Fire Emblem strategy

Okay so I didn’t discharge enough of my thought process in that other post to stop going over it, so here are a bunch more scattered thoughts about Fire Emblem games.

First of all, there is way more complexity in them than you ever need to deal with. You can do these “support” conversations, where if you put certain characters next to each other enough they can talk to each other and boost each others’ status during battle. I pretty much ignored that. Each character has an elemental affinity, which can affect how they work near other characters. I ignored that too.

In a later game (that I’ve seen but not played),

There are a couple of things I did that worked out for me.

• It seems that Fire Emblem games always start you out with a unit that’s really strong; I’ve seen guides call them “pre-promoted” units because they are already of a class that you can promote weaker units to. You never want to rely on these units, for two reasons:
1. Even though they can handle whatever enemy you throw them at (early on), they’ll hardly get any experience points for defeating them. This wastes experience points that could have gone to other units.
2. There’s not much room for these units to grow over time, and other units have higher potential stats.
• I didn’t use very many vulneraries (healing potions) at all. Instead, I had my healer, Moulder, heal with his staff on every turn if possible, even if someone was only slightly hurt. Here’s why:
• It means that other units don’t have to waste a turn using a vulnerary; they can just go ahead and attack.
• Healing is the only way a healer gets experience points, and by doing this as much as possible, I was able to eventually upgrade him to a magic user so he could fight when necessary.
• Even more importantly, repeated use of a healing staff eventually increased his skill with staves to the point where he could use the really good ones, like long-distance healing and all-team healing. That wouldn’t have happened if I had left healing up to individual units.
• I used magic users a much as possible. Besides being cool, magic can attack at close or long range, unlike most regular weapons, so magic users can often attack without risk of counterattack.
• Keeping your distance and letting enemies come to you can be very important. This was hard sometimes, especially later in the game when my characters were strong. There was this one spot where there were just a ton of enemies, and I kept figuring I should venture forward and take out as many as possible so there would be fewer of them to attack me on the next turn. But there were always more hiding in the darkness, and I kept losing. When I finally got smart and held my ground in a narrow passageway, I was able to limit the number of enemies that could reach my units on a given turn, and when they got weak, I could pull them back and replace them with someone else.
• When you raise a unit’s class (in some games at least), you can often choose between a class with higher stats and one with lower status but that’s more well-rounded, such as being able to use an additional weapon type. I prefer that my units specialize in one thing. It makes it more likely that you’ll be able to use the good items you find later in the game, and you have enough units that no one character needs to be good at a bunch of different things. It’s different if a class offers a special ability, though, like being able to move over water (pirate) or pick locks without a lock pick (rogue or something like that).