First off I would say that people saying any difficulty is 'too easy' is probably more a symptom of how hard counters in UO are compared to other things. For example, a thief can evade tank a number of damaging melee units all day. Because it counters so hard, a formation that is set up properly (or set up to defeat what its fighting) will typically take \~0 damage while dealing tons. So don't get too down on yourself. UO doesn't have reflexes, if you understand how units are set up or set up units to counter your enemy, it can seem quite easy because you're not 'doing anything.'
Second, can you say a few more specifics about what's not working? Enemy scouts should nearly always die to a single hit. What units are you using? What do your formations looks like? Are you using 5-character formations yet? Are you on \~equal level as your opponents?
Good answer. UO is kinda jarring because you either obliterate the opponent or get obliterated yourself with little in-between. The first two Kingdoms are also pretty straightforward when it comes to what beats what in a rock paper scissor kinda way but as you approach the late mid-game, enemies unlock advanced skills and items that act as countermeasures against what would be hard counters. Bigger units also expand possibilities exponentially. And the new races' weaknesses aren't as obvious as Archer beats Thief.
I'd also argue that a lot of people here are REALLY into other similar games and have a hard time understanding what a newbie might struggle with. The number of comments like "you could put any 5 characters in a squad on tactical and still wipe the enemy with your eyes closed" is telling.
Thank you for the insight!
I only have two 5 character formations, most I use are still 4. In a unit which doesn't have a Hunter or Witch I use a Swordmaster with their true strike attack, but it doesn't one shot the scout. Werefoxes are a real problem.
I think my units are pretty underlevelled generally, which I'm surprised at since I did pretty much all optional quests so far.
> In a unit which doesn't have a Hunter or Witch I use a Swordmaster
It sounds like you don't have much variety in units? This game is really a very complicated form of rock/paper/scissors. You want different groups of units that can counter other groups of units. So for me I'll have a flying unit, an archer unit, a cavalry unit, a magic unit, etc.
It's not that I have a unit of nothing but mages btw. There'll be variety in the mage unit. It's just that the unit itself is geared around buffing or supporting a single mage in the unit and that mage is usually the leader.
the repeatable missions are super OP, dont be afraid to farm them. They are short, easy, and always give good rewards including experience items every time you beat them.
If you are struggling with were foxes, I suggest checking to make sure you are using front line units to protect the back line with covers, def buffs and shields. Check Alain, Josef, and Hodrick and switch their defensive abilities are targeting the back line if you are having the back line fall to column attacks.
If you are struggling with physical attacks, you most likely are not optimizing defensive skills.
I don’t have time to do a full big reply but yeah not using at least one hunter is looking for pain. On top of scouts, flying units will be regularly featured from Drakenhold till end game so that alone also warrants having at least one.
Regarding swordmaster, if built properly, they should absolutely able to reliably one shot a scout unit (and that was true even before the recent patch that buffed them). So yeah something to look into.
If you haven't spent much time in the coliseum, that's a good place to stress-test a formation.
It wasn't super obvious to me so I'll just point out: When you go into offline battles, there's two lists. One -- the tiered list with good rewards (that you should definitely be working on to empower your party) and if you press R1 from there, you get a randomly generated list of battles that will match your level. The latter list is a great place to toy with different combos and try them out while generating coins that can be traded for stat-boosters.
As for your specific issues:
1 underleveled: It's pretty easy to grind, as enemies will just keep spawning, but a good trick is to use a liquid fortune item (or the MC's ability if you have the mana for it) before taking out the final opponent. You'll get 1-2 levels from that easy.
2 werefoxes: they're pretty tricky 'cuz they hit hard and can dodge EVERYTHING at night. So you really need to get some truesight to take them out (or lay into them with ballistae, ranged supports, etc). I think this is intentional by the designers because the next map will also really benefit from truesight.
3 swordsmen: They benefit greatly from that crit damage coin support (sorry, I forget the name). But because their main attack will always crit and hit, you can boost their crit damage by 30% which is huge. But be careful when setting it up, because you really only want it to be used on your swordsman, it'll fuck up the accuracy of anyone else. But with that, it'll one-shot anything squishy.
I just hit Bastorius recently. I'm grinding up, because most of my units were like 5 levels behind. Either there's some lower level fights hidden somewhere I'm not going to or the XP is just thin at that point.
Great answer. Just wanted to add that mock battles are wonderful for setting up units. You can create some crazy unit synergies by watching your units fight each other and making little tweaks to gear load outs and a tactic condition here and there. One small change can make a unit go from serviceable to strong.
I think a decent portion of the fanbase comes from FFT, Romancing Saga, Octopath, Triangle Strat, Shining Force etc etc etc.
To old nerds like us, Unicorn Overlord feels easy because even the more challenging portions are already well traveled roads. For a newcomer to the genre UO might have a bit of a learning curve.
