Eagle Eye

[+] Eagle Eye gives the hero a 40/50/60% chance to learn each opponent's 1-3/4/5 level spell before starting a combat and when a spell is cast in battle. Allows the player to view 1-3/4/5 level spells in the opponent's spellbook in combat. If both heroes have Eagle Eye, it is mutually blocked (similar to Tactics)

So... they have buffed Eagle Eye. The previous design that lasted practically since Heroes 2 is so famously bad that it could as well have no effect at all and only the crazed mapmakers and hardcore singleplayer guys would notice any difference – this skill is THAT bad.

I am not sure how I feel about this take on the skill. I was personally a proponent of yeeting the skill out just like Resistance was yeeted out, and replacing it with something completely different. This... is still trying to run with the concept of Eagle Eye by making it work more immediately and then adding another effect on top just in case. It may be a solid enough buff – after all information on your opponent has a pretty good value... but this just looks clunky at a first glance.

My prediction is that the main use for the new EE will be suicide checking opponent's heroes just to check their spellbooks. On a main hero it will still be mostly a shitty win more or a hail mary – and this is way too much investment for a hail mary.

Learning

[+] Learning increases the hero's experience gains by 25/50/75%. Gives the hero an extra level-up immediately when picking or upgrading the skill

So... two changes. The big boost of Learning's bonus exp gain effect is, well, important here, but it isn't exactly the, uhm, “exciting” thing about this buff. Sure, instead of a fraction of an extra level you get three extra levels in the long run, which is not that bad in itself – especially considering the buffs of many, many specialties that I will get to talk about later. The second change, though... It is genuinely insane. And I mean it in the negative sense of this word.

Now, first things first, I do understand the design goal of this – HotA Crew wants to make this skill worth picking at any point of hero's development, not just early on by providing an immediate impact. And I do agree on this goal, just not necessarily with the method – because this method is boosting early pickup of Learning to an disproportionate amount. It allows you to rush to the guaranteed magic skill to check whether a hero will get that Earth Magic, it allows you to jump ahead up to four levels early on providing a significant tempo boost, and in the worst case scenario it will let you basically reroll bad level up options. Around level 7 things do get saner, but levelling Learning on levels 2 and 3 is kinda busted.

[+] Learning specialization now increases the skill's effect by 5% per hero level

And then we have to talk about Kinkeria. Thankfully HotA Crew didn't go fully insane, and as such specialty was toned down. The specialty gives her roughly one extra relevant level compared to what you would expect from a non-specialist... which I'd argue isn't that crazy of a specialty effect. Don't get me wrong – it is a very nice boon, and she will be a high value hero in many formats, especially considering she starts with Slow in her spellbook – but a lot of other heroes gain a bit more from their specialty than that.

Interestingly, on M200 templates Learning has been pre-banned in this patch:

[+] 2sm2c(2), Skirmish(M), Nine-day Wonder Templates: banned the secondary skill Learning and heroes Loynis, Moandor, Xsi, Darkstorn, Merist, Kalt, Kinkeria, Victoria

That early game boost from Learning does sound to be quite a bit too much on templates where you can't really afford to have more than one high-level hero and the early contact is the norm rather than exception – and it seems like the HotA Crew recognizes that.

My prediction is that on XL+U templates we will see more control heroes per player on average (I guess half a hero more, if not more) – and Jebus Cross will probably get a little bit faster with the breaks into the desert. This skill will have practically zero impact on one hero templates, where you usually got to fill up all eight skill slots already. More templates may end up having Learning banned due to power level concerns.

Ultimately I wouldn't be surprised to see Learning nerfed... though knowing the HotA Crew's track record with their release cycle, I wouldn't be surprised to see no action at all even if Learning becomes a problem. I do believe if the nerf would be in order, the best way to do so would be to replace the bonus level up with a 20% or 25% boost to the current XP value – it is as close as you can get to retroactively applying the bonus in my opinion without having to deal with Kinkeria's specialty.

War machines

[+] Artillery protects the Ballista and Cannon, preventing them from losing more than 40% HP in a single hit [+] First Aid protects the First Aid Tent, preventing it from losing more than 40% HP in a single hit [+] Ballistics protects the Catapult, preventing it from losing more than 40% HP in a single hit

Cool changes adressing one of the core issues of war machines – their fragility... but there is more!

[+] First Aid gives the First Aid Tent the ability to increase the HP of all creatures in the hero's army by 5/10/15% (rounded down) while the Tent is not destroyed [+] First Aid specialization now increases the HP bonus granted to creatures by the First Aid Tent by 5% per hero level

Aaaaaaand that is terrifying. I am not sure if turning First Aid into Armorer with extra steps is a good idea.

[+] Expert Ballistics allows the Catapult to accurately hit targets

I literally forgot that wasn't the case already. Good change, but probably not sufficient to make Ballistics an appealing skill choice.

[+] Ballista price reduced from 2500 to 1500; Cannon price reduced from 4000 to 3000

Good change. These two were arguably overpriced.

[+] Ballista damage formula changed from [2-3 * (attack + 1)] to [2-3 * (attack + 5)]

This is... mildly worrisome. On the one hand it makes Ballista do something for pretty much any hero – extra 10 base damage on average ain't bad after all. On the other, it is a yet another early game tempo increase – and while it won't be relevant everywhere, in templates where it will Ballista users will likely be very efficient map clearers. The specialty also got buffed – it now pumps up attack and defense of Ballista by 3 for every five levels of a hero, rounded up.

It is more than clear that HotA Crew wants players to use Ballistas and First Aid Tents more, and to actually level up Artillery and First Aid skills. While the changes with Ballista are mildly worrisome, I do find them overall positive. As for the Tent... I am not a fan, though despite my worries, I am unable to dismiss this change immediately. One thing for sure – war machines will at the very least see a little bit more experimentation.

Pathfinding

[+] Pathfinding now reduces the standard cost of an off-road step by 25/50/75 down to a minimum of 95/90/85

lol.

lmao even.

I hate this change. I despise this change. I do get it that Pathfinding was a mediocre skill at best (with the exception of the One Minute Madness template) due to competing with Fly spell, as well as Angel Wings and Wayfarer's Boots artifacts... but we really didn't need bonus Logistics.

My prediction is that it will be a very polarizing skill, and that it will be pretty darn powerful on any template with a major desert area – Jebus Cross and One Minute Madness come to mind... tho on 1MM it is very likely that I will end up banning this skill altogether, considering how powerful the original Pathfinding already was.

This change is just god-fucking-awful, and makes me regret that I am writing this post in English instead of Polish, cause for this I really could use a language with a proper swear game.

Sorcery

[+] Sorcery now increases spell damage by 10/20/30%

Not sure if this is a just strong enough buff, or if this is overtuned. I guess with a specialty it may get hilariously powerful in one hero formats, especially combined with any of the +50% elemental spell damage orbs... but eh, at least this skill is usable now.

Mysticism

[+] Mysticism now allows the hero to restore 10/20/30% of his maximum spell points per day, but no less than 5/10/15

No clue what is the rationale here, but sure, why not. I do find it unlikely that this will entice players to unironically pick the skill for main/control heroes – it is still reasonably easy to rest in town to restore your mana, after all.

Hero Specialties

I have already mentioned a few of them, now it is time for the rest of them. And there are quite a few changes there. Let's start with spells.

[+] Enhanced specializations that add +3% to a spell's effect for n hero levels, where n is the target's Tier: changed to +5% for Meteor Shower, Chain Lightning, Resurrection and Raise Dead; +10% for all other spells

I think I kinda do understand why this change has been done – to make damage spell specialists have a little bit more of an unique spice to them. I am not entirely sure if that +10% for stuff like Ice Bolt, Lightning Bolt or Frost Ring is a good idea, though.

[–] Forgetfulness specialization now increases the reduction of attacking creatures' number in target stacks by 10% for n hero levels, where n is the target's level

If I understand it correctly, at level 20 and Expert Water Magic it completely neuters all damage output of opposing ranged units, which is mildly hilarious... and that's about it.

[+] Cure specialization grants +10% effect for (8 – n) hero levels, where n is the target's Tier (affects stronger creatures more)

Somewhat niche, but a cool niche.

[+] Bloodlust, Stone Skin, and Precision specializations add +10/8/6/4 to the spell's effect on Tier 1-2/3-4/5-6/7 creatures [+] Weakness specialization adds +4/6/8/10 to the spell effect for Tier 1-2/3-4/5-6/7 creatures (affects stronger creatures more) [+] Disrupting Ray Specialization increases the spell's effect by 10

All interesting changes, though Stone Skin specialty buff feels a little bit too extra. Labetha mains rise up I guess.

[+] Slayer specialization adds +20/16/12/8 to the spell effect for Tier 1-2/3-4/5-6/7 creatures

Maybe we will see an unironically cast Slayer spell in PvP?

[+] Adrienne's Fire Magic specialization increases Fire spell damage by 50%

She's a campaign hero, she can get this kind of a buff 😂.

[+] Haste and Prayer specializations add +3/2/1 to the spell effect for Tier 1-4/5-6/7 creatures

Not sure if Uberhaste needed a buff, same goes for Prayer specialty (note that Loynis no longer has a dead skill cause Learning is good now).

And now it is time for the unit specialties.

[+] Enhanced the effect of creature-based specializations, giving +5% attack and defense for n hero levels, where n is the creature's Tier: now +10% for Tier 1 creatures; +30% for Ballista and +20% for other creatures

The buff for creature specialties is a decent idea. I have seen some worries about T1 specialists getting a bit too much early game power this way, but I think this is still fine. Remember that the stat increase is based on the base stats of the units – not modified stats. A level 10 Shakti with a good sword won't suddenly give 15 extra attack to Troglodytes 😂.

