hi guys im writing an armor knight post because i wanted to but i havent completed it because i became very sleepy and went to bed. please keep the discussion in this thread going until July 15th so my post isn’t late.
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An Addendum to an Addendum: Absolution’s Monks Are, Like, Pretty Cool, Actually
Absolution does the same gimmick for its light tomes, but it makes that gimmick actually matter by having both of the player’s monks actually care about the stat bonuses they receive from their light tomes.
Jean is the first of the two monks you get in Absolution, and his combat art makes the bonuses from light tomes matter by just making them huge. When he’s using Prism, the basic light tome, Ray, goes from giving him just +2 Spd to bringing him up a whole speed tier with +6 Spd. This combat art doesn’t just care about the bonuses from tomes, though; bonuses from barrier staves, fire balm (+2 str/mag to a unit Evelia heals), and food (basically tonics) will also be tripled.
There is the issue of Jean needing to get into three combats to charge up his combat art, but it’s actually pretty solvable using Absolution’s various tools. I won’t go too in-depth here for the sake of space/relevance, but the Special Spiral skill recharges Prism whenever Jean uses it, and thunder bangles, opinean spuds, and/or the Shatter skill can give Jean that initial charge to use Prism for the first time.
Jean also has a personal skill, New Threads, which I love. It both communicates one of his personality traits and gives his light magic the vibe of being expensive (you can burn money on fresh tomes for Jean just for his skill) without actually making it prohibitively expensive (you can still use worn-down tomes if you need to).
Bishops in Absolution get crit +10 on promotion, which, combined with Jean’s personal skill and the moderate amounts of crit present on light tomes, also helps him fulfill the “crit mage” fantasy that vanilla monks try and fail to achieve. Enemy crit avoid stats in Absolution are high due to its unique crit/crit avoid formula, so his crits aren’t going to be guaranteed or anything, but he can still build up a high enough final crit rate to be noticeable.
The second monk you get, Femi, is a bit hard to talk about because a bug with the way his defining personal skill, Rally, is displayed makes it go off the side of the screen. The gist of it is that he passively spreads his stat boosts to allies within 2 tiles of him and also causes those nearby allies (but not Femi himself) to regenerate 50% of their maximum HP at the start of each player phase.
Femi’s statline is mediocre, and as such, he cares more about the stat boosts from his tomes as tools to buff his allies than as tools to buff his own combat. He does still want to engage in some combat, though, both to improve his chip capabilities and to build the weapon rank needed to expand his buff repertoire with higher rank light tomes.
Bishops in Absolution do not get staves. As such, while Femi’s healing output is pretty much unmatched (if you can finagle multiple injured units to be in range), the timing of it can be awkward, as he can’t heal units between their player phase combat(s) and their enemy phase combats (without using universal options such as pancakes). The bright side of not having access to staves is that his inventory slots are freed up for more tomes, which helps keep the flexibility of his gimmick from being stifled by inventory slot limitations. Or, well, it mostly does, as he still needs to reserve an inventory slot for a hoplon guard to counteract his abysmal Lck base and Lck growth (5%!).
To reinforce his support role, Femi’s combat art refreshes other units. This sounds huge on paper, but in practice, you’re probably gonna forget he has it because it takes 6 combats to charge and there’s not a visual indicator that it’s charged unless you check his stat screen.
Idowu is your only other light user in Absolution, and he doesn’t really care about the details of Absolution’s light tomes. He likes the 100 base hit of Ray to compensate for his low Skl, I guess. Also, he’s a troubadour, and this post is about monks.
Conclusion
“They grant various stat bonuses while equipped” can work as a design for light tomes, you just need to make the bonuses large enough to be meaningful. Jean demonstrates this by multiplying these bonuses, while Femi demonstrates this by spreading them out to other units. Note that you don’t need skills to do this; you can just directly make the granted stat bonuses large.
(Image is from An Unexpected Caller, which doesn’t use stat bonuses for light tomes broadly but still serves my point here.)
okay I promise I won’t make any more effortposts in this thread, I just thought the addendum to an addendum bit was funny
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I can’t say I find Jean all that interesting, but Femi is absolutely a nutters unit. I adore that little boy, and coolness must run in the family genes because his uncle is also GOATED.
Thank you for the response, ATHATH.
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Armor Knights are considered complete dogshit garbage. Is there a way to change this?
I don’t even gotta get into it man we all know that armors are poop from butt. They have low speed and movement in the speed and movement game and they also have shaky hit rates like half the time. That in mind, why are there a bunch of armor knights that people are actually fans of using?
The thing about armors is that they’ve got the archer thing going on, where a lot of them are disliked for being ineffective, but hated for feeling wrong in practice. We’ve all probably seen like five video essays a year show up on our youtube recommendations about archers throughout the series. They were bad when they had no stats and there was no difference between hitting fliers with a bow and literally anything else, but got good when games like FE11 and FE14 featured bows strong enough to OHKO wyverns and more aggressive map design that necessitated having a guy or two dedicated to OHKOing wyverns. I don’t really need to mention their stats becoming respectable because I’ve implied that with the previous sentence, but I will say that I kinda get why a lot of them were so shitty in the first half of the franchise considering half of them were just civilians who got into hunting to put bread on the table.
Regardless, I’m trying to say that people aren’t down with a lot of them because there’s a lot of entries in the series where archers, the guys made to kill fliers, are bad at killing fliers. Similarly, the real reason I think armors have such a bad rep isn’t that they’re slow or even the whole movement thing, but that there’s a lot of entries in the series where armor knights, the hard hitters who don’t die, are bad at both hard hitting and not dying.
Oswin rules. I’ve been playing FE7 HHM for the first time lately so I can earn the right to call Rebecca meta and he can just kinda walk in and take no damage and then hit stuff, maybe even double a sufficiently sluggish enemy. Hector also does all of that, though, but people love Oswin because he does what you expect him to do instead of getting slaughtered like Wendy or Wallace or whatever. Part of this is because a lot of FE7 maps have chokepoints he can use to block reinforcements on his own, but I’ve still seen plenty of people bring him to maps like the Vaida one and he does fine. That map is big as hell! Clearly the movement isn’t such a huge issue or else I’d see people double-deploying Matthew and Legault in every playthrough, right?
