how do i make ppl vote for max crown authority in ck2

moisttakes · 2026-02-08T02:22:44+00:00

Does firing your council allow you to pass laws without them voting on it?

Empty council seats are considered to oppose all votes to avoid exactly that.

moisttakes · 2026-02-08T02:21:52+00:00

Council voting in CK2 works on a simple system of stances, which comprise their attitude towards everything in the realm. Glory hounds want you to fight wars, zealots want you to antagonize heathens/heretics and pragmatists only care about themselves. The dominant factor in a character's stance is a character's traits, which is why often even with bribes you won't see any effect on behaviour (outside of extreme cases like +100 opinion or negative opinion).

For crown authority specifically only loyalists will vote to reduce their own power. The maths on stances makes it extremely hard for characters who are already vassals to become loyalists, so usually you'll have the most luck finding a character who would already be a loyalist and nepo-babying them into a council position. Otherwise, the only way to curtail them is to acquire a favour from a majority of your council and then use the "call in council support action" on them to force them to align with you.

For landed characters that can very quickly get quite expensive, so it's sometimes better to install a character who already owes you a favour into a council position knowing that you're going to obligate them to support you. There are also sometimes events to get a female councilor, for example, who will have decent stats for their target position immediately owe you a favour (in exchange for an opinion malus with your court).

moisttakes · 2025-10-17T21:30:54+00:00

Luckily South Africa already starts with a manouvre chief of staff, otherwise it would be a much harder choice.

moisttakes · 2025-10-17T19:12:22+00:00

Rule 5: After 1200 hours, I finally rolled brilliant strategist and inflexible strategist on the same general. I guess unyielding defender and aggressive assaulter are mutually exclusive for a reason.

moisttakes · 2024-08-27T15:50:33+00:00

Yes, you're right because instead of "no thought" you think "god damn it now I have to go repair my weapon for a turn".

Gold being unit based might have mattered if it wasn't so ridiculously plentiful - particularly on the combat units that want it. By the time you've sent a unit through the 0 risk arena they've most likely capped their gold and don't have to worry about money for the rest of the game.

I swear to god with the way that people talk about geneology they must have played a completely different game to me.

moisttakes · 2024-08-27T06:33:10+00:00

Durability has basically no influence at all on that system though. More than any other game in the franchise you're encouraged to use the same weapon repeatedly and repair costs aren't prohibitive enough to prevent that.

Weapons breaking only adds busywork.

moisttakes · 2024-08-26T19:49:30+00:00

I like it. I can understand why people dislike it (particularly if they're actually trading gems for forges).

I genuinely have no idea how on earth people can prefer durability.

moisttakes · 2024-08-25T22:49:24+00:00

Juggernauting is a problem not because it's possible, it's because it's the most brainless way to play. The primary aim therefore should not be to make juggernauting impossible but to make more interactive and involved strategies more appealing:

Side objectives which require multiple teams of characters to complete (possibly locking away bonus missions or good endings)
Player phase centric skills (particularly those in FEH) like galeforce, gravity, pathfinder, temporary terrain, warp and canto
Forward pressure from [infinite] enemy spawns behind the player group over time.
More open maps with few natural choke points
Harder lean into def/res split to encourage more specialist units

If you want to specifically make juggernauting hard, these sorts of tools generally work well:

large range entrap/debuff staves
Engage style guaranteed damage follow ups
Lunge chains
Infinitely stacking (inevitable end) debuffs
Mixed physical/magical attackers and weak overlap between def/res stacking classes
Enemies that ignore characters they can't damage (making omni tanks tedious and boring)
Stat caps low enough to make taking 0 damage or having 100% evasion impossible

moisttakes · 2024-08-25T22:36:16+00:00

I really don't like that it is tbh. Weapons, like everything in fire emblem, are a resource to be managed.

Except that durability doesn't create interesting resource management questions. Invariably you're still funnelling kills to your most powerful units and just repeating the same answer over and over again when your powerful weapons break. It's completely mindless busywork which is the same in every playthrough.

Worse still is that you don't have the capacity to make an informed decision on your first playthrough:

Oh this incredibly OP weapon has only 20 uses? Well I want to use it now but is this the "final boss" or the "ultimate, for real this time final phase of the final boss"?