[+] Fire Elementals specialization: +1 to Attack, +2 to Defense, and +2 to Damage – > +3 to Attack, +4 to Defense, and +2 to damage [+] Earth Elementals specialization: +2 Attack, +1 Defense, +5 Damage –> +3 Attack, +2 Defense, and +5 Damage [+] Psychic Elementals specialization: +3 Attack and +3 Defense –> +5 Attack and +5 Defense

I feel like rest of these changes ain't going to be THAT relevant – at least outside of one hero formats or maaaaaaybe something focused on native army like Conquest or One Minute Madness. After all Conflux isn't exactly known for its army, and these specialties – while considerably boosted, ain't exactly a big deal...

[+] Water Elementals specialization: +2 to Attack –> +12 to Attack

...but I feel like this specific change might be a little bit overcooked. Water Elementals are an early game unit, upgradeable to a shooter. Despite everything, it can deal decent damage, and with a +12 Attack boost... well. Early game will get nuked.

[+] Black Knights specialization for Haart Lich: +5 Attack, +5 Defense, +10 Damage –> +10 Attack, +10 Defense, and +10 Damage [+] Devils specialization: +4 to Attack, +2 to Defense, and +1 to Speed – > +10 to Attack, +10 to Defense, and +1 to Speed [+] Behemoths specialization: +5 Attack, +5 Defense, +10 Damage –> +10 Attack, +10 Defense, and +10 Damage [+] Dragons specialization: +5 Attack and +5 Defense –> +10 Attack and +10 Defense

Honestly? Sure, why not, I don't mind this change. I do think that it will make things a lil' bit more interesting on templates that have these heroes. And hell, these are campaign heroes – they can afford to be a lil' bit cooler, can't they?

I feel like the people most excited for these changes are one hero players – they pretty much got some new toys to experiment with... though I've seen voices of worry or even decrying these changes are ruining the format.

Factory

Factory got buffed... or rather one half of it.

[–] In the requirements of Upg. Halfling Adobe, Town Hall has been replaced with Blacksmith [–] Mechanics damage increased from 2-4 to 3-4, and Engineers damage increased from 2-5 to 3-5 [–] Heroes' starting Mechanics count increased from 6-8 to 7-9 [–] Automaton and Sentinel Automaton explosion damage increased from 70 + 5x to 90 + 5x [–] Cost of Dreadnoughts in gold reduced from 2,500 to 2,200, and cost of Juggernauts reduced from 4,500 to 3,500 [–] Gantry cost in gold reduced from 15,000 to 10,000 [–] Marketplace removed from the requirements for the Gantry; Resource Silo removed from the requirements for the Upg. Gantry

All of this is geared towards boosting the “mechanical” half of the faction. And honestly – fair, though I am not sure if I like Automatons' explosion dealing 20 damage more. These are already super annoying to deal with as neutrals, and that extra 20 damage lets them hit more breakpoints, being able to blast more tier 6 units. I do think the changes will make the mechanical build more appealing on many templates.

Dragons!

yip yip

[+] Building Dragon Cliffs and Upg. Dragon Cliffs no longer requires the Enchanted Spring and Unicorn Glade [+] Building Dragon Cave and Upg Dragon Cave no longer requires the Labyrinth and Manticore Lair

This is a really interesting change that on native army templates lets you go for Castle+Dragons week 1... provided you can afford these, of course. The impact of this is yet to be determined, but my gut feeling is that Dungeon is eating much better here than Rampart. I do guess it might also have some impact on Jebus Cross, but I am afraid it miiiiiight be a tad too fast nowadays.

Spell Research

[–] Town Portal or Dimensional Door dropping is now guaranteed at the third (rather than fourth) spell research attempt at the corresponding Mage Guild level.

Less RNG with rolling control magic was deemed necessary, and now the game gets that little faster tempo-wise again. Not entirely sure if this is a good idea to push for that higher tempo that much, but oh well.

Small shit

[+] Increased the AI Value of Ghost Dragons, Scorpicores, Red Dragons, and Cyclops Kings; reduced the AI Value of Nagas

Makes sense, I don't know the new values just yet, but I don't think anyone will complain.

[+] Increased the default number of Sharpshooters on the map, which makes it impossible to generate them in weak guard spots on random maps

Probably the most uncontroversial change. Rolling Sharpies as your 6k value guard was pain.

[–] Default number of Master Genies in Ancient Lamps reduced from 4-7 to 4-6

I feel this is relevant for exactly Jebus Cross and some direct hacks of it. I don't think that people will feel the difference on mt_MP – the change is too minor, and the map is a mirror either way.

[+] Purchasing a skill from the University of Magic in the Conflux now costs resources in addition to 2000 gold: Air — 5 Gems, Water — 5 Crystals, Fire — 5 Mercury, Earth — 5 Sulfur

Has a bit of relevance on traditional XL+U templates I guess – and I'd say it is probably a good change, even if some people would liked to see a bigger nerf to this building.

[+] 0-3 random obstacles appear in Experimental Shop combat; in about 50% of cases, this blocks the standard methods of kiting Steel Golems

Apparently HotA Crew has a massive hate boner for the so-called Experimental Shop “abuses”. Their previous attempts at curtailing schematic strategies in this creature bank failed, so they decided to go for this strategy now 😂. Let's disregard the fact that creature banks are pretty much the most schematic element of the game lul.

[+] The Cloak of the Undead King is not allowed to be assembled by default. It remains allowed on the Anarchy and Clash of Dragons templates, as well as in a number of single player scenarios [+] The option of banning combination artifacts, which influences the possibility to assemble and disassemble them on a template, is added

It is more a new template format feature than a balance change, but it's still a good change – a new and useful tool for template designers.

[+] The Disguise spell effect now lasts not until the end of the day, but rather until the next turn of the player who cast it begins

Shit, now I will have to think again what is the worst spell in the game 😂

[+] View Earth and View Air effects are now saved until the end of the player's turn; information is available through the World View screen

[+] Added the ability to teleport through the Castle Gate of an Inferno town to ally Inferno towns, including when playing without the HD-Mod

Oh right, you can play HotA without HD mod, makes sense.

[+] Now, when teleporting through multi-sided monoliths and whirlpools, the hero always arrives to a previously unvisited monolith of the same type, if any. After visiting all monoliths of the same type, the order of teleportation through them becomes fixed

Irrelevant for PvP, nice for singleplayer.

[–] The Diplomat's Mantle now allows the player to flee (rather than capitulate only) after a spell cast by an attacking hero in the first round of combat

Ehhhhhhhhh, not a super notable thing to be added, but I still don't like this change. IMO Couatl hit and run is already kinda toxic when it gets somehow pulled off – even if it is a rare occurence. This is just Couatl hit and run but better, cause you can run it with a better speed tier units, such as Firebirds or even Archangels.

le conclusione

The overall changes seem to be somewhat geared towards speeding up early game and boosting tempo... and I am not sure if that's actually a good thing. Yes, we all know that people say that Heroes 3 needs faster games... but there is something called too fast. Pathfinding and Learning changes are scary – and in this context, specialty and Ballista buffs do show a little bit of a worrying perspective. The current balancing direction seems to be all gas and no brakes – and I do fear this may eventually break pacing of games.

Let's just say I didn't think I would see this kind of power creep in H3 and end it at that for now.

#Heroes3 #GameDesign

“Lack of” security in X11

From what I understand, one of the reasons for Wayland's existence is the percieved lack of security. What does that mean? I did a bit of googling and here is what I gathered:

• There is no clipboard isolation, allowing a malicious process to steal clipboard contents;
• Keyloggers and malicious screen capture are very much possible because windows can capture input unfocused.

Wayland sets out to fix these two things... but let's ask ourselves completely honestly, are these really issues? In my opinion, no, not really – you should be only running the software you trust, and if that trust is incomplete you need way stronger sandboxing up to a chroot jail or even a virtual machine. If you are worried about a keylogger or screencapper but not malware that would simply grab your ssh keys and auth token files for popular software (i. e. Discord), then I feel something is very much missing from your threat model.

Getting in the way of the user

Now, granted a bit of hardening there – even if extraneous – would be fine and even beneficial, if not for the fact that it gets in the way of the user. The clipboard isolation makes simple control+C control+V situations annoyingly arcane at times and the screen capture limitations make screensharing or using OBS to stream/record anything from very inconvenient to impossible.

And then there are bugs. Now, granted, I don't know which of these bugs are Wayland bugs, XWayland bugs or KDE's compositor bugs – and which ones of them are now fixed over the course of roughly half a year since I've tried to use Wayland, however they still tainted my experience enough for me to not want to touch Wayland until the next decade – and I am sure I am not the only one that was thrown away like this. In roughly a two week period I experienced my keyboard inputs working both in Discord and in Firefox at the same time, I have experienced being unable to do basic copypaste into Discord or Firefox, and I've experienced being completely unable to screenshare on Discord despite giving it the permission to hook up into other apps. And sure, you could blame the people responsible for making Linux releases of Discord and Firefox, but honestly? It is Wayland that is coming in and breaking shit, and the rationale for doing so is very much insufficient for me.

Whyland and Whatland?

Yes, this is a bit of a late complain post. But my goal here is to understand what the fuck is Wayland even meant to be – a tech that is seemingly touted to be a successor to X11 in the same vein as systemd is a successor to traditional init scripts (sorry systemd haters, service files are an improvement). I am 100% positive that I am missing some very crucial info about Wayland and that I don't have a full view of the situation – and I do hope that someone will show me why and what is Wayland. I will very much appreciate some educational responses to this post on fedi, (preferably also ping my mastodon acc – @makiki@tech.lgbt) that would enlighten me to why Wayland is the way it is and what is the end goal of the project – because, frankly, I am genuinely confused when it comes to it.

#Linux #Wayland #X11 #Xorg

Chapter 27.

This map, despite looking complex due to the use of 3-10 range spell tomes by the opponent and a race towards the chests, is more or less a calm before the storm, especially considering how many broken units we have at our disposal right now. The only real issue is the awful movement speed due to the snowy weather.

On turn 4 Louise gets a very, very close call, dropping to 1 HP. Next turn, the weather clears up. setting me up to intercept enemy thieves.

