The LiquidLegends Lounge - Page 1204

So I get there curious as to whether the store is even open today (my smaller store I go to is closed because they're all at GP Toronto) and/or whether the event will fire.
Turns out, it does, but with only 4 people. Yay for guaranteed Anguished Unmaking promo!
We're really just playing for the mat at this point so it's 3 rounds Round Robin break to Top 2 for finals.
Decklist: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/soi-displacer-combo-2/

Match 1 - vs Grixis TiTi/control
Displacer is REALLY good against this guy's deck---he tries really hard to keep my board wiped and toss out stuff to activate the Thing but I am consistently able to blink it and prevent that from happening (once was an AMAZING topdeck). Both games I actually win without comboing off---one game I even activate Ormendahl for the win. At the end of game two he was so desperate to clear my board and activate Thing he Duressed me, then Clash of Willsed his OWN Duress to flip it and swing for 7. I was at 25 life at the time and just replayed my entire board so it didn't matter much in the end, though I was amused by the play, especially since I won with an Ever After shortly after that which Duress would have removed.
Match record 2-0
Overall record 1-0

Match 2 - vs Seasons Past
This matchup I usually find is sort of a 50-50. This guy played it a little bit oddly though. I got REALLY close G1 before he was able to stabilize for good (hadn't drawn any Cocos at all the entire day thus far until game 2 of this match) and started recurring his removal and gained life with Nissa's Renewal. I needed one more turn but I fell just short. G2 wasn't as close because he literally topdecked THREE of his four Dark Petitions throughout the latter half of the game, though he kept giving me outs by trying to tutor for specific threats/removal at the time rather than playing the long game w/Seasons Past. Ultimately it got to a point where I could have Ever Aftered for the win had I drawn it, but I didn't. Great games though, and a real nice guy to play with (this dude works at the store---scrubbed out of the GP in the morning then begrudgingly came to work lol).
Match record 0-2
Overall record 1-1

Match 3 - vs White Weenies
Kept a greedy 2-lander not knowing what I was up against G1 and lost immediately. G2 was closer, but then I pulled the bonehead move of a friggin lifetime. I had a solid board state against a bunch of +1/+1 countered weenies---a couple Catacomb Sifters got Declaration in Stoned but I kept drawing more and then had double Zulaport on the board which starts to get scary the more guys I can toss on there. What's more, I had two Nantuko Husks in hand and a Westvale Abbey for backup. I dropped an Evolving wilds, but my hand down and searched up a land. Me, being an absolute idiot, put my hand down in the exact same spot my deck was, promptly thought I just left some cards behind when I shuffled and gave my library to my opponent to cut. Then when I couldn't find my hand I realized what I had just done.

As it was a pretty casual thing going on my opponent understood and I was laughing at my own idiocy more than anything but we wanted to find out what the call was (I'm not sure if the store guy was a judge or not---he might be but either way he looked up the ruling). In Competitive REL that would have been a Game Loss, but since this wasn't competitive and me drawing three new cards would have been way out of the questions, I just had to eat a complete hand loss, and then shortly after, the game.

Now it's entirely possible I could have come back and won that game, and then gone on to win G3, the finals, and the playmat, but I truly don't think so (would have had to go up against Seasons Past dude again) especially considering how awful my Humans matchup usually is. It's just one of those things I will NEVER do again lol.
Match record 0-2
Overall record 1-2


So overall, I did just as well as I did last time, 3rd place overall! Yay!
In the end I accomplished what I set out to do, which was have fun with a slightly subpar deck, play some solid and fun games, and win a Top 8 promo Anguished Unmaking.

And the best part was, as I was leaving, store dude tossed me a full playset of the Uncommon participation promos and a second Anguished Unmaking! These beauties are going straight into my sideboard for tomorrow, when I hit up my other store. + Show Spoiler +

Orochi/Niles, was what I meant.



1: My bad, I didn't know that. I haven't really used the online features much yet since they don't play nice with mods, and I can hexedit my save to add anything like skills etc if I'm feeling like buying those.

2: By "shit" I meant "stuff", not like, "it's bad". I don't hate the my castle stuff, though admittedly I hate how slow and boring/rote most of it is, but I think it gets in the way of some things because it's necessary to use in order to access certain features (ex capturable units), so I really feel it's out of place in Conquest which is supposed to be the less grindy more traditional FE experience where it's benefits don't really have enough time to come to light (unless you grind online battles, I guess). I think it fits right into Birthright and Revelation.

Basically that there's more basic menu-based work required in this game, but not really an increased amount of cool tactical decision style menu work.

