The Art of Battle ‐ Skills and Combat

Fire Emblem wouldn’t be Fire Emblem without the Battle Phase. In recent games, Skills are a major factor in how battles play out - and Fire Emblem Engage is no exception.

While one might assume that Skills only relate to trigger type abilities or passives, in Engage they are used in various other situations, including setting parameters for Engage Attacks and map weapons, and defining properties for weapons that use atypical calculations, to name a few.

Understanding how parameters defined in skill.xml relate to the flow of battle is crucial for effective and rewarding skill creation - consider it a Proficiency that requires leveling up in (yes, I know this concept is from Three Houses, work with me here…)

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The Broad Strokes of Battle

One can arguably distill the Battle phase of a turn into three distinct sections:

• Pre-battle, which considers the time from the battle preview window up until before the first attack action occurs in battle proper;
• In-battle, where units in (generally) opposite armies engage in combat; and
• Post-battle, from the time the experience meter appears to just before a unit concludes their turn (unless under the effect of Canter or a similar post-attack skill effect).

These correlate roughly to the Timing values of:

• Pre-battle: Timing 2 through 5
• In-battle: Timing 6 through 15
• Post-battle: Timing 16 through 18

Further detail into these timings will be highlighted in the Skills page.

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Order, Action and Attack

What are these strange terms referring to? Perhaps framing them in more familiar Fire Emblem terminology will help:

• Order (手番) - a ‘round’ of combat. It’s better to think of a ‘round’ in the context of follow-up attacks as dictated by the speed check or skill effects - in this case, a unit that can perform a follow-up has two ‘rounds’ of combat for the battle.
• Action (行動) - this term is rather nebulous, but best interpreted in the framing of brave attacks or ‘unit attacks twice’ if you come from Heroes - in this instance, the number of ‘actions’ is two for a brave attack.
• Attack (攻撃) - the most basic unit of combat, a single move performed with a weapon by a unit, with the aim of affecting their target (usually an enemy). You will see a number of skills in skill.xml where the ‘attack’ number exceeds one, and these are almost always Engage Attacks (especially those that require multiple weapons for calculating damage) or situations involving Chain Attack modifiers.

Although not present in the base game, it is possible to have both Action and Attack count to be greater than one; below is an example:

A rather sprightly unit has an Action count of 2 and an Attack count of 3. Due to the meddling of a Divine Dragon worshipping skill coder, their damage dealt changes for the first and second Action count - let’s say 3 damage for the first, and 5 damage for the second. They will attack the enemy, initially three times for 3 damage each successful hit, and then another three times for 5 damage each successful hit, all before the enemy can counterattack.

In essence, each Order has a number of Actions, of which each contains a number of Attacks; though effectively for all cases in the base game, at least one of the Action and Attack count is one - to prevent combat calculations from turning into a typical day in Fire Emblem Heroes. (We are not talking about Potent Follow-Ups here, shoo!)

Tip

The Order count determines follow-ups.

The Action count determines if an attack is brave.

The Attack count is typically one, except for various Engage Attacks and Chain Attack modifiers.

There are various kanji parameters that relate to Order, Action and Attack, which can be used in your skill Conditions and ActNames:

• 手番回数 - the number of Orders
• 行動回数 - the number of Actions
• 攻撃回数 - the number of Attacks

For the following, these are used exclusively as conditions. A value of 0 refers to the first of each, and increases up to (n - 1) where n equals the total number:

• 総手番回数 - the Order position
• 総行動回数 - the Action position
• 総攻撃回数 - the Attack position

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We’ll explore some Flags that affect Order the next time someone wakes the Divine One and coerces them to talk to Emblem Lyn and Emblem Leif. Wait, is that Emblem Marth rushing in with Divine Sp-