On turn 9 I get a scare, because the boss can dish out INSANE damage with a siege tome. I think for a short moment about which unit is the best suited for this, and the end result is Pent taking all five hits of the tome to break it and let other units to come in.

On turn 10, the snow comes again, and Harken shows up as an enemy unit, whom I quickly manage to recruit. He has a Brave Sword, and a really fucking insane statline. At this point I am ready to ignore half of the enemies on this map – the only issue left is wasting all the Purge uses that the boss has, and to not forget to pilfer the chests. All signs seems to show that the unit best suited for this is Pent, with his high resistance, solid avoid and weapon triangle advantage. To kill the boss though, I will have to move in with my physical units, because the boss's resistance stat is too fucking high for even Pent to damage him. What's even worse, is that this boss has a motherfucking crit chance, so I have to slooooooowly bring Ninian to the fray to set up Ninis' Grace for safety. Sain with the +10 Res buff is able to break through, and after mostly non-exciting 24 turns, I move Hector to seize the throne.

As for the statboosters available on this map, I feed Speedwings to Sain, and Talisman to Hector.

Current army: Hector (lv20), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv4 pr.), Priscilla (lv3 pr.), Sain (lv13 pr.), Raven (lv7 pr.), Ninian (lv16), Isadora (lv2 pr.), Rath (lv1 pr.), Hawkeye (lv7 pr.), Pent (lv7 pr.), Louise (lv4 pr.), Harken (lv7 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath, Farina, Fiora.

Missed: Wallace

Chapter 28

The infamous Battle Before Dawn. The goal is to reach Zephiel as fast as humanly possible, and not let him die. With some (read: a lot) of luck, there is a possiblity to recruit both Nino and Jaffar. But honestly? It is not worth risking the entire run to this. Furthermore, there is a way more important secondary objective – Boots. A stat boosting item granting +2 to the movement stat.

The army lineup I choose to go for this chapter is as follows: Hector, Matthew, Priscilla, Sain, Raven, Ninian, Hawkeye, Pent, Harken, and Oswin.

I immediately make my way through the left side of the map, taking into account the problem called Maxim, the secondary boss of the chapter who has jacked up stats to hell. Beating his ass took me one turn longer longer than it should though.

I manage to intercept the thieves without issue though, and I do obtain both a Brave Lance and the ever so broken Boots. I send Seth to extract Zephiel, then I give him to Oswin to have someone who can safely carry him before Ursula will start smacking him with Bolting.

On turn 9 Raven sadly fails to dodge twice and dies during the enemy phase.

I “fail” to rescue Nino. The word “fail” is in quotations for one simple reason – I didn't even fucking try. This locks me out of getting Jaffar, but who cares.

Around turn 12 I am in a proper place to just escape to the entrance with Zephiel held in arms. Yes, this does mean I give up on a few items – a Rescue staff, Delphi Shield and Earth Seal, but at least I won't fucking game over.

At the end Jaffar is left intact, so I assume he is alive, just on the run from... well, everyone, provided he handled the death of Nino fine.

Current army: Hector (lv20), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv4 pr.), Priscilla (lv4 pr.), Sain (lv13 pr.), Ninian (lv17), Isadora (lv2 pr.), Rath (lv1 pr.), Hawkeye (lv8 pr.), Pent (lv8 pr.), Louise (lv4 pr.), Harken (lv9 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath, Farina, Fiora, Raven, Nino

Missed: Wallace, Jaffar.

Chapter 29

After the infamously inconsistent chapter, it is time for a different kind of hell now. Ton of siege tomes, sleep staves, and silence staves are here to wreck my army. And it is a rout chapter to boot, so no janky “skip to boss” thing is available. I will have to grind my way through... and do so slowly to not get overwhelmed by statuses. It will be hell.

And hell it is, as evidenced by me losing Harken to the magical onslaught merely on turn 3. I “love” siege tomes. This is the moment where I realize that this may become the very end of this run. I go a bit YOLO to eliminate the threats as well as I humanly can, even exposing Hector – since any further death can be very much fatal the entire run. However, there were very little options for me to rescue myself from this, and ultimately, Hector dies to a powerful Bolting hit from a distant enemy Sage...

There is little to say here now. I didn't think to stock up on pure waters on the one chapter where I could safely do so – and this sealed the fate of my army. Even if Hector lived, I would need way too much luck to not have at the very least half of my army slaughtered.

The Fatal End

I tried my hardest to go through this mess of a run with way too little experience to handle it properly, but it was certainly fun... and I will certainly try again in the near future to go through this, with the experience I've gotten from this run. But for now, I think I will go for something calmer – like FE6 Normal mode Ironman challenge, or FE8 Difficult? Maybe I will also livepost my attempt now on the microblogging side of the Fediverse... probably not, but still.

#PlayReport #FE7Ironman

Chapter 17

The first thing we see is Merlinus joining our band, providing us with a convoy capabilities. Sadly we can't just buy some iron weapons from him for us to just get by for now.

Step one of the master plan – figure out who can we even bring to fight. By this I don't exactly mean who can survive – I mean more something like who can I give enough weapons to even get by. I would love to use Kent now for example – but I just can't give him enough items to make it work.

Ultimately, I decide on this lineup: Hector, Oswin, Matthew, Priscilla, Sain, Lyn and Wil. If I had more weapons, I would bench Lyn for safety, yet here we are.

Hector, Sain and Matthew will spearhead the assault, Oswin will guard the rear, and the other two... well, they will do something, I guess?

I try to move out quickly to secure at least some of the good items and not let the two recruitable characters to die. I manage to handle things just enough to get the bottom two chests, containing Unlock staff and a Hero Crest. Sadly, I do screw up things a bit and lose Wil by letting him fight a tiny teensy bit too much on the enemy phase. Apparently he wasn't that good at dodging.

The top chests sadly got pilfered, so I won't be able to promote Oswin just yet, and losing a silver sword does suck ass. I also fuck up a yet another side objective – that is keeping at least one green soldier alive – which locks me off a gaiden chapter. I get to properly recruit Raven and Lucius though, so it isn't THAT big of a deal.

After a certain point, I have to send Oswin back to the entrance, to hold off Cavaliers and Nomads. They all dealt no damage to him, which gave me the opportunity to do a bit of a degenerate grinding strategy, by letting the enemy Nomads to simply break their weapons on Oswin. Afterwards, I stepped in with Raven to mop up the remaining enemies and safely feed him some XP. In the meantime, I set up Sain to dodge tank the javelin hits from the boss, to provide him with some extra XP for free.

Due to this strategies

Current army: Hector (lv13), Matthew (lv17), Oswin (lv17), Priscilla (lv6), Lyn (lv6), Florina (lv8), Kent (lv6), Sain (lv4 pr.), Raven (lv7), Lucius (lv4)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil

Chapter 18

Time for a battle on top of a ship. Primary objective: Survive.

Secondary objectives: Steal Elysian Whip and buy a truckload of weapons, mostly iron ones. I am really struggling to properly equip my army after all, and thankfully there is a very accessible armory here, so...

Teritiary objective: Steal Guiding Ring from the boss of this chapter. I am not sure if it is even possible for me to do so considering the current state of my army and shitton of reinforcements to care about, but if I'll manage to do so, I will happily take it – then use it on Priscilla later on, since she definitely needs the extra stats, and some ability to defend herself will also aid her utility.

I bring Hector, Oswin, Matthew, Priscilla, Sain, Florina, Raven and L

To set up some funds in a proper way, I sell the Unlock staff, as well as Eliwood's still unused Rapier, netting me extra 3750 gold to spend on cheap weapons.

I begin the map, set up a decent formation, then the Pegasus Knight holding the Elysian Whip crashes on Raven for some reason instead of attacking weaponless Oswin. Fucking hell.

I manage to survive the onslaught for the mandated 11 turns, killing most of the enemies with my strongest units.

Current army: Hector (lv14), Matthew (lv18), Oswin (lv17), Priscilla (lv7), Florina (lv9), Sain (lv5 pr.), Raven (lv7), Lucius (lv5)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil

Chapter 19

Finally something that looks a bit calmer. From the get go, we get Dartz, a Pirate, and we can also recruit Fiora here.

Generally there isn't much to talk about this map, except for the fact that it is a fog of war map, and the boss is a pretty darn tough bastard.

Speaking of the boss, I hoped to weaken him with Florina. End result? She got doubled and died. Fuck. One of my favourite characters dead due to me being an utter fucking idiot.

Still the map has been completed within 15 turns, which allows me to go onto a gaiden chapter. Now, the question is, whether or not do I want to go there. I check what do I have to gain from this, and I decide to not accept the side quest. Silver card sure is powerful, but I do still need to manage my weapon count nothenless.

Current army: Hector (lv14), Matthew (lv19), Oswin (lv18), Priscilla (lv7), Sain (lv6 pr.), Raven (lv9), Lucius (lv5), Dart (lv9)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina

Chapter 20

Oh god oh no I have to bring Eliwood and Lyn aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Eliwood is currently completely and utterly useless. The plan is to hide him in some kind of a safe space, then work my way through while hopefully not losing the Guiding Ring on this chapter... yeah, right, I have no clue how do I get to it in any reasonable time. Granted, the goal is to recruit Legault here, but intercepting him in time will be a massive undertaking. I prepare Raven to promote in this chapter, hopefully he will get one more level under his belt and gain the power to use Axes.

I move Eliwood back for safety, and assault the entrance corridor with Sain. Sadly, I am forced to move back before I will get wrecked, meaning that getting Legault is pretty much not possible. During the tactical retreat, I lose Lucius in a stupid way.

Counting in reinforcements, the amount of enemies is absolutely staggering. I manage to promote Raven at level 10 during the fight, getting me a new solid frontliner.

I manage to get a blue gem and brave bow from chests, with rest of the items failling victim to enemy thieves.

Around turn 18 I manage to finally approach the actual boss of the chapter. I defeat him in two turns with Sain.

