I’ve been working on a 3 branch promotion system for my hack. I’ve essentially added one magic option for each class as well as modified several existing classes. My idea is to make the promotions as balanced as possible so they player really has to make a choice rather than a brainless one (Ranger over Sniper). My hack will be a shorter game intended for Ironman runs, so the idea is to promote a unit to fill what your party needs rather than just what makes it statistically better.
I’m looking for feedback. Feel free to comment on the doc or on this thread. Thanks
I’m liking the overlapping parity in similar classes (infantry of similar types have one or more overlapping promotion options), likewise its cool that most classes also potentially have access to a horse if you are going for a LTC run or something similar
My only real takeaways that could be considered negative:
-infantry magic users have a potentially unbalanced split by gender; I understand you are working with limitations like available animations, number of slots to insert animations in FEBuilder, etc, but having Female magic users consistently getting a flying option over a mounted cav option will require some careful map design consideration to avoid turning what is already a consistently overperforming class type into a dominant “top tier” pick
-Barons work thematically, since they are based on FE4 and 5 Barons, but having near perfect weapon triangle control doesn’t have enough cost in comparison to the other options, and will make armour knights and the armour mage supperior choices unless you are going for something like Low Turn Count
-I suspect, unless you design with the class in mind, no axe infantry will want to go war monk. Unless you have a “utility” axe unit in the roster, pivoting from a purely offensive class to a support class in fairly counter-intuitive, though it makes a solid pick for healers with bulk promoting, so take that with a grain of salt
-pivoting off the last point, unless every unit is a quality unit (I’m talking equal or comparable growths in STR and MAG, as an example), there will likely be only 1 or 2 picks that “fit” for each character; If thats your intention to give every character a niche and reward Ironman runs or repeat playthroughs, awesome, but if you address that with stat inflation and high growths, just, be prepared and design accordingly
Warrior:
Depending on how good bows are in the hack, it could be neat if they got the same terrain-crossing abilities as Berserkers, since it otherwise still seems like a hard sell compared to the other options
Heavy Cavalier:
You could probably get away with just giving them 7 move; as for how it affects the Knight balance, if you don’t want to give General 6 move to compensate, you could shoot up their base ranks to make them a true walking armory, like minimum B ranks on everything
Harrier/Malig Knight:
Unless every playable flier has bad Magic, they should really be 7 move like Mage Knights considering how good tomes are (not that I’d complain about 8 move magic fliers, of course)