Or replacing Affinity with Skills, whatever. I don’t know about you, but I have never once cared about a unit’s Affinity.
So I thought maybe you could tie skills to affinities, and make support bonuses the same for everyone (+10 hit and avoid per level, FE4 leadership star style). This way skills aren’t tied to classes.
So you’d need an affinity slot for each skill + one for no skills, and somehow implement an affinity check for skill activation. On the plus side, no need to mess with the graphics beyond changing a few icons.
Is this a good idea? How hard would it be to execute?
It’d basically be like adding another “Character Ability” bit, if you wanted the ability to combine skills easily (which presumably you do). Or you could link the affinity byte to a skills array and manually combine different permutations of skill combinations in order to have 0xFF skill slots. Deprecating affinity functions wouldn’t be too hard, I guess? You’d also probably want to make the skill icons read from a separate location, since currently affinity icons are loaded out of the same space as weapon icons (they’re just kinda sitting there smack dab in the middle).
The affinity icons begin at 0x7A in the icons list. I think you could change this to 0xDF+Affinity and move the icons to the end if you repointed the whole thing to some free space. This way you could have as many affinities as you like.
EDIT: Yup, that’s the one. I give you Eirika with Guiding Ring affinity:
