Shattered Throne map 15 sort of brute force run
1Just thought I'd post this to respond to a level help request for Shattered Throne. Somebody was needing help on Level 15. I wasn't sure why so I decided to overview what was going on and...I stumble upon some general brute forcing ability against the central fortress. Basically, I used Destroyers and Gryphons to pick off enemies, eventually positioning a Treant where he could clear the way in for a cleanup squad. And all the player needs to do for the map is destroy the Banner in the fortress, no need to worry about capturing the marked Forts. What I was expecting, by the way, was to work my way through the north front after taking care of the southeast area.
I feel the map was a little tepid, not least because of the surplus of demand of using Destroyers and Gryphons, both of whom have their definite share of safety. I'm not up for seeing either of those two nerfed aside from both having level up benefits swapped. (Let's face it: Fire Support is a much weaker benefit for the Destroyer than +1 Range is. If you don't get what Fire Support does, it increases adjacent allies' COUNTERATTACK DAMAGE, by only 1 ATK at that. That couldn't even be overwhelming as a silver level benefit for Stone Wall units.) What I want to point to is that even if it's more subtle than what I had been bringing up about Treant, you can see how powerful Treant's Sunder is to decrease DEF by 2 points instead of 1. I wasn't even expecting Sunder to provide a way to really punch through against Dark Cabal's high HP-to-DEF ratio, and yet here we are. It's not so ridiculous here, but that could be because of the map.
This sort of thing does show why I think melee should be encouraged better and in a clean manner. I stand by how I feel that Sprite should have 3 ATK (instead of 2) which still won't even sink any boats in 3 hits, and I think all 3 factions' Transports should each cost 10G less to at least speed up naval combat, in addition to improving their viability via Combo Point support and make it harder for Sprite spam to suffocate them. Don't get me wrong: there is still some interesting gameplay in the navy combat, but I definitely can't help but notice where it could stand improvement.
Oh, and also, I'd be for an added mechanic in surplus Mana converting into EXP to reduce reliance on CO Powers for progression and make the stronger ones less of a no-brainer.