Thinking about replaying PoR and wondering what your thoughts are on Fixed mode? Is it worth choosing over the regular mode?
I am sorry that it took so long to get to this I just now got the time to address it fully.
In my opinion, Fixed is not worth it. There are a few reasons for this, but really it comes down to one in particular, a habit carried over from XCOM. Before I go on, though, let me just say that Fixed forces every character to stay exactly on par with their average stats, and no character’s averages are really that bad in PoR, so if you want to play a run of the game with all your favorite characters who may or may not be underdogs and don’t want to worry about stat screwage, you absolutely want to play Fixed. If that appeals to you, completely disregard the rest of this ask. Reasons for my dislike under the cut.
All right, backstory: there’s a feature in XCOM: Enemy Unknown called Not Created Equal that randomizes character start stats, and there’s another one that randomizes growths. This sounds like hell, but it’s really not; your first few maps with an untrained team suck, but then as time goes on, it gets easier and you end up with a team of super soldiers. Here’s why:
Character stats are determined by a few random variables that fall within strict parameters. These parameters lead to certain trends (statistics nerding inbound), and one of those trends is that, after an infinite number of trials, the stat distributions end up as a normal distribution.
This thing (character stats don’t increment by infinitesimally low amounts so it’s not 100% accurate but it’s good enough for our purposes). So, 50% of characters end up below average, and 50% of characters end up below average, easy peasy. Bell curves have an interesting property, too -- if you combine two random variable systems that follow bell curves, the resultant system also has a bell curve. So characters with a certain base stat set and certain growths fall somewhere on a bell curve -- 50% above average, 50% below.
But selection bias kicks in eventually, so the actual stat range of an endgame team in XCOM is higher than the average. If you have high- and low-performing characters, and you decide to continue to use only the strongest, your team’s average is offset to the right -- that is, your team’s stat average is above the “true” average, because you chose to use only units that excelled. Your team is stronger because you selected and continued to use only the strongest members you had available to you.
This carries over to Fire Emblem. All of your characters end up above or below their averages. If you’re not overly attached to certain characters (as many of us are), you can drop characters below their normal (or below the team’s average) and instead focus on higher-performing ones. Fixed Mode eliminates this possibility, pulling all characters to the center. It doesn’t allow breeding for endgame like Random Mode.
The likelihood that all of your characters get sufficiently stat-screwed so as to make Fixed Mode endgame stats globally better than Random Mode endgame stats is so astronomically low that I can’t really advocate it as superior in any way from a strategic perspective.
Also Blossom is better for Sothe in Random Mode, so Random is better for transfer data for RD.
