That’s a nice idea that doesn’t have a relation to reality. An intelligent player will quickly recognize that there’s no reason to strain themselves and push for risky maneuvers if they don’t garner any actual advantage for doing so. They will then rightfully point out that the game is easy, and arguably not fun (saying the burden is on the player to make the game fun for themselves is asinine; it’s the developer’s job to do that).
If people are uninterested enough in risk to avoid doing it on purpose, how can we be certain forcing them to play otherwise is supposed to be a good thing? Someone who went out of their way to take an approach that was extraordinarily slow did it to themselves. Even people who play games like Dark Souls can claim that it’s just a grindy game because the game gives the ability for this to be possible, regardless of if other people clearly show everyone that they can achieve victory efficiently enough without using any levelups whatsoever. (The FE equivalent of course are 0% growth runs.)
Even within this thread itself are already mentions of “how it can go wrong” with things like overly strong reinforcements. I’ve seen people say siege tomes are fake difficulty because all they do is bait them until they run out of uses instead of actually trying to advance within their range, and I’m almost totally sure that me saying “Okay, so I’ll give enemy siege tomes infinite uses then” would be called off as bad design in retaliation because its unfair to the player. I’ve never once bothered to bait out all 5 siege tome uses of an enemy (and repeating for each one) before actually moving because I know I don’t have to do it nor feel like playing the game that slowly.
That people will choose to optimize the fun out of a game if a safer, more reliable option exists is a fact. The degree to which some people will do it (see: your example of breaking siege tomes being too tedious for yourself personally, while other people do it) does vary, but pretending it’s not real and that players will always do what’s most fun as opposed to what’s safest is the equivalent of us burying our heads into the sand.
It’s true, they will. To extreme detriment of knowledge, adaptation, or interest in personality, even.
In most cases I see people optimize their plays, it is to make the game faster than it is to make it slower. Get together a team of shooters to stunlock a boss until it dies before it gets to do anything. Use the deck that kills the opponent too soon for them to make plays they can possibly have against you. Build the character that inflicts the most damage to reduce fight time as much as you can and call everything that doesn’t non-viable, no matter how stupid you look doing it due to the combination of equipment necessary. It’s almost saying, “I don’t want to play your game, I want the winning play.”
But I usually don’t see people actually say this isn’t fun, outside of when they are on the receiving end of it instead of using that power themselves. When it involves a grind, the answer is less “that boss is a very tough challenge” and more “they just made it grindy to levelup” regardless of how frequently it’s proven the boss can be defeated with better understanding of how to play. What people are really trying to minimize is the degree of thought or patience they have to put into the game.
People just don’t seem to want to think all that much. This includes in “good” game design where a lot of it is geared towards achieving the right amount of lenience, with the extremes of a lack of it being determined to be a puzzle map and bad design for that. Is there really that much of a difference between a player aiming to braindead what they engage with playing slow or fast?
It all comes down to how the player wants to ‘enjoy’ the game. I don’t know why so many people see it as this cardinal sin… If you’re not the one playing the game, who frickin cares man. Let people try out strategies. I’m sure after a while the player will get 1) bored of turtling and evolve 2) or two keep turtling because OBVIOUSLY strategy is not what they care about. I know some will say “well, hey strategy is what defines fire emblem” which I’d say can be debated. Fire Emblem has intriguing storyline (though I bet someone would even debate me on that) , amazing sprite work, neat and nifty secret weapons/treasures etc etc. I guess what I’m saying is that Fire Emblem is more than just strategy and there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Turtling is a valid strategy, that’s all. The problem resides in how strong it is as a strategy.
If you can’t be punished, why would you not do it every chapter?
Generic enemy units usually sucks in FE games, that makes turtling the best strategy in every situation where you don’t have a turn count limit or some good reward to obtain.
I don’t like the idea of taking risks, I always try to play “as Ironman as possible” even on my first run in every FE, If the enemy has a 1% crit on my unit with a 20% hit, I would not risk it.
