Showing Growths vs. Hiding Growths? Which is better?

Design
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I am not sure if this topic has been talked about enough but I’ll talk about it anyways.

I see both sides of the coin here on what pros and cons each offer in a game. I am just curious on how everyone feels about this, so lets discuss it.

I like games where they show growth rates. Its a nice added information in deciding whether a unit is worth investing or not. Aside from that, its fun to have a good laugh sometimes when we immediately see a unit with very questionable growths and somehow we can make work with. However, sometimes when I do see the growths, I kind of feel like its another added layer of decision paralysis to me. Some say there are good looking units aesthetically or lets say we found a skill we find fun to use. But when we see their growths… it kinda hinders me in a way that upon seeing lackluster growths it gives that sense of doubt if we’re doing the right thing or not.

On the other hand though, when games hide the growth rates, it adds a sense of intrigue to me to see what type of stats different units show. Sure, it may be more prone to players being misled with information not immediately presented. But with my own experience, I find it fun too to try and guess what the game designer intend a certain unit to be through unspoken information.

How about you guys? Whaddya think is better between the two?

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It’s mostly just contextual to the narrative/vibes of the game you want to achieve.

If you don’t want someone to stress about the numbers your player units have and focus on the writing or just using your favorites without worrying about benchmarks don’t use them.

Drums of War does this quite well.

If you want the player to optimize numbers and make informed decisions about feeding units exp (ie if your trainee is good or an Amelia) or you want to clearly convey the role a unit is going to be filling in the army.

Sotf and 4kings does this quite well.

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Showing growths is only QoL when there’s trap units who are built wrong as a joke. I find it easier, as a campaign designer, to simply not give the player an unpleasant surprise in that way. With that eliminated, growths aren’t a particularly important element of unit evaluation. 40% vs. 55% doesn’t really make that much of a difference, particularly as 40% can easily grow like 55% and 55% can easily grow like 40%. People say ‘bases and growths’ like they’re equally important, but it’s actually ‘the stats they have on join’ and ‘the stats they have on a given chapter’. If so-and-so has 16 strength by chapter 18, does it really matter if they would, on average, have 13 or 19?

There are plenty of reasons you might want to hide growths without it just being ‘ha ha, the fighter with high base strength has 20% growth to taunt you’. And it’s nice to have a little uncertainty when a new unit joins, rather than encouraging the idea that they should be perceived first and foremost as a statblock. Of course the stats should complement their personality, but you already have bases for that.

So, I don’t see any compelling reasons to show growths, and kept with the vanilla approach of ‘if you insist, you can go look them up, but you aren’t getting them in the ROM itself’. So, Cromarbot and the websites. Theorycrafting is fun, and growths are a relevant consideration there. Just not so much for casual playthroughs.

Of course, if you have them in your campaign, I’ll look; if you don’t, I won’t, or else will save it for a second playthrough. The only thing that really matters, honestly, is that Skillsys standard growth colours look appalling, immediately compromise any and all aesthetic sensibilities your statscreen might have, and aren’t even calibrated well.

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Imo in a game that I am playing I would like to have the growths show because growths really influence if I use a unit or not.
But I think if you don’t want the growths to have a huge impact on your unit’s first impressions you can always have them hidden in game but available in in a file somewhere on your thread.
So people who want growths can look them up,
And people who don’t can just play without their influence.

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If you design a game well, every unit will have some worth, so it doesn’t really matter who you train. I prefer to not see growths because it clouds my judgement and makes me not as likely to give units a try i would’ve given a try otherwise. Maybe add it as an optional thing, or post game thing.

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Obviously it comes down to whether you want your player to focus on using the unit at base or long-term performance. Generally, though, I think if the unit’s growths are an important part of their design, then they should be visible.

For example, let’s say you’re choosing whether to deploy a new joiner with a notably low level and middling bases. Are their growths especially high, or is the designer giving them normal growths and allowing them a lot of levels in return? Or maybe the hack is just poorly-designed, and this unit is bad? How many levels will they need to catch up to your other units of the same role? Can you afford to feed them that many levels? In this case, the growths impact your decision on whether to use the character and how to use them, and therefore it’s nice to know them.