-Most in-battle weapon decisions boil down to cycling through everything in the inventory and seeing what the best is.
-Pre-battle effective weapon / item swapping and such is more prevalent because you get more access to it in this game, and the increased diversity within squads of enemy units relative to other games makes it less simple but not really any deeper. This is kind of just like w/e but then there's...
-Inventory bulk. Too many items. Wayyy too many items.
-Skill- and weapon- centric difficulty means I have to cycle through all of the enemies and look at what shit they have, rather than just looking at the sprite and knowing what that enemy does. I already did this anyway, but it's more important and prevalent in this game.
-Too many small min-max sequence things that result from pair-up like [pair up +move class as the support unit -> Move max amount of spaces -> switch -> separate the non +move class and put it in front :: this sequence maximizes distance traveled in a turn], or [selecting a unit -> moving 0 spaces so you can change what weapon you have equipped -> unselecting the unit -> attacking with adjacent ally -> do whatever with the initial unit :: this sequence just gives the pair-up attack you actually want].
-My castle: the kitchen shit, chugging potions in base, feeding lilith for gold bars, and talking to people for items / support exp; are the significant things that jump out to me and that require boring rote menu work to get to. Forging and capture are gated behind materials too, which are in turn gated by the arena, and inviting allies for support exp, but those take too long so I just ignore them / they're not really the same complaint.





I mean, in terms of minor contributions in the early game and as pair-up stat bonus blocks, sure. I'm sure even the bad units can be used on hard, or with grinding etc., I'm unsure about lunatic because I haven't tried it yet but I'm willing to believe you on viability. I dunno what you specifically mean by unit equality (like non-homogenous power curves like mozu and gunter are good and I think most series fans like this), but something more like unit equity would be cool and this game defs doesn't have it because the great units blow the ok units out of the water, and there's nothing about the gameplay and keeps them from being overcentralizing unless you just intentionally use them less.

It's not terrible but it's just ok/mediocre and pretty par for the course imo. It is very, very far from "exceptionally good for the series" lol. Of the English-localized games exclusively, it's worse than Awakening and 9, roughly comparable to 7 I think (Conq might be a bit better), and better than Birthright and Revelation. Intentionally excluding 10 because it had such split unit availability. I dunno about 8 or SD. Class-wise specifically though bow-units are way up so that's good/cool.



Awakening centred the idea of FE being a game where you can customize your units to a fair degree, grind them to whatever levels and skills you wanted so any unit was equally usable, had fairly customizable children etc. You could have fun designing your own army based on the characters you like or whatever else. For some people this is a huge thing, and I imagine it appeals to the waifu etc crowd somewhat. This is what I mean by the "army building aspect of the series", where the non-class-changing and non-skill games don't really have this in any meaningful capacity and Awakening was 95% army builder + 5% soundtrack.

Birthright is obviously the successor to Awakening's version of this idea and lets you grind up units (and supports) though in a much less convenient way, and the hard lv 20/20 limit makes pre-planning your leveling patterns more important (somewhat overruled by buying skills), so the children make a lot of sense here even if they're not as well off as they were in awakening (side-note: I'm not 100% convinced that Birthright is better than Awakening even on "just gameplay", but that's an opinion I need to mull over much more). In Conquest it's the same thing without the grinding and with less money to buy your skills with, so you get them later and with less ability to work them into the shape you want.

I'm not sure how weak your main roster was if you think the children are immediately usable or comparable to your other units. Even with the fairly abrupt exp-gain declines in this game my main roster was far, far ahead of the children I was getting even post-offspring seal. Are you unlocking the children like, super early before you have skills to pass down to them? Or is lunatic such a sharp exp decline that the children become comparably leveled?

Ahh ok, it's clearer what you mean.

I think this is largely a recurring trend across the DS era games where stat bloat adds more tedium and needless complexity to assessing combat (e..g weapon rank based stat bonuses). As a trend, I'm not a fan of it, but I don't think Conquest significantly makes it worse than it already was.

Also, I never feed Lilith. I remove her temple right at the start and never rebuild it. The gold she gives is barely relevant unless you spend a long time durdling around and visiting peoples' castles. In the context of the maingame it essentially amounts to ~100g per chapter which will never really make a difference.


It's more apparent on Lunatic but what I mean is that you can't just use only the good units and just lowman the game with them. They aren't overcentralizing because your other "weaker" units still have to make contributions, so how you develop them is still important.


There's absolutely no way the unit balance is worse than Awakening. Robin alone is massively more overcentralizing than any of Conquest's best characters and it's not even close. Beyond those best characters unit balance is pretty similar for the first gen, but even ignoring Robin, the children completely destroy Awakening's unit balance, with the best ones (Lucina, Morgan) being hyper-Ests that recruit with acceptable bases and rapidly outscale everyone but Robin, and the worst ones (Inigo, Owain) being essentially unusable in moderate-efficiency main game play.