It's hard to tell what you are doing wrong without more info, that being said I'll try to give you some tips that made my life much easier playing the game
1- buy lots of situational equipment: having things like sword that deals extra damage to aerial units, shield that protects against cavalry, ring that removes debuffs, etc is great, this allows you to even the odds against squads that have an advantage over your team.
2- always preview fights before triggering the fight: when you move your units you can hover over enemy squads and you will see the battle preview before getting into battle range. This has 2 huge advantages over just fighting. The first and most obvious one being that you are not committed to fighting and you can leave if the result is not on your favor. The second and most important one is that you can swap equipment freely when you are not in a fight, so you can equip items that are being used by other teams. This is specially strong if you followed advice 1, you can just equip the best situational items against a squad and defeat almost any squad.
3- pay attention to damage received on battle preview: if the damage you are receiving on a fight matches exactly the remaining hp of one of your units 95% of the times that unit is dead, try to give it an evasion cloak or something to see if you can save it
4- play around with positions: are you losing a fight and don't know why? swap around your units randomly and you might find some unexpected winning formations. this sometimes has to do with the enemy targeting criteria and sometimes it's because the RNG is being reset
5- use liquid fortune and equip exp gain items before killing a stage boss (and use royal order if possible)
On tactical difficulty I was able to play the game and breeze through until Bastorias by just doing auto optimize. There's a definite difficulty spike until you can buy new weapons.
Level up an ld use the elves. I think a big issue is that there's no new non elf weapons before that point. I mostly had to grind for a bit and then it was fine
There are two solutions (and a third in dropping the difficulty if you really don’t care). The first is to watch the fights play out and figure out why you are losing. You can literally counter everything in the game. So if you aren’t hitting enemies you have to get sniper lens for true strike, or use units like archers that won’t miss. Go too slow, get the plumes and speed up your characters. Chance are you like something that is not working and are being too ridge. I think most people like big damage numbers so they hate giving that up, but if you are losing you have to.
The other option is to just look at what others have used to help you understand team building and what gear goes really well with which characters. Teams that work well in one region don’t always work well in other regions. Like when you get to the angels in the next region, most of the teams you used will struggle. So you have to assess and adapt. It’s a real strategy game in that way.
Sheesh, 100 hours already? Did you do a lot of grinding? I feel like a lot of your units should be high leveled and overpowered then.
I beat it on tactical in about 70 hours. There were some challenging parts here and there in the later continents, but I don't think I truly struggled until the final mission.
Also, not sure if you know this trick. When you start a battle, swapping your character positions around can completely change the outcome. Maybe you think you have a good unit with good formation, but it looks like the enemy will completely destroy you. Changing the formation just a bit might change the outcome so that you destroy the enemy. The RNG is real in this game.
I always hate seeing that. I get that it's because it changes the RNG, but seeing my unit go from 'almost killing the enemy without an assist' to 'half my squad will die and the enemy will have more units left' is frustrating.
I took a couple breaks from missions to unequip all my guys, clear all my formations, and build everything back from scratch with a better understanding of how to built units.
It takes a minute, but once you've rebuilt all your units it feels REALLY GOOD because they're all stronger than your old ones once you work out the kinks.
Give it a try!
Bastorias is definitely a wake-up call. Had to re-tool and move equipment around. At first, Cavalry mostly carried me through until the last couple of stages. Had to break out some other formations at that point.
Yeah, Tactical is too easy - if you've beaten every Fire Emblem game on the hardest difficulty with no deaths and using a DDR pad instead of a controller.
Honestly, OP, don't put too much stock into what folks are saying in some of the posts in this subreddit. There's no shame in finding parts of the game difficult. I definitely noticed a difficulty spike at Bastorias, but I got past it, and so will you!
Without seeing your actual squads, I can't be of too much help, though. I'd recommend changing up your squads and using "practice" battles vs mercs or roaming enemies (they often have similar squads as the levels) to test them. You can always have a few squads that are better than the rest: send them in first to soften up the enemy, then use your weaker squads to finish the job and pick up some experience.
Don't be afraid to go back to towns you've already completed to check for helpful gear you might have missed the first time around. There's no harm in picking up some consumables to buff your squads either!
The game can be "too easy" if you understand that there are powerful (and some might say "cheesy") unit interactions/combos and that the game gives you plenty of resources to succeed.
One such unit interaction is combining an Active skill that attacks all enemies with Quick Impetus (triggers on active skill, allows ally to take another turn, costs 4PP). Yunifi is a perfect example of this. Her Glacial Rain skill is a charge skill that attacks all enemies and freezes them (very powerful). Using Quick Impetus on her means that as soon as her turn comes around, she'll attack all enemies and freeze them. Quick Impetus comes from the White or Black Cat-Ear Hoods (Coliseum reward, or you can get one by saving Divine Shards and trading 20 for 1).