However, let’s say your hack only has units where their growths roughly match up with what you’d expect from their bases and class. In that case, no, visible growths aren’t necessary. If you can expect units to do their job at base and keep doing that job forever, then you don’t need to know what their growths are.

This is an anecdote, but I did find knowing growths to be a big help in a purely psychological sense when I first started playing hacks. More experienced players (and those who have spent more time in the community) have a better idea of what to expect from units and what’s common practice in unit design. However, as a new player who barely engaged with any FE fandom before, not knowing growths added another layer of perceived ambiguity and blind decision-making, which was off-putting when hacks are already more difficult than what I was used to.
I also didn’t know that not showing growths was deliberate, and meant to state “don’t worry about them”, so the idea that I was just not supposed to think about it was lost on me. Not knowing hacking conventions, I figured the designer had just forgotten to include this, the technology didn’t exist, or they had some other mysterious reason I hadn’t considered. Ultimately it didn’t impact my experience THAT much, but might be something for hackers to think about.

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I prefer unit design when information is not kept from the player, especially when it’s a key part of most unit’s design.

I don’t feel like I can really trust hacks that neither make their unit’s growths public or make it show in game.

I just think it is QoL

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this got me thinking:
what if there was a way to make a toggle which allowed you, the player, to choose wether growths were visible or not? ik it isnt much of anything but i wonder how people would feel about that.

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I think you should show growths unless there is a story or gameplay reason not to, QOL should always be included otherwise, for example in the ds [good] version of 999 you must restart the game over when you go for a new ending the port of 999 added a chapter select like feature and this is awful because it makes the themes worse, makes the game harder to understand, and allows you to miss a plot critical scene.

If you are using FE6 base it is fine to not have growth toggle as FE6 is very limited and I don’t believe is able to show growth.
In the case of FE6 documentation should be provided.

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10

I think only the most important growth, Skill, should be shown. You always want to know if your characters have a 35% skill growth without anyone knowing.

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I used Rinkah in Fates because I thought she was going to have a lot of STR and not be basically a tank with low-ish HP. Silly me, apparently, she never got a damn strength level up and only got anything when she promoted and I’m never going to get over my first playthrough of Fates.

Yeah, I much rather have the growths there so I know what to expect, sometimes you’re going to have characters that look like they’ll fill a role, but nope they’re actually support!

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still not posting growths

My real stance is though, the numbers themselves are misleading; just because something is 80% doesn’t mean effectively 100%; it means 80%. It doesn’t mean if it doesn’t proc 4/5 times, the next time it will proc guaranteed, it means each individual chance is 80%. I’ve always felt like having the growth information has only benefited me when there are obvious gimmick/throwaway characters, and otherwise has skewed my perspective of units. I prefer the method @BwdYeti started, which is showing the player what the average stats would look like for the unit at their particular level.
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The more red, the more that stat is below average, the more green, the more that stat is above average. This metric to me works better because it tells you if this unit is doing well immediately and can be a good way to determine if its worth investing in them further. Technically, this does show growths (because you can calculate it somewhat), but there’s no hard number given to the player.

Additionally, I’d like to add that my experience of misleading percentages is not a FE exclusive metric, and to me is most prominent in Pokemon. Focus Blast is known as an extremely unreliable move, yet the accuracy is 70% despite feeling like 50%. Scald is an infuriating move because it’s 30% chance to burn feels like it’s 90%. Same chance (30% to miss, 30% to burn) yet the perception of it is very different. I’m not advocating for hiding hit rates or anything, though.

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I just like transparency in games, so showing growths appeals to that. Giving the player access to as much information as is reasonable improves decision-making. Personally, I can get paralyzed when deciding which units to use, so knowing roughly how they’ll grow helps with that.

For example, you may come across a basic looking Axe bro, but upon checking his growths you see he has a ridiculous Speed growth. That alone could be the deciding factor between whether or not they join the squad.

