Idea for a Tension system

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I think that playing Fire Emblem at a moderately fast pace is when the game is at it’s most fun, but this pushes a lot of weight onto the map design to incentivize you to speed up. It’s up to the map maker to add strong reinforcements that chase you or villages or enemies holding items to every map. And this is a solution that works but I was thinking that there could be a system that is always active that explicitly encourages and rewards fast play.

Tension would be a system where the more your units fight, the higher their tension gets. At low levels you get small bonuses to hit/avo and at high levels you start getting that plus some bonus damage/defense. Your tension would decrease at the start of every player phase and ideally it would be balanced to require you to take enemy phase combats to reach high tension. Then your reward for playing the map faster is that you get to take some combat bonuses into the latter part of the map and the boss.

I forsee a couple problems with this though. I think it could easily lead to a rich get richer effect where tension just makes your strong units better at juggernauting. If you were to drop this system into Sacred Stones it would just make Seth even more dominant. This system would only work in a game with strong enemies where your durable units are 3RKOed or 4RKOed at max. Another problem is the potential for your units to change stats on enemy phase. It would probably be very uncommon but extremely frustrating for a unit to gain a damage bonus from increasing their tension on enemy phase and kill something they weren’t supposed to kill.

Besides that I think this system could enable some cool smaller things like a staff that increases a friendly unit’s tension. What do you think?

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Biggest problem I see to this is that there is no drawback, it’s purely a buff. IE there’s no reason for me to every bother managing tension. Additionally, enemy units basically have no access to this mechanic given they’re going to be going down in 1-3 rounds under most circumstances.

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To add on to this, a sort of “fatigue” system could be used to prevent juggernauting. Too much tension can create stress that can make people crack under pressure; so basically, why not have a threshold in which tension starts making you lose stats instead? It would basically make it so that you want to be in a sort of sweet spot of tension that the player would be encouraged to maintain.
The exact numbers and stuff would be something to figure out, but you get the idea. Too little tension = bad, too much tension = bad, you want to hit the sweet spot.

Edit: could also have something like “too high tension for too long fatigues a unit” or something.

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