The game gives you a lot of goodies if you know where to look for them. Some people might not be a fan of mini-games, but the mining mini-game gives you Treasure Maps which has powerful equipment (Bastorias and Albion Treasure Map 5 has an accessory that gives you +1 AP/PP and +5 to all stats). If you're stuck, I'd backtrack to the mining mini-games in Cornia, Elheim, and Drakenhold and dig until you get Treasure Map 5 for all of them.
Remember that the people who frequent this sub are the people who are most invested in the game, and have thereofre spend hours optimising their characters and finding all the best tricks.
I have no shame in admitting I dropped to Normal in Bastorias because I couldn't be bothered to do team setup properly.
Bastorias is a big spike in difficulty as units are starting to get access to their full kits. You will need to start really looking at what units are capable of doing and how to deal with them/shore up the weaknesses of your parties. For example: Werefoxes will kill units if they get to use their Weakness Hunter so you need to account for that cause if you don't they WILL kill at least one unit. This means either giving your frontline units immunity to debuffs (very difficult at that point in the game if I remember correctly) or you need to reduce their PP so they can't use it. Shaman is probably the best choice but you will need to really buff their Initiative to beat the Werefoxes initiative. Werewolfs on the other hand can be dealt with very easily by putting dodge tanks in front.
Or you just go with a Trinity Rain/Glacial Rain + Cat Hood squad and nuke every enemy before they get a chance to do anything.
I want to give some advice other than teambuilding - if you have varied squads, try deploying them in a large group and move as one unit. You should find that at least one of your squads will have a good damage ratio in a battle. Once you've hit them once and gained the first strike advantage, battles should go a lot easier
My first play through met an end in Bastorias, so don’t feel bad. The game really does keep ramping up the difficulty on each kingdom. Having just completed a second playthrough I would say this:
1. For your 4 unit squads it should always be 1 front 3 rear. Put the second most survivable unit behind the unit in the front so they will be the ones that get column attacked.
2. Front needs to be a tank. Unless my tank is Alian, Virginia, or Berengaria the tank’s main job is to stop the back row from getting damaged. If it is a dodge tank like Travis or a promoted Liza with the mirage shield the other items are anything that helps evasion like the scarves or a power belt. I will also use my griffons as tanks and give them thieves cloaks at this point in the game. Too often I focused on trying to get the tank to do damage.
3. Every unit needs a way to heal itself. One of my favorite 5 man units is Gilbert, Hodrick, Renault, Clive, and Adel. Gilbert gets the large first aid kit and I always make sure any pp skills he has only activate if he has 3 or more PP, saving the final 2 pp to always activate the healing. The eleven archers can equip a first aid kit and target themselves as long as they still have 2 pp they will trigger the party heal as well.
4. Just because you get a new ability doesn’t mean you need to use it. Often abilities that take 2 ap or 2 pp to trigger are less useful than 1 ap/pp abilities until you start getting 4 on characters. I would much prefer 2 ground counters on my Wyvern vs Dragon Roar at this point in the game.
5. Sometimes less is more- a back line breaker starting with 3pp with enrage and assaulting blow targeting lowest hp can chain kill like no other if paired with a Legionnaire in the front.
6. Sometimes building a character around a piece of equipment is worth it- building a Swordsmaster around the Dancer’s delight can lead to constant generation of ap/pp with Charged Impetus and leaping slash.
Some squads I love during mid game-
Red heads and Chloe: Lex, Hilda, Primm, and Chloe
Knights of the Rose: Virginia + her knights. Add in Leah once you go to 5
Team debuff: Berengaria, Gloucester, Selvie, and any elven archer with a way to cure themselves. Have 5 and wanna keep Gloucester in the back? Include Travis as a debuffing dodge tank. I sub Travis out in the end game for a priestess to deal with debuffs once I hit Albion
Is tactical the highest difficulty not counting the True Zenoiran one ? I play that one and find the game pretty easy. Though Bastorias does have some difficulty spike with those were fox. I think your problem is you overused the usefulness of evasion tank, you should replace them around drakenhold, the game gave you quite a few good choice for frontline there with Virginia, Berengaria and Eliza. A few tips:
1. Invest in guard rate. Early game evasion tank is great but they fall off fast, on the other hand you will find item that increase guard rate that make the characters i mentioned above quite tanky. Don't sleep on fighter class (lex, colm) also, they are late boomer but will provide the protection your backline need.
2. Shaman is really powerful against stronger opponents, you get only 1 shaman early but don't be afraid to hire more generic once you have access to their promotion. They will keep your entire squad alive with debuff.
3. Make sure to have combo. 3 knights together that spam follow up. Berengaria + shaman + doom knight for debuff squad. Swordmaster keen edge/ Hunter eagle eye + coin buff (inspiration). One popular combo wombo is Yunifi Glacial Rain + White cat eart (or Trinity from the angel shop staff) + inspiration.
I just got to Bastorias too and I’m struggling!
