engagement farming, pt. 13
We are back once again with Engagement Farming, our continued playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage. Last time we repelled an invasion; this week it's time for battle on the high seas! Let's begin.
Two chapters tonight, which is a pretty comfortable pace. You may have guessed by now. Our first one is Leif's Paralogue, which I wanted because this lets me give Vantage to Panette and make her an unstoppable death machine; the second one is a story chapter.
Leif's Paralogue is . . . interesting. The enemy has a lot of ballistas which do massive amounts of damage and have a 100% hit rate and a range that will require you to spend several turns in their range in order to get them in your range (barring warp and rewarp and rescue shenanigans). To discourage you from just baiting out their attacks until they're out of ammo, there's also a bunch of enemies with lootable items fleeing towards the exit. And as a bonus, behind Leif, there's two very beefy units with even more lootables behind him, and also some of the ballista operators have lootables. Several Emblems that I have access to at this point do have a variety of tools to help deal with the ballistas: Lyn can summon doubles, Lucina can guard an ally against attacks, Sigurd gives you enough movement to cross the distance, etc; I didn't have the tools to properly do Warp shenanigans, so I had to take it slow, and let a few of the lootable items out of my sight. (Alas, etc.) Oh, also, the ballistas are protected by priests with staves; some of the staves can Immobilize your units, which isn't great when you're trying to rush them down. And, of course, there's also normal units protecting the path in.
The ballistas and their escorts are supremely nasty, and there's really only two ways to deal with that: either warp someone in and deal with them before they can cause you problems, or tank the damage and heal it off until they run out of ammo with their staves and ballistae. You can be a little creative with Emblems but ultimately the challenge these present is less interesting and more of a tax on your resources. Leif himself was fairly easy to deal with, but he was surrounded by a lot of mage knights with long-range spells that hit hard.
And then from there it's onto the obligatory naval battle map! After repelling the Elusian army from Firene, we take one (1) ship to invade Elusia and defeat the Fell Dragon. There's a cutscene where the Fell Dragon chastises his chief minion for losing some Emblem Rings, and then he finds out that he has another living child, and instructs her to murder them when she next encounters them. Apart from the twist that we are that child I think the story from here on is probably pretty straightforward: travel, fight the bad guys, etc etc.
This naval battle map takes the form of us starting on a ship in the middle of the map, with a ship on either side of us attempting to board. We have a fire ballista we can use to slow them down and soften them up, but I ended up barely using this. Panette and Yunaka were able to handle the western boat more or less on their own, while the rest of the crew dealt with the east.
I do like the vision here: you're surrounded but you have a siege weapon that can damage and slow down one of the sides, so you can focus most of your attention on the other side. But--and it's very likely that half the problem here is that I now have several units available that I feel comfortable just sending into enemy territory to tank a bunch of hits--the enemies were neither numerous nor aggressive enough to really sell me on the idea that I was surrounded and needed clever tactics to get out of this.
A stray thought from tonight: in Three Houses, when you moved an enemy, the map showed you lines representing the enemy's intentions and how strong their attacks were. These were accurate so long as conditions didn't change (e.g. by someone dying or being moved), so it was a lot easier to place units tactically--if you knew they wouldn't be targeted then it wouldn't really matter if you put them in harm's way.1 In Engage the lines only show you who all is capable of attacking a specific unit, so it's harder to predict the AI's behavior, which encourages a much more cautious approach. (It also seems like it doesn't make the lines thicker or thinner based on how much of a threat they are anymore, but maybe I'm just bad at noticing that now.) I preferred how Three Houses handled it but it's still nice to have the information about just how many hits you're in range of.
Anyway, that's all I have for you this week. We make landfall in Elusia next week and presumably I'll do another paralogue because I've still got several of those left to do. Until then, take care, friends.
3H also had the undocumented feature on the Thief and Assassin classes (and I think Trickster?) that, if there was another valid target, the enemies would just ignore them. I feel like I've mentioned this before, but I really enjoyed how this really made these classes feel like their namesakes. You had someone drawing aggro and slipped your thief in past enemy lines where they could be maximally disruptive. It ruled.↩