Current army: Hector (lv16), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv19), Priscilla (lv8), Sain (lv8 pr.), Raven (lv1 pr.), Dart (lv9), Fiora (lv7)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius

Chapter 21

Another fog of war map. Yay. There is an arena here, which is an interesting sight to be honest. A high risk, high reward gambling machine. With some effort I will be able to level up most of my army to obscene levels, which is amazing.

I also finally get Ninian the Dancer, who gets the stats of Nils from Lyn mode.

After getting rid of reinforcements and any other enemy that could threaten my arena abuse masterplan, I get to working. I am using the fact that there is a glitch where Ninis's Grace buff does not wear off when the unit is rescued, so I can just keep on going into the arena with the obscene +10 to both Str and Res. I also go for wagers below 750 gold, so that the enemies will be weaker – ergo, safe enough for ironman setting.

Since I've had to field him, I bring Eliwood to level 10 so he won't be a total liability for chapters such as this one. He's still crappy, but at least he will be able to be promoted to a mounted unit later in the game – and the promotion bonuses he gets are pretty darn solid all things considered. I also level up Fiora to level 12 and promote her with the Elysian Whip available in this chapter, to get a solid enough flying unit after I lost Florina 😢. Fiora also has really good resistance stat, which will be extremely important against magic units. All the dancing and healing also provided Priscilla and Ninian with a decent chunk of XP.

You may ask why not go all the way through up to level 20 here. And the answer is simple – too much time and too much risk. Arena abuse is tedious, and most of my non-benched units don't really need that extra exp much – and the higher you go, the more you risk fighting against enemies with silver weapons, while you are forced to roll with just iron ones. And as for money, I will get more on the way through.

After this, I get a close call with Sain because I forget that the boss of this chapter has a motherfucking Killer Axe. Merry Critmas. I manage to setup a steal of a Hero Crest in response, and finish the boss with Raven.

Current army: Hector (lv16), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv20), Priscilla (lv12), Sain (lv9 pr.), Raven (lv3 pr.), Ninian (lv12), Fiora (lv1 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood (yes, he is still very benchable), Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius

Chapter 22

After lots of plot development, we are thrown right into a yet another defense chapter. This time, we have three recruitable units available to us. Isadora, a Paladin, joins us from the start, which means we have a yet another strong unit to use – even if not as overpowered as Sain. There is also Rath, the Nomad from the Lyn mode, that I forgot whether I can promote yet or not, and Heath, an enemy Wyvern Rider, who is another solid unit thanks to the hard mode bonuses.

I can also get a Knight Crest, which means I will finally have a chance to promote Oswin into a General... provided I won't fuck up anything on the way. I will also have to try and reach the chest with Brave Axe in time... tho knowing life, it is a hard ask. Isadora comes in with an Angelic Robe, which I immediately use on Hector.

After a short while, Heath comes in range of Hector's Talk command, and so I recruit him. Next turn, Heath is dead. This is the moment where I realized that I am an utter idiot to not stock up on Pure Waters. Still, I at least manage to bring Rath home, and I find an opening for Sain to bumrush the boss of this chapter to rob him off the very important Knight Crest, while the rest of the army went into a turtle formation.

On turn 7 I manage to both intercept the enemy Thief, netting me the Brave Axe, and to kill the boss, getting the promotion item and and finishing the chapter early. That felt gooooooood.

Current army: Hector (lv16), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv20), Priscilla (lv13), Sain (lv11 pr.), Raven (lv3 pr.), Ninian (lv12), Fiora (lv1 pr.), Isadora (lv1 pr.), Rath (lv8)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath.

Chapter 23

It is time for a desert chapter. Or in other words... pain. Most of your army will walk extremely slow, with only mages and fliers being more or less unaffected, and cavalry units are slowed times four instead of just times 2 that you would expect from most units. Not only that but as soon as one starts this map on Hector Hard Mode, fog of war comes in. And we have to rout every enemy while also attempting to find some hidden items and hopefully steal a valuable Guiding Ring to finally promote Priscilla. The only saving grace is that there is only 8 turns of reinforcements to deal with.

Other than routing the enemy, we also “need” to protect Pent... but the thing is that he is insanely powerful by himself, and as such we don't really have to be scared about him. We also can recruit Hawkeye here, who is a Berserker.

Bosses on this map are somewhat scary – Killer Axe can oneshot most of my units with a crit.

As for the Guiding Ring... well, Pent murdered that guy who had the ring. Yay. Another Guiding Ring missed.

At the end of this chapter we get Afa's Drops, which can increase the growth rates of one unit. I use them on Raven.

Current army: Hector (lv17), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv1 pr.), Priscilla (lv13), Sain (lv11 pr.), Raven (lv4 pr.), Ninian (lv13), Fiora (lv1 pr.), Isadora (lv1 pr.), Rath (lv8), Hawkeye (lv5 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath.

Chapter 24

Can we fucking stop with the fucking fog of war already????

Anyway, we can recruit Wallace here. I don't think I exactly want to, especially considering I have a beefy Oswin available to me, but I guess I can. The more important thing though is a village with an Earth Seal to save – a promotion item that works for nearly any single class... including Troubadour, and Priscilla REALLY needs to get promoted ASAP.

There is an Arena on this chapter, which can allow me to boost Rath to respectable levels and promote him, but I am not entirely sure that this is worth the effort. He is a little bit too behind, and soon I will get Louise as an bow user – and she has some pretty solid stats and can also use Brave Bow.

On the first turn, I rush to the Earth Seal village with Sain, to prevent reinforcement brigands from wrecking it. I also manage to buy some steel weapons and a couple of Swordreavers for future use.

On turn 3, I move Oswin too far forward, which activates Lloyd too early, putting me on a very tight clock for reaching the village. As soon as I will kill Lloyd, the map will be over, and the Earth Seal will be gone.

Lloyd is a problematic boss. He has a magic sword, which means that he is targetting Resistance, and he has a high crit rate, so my units are at a severe risk of dying. Granted, at a two range, there is no chance of crit, but that doesn't mean he isn't dishing a truckload of damage and doubling most of my army nothenless. I have to play risky and eventually I deal the last hit with Matthew. It was pretty darn stressful.

As for Wallace, noone recruited him, but he didn't die, so he doesn't count as a death I think? I'll mark him as missed I guess.

Current army: Hector (lv17), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv1 pr.), Priscilla (lv14), Sain (lv11 pr.), Raven (lv4 pr.), Ninian (lv14), Fiora (lv1 pr.), Isadora (lv2 pr.), Rath (lv8), Hawkeye (lv5 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath.

Missed: Wallace

Chapter 25

A seize chapter... except we are to seize three forts. FE4 anyone?

During battle preparations, I immediately use an Earth Seal on Priscilla, because as I've said multiple times, she needed that for quite a while already.

I can recruit Farina here for a small sum of TWENTY THOUSAND GOLD. I guess she is a yet another flyer, and she can promote from the get go... provided I will get that Elysian Whip from this village, which does not seem like an easy task on this layout to be completely honest. My best option seems to be intercepting pirate reinforcements with Fiora it seems, and this works far more briliantly than I thought it would.

By turn 5, I have already seized one of the castles and obtained an Elysian Whip for future use. On this turn, Farina has spawned, and then I've realized I don't have enough money to recruit her. Happens.

I am advancing really, really smoothly too. There is little standing in my way that can survive my attacks, or even damage my units in the first place. That is, until I get into the aggro range of the boss, who dishes huge damage and will be really hard to fell, forcing me to fall back for a moment. With combined efforts of Hector, Oswin and Hawkeye, he dies on turn 8, leaving nothing much other than weak generic enemies.

Farina eventually dies trying to navigate to Hector, which is mildly unfortunate. For her, not for me, she did kill a few enemies on the way and I didn't have money to hire her anyway.

Fiora is able to singlehandedly destroy a huge regiment of monks on the right side of the map, making handling this way easier than it should be.

Eventually I get past all the enemies and capture second fort, and then the third one falls soon after.

Current army: Hector (lv19), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv2 pr.), Priscilla (lv1 pr.), Sain (lv12 pr.), Raven (lv6 pr.), Ninian (lv14), Fiora (lv3 pr.), Isadora (lv2 pr.), Rath (lv10), Hawkeye (lv6 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath, Farina

Missed: Wallace

Chapter 26

Time for a very scary chapter – I am forced to field both Eliwood and Lyn, and they are both very much out of position. Furthermore, my army is split into three regiments. On a more positive note, I get to use Pent and Louise now, who are both really fucking good. The village here has a Hammerne staff, but I don't think it is exactly feasible for me to go for it.

During battle prep, I promote Rath to give him a little bit extra power and utility

The turn one plan is simple – promote Eliwood ASAP, then get Lyn to safety using Fiora.

I have made an attempt to use fiora to get Eliwood to safety... but the end result was Fiora dying to a nomad. Didn't check the ranges correctly, and the end result was fatal. This is pretty darn painful, cause lack of a flying unit hurts a whole fucking lot.

At turn 8, I am getting overwhelmed due to being spread so thin. It is really hard to defend against so many flying units. Rath gets close to dying, but thankfully Pent comes with a Physic Staff, allowing me to heal him. Ultimately, I manage to survive for all these 11 turns without any further casualities.

Current army: Hector (lv20), Matthew (lv20), Oswin (lv3 pr.), Priscilla (lv2 pr.), Sain (lv12 pr.), Raven (lv6 pr.), Ninian (lv15), Isadora (lv2 pr.), Rath (lv1 pr.), Hawkeye (lv6 pr.), Pent (lv7 pr.), Louise (lv4 pr.)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy, Rebecca, Kent, Lyn, Dart

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus, Wil, Florina, Lucius, Heath, Farina, Fiora.

Missed: Wallace

This is as good time as any to finish this blogpost. We are nearing the endgame, and I am excited to see if I will prevail against the remaining few chapters... Including the infamous Battle Before Dawn.

#PlayReport #FE7Ironman

Chapter 9.

