Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones/Chapter 5: The Empire's Reach

Defeat the Boss
You have to bench four of your units this time. Again, Colm isn't very useful, and you might as well give all of Moulder's stuff to Natasha, as she has to fight in this battle. At the start of the fight, send Seth down to the village in the southeast corner, then have him and one other unit deal with the bandits north of there. Split your party into three from there. Have Eirika go to the middle staircase and wait. Have Garcia, Franz, and Lute go up the left staircase and take out the enemies in that street, as well as the Archer on the other side of the wall. Have them wait near the armory, and stock up on equipment if necessary. The rest of your units should lure out the Soldier and the two Fighters in front of Joshua, weaken them on the counter-attack, then finish them off on your next turn. Recruiting Joshua isn't hard once you've taken out the soldiers. Natasha won't get attacked. Just go put her near him and select the talk option. At this point, you should have had Eirika take out the Fighter next to the vendor and the soldier in front of the village. Visit the village while Joshua takes the brigands near the arena out. Send the left-side party east to visit the village and attack the enemies around Saar. Once Saar is the last enemy, you can have Joshua visit the arena with his killing edge. Chances are he'll do better than he did before the chapter began. (Note: Because of the prominent arena in this chapter it may be viable to do exp grinding in it, this is quite easy with an emulator's "Save State" option, alowwing you to save at any time. With this you simply grind in the arena, saving before each battle, reloading in case a unit perishes. This is a long and tedious process but an easy way to get many units to level 20.)

Boss: Saar
Equip the armorslayer to Joshua and the rapier to Eirika. Have them both attack Saar on the same turn, and he should go down against the two effective weapons. If not, have Ross waiting to make the final blow.