Fire Emblem

[A Black Falcon]

When there are several paths, I split my people up to cover all of them if at all possible. When some people are faster than others, I send them on ahead unless they're really weak and can't survive... then I might send them anyway but be sure to keep them out of range. Sure, sometimes lines or stuff are useful, and you often have to have groups of a few units to guard narrow points, but the people in the group will be chosen by their abilities, not by if they have possible supports... and it's only for a few turns, not dozens!

And anyway, it's always nice to have characters who can take out bunches of enemies alone... of course you need to move units in strategic groups, covering eachother, etc. But that does not necessarially mean that they are actually touching eachother... it's more likely that I'd have more scattered groups, with a couple people contiguous but each group seperated from the others.

Stupid FE dragon... the TSS one was too easy, but the FE one was such a pain. Making it essentially invulnerable to almost everything was a BAD idea. If I hadn't had Luna... yeah, that would have been very, very bad. With Eliwood only at about 20/10, his speed was too low with the special weapon (just 9), so the dragon got two hits and always killed him, ending the game. Hector (20/4) and Lyn (20/15)? Not good enough to both do damage to it (Lyn... 20% crit chance with the sol katti, but base attack with the best weapon was 29 vs. its armor of 30... and the sol katti was less.) and do damage worth mentioning to it and/or survive (Hector)... so they were useless. Florina with the Rex Hasta (she finished at level 20/20. :)) could do like four damage, but that's not exactly too helpful... and just about everyone else would die and/or do no damage. Only Athos was capable, and as I said, I had to heal him then rescue the healer every turn after he attacked... (because the dragon has 3 range) Really, what finally got me to beat the dragon was realizing that it was just a 3-range unit, so I could do that and it'd work. Before I was trying to beat it in one or two turns and of course it didn't work... but of course, there's also the fact that the level before it is hard and very frusterating. I beat the dragon in like four tries, but that level... it probably took a dozen times for each time I got to the dragon, at least... oh, most of them didn't get too far before someone died or something, but still.

I know, that's the FE game design. Cruel frusteration and forcing people to redo missions endlessly. It's just hard, and drives me away from the games for a while after another paticularly frusterating loss...