There's a simple answer to why Mov is the most important stat. If you can't get somewhere, you can't do anything. Not being able to do something is bad, ergo you want more mov. Also, each additional point of move gives up to 4*move more potential movement squares than a unit with 1 less move. The difference between 7 and 5 move 52 spaces, almost double of the potential 60 spaces a 5 move unit can move to. In practice, you won't have access to the full spread of options, but that difference alone shows how valuable move is for positioning.
Honestly this is why radiant dawn is my favorite fire emblem game. Haar, Jill, and the bird royals aside every unit with mounted or flying movement was significantly neutered. Yes Titania and Oscar are extremely useful in some maps, but in the end caps actually matter in rd. Cavs being completely unable to access parts of maps, pegasi being extremely weak, they still have their utility and good enough combat for parts of the game but they're more utility than combat in many places, which is radicalized by tellius canto.
One thing I do wish is that they had more variety in heavy and light cavalry. That you have tier 2 and 3 of both. Maybe only light cavalry has canto and heavy cavalry does not as that does mirror what the distinction was historically. Light cavalry were for harassment while heavy cavalry was for finishing off a weakened foe. That while spears are widely available lances are exclusive to heavy cavalry and that they have the highest might in the entire game by a large margin, even able to overpower armor knights but can't double at all, have penalties to defense and have only a small handful of uses.
3H also supports movement growths, though you'll only see this if the growth rates are somehow modified (such as a randomiser run) because the movement growth rate is set to 0% for everyone normally.
The point about benchmarks is so real. Roles only really matter in the early game, but move is everything once you gain enough stats. I usually give up on training anyone but cavs and fliers because even just one or two good ones end up routing most of the map anyway. Purposely waiting for foot units to catch up isn’t fun imo. Great video!!
It mainly depend on the game tho. Conquest has map that actually punish you really hard for building full cav/flier team Instead the best class are usually the shuriken users which while not as fast as cav got higher mouvement that infantry, can retaliate from 1 to 2, got great stats and potent support potential. You've also got abomination like puppeter which make you double your character count lmao Likewise in engage Armor are ridiculously tanky and having one can be extremly beneficial to stall some part of the game. (The map are really well made in engage) And simple infantry got some of the best offensive support option with support attack which deals a FLAT 10% DMG. Which you can double with the right setting and is mandatory to reach engage benchmark as they were designed with that mecanic in mind Awakening lunatic is all about creating an invincible unit using duo and abusing the broken feat. Final boss damage reduction doesnt work on bow so you usually end up with a warrior in lunatic+. (Especially when in lunatic+ ennemy unit can have counter so bow is great on lunatic+. Otherwise its nosferatu tanking) Just walk to the mass of ennemi and let them die on you Otherwise yeah just go cav/flier
Which is why I think it is important to do something about that. Flyers should have lower move than cavalry, something inbetween infantry and cavalry. Also cavalry should be very heavily slowed down by rough terrain in ways infantry aren't and also be more vulnerable. I like what they did in three houses where cavalry all have very low speed and negative speed growths. Unfortunately they made flyers so overpowered that it largely nullified it. But I do hope they will return to the three houses model of cavalry. It makes sense for cavalry to have low speed stats as speed means avoiding attacks and doing follow ups. A horse is not as nimble as a human and it takes longer to make a second attack. I think the same should be applied to pegasus knights though to a slightly lesser degree. That their speed stat is fairly average on the level with like brigants and the like but that they have nowhere near the same defense or HP. That sending in high mobility units alone will get them killed easily.
I like using Boots and Celerity on units to make their moves equal to mounted and flying units, so I have more options of positioning for the entire team. In the Tellius games, movement is more valuable on Pegasus Knights and Rolf's family if you're aiming for Triangle Attacks. Otherwise I focus on giving dancers the boots because they essentially double the movement range for any unit (up to 4 in 9 and 10).
I think one of the best examples of the power of movement is Hortensia from engage. Having 6 move that is unimpeded by terrain is already great but having a +1 range on movement based staves is what really makes her a top unit. She is a high movement unit that grants high movement in the game with the lowest movement per unit to date.
And further supporting this is why Micaiah is considered a top-tier Emblem, because all those movement-based staffs? She can make them AoE. Why warp one unit when you can warp five at once?