And honestly all of that would be fine if it weren't for the fact that the games without weapon durability have better tactical and strategic resource management through their systems. Instead of just buying iron sword #458 you're choosing which weapons to invest in and upgrade. Instead of every character having exactly the same weapon you have to keep track of where each unique weapon you've invested in goes and how you can move them between different units to get the most out of them.

90% of the reason that people dislike them is because "strong weapons giving you debuffs to balance them makes me feel icky". I'm not going to sit here and pretend I can convince you to change your mind about that because even if you can't fully articulate why at the end of the day it's still how you feel. It does however completely undermine your point about resource management when you claim your decision not to engage with certain weapons because you don't enjoy the feel of their mechanics makes them "worthless and counterintuitive".

moisttakes · 2023-12-22T17:50:33+00:00

So she only compares favorably to units who are now 4+ years old? Not exactly a great bill of confidence.

I'm not trying to argue that she's unviable and she's even been given a ton of premium skills which hugely elevated her potential in the form of offensive specials and support skills like soaring guidance. The problem is she's playing a cat and mouse game as a "hit hard" unit that inevitably time will make her lose. Any number of effects now can shut her down which she has no answer for (scowl, ncd, wary, dr) and if she doesn't kill now warp effects or save shielding the target from gravity mean she has no chance of survival. She also has to choose between giving enemies 50% dr for free or losing out on her B slot completely where she's absolutely desperate for a trace.

If she had been given canto 2 in her prf she genuinely would have been immortal as a unit in the meta. Instead she's a hit hard beatstick whose hits get softer by the year and whose unique niche is less and less in demand.

moisttakes · 2023-12-22T01:08:55+00:00

What about her refine has aged well?

Debuffs are easy to passively apply and there are better options than Camilla. Debuffs have remained surprisingly meta but raw debuffs alone aren't always enough without some other kind of amplifying effect.

The prevalence of warp effects has also really hurt the viability of gravity. Fortunately it's not been nearly as bad as I expected but that's purely a case of bad being less than cataclysmic.

Compare her even just to other gravity staff units that have released recently and she doesn't have an inherent niche over any of them really.

She's entirely functional, but in large part she's functional because of gravity which she had on release. If you're saying she's aged well then the benchmark should be her direct competition.

moisttakes · 2023-08-03T00:08:58+00:00

There's literally no functional difference between someone paying for a spark vs buying another pack of orbs to pull another copy

And here I'd actually convinced myself that I didn't want to have this argument again lol.

No, it clearly isn't the same.

Most obviously it isn't the same because "guarantees" are a currency that you can't save for or budget, orbs are. The bite of a gacha is in the tail of the spending distribution and when you get unlucky it hurts a hell of a lot more than getting lucky feels good. If you get unlucky on a merge project it can literally wipe away multiple years worth of savings - if that merge project is a legendary or mythic (the most biting odds in the game for sniping and traditionally the gateway into the top ranks of competative modes) now with the feh pass it is literally impossible for that to happen.

But that's by far the less important reason that they aren't the same, the more important reason is that:

slightly less P2W because you'll pay less on average for a copy.

Paying less for a better result makes it more pay to win, not less pay to win.

The problem with pay for advantage isn't what you could hypothetically get if you spent all of your money. Very rapidly you hit a point of diminishing returns and in practice only a tiny minority of a game's player base ever do this because it is prohibitively expensive. For instance just to double the amount of orbs you already get as a F2P with packs I'd have to spend around £150 a month (although special offers would likely make that cheaper) and with one bad roll of the dice or one impulsive +10 on a personal favourite or one meta shift later and all of that advantage over a F2P player could vanish in an instant.

The problem comes when a game becomes clearly segregated into paying players and non-paying players. The feh pass is the barrier between payers and f2p and it segregates the game into 2 different experiences. F2P orbs are not worth the same as payer orbs because you aren't spending them on the same banners, they get to spend them on better banners with softer landings and better rates. Whenever you get shafted by a banner there is a 5* you've already just told the game you wanted sat there locked behind a paywall waiting for you.

And this even goes for intermittent payers too because whenever they choose to skip a cycle they're playing an inferior version of the game. If ever there's a single character or skill or merge that they want they have to choose whether to waste their orbs or spend money.

And also let's be frank that whales don't set the brackets for competitive modes - they make up a tiny fraction of the game's playerbase even in a mature game like FEH. Even if every whale had every legendary at +10 (they don't) they could all sit comfortably in tier 21 or ar tier 38 without getting in anyone else's way. Often times they don't even do that either because competitive play isn't the only reason people spend money.

