FE12 is very carefully balanced around its low deployment and imo increasing deployment slots would completely ruin the balance of the game. For one, FE12’s maps don’t have a lot of enemies on them in comparison to other FEs. Other FEs usually craft maps with 30-40 enemies, and FE12’s maps usually have around 20 enemies or so. In FE12’s case, the low enemy count is balanced by your low deployment slots. 20 enemies is a LOT more threatening for 11-12 player units than it would be for 17 player units. In fact, if you could deploy 17 units, so many of FE12’s maps would become trivial, because you could match the density of enemy units and you can deploy sacrifices/meatshields to draw enemies out of their formations.
In addition to all of that, there just wouldn’t be enough EXP to feed 17 units. FE12 expects you to be training around 10 or 11 units, and there’s enough EXP to do just that. Increasing deployment to 17 completely kills EXP gain and FE12’s progression system. There’s also the matter of matching the enemies’ high stat caps. Enemies in FE12 - particularly in the lategame - tend to reach ludicrously high speed thresholds and you need max or near max speed to reliably double them. It’s doable for ~8 units to be able to double enemies. 17 units is over double that, which means that over half of them aren’t going to be doubling enemies. And if you’re not doubling enemies, what ARE you doing? There are only so many deployment slots that can be used on healbots and the like.
There’s also the matter of the stat boosters in the Lunatic and Lunatic Reverse shops. You have three of every stat booster in the shops, and that’s more than enough when you want to divide them among a team of 11-12 units (some of those units, such as your healbots and Phina, don’t even need the stat boosters anyway). Dividing the stat boosters among 17 units isn’t feasible unless you raise the amount of stat boosters in the shop. And if you’re doing THAT, what’s to stop you from loading all the stat boosters onto a super unit (like Kris or Palla) and calling it a day? The limit of three of each stat booster makes it more difficult to do this in the base game, but having, say, four or five of every stat booster so that they can be divided among 17 units makes stat-stacking way more doable. It’s a blatant case of “the rich get richer.”
Last but not least is the hard limit on useful classes such as Dracoknights, Snipers, and Swordsmasters. You can navigate around class limits in the base game because it’s been balanced for a team of 12 units (and this is more like 10 because Marth and Phina can’t reclass). Once you raise the deployment limit to 17, you’re running out of useful classes to use. Instead, you’re going to be deploying units in filler classes such as Hero, Warrior, and Sorcerer because you’ve run out of the good classes to use.
Okay, I’ve rambled long enough. Sorry that this got really long. I adore FE12 and I enjoy playing it on its highest difficulty, and I’ve given the game a lot of thought and theorycrafting whenever I’m ready for another run. I know that FE12 is a remake of FE3, but the two are fundamentally different games, and you should judge FE12 on its own merits.
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