Ember Throne Saga: building a party that survives the mid-game

Ember Throne Saga is generous early on, and that's a trap. The first dozen fights let you brute-force your way through, which teaches all the wrong habits. Then chapter four hits and suddenly your glass-cannon party is folding in two turns.

My advice: level your support character even when it feels boring. A single dedicated healer turns unwinnable fights into manageable ones, and the AI-controlled bosses target your weakest member relentlessly, so keeping everyone topped up matters.

Elemental matchups are the other half of it. Every boss has a weakness the game barely hints at, so it's worth spending a turn testing spells if you're unsure. Once you find the weakness, damage roughly doubles and the fight shortens dramatically.

Don't sleep on positioning either. Keeping your fragile characters in the back row cuts the damage they take, and that alone saved me more than one run through the swamp gauntlet.