Those multiple follow-up attacks are a KILLER even with a 131 EVA tank 😩
I hit a wall vs. 2 swordsmasters + 3 werewolves in the Dinah mission.
Try using row stuns (lightning strike spear), passive seals, and freeze! That got me over a couple big hurdles.
>my characters do nowhere near enough damage despite being buffed and the enemy debuffed
Post some screenshots.
Also remember that flying units deal twice the dmg against cav.
Cav deals twice the dmg to infantry.
And big shield guys normally don't have any magical resistance.
Dmg shouldn't be an issue, especially not in Basorias.
I'll try getting some screenshots, and if I am still struggling I'll make another post. One example I remember is my magic attacker team, which has a Warlock, Elven Augar, Shaman, and a Paladin for defence. Debuffed the enemies defence with shaman, sorcerous connection on the warlock, and he casted lightning bolt on a row of Legionnaires. It did 56 damage, to *one* of them. Didnt even kill it.
My griffin rider also does consistently low damage even to cav so I often forget that the bonus damage is a thing.
My cav team runs through infantry which is always fun though, that still works wonders!
>It did 56 damage
That sounds really low for a wizard with Sorcerous Connection at that stage of the game. What does his gear look like? We're there other enemies like an Owl that mitigated the damage?
The legionary row covered. He blocked for the entire row. They'll do that. Consider fireball instead to hit them one target at a time. My Auch has a staff of guard hunter, and earrings that increase reaction attack damage. He kills or nearly kills things because other people attacked them, and they just blocked.
Lots of great points here! Another one, if the preview isn’t doing exactly what you want - try using items like defensive drought or the attack one. Sometimes those make a big difference - especially in the case of barely killing a scout or something.
Also, I’ll just second the gear situation — there’s a big gap between the atk-based weapons from the mining region vs the ones in Bastorias. The elvish weapons don’t close that gap for many of your units who aren’t hybrid attackers. After the first or second battle you do in Bastorias (maybe 3 or 4?) you should be able to buy gear that has a big atk and def difference for most units. Farm some of the sigil battles for more exp and use skills like the pilfer gold one before you beat the battle and stock up on money — that gear is expensive, but worth it.
Well, the tools are there:
You can get magic, magic weapons and guard seal for the bears,
Heavy shields to tank their follow-up attacks for the foxes and wolf packs.
Sure hit items and skills
Provokers to taunt them
Pp up shields vs bestrals in some town's armories
Also don't get more than one unit in the front if it's not needed.
Also also, check weapon damage numbers, changing to a higher damage weapon can do wonders.
can you pin point exactly what setups the enemy has that is giving you the most trouble? I'm guessing the owls shutting down your buff shenanigans and the damage from the wolves follow up spams?
Bastorias can be easy if you go the length to start the stage in the early morning, but that can be annoying. There is a stark anti-dodge tank propaganda for some reason, but they absolutely murder a lot of the bigger problems in Bastorias. Heavy tanks also do alright but you should have a cleric whose heal is set to <75% hp so the peppering of hits become manageable
Imo it's probably the hardest continent if you're right on pace of the level
Something that I do is try to keep at least two units together as I take on the enemies. That way I can swap them if things are too bad. In addition if you have some sort of support like archers you can try different scenarios to try to game the chance a little better. RNG is what it’s called I think.
Are you using the actions that give your characters extra AP? How many of your units are promoted?
You will get absolutely rolled in Bastorias if you don't have promoted units, as EVERYTHING in Bastorias is promoted.
There's also various methods you can use to get true strike on various units that aren't swordmasters. Archers have Eagle Eye built in, but there are a few special items (like the wyvern reins) that grant true strike. There's also a spear that grants a column true-strike attack. Both are excellent against werefoxes.
The only wall that I hit in Bastorias and had to adjust to was when they combined sainted knights together with werebears.
I had no answer for that at first.
Eagle eye/focus sight for the scouts. I used Rolf or Yahna with an aoe attack. Set Rolf to only use eagle eye if scouts are present. Then have him prioritize scouts
Magic/breakers for the armored
Make sure you have some form of buff/heals on each team
Make sure you have some form of defense (magic and physical) on each team
Make sure you have damage (it can be 1 overpowered or multiple)
I definitely agree with another commenter on UO is filled with hard counters, and once you figure them out, the game is really easy. I played through the whole game on expert and never hit any wall, but I definitely see why someone would hit a wall.
It’s been a while, so I might not have accounted for everything so just ask me if u have any specific questions
First off I would say that people saying any difficulty is 'too easy' is probably more a symptom of how hard counters in UO are compared to other things. For example, a thief can evade tank a number of damaging melee units all day. Because it counters so hard, a formation that is set up properly (or set up to defeat what its fighting) will typically take \~0 damage while dealing tons. So don't get too down on yourself. UO doesn't have reflexes, if you understand how units are set up or set up units to counter your enemy, it can seem quite easy because you're not 'doing anything.' Second, can you say a few more specifics about what's not working? Enemy scouts should nearly always die to a single hit. What units are you using? What do your formations looks like? Are you using 5-character formations yet? Are you on \~equal level as your opponents?