Friendly reminder for anyone who doesn't play FEH but is aware that Reinhardt is/used to be the funny meme man: part of the reason for it was that he was a ranged horse. Of course, the full story is that his combat is an amazing player phase that hopefully kills you before you can retaliate, but having the highest movement possible in the game + being ranged means that no unit in the entire game could get to you before you could get to them and show them why magic is everything Of course, FEH is a very different game to the rest of the franchise, having tiny maps with equally cramped movement, and being a lot more pvp centric than the rest of the franchise, but these concepts still ring true even in the silly arguably spinoff game. Whenever a Legendary/Mythic Hero comes out, they rerun all the relevant Legendary/Mythic Hero Battle maps as well, and those are maps with a ton of rather dangerous reinforcements (at higher difficulties of course) coming from all over to harass you, and while you could sit in an armor ball to tank everything, you could also bring one or two horses with Canto to get rid of threatening glass-cannon type enemies before running back to safety. And this is a game where Armor units can enter combat instead of the actual unit the enemy is targeting and tank for them.
even now the pvp meta is partially dominated by fliers because they have insane warping that almost makes them capable of moving anywhere in the map, and the chroms who (and that's being reductive) can move twice in one turn as long as they have an ally near them
It's so much fun when you get your main lord or robin the boots and can just run like a mad man to any location. Awakening I love using the plus one movement on top of the bonus movements and pass to rush around the map Fates I gave all the capture units and dead ones in revelation (Scarlett inzana etc) broken kits with Max stats boots and dlc skills to show how broken they can be at their max potential. May even do a run with just them someday.
high movement units are fun to use, i remember how my Tina in FE5 reached 10 move and her with her movement stars she could escape mounted units that got close to her and how she was awesome in indoor maps for not having movement penalty like the mounted units now if there were a way to give her canto like the knight ring from FE4 it would been even better
I'll never get why someone would think Mobility isn't extremely broken in a game series about military combat Edit: That's also why I think Obstruct should be a class skill for Armor units, It'd be so sick
because high move alone doesn't allow you to do 2x37 damage with 69 crit. And apparently, overkilling the enemy five times over is more important than actually *reaching* that enemy.
In engage, I find that more movement is still important even in ringless maddening mainly cuz of all the positional skills like chloe and alear's personal skills and even movement based skills like momentum and canter. And those benefits is what makes wolf knights all the more especially dangerous after they are lvl 5 due to hobble. But my favorite stat in this game is not even what units can get or use. Its game knowledge and planning. :D
Move disproportionally improves the number of options you have on every turn. And it even more disporpotionally improves the number of options you have over the course of several turns. These possibilities translate into more potential strateiges that allow to secure objectives, shave off turns, improve reliability or help in any other conceivable way. That alone should make it easy to see why movement is arguable the most important stat in fire emblem, in a vacuum. This is also the reason why abilities that enhance movement directly or indirectly, like reposition, canto, galeforce and celerity, are often considered among the best abilities in the franchise. It is also the reason, why dancers/refreshers and staves that affect unit movement, like warp, rescue and again are considered good.
Fire Emblem, whether fairly or unfairly, often gets called “anime chess,” so I’ll draw a comparison to chess. Everyone knows the Queen is the strongest piece because it can go to in any direction, i.e. it has the best mov. In Chess, mov is the only stat because each piece has the same level of “combat” - any piece can capture or be captured by any enemy piece. Obviously Fire Emblem has many more stats at play than Chess, so the analogy is far from perfect. But by taking things to an extreme, Chess shows just how powerful mov can be when other stats are similar enough to each other.
And the knight is the only piece that can utilise the third dimension. Even in 5D chess, where the queen can go vertically, horizontally, spacially, and chronologically, only the knight can jump. (Not counting dragons or unicorns, who are oddball pieces anyway. The princess is more common, being able to move in up to two directions rather than all four)
Fire Emblem games need to structure maps around low-movement units. They need to add more side-objectives where low-move units have something to do. For example, look at Genealogy of the Holy War Chapter 2. When Arden has to go out of his way to get the Pursuit Ring, a good idea would be to place pirate reinforcements in that vicinity, so Arden can be useful.
I feel like good map design would have uses for both high and low move units on most maps. For instance, maybe have far away villages that you can use high movement units to get, but also having a choke point near your starting location that an armor knight can defend, and reinforcements coming from both directions. Generally speaking, I think maps are more fun when you are encouraged to use high move units, because that generally implies more pressure to get places quickly, which means more decisions for the player to make. Low move, high power units still feel good though, and I think they should definitely have a role in fire emblem that maps should account for.
