u/Legitimate__Username

#Average stats calculator

#Stats database and additional features

Features included:

• Average stats calculation for any class paths, detecting only legal routes

• Calculate kid bases from parents set to any desired level of investment, as well as further average stats from there

• Easily toggleable manakete and beast transformations

• Stat growths and caps display/calculation for any combination of parents, including modded options such as UGA pairings and class inheritance without gender lock

• EXP and internal level calculators to help easily route the expected number of levelups throughout maps.

• Support for the fixed growth mod, including displays for what all your next levelups will be

• Separate child base stats calculator compatible with any possible parent stats

• True hit and proc chance calculators for any skill combination

• Separate support for modded versions like Thabes Overwritten's game data with its own changes and exclusive characters/classes, as well as average stats for the Awakening Enhancement Hack's rebalance changes

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Okay so I was a little bit dissatisfied with the online resources available for this game. This started out as me just wanting growths and caps calculators that supported UGA pairs. Beyond that, I just kept on thinking of features that I thought would be useful to have open while playing the game, and this was the full scope of what the project evolved into. The only other average stats calculator out there I know of is a discord bot (I vastly prefer using websites) and none of them out there have gen 2 compatibility, so I made it so that one actually exists now. I think people have said over the years that all of these systems would be too difficult or complicated to implement? Idk why lol.

I keep this page open regularly while playing the game, since the true hit, procs, and fixed stat growth calculators are extremely useful to have on hand and I hope this can be similarly useful to someone out there.

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###Why did I make this?

I am obsessed with Awakening Lunatic, the adoration I have for this mode is unreal. (If Lunatic seems too daunting for you a lot of my fundamental design praise applies to Hard mode too, I just really adore what the extra challenge does for the experience.) I think that it's built up a reputation over the years that kinda betrays the true depth and value of everything it can offer. Most of the common knowledge seems to cover only a fraction of the game's depth, and I think the metagame is incredibly fun and interesting to optimize when you really learn it. I wanted to make a resource that would help improve its accessibility and de-mystify some of the math and mechanics behind it. Like wow, who knows how Lucina's stat benchmarks will turn out in a typical playthrough, isn't all that math just too complicated to analyze? Nope, now YOU can find everything you need to about any of these units, easier than ever!

This is going to be a long post, I have a lot of thoughts and musings about the meta that I wanted to share as a result of working on this calculator project. I have a lot to say about the sheer level of untapped potential that gets overlooked in Awakening's meta. I seriously hope that at least one person finds this at all interesting to read, or if I could even be so lucky as to inspire someone to try the game out.

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###I also made a minimal-rebalance QoL hack that adds a mode between Hard and Lunatic, removes ambush spawns, and slightly nerfs a couple of the game's most broken options.

You can read about the full list of changes here. If you don't like Awakening because the difficulty scaling is too wonky or it has too many unfair, cheesy, or bullshit mechanics, I hope that this could be an experience that would interest you. I aimed to preserve the core appeal of its gameplay identity as faithfully as possible while fixing the issues with the maps and class playstyles by putting my hand on the scale as minimally as possible. All of the changes are carefully targeted and tested to have an explicit positive yet overall still faithful effect on the broader gameplay experience. Also fully UGA compatible!

I will however, for the most part, be using this post to talk about what I love about the vanilla game and why I think its meta is a lot more interesting than it tends to get credit for. You can read that post if you're curious about the issues that I do have with the balance and how I wanted to go about cleaning them up myself.

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###Awakening's gameplay is actually really, really cool

Even though its gameplay doesn't exactly have the strongest reputation, I really do believe that the full experience contains a lot of exceptionally strong, unique, and fun design, that no other game in the series can really replicate the exact strengths of. The earlygame is infamous for good reason, the challenge it provides is absolutely brutal. And I adore it for this. It's that level of earned notoriety that makes it so fun and satisfying to overcome, when you manage to beat these maps you feel like a genius and it's an incredible feeling. And despite its reputation, I do think that its difficulty is broadly overstated, it's entirely surmountable and I feel confident saying this because the diversity of solutions available is actually quite wide. You don't need to water trick Robin to cheese it. You don't need to rely on Frederick soloing the whole thing, though don't be afraid to use him liberally of course. The enemies are massively threatening and you need a whole squad to jump them at once just to take down one, but you are given the tools to do this and the strengths to leverage across your units are actually quite diverse. Each one has a different set of matchup advantages or utility to leverage in this equation. There's quite a wide array of unit playstyles you can center your plan around, and choices for investment as you attempt to overcome the map.