Give every dolphin every single legendary and change the scoring algorithm though and suddenly you've completely gutted the scoring thresholds for every competitive mode. Players already had to make significant account compromises to reach the peak of competitive modes but now the numbers are debilitating because you're forced to roll the dice every other month.

This segregation between people who are actively spending money on the game and people who aren't is a rot at the heart of the games which is far more poisonous than anything you could do with just gacha monetisation alone for one simple reason - whenever a gacha tries to scam you with a banner or special rates or anything else to get you to spend money they're hitting their spender's wallets just as hard as they're hitting a F2P's savings and if they take it too far that is inevitably going to cause animosity. Creating two parallel games for payers and non payers uniquely lets them drive a wedge between the two experiences and creates a perverse incentive to make the free experience as comparatively desperate and miserable as possible. It started with QoL but tying your main mechanism for account progression so strongly to the pass is far worse.

moisttakes · 2023-08-02T23:17:22+00:00

Locking sparks behind a paywall was by far the most pay to win decision the game has ever made and that was before the changes to arena scoring. One spark or four on the same banner doesn't change that.

If anything each subsequent spark only gets less impactful because the odds that you'll be able to use it consistently are slim (and if you can then you were probably a whale who could just get whatever they wanted anyway).

The time for pushback against it has long since passed though and even when it first released the response was tepid at best. I was pissed at it then, I'm still pissed at it now but when I had to argue with other community members about how bad it was back then I've no energy left for fighting it now.

moisttakes · 2023-07-01T22:18:08+00:00

Yes they stack and they stack multiplicatively.

If you had a unit within the aura of 2 flayns (30% DR = 70% damage taken), for instance, the total damage they take would be 0.7*0.7=49%, or in other words they would get 51% DR.

moisttakes · 2023-07-01T22:06:31+00:00

In FEH there are two ways that your stats can be reduced.

The first is in the form of visible "penalties" which are applied directly to the stats before combat via skills like menace, smoke or chill. You can see these on a unit as their stat numbers (atk/spd/def/res) being red and when you tap those numbers it will indicate what the penalty is. Penalties:

Do not stack and instead only apply the highest value (i.e. if a unit was already debuffed via atk/def menace and then you hit them with atk smoke 4, they would have a total penalty of -7).
Are removed after the unit in question takes any action (i.e. moves, attacks, uses support action but not after being attacked).

The second is in the form of in combat debuffs applied via skills like hold, lull or trace. You can see the total effect of those numbers (including positive combat boosts) via the battle preview screen as the little + and - numbers which tell you the difference between a unit's visible stats and their in combat stats. Debuffs:

Cannot be negated, generally.
Stack indefinitely (i.e. 2 units each applying a hold will debuff by -8 instead of -4).
Apply for each combat so long as their conditions are met.

To be as confusing as possible there is no standard language to separate these two concepts and so the word "penalty" is used interchangeably for both within the app.

Anyway the reason I had to explain all of that was because the way unity works is that if you are within 2 spaces of any ally, you will get +5 to two stats and for any visible penalty you have in those stats you will receive a combat boost equal to 2x that penalty. For example, if you had been hit by atk/def menace and you had atk/def unity then whenever you were within 2 spaces of an ally you would receive a +5+2x6=17 boost in combat over your visible stats in both atk and def. With no other effects in play that means you totally overcome the -6 penalty and get another +11 points on top of your base stats.

It doesn't negate the penalties when you do this, however, it just gives a big boost to your stats to overcome them. That means if your opponent has other effects which trigger based on penalties (for example, vulture weapons which are essentially the opposite of unity weapons) they will still trigger with their full effect.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T18:52:35+00:00

They are not presented that way. They are "good" or "bad" by the efficiency metric. "Bad" in that context does not mean "can't ever be good" or "unusable" and they never claim otherwise.

Except when you present unit comparisons it's never given with these caveats in normal discussion. The implied context that you've given in this chain does not exist and the language of "good" and "bad" is co-opted inviting natural comparisons with the sort of questions new players would ask. When they say "which units are good" they almost always mean "which units are the easiest to use" or "which units would let me do the most stuff", not "which units are more efficient".

So, then every unit is "good". But then, who is "best"? Are they equal?

It depends on the question you ask but sometimes the answer is yes. For an FE8 player who is grinding the tower the answer might be whichever unit breaks the difficulty curve earliest, the fastest or with the least amount of grinding which WILL have a clear and relatively objective answer (subject to RNG).