I feel like what people are saying is less that "move isn't good," and more that it seems over prioritized by everyone. I've always felt a good army has a split between a few fliers, a few cavs, and then the other half on foot. Almost giving myself two armies, one with a more reduced speed. A few units with high move/flying is more than enough for any side objectives I'm worried about, and I can flit them about the map fortifying other fronts as I make my way through. But yeah there's no arguing that move is ridiculously good. Even for slower play, any game where your Cav's have Canto, high move lets you run out short distances, attack, then hide behind your front again, showing its worth even in Turtle play.
The ability to choose where and when to fight is insanely powerful. It forces your opponent to react, which means you have more strategic freedom. This can be more than enough to compensate for theoretically weaker units. This obviously doesn't just apply to FE.
5:14 I'm currently at this map I struggled because I hadn't selected enough Pegasus knight (and I miss the occasion to recruited cormag) so yeah moove matters
A nice movement thing I like in my favorite game is radiant dawn were most high move units have several trade offs. The Cavaliers dont have access to ledge short cuts that are present I most maps and several laguz have better movement than a lot of beorc units but have 1 range and the transform meter. The only units who dont have as much of a trade of are fliers but this is a game with 3x effectiveness so it becomes riskier to just sent fliers off without being aware of the enemies.
I really like the mounted-vs-unmounted balance in radiant dawn. Mounted units actually have meaningful drawbacks compared to foot units, but their advantages are also still relevant so you have an incentive to use both types of units. Except for wyverns because game balance apparently does not apply if you are riding a dragon.
The eternal stairway might be my least favourite conquest map on Lunatic. "Run through this escape map where there are constant, infinite reinforcements while being constantly chipped by skills, pelted by stonebournes, and getting cucked by the super dangerous reinforcements having void curse and wary fighter. My strat for it is to pair-up one unit with tons of dodge-tanking bonuses with Azura, and a staffer with corrin. Don't deploy anyone else, just bum rush the map, using Corrin's superior stats and skills to survive wave after wave of Faceless with your highest MT weapon that does not lower your effective speed or decrease your speed. If you get a forged blessed weapon it's a good example. Your goal is to have Corrin rush dragon veins with sing allowing you to get past the stonebournes easier, then rescue azura to the escape tile. The map proposes an interesting challenge, but after you beat it once, you probably have a similarly effective strategy that just works every time. Fyi I generally give Azura Kaze due to the high speed, increased luck, ease of high support ranks and personal skill for if things hit the fan. Azura naturally has pretty good avoid so dodge-tanking is pretty viable.
Honestly, the main reason high move is "good" is due to FE design generally failing to support low-move units. The first issue is that high move units, and especially paladins & wyverns, don't really pay for their high move, they still get amazing stats. They don't have a significant weakness to make up for their high movement. Really the only unit that ever seems balanced around being high movement are the pegasus knights in some games with their terrible stats. The second issue is that very few levels and (side)objectives are designed around slow units. FE could do a much much better job at providing objectives for slower units. Take that example you gave at the start in FE 1, why is there only 1 enemy in the south? Simply adding in an extra enemy or 2 would immeadiatly make it a much more interesting objective to deal with for slower units.
Can't say I agree with people saying Mov is the best stat, specially when you have games where they give you infinite uses warp (Shadows of Valentia), nearly infinite (Three Houses because warp just refreshes it's uses after every battle). And the games where Warp is very limited have either small enough maps, don't require much movement to achieve goals, or the movement is rendered pointless, because the movement unit dies whitout support from the slower movement units. For me, the only games where movement seemed to be truely more important than most stats would be Genealogy, Thracia and Binding Blade. In any other games, movement was only better than the SKL and the LUK stat. Movement is great for those maps where you have goals that must be achieved quickly, but those are usually few maps out of the many.
Hi Lizard! I wonder if games/hacks would be generally more fun and interesting if they showered you with a few more movement increasing items. Usually, you only get a single boots and a single warp staff, so with almost no exception, every unit is permanently locked to their base movement. But what if you could have a bit more flexibility? Would that make the experience better?