If the map forces the player to take rng based risks, to me is just bad level design.
I think no one likes to lose units due to rng so, forcing the player to rely on rng, is just like encouraging the player to restart until he gets what he wants.
A chapter, in my opinion, should always be “solvable”: there should always be a way to win and do everything without taking any rng risk.
The main problem is that this should be hard to do.
In mostly FE games, this is not possible or too easy, no middle ground.
Look at FE7: in the majority of the game you can turtle everything without any effort, other chapters are an RNG fest.
About the cheesing, I like the Dark Souls analogy.
When I played a Dark Souls game I never farmed, but when I had to chose a weapon, I never chose a bad weapon.
Why should I use a standard Long Sword when the Balder Side Sword is better in every aspect?
Why should I dodge an high tracking attack when I can block it?
If I die because I use a bad weapon or a risky strategy, I will just feel stupid and that’s the same in FE for me.
The problem comes when a single weapon/strategy is better than anything.
If that is better, why not doing it?
What is “fun” and what is not is purely subjective.
What works better is not and making turtling the best option for everything, simply punishes players that wants to play the game in a different way, that is also bad design in my opinion.
As I said it’s really hard to find a middle ground where both turtling and not turtling are almost on the same level, that’s why usually people tends to punish turtling, to make “not turtling” a viable strategy.
Turtling should NOT be on the same level, it encourages inaction in a game about choice.
Fire Emblem is a game where you should need to come up with strategies to deal with different problems presented by different maps, and applying the same trick for every map makes you able to just not strategize, there is no need to do anything new or different when you can break the game with the same trick over and over again.
And you shouldn’t like take risks, that is a valid choice. However, the game should be designed in such a way that fast and clever use of the game’s mechanics nullifies risk by going fast.
Things like trading iron runes or killing enemies at 2 range if they have killers, for example, can be as safe as turtling. You just need to do some math to make it all work.
The issue is when none of this is rewarded, and going fast becomes suboptimal because the game can be broken easier, and potentially faster (in real time, not turn count), by turtling.
Why would the no strategy way to play be encouraged in a strategy game? It makes no sense.
This is true only if enemy units sucks. When they are strong, making them stack is harder than killing them fast, and might require more thinking.
Yeah but you are supposing that this is possible. There are no Iron Runes in FE6 and the one you get in FE7 is in late game.
So, if you don’t want to risk a low% crit, you must resort to baiting the enemy.
Killing them from range is only possible with units with high damage and reliable hit rate, that means that you have a really strong unit that usually breaks the game (like Lugh in every FE6 run I ever did) or the enemy sucks, so even a mounted unit with a ranged weapon unit can kill him.
As I said, if the enemies are strong enough, turtling may be harder than killing them as fast as possible.
Simply put, I think there should always be a way to play fast and safe: you do your math well? Good, you can complete everything in the chapter without taking any rng risk.
The others 2 ways, are playing fast relying on RNG, and this for me is far more boring than turtling or
as second option, you rely on turtling and finish the chapter losing some rewards.
I never said turtling should be encouraged, but it should be considered a valid option, that simply should be as hard as playing fast, or less remunerative.
In my opinion a chapter that forces you to rely on RNG is far worse than one that forces you to turtling.
If someone is not good enough to play the chapter in an optimized way, I think it’s way better letting him to slow down and play safer than forcing him to rely on RNG, resets or save states.
“Playing fast relying on RNG”, or simply bumrushing/full-moving the chapter and hoping for the best, is akin to “juggernauting”, another strategy that is equally as disliked as turtling. I don’t think anyone is promoting that as a desirable solution.
This isn’t really possible. Defensive tactics are by their very nature…defensive. Slowly edging out the enemies with a large clump of units is pretty much always going to be the safest option. Striving to make turtling as hard as playing fast sounds like a fool’s errand with no net benefit.
I think you’re incorrectly associating the encouragement of fast play with the mandate of fast play. As was mentioned prior, one way to encourage fast play without mandating it is to provide rewards for doing so.