My nutso theory here is that every unit has some sort of niche, even if the niche is just being sorta generically good or being on a horse, and bad units are usually bad for not having the niche they should have and not making up for it with something else. That’s why you see people unironically going up to bat for Selfina and Hugh - having a horse and hitting resistance are functions of their class that can’t be totally negated by bad stats.
I’m not saying units are only good when they’re following class stereotypes, plenty of hacks have had really fun fast armors and buff myrmidons and such, but these subversions of expectations lead to units that can get a lot done. Meanwhile, Lyn is so underpowered without playing through her mode that she does single-digit damage to cavaliers with her sword that has effective damage against cavaliers. Her class gimmick is to be a glass cannon, but she forgot the cannon part and all she can do is run around really fast. It’s like how nobody goes for Logan in TLP because myrmidons are supposed to have low strength and high speed, and instead of ‘low’ strength they gave him ‘no’ strength, which rhymes. This post has been kinda barebones so I’ll put a picture of his stats here that I got from the Blastinus playthrough on LPArchives.
Yeuuup. Anyway, the point is that lopsided statlines are supposed to provide value. Myrmidons are supposed to deal lower-than-average damage and excel against units with low bulk because of their near-guarantee to hit twice. Bad myrmidons like Radd or something don’t have enough of their “high” stat to fill their niche, and the ones who do have such exaggerated “low” stats that the niche ends up being useless. Replace “myrmidons” with “knights” and “Radd or something” with “The FE6 guys” and you should know where I’m going with this if I wrote it right.
By all accounts, Barthe is a good knight on paper. Bors and Wendy are like some other shit so I’m just not gonna bother bringing them up. He has huge defense with one of the highest growths in the game and weapon triangle advantage against the idiotically fast sword users that can one round WAY too much of your roster for me to consider FE6 HM a difficulty worth discussing seriously. Neat, right?
Problem 1: The iron sword mercenaries in his join chapter deal 0-1 damage against him. Awesome sauce. As soon as they start stepping it up statwise and getting better weapons, he’s gonna start facing double digit damage from enemies he should be eating alive, and he already faces that in his first few chapters from most enemies using axes. What’s the point of having a tank when most other units are better at tanking than him? Even when he promotes and gets triple weapon ranks, the +1 defense from the weapon triangle really isn’t going to do much by the time it happens.
Problem 2: He has no real impact. We all already know about the 2% resistance growth, and 5 base speed 20% growth yeah yeah uhuh. His skill and luck are awful with a 25% and 20% growth respectively, and that combined with the steel lance he starts with gives him 68 hit in total. Yowza! Even if he could hit, he’s really not doing much. A 60% strength growth is actually really nice, but 10 strength at level 9? On someone who never doubles? He’s doing chip damage at best. Even his health isn’t too crazy, a 100% growth is a cool gimmick but 29 HP is pretty standard for a level 9 unit. Did you know he can never cap HP naturally? He makes it to 59 at 20/20, one off the cap. That’s super, Barthe.
Put all of this together and even if he had 40 base defense, he would just be average. Benny, the version of Barthe that deserves to live, is a good example of this: He’s excellent at surviving against enemies that do nothing but target his massive defense, but he needs outside help to take them out a lot of the time and mages or berserkers slaughter him easily. It’d be fine if his defense was super super exceptional, but you get wyverns and Xander and Camilla so like, you know. Compare him to Effie, who has a far warmer reception in the meta because of her offensive potential and ability to avoid doubles. Fire Emblem gameplay is considered to be at its best when maps involve a lot of forward momentum, and while living through an enemy phase is wonderful, doing only that doesn’t contribute much. Could you imagine how people would talk about Wolf and Sedgar if they couldn’t use horseslayers or bows?
The examples I’ve brought up have been a little disjointed, but I think they all show off what I’m trying to say well enough: Units made to fill stat-based niches should have the necessary stats for it, and they should have some way of contributing to clearing chapters if that niche doesn’t provide it. DSFE generals have a pretty good track record, but it’s for the same reason DSFE archers do - you give them a forged silver bow and they deal 60 damage to a wyvern and there is infinite joy throughout the Earth. If they didn’t have that sort of killing power, they’d take a hit from a wyvern and deal like 9 damage in return and you’d need to find someone to kill them next turn. Cool. Lowen does this shit often, but he can additionally use his iconic horse to rescue someone who just killed an enemy and get them somewhere they won’t be ganked on enemy phase.
Knights should ideally make up for their low movement by having the stats to walk into enemy formations [that don’t have mages [maybe one or two mages if it’s a REALLY good knight], survive a bunch of hits while getting some nice counters in and leaving you with a weakened group of chuds to clean up when your turn comes back around. Oswin does that because he rules. Gatrie does that because he rules. Byrd does that because she rules, but a lot of you have no idea who that is because she’s from a hack.
Romhacks have been happening long enough for developers to get a really good sense of what makes Fire Emblem units work. I guess it’s kinda expected considering hackers have like 20 years of knowledge over the vanilla GBAFE devs but y’know. Romhacks have also been happening long enough for there to be a lot, so we can look at this sorta thing from pretty much every conceivable angle. Gimme a second to go through my FE hack folder.
Byrd from Sigmaraven’s Dragon Herald is kinda like the main unit I was thinking about while writing half of this. Dragon Herald is really hard and there’s a bunch of reinforcements! A lot, and they’re buff! I’ve had to reset like five times in my current because I keep savestating myself into corners. Byrd has 4 more defense than the jagen and I use her in every map even though she’s 8 levels above everyone else from the start because having huge defense, and it’s interesting because she’s got the Barthe statline I was bitching about earlier. It really shows how much a few points of skill and luck can do for consistency [alongside not having fucked up FE6 hit rates], but regardless it turns out you end up not giving a shit about 4 movement or a few icky stats if your tank can tank. Disregard everything I said about strength making or breaking a knight you can just have high enough defense to get around it. 14 base defense! Jeez……..
