatigue.

If your goal is to simply make the player stop using units they like using, then, okay. Fatigue is a great way to do it.

However, based off Onmi’s writeup, it appears his goal is to make the player diversify the army a little more. If you force me to stop using a unit because they suck for a chapter thanks to a number on their screen, I’ll be annoyed, especially if I really like using the unit. However, if you keep other, less-used units competitive, then I always have incentive to try them out. For example, suppose you’re playing FE7 for the first time, and you’re using the following units:

Hector, Serra, Matthew, Dorcas, Bartre, Erk, Lowen, Guy.

Several chapters into the game, you get a cool new unit. Her name is Priscilla. Now, you like Serra, because of course you do. She’s fucking awesome. However, maybe you want to try out Priscilla for a while. You drop Serra for a chapter, and put Priscilla on. She performs quite well! After three or four chapters, Serra starts to fall behind in levels, and let’s say 6 chapters pass or so.

Now, on this chapter, let’s say Chapter 17 or so, you glance at your units. You say, “Man, I liked Serra, but she’s so weak now. Guess I’ll just keep using Priscilla.”

Two chapters later, fatigue kicks in. Priscilla is going to be weak until you ditch your main healer for a chapter. You say to yourself, “Goddamnit, now I have to use someone else.”

Are you more likely to use Serra? No. You’ll probably go for Pent or another equally good candidate. Serra is too weak to be usable. So you pull out Pent, and you’re like “Hey he’s not bad, maybe I’ll use him for a chapter or two!”

Three chapters later, Pent outclasses Priscilla. You say, “Oh well, she’s just not as good as him anymore.”

Eventually, Pent becomes fatigued too, and the process starts all over again.

Now, honestly, Serra is the worst candidate for my example, because Healers don’t benefit much from a bunch of stats like a combat units does. Guy<Raven or especially Lowen<Sain/Kent would be a better comparison, but hopefully you get my point.

Had Serra instead just kept competitive by getting a bonus every chapter or two, you’d always be able to at least say “Hey, she’s not worthless, maybe I’ll try her out for a chapter or two and powerlevel her since Prissy isn’t getting much EXP from enemies. She has +3 in all stats for this one chapter, so she isn’t woefully underpowered!”

In Fire Emblem, if a unit sits out for a few chapters, they’re basically fodder for the rest of the game. Think of how FE9 and 10 solved this with BEXP. By weighting the BEXP for lower leveled units, they allow you to try out different units in your army that you normally wouldn’t. By giving less BEXP for higher leveled units, they forced the player to say, “Well, Oscar is already really good, so I might as well level up Mist a bit. Having a second healer on this chapter might prove useful.”

It’s the same principle as BEXP, in that the idea isn’t “Punish the player for playing how they like” but instead “Reward them for trying different units out.”

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Although you have to consider the repercussions of using a bonus unit, too. In a game like Fire Emblem, this penalizing and rewarding just swaps when a character is less usable because it isn’t time-framed or modifiable by the player. eg) fatigue level met -> next chapter weaker or using a boosted unit -> losing that boost for the next chapter. The boosts work to disincentivize using units in the same vein as fatigue, especially when all terms are equal (1/4 penalty fatigue vs 1/4 boost well-rested).

TBH I think the Bexp option is probably the most well thought out option so far that doesn’t limit player choice. While I’m torn on forcing a drawback for low manning (simply because I can’t decide for others how they enjoy a game) it has always struck me as strange in a war and tactics game like this to say, solo with Seth.

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I personally like fatigue, especially in this fashion because it allows me the fun I had with FE5 fatigue without FE5 fatigue’s faults. Besides, it’s completely optional, don’t like it, don’t activate it.

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Um. What? How is fatigue optional?

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Its optional in normal mode, forced in hard mode

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I mean hey, you could have my version of fatigue for easy, the Onmi version for hard, fuck around with them, see what people like.

I kinda wanna try that now myself. Hmm.

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People getting tired of fighting too much makes more sense than people becoming stronger by not fighting at all. Your version is better game design but it doesnt really make sense to me

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It’s a well rested bonus. Maybe they do some light sparring during their downtime. Plenty of narrative room.

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Maybe he can add the stat bonuses from fe12; but the less a character is used, the more bonuses they get

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I’m not implementing your Fatigue Klok.

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Do you at least acknowledge the potential problems with fatigue

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Yes I do.

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