In this chapter we obtain Wallace – an Armor Knight, who is instantly ready for promotion. In Lyn normal mode, you are forced to promote this guy. In my playthrough, since the master plan to obtain a busted Paladin failed, I am kinda forced to promote this guy, since I can't transfer the Hero's Crest into the Hector mode. Pain. Furthermore, since I've lost my cavaliers, I will have to actually use Wallace for progress, which sucks, cause he is not a mounted unit – ergo moves slowly.

I am forced to move annoyingly slowly in this chapter to properly protect my units, because there is a solid amount of really, really annoying reinforcements combined with fog of war. Ugh. And by annoyingly slowly, I pretty much just turtle at the start, with Wallace soloing the northern reinforcements, and rest of the army handling the southern flank. After this initial wave I begin my offensive on turn 6, cleaning up the remaining enemies and advancing towards the boss.

The boss has 1-2 range weapons – Javelin and Hand Axe, and since he has 10 Str, he hits like a truck, while taking little damage thanks to his 10 Def. If only I still had Sain... Instead, I pretty much have to bring Wallace into the fray to weaken the boss, then I finally finish the last hitpoint of his with Lancereaver wielded by Lyn for a more poetic finish and a little bit more potential survivability for her in the Hector mode. She now has 7 Str at level 10, which is bit disappointing to be honest – but not below average. Florina though, got to 8 Str on this map while still on level 6, which is pretty great.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv10), Florina (lv6), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv5), Serra (lv3), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv8), Matthew (lv2), Lucius (lv5), Nils (lv3), Wallace (lv1 pr.)

“Dead” units: Kent, Sain.

Chapter 10

It is time for the finale of the Lyn mode – the battle against Lundgren.

This map has a gimmick where on some turns there is rain, during which all units move so slowly that you wonder what's even the point of playing the game.

There is one interesting thing here – an Energy Ring from the village, letting you get a permanent +2 to either Str or Mgc, depending on the class. The question is – who the fuck do I use this ring on? If Sain was still here, he would be an obvious candidate, as pumping powerful units full of drugs stat boosters is really great in this game, but now I don't have a clearly good option. I decide to spend the ring on Florina, as having a solid flyer for the early Hector mode sounds like a really good idea to be honest.

Florina got another +1 Str on level up, making her pretty darn formidable now.

Wallace together with Lucius killed Lundgren, and Lyn comes in to seize the castle gate and finish the chapter... and the entire Lyn mode part of the game.

The following units will retain their stats for Hector mode: Lyn (lv10), Florina (lv7), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv5), Serra (lv4), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv8), Matthew (lv2), Lucius (lv6), Nils/Ninian (lv5), Wallace (lv2 pr.)

“Dead” units: Kent, Sain.

Chapter 11

It is time to start Hector Hard Mode – where the game starts for real now. And let's be honest, I am going into this chapter practically blind. The fact that I have no vulnearies scares me here. I quickly overextend Matthew, and end up with him dead. That will certainly have annoying ripple effects, since I will have no access to a thief for quite a few chapters. I lose a Red Gem, which sucks a bit, but oh well.

And then I miscalcuate and die just before I can use a dropped vulneary.

I think that definitely counts as a skill issue.

What now?

So, this means I will hav e to go through a yet another attempt at this Ironman challenge. I am considering two options here – go through Lyn mode once fucking again, or decide “fuck it” and discard the useful Lyn mode bonuses.

I have decided to rush through Lyn mode once again, because I want to have ultra strong Sain as Paladin – however, writing the full recap here yet again would be honestly pointless, so a shortened version is all what I will do.

Lyn mode quick recap

So, again, main focus on training Sain with some exp going to Florina and Lucius, while making sure to not die to a 1% crit this time. I got Sain to level 15 before promoting him to a Paladin – this will give me a busted early game unit for the HHM, unless I will botch things yet again 😂. Florina didn't really get any Str, however I still decide to use an Energy Ring on her, since she is still a valuable flying unit. I didn't use Lyn much this time, so she basically exists to be benched now, since using her in HHM without extra Lyn mode levels is pain.

Forgot to take note of the levels of each unit, but the important ones are Sain at level 1 promoted, Florina at level 7, Lyn at level 4, and I think that's it?

Chapter 11 once more

Okay, now that I know how this chapter works, I have to figure out a way to get vulnearies ASAP. I ignore the chest with the Red Gem for survival reasons, and I take the much safer top route at the start. And Hector dies once more because he missed a 75% (which is in practice 87.5%) chance to hit an archer like 10 times in a row. Yay.

At this point I think there is no point going through Lyn mode again, and again, and again... I can get through it very consistently, to the point that I don't want to waste time considering how inconsistent this chapter is. So I decide to cheat the ironman rules and repeat the chapter again and again until I won't get fucked by accuracy rolls.

Is my attempt illegitimate now? Yes. Do I care? No. I am here to see janky consequences of my actions, not

Two attempts later...

Finally Hector decided that not missing Archers is a good idea. I accidentally estabilish a steal loop, and I decide to use this opportunity to grind Matthew way too much. I grind him to level 13 and then a little bit more, when I decide that I am already losing my mind, so I just stop.

Eventually, after somewhere around 100 turns, I obtain the remaining vulnearies and rout the remaining enemies.

Current army: Hector (lv4), Matthew (lv13)

Chapter 12

Time for more, erm, traditional Fire Emblem gameplay now, not an obscene puzzle that was the previous chapter 🥴. We get a shitton of units from Eliwood's side of the map – Eliwood the Lord (duh), Marcus the Paladin, Rebecca the Archer, Lowen the Cavalier, Bartre the Fighter, and a familiar face – Dorcas the Fighter. We also get Oswin the Knight and Serra the Cleric – another familiar face!

Out of these units, we will certainly want to use Marcus and Dorcas. The first one is a powerful prepromote, and Dorcas has some exp under his belt.

The question is, how do we approach this map in the first place? The biggest threat are the Pegasus Knights – a relatively obscene amount of flyers at this stage of the game, which forces me onto defensive for now. Here I very much see that levelling up Matthew paid off greatly, cause he can now hold the line against flyers on this map... Yet I still misplay and lose Serra, which will make things way more difficult until I hopefully get Priscilla. Yay.

When there is only one passive enemy left, I dawdle a bit to get a solid amount of vulnearies for everyone, as well as an extra Iron Axe for Hector.

Current army: Hector (lv5), Matthew (lv14), Eliwood (lv1), Marcus(lv1 pr.), Rebecca (lv1), Lowen (lv2), Bartre (lv2), Oswin (lv9), Dorcas (lv6)

Deaths: Serra

Chapter 13

The army is no longer split in two, which makes things way, way easier. The Pegasus Knights are still scary, but are manageable now. I am also relying a lot on Marcus to push through.

I can recruit Guy here by talking to him with Matthew, but it does pose a risk due to him wielding a Killing Edge. I manage to do it correctly though without any deaths.

I do move way too slowly to rescue the second village on the map, losing access to a gaiden chapter – however, my main focus now is to stabilize.

Current army: Hector (lv7), Matthew (lv15), Eliwood (lv1), Marcus (lv2 pr.), Rebecca (lv1), Lowen (lv2), Bartre (lv2), Oswin (lv9), Dorcas (lv6), Guy (lv3)

Deaths: Serra

Chapter 14

Finally, the battle preparations screen. I can now safely bench Eliwood so I won't have this, to put it bluntly, liability to worry about.

I start the chapter with two problems. Problem number 1 – I have to get to bottom village ASAP, or otherwise I will be without a staff user for way longer than I am comfortable with. Problem number 2 – I will have to deal with an entire regiment of enemies attacking me from the back.

Problem number 2 is the easier one to solve – I will let Oswin deal with these five units, making sure beforehand that he has some vulnearies. I will also leave Bartre at the back to speed up killing enemies.

To solve problem 1, I will need to formulate a proper attack plan to get to the village in time. There is plenty of red units on the way, with swords, bows and spears, and tanking it all will be a challenge... Except that Hector has 13 def now, so he can take no damage here now. After I've checked all enemy units, it seems like Hector can almost solo this map, but still.

I try to rush in and lose Dorcas, cause apparently he was too good at killing enemies, and he couldn't dodge for shit. I predictably fail to recruit Erk, and then I lose Bartre due to a slight miscalculation. I am certainly a competent Fire Emblem player.

Other than that, the big problem I have is that Wolf Beil, the personal weapon of Hector, is almost wrecked at this point.

Current army: Hector (lv9), Matthew (lv15), Marcus (lv2 pr.), Rebecca (lv2), Lowen (lv4), Oswin (lv11), Guy (lv3)

Benched: Eliwood

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre

Chapter 15

A random-ass defend the throne chapter that for some reason is a Hector mode exclusive. Sealen, the boss of the map can drop a Dragonshield, allowing me to potentially boost defense of one of my units by 2, however getting to him can be tricky. The chests contain a Silver Axe and a Mend staff, both pretty worthwhile to get. However, it is tempting to just let Hector turtle forever and alone and finish the map this way, since most enemies can barely scratch him, especially with the throne's +2 Def bonus. I hide Guy and Rebecca in the bench and start to wonder about Priscilla's safety. However, I decide that there is no point in discarding these heals, with how strained my army already is.

After a single turn I realize that going for these chests is a lost cause, though.

After a few turns I am forced to sacrifice Lowen, and ultimately I realize that the side objectives of this map are frankly impossible in the current state of my army. I am now extremely glad that I've put the effort to level up Matthew with the steal loop cheese, cause he is now powerful enough to singlehandedly keep up with all the enemies at the current stage of the game.

Priscilla sadly only consumed a zillion vulnearies, which is sad. I make a mistake by leaving Marcus with sword instead of lance equipped, and I lose him along with several powerful weapons.

I should have just tanked everything with Hector.

Current remains of the army: Hector (lv10), Matthew (lv16), Rebecca (lv2), Oswin (lv12), Guy (lv3), Priscilla (lv3)

Benched: Eliwood

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus

Chapter 16

A huge issue now is that I am running out of weapons. I need swords, I need lances, and most importantly I need axes. The fact is though that I get a few returning faces now – Lyn (oh no), Sain (oh fucking yes), Kent (fine), Florina (how the fuck she'll even stay alive?), Wil (okay sure I guess he exists). The only reason I am not fielding Guy for example is the fact that I can't give him a weapon to wield.