You can make enemies group up and attack the player only when they have the numbers.
In this case, the safest thing to do would be to kill them as fast as you can, turtling would be harder than playing fast.
If you could force enemies to intelligently group up and attack the player in response to defensive tactics, that would indeed make turtling harder than playing fast…which just leads me to lament the state of GBA AI. We went from stuff in the SNES era like Arion’s three-pronged dracoknight attack to FE8 cavaliers crowding each other in a mad dash to hit the weakest player unit instead of moving in formation.
With a bit of work it’s possible. There is a new patch for an event that allows you to count enemies in a specific range.
You can set up events to change the AI every turn and make the enemies smarter.
I think that an event that evaluates the distance between units would be really helpful in this.
“Smart” AI like this would probably just come off as weird, unconventional, and frustrating imo. There’s something to be said about being intentional to prevent turtling if you think it to be necessary, but making weird AI with that intent may be the wrong way to go about it.
Why do you think so?
I mean, “weird” and “unconventional” yes… probably, because this is almost never done and many would feel that way, but why would it be frustrating?
I’ll probably try to make something like this to see if it works.
The risk/reward ratio is flawed when you turtle.
You gain too much by taking close to no risk.
And since players are pretty risk averse you need to insentivise them to take some.
You know the drill: time limits,villages,items on the bosses , thiefs etc.
Sure you could bait one ennemy at the time and choke point but you lose on some keys ressources.
Beeing pretty risk averse I really need to have a time restriction on most chapters to keep me from turtling.
On a side note I think it’s pretty weird that the best way to play defenses or survive chapters is mostly just to play super offensively to control the ennemy flux and get the most rewards
I actually considered adding arbitrary hard turn limits to every map in Four Kings because I was so worried about this. Though at a certain point, I think a designer just needs to accept that some people are always going to try for the safest and slowest way to play any game. Outright negating any type of slow play, while in theory good design, also negates that entire playstyle for quite a number of players, which in turn can make the game unfun for them.
Personally if a hack doesn’t challenge me to not turtle it just doesn’t interest me and I either get bored quick or don’t take the game as seriously and just try to beat it fast (miss side objectives, don’t reset for lost units, etc). I understand people can get frustrated easily by overly difficult map design but I think there’s also a large enough group of people who have played so much FE that easy maps are just mind-numbing and it’s impossible to enjoy.
Though, the real worst maps are the ones where you’re basically forced to turtle and other strategies are either too resource-intensive or straight-up impossible. I’d rather be able to blitz through an easy map than have to slog through something where turtling is the only option (I think Dream of Five had a lot of examples of these but I could be remembering wrong).
To jump back on in this, I think there’s a difference between allowing turtling and promoting turtling.
You don’t want to create a situation where turtling is the ONLY option. If playing fast just doesn’t work because the game throws too many enemies at you and you can’t cover your flank, why not box yourself in a room? I always took issue with Radiant Dawn 4-4 (the Oliver chapter) on harder difficulties because it starts throwing a blue million reinforcements at you and the game just kinda stagnates. This also can include having obvious chokepoints on maps, where you can plant a high defense or high avoid unit (or two) and just sit there and wait 20+ turns for all the enemies to die on them (because generics in FE suck). This gets even more boring if you just got a weak unit but you like the feeling of training them into a decent or even good unit because then you turtle to feed them kills/exp (yes I’m 100% talking about FE7 Cog of Destiny shhhh).
Trying to negate turtling is all well and good as well, of course, but the idea of risk/reward so that people can play how they want but are rewarded if they take riskier moves is far more interesting and a better design philosophy. You don’t want to design a map with obvious chokepoints as if you almost WANT the player to turtle (this is part of what makes interior maps so difficult to do well, though they have the advantage of obvious thieves to punish it). I agree with earlier statements that illogical OP reinforcements or same-turn reinforcements or any other form of “unfair” punishment against turtling isn’t warranted, and is just as bad as actively encouragaing it.