I don't think that heavily feeding Frederick (or Robin) necessarily locks you out of training other units or having to juggernaut these guys to win. Frederick and +Spd Robin are fantastic enablers of training others by just avoiding enemy doubles, dealing nonlethal chip damage into the squads of enemies they tank, and then letting allies clean them up. Just keep an eye on your damage thresholds, equip the right weapons and pairups for the situation, and you should be able to build up a solid roster after the first few maps with pretty solid consistency. I do appreciate that the earlygame difficulty lets up after a few maps though, because after the satisfaction of clearing this challenge the other units really start to shine. The chapter ~6-11ish phase is much easier as your support ranks build up and units get pretty consistent dual strike damage and stat boosts, and there's something cathartic about being able to more comfortably power through the enemies that only just recently put you through such misery, while the overall challenge still remains comfortably engaging compared to Hard mode. The map design in the Gangrel arc is just genuinely extremely fun and really does a great job of facilitating engaging gameplay across some very well-paced layouts.

It's in the midgame though where the truly unique fun and diversity of Awakening's gameplay really starts to shine. I love the earlygame and any FE title where your units have to gang up David vs. Goliath style against absurd enemy quality, but Awakening's real unique mechanics lies in the depth of its unit building sandbox. The amount of crazy and interesting options you have, not just for routing skill and reclass paths for different playstyles on your main cast, but also having a roster of offspring that can inherit and build even further from those paths to enable new unique builds, is so much fun to experiment with and optimize. The pool of viable options and diversity of playstyles enabled by them are too immense for me to get into, but they really do give the game so much character and a huge pool of depth to explore.

Around late-Valm the game does pick up again in difficulty and really rewards you for engaging in thoughtful and synergistic builds, though the meta is still diverse and forgiving enough that you can probably still just take favorite ships and find some unique strengths to leverage in them. While the maps have a bit of a reputation for just being rout squares, they do tend to at worst at least be reasonably satisfying to throw all of your favorite projects into, and even among these there are a ton of fun and diverse paralogue maps that help keep up diverse pacing for the game among these. The more paralogues you unlock, the more fun the experience will be. You get some solid defense maps with Owain, Brady, Gerome, and Tiki, or a unique escort mission with Severa, among many other weird and fun mechanics to engage with.

I actually think that the full experience is exceptionally well-paced. It moves through a lot of different gameplay styles throughout the whole game, but each one has something engaging to offer, whether that be harsh challenges or new fun high-payoff projects to build, there's a pretty solid throughline to engage with. You're always either trying to power through a really difficult map, planning an investment route for a longterm payoff, or reaping the rewards of that all coming together, and there's really nothing else in the series that plays quite like it.

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###Unofficial Gay Awakening is awesome

I really like this mod and making a resource that supports compatibility with it was really important to me. It's not exactly a TOTALLY balanced experience, there are a few really broken options in there, but even then it's still an INCREDIBLY fun meta to play around in and a lot of these options feel like they should've just been in the base game. De-restricting Chrom supports gives you a way more diverse set of different Lucina playstyles to work with, with Miriel and Tharja granting strong magical builds, or Cordelia being a truly insanely powerful spectacle to witness. The option to take his support synergy with Frederick, Vaike, or Gaius all the way to marriage allows for some really unique Lucina builds too. Sumia similarly gets a ton of fun new playstyle diversity with the option to marry Vaike, Stahl, Gregor, or many other strong options that really should've just been in the base game. And this isn't even getting into the yuri pairs that let you unlock two kids per parent combination. Lissa/Tharja and Sully/Miriel are some of my favorites there. It's a little overpowered, but there's still some pretty awesome new build options you can get, and being able to unlock and play more of the game's maps and content without needing to grind honestly makes the pace of the experience a lot more fun. If you've got some crazy ships you wanted to try out, I highly recommend experimenting with the mod, there's SO many fun options to uncover there.

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###The metagame is still heavily underdeveloped with tons of untapped potential for discovery

There's so much deep, complex, and incredibly cool stuff to unpack in this game, because of that gen 2 inheritance system and the sheer levels of optimizations and combinations there are to discover there.

I love Awakening's take on gen 2 mechanics so much because of how mechanically interesting their scaling potential is and the really cool and kind of unhinged effects that it has on the game pace. Whereas Genealogy grants you a replacement army after a story timeskip, and Fates gives you new units with seals designed to catch them up and keep them relatively balanced to the scale of the rest of your army (very fitting for a second draft on the mechanic), this sort of took away a lot of the character of Awakening's original gameplay, where you get to engage with the fun of training up new units through a satisfying catchup and watching the numbers just go brrr. The balance behind Awakening isn't actually any worse, just different in its own uniquely fun way.