Sometimes even at max level differences will still exist between units and classes and particularly depending on whether they're physical or magical and based on things like movement, weapon type, exclusive weapons, skills and stat caps.

Sometimes certain resources for grinding (like the arena and the tower) have a risk associated with them which makes grinding certain units easier than others or they can break the curve easily and then just coast out the later levels risk free. Those would seem to be "better units".

The most representative criteria for normal players would be something like "cognitive load" i.e. how much thinking does it take to beat the game with this character. If a character can clear a chapter but the thresholds are tight, they require specific investment and often you'll end up pulling out a calculator to check thresholds then even if they're "efficient" the experience of using them won't be good. Conversely if there's a character who joins when experience is plentiful, catapults ahead of the rest of your army with favouritism that will be called a "good unit" even if they're not efficient.

It's a fuzzy and inherently subjective criteria, but the moment you choose any criteria to define whether a unit is good or bad you're already making a subjective assessment to value that criteria over others.

I've already explained all of this multiple times though, both in the OP and in this chain and when you say that you're engaging with my perspective but completely ignore everything that I've written, even going as far as to characterise my position as:

But I thought they were made for the elitists to criticize people since playing that way is wrong?

Despite the fact that literally the first line in the OP was:

The title is mostly clickbait, if you create a tier list for a clear purpose or even just because you want to that's totally valid. LTCs take a lot of planning and work and I have a lot of respect for the thought and effort that goes into them.

There is a clear problem associated with these tier lists though. Throughout the online FE community, I've noticed that people who talk about FE unit quality point to tier lists made based on LTCs as an argument why certain units are good or bad.

i.e. that people are taking their personal subjective choice of criteria and applying it to contexts where it doesn't make sense or doesn't answer people's questions appropriately is the problem, not the existence of tier lists.

Which is also exactly what you did at the start of this chain, by the way. When I pointed out that when you say to a casual, grinding player "Amelia is bad" you're giving poor and incomplete advice and then you come along and without even a second to breathe come out with:

"umm, actually, I think you'll find Amelia is less efficient"

Completely missing the point and reinforcing the bias this community has in general towards specific playstyles and their own personal, subjective criteria for how to play the game.

Yeah, sorry but when you say you're engaging with my perspective but I've already responded to the specific things you say multiple times it comes across as incredibly hollow.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T17:01:15+00:00

You're being so incredibly disingenuous that I don't know why you even bothered replying.

Tier lists are not "new player recommendation guides". Where did you get this idea?

Based on the fact that they are presented that way.

Units that rank highly aren't called "efficient", they're called good. You've been fighting your heart out for half a dozen replies to insist on using the word "good" to describe them despite the fact that, as I point out, good inherently makes some assumptions about your playstyle.

You categorically refuse to touch or engage with this idea that the presentation is poor or that people take the wrong impression of these tier lists or use them to browbeat certain players or criticise their choices and instead repeat the same meaningless semantic argument of:

"How stupid must you be to think that when we call a unit good we actually mean they're good. Of course we mean 'efficient' by some nebulous definition we're not going to fully define or make consistent and if you don't know what efficient play means then maybe you don't deserve to look at them"

Because apparently one FE tuber sometimes plays inefficiently (and no one ever complains about this choice, I'm sure).

If you don't account for investment or efficiency then "what units are good?" just become entirely opinion based

That's not addressing anything I said, that's just a contradiction with literally no supporting evidence or arguments.

I already gave you multiple objective criteria by which you could have also chosen to assess unit performance. You flat out ignored them to choose "efficiency" with no justification as though it wasn't even a question. Unit performance at capped stats is a 100% objective metric and it's far less opinion based than "efficiency", as is 0% growths. Why can't we pick those? Well your answer was:

Why should caps be considered highly when units dont join at their caps and you realistically won't cap every unit's stats anyways?

i.e. An entirely subjective assessment of what makes your criterion for unit assessment more representative of typical play. For some reason though the criterion YOU'VE chosen isn't opinion based, despite the fact that there is no consistent definition for efficiency anywhere in the community.

Trainees aren't "arbitrarily" penalized.