I do agree that people should be free to play how they want to play. I’ve moved beyond turtling to play much more aggressively in the past year, but I still really like training growth units despite the fact that it’s kinda pointless. It’s just how I am. Heck, I have an old post somewhere around here that rants about that exact topic. But everything should always be a trade-off, hence why the “risk/reward” idea should be so embraced. Don’t promote turtling with your design. You should promote the idea of playing faster, of taking risks. That’s really what thieves and bandits raiding villages are. They don’t outright discourage turtling, they just promote NOT turtling. It gives the more advanced players something to strive for, while still allowing slower players to play how they want to play if they’re too nervous of losing a unit or just don’t want to reset a whole lot. This allows turtling, but doesn’t encourage it.
I see a lot of interesting points. While I can see where some of you are coming, I’m mostly unconvinced about the virtues of anti-turtling measures.
Rewards such as chests and villages that are hunted down by enemies are optional only in theory. In practice, because of how the human mind works, almost every player will try to get everything, which causes casualties, which causes the player to reset until everything is attained. By putting these so-called optional rewards, the player is indirectly encouraged to reset as much as it takes, making him lose all his progress several times in the process, and nobody likes to put in work and lose it. It could be argued that I can ignore the loot in order to keep my units safe, but I’ll feel like a loser for not getting the good stuff. No one wants to miss on precious treasure. So most players go for the reward.
In other words: a choice between safety-without-loot and risk-with-loot is effectively not a choice (for 95% of players). Trial and error happens until the player finds the perfect sequence of actions that somehow manages to keep all his units alive and get him the treasure. The one true strategy. The “right” way to play the chapter. Inflexibility has occured because the developer happened to think that going slow or minimizing risks is boring.
In the end, who determines what is “fun”? It’s subjective, hence why I don’t think developers should punish a playstyle. That playstyle may be boring to the dev, but it may be enjoyable for the player. Punishing or discouraging it is a loss-loss scenario, because the player gets a worse gameplay experience and the dev gains a hater.
This, I feel, is why hard time limits in XCOM 2 were received with overwhelming hate. A particular comment posted three days ago in the video linked earlier resonates with me:
Personally, I wish games would just leave us alone and let us play however we like. I struggle to enjoy games that grade you because I feel like I’m better off watching a let’s play if there’s a specific way it’s supposed to be done, doing it myself and getting a substandard score just makes me feel like I’m fumbling my way though and makes any strategy but one feel invalid.
Take a racing game. I don’t mind a system that gives you a better score for coming in first as opposed to second because that’s the point of racing, but if it gave you a worse score for drifting or using the handbrake then it just becomes a matter of doing what the developers are telling you, playing the way they tell you to play, and suddenly all interest in the game is gone.
Yes, because play that makes the player go fast is harder to achieve, and getting the loot is the reward for putting in the effort. Developers should reward the player for using the game’s mechanics to their advantage, and since Fire Emblem is an SRPG, in this case, the reward is given if player go fast, precisely because it is harder.
Effort means reward, this is balancing 101.
This is a lie, players come to an SRPG game expecting to play an SRPG game. Maybe the players are drawn towards the game for different reasons, like story and characters, but the game is balanced, ALWAYS, with a specific type of play in mind.
It is impossible to account for every type of play imaginable, so developers try rewarding moving fast as an incentive to efficiently play through the game, because fast play is engaging.
You may personally think differently, but Fire Emblem has done this for 30 years for a reason.
In XCOM’s case, they were badly implemented because the game literally game overs in a turn count.
In Fire Emblem there is rarely a thing like hard turn limits, usually reserved for a few maps (and these maps are also hated if the turn limit is too strict, like Battle Before Dawn). There are soft game overs like the game spawning strong units you’re not supposed to fight, but you can work around those. They are just strong, so if you really want to, you can try using a tank or a Jagen to slow them down. Even when the game tries to make you game over, you still have options.
