[ks] A Novel Skills and General Analysis: 2024

ks a very nice work and an promising way to analyse generals in a reliable way.

One thing I must say. Item swapping between move and attack is for me absolut indispensable:
Full movement is the key to sucessfully win the campaigns, but untill endgame we will have only one war horse, so the war horse must rotate between all non infantry anyway. And I don't want to attack with movement items when I have the possibility to add up to +12dmg for using attack items or put a snair drum when necessary.
But even for other items: early in the game you will not have enough items to fully equip your headquarter.

Movement stars must be rated much higher than other stars as they are very hard to add later.

PS. As much as we know, have the skills Mobility/Infantry Tactics/Ballistics no effect at all.

Really? I don't think so. At least with my luck, Diez somehow shows up every 3 refreshes or so and I can't afford him, so I need to grind medals with my medal farm.
When I finally have 540 medals to afford Diez, I already have 3 refreshes as a byproduct from the medal farm. And Diez shows up again. It's an endless cycle until I don't need Diez anymore.

Even without this insane luck of mine, the odds are 6/93 or approximately 6.45% to get a general you want from a tier-1 shop.
Simple calculations say that 15~16 refreshes are needed in average per Diez.
Just use my RR farm to get max refreshes in less than 4 minutes and that leads to roughly 20 minutes per Diez. That's not so bad.
RR farm isn't limited to endgame players anyway- as long as you reached the Battle of Waterloo, the penultimate mission of the Coalition scenario- you could build it.
The cherry on top is that you don't even need any generals to build the farm. 

It's more of a problem to farm medals, since Diez is the most expensive trainer out of the 7 cheapest trainers for their own category. (inf, cav, art... and Diez's mov.)
But for me, I have a great automatic medal farm that yields about 700 medals per hour. This is in conquest mode, and I didn't use any general, so literally any beginner can try and build this farm. (It's not hard to build but it's quite tedious, it took me about 130 turns to make. But I'm willing to do the hard work to enjoy the fruits of my labor.)

Anyways, I thought the consensus was to purchase movement items before stars? They could be swapped around generals and have a better cost efficiency.

In the end, though I agree that movement stars are much more valuable, I don't necessarily agree that they are very hard to add later nor that it should be rated drastically higher.

Lucky you - it is even not unusal that it takes 30-40 refreshes to find Diez. (As you said more than 15 refr. are avarage)

Anyway, because there is only one movement trainer that you need to find, and on top he is one of the most expensive trainers in t1, this is the reason, why I suggest to rate movement stars much much higher than missing combat stars.

Nelson

Price: 8 emblems

Being the only general with leadership+an artillery skill alone would get Nelson to at least B tier, and his 4 training stars and out-of-the-box naval aptitude easily push him into A tier. Navigation, while not as good as steersman or fireproof, is nice to have, and leadership is a great skill for navy gens as well. Potentially, banner could be more useful for navy gens to give their troops the upper hand, since all ships have similar stats, but either way, Nelson is a strong artillery gen and a great navy gen.

Radetzky

Price: 8 emblems

He is a mini-Lan, and since Lan is OP, that's high praise. I’ll say he’s marginally better than Dombrowski because of his extra training star (even though Banner>War master), but there is basically no difference. He does cost 8 emblems instead of 6, but that is not factored into this rating. Strike+surprise coupled with another good skill (defense art) gives him a good enough advantage over Golitsyn to be worth buying.

Soult

Price: 6 emblems

A severely underrated general; there are few if any better inf-art hybrids. Mass fire and formation make him an excellent infantry gen, and accurate makes him plenty capable on artillery too. Possibly only Lannes is better as an inf-art hybrid. He nicely fills a unique niche in the game, and imo doing that is one thing that can make an IAP worth it. If the purely cosmetic stain of being an infantry trainer was removed, more people would appreciate him for his abilities.

Kutuzov

Price: 8 emblems

A high-level infantry general with potential on all other units too. Siege+formation+DA makes him a powerful infantry gen, though a step below the top tier due to lacking mass fire. But he makes up for it by being competent on both cav and art. Additionally, he is great on navy thanks to siege, defense art, and fireproof. His two strongest suits, infantry and navy, are sadly the two weakest units, but he nonetheless manages to be a four quadrant general in a unique way. He is also the best fort general in the game for that one American mission ‘Great Sea Warfare.’