Hunter from DoinThangs’s The Fisher King and Zwieback from Team Adversity’s Bells of Byelen are kinda like bizarro Byrds, and therefore bizarro Barthes. Same really bad speed and resistance, but instead of having huge defense and decent strength, they have above average defense and trade counterattacking for oneshotting on player phase with huge strength. Zwieback looks like butt ass but his skill grants +25% of his enemy’s max HP as damage when they’re at full HP and Hunter gets a damage and accuracy buff when he doesn’t move very far before attacking. I’ve always kinda loved bow armors. Permanent 2+ range is a nice way to make the 4 move into less of a hassle to design and play around. Speaking of!
Every Armor Knight from SaintRubenio’s Hag In White has this going on. I’m not super into hybrids, but every armor knight in this hack having access to magic is sooooooooo cool. Aside from the 1-2 range of magic getting around the 4 movement, having the option of hitting either defense or resistance makes it really unlikely for them to not make an impact on enemy phase. Knights in this hack don’t actually have very high defense, it’s a bit like FE6 where the defensive growths trend pretty low so there’s a bunch of 35 and 40%s, but the range and HP and defense and magic come together to give you a unit you can feel way more comfortable enemy phasing with than most others. I’d say some stuff about how having a single healer makes their above-average bulk way more impactful than it would be otherwise but every other person in this thread has already done that. Thanks, guys!
Second paragraph for Hag, actually, because I didn’t mention generals getting canto+. Still 5 movement, but it adds a lot to the doing-it-all vibe that Hag armors have. They’re just really consistent all the time, it’s great. It really zeroes in on how nice it is for armors to be consistent, and to have a guy who is big walk into a place and then walk out with a bunch of guys at half HP. You know what I mean.
My armor knight from my hack would go here if I had one but I don’t.
Drake from Sacred Blaze’s Requiem has a really nice palette. I think something that doesn’t get mentioned about armors is that they just look really pleasant a lot of the time. All round and shit and they walk slow while the other guy just sorta waits to get speared in the face and then they slowly walk back. This is like one of the best battle sprites in the series. It feels soooooooooo good to have a guy who looks like this be really really strong. Drake isn’t that, but his base defense is enough for the fantasy to live for a few chapters.
Otto from ArcherBias’s Doubled or Nothing has 0 speed in a game where everyone has 0 speed, and 5 movement in a game where most units have 5 movement, but he still feels like a knight. I wouldn’t really say that he’s got the best bulk, that’s probably Lass when she gets the +3 speed triangle-neutral sword, but he’s super close. Just having great defense and nice strength and workable accuracy helps a lot, and he still has a slow vibe considering he opts for just having good stats instead of the gimmick weapons other units get that lets them maybe double sometimes. Did you guys know I’m super good at Doubled or Nothing? Final turn count of 50. Hooooh…
There’s a lot of cool armors with wonky statlines but the only one I can remember off the top of my head right now is D’Erica from SaintRubenio’s The Princess’s Lament, which is a good hack. She has gonzo speed and def and health and booty butt everything else, which feels wrong in the good way. She still has insane bulk and the lack of getting doubled honestly gives her higher survivability than most other armors, and instead of chunking a guy and barely not killing him she lightly taps a guy twice with a lance or axe and barely doesn’t kill him. Maybe she does once she starts leveling strength iunno. She’s getting the same ‘knight job’ done, but the slightly different way she goes about it is enough to feel like a nice change of pace. There’s way more knights in hacks like this and many take it to further extremes, but D’Erica is a fun example.
This post has hit like 2k words so I’m happy not having any other hacks to talk about off the top of my head. Knights fill a really neat niche of being situationally incredible and consistently pretty swell, if you give them serviceable statlines and/or situations where their stats are really useful. It’s also really easy for you to give an armor knight extra unit identity points by subverting the rigid statlines they’re expected to have. I should play more HHM. I’m on the boat map right now and Oswin taking 0 damage from the pegasi and mercenaries is probably gonna hit like crack.
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good post
I was initially surprised that you didn’t touch on the 4 mov vs. 5 mov debate (vs. the secret third option of 5 mov but no mov gain on promotion), but upon further reflection, it wasn’t really relevant to the “just give them a niche and they will feel good” thesis of your post. so, uh, never mind.
(there’s also the secret fourth option of dark stone’s +1 mov support chain between its 4 mov armors, but that one kind of fell flat because your armors in that game can promote to the 7 base mov great knight so they kind of just become paladins)
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it just kinda flew over my head bc ive never really noticed a difference between 4 move and 5 move knights in my head they all just kinda blend together for me… if movement was really such a deal breaker tormod would be higher on tier lists
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Tormod SHOULD be higher on tier lists because he is awesome. Though ironically it’s more because all mages are prime rescue targets in FE9, so his raw movement doesn’t come into play as much. Which armors usually are not, haha. Say, FE2 Lukas is one of your best warp targets (and FE15 Lukas is solid too!) so he sidesteps the movement issue, but you probably don’t wanna bother ferrying Gilliam somewhere when he won’t get anything done once he arrives at a destination. And some armors like Barthe are too fat for most people to even pick them up. Lay off the doughnuts, lego man.
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exactly!! its so bizarre how people dont fuck with tellius mages like i get theres enemies with res or whatever but cmon 1-2 range in a “”“”“enemy phase”“”“” game… whoever split anima into three separate ranks is a bad person though
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The trick is that FE9 mages are actually ballisticians in disguise (yes I made sure retina mentioned this in his writeup). The separate anima ranks were just a clever excuse to give the player more siege tomes!
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i agree with this post anima triangle exists purely to gimp when your mages can use which tomes, which is just the absolute most boring and deflating way to “”“”“”““balance””“”“”“”" your weapon drops
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idk I think some tomes being pseudo-prfs that other units can access with a significant amount of effort is kind of neat
like I think a universal anima rank is usually better, but I can see some (theoretical) design use cases for split anima ranks
it is hard to come up with unique design spaces for just three types of tomes, though, let alone six
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Pegasus Knights
In the original Greek mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse sired by Poseidon, and was ridden by Bellerophon to slay the monster Chimera. This would not be possible in any game apart from Fire Emblem Fates, due to the gender lock on the class - but only due to that. From Caeda and the Whitewings, to the Illian mercenaries, to so many more, their utility, strength, and fantasy has let them cement themselves as a staple of Fire Emblem.
