If you're having trouble, one thing I recommend is using less units. The first few playthroughs I did, I tried to keep everyone fairly balanced level wise, and that made it harder. If you instead focus on eight to ten characters and ignore the rest, you'll end up with a good team that won't have too much too worry about.

Another piece of advice to make things more manageable is to use Seth, he is far and away the best character in the game.

Another mistake I made was ignoring the weapon triangle in my first two playthroughs, I thought 15 hit rate, and 1 damage, no big deal.
It really is a big deal, the altered damage alone makes a regular difference, but the big thing is the 15 hit rate is the real big one.
If you try to keep the upper hand, you'll very rarely miss attacks, and you'll dodge significantly more.

NEVER!!!

No seriously, I like having balanced teams and stats in RPGs too much to ever do anything else.

Weel then it looks like the only way to not struggle through the game is to spend extensive hours in the Tower of Valni, at least that gives you plenty of time to practice safely supporting characters as you fight!

I know you're supposed to get a guiding ring after you beat the level where you recruit Joshua, but I didn't seem to get it. Does it matter if you skip the conversation where you would get it by pressing the B button?

Ok so in a level (ch. 12) I was doing a good job of simultaneously (slowly) moving the units while keeping them next to each other (basically this meant letting Kyle and 1 or 2 others fight everyone and they follow behind, and eventually the reverse when more units suddenly appeared. But then I realized the game was refusing to allow anymore support upgrades even if I sat there for like 20 or 30 turns. I don't care if there is an explanation of why that happened, that's also definitively a dumb idea. Any reason why that happened doesn't change it from being another dumb decision made to annoy me. I was starting to really get into the game again too. I can at least kinda see other reasons for other problems I have for the game but I can't see a single reason that should happen. Maybe if it prevented getting 2 support levels for the same 2 characters in 1 battle I could understand that...

Other than modern Final Fantasy, I can't think of a game that does so much to prevent me from enjoying an otherwise good game.

The thing that makes this game stand out from other strategy games like Advance Wars is the fact that you don't create random units. Each unit has a personality and you get attached to them and can't have them die.

Yes I can, because none of the characters have any reaction to their death. If no one else cares, why should I?

It's actually a great idea, but this is a video game, so unless you want to spend a lot of time on tons of extra dialogue options and stuff like that, it doesn't work anywhere near as well as it should as a story. I don't agree with these people, but I know a lot of people whose opinion of a story can change dramatically depending on the ending, and in a similar way, having these characters die in such a pathetic, anti-climatic way without any acknowledgement from anyone really does a lot to take away from their entire characterization. It really seems like most of my frustrations are with things that could have been brilliant but weren't given the time to make it fully work, at least for me.

@Kkslider
It is true that units don't care if other units die and there is no reaction whatsoever, but I still think having each unit with a personality is still better than other strategy games where you make thousands of expendable units. Imo but Fire Emblem just is more immersive for me and character personalities aside, it is just way too addicting leveling all the units up for me.

Yes it's true. No other character reacts to someone's death. Some even still show up in cutscenes if they were one of the main characters. I still hate letting anyone die though.

I think that permadeath is one of the best things with this series. It makes you consider your every move and really pay for your mistakes. I wish there where more games like this with permadeath.

Instead of complaining about it all the time people should just except that this series is not for them and play other games in the genre. There are to many games now a days that holds your hand throu the entire experience without really giving you a consequence to your actions.

Thank god for Roguelikes;)

Correct

Good to know, but I never tried that so that doesn't actually answer anything.

You can't gain more than one support level between the same two characters in one battle.

Yes, but does it limit how much a single character can get with different characters? Because I tried to get a basic support level for one character with 3+ different characters and it refused to do more than 2...except for that time it refused to do more than 3.

As far as I know, you would be able to support one completely unsupported character with 5 different characters in one battle.
A character can only have 5 supports though, B supports counting as 2, and A supports as 3.
Characters only have a small group of characters that they can support with as well.

Super Trainee Amelia.
That is all.

@Digiki
Seth is very far from being the best character in the game. However he is very useful for beginner players. Just gotta know that he gets heavily outclassed pretty quickly as you go along, even though he's still usable later on.
I've played around 15-20 playthroughs of just this one game already (I don't want to count the amount of times that I've played some of the others), this is just from my experience.

Super Trainee Amelia is a poor choice. Not only are are both of her cavalier promotions significantly better, upon promotion through the trainee ranks her constitution does not increase making her significantly slower as all of the weapons she can use have significant speed penalties.
At first promotion Trainee has the benefits of +1 HP, +1 Str, +2 Def. Cavalier has +1 Skl, +1 Spd, +1 Res, and +3 Con, (which in effect gives her an advantage of +4 Spd most of the time). Cavalier Amelia is already better, and that's before her two bigger benefits of +2 move and being able to use swords.
Super Trainees are cool novelties, but are impractical.

The only thing that prevents Seth from being the uncontested best character is favouritism of other characters, as far as efficiency is concerned, no character holds a candle to him. Yes if you play slowly and grind everyone, statistically he will not be the best although killing everything in one round while being able to move 8 spaces per turn is something makes statistical advantages irrelevant since you can't really do better than one rounding everything.

Who pray tell would you say outclasses him?

Not really, I am just pointing out how either because of not putting enough effort or having enough time they couldn't make brilliant editions to the genre feel genuinely complete or worthwhile. Like imagine if your favorite story ended with characters dying and other characters not acknowledging that fact. That'd be pretty unbearably terrible.

also about the game not being for them, I guess being my 2nd most played game on 3DS = "not for me". Ok.

You are absolutely right about the problem with characters not acknowledging that others have died, that is bad game design.
My point of criticism was not directed at you personal, but rather at everyone who says that this series is bad because of perma-death.

I feel its grate that you have played the game alot, the more who acknowledge this series the better for everyone who likes it;)

Sorry if It read like I was pointing my finger at you.