I do appreciate FE9's abundance of gold for effectively eliminating the FOMO that causes hoarding of resources. I have never forged as many maximum might/hit/crit weapons as I have in FE9 because it gives you so much money to work with.

When I was a kid playing PoR, I remember having low money at some points. And this showed me why - I forged at least 2 tomes. I remember giving Ilyana a thunder tome named PIKAPIKA!! at the very least lol

you forgot about the real life gold management of heros

One interesting thing to note about fates’s gold system is the interesting way gold is handled in rev. More specifically, the lack of it. In rev, there is a complete lack of gold from chapter 10 to chapter 19. The player needs to find their own sources of income via selling dropped items/ doing percy paralogue. Or saving gold from the initial amount you get. While this isn’t an objectively good or bad thing (it’s debatable if it is even intentional given the “balance” of the rest of rev) it is something that does have an interesting effect on the game.

I made an audible yelp of surprise when I found out you can do the arena more than once a day. I guess my playthroughs were more balanced because I thought that arena was a once-a-day type of activity.

“You’d have to try to run out of gold on purpose” Me who forged 3 different light tomes, one of which had +9 crit:

Quick correction: The standard fates weapons tend to be bronze/brass weapons, not iron weapons, as they provide more crit avoid and more hit for the same price.

Hey shoutout to THICC Moulder for making me spit out my drink during the patron shoutouts

Loved your thoughts on FE12, the economy is amazingly well designed with a ton of agency. And large bullion is rare enough that the thief staff adds even more interesting choices than usual, whether to loot that flexible 10k or a rare treasure.

This couple of videos is some of the most solid analysis of the series I’ve ever seen. Great work

Three Houses also has an integer overflow bug with the fountain in Abyss that leaves you with infinite money once past a renown threshold. Granted, that threshold probably won't be hit till new game+, but it is hilarious nonetheless.

I have some issues with your assessment of Three Houses. The monastery does have problems, but this isn't it. Just farm tournaments for gold because it gives you professor points as well? You have to fit in dining time with students (Which still provides a healthy 66% of prof XP you get from Tournaments) and Faculty Training for Byleth (who doesn't get skill points for free like everyone else). Without dining time, you lose out morale and recruiting students out of house, the latter of which is useful even for characters you don't intend to use, thanks to their paralogue reward. Yes, you can do tournaments and then buy gifts with the money instead of dining, but it's never more efficient to do that until pretty late in the game, so you're trading money for professor XP. And of course, there's cooking, where you can provide an army wide buff to a stat once per week, which also takes up an AP. This creates a pretty interesting balance early on. How do you manage to train Byleth, gather valuable support points, get money, and raise your professor rank? You have very few AP, and you need to do all of these things, especially if you want Byleth training a skill he can't get in combat by himself, by which I mean Flying. Heck, Byleth also wants D Bows ASAP for that Sweet, Sweet Curved Shot and Mini-Bow. Not to mention Archer class later down the line. Later on, yes, you do do almost nothing but tournaments. But that's AFTER you've maxed out your professor rank, because it's only at that point that you have no more need for more than a cursory amount of dining or faculty training. But even then, I still think gold is well handled. Yes, you get A LOT of gold. But don't forget what you spend it on. Smashing with a Killer Axe costs 5/25 of a Killer Axe+ durability. It costs a little less than 2000 gold to repair, and you can quite reasonably need to repair it EVERY mission for certain builds. Swift Strikes is better, using only 4/35 uses of a Silver Lance. And don't forget the Relic Weapons, which only have 20 durability, and cost 3,000 gold to repair (the Umbral Steel isn't TOO hard to obtain). Add in that you are still gardening (and you can spend up to 3,500k gold per week depending on what you're growing), and costs in Part 2 are still pretty serious, at least on Maddening where you need to keep yourself supplied with forged Killer, Silver and Relic weapons. I'm honestly starting to wonder what you left out in your descriptions of earlier games now. "Farm Prof XP for infinite gold" is such a shallow take on what starts off as a fairly complicated system with lots of choices to make. You did say you spend your spare points there, and I agree, it's what you do when you when you've done everything else you wanted to do. And I won't argue that the obligation to spend lots of time there (because yes, I can totally make use of all the money I earn there) is tedious and a serious drag on the pace of the late game. But to leave off how well the early games goes, with Battalion upgrades, getting new weapons, and using forges to repair a weapon to save money, and buying gifts to rush support points for recruits... and acting like all that is negated by "Just train, bro" is pretty crummy. Especially since the Prof XP grind from monastary activities is often over-rated. You get so much just from Gardening (again, something you spend lots of money on) and the monthly question, and the dining you'll want to do for support points and morale, that optimizing it is usually not worth the effort unless you're really close to a goal. Even the famous first Fistfuls of Fish isn't a huge boon, since you can't buy fishing supplies before that, so you only get so much out of it. I'll trash the Part 2 Monastery as much as anyone. It's poorly designed. And while I think the Part 1 Monastery has a lot of interesting choices to make, it does still involve a lot of tedium. But unless you're running a team with cost efficient combat arts and playstyles (Mages and Dodgetanks are very cost efficient), you can find use for money throughout most of the game. At least until Part 2.