The platonic ideal of a pegasus knight, or at least the default one I think, would be the classic, weak, frail, but fast and accurate lance flier. One that starts off weak and with unimpressive combat forecasts, but whose flying nature can provide unparalleled utility by ignoring mountains, cliffs, and fences to reach places no other units can reach quite as easily. This utility is part of the core conceit of the archetype - a flier with mediocre combat can provide a lot of value, compared to an infantry, or day I say, a knight, whose combat is only slightly better.
This is doubly useful due to GBA having Rescue, the ability to store a unit with less con than your aid stat. With fliers having innate Canto, pegasus knights can utilize the mounted aid formula to ferry around powerful infantry, thieves, or lords to seize points, making them capable for side objectives such as chests or villages, or for speeding up the map. This is reflect in many hacks having rescue.
To curtail this strength, Fire Emblem utilizes archers, giving bows effectiveness against fliers in order to box out certain areas with carefully placed archers, or a ballista if we’re feeling especially hateful. Wind magic has also proven to be effective, but are less effective due to often decent or serviceable resistance. With this, map design and enemy placement can be used to, on paper, give pegasus riders small routes they can use. Cliffs to block anyone off can be under the watchful eye of a sniper, a path to reward you for using a flier can be through forests or thickets, with only frailer sword users.
But of course, weaknesses can be overcome. And when your weakness is that you have everything except combat, there’s nothing that love, care, boss abuse, and performance enhancers cannot fix. Body Rings can fix the -4 AS from an iron lance. Energy rings can net you that kill. Angelic Robes and Dracoshields can turn you from a wet towel to someone who can tank a bow and kill in retaliation. A promotion from a Master Seal or Elysian Whip will give them plenty of stats and a sword, bow, or even staff for extra utility. By the end of the game, any unit can become a monster if you please, and nobody benefits more from being a monster than a flier.
Vanilla Pegasi
A Complete History Of Pegasus Knights In Fire Emblem
This is a video going through every pegasus knight in Fire Emblem. It’s long for sure, because pegasus knights have a very long history, starting from the beginning with Caeda and the Whitewings, with many many impressive performances. In this case, due to this being a effort post regarding hacking and how to use the class, we’ll go with a classic, Florina, in an era kind to flier, especially due to Rescue.
This is Florina. In Lyn mode, she starts in Ch 3, against a map with 4 brigands, 2 archers, and plenty of fences blocking off a house she can reach turn 1. She starts with a Slim Lance because, believe it or not, she loses 4 AS from starting with an Iron Lance.
As above, she’s unimpressive early on - Slim Lance deals paltry damage, holding an Iron or a Steel Lance will prevent doubles, or even cause her to be doubled herself. But Lyn mode is very kind to her, offering everything a flier would want - outdoor maps with plenty of mountains, rivers, and bridges to fly across, weak enemies you can set up kills for, and most importantly, an Angelic Robe and an Energy Ring, two statboosters she enjoys a lot. Oh, and effectives are only 2x here - she’ll fear bows early on, but patching up her HP and Defense will let her reach thresholds to survive bows far earlier than in FE6 or 8.
With Lyn Mode under her belt, she’ll remain a mainstay in the army for the whole game - offering competitive offenses, and when that fails, using her minimal Con to Rescue and ferry units like Marcus or Hector where they need. Rescue being what it is gives a massive boost to mounted units, especially fliers to ferry someone over a mountain. Even if you skip Lyn mode and go straight into Hector mode, Florina’s no slouch by sheer utility of flying and Rescue. And even if you don’t deploy Florina…
There’s always a second or third flier waiting in the wings. That isn’t to say she’s a replacement - the more, the merrier. It’s well worth deploying them alongside your wyverns if they’ve grown fine.
Hackrom Pegasi
There’s always a push and pull compared to the times. When a class is good, you want to see it be bad. When a class is bad, you want to see it be good. There’s been many questions of “How do I make archers good?” or “How do I make armors good?”. The reverse would be, “How do I nerf cavaliers?”, or “How do I make wyverns bad?” While my initial expectations were that they’d lean towards the latter, the impression early game pegasi have managed to thread the needle somehow. There are some that are worse, some that are better. But none have ever fallen into the hypothetical “10 MOV, 0 STR flier that rescue drops” where they’re all utility, no fun. Instead, I’ll talk about a few situations that are similar or contrast the existing pegasi template, and how they benefit from certain things.
TLP - Statboosters
I’ve played TLP a long, long time ago, so these are hazy memories. Inanna joins in Sieg mode, The Last Promise’s Lyn Mode equivalent, which cannot be skipped. She’s fine, an early game pegasus knight for sure. Not bad offensive growths if I recall correctly, not amazing either. However, just like Florina, she has unique advantages from being in this mode.
The image shamelessly ripped from an LP like many others, there are both buyable Angelic Robes in the last chapter, and an early Elysian Whip in Chapter 3, her join chapter. These won’t carry over, so you need to choose who to invest in - prime candidates being Cia and Inanna.
I personally sold everything to get Inanna to 40 HP after promotion, shoring up her middling HP. WIth all this investment, when she rejoined on Chapter 16 she was… solid, to say the least. My Ben had turned out cracked somehow, and my Karina was no slouch – wyverns are often considered one of the best classes for reason. Still, she was great, and having a high hp, tanky promoted flier felt great.
Unfortunately, Lirin the second one didn’t take off. This is purely off my subjective experience and rng, so this isn’t a unit evaluation, but the Lirin in my save was incredibly strength screwed. She failed to pick up kills, and was frequently weighed down and doubled. Unfortunately, with 2 / 3 fliers to invest in by the time she arrived, I didn’t particularly want to invest extra in her. This was a flier without statboosters or much grinding. She got exp, she got kills, and she turned from bleh to serviceable.
Serviceable was enough.