I guess you could get that information across via another method, but I like numbers :sweat_smile:

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As others have said, it’s very much case by case. Visible growths can work in some contexts while hidden ones can work in others. I used to be very pro-visible growths when I first started playing hacks, but as I played more hacks I began to find that FE was more interesting for me 99% of the time when the game is designed around growths that are both a: integrated with individual character lore in some way and b: not easily accessible, so that the lore is something the player has to go out of their way to think about.

For this to work, I do think it’s on the onus of the hacker to not design any deliberate trap units unless the signposting is very clear, and to tie any especially out-of-place growths to some visible point of characterization. Mithra from Code of the Black Knights is a great example where she has piss poor Skill because she’s literally blind, which is easy to infer off context from the moment she joins. But I would’ve found it a lot more satisfying to play the game not knowing this until I opened the game in Builder after finishing it, rather than immediately seeing the red label on her Skill stat. Deducing that kind of detail on your own from the narrative that has been presented to you and feeling vindicated in those predictions is a feeling that you just can’t get when the growths are handed to you on a platter.

I wouldn’t be opposed to locking visible growths behind reading an individual character’s story content though.

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Personally, showing growths for me brings out the “Elite” side of me, which derails my enjoyment of a playing through a game/hack for the first time. I know in the back of my mind it’s not a good idea to train up the bad GBA Archer.

Of course, playing the game again I’ll dig into the units growths and use whoever I want, and I’m a sucker for the sticking with what Vanilla does well in my opinion.

There’s a great video by Mythril Zenith that goes into great detail on both sides of the spectrum if your interested:

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16

I think hidden is better, by leaps and bounds. While showing growths - on an objective level - is a nice feature for some, it’s also harmful and I find the cost higher than the reward.

tl;dr: If I trust the developer, seeing growths doesn’t change anything; if I see them ‘bad’ units are at best a chuckle before benching; and whether I think a unit is bad isn’t accurate to the game’s reality. Not knowing chances creates interest, unlike how not knowing numbers creates rage.

Unit Balance & Archetypes inform growths

For example, if the units are actually balanced against the game, I should be able to beat it with most combinations of units. If I know a unit’s got an 80% and keeps missing it, I’m going to be upset, but if I don’t know that, then I have nothing to get mad over as long as they’re getting stats. I may assume a character has growths that are nothing like they have, but because the growths are random it’s entirely plausible and even normal that I will get the unit’s 10% growth as my first level and not see their best growth hit until their 3rd and 4th levels.

Secondarily, a lot of unit archetypes have growths heavily correlated to their bases, like, Myrmidons have 5 / 30% strength and 10 / 60% skill and speed. They just will, that’s how Myrmidons work. Those attributes are what define the class. If a unit bucks the trend, it will probably show me that it bucks the trend after a few levels and I can either keep with them or swap them out - over the course of any reasonable campaign, the developer already has to give new units that are viable to swap in, or chances for weaker ones to catch up.

This all comes down to, in essence, having trust and faith of the developer: They are not here to troll me. The level 5 unpromoted unit in chapter 15 of 25 has comparatively high growths, not total trash ones.

That, of course, comes from how the developer wants the player to beat the game. It’s not adversarial, despite the fact that they are the one putting the challenges in front of me.

Effects of growths and showing them

Because of that, showing growths feels a bit like the developer saying either they don’t deserve that trust, or that something is weird with many of the units.

It’s also the case that growths… are actually not that important a lot of the time. If you’re thinking about an average, 5% growth maps to 1 stat per 20 levels - and most games do not let units get to 20/20, it’s way more common for the game to end at L10 promoted - and units don’t always get to L20, and very few join at L1. So a 20% growth difference can easily map to only average change of 3 points because the unit only gets 15 levels in a playthrough - very significant, but also not make-or-break for a given unit if it has other stats.

People can and will see a unit who has 6 / 20% speed and say “oh bad unit” even if that unit is actually one of the best units in the game from their other stats because of what kinds of enemies you deal with. It’s incredibly disheartening to watch people pivot away from a character because they check the growths - that frequently barely matter! - and even worse, these snap judgments are wrong plenty often.