Ive seen hacks reduced boots to only +1 mov but give more of them but generally hacks don’t mess with movement because that’s impossible to balance unless it’s « The Cerulean Coast » for the movement related part there’s universal shove for infantry since all mounts get canto+, there is an item that increase mov by two but also give -4luck/def/res when in inventory and there is a 10 mov glass canon with canto+ and a brave 100% crit weapon that has 10hp and 5% hp growth along with 0 base def/res it just encourages you to go crazy in general
I don't really care about turn count strategies, and I absolutely love having high move units. They're just so useful in so many ways. Units with low movement are stuck at the mercy of the map, and need to rely on their stats to bail them out of bad situations. High move units can react faster to bad situations, are better at picking off enemy glass cannons that might be super dangerous if they're allowed to attack first, and are so much more flexible in terms of finding favorable engagements. If a giant army is heading towards you, high move units can retreat while staying in range of one or two enemies at a time, which can let you pick it off little by little until the rest of your army is strong enough to finish it off. Low move units can't do that, and have to rely on things like choke points to engage bigger armies, since you can't play the positioning game nearly as well with them. I really learned this on my second three houses playthrough, where I used a lot of super high move units, and every map just got easier as a result. Positioning is everything in fire emblem, and when you can position your units so that they don't die, everything works so much better.
Yep. Many people don't seem to realize that the "mov is the best stat in the game" applies to *all* playstyles, and not just to LTCs. It is even moreso true in LTCs though.
for me the only thing is that sometimes I don't really know what to do with a ton of movement, like I would have leonie be able to go far to the front easily but didn't find her good enough to try and take advantage of that though claude was a different beast entirely, I didn't really make use of sigurd that much but that comes more from that I usually play with dlc because I find the dlc skills more fun to mess around with and sigurd really only has movement with some meh other effects(also the game is really mean to having too many dedicated combat units on normal and hard at least and I really didn't want to repeat what happened to lapis on my first run leading to me valuing anything that gives some support like veronica, soren and chrom a lot more to avoid that from happening again), that said I have only played 3h engage and path of radiance(and the warriors spinoffs were funnily enough movement is also really good though in both the pegasus line is really awkward to play as) so I haven't had that much experience with things like seth, though I have also gotten a lot of value out of certain units with high move like claude and alear(reclassed into griffin knight) along with some other ones but I feel those two were the ones were I took most advantage of their movement rather then just their combat
Wouldn't you say rescue dropping makes high move less important in a weird way. Yes it helps the utility of the high move unit, but its the low move unit that is actually benefiting here.Your low move is less of an issue because the high units can fix that for you. Also, I feel like some of the points being made were more of an argument to flyer movement being good rather than high move. Like if Ceada had the same move as Marth, she would still be a better candidate for attacking the thief than the cavs because of the flyer mobility. So in that case it wasn't as important that she has high move, but that she can traverse water uninhibited.
Move is weird, in most games including FE, move is extremely good if the unit has decent stats, but quickly becomes worthless if the unit become slightly subpar. Imagine hypothetical FE4 with foot unit sigurd and friends, mounted Alec and Noish can't really do anything on their own with their shitty stats so they have to conform to sigurd's pace.
technically speaking, Joshua is not a particularly good candidate for the boots because he will always have the issue of not having any real 2 range (except for lategame magic sword gimmicks) so him taking the lead usually doesn't result in all enemies being dead. But it IS pretty satisfying to have him yeet across the map and crit everything into oblivion. And that matters, too.
Movement hasn't ever been a vital stat in any of my playthroughs. Probably why I don't have a hard-on for paladins like most of this community seems to. The most common use of movement boost that I've had is on assassins. Apart from that, giving knights and generals the ability to head a charge without having your party wait on them is a mildly convenient as well. Also of note, for lockpicks to enable faster access to chests, for fliers because movement is usually their primary purpose and more movement is constantly of use (unlike for those horse-mounted units), and for pre-promote lords. All of those are _really_ niche cases though. I've had playthroughs where I don't use the boosts for numerous chapters, even forgetting I have them at times. I have had cases where I've used boots because I got tired making units march back and forth through sand. XD That's probably my third most frequent use for them tbh.
Move is so good because mobility in general is good in most games. It's why most of the overpowered champions in League of Legends have had a hundred dashes, it's why rushdown characters tend to be good in fighting games, it's why Androxus from Paladins was OP back when one of his cards turned his 3 dashes skill into 3 separate dash cooldowns, and it's why the Queen is the best piece in chess.
Most players turtle and death ball the shit out of maps anyway movement really hasn’t mattered since timed objectives have become so rare in modern games. I will say Engage chapter 24 was a good example of a timed map in modern games that punishes turtling especially if you’re not warp skipping or pulling the boss with Astra Storm
mov is useful even for turtle strats. It allows you to reposition more reliably and account more effectively if something doesn't go as planned (e.g. if unexpected reinforcements show up).