There is a booster called the Ether Sphere, which gives 10 HP and 3 to every stat. This is a very, very competitive booster. You can give it to Howard, you can give it to Kevin, or you an give it to Alice, the final Pegasus Knight who joins. With the booster, she performed better than Inanna, albeit with less HP. The reason why I invested a high value item for her was because you can pull off the Triangle Attack, a guaranteed crit. In current FE8 hacks where enemies are less bulky and you have more offenses, this is less useful. In The Last Promise, there are multiple high dodge, bulky throne bosses. A guaranteed crit on one of them made bringing Lirin along acceptable.
In the end, I think it was worth deploying and using all 3. Ben and Karin, my wyvern riders, and Howard, the late game paladin, had better performances than all three, despite my investment. However, 3 more fliers, ranging from good to fantastic, is nothing to sneeze at, and Inanna got her time to shine on her own during Sieg mode.
Shackled Power
I think it’s worth posting this effort post about Eileen, which says exactly what I was going to mention on Shackled Power.
She’s unimpressive in combat initially, has poorer growths than most other early game pegasi at 30 STR, and still manages to contribute due maps being designed around letting her maneuver through tricky terrain, her join chapter being a highlight.
Embers Entwined
This is Deesa, your Chapter 1 Pegasus. There are several chapters including cliffs and thickets, villages, even desert maps to fly across freely. On the flip side, there’s these.
Navigating these, not letting Deesa die, and training her up lets you get a good head start for a good flier, even when Wisteria, a solid wyvern joins. I did this myself, and Wisteria and her made the desert maps early on a lot more bearable, and with her good growths I invested certain boosters into her.
Then she died, and I got stuck with this one in Taking Back the Town.
Mary’s not the traditional pegasus rider. She has swords, leaving her without the Saunion. She has worse strength and speed for her level and join time than Deesa. You even just got out of 2 desert maps where flier movement was appreciated. To make use of her, I tried using the Wind Sword, to at least try and nail down fliers with effective damage - and even then you have a few sword units who would like that 1-2 range instead.
What she offers instead is defense, which, with my army, was surprisingly useful. Without Wisteria (who likely wouldn’t have had the same defense at this level, she was a useful shield that could swoop in and block a spot. The Arbalest does negate this and make her moot with HP that’s just okay, but she can still soak a hit and even kill if you throw a pity Brave Sword. This was an odd ironman run, and it did show that giving worse and worse offenses can let pegasus knights struggle. However, the unique statline did allow for a different usage and role she could fill - not unusual for a telephone, but still relatively novel.
Wing Spear
I can see the writing on the wall with this writeup so far, so rather than just talking about certain ones that may or may not fit the template, I’ll talk about a rather common trend - the Wing Spear equivalent. The Wing Spear, debuting in FE11, was a Caeda exclusive - a rapier-esque lance that makes her far, far better. There is a non-zero amount of pegasus knights who follow this trend - be it with a literal Wing Spear, or with an effective weapon, or a skill or something that incentivises it, or even just a reaver prf. Something that turns the grind of feeding kills to a weaker pegasus knight into less of a grind, giving matchups to win.
Vision Quest
Natsuko from Vision Quest starts with swords, a type that does not weigh her down, and has the Lady Blade, a weapon great against brigands in her starting chapter and in the port chapter soon after. Not a prf, but it does give her good match ups. There is something to say about her starting skill, Lightweight, which gives AS upon holding 3 or less items. With the lady blade and iron sword not weighing you down, this skill is what lets her make or break certain speed thresholds. If you pick up an item from a village, pushing you to 4? This’ll become an issue.
Absolution
Absolution leverages its unique favored weapon system, divebomb, and the power of having a starting inventory to help give her good early matchups. While not as accurate or devastating as a normal prf, having these match ups helps her snag kills, while still performing like a normal pegasi knight - one that will blow up due to being weighed a ton, but with good enough stats/growths and enough terrain that you still like her.
Four Kings
Four Kings’ whole conceit is prfs, which each of their units having their own unique prf.
With Marcie as the first flier you get, it dials it up - she’s defined by the Wardlance giving her great magic match ups, while relegating her to ferrying around. Patty’s similar - in this case, being optimized against armors with decent defense.
Dark Amulet
Freya’s largely here to show that it doesn’t have to be an effective. A reaver weapon letting her one round fighters and thus giving her good matchups is nice - though, in my playthrough, she didn’t take much time to get off the ground without it.
Cistia from Daughters of Braghedunn
Of course, there is no other unit you’d know better than your own. No other sandbox are you more familiar with than your own. So, compared to others, this is the one I have the most to say, to fit.
Years ago, when LTPhone was in development led by me, I chose to be Chapter 3. An early game chapter, one where the current party hadn’t had a pegasus knight yet. Of course, I designed the map with the flier utility in mind. Of course, I knew I couldn’t make a pegasus knight strong or abusable - what fun is a unit that would break the game? So I wracked my brain, knowing that no matter how much I nerfed a unit, she’d still be useful due to flier utility.
Meet Cistia. The fabled 0 STR utility pegasus knight. There’s an obvious twist here, of course.
Who needs Strength when you don’t need it? Cistia is a 0% flavored unit. As long as she has effective weapons like the horseslayer she starts with or the mage effective lance and the requisite enemies, she’s happy. And there’s plenty of those enemies on her starting map. She has a solid showing, with mountains and rivers and enemies that want you to cross over or run away. Not to mention, her skill gives her beautiful numbers when she’s has a good match up, and she has reposition when she doesn’t have one in sight. What a great unit!
And for the next few chapters, she’s having fun. Chapter 4? Port map with small bridges and cavaliers, as well as a dragonspear. 5? Some dragons to pick on. 6? Probably her best map the whole game - defend map with plenty of swamp to fly over, a soldier effective weapon, and many side objectives to gun for.
Then the vibes begin to change. There are less bodies of water to cross, no more villages. There’s a few more ballisticians. Your effective weapons begin to run out, or rather, you don’t get any new toys. These guys begin to appear.
Cistia is still dealing single target nukes, even against some bosses which meet the right conditions. But it’s different. You can only eke flier utility out of a flier as much as a map lets you, and the maps begin to not let you. Often times, if you’re bringing her, you’re using Cistia as a combat unit for the most part, rather than really utilizing her flying. In my own runs, Reposition, usually a winning flier skill, was rarely used.