I kind of enjoy having an abundance of gold so we can find those secret shops or just buy excess weapons to replace the broken ones or even forge a decent weapon because they give you the option.

Thanks for putting the link to the first part in the description. Just found your channel because of the PVP FE7 playlist and now enjoying the Myrm Emblem streams! :) Also I think fishing is a faster way to earn Profesor level but you should fish during certain events (plenty of Fish) and wait until you can actually buy baits. Otherwise between buying Battalions, gifts/tea (that I never used) and forging weapons I was never swimming in cash in 3 Houses...it´s after the time skip that It kinda overflows with the optional battles (specially in Normal since they don´t cost activity points). At that point I just did tourneys for the first rewards, then spent activity points dining for supports. The tournaments never felt so broken even if they were the extremely optimal choice (they give money AND professor exp), but then again I usually don´t try to break the game I´m playing but totally see how others would. ^^

As an explanation of why tomes are so expensive to forge in FE9, it's because forge cost is based on the relative change in stats, in part. Going from 10 to 15 might with a steel weapon is a 50% increase, going from 2 to 7 is a 250% increase, and squaring that becomes a big amount. 0.5^2 is only 0.25x for the 10 might weapon*, but 2.5^2 is 6.25x, considerably more for the 2 might weapon *Not that this is exactly what the forge will cost, but that number is a significant factor in the cost calculation. The exact formula for might increases (decreases is a little different) is roughly: Base cost * (5F + 2.5F^2), where F = increase in might as a fraction, i.e. (might increase) / (base might) For example the 10 to 15 might example, this gives base * (5*5/10 + 2.5*(5/10)^2), so about 3.1 x the base cost. For the 2 to 7 might example this gives base * (5*(5/2) + 2.5*(5/2)^2), about 28.1x base cost.

Three houses gives so much money, in a hard mode run where i didnt use the monestary it took me until literally the last month to run out of gold but had to go out because i really needed gold to replace weapons and buy more smithing stones for forging

i hope one day i can find someone who loves me like mekkah loves the last promise

3:12 It gets deeper than that. Shop & forging availability is difficulty specific with Hard being the most restrictive and Maniac the least restrictive.

excellent work on this one athena!

This is such an informative and exciting video. Thank you so much=)

A little bit added info for Fates part. You see Iron +2 will cost you 4000 gold while steel weapon cost you 2000. Interesting thing about it is that Steel weapon is stronger than Iron +2 however it does have drawback of making your unit slower. So the game have this risk and rewards of Steel is cheaper and stronger but it prevent you from doubling. While iron is weaker but you can double with it.

Don't forget the economy breaking extra money DLCs that are (were?) available for all three of the 3DS games. Out of money? Pay real world money for a map that gives you 50,000 gold for playing it just once.

