Lol, I mean, Black Eagles for life.

Saw no thread for this yet. @Jon and me are playing. Thought I'd start the thread to get some strategy talk going. Try avoid talking about spoilers even when talking strategy, but even classes can become spoilery when talking about the main characters.

All I'll say about that is I'm hoping I can make Edelgard Fem!Hector. Curious to see if I can.

I've already picked out the three I really wanna poach from the other houses: Felix (Sasuke lol), Ashe (that Lockpick skill he has looks unique and potentially useful), Leonie and Lysithea.

Petra is best girl, obviously. She looks similar to Felix in build but I want to make her either some kind of cav bow or pegasus knight. Felix can be the crit sword monster.

 

I'm very early, and I haven't played a FE game in a long time, but the gimmick in this game is that you start of (pretty much) as a professor at a monestary that doubles as an Officer's School.

The cheeky bit in the thread title where I called the game Black Eagles is another tick in the 'HP' box. You have three houses to choose from to teach (though you can poach students, bar from the Lords themselves I guess, from the other houses), though they're not tied to the school, but the noble families that lead them. There are three. Black Eagles, Blue Lions (FOR NERDS), Golden Deer (I understand... Claude is pretty Husbando...)

It seems early on the majority of your time is spent in a very 'Persona-like-lite' way. Your 'teacher level' dictates how many actions you can perform in a day, and these actions go towards bettering your students. Otherwise, you can walk around and explore the monastery to your heart's content.

Atm I'm not even playing much. I'm researching the students I want and am then going to work towards poaching them for Black Eagles!

Also a very big note for FE vets. The Weapon Triangle seems very much absent. Sword users can still get axe breaker etc and so on, but there's no inherit advantage/disadvantage - save for bows being good against fliers etc.

 

Give me 36 hours for to be a scab and break solidarity with the striking Amazon workers, and I'll be all over this thread.

If only I'd ordered it half an hour earlier, I'd have it today. ;_;

 

Wait, Amazon are selling Nintendo shit again? I've no idea what's going on anymore on that front.

 

I’m over halfway through the Black Eagles main plot - been playing nonstop since release.

The characters have incredible depth compared to the last few Fire Emblems. Without any spoilers, I strongly rec reaching B support with Bernadette, C between Petra and Caspar and B between Ferdinand and Dorothea. All the characters who would have been one note in Awakening or Fates have been fleshed out in ways that are incredibly rewarding to those that pay attention to their backstory and noble history. Reading the lore entries in the library only further serves to add color.

Recruiting other students is harder than expected, but given that NG+ lets you keep your Saint statue levels and (I think?) professor level, that seems intentional to add replayability.

This game has a refreshing amount of meat on the bone, and I can’t wait for the expansion pass to start paying out to add to it. 5/5.

 

I bought it, and played obsessively through my weekend. I'm in September right now. Having a hard time poaching students even when I supposedly meet their standards (trying for Felix and Lysithea at the moment, will probably make a play for Raphael too since Black Eagles don't have any good natural tanks). Making do with Edelgard as an Armor Knight at the moment, but she's not exactly ideal for the role. I'm also worried a bit about ruining Byleth by being too jack of all trades in service of trying to grab recruits from the other houses). I'm starting to see the skill levels on his main weapons lag behind relative to the students. Not by a ton, but it could become a problem later.

Supports seem really slow in this game compared to the previous few entries, which is a detail I actually appreciate.

 

I'm still early. Just did the mission with the uprising. This story is very dark and intense, I love it.

I spent my first day not even playing, just looking through all the units and see who I want and how I'll build them.

Edelgard seems to naturally be an armoured tank, and I want her to be a FemHector, so that's how I'm building her. I'm also building Ferdinand to be another armour too. After Lys, my three priority poaches are Leonie and the rapist dude (their abilities syn so well together) and Felix.

 

I mean, yeah, except that neither of them have the greatest personal defense growths (both sport a 35). I'm not saying you're wrong to do what you're doing, since I'm doing the same with Edelgard at the moment for lack of a better option. I went cavalry with Ferdinand, though he might eventually be bench fodder due to getting somewhat RNG screwed during his early levels. Particularly in strength. Dorothea had the same problem with her magic, so she's going Dancer as soon as I get the class and have Lysithea on board to replace her as a mage.

 

Just finished Chapter 11, and I gotta say, I haven't been sack-tapped this hard with a surprise twist since the ending of Bioshock Infinite. I literally had to get up and go take a walk.

This is the non-spoiler talk, which I'll honor by not putting you all on blast, but to put it very shortly and vaguely: if you chose Black Eagles expecting a linear route, stop playing. Right now. I'm dead serious. Go do Deers and Lions first.

For a little more information on what I mean by linear:

Spoiler

At Chapter 11, the story splits, and you either join the Church of Seiros defending them, or Edelgard in pursuing war against them. And joining Edelgard is hard - you basically have 1.5 chapters where her support tree unlocks at date 2/8 to speedrun her support up from C in time to unlock her route.