Gen 2 is so much fun to play with because their ability to access so much stronger and more diverse skill combinations through the inheritance system opens up so many more powerful and unique playstyle options that their parents could often only really dream of. A lot of the gen 1 cast can definitely beat the game if you funnel enough overfed EXP into them in order to keep them above the enemy stat curve, and put them into Sorcerer or Hero so that they can slowly walk forward while being effectively unkillable until you eventually win. But gen 2 can pull off SO much crazier stuff than that, and it's such a blast to find optimizations for. The ability to duplicate Galeforce from a Pegasus Knight mom to another kid, if not potentially two, lets you unlock viable player-phase strategies for an army roster at an extremely reasonable cost of investment. If you pass this skill down to kids who can access Sorcerer or Hero, you can create INCREDIBLY aggressive sustain tanks who can make fast-paced ruthless forward-positioning plays, which is a blast to pilot. Or you can do something like get Armsthrift, Vengeance, and Vantage onto a mage to sweep the lategame with Valflame, hitting damage and consistency thresholds beyond what a typical tank would need Dual Strike luck for. You can stack procs and watch things blow up, or get a Swordmaster who can actually spam an unbreakable Amatsu, or route for multiple rallies if you want even stronger support builds, it's a whole world of possibilities out there. The game's actually incredibly diverse and fun when you route through these kinds of strategies, it gives you something really engaging to work towards rather than just letting a handful of generic tanks sleepwalk through the midgame, and you'll be rewarded with all kinds of cool and unique playstyles to actually have fun with.

These are far more than just for-fun flex builds that let you have something to do if you really want to feed your favorite characters through some suboptimal favoritism strategies. I think they have a lot of genuine and valuable purpose for both generalist roster strength and efficiency strats. Sure, they start behind their parents in terms of base stats, but the overtake they perform is extremely fast and practical, and the benefits of putting resources into them manifest themselves into a ton of useful benefits for the kinds of plays you can make.

Take Lucina, who like every kid starts with an internal level of 10, and ideally wants play in Cavalier. A Second Seal reduces her internal level to 5, and if you put her into combat against the level 18 enemies of chapter 14, she gains 73 EXP per kill. Compare that to a parent unit like Chrom who we can ballpark estimate to level 5 promoted or so (actual levels will vary depending on investment plans but this is a reasonable lowball estimate), they will gain only 15 EXP from killing the same enemies. Lucina will gain approximately 5x the EXP of her parents for every kill she gets. This number is a bit of a highball, as this EXP gain will scale down gradually as she gains levels, but it only drops as low as 43 EXP by the time she hits level 9 Cavalier, still a 3x return, and this doesn't take into account the potential for her to kill any of the promoted enemies as even bigger EXP piñatas for her trouble, so it reasonably balances out. She's spending this unpromoted reclass time gaining approximately 4-5 levels for every 1 level her parent could've claimed. At this point, you can see that it only takes about 12 kills of investment to get the 9 levels needed catch a kid up to surpassing their parent. The opportunity cost of this is that those 12 kills could've earned the parent a measly 2 levels instead. It's easy and convenient now to check those parent catchup thresholds on the calculator now to confirm this if you'd like!

Seriously, apply this equation to literally any other Fire Emblem game. Say you have your best character, and two buttons to press. The first button will immediately give them 2 free levelups. The second button will give you a free duplicate of that character, who you can use ALONGSIDE the original, and that duplicate even has two of the strongest endgame-level skills you can pick to add to that duplicate just as a free bonus, and they probably even get faster EXP gain compared to the original too. Which button seems like the better deal? Honestly, it's not even that difficult to to actually press that second button and train these kids through these 12 kills of catchup EXP if you know what you're doing. Just hand them some D-rank effective weaponry or a forged Thunder tome. Chapters 14-16 and Morgan/Owain/Kjelle/Laurent paralogues are full of plenty of pretty weak enemies for them to farm. You can absolutely get them caught up and past their overtake even if you're playing under efficiency standards, they just scale that drastically high.

The benefits of doing this are extremely tangibly useful as well. It's the cleanest and easiest way of surpassing the lategame power spike of chapter 17, where enemies get a huge power boost and you usually need to juggernaut a really low number of carries in order to overcome it rather than having a viable larger army. Having all of these extra units to work with who are scaling above your normal gen 1 power level let you easily overcome these obstacles, have a greater number of units to work with for better efficiency, with this improved play speed having tangible benefits in letting you forward quickly to prevent your support units from getting sniped by the ruthless ambush spawns of the lategame maps. You'll have a far easier time clearing defensive side objectives, letting you far more easily get all of the powerful optional paralogue rewards in maps like Owain/Brady/Gerome, or even actually recruit Tiki since certainly nobody wants her to leave her to die among the Risen or anything. Playing without these characters as the primary combat carries can be extremely limiting on a run, but switching over to them as your main tanks while transitioning their parents into supportive roles really boosts the level of power, speed, and defense you're capable of bringing against the game's challenges.