Part of the reason why Cistia’s flying utility falls to the wayside isn’t because of other fliers. There’s a flying manakete, and you can promote a fleet into an airship, but neither is brought for big flying shenanigans, and the next wyvern is several chapters away, on another map where fliers aren’t that necessary.
It’s because the sandbox narrows the gap due to long-range attacks, baiting, and even warping. Your early-game archer has a skill that lets them set up a temporary line-locked siege shot. Your fleet? Playable ballistician. You have an early game duo that can swap places in a heartbeat across the map, a thief who phases through walls, an armor that can rescue and warp to tagged allies, and a swordsmaster that is just insane, rewarping and warping and delivering devastating 1-2 range attacks, and more. This isn’t an exhaustive list - it doesn’t include staves and items that can grant movement abilities. Best described by someone else, maps just don’t encourage high move via the move stat, and you have weirder ways of moving around that are better.
This monopoly on movement and range and presence being shattered doesn’t mean she’s unusable. In the eyes of many, her niche of obliterating a single target is enough. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s easy. I’ve seen several screenshots of high numbers against normally deadly bosses, and that’s part of the unit’s appeal. Not to mention that there are some maps that still reward fliers, even if fog or wing crushers can clip your feathers. Part of the reason this write-up took so long was that someone would pop in and mention that they liked Cistia and she’s fun, making me smile.
But Cistia sometimes doesn’t feel like a pegasus flier, or feels like changing her to a cavalier would change little. By zeroing in on the “solutions,” she gives off the opposite feel of someone like your classic flier. Overreliance on the weapons means that stat boosters don’t matter. No amount of babying will fix her strength (even though there are tools that could theoretically fix it). She’s a unit who averages out to a lukewarm reception when you take into account the hater(s) who do point out that other units can also one-round without hogging effective weapons.
In a way, she’s a success. She’s a C to B-tier flier who can’t juggernaut. She still has good numbers for people to enjoy. I don’t hate her at all. But the design was founded on an unfounded fear of making a unit too good, when in reality, it’s a lot more fun to let them grow.
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cistia mentioned let’s gooooo
some of the formatting in your post seems to be messed up? there are some paragraphs that are on single lines you have to scroll horizontally to read.
EDIT: looks like you fixed it.
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Yeah, curse of copy pasting from docs is forgetting the stray indents.
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I agree with your overall thesis for what makes wyvern knight a satisfying class to play with, but I think there’s one additional factor that adds a lot of texture to vanilla wyverns that hack wyverns can kind of struggle with: availability.
One pattern that you might notice with wyverns in the vanilla games is that a good majority of them join your forces in the chapter 10 to 15 range. Minerva, Miledy, Cormag, Camilla, Ivy, Dean (FE5), Jill (FE9), Heath kind of (FE7 chapter numbers are fake), and even Seteth all join right around there. Now, while there are obviously many reasons to delay giving the player such a broken class, why is it always right before or right around the halfway point? There are probably multiple reasons, tradition might be one, wanting to build up the class narratively through enemy wyverns before granting the power of one to the player is likely another, but I want to talk about potential reasons from a gameplay perspective.
It’s chapter 13 of the Binding Blade, and it’s your first time playing it. By now the game has gone on long enough that you’re not forced to use chumps like Bors or Wolt, and so you probably benched them a while ago. In fact you’re likely settling into a bit of a routine, fielding Marcus, Rutger, Deke, maybe you’re pondering over whether to promote Alen or Lance first when suddenly, Miledy appears. This flying death machine, way above the power curve of the rest of your army, is just handed to you on a silver platter and now you’ve got to decide who she’s gonna be replacing. Is it time to finally let Marcus retire? Is my unpromoted christmas cav gonna be worth that slot? Are Rutger and Deke still pulling their weight?
This I think is the true power of the midpoint wyvern knight. It keeps your army selection from getting stale, a problem that you’re probably gonna have to reckon with at some point if you’re making a game that’s 20+ chapters long. And while it’s true that Miledy can only physically replace one of your party mainstays, she opens up the floodgates for a full reevaluation of who you’ve been bringing and why.
This is why in vanilla you’ll sometimes see the broken wyvern gets paired with a mediocre one. Miledy and Zeiss, Dean and Eda, Camilla and Beruka, all of them come with an implicit advertisement from the game. “What’s the only thing better than a flying death machine? Two flying death machines.”
This is another reason why I think Loewe feels less like a wyvern and more like an “air nomad”, as @leche put it. Even if you were to go back in time to 2021 and change all of Loewe’s stats and weapon ranks to exactly match Miledy, he still wouldn’t feel like Miledy because he joins in chapter 1. There is no status quo for him to upend. He’s the lord, he is the army’s status quo.
Does this mean hackers should also stick their wyverns in like chapter 12? I don’t think they have to, as @BandanaSplitzzz points out, Hrolf from Homecoming does a really good job capturing the wyvern vibes despite joining in chapter 4. Just because Intelligent Systems has taken an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to wyvern availability doesn’t mean you have to. The main conclusion I’m drawing from this is that wyverns as a class deserve to stand out. Unlike my own selected class, clerics, who are more than happy to fade into the background, wyverns are a class that shine in the spotlight.
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Defining a Lord
Every Fire Emblem game has a lord, or possibly several lords, but no two lords function the same. Sure you get a game over if they die and at least one of them is force deployed and seizes thrones, but what else makes a lord a lord? Lords in both vanilla Fire Emblem and romhacks tend to have most, if not all, of the following properties.
- If they die you get a game over!
The lord is the main character of the game. If there are multiple lords, they are probably collectively the most important characters to the game’s story. Thus if they die the story no longer works! There are some other guys who need to be alive for the story to work (usually the lord’s advisor character) who retreat if defeated, but lords are not content to retreat when injured and talk from the sidelines for the rest of the game. They are your main character and you are stuck with them!
- You must deploy them!
There’s a bit of wiggle room here, FE7 is not making you deploy Lyn every chapter and FE8 is not making you deploy Eirika or Ephraim every chapter on the other lord’s route. However in general you should expect the game to require you to deploy your main lord every chapter and other lords (if they exist) in at least some chapters, usually in chapters with pivotal story content. Once again, the lord is your main character and you’re stuck with them so you should get used to having them around.