I like to think that the reason of why the dawn brigade has less gold and resources than the greil mercenaries its because they come from Daein wich its a country in recontruccion. I like that gold complements the history and the message of the game, or maybe the developers just hated the dawn brigade i dunno

I was unaware how practical the tournament was until now. This will make TH interesting when I pick it up again.

I thought this was a re-upload but happy to see more *M O N E Y*

I still need to finish The Last Promise. (Funny thing happened when I typed that, KZfaq wanted to auto type The Last Promised Neverland, like some portmanteau of The Promised Neverland and The Last Promise)

THE SEQUEL WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

The main problem with gold is that for it to be engaging on next playthroughs it should be scarce but in order for gold to be engaging in first playthroughs it has to be forgiving. The way I think is best to fix it is by making Shops have a full catalogue of everything they *will eventually* have so you can know the prices and abilities of weapons before you can buy them allowing you to better plan for the future and properly gauge player expectations. Then, each weapon or group of weapons can have strong associations with the different regions of the game so players who pay attention to where the party is headed know both what they are up against and what new goodies they can obtain.

Fantastic video, gold management in fe games is something i enjoy but wish required actual thought into it for most games

chroms and lucinas falchions are the greatest's money saving option as they are infinite use

Definitely worth the wait

I really like Awakening's economy actually, it's way more interesting than it's usually given credit Like a lot of things in Awakening Skirmishes are mostly just a bad idea on Lunatic+ Reeking Boxes are expensive, you won't get any meaningful exp from the Skirmish, you'll barely make your money back unless you have a Despoil spamming option Also you'll kinda just die? Units strong enough to handle the penultimate chapter can just get slaughtered by skirmish enemies if you're not immensely careful So in practice you only have the limited gold the game gives you, and you have a lot of things to spend it on Forged Weapons are bordeline necessarily to muscle through some of the bulkier lategame enemies, especially on units who don't have the luxury of access to weapon types that can ignore Pavise+/Aegis+ (i.e. a Grandmaster can switch between a Tome/Sword to ignore Pavise or Aegis, but a Great Knight has no option to bypass Pavise) forged effective weapons and brave or killer weapons get so expensive and you have no constant income that it's actually really tight management Really the only major issue I see with it is how cheap Nosferatu is relative to it's preformance Aside from the Random Annas Annas being random is pretty silly and that's totally a reasonable critique

I find what you said about radiance highly ironic. Because that is the only fire I love game when I've experienced running out of money.

Ha! I beat FE12 on Lunatic on my first playthrough! And it only took me seventy billion resets to do it!

Jokes about managing real money aside, money management is also present in Heroes. The main thing is that, while you can turn *most* units viable as long as you're setting up a squad that suits them, you obtain the resources to upgrade them really slowly (by FE standards. The only mobile game I've played that lets you build your units faster is Megaman X DiVE). This means you need to consider if the units you're upgrading are a good investment, especially because certain upgrades cost other units.

Dang I get to be a Dancer! I didn't think I was THAT good at Fire Emblem but I'll take it =P

This man's gonna plug The Last Promise that hard and then not link it in the description? Insane

I need to play Conquest now!!

Nice analysis, always happy to see praise for FE12 If you haven't played FE12 please go play it, the difficulty is amazing and the economy is a big part of why

I once embarked upon a run of 3H with a friend where we weren't allowed to spend any money at all. Not only is this extremely doable, but it makes for an engaging challenge as you realize you have limited class changing seals and battalion durability. It also eliminates the need to grind tourneys for money.

At 20:25, it’s shown that Reeking Boxes cost 500 per, which is interesting. My copy had them priced at 4800 and thus I never really bought them; was this some sort of patch in an attempt to balance the game?

Nice and all, but I hope you do this type of analysis after engage comes out.

What about engage? Are you gonna make a mini one for it

As someone that pretty much did nothing but forge weapons (Magic and weapons) in FE 9 I was constantly at the "What money point?" Crit and wt were pricey to alter if memory serves. And most of the time I was tweaking those the most to ensure doubles and better crit rates. I can also say forged weapon only playthroughs can be interesting if you intentionally are tweaking stats.

Nice editors, still remember the quality 144p videos.