I realize that I fucked up Lyn mode finances, so I can't stock up on weapons just yet. I sell Wil's Iron Bow to buy an Iron Axe that I will eventually pass to Hector, and rush forward to rendevouz the armies... with exception of Wil, who pretty much has to function as a fodder at this point, baiting enemy flyers. However, he miracolously survives the initial onslaught.

Current army: Hector (lv12), Matthew (lv17), Rebecca (lv2), Oswin (lv13), Priscilla (lv4), Lyn (lv5), Florina (lv8), Kent (lv6), Sain (lv2 pr.), Wil (lv3)

Benched: Eliwood, Guy

Deaths: Serra, Dorcas, Erk, Bartre, Lowen, Marcus

Time for a break

I feel like I have finally equalized. Sure, I've lost Marcus and a shitton of weapons, but at this point I finally have a solid army that can take enemies on, provided I won't hose myself completely by running out of weapons, which seems increasingly likely.

Next post

#PlayReport #FE7Ironman

Here is where the Ironman challenge comes in. It is a self-imposed challenge that takes away your ability to reload. Every mistake is permanent – every lost unit, every missed item, there is no turning back. And if you game over for any reason... well, time to start from the very beginning.

This is actually my second attempt at this – I've lost Hector on my first try on Chapter 15, then I've realized that I ain't gonna fuck around with Lyn normal mode again, which is a tutorial consisting of TEN chapters. I've found and applied a patch that unlocks all modes of play from the get go – so I am starting with Lyn's Hard mode, in which the only difference is that I am not forced to go through movements forced on me by the tutorial windows once again. As for what will follow the Lyn mode... I think I will go for Hector Hard mode for maximum pain possible in this game.

Prologue

Simple map, nothing to say except that I've predictably used one vulnearly and less predictably Lyn got a strength level up.

Chapter 1

Sain and Kent join in this chapter, and they are immediately powerful units by the virtue of being Cavaliers. 7 movement, ability to use both swords and lances, good stats, and absolutely broken promotion into Paladins later on. I will want to try to reach level 10 with at least one of them before the end of Lyn's mode, since they can use the sole promotion item available in this mode, which would be otherwise wasted on an Armor Knight named Wallace.

I decide to focus more of my efforts on Sain, since he has more strength. This does require me to shuffle around my items a bit, since Sain starts with no sword to dispatch the enemy axe units, but still.

Sain got two pretty mediocre levels, but oh well.

Chapter 2

This is the first chapter I can do boss abuse on. There is a source of infinite HP for me – that is, forts regenerating HP – and the boss is sitting on a throne, which also regenerates HP. But I am a busy (and slightly impatient) man, and I ain't got time for spending few hundred turns on this map.

Other than that, this chapter is pretty uneventful. Lyn gets her Prf weapon, Mani Katti, which is solid enough for this stage of the game, and that's about it.

Chapter 3

We get a Pegasus Knight (for some reason shortened as Peg Knight which deals me psychic damage, especially considering obvious yuri undertones involved here) named Florina, and an archer named Wil. T he first unit is a relatively solid flyer, but requires a bit of training – the second is your average archer – that is to say, meh at best.

I buy one iron lance and two iron swords here.

Lyn levelled up strength here, which is actually nice, and ahead of average.

Chapter 4

Ah yes. A mission to protect an NPC – and yet in practice you can kinda go out and kill all these bandits. There is a recruitable unit on the enemy side – Dorcas, who is an axe unit that can't hit a stationary target – and since there aren't too many enemy lance units at this stage of the of the game, he is further disadvantaged by the weapon triangle mechanic. Yay. Still, a new unit is a new unit.

Cavalier duo destroys most of the bandits on their own because they are just that good... tho Sain's level ups are not exactly impressive at this point.

Kent got a bit too close to getting wrecked though, and Dorcas surprisingly hit every single hit he tried to make, so that was interesting.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv6), Kent (lv3), Sain (lv6), Florina (lv3), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv3)

Chapter 5

Finally, a cleric to save our waning amount of vunlearies!

Sain's level ups caught up to the expectations, and he's the expected paragon of destruction now. I buy a javelin in the armory for Florina, and Lyn got an absolutely garbage level up – literally just HP+1.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv7), Kent (lv3), Sain (lv7), Florina (lv3), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv3), Serra (lv1), Erk (lv1)

Chapter 6

In this chapter we are introduced to Rath, a Nomad and Matthew, a Thief. Both of them are really useful units – Rath is a mounted bow unit with actually respectable stats, and Matthew is a Thief.

We also obtain Angelic Robe, a consumable item that permanently increases max HP of the unit by 7. I give it to Sain to make him even more busted.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv7), Kent (lv4), Sain (lv7), Florina (lv4), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv3), Serra (lv1), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv7), Matthew (lv2)

Chapter 7

The plot moves forward, and we get two new recruits – Lucius, a Monk, and Nils, a definitely normal Bard with no supernatural origins involved. Both units are solid, tho Lucius is very likely to fall off without being spoonfed some XP.

Bard is a reskinned version of a Dancer class that is commonly found in FE games – as dumb as it sounds, they allow other units to move twice (relevant: https://youtu.be/eaSBkLgwgAo). Needless to say, it is an extraordinarily good effect.

Florina is getting great level ups.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv7), Kent (lv4), Sain (lv8), Florina (lv5), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv3), Serra (lv1), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv7), Matthew (lv2), Lucius (lv3), Nils (lv1)

Chapter 7x

The first gaiden chapter, which of course I am embarking on cause, you know, more XP.

Sadly I can't steal an extra lockpick from this chapter because of insufficient speed of Matthew, but it doesn't matter in the long run.

Sain has almost hit level 10 on this chapter, missing out by 1 XP. However, it doesn't really matter much, cause it is pretty much settled at this point that he will get that promotion into Paladin in time.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv7), Kent (lv4), Sain (lv9), Florina (lv5), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv4), Serra (lv2), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv7), Matthew (lv2), Lucius (lv3), Nils (lv1)

Chapter 8

An annoying chapter, solely beause of the ballista right in the middle threatening Florina. Still, she can go and get the village in the top right corner of the map, while still keeping herself safe from the ballista. Rest of the army will just rush down, with Sain leading the fray.

I have seriously overextended Kent and put him out of commission though – which honestly sucks, but well, I will get him back on chapter 15. Still, this will make the rest of Lyn mode a bit harder, and Kent will be with just level 5 and somewhat average stats... and then Sain got critted by the boss, wasting all my effort levelling him up. Fuck. There goes my godly Paladin with an insane strength stat.

After losing Sain, I have no clue how to proceed with this map. I put out Lyn forward, thinking to myself that in the worst case I will just restart the run. This didn't happen.

At the end of this chapter, I have the following units: Lyn (lv8), Florina (lv5), Wil (lv3), Dorcas (lv4), Serra (lv2), Erk (lv1), Rath (lv8), Matthew (lv2), Lucius (lv4), Nils (lv1)

“Dead” units: Kent, Sain.

I need a break.

Next post

#PlayReport #FE7Ironman

So... where do I start?

Godawful hardware requirements

Well, starting with the low hanging fruit is probably the easiest.

To browse the internet, you need to use a device with a somewhat excessive power, and a somewhat excessive amount of RAM. And sure, I get that a bit higher requirements to handle stuff like proper Unicode rendering make some sense, having a browser eat up more RAM than some of the professional tools and having typical websites be impossible to properly view on lower end devices does not.

There is absolutely no legitimate reason why devices with 4 GB of RAM shouldn't be able to handle checking a news site and having something running in the background – yet alas, here we fucking are. And if you are going to say that these devices are not a thing anymore and everyone has an ample amount of RAM to (ab)use, I am going to shove those 16 GB RAM sticks you likely have down your throat.

Huh. Guess I do still have some anger left.

But yeah, I have recently talked with someone who has an old-ass laptop that has 4 GB of RAM, and I remember the times where I, as a young whippersnapper, could run many various flash games and view pretty much any website on a Windows XP PC with 256 MB of RAM. And despite all the performance and bandwith gains over time, the web feels more sluggish at times compared to these times where 10 MB flash game was considered huge.

Utterly insane complexity

Part of why the system requirements of browsing web are so high comes down to the fact that web browsers are extraordinarily complex applications – and they have to be, because the web standards are extraordinarily complex. You have the easy part, which is HTML, and two absolutely fucked up monstrosities – CSS and JS.

CSS is used for styling the HTML. And god, it has so many fucking functionalities that one has to wonder how the fuck anyone can even implement it all correctly. You not only have simple shit like changing font or background of an element, you not only have the more advanced yet still very useful things like flexbox layouting, no, you also have animations. And not just 2d animations, no, you also have 3d ones. And then you realize that there are constantly more new things added to the CSS specification that brings it closer and closer to a general purpose language for some ungodly reason, while most websites would be just fine with like, idk, a few kB of CSS tops. Hell, even this blog would be more than fine having less CSS but I am too lazy to build my own solution, and it is still better than a typical Wordpress install, so well.

And as for JS... god, JS is so fucking ass, both as a language spec and as the entire goddamn ecosystem. It is just a fucking mess, with so many goddamn features and APIs constantly being added on top that if you are out of the loop for a year or so getting back up to speed might be a bit of a struggle, because the best practices may have changed heavily during that time. And when you add the ecosystem on top, with npm dependency fuckfest of unauditability, zillion different build systems (for an interpreted language no less), zillion different frameworks (with like 10 in more or less popular use), fuckton of the flavor of the month libraries, and at this point I wouldn't be surprised to see someone that makes webdev their entire fucking personality, way beyond a typical autistic or ADHD hyperfixation, cause that's what it sometimes feels is expected from you to keep up.