I'll give IntSys credit - I was never expecting the female protagonist/love interest to be the hidden route, considering she's going to be a primary romance choice for what I'm sure is a dominantly male audience.

For the lore reveals at Chapter 11:

Spoiler

The main route you're essentially railroaded into is the Church of Seiros route. Edelgard abruptly zonks out and reveals that she is the Flame Emperor and that she's declaring war against the church. If you haven't unlocked her route, there's very little explanation beyond what you've likely gotten from her hints and such about not liking the crest system.

If you have unlocked the Edelgard route and choose her, the curtain drops and reveals that Rhea's a fucking dragon from a race called the Immaculate Ones, who Edelgard claims have been controlling the whole continent through the crests. In other words, this is most likely the endgame route, given the tight requirements for qualifying. I stopped at this point, so this is all I know, but in short, I'm pissed. I enjoyed Black Eagles, but I wish I hadn't played it first.

I'm going to keep going on Black Eagles -

Spoiler

Church of Seiros route

- but only so I don't waste my work and I can take my NG+ to Deers and Lions before I do Black Eagles again. If I could have done it all again, I would have started another route entirely first just to preserve the experience. If you haven't gotten to Chapter 11 yet, I would honestly suggest dropping the run and doing Golden Deer and Blue Lions first.

In short:

Spoiler

FUCK YOU RHEA, YOU DRAGON-NAZI BITCH. JUST WAIT UNTIL I COME BACK IN NG+3 WITH MAX STATUES AND RENOWN TO STOMP YOUR ASS IN THE EDELGARD ROUTE.

 

I'm making Dorothea dancer too. She's useful atm as an extra mage, but just kinda meh long term. Especially now that I just class changed to mage, Hubert, Lys and I are doing fine there.

Also re. the story, I'm not clicking your spoilers, but the foreshadowing early game is about as subtle as a sledgehammer... Maybe I'll be surprised, I dunno.

 

The more i hear, the more i want this game. But don't have a switch so this is gonna have to be a birthday (november) present. Let's hope I can avoid spoilers until then.

 

To those wanting the Sylvain/Leonie cav dream team, Leonie really likes those Owl feathers.

 

Everybody does. Owl Feathers are a universal gift that grants two points of support to whoever you give one to.

 

Ah. Cool.

Btw, finding out i have to rest on my free days to restore durability on Byleth's sword just means I'll never use it... Even if it has distant counter.

 

Alright, then. I was torn between Black Eagles and the Capitalist Republic of Hufflepuff when choosing my starter Pokemon, and have only just finished the training battle with the other houses, so I'll restart on your say-so.

Thankfully cutscenes are skippable.

 

I will definitely be doing a second playthrough regardless... not a third though. Fuck the Lions.
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I'm not sure how many extra students I want to recruit on my first run - especially with all the non-students that have been added on top of them - but I've already recruited Lys and Sylvain and I'm very, very close to getting Leonie and Felix too. I think I'll only add one more, either Marianne or Ingrid.

 

I only recruited Lysithea and Felix, and haven't ever needed more. I've just finished Chapter 11 and still have yet to come across a battle allowing me to deploy more than ten units. It's good to have a few more than that to use as adjutants, though I mostly find it easier to just recruit from the faculty rather than getting other students to fill those roles.

 

I'm a long time Fire Emblem fan (as evidenced by my avatar) and I am very, very happy with Three Houses so far. My only significant complaint about it is that difficulty-wise it feels a little too easy even on hard mode, but other than that I think this game is amazing. A lot of the mechanics changes are positive, the characters are interesting and deep, and the story is actually pretty good.

One mechanical thing to note for people that want to recruit other characters is that meeting the weapon rank/stat requirements to recruit other students is actually pretty difficult, since those requirements are high. However, you can bypass this by simply achieving a B rank support with them, which will cause them to randomly ask to join your house at some point in the near future.

I've generally found recruiting other students to be useful in the following circumstances:

* The student has some sort of unique trait that makes them desirable to have to round out your team. This could be their innate abilities, talents/spells that they learn, weapon proficiencies, growths, etc. For example, Lysithea and Lindhart are the only two students that are able to learn the Warp spell, so they are prime recruitment targets for people interested in clearing maps quickly.
* You want to replace somebody that fell behind. Nearly every character in this game is dependent on their growths, since everyone starts at such a low level, and it's inevitable that eventually some of your units are going to get screwed by RNG. If that happens, it's usually more efficient to just bench them and replace them with somebody else. The level and stats of recruited students scales with the chapter of the game you're on, which means that they are always reliably statistically average when they join, perfect for replacing the students you have that got wrecked by variance.
* You love your waifu (or the student's character or something) and just want to use them because you like them.

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Also, on a side note, bows are really, really freaking good in this game. They are a top tier weapon type, and might actually be the best. I never thought I would ever say this about a Fire Emblem game, but in this game I think that archers actually have the most reliable enemy phase combat.

 

I'm on chapter 9 or so and my beefy, sppedy mage Byleth and my fortress Edelgard can solo pretty much anything.

Byleth will get steadily less tanky as the game goes on I'd wager though.