The Let's Play Archive

Fire Emblem: Binding Blade

by Melth

Part 18: Second Interlude (Ranking Progress Reloaded)

Another arc down. At the end of this one the otherwise useless Elphin has begun offering a clumsy prototype of the rankings check you can do much better with Marcus/Oswin in FE7. So I took the opportunity to check in with him for a mostly unhelpful summary and then also crunched the numbers in more detail on XP and funds. I probably won't do a status update like this after every arc, but it seemed appropriate after just getting the augury ranking check option.


First of all, I remain behind on turns. That's largely because of the last two chapters actually, I'd easily been reducing that deficit to 0 before they hit. I remain confident that I can get into the positives any time I want, but I should start working on that since I would like to exceed the requirement by a lot. The big problem is usually that a lot of reinforcements don't spawn until at or near the final allowed turn, so getting a good XP ranking requires me to wait around a long time.


As usual, power is exactly the same as XP so you'll see how I'm doing there when I get to XP.


Survival is a triviality.


Now, unexpectedly, I actually do NOT have max rank in combat at the moment. Elphin's status update is kind of ambiguous but I THINK when he says I'm doing "Very well" he means I'm at a 4 star level basically. This is a VERY hard ranking to improve. It was usually just in the bag in FE7 but here the enemies are tougher and my units are weaker, plus I need to train huge numbers of really weak people every chapter. The result is that I actually can't kill many enemies in one round. And some bosses take a huge number. There's just no one on my team who can reliably one-round enemies. Only Gonzalez has the strength (barely) and he doesn't have the accuracy.


So what about XP?




That chart ranks each character by XP gained. You can see that absolutely everyone has actually been used at least a little.

And the results are good; my lead has widened (despite several impossible requirement chapters) to 7600 instead of about 4800. This is nice, and actually even better than it sounds really. See I've looked ahead on the charts and it looks like FE6, unlike FE7, doesn't have any chapters with absolutely massive XP requirements. Nothing ever requires more than 2000 or 2500. Even 2500 is really rare, it's mostly 2000 and a few 1500s. That's majorly different from FE7 where in the final 8 chapters or so the requirements suddenly went through the roof with absurdities like 6150 on Victory or Death. If you went into that chapter with less than a 4000 or so surplus, you were completely done for and you didn't even know it.

Plus I'm still going to get a few more fairly usable low level people. That's good because I really, REALLY don't want to have to try to train Wolt or the armor knights. Or Ward. But just the thought of trying seriously to give levels to Wolt makes me shudder.

So I certainly can't relax just yet, but I can maybe bring out some more good units. That should help me salvage my combat and tactics scores.


Now because Elphin's augury kind of sucks, the best way to figure out my funds is still to tabulate the value of everything. So here's a giant chart:




We're drowning in treasure. I mean, 12 chests last level? And a bunch before that. And then like 11 villages or whatever on chapter 11. And 8 chests or something in Ostia. And 10 villages or something. And then there were a giant number of chests in the one with Wagner too. And so on.

And I've acquired everything, right down to vulneraries and antitoxins, and been moderately frugal with weapons, so I'm now sitting pretty on more than 75,000 in excess capital. And that's after promoting Alan. Unless I miscalculated something, that actually means I can promote 15 characters if I want to right now. So... I'm done with funds. And not even just for the lame glitched 84,000 requirement. This is for the intended 150,000. Wait, holy cow, I'm nearly AT that requirement already aren't I? It's like the designers had no idea what they were doing at all! Someone check my math on this one.

So I'm pretty much in the clear with regards to funds. If that's the case, my XP worries will also be alleviated somewhat. That will mostly leave combat (and actually turning tactics around).