I have to make sure players don’t do that.
I would like to design area encounters such that certain characters have an advantage there. Say an area with many Ahriman that Wakka can easily kill and Lulu can fairly consistently with Thunder spells.
I was wondering about showing the encounters of an area in some way. I could have an image of encounters, or I could show a few enemies on the map during the prep screen as a preview of average battles… maybe I could have the prep menu loma to a battle map for this. Just brainstorming at this point. The player knowing the encounters and strategizing which characters to pick would be good I feel.
I feel that the best way to encourage using a variety of characters is by much stricter xp regulations than regular fire emblem. I don’t want it to be completely impossible to basically bench a character, but overleveled characters need to get so little xp that grinding for hours to win the game with just those 3 characters would take longer and be less fun than leveling up all of your characters. This might be tricky to figure out how I need to adjust xp awarded. There are a few patches related to xp, and I’ve been experimenting a little with changing the class relative power of the player classes. This would however prevent me from using those classes later as enemies that award little xp, probably. I’m not sure of the details, but I have a vague idea of how I’d like to reward xp.
Yuna is going to be problematic, though. She is likely to be the most useful unit overall with access to dance, staves, summon, and weak light magic. She’ll continue to get a lot of xp from providing support, so she could easily become overleveled I believe. But as she provides a supporting role with generally low defense, I am hoping that her being overleveled wouldn’t make the game much easier. Additionally, her summons will be based on the temples you’ve visited (so Yuna will invisibly change class or unit # several times I believe), so I can balance her summons that way. Her summons will just be the same classes as enemies I’ve made. (Eg. Frog, Coeurl, etc.)
Players who haven’t leveled all units could potentially get stuck on a boss stage, but I’d like to make it so you can just go back and grind some battles for your weaker units until they are up to par.
Lastly, I would also like to not give a huge window of time of when you can promote a unit. It’s hard to design challenging battles when the player may or may not have changed classes yet. Overleveled units would hit a level cap twice in the game and be unable to promote until the areas are challenging enough / I give out the promotion item. Underleveled units can promote straight to the weaker tier 3 class choice from tier 1 and have greater promotion bonuses but ~10 fewer levels.
Every fire emblem game I’ve played I feel like beyond chapter 2 you’re encouraged to level up all of ~3 units and bench everybody else. So I really want to avoid that sort of design, especially with such a small cast. I feel like it’s often more fun to just be using around 3 units at a time (or in a section of a map, say your chars are split up), but to have more units than that for strategizing who you’ll bring with you.
It will be tough to avoid encouraging that playstyle. If you have further ideas I’d love to hear them.