There's not enough women in the game. If you marry one of the first gen girls who aren't Reina, Flora, Scarlet, or Anna (since they can only S rank the MC), then one of the father units will be left without a romancable female. So if you're a Male MC and want all of the children, only romance the 4 I mentioned or any of the kid units. This applies to all 3 routes.
Uh ohthere go my chances of seeing everything in Conquest even with DLC support grinding, then. Then again, one way to cover for this (as I'm primarily interested in seeing all the maps) is to leave one of the characters that appear in multiple routes as my odd man out. I assume Silas and Jakob follow the avatar in both routes, no? And that the paralogues are the same for fathers that appear in multiple routes? I've hardly used either of them anyway, so it's no skin off my back to leave one as a bachelor.
Fates inspired me to go back to Awakening and finish the Paralogues I hadn't done and the Future Past DLCs. When I got to
paralogue and just saw a big ass open map with a shitload of units and same-turn-attacking reinforcements I just went "yup, that's Awakening". Compared to what I went through with Conquest it also felt pretty easy. And then when I got to the Radiant Hero paralogue and saw 50 overpowered units in another huge open map, every single turn taking up forever and no possible way to beat it besides grinding my characters and coming back later I was like "yeah, that is
definetely Awakening". I still love the game but jeez the leap in gameplay quality from it to Fates was much bigger than I initially gave it credit for. Still plan on doing Future Past but I hope it's at least a bit better than that.
I cleared Radiant Hero myself a few weeks ago as it was the last thing remaining on my original Awakening file from way back in 2013. I didn't need to grind for it, but I did need to burn through about seven Rescue staves to see my units through every turn, since you are swarmed from all sides. I had a whole back line, about a third of my party, just dedicated to picking up or positioning other units instead of fighting head-on. I haven't finished Future Past either, as I am definitely under-levelled for it, but the DLC locks down the one thing that can cheese you through just about any map in Awakening (Rescue) so it's quite methodical to play. It definitely has Awakening's problem with same-turn reinforcements, though, which is an ugly bit of trial-and-error difficulty that I'm glad is out the window in Fates.
Some of the early chapters in Conquest tested me just as much as Radiant Hero in that I was taking about half an hour per turn to make everything add up
just right, although I think the difficulty settles down a bit once you get comfortable with the Fates-specific mechanics and get a chance to cultivate a core party. But it's so nice to have the challenges come from complex interactions between class skills, weapon effects, and map elements rather just being beaten over the head with raw numbers. Fates doesn't screw you with RNG or surprise reinforcements or enemies with huge raw stats; it screws you with Counter and Lunge and stat-drop weapons. And I like it that way.