And all that complexity also causes one more thing – making your own browser is a nigh impossible task now. Hell, even Microsoft has tried doing so with Edge, and ultimately ended up making a yet another fork of motherfucking Chromium. Like, it is a miracle that we still have Firefox and its forks, despite Mozilla's best efforts to fucking throw it all right into the fucking garbage can.

And sure, there is a new rendering engine actually being made – Servo – but it is like one part of the browser, and it currently is very much work in progress, which only confirms how incredibly fucking hard it is to make even a barely working browser.

And yes, I know, there is a legitimate need for some of these complexities – but what we currently have now is way fucking beyond what we need. But hey, that unyielding increase in complexity serves to cement the dominance of Chromium on the browser market, so we ain't gonna see a change unless some kind of a revolution happens. Yay.

Lack of care, plenty of malice

Of course, the specs are just one part of the puzzle, and you can still make performant and lean websites. Hell, it is arguably easier than using all these big ass frameworks and shit. The issue? You need to want to not force the client to download 10 MB of JS code to display like 10 KB of meaningful data, you need to want to care about the bandwidth and shit – but hey, let's add all those trackers and ads so that the website will be unusable on anything lower-end than a fullblown gaming computer.

And then you have all these goddamn frameworks, which sure, make it a bit easier to create interactive frontends – but they are so fucking heavy. And hell, some people use it for relatively tiny stuff instead of fullblown apps in the browser, which pumps up the js bundle size so fucking hard that I don't fucking know what can even be said at this point.

Corporate social media

You could make an entire series of articles on the effect that corporate social media had on the society. You could write an entire book on this.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter effectively killed the good old forums via sheer convienence, and became alghorithmic hellholes promoting aggravating shit for the purposes of engagement metrics. More clicks, more addiction, more ads shown, who cares if you incite genocide by doing so. And this of course impacts people pushing out stuff to attempt to game the algorithm – while in practice they are the ones played by it. Posting various clickbaits, engagement baits, catchy misinformation, dropping hate bombs, and so on.

Furthermore, the algorithms used want to use as much data as possible to make the use of such websites more addicting, and the ads being more targetted – and as such, the corporate social media attempt to learn everything they can about you without even asking you for even a semblance of consent. Even if you don't have an account and don't visit the social media service, you are being fingerprinted and tracked at every single goddamn opportunity whenever you find something with a “share to facebook” button or similar. Almost every ad displayed on a site also comes with zillion of trackers to spy on your movements. It is honestly absolutely terrifying.

The centralization of the speech under these social media corpos also means that these corpos dictate what is even allowed to be said, providing the immense censorship abilities. Political party they don't like? Just cut their reach. Talking about women reproductive health? Call it porn and ban it. Someone talking a decentralized alternative to their service? You know they will aggresively ban such thing. It fucking sucks.

Malicious code

So, JavaScript is actually a curse of the web. Sure, it is useful, but if you look at this with even a bit of scrutiny, you realize that it is running arbitrary, unauditable code taken from random places. Sure, the sandboxing is implemented solidly enough in the two browsers that still matter, but it's not like you can't do fucked up shit within that sandbox.

The aforementioned trackers mentioned above, the utterly asinine spyware that is for some ungodly reason accepted by populace mentioned above – it is just one category of stupid bullshit that browsers are all too happy to allow. Nah, you also have some more direct and explicit attacks – for example tricking the target into letting the website's push notifications in. These push notifications in turn show various forms of “your computer is infected” messages, which in turn leads the poor user into scamware shit.

You also have secret cryptominers, which burn through your computational resources like there is no tomorrow just so the owner of the miner can get a few cents or something.

You also have XSS attacks where the attacker injects their own JS code into a legitimate website. Sure, it requires the website to be vulnerable to such attacks... but you ain't gonna know until it is too late most of the time, unless you have a habit of attempting to hack every website you see. And hell, you probably won't know even after the XSS vuln fucks you – the user of the website.

Browser monopoly

So, there are two or three web browsers that matter: Chrome, Firefox, and if you count it, Safari. You may ask, what about stuff like Edge, Opera, Brave or Vivaldi? Sorry, they are just Chromium forks. Like, at this point if you see a new web browser, it is more likely than not a chrome reskin.

Still, we have choices, right? Two or three competing browsers ain't bad, right? Well, it wouldn't be bad if Chrome/Chromium wasn't like 80-90% of browsers used. Ergo, Google dictates the web standards, and I can guarantee you that they do not care at all about the needs of people, they only care about forcing their adtech down your throat.

Conclusion

*crying kobold noises*

#Web #Capitalism

A short infodump about IPv4 and IPv6.

IPv4, in very simplified terms, is a set of protocols used to essentially handle all the internet flow, with its specification finalized in early 80s. It honestly works fine, except for one issue – the address range.

The creators of the internet standards didn't think the internet will be a big thing, so they've made the address range a 32-bit number – which gives us a bit under 4.3 billion addresses. Furthermore, they allocated these addresses to organizations willy nilly, and suddenly there was a credible threat of exhausting the pool of available addresses.

So, what's the solution? Well, of course, extending the address space, right? And well, yes. That is the solution. And as such, in 1998 the standard for IPv6 was introduced. Main draw? 128 bits of address – ergo, 2^128 (roughly 340 undecillion) possible addresses. Main problem? It needs new hardware pretty much everywhere – and as such, there were steps made to stall the address exhaustion problem. Some steps were societal – some organizations have released their huge IP ranges back to the common pool, and the IANA made the IP allocation policy way harsher to slow down the use of this limited resource. Some were technical, such as the introduction of NAT44 and eventually NAT444, for which I will explain the basic idea a bit later.

Yet this still was not enough – the last block of IPv4 addresses was assigned in 2019, and the IPv6 deployment is more or less nowhere. Of course, there is a question that immediately comes to the mind – why?

Why despite all this time, IPv6 was not widely implemented?

The answer, while maybe not exactly simple, boils down to one thing: the capitalism. Not only there is little capitalistic incentive to roll out IPv6, considering it is a large cost due to requiring new infrastructure, but also keeping IPv4 alive for as long as possible is something that is actually beneficial to the capitalists.

The “benefit” of IPv4 that I am talking about is simple – the aforementioned scarcity and address exhaustion. The estabilished players on the ISP and cloud provider markets have wide enough pools of IPv4 addresses reserved for themselves to still last them for a while. They very treat it as a commodity in similar vein to how landlords and real estate traders treat the land and housing – abusing the scarcity for profit, renting the IPv4 addresses for not insignificiant amount of money.

The scarcity of the IPv4 addresses also makes hosting things on premises – whether for business or for personal stuff – far more difficult than it should be. And the reason for this are NAT44 and NAT444 – the address conservation mechanisms I have mentioned a few paragraphs ago. As simply as I can put it, NAT44 allows multiple devices on the same network to share the same public IP, while NAT444 expands this concept to multiple networks at once. As ingenious of a solution this is, allowing various devices to initiate connections with relative ease – it causes a massive problem when you want someone from outside to connect to your devices. There are ways to work around this, but they are pretty darn technical and in some cases pretty unreliable.

Now, one may ask why I am mentioning difficulties with on premises hosting of various things as something that is advantageous for capitalists. And the answer is simple – it pushes people towards the use of cloud provider services instead of their own hardware and it pushes people towards the corporate social media instead their very own places on the internet. This in turn contributes towards the centralization of the internet within the hands of few big corpos, centralization that allows them to dictate the terms for smaller players and self-hosters and to determine what is even allowed on the internet in the first place.

Capitalism is pain

There is a capitalistic incentive to prolong the life of IPv4 protocols for as long as possible, and little incentive to transition towards IPv6. Not only the big players gain advantage from the issues of IPv4, they also would bear most of the costs of this techonogical transition.

Funnily enough, most of the current networking hardware in use handle both IPv4 and IPv6 just fine. Hell, most likely your computer, your phone, and whatever networking devices you have at your home handle both IPv4 and IPv6 too. The issue is infrastructure – the thing that we common folk have little influence on. It doesn't matter that you can have your own IPv6 address subnet when your ISP doesn't want to implement IPv6 in their own infrastructure. This means for IPv6 to become a proper thing, we have to wait until either the capitalist class decides to be nice or the politicians decide to force the capitalist class to properly implement IPv6. In some countries that forcing factor does show up, in others it seems really unlikely that any politician will even bother – but every host that is migrated to IPv6 is at least some progress towards a freer internet.

Let's just hope that we will be able to see IPv6 dominate over IPv4 within our lifetimes.

#Capitalism #Internet

At least in the online spaces, it is not a secret that I am aromantic. After all, both on Discord and on Fediverse, I have a very visible aromantic pride flag on my profile picture, and I explicitly write out that I am aro in the short intro about me on my main page. I haven't really went into much detail yet when it comes to this, though – I did say some stuff on some Discord server, but these words are pretty damn ephemeral, and I still were figuring myself out back then even if I knew I was aro. I want my words about this to be more persistent and more well-thought than that. I want these words to be able to help out people who want to figure out themselves and who want to understand more about others.

So... what is aromanticism?

Well... as the name suggests, it is a romantic orientation that is characterized by experiencing little to none romantic attraction. This should not be confused with asexualism, which in turn is experiencing little to none sexual attraction. Yep – romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two different things that do not have to match. You can for example be homoromantic heterosexual, panromantic asexual, and so on. Any combination is possible, even if it might be rare.

When it comes to me, I am aromantic heterosexual. I do get that standard neuron activation when I am looking at hot girls – ergo, I am sexually atracted to them – but I do not really feel something deeper. I do not experience romantic attraction at all.

At this point I would try to explain what romantic attraction is – but that would require me to know how it feels... and since my brain does not know the emotion of romantic love, I have no clue what it is. I tried to ask around when I was still figuring out what aromanticism means for me – but the answers I got were somewhat varied. All I know is that romantic relationship is far more emotionally intense than a platonic one – and I assume it is one of these things that when you feel it you know it. That naturally brings this post to an obvious question...

How did I learn that I was aromantic?