Like, consider: Roy is actually a competent fighter. He’s not got excellent combat, but even on Hard Mode he does not struggle to hit or deal damage or risk dying in one hit often. Yet people will tell you that Roy has bad combat, which comes from three things: He has 5 move in a game that’s loaded with good cavalry, his promotion time is obscenely inexcusably late, and he must seize every throne so it’s “inefficient” when he’s fighting - or even walking on his own because of said 5 move.

In a similar way, look at Blazing Blade - even in Hard, most enemies will have attack speeds less than 16 up until the actual final chapter, so the fact that a given unit is slow doesn’t really matter. Oswin is a fantastic unit despite having 5 / 30% speed because that’s actually enough to double.

What if the developer's messing around?

Let’s look at the other end - If the units are not balanced, then seeing growths… lets me know that? And then I don’t use the unit. What was the point of giving me a unit that has garbage growths if I can immediately see that it has bad growths and therefore no payoff for use?

If units don’t have growths implied by their class or bases, then I find this out without investing anything into them and decide if I want to use them or not. Frequently, this isn’t meaningfully different than the case earlier, however, because whether I use a unit initially is dependent on how many units I have and what stat profiles those units cover -

No matter what the unit’s growths are, if I have zero units with Res and you give me a unit who joins with 10, I will use that unit when you throw eight mages at me. They’re the only unit that can perform a job that I’m in need of.

Similarly, if you give me an armor knight in a chapter that’s full of Hammers, I’m not deploying them, and probably even if I know the unit has turbojacked growths, because using the unit will be such a total pain in the ass that it doesn’t seem like it will be fun, which is what I am ostensibly playing a game for. But if you give me a ranged attacker in a map full of choke points, that’s much more palatable!

One of the most fun times I ever had with units was with Eliwood - his growths, being 30~50, make his stats at any given point in time incredibly chaotic. Sometimes he’s the best unit and sometimes he’s the worst unit, and that’s really neat. But if I saw his growths, I’d be put off by this trait! He doesn’t do something well, and that means I have to constantly play around his progress. Which is actually really nice.

It’s also sort of the case that, generically, having randomness and chaos is one of the only unpredictable elements - just like hit rate - and having these is very good because it creates slack that prevents the game from becoming a puzzle where you have to figure out the intended solution.

1 to 12 preferred hiding chances

FE1 to 12, the only other piece of hidden information about units is how 4/5/8/9/10’s skills exactly work - the proc rates are hidden. Just like growths, that’s also a random chance of an event occurring.

Most skills that are consistent, and the ones that actually affect damage ie. Counter, Cancel, Luna; or mid-turn recovery ie. Sol, do have their actual influence listed.

The only ones I know that don’t give information like that are Renewal and Corrosion, which say “a set amount” and not mentioning that the durability damage scales with user level respectively.

But then 13 made it so that every proc rate is exposed! And yet, they still hide growths.

Because at the end of the day, the thing that defines Fire Emblem is its simplicity and the thing that seeing growths does is make things complicated. It asks you to judge how much growths matter, how much experience units will get and how much that means their growths affect their stats -

But the point has never been about planning around the future. You don’t know the plot in advance. The characters that you get, what they wield let alone what their stats are. That’s really cool and interesting. While tactically the game is about simple, understandable stats and formula like X = A + B - C, Fire Emblem has always been “Oh, what will happen on this journey” - and that requires not knowing things.

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I think that growths are one of those things that the player doesn’t need. I’ve got a little blurb in my project’s FAQ about behind-the-curtain numbers and whatnot:

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Yeah, I think this is better than showing growths if I had to choose between them, although both is fine with me. Unfortunately this is tough to implement in the gba engine due to the limited sram and the fact that information about when you promote and what stat boosters you use is not saved anywhere. It’s something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a long time to maybe try and implement.

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i think it’s cheating and also gives a false impression on the characters if you show them.

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I live in AMERICA and in my AMERICAN household we DO NOT display accurate information. All prices are PRE-TAX, Terms and Conditions are ARCANE and LEGALLY UNENFORCEABLE, and companies do NOT give you salary expectations when hiring. In order to achieve TRUE FREEDOM, you COMMUNIST ANIME CHESS players need to HIDE YOUR GROWTHS, or at least utilize a capitalistic degree of OBFUSCATION (read: lie about them).

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