As you know from our prior discussions I don't have enough experience with PoR, so it's very hard for me to comment on the comparison to Conquest there. Regarding the other games you mentioned, 8's unit balance is completely fucked by Seth's existence (and still suffers a number of problems even without him), and SD suffers from a large bloat of bad units.


Conquest isn't meant to be an Awakening style "army builder". IS found a role for the kids in the context of a traditional FE game, and I think they work very well here in the function they've assumed. That they don't fit the same function as they do in Birthright and Awakening doesn't mean they don't work. From a gameplay standpoint, I just think kids work better than traditional lategame prepromotes for a number of reasons and their variable recruit times add a lot of options to their use.


The XP decline is sharper in Lunatic than in Hard, yes. XP drops to 1 with a 5-level advantage on Lunatic, so generally the kids are pretty close to on-level (2-3 level disadvantage at recruit which is easily covered in their recruit chapter). How good the kids are at that point depends on the parents and the individual kid, but from a scaling perspective, it largely works just fine.

Match 1 - vs Seasons Past
I'm starting to get sick of this deck. Games take 80 years and I grind them down to within one turn of winning and then Nissa's Renewal, or I win. Either way it takes forever. Grinded out to a draw, 1-1.

Match 2 - vs Seasons Past
Fucking another one. This one I was within 2 life and one turn from winning G1 multiple times but couldn't get there, and crushed G2. G3 I ultimately lost in the FINAL turn after time was called to Kalitas. Just sucked big time.

Match 3 - vs Mono-U Brains
Played against a 10(?) year old who may have been better at magic than me. He certainly played as though he had a decent amount of experience. Beat him 2-0 because I can combo off really easily.

That second draw cost me a cut to top 4 unfortunately; the guy who beat me made 4th place and had one more point than me or something like that. I got a third Anguished Unmaking promo but just JUST missed out on the full playset. Got another playset of Incorrigible Youths though. (yay...?)

Final thoughts - should have played my Brains deck in the end haha. Would have crushed both of those Seasons Past players. My deck is good but not great, really needs Liliana.
Draft tomorrow and probably some more standard for fun.

Eh, I mean, I don't suspect it was prevalent in SD (no more so than in 9 or 10, at least), but I would agree with stat bloat increasing over the nMystery -> Awakening -> Fates set of games. tbh I still don't know how weapon ranks or weapon triangle factor into stats in fates because I can't find the pages on SF if they're there and the wiki didn't have much, but it doesn't seem like a big deal at all so far. I really do think it's much more prevalent in Fates than it was in Awakening, though, primarily due to inventory / item bloat and the management that ensues from it.


I don't use it either because I don't use the castle battle features (and as such have no use for Lilith's stats) and I have access to the DLC as well as being able to just edit more gold into my save if I really needed it / wanted to / fuck lilith. I assumed the gold would matter on Lunatic Conquest where gold is supposed to be scarce? I've had more than enough on every other path/difficulty combo so far, so maybe the gold starvation myth is just a myth?



Ah, ok. I remember before you mentioned there was less flexibility for lowperson play, but I haven't experienced any of it yet. If it's restricted only to Lunatic Conquest then that makes sense. rip lowperson runs.


Awakening has infinitely accessible infinite grinding, so unit balance concerns really get thrown out the window. Some require less work of course, and class sets still matter, but the system is workable by the player to a far larger degree than any other game in the series, and you can easily get every character to the point where they one-round enemies on the counter attack while never dying, at which point excess stats and skills become meaningless.

9 is similar in the sense that the game is so easy and easy to play with lowperson strats that every unit still gets to the point of "kills everything, never dies" reasonably early at which point which units is stronger on paper etc doesn't matter, and solo runs are possible with every single unit barring Sothe (even then it's only because the boss of chapter ~24 (iirc) is on a heal tile). Archers are weak ofc (all both of them) because of no reclassing options, everyone 1-rounds fliers anyway and acc is so high in general that 1-2 range weapons are great -> so bows aren't anything special, and it being an offense on enemy turn game, but solo runs are still possible with them.

I had assumed balance in 8 was generally workable by the player due to the Arena, is this not the case?


Eh, I'm generally coming in from the perspective that the kids were just shoehorned into Conquest where they didn't belong as half-assed and half-functional army builder toys, but I think your perspective is one I can/might come around to. They really don't fulfill that lategame prepromote function on any difficulty other than Lunatic, but it's sounding more and more to me like Conquest is only designed to be great on Lunatic, which is fine I guess since it's clearly the setting the target audience is going to go for.