Now this isn't to say that this level of expected power is universally true of every kid or that they're all combat top tiers. You only need a few of them built up as tank carries to win the game with idealized efficiency, which leaves many others on the table to either take some pretty powerful support roles thanks to the extra tools granted by skill inheritance, or some are just hurt enough by poor availability to indeed be pretty outright bad units. Morgan, their sibling, and a sorcerer Laurent or Owain can be fantastic high-scaling tanks, while Cynthia and Severa can be solid mobility enablers with practical access to inheriting Galeforce. Brady still has incredible support thanks to his immediately strong access to Rally stacking at base alongside staff utility. Kjelle, Cynthia, and Severa can also have very worthwhile use cases with support consolidation too alongside their potential combat benefits if built in either direction. But many of others are still flawed and some are correctly evaluated as just downright bad, the late joiners just get absolutely screwed over by availability limitations and training them to any reasonable catchup before the game actually ends is basically just impossible. Yarne is overall quite workable but held back by poor class and skill access, Noire has a decent floor with innate Sorcerer access but is hard to find unique practical use cases for, Inigo just will not function if he doesn't have Chrom as a parent to let him cheat the availability timer, and Gerome and Nah are pretty much downright irredeemable. But like at least half of these kids have EXTREMELY strong traits to leverage as primary win conditions and are extremely worth treating as such, and will very easily outperform their parents if given an extremely small amount of investment and resources to allow them to do so. And more importantly, the depth and diversity that their build potential with different parent and skill combinations presents leads to so much untapped potential for discovering new and powerful routes that may have never been fully considered before!

The cool thing about the calculator though, is that it's now accessible and practical to plan routes around these characters! You can check how much expected investment in their parents gives you what base stats to work with, figure out their combat thresholds into enemies and what their most practical training matchups will be, and how much they'll need to fight to catch up to the rest of your team with the average stats and EXP calculations! You don't need to just experiment on vibes anymore, you can plan around hard numbers with a much more close and accurate idea of what to expect out of their performance than was ever possible before. They're a ton of fun to play with and optimize, and now it's never been easier to figure out how to leverage the most value out of your favorite builds for your favorite characters and pairings.

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###Your favorite characters and pairings probably have untapped potential that nobody has bothered to lab and discover yet.

This game legitimately has way too many depth of options, combinations, and interactions to still be even anywhere close to reasonably resolved. There are a lot of tools and options that are known to be pretty good, sure, but even most other ideas at least have some unique niche and set of ideas they can able that make them worth leveraging, and maybe are even a a small push and new realization away from being able to contend with the best of the best.

I could probably gush for an even longer time about how overlooked some extremely powerful characters are and go into all kinds of details on the routing options that I've found for them that really push them to the top. Like I swear, Sumia's one of the best units in the game, and her pairing with Robin is so uniquely synergistic that I'm shocked at how nobody's really uncovered the sheer density at which it produces highly optimal win conditions. I've also never seen anyone talk about how strong Chrom's pairings with Olivia, Maribelle, and Sully can be when you use them as cheap automarriage support units so that you can save EXP that can go into supercharging his investment with a Second Seal reclass, freeing up EXP for building up other powerful units without sacrificing Chrom or Lucina's combat potential and preserving two strong Falchion users into Endgame. It gives you SO many incredible routing benefits, but the common knowledge basically just starts and stops at "marry him to a Galeforce f!Robin or Sumia and have him play a background role while his wife steals all the EXP", which is a certainly a strong strategy but the alternative routes with super-Chrom alongside other powerful teammate options are brimming with unrealized potential. There's plenty more I could go on about, there are so many roster combinations and investment paths worth trying out that get so easily overlooked across this game.

But at the end of the day, it's about having the ability and freedom to push your favorites through that thrill of discovery. The potential for your own personal story of exploration and beautifully satisfying realizations is one that is nowhere near out of reach for you in a game like this. Don't play Awakening the way that I do. Play it however you want to. Take your favorite characters and ships and playstyles, and find the strengths in them that nobody else has. Especially if you want to play your favorite UGA additions, there's so much cool shit to experiment with that certainly no one has really tried yet. I would love so much to see more people challenge this game's established status quo and help push the meta all the further it still has to grow. And even if you aren't up to that, I promise the game itself is still REALLY fun.

And I really wanted to focus this analysis on everything I love about vanilla Awakening and the legitimately cool things you can do in its notoriously unhinged environment, but if Nosferatu spam, the lack of a comfortable difficulty mode, or dealing with ambush spawns still sounds like an unappealing experience to you, I do still have that romhack available for showing off what the meta can look like without these frustrations hanging over it.

I hope my website, calculators, and optionally even my QoL rebalance hack make the game a little easier for people to approach. I swear it's worth your time to play it. If you have any questions about army building and roster investment advice and strong options or class builds to bring into an Awakening run, feel free to ask and I'd be happy to clarify anything you might need!