wataru14 wrote:I remember when I first started playing Tactics I would have people dying left and right, which is why I don't ever play anyone who can die anymore (except for Noah, Rene, and occasionally Cedric) if I can at all help it. Which means in a game with 50+ playable characters, I only ever use the same 10 (Kyril, Andarc, Seneca, Corselia, Lazlo, Kika, Frederica, Akaghi, Mizuki, Lalacle).
On my first play I had to restart a battle quite often because of deaths, but instead of changing the character selection, I focused on understanding the mechanics and improving my strategies. In a game with 50+ characters I want to make use of 50+ characters. In the following plays deaths and even retreats happened less and less.
wataru14 wrote:I don't mind a character dying because of my bad planning. What I can't stand is a character dying because the RNG hates me. My favorite scenario in Tactics is: character moves into a position that causes more enemies to spawn nearby. One of these enemies randomly has strong compatibility against them. This enemy takes it's turn and critical hits my character. Character dies. Screw that.
It's similar to Suikoden 1 military battles. Pannu Yakuta. Send in Krin, who fails, because he's friggin useless. Have to go in blind. Kwanda likes charging (he's an infantry general after all) and that old book says to use archery when you are low in soldier count. So I'll use magic since he's most likely to charge. Aaaaaaaand Luc is dead because Kwanda decided to randomly use archery on the first turn. Screw that, too.
In S1 war battles the enemy attack is usually random. And whether thieves succeed is always a matter of luck. So even on your 100th run you can permanently lose a character if you use killable ones and you have some bad luck. In Tactics there are actually only a few things random: a small amount of random damage upon any attack; skills kicking in or not; spell (effects) hitting or not (e.g. earthquake and wind of sleep). Ambushes/reinforcements aren’t random, so if you’re in your 5th run or so and you die from an “ambush” because you let a fragile character move ahead without support then it’s “bad planning”. The only thing that is comparable is the anger when a character dies.
I don't like the system „lying“. I’m talking about the random damage I mentioned above. The display sometimes tells me the enemy will die from my attack, but it doesn’t. It seems the average damage number determines the symbol displayed. They should have added a third symbol (containing a question mark) if the enemy’s HP lies between my minimum and maximum damage of the selected attack.