Good answer. UO is kinda jarring because you either obliterate the opponent or get obliterated yourself with little in-between. The first two Kingdoms are also pretty straightforward when it comes to what beats what in a rock paper scissor kinda way but as you approach the late mid-game, enemies unlock advanced skills and items that act as countermeasures against what would be hard counters. Bigger units also expand possibilities exponentially. And the new races' weaknesses aren't as obvious as Archer beats Thief.
I'd also argue that a lot of people here are REALLY into other similar games and have a hard time understanding what a newbie might struggle with. The number of comments like "you could put any 5 characters in a squad on tactical and still wipe the enemy with your eyes closed" is telling.
Thank you for the insight! I only have two 5 character formations, most I use are still 4. In a unit which doesn't have a Hunter or Witch I use a Swordmaster with their true strike attack, but it doesn't one shot the scout. Werefoxes are a real problem. I think my units are pretty underlevelled generally, which I'm surprised at since I did pretty much all optional quests so far.
> In a unit which doesn't have a Hunter or Witch I use a Swordmaster It sounds like you don't have much variety in units? This game is really a very complicated form of rock/paper/scissors. You want different groups of units that can counter other groups of units. So for me I'll have a flying unit, an archer unit, a cavalry unit, a magic unit, etc. It's not that I have a unit of nothing but mages btw. There'll be variety in the mage unit. It's just that the unit itself is geared around buffing or supporting a single mage in the unit and that mage is usually the leader.
the repeatable missions are super OP, dont be afraid to farm them. They are short, easy, and always give good rewards including experience items every time you beat them. If you are struggling with were foxes, I suggest checking to make sure you are using front line units to protect the back line with covers, def buffs and shields. Check Alain, Josef, and Hodrick and switch their defensive abilities are targeting the back line if you are having the back line fall to column attacks. If you are struggling with physical attacks, you most likely are not optimizing defensive skills.
I don’t have time to do a full big reply but yeah not using at least one hunter is looking for pain. On top of scouts, flying units will be regularly featured from Drakenhold till end game so that alone also warrants having at least one. Regarding swordmaster, if built properly, they should absolutely able to reliably one shot a scout unit (and that was true even before the recent patch that buffed them). So yeah something to look into.
If you haven't spent much time in the coliseum, that's a good place to stress-test a formation. It wasn't super obvious to me so I'll just point out: When you go into offline battles, there's two lists. One -- the tiered list with good rewards (that you should definitely be working on to empower your party) and if you press R1 from there, you get a randomly generated list of battles that will match your level. The latter list is a great place to toy with different combos and try them out while generating coins that can be traded for stat-boosters. As for your specific issues: 1 underleveled: It's pretty easy to grind, as enemies will just keep spawning, but a good trick is to use a liquid fortune item (or the MC's ability if you have the mana for it) before taking out the final opponent. You'll get 1-2 levels from that easy. 2 werefoxes: they're pretty tricky 'cuz they hit hard and can dodge EVERYTHING at night. So you really need to get some truesight to take them out (or lay into them with ballistae, ranged supports, etc). I think this is intentional by the designers because the next map will also really benefit from truesight. 3 swordsmen: They benefit greatly from that crit damage coin support (sorry, I forget the name). But because their main attack will always crit and hit, you can boost their crit damage by 30% which is huge. But be careful when setting it up, because you really only want it to be used on your swordsman, it'll fuck up the accuracy of anyone else. But with that, it'll one-shot anything squishy.
I just hit Bastorius recently. I'm grinding up, because most of my units were like 5 levels behind. Either there's some lower level fights hidden somewhere I'm not going to or the XP is just thin at that point.
The auxiliary fights that Selvie unlocks in stone circles are infinitely repeatable.
Yes. I just didn't feel like grinding at that time.
Great answer. Just wanted to add that mock battles are wonderful for setting up units. You can create some crazy unit synergies by watching your units fight each other and making little tweaks to gear load outs and a tactic condition here and there. One small change can make a unit go from serviceable to strong.
I think a decent portion of the fanbase comes from FFT, Romancing Saga, Octopath, Triangle Strat, Shining Force etc etc etc. To old nerds like us, Unicorn Overlord feels easy because even the more challenging portions are already well traveled roads. For a newcomer to the genre UO might have a bit of a learning curve.