- They seize the throne!
It wouldn’t do for a fighter or myrmidon to sit on the throne. The lord needs to lead by example and seize it! Many chapter objectives involve seizing a gate or throne, and the lord is the only one allowed to do this. Perhaps your lord is heroically leading the charge, or perhaps they need to be escorted by their powerful entourage, but either way you have to bring them to their destination to clear these chapters. You can’t just leave them in a corner cursing the fact that you had to deploy them, you have to bring them to the objective whether you like it or not.
- They have a rapier!
What distinguishes a sword-wielding lord from their fellow mercenary or myrmidon? It’s their fancy rapier of course! It may not be called rapier, may not be a sword, and may not even be effective against armored and cavalry enemies but don’t be fooled; the prf weapon of the lord is most certainly a rapier in spirit. The rapier gives the lord a few matchups that are much more favorable than they’d otherwise be giving them a niche where they shine even if their stats are not up to par. Some rapiers are better than others at their job, but even if the rapier is on the weaker side, it is there and you may as well use it. Or you could sell it if you’re playing FE7.
- They don’t promote normally!
Maybe they need a special item to promote, maybe they promote when the story demands it, or maybe they don’t promote at all! Regardless, many lords do not promote with a master seal unlike the rest of the cast. Vanilla Fire Emblem has shifted away from this in more recent entries (likely as a result of allowing lords to change classes), but traditionally special characters like the lord promote only under special circumstances. Sometimes this results in the lord languishing at level 20 wishing they could break free of their 5 move shackles, but that’s just one of the many struggles of being a lord.
- They get an epic dragon-slaying sword!
Is the lord rolling up to the final boss armed with their trusty rapier? Of course not! The rapier did its job for a while but now it’s time for an even cooler sword to take up the mantle. Who cares about armored and cavalry enemies when we’re in the endgame? It’s time to kill some dragons and we need a weapon that’s up to the task. The epic dragon-slaying sword is often plot relevant and signifies the final boon that the heroes need to defeat the villains. Whatever enemies you need to kill in the last stretch of the game, this sword has you covered with properties like high mt, effective damage, and fun battle music. Like the rapier, some of these are better at their job than others, but if the lord is struggling with the epic dragon-slaying sword, imagine how much they’d struggle without.
The Quintessential Fire Emblem Lord
Fire Emblem has a lot of lords and I could talk about them for ages, so instead I will only talk about the most lordly lord that comes to mind: Roy! Roy is the sole lord of his game, and as such his death is the sole game over condition, he is force deployed in every chapter, and he must seize the throne or gate to clear each chapter except the finale in which he needs to defeat the boss himself in order to get the best ending. He shows up in chapter 1 with bad stats and a rapier which is held back due to having poor mt and weapon triangle disadvantage against most armored and cavalry enemies except nomads which it’s not effective against for some reason. Despite this the rapier is still useful in a few chapters, but this is not one of the better performing rapiers in the series. If you train Roy you are rewarded with a level 20 5 move unit with bad stats and a bad rapier who refuses to promote. Most of the game is spent dragging him to the throne or gate while trying to avoid having him engage in combat. Finally, when there are just four chapters left in the game (or only one chapter if you missed any gaiden chapters), he finally promotes and gets his epic dragon-slaying sword: the Binding Blade! This sword is like another promotion (with 20 durability) that let’s him kill dragons with ease, including the final boss. It is by far the most powerful weapon in the game and it finally lets Roy pop off after spending so much time being a liability. It is the most effective and story-appropriate way of defeating the final boss even if Roy has not leveled up much in the playthrough.
Roy if he was Awesome
Enough about vanilla, let’s talk about the romhacks. Roxelana from Drums of War is in many ways similar to Roy. She is the main character with all the normal main character traits regarding forced deployment, seizing thrones, and game over upon death. She starts off looking like this.
Since Drums of War speeds through the early game, Roxelana’s base stats are worse than they seem at first glance; they are passable for her join time and subpar for her level. She can take a few hits but struggles to double most enemy types and doesn’t hit particularly hard. However, she is armed with an incredible rapier that puts Roy’s to shame. The hanger’s description is pretty hardcore, and the weapon does not disappoint. Like in many other FE lords, Roxelana often faces weapon triangle disadvantage when using the hanger to crush armor and slay horsemen, but she can simply power through it with her high skill stat and weapon mt. Cavaliers will usually go down in a single blow and ironclads (armor knights) will get doubled and die to the second hit, and since there are many enemies in this game who are vulnerable to Roxelana’s hanger, it is easy to level her up quickly. Even against enemies it’s not effective against, it has the hit and mt of a steel sword which is pretty nice at this point in the game, and with 60 uses, there’s no need to hold back. Instead of looking for scraps with a flimsy rapier, she’s able to generate substantial exp from the hanger. Quite early in the game, a story event occurs and she gets a unique promotion item which can (and probably should) be used immediately, after which she will probably look something like this.
Wow that’s a lot of 3’s! While she doesn’t get a new weapon type or more movement, she gains a lot of stats and +15 extra crit chance. This combined with her high skill stat and fast S rank in swords (she is likely to hit S rank from her promotion bonus) she will have crit rates around 25-30 vs many generic enemies without even needing a killer weapon. To make things even better for Roxelana, 18 speed is plenty to double many enemy types of the rest of the game, making her quite good at combat without needing to rely on the hanger anymore (though it’s still great of course).
The game progresses and Roxelana gets a few more goodies: an extra copy of the hanger, a 20 mt dragon-slaying sword that doesn’t weigh her down, and an S rank brave sword that probably doesn’t have anyone else who wants to use it. None of these are huge game changers but they are certainly nice to have and add a bit more unique power to the game’s Lord. Ultimately, Roxelana follows the same blueprints as Roy, but ends up being a much stronger and much more Lord unit than he is. All this is to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing what vanilla FE has been doing for decades if you design your game in such a way that it works out. In the case of Drums of War, Roxelana’s numbers and glow-ups are designed in a way that makes her never useless, sometimes great, and always unique among the game’s many other units.