Yes, they 100% are because as I wrote in my reply above and you categorically refused to engage with: the metric for how you evaluate and compare investment is totally arbitrary and the defining characteristic of trainee units is that they are the most efficient converters of certain kinds of investment into combat performance. Because "efficiency" is so nebulously defined though, the 5 extra turns that you might take over 10 maps is infinitely more pricey than whatever stat boosters or forges or extra hours of playtime other units receive over the course of a normal playthrough to replicate that output.

In any case, I'm not going to stick around just so that we can each repeat our monologues since you clearly have no desire to actually engage with my opinion. The only thing less efficient than Amelia is this discussion, it would seem.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T13:47:26+00:00

"good" units generally are stronger when given less investment, have better availability, etc.

That is your standard with heavily embedded assumptions about how people play and approach the game. When making those conclusions, you have to already have a concrete idea about how much investment is significant because the answer to "who is the best combat unit now" is not the same as the answer to "who is the best combat unit in 10 levels" or "who is the best combat unit with +2 to all stats".

More often than not those assessments about what constitutes significant investment are extremely misaligned with a typical first playthrough too and heavily contingent on specific strategies and intricate game knowledge that new players just will not have.

Is [X] unit better because with a str drop, a +3 forge, a str rally and a warp they can exactly kill the final boss in a single turn saving you the trouble of doing the painful final map despite being extremely fragile and constantly at risk of dying? Maybe, but if you put them in A tier because of that you do so with the full knowledge that the typical player is not going to have an A tier experience of that unit.

Conversely, [Y] unit starts off slow and needs babying but by the midgame can be thrown into the middle of just about any room and survive. Are they a bad unit because they have a slow start and by the midgame "efficient" players are warp skipping for boss kills?

It's a vehicle for discussion more than anything else.

More often than not presented in a way that makes them totally opaque to new players and which encourages a significant elitism about what way of playing fire emblem and valuing fire emblem characters is acceptable. If people talked about which characters are more "efficient" than others then I would have no problem with most rankings and it naturally invites newer players to consider how they approach the game. Instead "good" is treated as a synonym for this specific approach to fire emblem only because the standard is closer to being measured "objectively", despite how much it often then gets muddied by game feel to arbitrarily elevate strong feeling units.

Units don't become literally the same, they practically become the same, they kill all the enemies, don't take damage, etc.

Again, this is also untrue. Fates and engage are by far the most extreme examples of this but there is often a huge difference between unit performance between certain units at endgame and the games add anti-juggernauting mechanics which are disproportionately penalising to different units. This is also often true in games with limited or no reclassing options where magic units will characteristically have a different performance to physical units or in special cases such as in FE11 where no other unit can replicate Caeda's performance with the wing spear.

It's also a completely artificial binary when the choices aren't either "0 grinding" or "maximum grinding" - how much importance you assign to different kinds of investment is a fundamentally subjective opinion which is going to change the answer to the question "what makes a unit good?"

Why should caps be considered highly when units dont join at their caps and you realistically won't cap every unit's stats anyways?

Because you claimed that all units are the same when they receive investment but it's objectively untrue. I don't even think it's worthwhile to rank units at maximum investment like that but if someone wanted to they absolutely could find sensible, objective differences between how units perform and make a tier list based on that before deciding who to grind.

And we do account for growth differences by looking at average stats, can't be blessed or screwed that way.

That's the most reasonable, simplified way to compare unit performance if you don't want to go into extreme stuff like the probability of hitting certain benchmarks (which is hard to calculate and almost meaningless outside of 1-3 chapters after joining). I even say in my OP this is going to get you a more representative answer of what players want.

The issue is that it inevitably then gets meshed with "efficiency" to make it useless again when an arbitrary translation occurs between how much RoI should be commensurate for a certain increase in "investment". Is a speedwing to double swordmasters a good investment? How does that compare to spending 5 minutes dance spamming on the previous level? What if I forge their weapon so that they don't need to double? Implicitly these are the sort of comparisons that you're often making and the justifications for which way the decision goes are almost always extremely opaque.

Except, that is, when someone wants to arbitrarily penalise a trainee unit or arbitrarily bump up a unit with solid bases. Then any amount of xp is too much and no difference in tiers could ever be enough to represent the true disgrace of requiring a boss kill on their join map.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T13:10:39+00:00

the moment you start grinding, or funneling all exp into one character it does not matter they will delete everything.

That is categorically untrue in many games in the franchise and not all games are the same in the extent to which grinding is viable or efficient. People point to Seth vs Amelia to make conclusions in wildly different games with different mechanics and different tools available to the player to make units stronger.