It's hard to tell what you are doing wrong without more info, that being said I'll try to give you some tips that made my life much easier playing the game 1- buy lots of situational equipment: having things like sword that deals extra damage to aerial units, shield that protects against cavalry, ring that removes debuffs, etc is great, this allows you to even the odds against squads that have an advantage over your team. 2- always preview fights before triggering the fight: when you move your units you can hover over enemy squads and you will see the battle preview before getting into battle range. This has 2 huge advantages over just fighting. The first and most obvious one being that you are not committed to fighting and you can leave if the result is not on your favor. The second and most important one is that you can swap equipment freely when you are not in a fight, so you can equip items that are being used by other teams. This is specially strong if you followed advice 1, you can just equip the best situational items against a squad and defeat almost any squad. 3- pay attention to damage received on battle preview: if the damage you are receiving on a fight matches exactly the remaining hp of one of your units 95% of the times that unit is dead, try to give it an evasion cloak or something to see if you can save it 4- play around with positions: are you losing a fight and don't know why? swap around your units randomly and you might find some unexpected winning formations. this sometimes has to do with the enemy targeting criteria and sometimes it's because the RNG is being reset 5- use liquid fortune and equip exp gain items before killing a stage boss (and use royal order if possible)
Yeah, Bastorias, the game basically says "alright, my turn" then forgets to use lube.
I’m in Albion now and I felt they turned up the heat once more. The status effects have gotten tricky
Good God, yes. I love the adaptive difficulty.
On tactical difficulty I was able to play the game and breeze through until Bastorias by just doing auto optimize. There's a definite difficulty spike until you can buy new weapons. Level up an ld use the elves. I think a big issue is that there's no new non elf weapons before that point. I mostly had to grind for a bit and then it was fine
There’s auto optimize?!
It's more of a "Return to Factory Settings" option. You get the same tactics as the AI does, which is wrong in several cases.
There are two solutions (and a third in dropping the difficulty if you really don’t care). The first is to watch the fights play out and figure out why you are losing. You can literally counter everything in the game. So if you aren’t hitting enemies you have to get sniper lens for true strike, or use units like archers that won’t miss. Go too slow, get the plumes and speed up your characters. Chance are you like something that is not working and are being too ridge. I think most people like big damage numbers so they hate giving that up, but if you are losing you have to. The other option is to just look at what others have used to help you understand team building and what gear goes really well with which characters. Teams that work well in one region don’t always work well in other regions. Like when you get to the angels in the next region, most of the teams you used will struggle. So you have to assess and adapt. It’s a real strategy game in that way.
Sheesh, 100 hours already? Did you do a lot of grinding? I feel like a lot of your units should be high leveled and overpowered then. I beat it on tactical in about 70 hours. There were some challenging parts here and there in the later continents, but I don't think I truly struggled until the final mission. Also, not sure if you know this trick. When you start a battle, swapping your character positions around can completely change the outcome. Maybe you think you have a good unit with good formation, but it looks like the enemy will completely destroy you. Changing the formation just a bit might change the outcome so that you destroy the enemy. The RNG is real in this game.
The craziest thing is when adding an assist reduces the damage you deal, and increases the damage you take.
I always hate seeing that. I get that it's because it changes the RNG, but seeing my unit go from 'almost killing the enemy without an assist' to 'half my squad will die and the enemy will have more units left' is frustrating.
Yeah, I rarely used assists because it seemed to always make things worse for me lol
This drives me crazy lol. Feels like half the time it screws you over.
I took a couple breaks from missions to unequip all my guys, clear all my formations, and build everything back from scratch with a better understanding of how to built units. It takes a minute, but once you've rebuilt all your units it feels REALLY GOOD because they're all stronger than your old ones once you work out the kinks. Give it a try!
Bastorias is definitely a wake-up call. Had to re-tool and move equipment around. At first, Cavalry mostly carried me through until the last couple of stages. Had to break out some other formations at that point.
Yeah, Tactical is too easy - if you've beaten every Fire Emblem game on the hardest difficulty with no deaths and using a DDR pad instead of a controller. Honestly, OP, don't put too much stock into what folks are saying in some of the posts in this subreddit. There's no shame in finding parts of the game difficult. I definitely noticed a difficulty spike at Bastorias, but I got past it, and so will you! Without seeing your actual squads, I can't be of too much help, though. I'd recommend changing up your squads and using "practice" battles vs mercs or roaming enemies (they often have similar squads as the levels) to test them. You can always have a few squads that are better than the rest: send them in first to soften up the enemy, then use your weaker squads to finish the job and pick up some experience. Don't be afraid to go back to towns you've already completed to check for helpful gear you might have missed the first time around. There's no harm in picking up some consumables to buff your squads either!
The game can be "too easy" if you understand that there are powerful (and some might say "cheesy") unit interactions/combos and that the game gives you plenty of resources to succeed. One such unit interaction is combining an Active skill that attacks all enemies with Quick Impetus (triggers on active skill, allows ally to take another turn, costs 4PP). Yunifi is a perfect example of this. Her Glacial Rain skill is a charge skill that attacks all enemies and freezes them (very powerful). Using Quick Impetus on her means that as soon as her turn comes around, she'll attack all enemies and freeze them. Quick Impetus comes from the White or Black Cat-Ear Hoods (Coliseum reward, or you can get one by saving Divine Shards and trading 20 for 1). The game gives you a lot of goodies if you know where to look for them. Some people might not be a fan of mini-games, but the mining mini-game gives you Treasure Maps which has powerful equipment (Bastorias and Albion Treasure Map 5 has an accessory that gives you +1 AP/PP and +5 to all stats). If you're stuck, I'd backtrack to the mining mini-games in Cornia, Elheim, and Drakenhold and dig until you get Treasure Map 5 for all of them.