From a more generic game design perspective there's a fundamental question to be asked here. What's the point of gold in the first place? Of course each game has a different relationship with gold and resource management in general, but I'm interested in potential here. For a thought experiment, how could the fire emblem devs implement gold in a way that's as fun as possible for as many kinds of players as possible? Non-gameplay factors aside, is it even possible for one game's mechanics to please the entire playerbase? That's a very tricky question that I really don't have an answer for. There's a saying that goes something like 'Try to please everyone and you'll end up pleasing no one.' ...But I feel like that doesn't _have_ to apply to games since with smart enough design they can adapt to player preferences, at least to some extent. Okay I'm starting to ramble now I'll stop

wonder when we gotta see a gold card

I'm supremely disappointed by the lack of the fe6 money man in the intro.

Man, I've just realized I've been playing 3 houses wrong.

Awakening's main thing is "can you buy Rotten Boxes in harder modes?"

Damn, I thought the guy in the thumbnail is Sol Badguy

I find it funny when people insist that awakening isn't balanced ( which is true mind you ) because they indirectly imply that other FE games aren't as unbalanced and/or don't have massive broken elements in them as much as FE13

3 Houses is weird. At least for me, It feels like from mid to end of game, I have more money than I need (this is on Hard mode, by the way). Once I get to the end of the game, I convert my gold into renown, so I can use it during my new game+. This way, I least getting all that money has some use.

If you think the Training Grounds breaks the 3H economy, try looking into Fistfuls of Fish. If you buy all the bait you can at every opportunity and save it all for Fistfuls of Fish, you will end up with more gold than you know what to do with just by selling the money-focused fish, let alone all the excess stuff you won't need for cooking. You will also be bored to tears. But hey, you can spend your activity points on something other than the Training Grounds!

fe4 still sweeps

Three Houses training grounds tournaments are the true abusable grinding of the series though not in pure levels (with other monastery stuff hitting into proper abusable mechanics in other factors with said extra money once you've done anything you might use your first few activity points on), not being a considerable amount of IRL time that Skirmishes are that make them investments you can and should choose to use as much as you personally want for challenge and time you have to use, is related to limited use mechanic anyway that it gives you more uses of faster than anything else that more actively pushes you towards it while giving you more resources for other things (being a proper unbalanced choice like on an easy chapter having you pick between a good for that chapter only weapon and good for entire rest of the game weapon just not that already easy one) and has a high reward given at least once that further makes not doing it even just the once not purely just saving time but actively hurting yourself for little time save that you will likely lose from not getting it. The other farming for resources methods of other games are almost entirely a player issue (unless the game is designed in a way that expects a certain amount of it that makes skipping doing it at all making you fall considerably behind) that complaining about them being too useful too much as a mechanic (and not certain quicker abusable methods) is cringe or showing you have too much time, its a much more proper actual issue with balance in regards to money for low investment...that's not a glitch.

Fates has another change. The arena lets you gamble on your match (with a randomly selected character), but instead of betting gold you bet those resource items you handwaved, and it's a "double or nothing" system where you can have that character keep going. For anyone who didn't play Fates, those gems are HORRIBLE. Your castle gets one gem mine randomly selected when you start a game, and you get one of that gem from that mine after several hours irl time. Each gem is associated with one weapon type, so you better hope you got something you like because the tutorials last FOREVER. There's other ways to get them, but one is streetpassing to someone else's castle, another could randomly be any other item if you even get an item, and the third is gambling on the arena.

I'm early but I honestly forgot about the last video haha

Awakening's loose balance system is one of the main reasons I couldn't get into it the same way I did with Three Houses. Even on Hard mode the game felt designed to either be cheesed with absurd DLC or by abusing daily/random events.

what about feh

You know, it's possible that Awakening doesn't get credit for Tonics because Awakening didn't introduce Tonics - New Mystery did.

Ike’s army just uses money better than Micaiah’s because men be shopping.

First

All this analysis made me remember how much i hated 3 houses and fates, how embarrassing that games from the 90s have better and more cohesive design.