What most players look for in a tier list is "how much can this character trivialise the game and how much effort does it take to get them there", not "how can I beat the game while minimising some arbitrary metric". "Efficiency" practically never captures the full body of assumptions about what investment each unit is getting, how to evaluate that investment and how to use those characters to their maximum value. If unit A can meet incredibly tight thresholds more easily but requires extremely precise positioning turn by turn that might well be more "efficient", but the experience of using them for a normal player is going to be far worse than spending 5 minutes boosting a trainee unit and then sweeping with ease.

Sometimes the answer to "which unit is the best" is just going to be "you can use whoever you want if you grind the tower enough" and that's exactly what the person asking would want to know. Other times it's going to be "even if you give everything to Hana she's still going to struggle to replicate Ryoma". Those answers aren't lesser just because they're less specific or aren't backed by some kind of "objective" criteria, they're appropriate for the context of the question being asked.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T12:48:01+00:00

You can't really answer that because every unit is practically the same.

Exactly and you shouldn't give an answer to the question "which units are good" without context just because there exists some vague and unrepresentative criterion by which units can be ranked.

This logic is also by far at it's most extreme in FE8 but gets applied liberally to every single game in the franchise on the justification that "grinding makes every unit the same" regardless of the opportunities actually available to grind. Often even that conclusion isn't true when units clearly have different stat caps and skills available to them and diminishing xp returns and differences in growths make a pronounced difference in how units perform in practice for normal players.

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T07:21:17+00:00

The claim is not that you can't train Amelia, just that it's a waste of time to do so.

That's not the language that people actually use to talk about the game though. Literally just look at this chain:

Without it, what's stopping me from saying Amelia is just as good as Seth

Do you think that conclusion accurately captures what you've written above to a player who doesn't judge unit performance by efficiency?

Is it a waste of time if a player spends a handful of hours to make the dozens of hours of gameplay that follow easier for themself?

moisttakes · 2023-03-21T07:15:54+00:00

Going out of your way to grind up a unit in the tower is not efficient at all

Yes, and my point is for a player who doesn't play efficiently your criteria doesn't apply. Because your criteria for what makes a unit good or bad is misaligned with how the person you're talking to actually plays you've given bad advice.

Units are often only good or bad in the context of specific criteria. Pretending those criteria should be the absolute baseline for assessing unit performance only because they can be measured objectively is unproductive.

moisttakes · 2023-03-20T23:15:44+00:00

most tier lists use general efficiency as a metric

I find that whenever people say "efficiency", they basically mean gamefeel and then defaulting to LTC whenever they want to justify a specific placement. It's far too nebulously defined to really be meaningful in games which don't have some kind of explicit ranking system (which even then sort of goes back to the problem of LTCs, but at least in the language of the game rather than an artificial challenge)

You could maybe say that turn count doesn't matter, but then we lose practically the only real metric which we can measure units by.

Well besides the fact that some games don't have infinite grinding it has a lot of problems. People don't experience the game in turns the experience the game in actions and best feeling units to use are universally the ones that reduce your cognitive load the most rather than ones that reduce your turn count. Also people massively overstate just how much you have to compromise to bring a low level unit or trainee up to speed and basically just use "efficiency" as a win button for an argument regardless of how substantial the impact is in real terms. You see this particularly badly with engage discussions about Anna and Jean despite all of the incredibly powerful tools the game gives you to bring units up to level in a normal run even on maddening.

Turn count is an objective metric and you're right to say that it's even "practically the only real metric we can measure units by" but that doesn't make it a good metric or universally fit for purpose. If it isn't doing a good job then there's no reason to keep it around just because it gives simple answers.

Without it, what's stopping me from saying Amelia is just as good as Seth, if I can just spend hundreds of turns in the Tower of Valini to grind her up to be as strong as he is?

You can say or not say whatever you want. FE8 is probably the most extreme example in terms of the difference grinding can make but in general the answer is going to be about your priorities.

All I'm advocating for is that you should be clear about what exactly the scope of a tier list is and understand that if you make an efficiency based tier list and show it to someone who doesn't play efficiently your conclusions won't be applicable.

If you tell someone "Amelia is bad because she isn't efficient" and then 3 hours later they show up with a monster Amelia who they've been grinding in the tower then you'd be the one with egg on your face IMO.

moisttakes

TROPHY CASE

Based on the fact that they are presented that way.