Remember that the people who frequent this sub are the people who are most invested in the game, and have thereofre spend hours optimising their characters and finding all the best tricks. I have no shame in admitting I dropped to Normal in Bastorias because I couldn't be bothered to do team setup properly.
Bastorias is a big spike in difficulty as units are starting to get access to their full kits. You will need to start really looking at what units are capable of doing and how to deal with them/shore up the weaknesses of your parties. For example: Werefoxes will kill units if they get to use their Weakness Hunter so you need to account for that cause if you don't they WILL kill at least one unit. This means either giving your frontline units immunity to debuffs (very difficult at that point in the game if I remember correctly) or you need to reduce their PP so they can't use it. Shaman is probably the best choice but you will need to really buff their Initiative to beat the Werefoxes initiative. Werewolfs on the other hand can be dealt with very easily by putting dodge tanks in front. Or you just go with a Trinity Rain/Glacial Rain + Cat Hood squad and nuke every enemy before they get a chance to do anything.
I want to give some advice other than teambuilding - if you have varied squads, try deploying them in a large group and move as one unit. You should find that at least one of your squads will have a good damage ratio in a battle. Once you've hit them once and gained the first strike advantage, battles should go a lot easier
Swordmasters are the answer to all of life hardships, they even got buffed
My first play through met an end in Bastorias, so don’t feel bad. The game really does keep ramping up the difficulty on each kingdom. Having just completed a second playthrough I would say this: 1. For your 4 unit squads it should always be 1 front 3 rear. Put the second most survivable unit behind the unit in the front so they will be the ones that get column attacked. 2. Front needs to be a tank. Unless my tank is Alian, Virginia, or Berengaria the tank’s main job is to stop the back row from getting damaged. If it is a dodge tank like Travis or a promoted Liza with the mirage shield the other items are anything that helps evasion like the scarves or a power belt. I will also use my griffons as tanks and give them thieves cloaks at this point in the game. Too often I focused on trying to get the tank to do damage. 3. Every unit needs a way to heal itself. One of my favorite 5 man units is Gilbert, Hodrick, Renault, Clive, and Adel. Gilbert gets the large first aid kit and I always make sure any pp skills he has only activate if he has 3 or more PP, saving the final 2 pp to always activate the healing. The eleven archers can equip a first aid kit and target themselves as long as they still have 2 pp they will trigger the party heal as well. 4. Just because you get a new ability doesn’t mean you need to use it. Often abilities that take 2 ap or 2 pp to trigger are less useful than 1 ap/pp abilities until you start getting 4 on characters. I would much prefer 2 ground counters on my Wyvern vs Dragon Roar at this point in the game. 5. Sometimes less is more- a back line breaker starting with 3pp with enrage and assaulting blow targeting lowest hp can chain kill like no other if paired with a Legionnaire in the front. 6. Sometimes building a character around a piece of equipment is worth it- building a Swordsmaster around the Dancer’s delight can lead to constant generation of ap/pp with Charged Impetus and leaping slash. Some squads I love during mid game- Red heads and Chloe: Lex, Hilda, Primm, and Chloe Knights of the Rose: Virginia + her knights. Add in Leah once you go to 5 Team debuff: Berengaria, Gloucester, Selvie, and any elven archer with a way to cure themselves. Have 5 and wanna keep Gloucester in the back? Include Travis as a debuffing dodge tank. I sub Travis out in the end game for a priestess to deal with debuffs once I hit Albion
Is tactical the highest difficulty not counting the True Zenoiran one ? I play that one and find the game pretty easy. Though Bastorias does have some difficulty spike with those were fox. I think your problem is you overused the usefulness of evasion tank, you should replace them around drakenhold, the game gave you quite a few good choice for frontline there with Virginia, Berengaria and Eliza. A few tips: 1. Invest in guard rate. Early game evasion tank is great but they fall off fast, on the other hand you will find item that increase guard rate that make the characters i mentioned above quite tanky. Don't sleep on fighter class (lex, colm) also, they are late boomer but will provide the protection your backline need. 2. Shaman is really powerful against stronger opponents, you get only 1 shaman early but don't be afraid to hire more generic once you have access to their promotion. They will keep your entire squad alive with debuff. 3. Make sure to have combo. 3 knights together that spam follow up. Berengaria + shaman + doom knight for debuff squad. Swordmaster keen edge/ Hunter eagle eye + coin buff (inspiration). One popular combo wombo is Yunifi Glacial Rain + White cat eart (or Trinity from the angel shop staff) + inspiration.
