During my time in the Fire Emblem community, I noticed that Armor Knights are used as a Defensive Tank which is a useful tool for FE players to use. But there are Armor Knight who lacks movement and their usefulness has been sidelined for better units that perform better than the Armor Knight line.
Any suggestions on how we make Armor Knights better or not? Feel free to spout out ideas.
Give them infantry movement and competent stats. That’s literally all you need to do. Provided that infantry aren’t bad as a whole (i.e. your game isn’t completely dominated by mounts), then armors will be at least decent.
make more maps centered around their strengths, which are defending
Give them bows.
Literally they made Gwendolyn into a beast in Project Ember by just giving her access to a bow.
All of the above points are already on the money. Movement, defense maps, and range would all help a boatload. I’d also say giving them more weapon triangle control could help out a bit.
Would you rather have a 4 move, lance-locked unit or a 7 move cav with swords and lances? Most tier 1 units only have one weapon as it is (that’s just another point toward cavs being insane but still), but if knights AT LEAST had weapon triangle control it’d give them SOMETHING over 90% of the T1 infantry, and make them more flexible overall. I feel that’s a bit redundant with the bow point, but having swords or axes would be neat and definitely help them stand out.
I don’t really think armor knights are supposed to be good on the players side, having a very slow tank doesn’t really work as a concept when you’re the pursuer most maps, any attempt to try and make them good will only take away what makes armor knights unique. Armor knights are really good in enemy hands because the enemy units don’t necessarily have to move, you are moving towards the throne or choke point and the armor knights just need to sit in one spot to stop you.
Oswin is really good in fe7 because there’s an early game defend map in hector mode along with a lot of close chokepoints that let oswin easily get to a specific target in time.
If you really want to make armor knights useful on the players side I think the best way is to have a map progression structure similar to fe7 with the great knight promo from fe8 with 7 movement (aka cavalier movement). Giving them low con can also make them more useful because it allows for rescue dropping, giving them stats comparable to oswin also helps give a reason to actually make use of armor knights.
Now generals there’s no saving those guys, they got an extra movement, full weapon triangle access, and an ability that can nullify all damage and they still suck because of the inherent flaws of being an armor knight.
have you forgotten the true god of project ember?
a more unconventional idea, good class-locked 1-2 range weapons. Accurate physical 1-2 range is rarely a thing so armors would be nice for the reliable player phase tosses and the usual strong enemy phase.
The problem with designing a game around making armors good is that the game would suck. FE7 has tons of defend maps and, shocker, they’re all boring and tedious. The traditional strengths of the armor class are more prominent for enemies than players for a reason.
I like to think of armors kinda like the TF2 Engineer: if it was the best class in the game, then the game would not be very fun to play because it would be so slow.
I think if armor knights could build teleporters they could be pretty good. 
Fun fact, Vestaria Saga sort of does this, but not really. Unpromoted armors are the only tier 1 lance class that can use throwing lances. Except promoted paladins and pegasi get them anyway, and also the pegasi have a class-locked brave javelin that they can use unpromoted. So I guess kaga just didn’t really wanna commit to the idea.
given the fact that historically we disagree vividly when it comes to gameplay, i’ll just agree to disagree
giving armors infantry movement only turns them into slower infantry units weak to a slayer weapon, it does nothing to fix their issue nor does it highlight their strengths
They should have at least one or two of the following:
If doing none of these, don’t give them lower movement.
Historically armor knights have had so many glaring weaknesses it’s hard to call them tanks. You always outrange them, they’re slow, weak to any magic attack, and have a whole set of effective weaponry against these non-threats for some reason. Most other classes don’t have so many weaknesses without great strengths like flight.
really makes you think armor knights were supposed to be in the same camp as brigands, mostly enemy locked.
How to make 4 mov knights/trainees good?
Make everyone else 3 mov
Honestly one of the more simple FE solutions. Most hacks that slap an extra point of movement for parity with infantry seem to do the trick.
Especially when you think about Generals being enemy-only in FE1
I personally find 4 movement to be kind of part of the identity of what it means to be an armor knight. I think enemy armor knights work just fine by default, and have found giving player armors the Pivot skill (jump over an ally to the other side of them) a tonne of fun. I call it Cover instead, like to think of it as the armor jumping in front of an ally to shield them from damage.
Also messed around with having an adventurous armor character get Acrobat, which I’ve found to can be pretty impactful. Much more map design dependent though.
Lorenz slowly fades in the distance
if 3H hadn’t already caused him to do so I guess
I’m not sure how it would work long term as a solution, but I did come up with something off the top of my head at least.
In a world of wizardry, dreams of impossible things…like this:
Change the way armor effective weapons work. Instead of a multiplier, they would ignore the target’s defense, but only if the target were armored. Then give them a load of defense, normal infantry movement, and good other stats. Resistance optional. More weapons could be a thing too.
In theory, this would make them at least a little better off. In such a setup, they’d be great against nearly anything unless it had an effective weapon or magic. Which frankly I think is how it should be. If a game is half magic and one class is really weak to it, it only makes sense to make it really strong to the other half, at least to me.
Though it’s 2am for me as I write this, so I have no idea if this even makes much sense as a concept.