Before I answer this question, I have to say, the timeline of events will be somewhat intentionally vague. Part of this is due to the imperfections of my memory, making summarizing the stuff from last 10 years or so a bit difficult to do so accurately. Part of this is still just my wish to retain reasonable amount of privacy. I do wish to keep my real life and internet identities somewhat separate after all.

Having said this, it is time to begin my story... And I feel the best place to start for me is my high school years.

Back then, I was going by train to school, along with a few acquaintances of mine. One of these folks was a pretty darn cool girl – one that I was vibing with. It soon came to the point where I was considering whether this was love or not. After all, I was a boy, she was a girl, and she was important to me... And yet, I didn't feel any pressure from within myself to get, erm, closer to her.

Eventually, she left for a year for a studen exchange program trip. And then I began to realize things. I wondered whether I am someone broken, since I felt like I was unable to love. I tried to explain to myself that it is my subconscious that was blocking this cause I felt like I have no time for love. After all, I did have to deal with schoolwork, extracurricular stuff, and a bit of burnout on top of that.

Some time later, when I was a bit older, I was randomly browsing through the internet and landed on some LGBT wiki. I don't remember what exactly I was looking for back then, probably some non-binary label that I had no clue what it was back then. As it is the case with wikis, I obviously clicked around through some links... and it was that moment when I first encountered the terms of romantic attraction and aromanticism. I did not pay too much attention to this, though – not at this point, at least.

Fast forward a little bit further, during my university years I was interacting more and more with various queer people – mostly online, but still. I was at the point of my life where I was slowly but surely shedding my ignorance and internalized bigotry. I was more and more understanding of various gender and sexual identities. I was opening my mind towards what makes different people, erm, different from each other. And eventually I've stumbled upon some stuff about aromanticism again – it was something related to Aromantic Awareness Week on Twitter if I recall correctly. This piqued my interest considerably, and I started reading about aromanticism. And from this point onward, the metaphorical gears in my head started turning. A few months later I started calling myself aromantic, even though I still had a lot of doubts about myself at that point. Sure, these doubts weren't anything strong and well-formed, but they were still there.

Eventually, I have posted something about aromanticism on one server. This sparked a discussion on what is aromanticism, what is the aromantic spectrum, and the questions on how am I sure that I am aro. It was, well, difficult for me, considering I still had quite a bit of doubt in myself... doubt that wasn't helped by certain people on this server entering the discussion in bad faith, and me not having enough experience to notice it back then.

As I moved forward in life, I was slowly gaining confidence in me being aromantic. After all, I haven't seen nor felt any evidence to the contary. And finally I reached the point where things got calmer. I (mostly) finished the degree, I had a reasonably solid job, and I left that arguably radioactive Discord server I mentioned above. This gave me a time to think, to collect myself (university was fucking unreasonably stressful), and to focus a bit more on actually understanding myself. However, I didn't get any immediate conclusions back then – I was just stuck at the point of trying to figure out why I know I am aro. I do think that I was still seeking that concrete proof... proof that I couldn't find yet. That would have to wait, until the arguable collapse of Twitter.

Now, why does this event matter for this story? Simple – it was an impulse for me to join the Fediverse. I have chosen the tech.lgbt Mastodon instance as my entry point, and slowly began to find more and more people to follow – most of them predictably queer. And reading about various queer experiences there – whether trans, gay, ace, and so on – opened my mind quite a bit. Even if these experiences are completely different to mine, they still showed me that despite all the preconcieved cultural notions, despite all the lies and misinformation coming from multiple angles, the queer experiences are real and valid. And while I was already at the point where I wasn't going to deny others their gender, their orientation – but my resolve about this wasn't yet there, and this has changed. This in turn bolstered my confidence in me being aromantic.

Finally, the last few months over which I was writing this blogpost were calm enough for me to be able to think more deeply about myself. I was able to reflect more on my past. I was able to reflect on my experiences, on my feelings of brokeness – and fully confirmed that I am right about this one thing. I am aromantic.

Pain points

There are still a few pains of me related to me being aromantic – some of them minor, some of them less minor. I've still got to explain this thing to my parents – which will be a bit of an ordeal – but don't worry, it's not because they ain't gonna accept this. It's just cause they might have a bit harder of a time to wrap their heads around this.

I also still struggle a bit with the sense of belonging – I very much do not fit cisheteronormative spaces, but it also doesn't exactly feel I fit into the queer spaces? It is a bit hard to explain to be honest, but it does kinda sometimes feel like aros are getting forgotten or lumped together with aces, despite aromaticism and asexualism being two separate, abeit not mutually exlusive things.

This comes right into my third pain point – the fact that aromanticism is relatively unknown and incomprehensible to most. Romantic love is considered by many as one of the fundamental emotions – making it really fucking hard to imagine world without such an emotion. And aromantics struggle to explain the lack of romantic feelings – because how do you explain lack of something you don't know jackshit about?

The last pain point about this is extremely minor and kinda silly – I ain't gonna be able to write romance like ever. If I would attempt to do so, I would end up writing a deep platonic relationship at best 😅.

Conclusion

It is really hard for me to come up with a suitable conclusion, a suitable ending to this post here. I really hope that this blogpost that I've been working on over the course of the last few months will be helpful to at least one person out there, whether they are aro or not. I will keep bearing the aromantic pride flag in the online spaces to hopefully raise awareness passively – and I will try to do some stuff actively too, whether it is sharing links to materials on aromanticism and so on.

...And speaking of links, if you want to learn more about aromanticism, I have to drop this link in particular: https://www.arospecweek.org/

This is a knowledgebase containing really good information about aromanticism, various flavors of it, aromantic experiences and links to various aro communities.

And if you want to ask specifically me anything about aromanticism... well, you can message me at @makiki@tech.lgbt on Fediverse – or, if you have the connection to me through Discord, you can also ask me there.

Happy Pride Month, everyone.

#Aromantic

And as such, I have decided to have a different approach instead to what I tried before. Back then, during my previous attempts, I've started with drawing maps, but since I didn't really have any overarching sense of direction, of what I want to do with all these rooms, I had zero idea on how to breathe life into the dungeon. This time, I will start with a more high level idea of what I want to include in the dungeon. I will start with the necessary overarching worldbuilding, instead of jumping headfirst into details.

Of course, from this point onward, spoilers ahead. If you think you might be a player for this megadungeon, you probably want to not read further. That being said, the extra knowledge here shouldn't be that impactful on the gameplay yet, but if you would want to attempt to discover the why the dungeon even exists in the first place, well, you should probably stop reading now.

Starting from the beginning

So, let's start at the first thing for this worldbuilding excercise – why a megadungeon such as this would exist in the first place? Digging out an underground structure is hard^{[citation needed]}, especially if you consider that such structure is a living space for various creatures, and well... it is huuuuuge. Not only that, but the deeper you go, the larger the expectation for crazy things to be there – so it can't exactly be just a large natural cave complex.

The idea I have in mind is centered around an artifact left by a long gone god. The artifact isn't really well known, but for simplicity let's call it Chaos Core. During a feud between gods, one of them has decided to set up a contingency plan in case their demise – an object buried deep into the ground that would shape the surroundings and create new followers. While that god no longer has any followers – and as such no longer exists – that Chaos Core still works and shapes its surroundings, even if the area of its effect is limited.

The aura of the Chaos Core has attracted a certain crazed wizard (name and details obviously still pending) to build a tower over its location. The wizard did not know about this divine artifact – their plan was instead to create a place where they could experiment with rare and dangerous magical rocks undisturbed. They dug deep, getting somewhat close to the cave-like structures created by the Chaos Core – but before they could reach it, they have realized the danger of these magical rock is so high, that it has to be sealed. They have created one last vault, and left this world soon after.

Soon after, the upper floors of the dungeon have been expanded and settled by various creatures and animals, connecting them to the nearby caves. The lower floors that housed the laboratory were eventually reached and connected by the Chaos Core's structures. This allowed the energy of the artifact to emanate more freely, and ultimately influence a larger area with its power.

Going back to structure

The worldbuilding done here gives me an actual idea on how the dungeon will have to be structured. There will be essentially three layers of this dungeon, each spanning several floors.

The upper layer will be the living layer – you will have mostly some typical factions there, like kobolds, goblins and orcs, as well as mostly dangerous animals. That being said, thanks to various magical influences of previous denizens, as well as the power of Chaos Core, there can be spots where undead are a thing.

The middle layer is going to be the lab of the wizard, with the vault containing the dangerous magical rock being the main, erm, “attraction” – tho I will slap on the radioactive waste warnings onto that. There will be plenty of golems and machinery there, as well as some undead and really weird arguably living beings.

The lower layer will be dedicated towards the chaos. Expect non-euclidean architecture, and absolutely weird and unhinged shit. If I get down there with creating the megadungeon, I will go crazy here. A bit of noneuclidean stuff will be featured in the previous two layers, like teleports and loops – but here I might get to the point that it would simply be easier for me to not bother with drawing a proper map and instead just mark down the graph structure on the paper or something. Players will get lost. Hell, I will probably get lost as a GM. You could call it a bad game design, but honestly? If you manage to get so deep into the dugneon, if you manage to get both your characters and your player group to hold on for that long – the final challenge should be intense in more ways than just one.

What's next?

Next, I will have to start fleshing out the three layers that I have outlined. I don't want to jump right into the floors themselves just yet for two reasons. First, if I were to go into specific floors right now, I risk these floors to be detached from each other, being essentially separate areas stitched with each other, instead of forming a coherent microworld to explore. I am not saying it is a mistake to duct tape things like this – but I do want that certain degree of coherence. The second reason is the fact that I want to incorporate some structures that span across two or more floors. They are important to faciliate some kind of fast travel, they work wonders with connecting the floors with each other, force players to think in the third dimension, and well... they are just cool as fuck.

With this being said, the plan for the next steps in the megadungeon creation is set. The next blogposts will be about the three layers and the important structures I want to incorporate, as well as some factions and denizens of importance.

#GameDesign #OSR #Megadungeon