[FE8] Does unit palette order matter?

Questions
1

It’s hard to convey exactly what I’m asking in a short, one-sentence title, but what it is is this:

Each character has an internal list of battle palettes that’s 7 entries long. FEBuilderGBA labels these entries, in order:

  1. Trainee Class (Trainees Only)
  2. Base Class 1
  3. Base Class 2 (Trainees Only)
  4. Promoted Class 1
  5. Promoted Class 2
  6. Promoted Class 3
  7. Promoted Class 4

My question is, do these labels actually reflect anything about how the game handles things internally, or are they purely there to denote how Intelligent Systems used each slot for the user’s convenience?

Essentially, if I wanted to, let’s say, give one of the trainee characters access to an additional class, would repurposing their “Trainee Class” palette slot for the new class not work, break anything, or otherwise cause any odd behavior? Considering the Trainee Class palette slot is always left as 0, anyway, with the trainees’ palettes in those classes actually being the generic ones, it seems like kind of a wasted slot, assuming it’s possible to use it for something else.

Additionally, Ross and Amelia’s class trees each have a convergent final class option (Warrior and Great Knight, respectively) which is listed twice in their palette lists; once for each “middle” class that can promote to it. Is it necessary to do this? It seems rather redundant to me.

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2

To my knowledge, it doesn’t really matter how you assign the palettes. The palette for the base trainee classes is 0, because the trainee battle animations resemble the palette of Ross, Amelia and Ewan. You can safely create a new palette and reference it there.

As for the duplicate tier two classes:
Ross’ pirate and fighter promotions both share the warrior class and Amelia’s knight and cavalier promtions both share the great knight promotion. Ewan however, has four different tier four promotions: Sage, Mage knight, Summoner and Dark Druid. I think that the double great knight and double warrior is just the way how the developers document the palettes, so I see no harm in changing them.

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3

Gotcha! That’s kinda what I suspected; that they just wanted to establish consistency in regards to which palettes would be listed in which slots. It’s good to know that all seven slots can just be used however, though; that’s actually tremendously helpful.

Thank you for the response!

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4

Im told battle palette rework allows you to use more then 7 palettes. This is especially helpful if you want to give the pupil class another branch (monk for example). I’m still trying to figure all the palette stuff out tho