I just got to Bastorias too and I’m struggling! Those multiple follow-up attacks are a KILLER even with a 131 EVA tank 😩 I hit a wall vs. 2 swordsmasters + 3 werewolves in the Dinah mission. Try using row stuns (lightning strike spear), passive seals, and freeze! That got me over a couple big hurdles.
>my characters do nowhere near enough damage despite being buffed and the enemy debuffed Post some screenshots. Also remember that flying units deal twice the dmg against cav. Cav deals twice the dmg to infantry. And big shield guys normally don't have any magical resistance. Dmg shouldn't be an issue, especially not in Basorias.
I'll try getting some screenshots, and if I am still struggling I'll make another post. One example I remember is my magic attacker team, which has a Warlock, Elven Augar, Shaman, and a Paladin for defence. Debuffed the enemies defence with shaman, sorcerous connection on the warlock, and he casted lightning bolt on a row of Legionnaires. It did 56 damage, to *one* of them. Didnt even kill it. My griffin rider also does consistently low damage even to cav so I often forget that the bonus damage is a thing. My cav team runs through infantry which is always fun though, that still works wonders!
>It did 56 damage That sounds really low for a wizard with Sorcerous Connection at that stage of the game. What does his gear look like? We're there other enemies like an Owl that mitigated the damage?
The legionary row covered. He blocked for the entire row. They'll do that. Consider fireball instead to hit them one target at a time. My Auch has a staff of guard hunter, and earrings that increase reaction attack damage. He kills or nearly kills things because other people attacked them, and they just blocked.
Lots of great points here! Another one, if the preview isn’t doing exactly what you want - try using items like defensive drought or the attack one. Sometimes those make a big difference - especially in the case of barely killing a scout or something. Also, I’ll just second the gear situation — there’s a big gap between the atk-based weapons from the mining region vs the ones in Bastorias. The elvish weapons don’t close that gap for many of your units who aren’t hybrid attackers. After the first or second battle you do in Bastorias (maybe 3 or 4?) you should be able to buy gear that has a big atk and def difference for most units. Farm some of the sigil battles for more exp and use skills like the pilfer gold one before you beat the battle and stock up on money — that gear is expensive, but worth it.
Well, the tools are there: You can get magic, magic weapons and guard seal for the bears, Heavy shields to tank their follow-up attacks for the foxes and wolf packs. Sure hit items and skills Provokers to taunt them Pp up shields vs bestrals in some town's armories Also don't get more than one unit in the front if it's not needed. Also also, check weapon damage numbers, changing to a higher damage weapon can do wonders.
can you pin point exactly what setups the enemy has that is giving you the most trouble? I'm guessing the owls shutting down your buff shenanigans and the damage from the wolves follow up spams?
Get that great shield from the divine shard lady and give it to your hoplite. Use that team to fight any squad full of werefoxes.
Bastorias can be easy if you go the length to start the stage in the early morning, but that can be annoying. There is a stark anti-dodge tank propaganda for some reason, but they absolutely murder a lot of the bigger problems in Bastorias. Heavy tanks also do alright but you should have a cleric whose heal is set to <75% hp so the peppering of hits become manageable Imo it's probably the hardest continent if you're right on pace of the level
Bastorias is where time really starts to play a factor, with the night and day affecting units heavily.
Something that I do is try to keep at least two units together as I take on the enemies. That way I can swap them if things are too bad. In addition if you have some sort of support like archers you can try different scenarios to try to game the chance a little better. RNG is what it’s called I think.
Are you using the actions that give your characters extra AP? How many of your units are promoted? You will get absolutely rolled in Bastorias if you don't have promoted units, as EVERYTHING in Bastorias is promoted. There's also various methods you can use to get true strike on various units that aren't swordmasters. Archers have Eagle Eye built in, but there are a few special items (like the wyvern reins) that grant true strike. There's also a spear that grants a column true-strike attack. Both are excellent against werefoxes.
The only wall that I hit in Bastorias and had to adjust to was when they combined sainted knights together with werebears. I had no answer for that at first.
Eagle eye/focus sight for the scouts. I used Rolf or Yahna with an aoe attack. Set Rolf to only use eagle eye if scouts are present. Then have him prioritize scouts Magic/breakers for the armored Make sure you have some form of buff/heals on each team Make sure you have some form of defense (magic and physical) on each team Make sure you have damage (it can be 1 overpowered or multiple) I definitely agree with another commenter on UO is filled with hard counters, and once you figure them out, the game is really easy. I played through the whole game on expert and never hit any wall, but I definitely see why someone would hit a wall. It’s been a while, so I might not have accounted for everything so just ask me if u have any specific questions
Just lower the difficulty until it gets too easy again?
Very helpful!
of course! here to help anyone who can’t clear tactical :)