Leading by Example
For a very different red haired lord, Cerulean Crescent’s Ellerie is as unique as it gets. They say an image is worth a thousand words. Here’s two.
Yeah. She can also use staves but she doesn’t really have the time for this when she can refresh a bunch of units each turn and can reliably delete three sword enemies per chapter. It’s not an exaggeration to say Ellerie warps CC’s gameplay around her. Every turn multiple units’ movements will depend on where Ellerie will be when she kills an enemy. Later you get a lance that grants galeforce and upon promoting Ellerie gets 8 move an a mount leading to even more insanity.
Aside from the obligatory main character stuff like forced deployment and needing to be kept alive, Ellerie as a unit isn’t breaking the mold in ways that other CC units are not. All units in this game have a powerful personal skill and many have a powerful prf. Ellerie doesn’t even promote under unique circumstances but despite all this she is so centralizing thanks to her skill that she never lets you forget who the game’s main character is.
Two Lords?
Forget games FE7 and FE8 where the non-main lords don’t really matter. Some FE romhacks have multiple lords who share the spotlight. Shackled Power has Prosel as an axe-wielding rapier lord and Marilyn who is very similar to a regular cleric. Unlike most units in this game, they also have skills!
Prosel’s str/spd/luck are solid but the rest of his stats are okay at best. His prf, the royal chopper, is essentially an axe version of a rapier with fantastic mt and hit. Effective weapons are generally great in this game and the royal chopper is no exception. He also is the only unit who can shove in the game and he can open chests and doors in case your thieves are elsewhere or undeployed. Marilyn is basically just a regular cleric with light access (this isn’t very impactful) and extra staff range. She is one of just two staff users you will have until you get promoted units so she is naturally a very important unit during these times.
Both of these lords take their time promoting. They each have a fitting story moment that causes them to promote and by the time they finally promote they will likely have been level 20 for some time and the rest of your army has probably promoted many chapters ago. However, neither of them are liabilities when forced to be deployed prior to promotion. Shove is unique to Prosel and it keeps him useful even in scenarios where his combat is not up to par, as does his ability to kick open locks in relevant maps. Shackled Power’s large maps and Marilyn’s magic-focused statline make her great at sitting in the back and healing units with physic in scenarios where she can’t easily be kept safe.
Once they promote, they get some new fun properties but nothing to shift the paradigm. Prosel gets access to bombs (a special weapon type that few classes can access) and later gets a nice lategame prf. Marilyn gets a solid boost to her combat stats and a new weapon type, though she will probably remain primarily a staffer. Ultimately they never do anything too crazy but through their highs and lows they will always fill a useful niche and have some special flair over other units in this game.
The only one who can do the thing
In Hag in White, Kyra is the primary lord and she a bow user with a str focused statline. She does cool things that are hard to talk about without spoilers so I won’t. Just play the game, it’s really good. Apate is your secondary lord and your only healer because healing magic is illegal. Vulneraries are inefficient and forts don’t heal so you will rely on her more than you’ve ever relied on a healer before. The pacing of many maps is dependent on how you can move Apate to heal whoever you need to heal. Maps with splits often have a side that makes fast forward progress because Apate is there and the side that chugs vulneraries and crawls along because Apate is absent. She is perhaps the most centralizing unit I have ever seen in any SRPG. She makes the entire gimmick of the game work and as a result Hag in White is truly unique in how it plays.
Four Lords?
Four Kings has four lords for most of the game. This game gives every character (except the bard) a prf so the lords having prfs isn’t particularly remarkable. Walter and Lionel are designed like traditional lords, being needed to seize gates and thrones and joining with prfs that function similar to rapiers. On the other hand, Zachary and Ava are not only lords as well but also your only thieves! In Four Kings, almost every chapter has something to steal making these two units you’d always want to bring along. Ava uses bows and has pretty solid combat and Zachary is a prepromoted sword user and acts as the game’s Jagen. As the game progresses, Zachary falls further and further behind the rest of your units, eventually needing a pure water or angelic robe to not die in one hit to bolting. More than the traditional lords in this game, he is someone who needs to be protected and escorted to the objective like many vanilla FE lords before him. All this results in a cool dynamic where in many maps you need to bring your traditional lord to the primary objective and your thief lord to the secondary objective.
The Fake Lord
In A Vestrian Tale, the thief Ezekiel is functionally the lord of the game. However, someone else entirely has the “Lord” class. Coventry joins with minimal fanfare, no speaking lines, and no weapons at the start of the game’s third chapter. He has paragon, a max level of 30, and cannot promote reminiscent of Marth from the Archanea games. He also has E rank in all four weapon types so players can be flexible with how they want to train him. All his stats are mediocre except luck but he levels up so much that he will likely end up with some stats turning out well. There’s nothing stopping non main characters from having a unique lord class, even if they are not the lord of the game. AVT does this to great effect with Coventry being a very memorable character despite not having no dialogue outside of a few optional conversations.
Jacques
Perhaps Roy was too strong and instead the lord should be a complete liability for the entire game. Westrian War’s Jacques has awful bases, awful weapon rank, no prf, decent growths, and supply as his sole personal skill in a game where everyone gets one. His only useful trait is that he can shove. He used to not promote and though a promotion was added in an update, realistically he is not making it to level 10. Despite all this, would Westrian War be a better game if he wasn’t totally useless? Perhaps not! He is about as close to a non-unit as it gets (aside from the rally luck civilian) and as such he demands no exp, no weapons, and no consideration aside from keeping him alive and sometimes dragging him to objectives. In a way he is more objective than unit, and he serves this purpose well.
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SOLDIER
1 – The Literal Spear Carrier
Oh, soldier. What is a soldier? On paper: lancelocked infantry. But just seeing that name conjures up so many associations, right? Mostly insults. The Hackrom Soldier. It’s not a compliment. Often too balanced. Frequently undertuned. Forgettable designs harping on the same tired formulae. Et cetera, et cetera. But at the heart of this much-maligned class lies a compelling power fantasy, one that just need a little help to get to fruition. There is a reason they can be a challenging class to land, but there’s a reason we all keep trying.
Why am I doing two effortposts? Well, deeply fittingly, Soldier wound up being the leftover. When the initial set of classes got laid out, Soldier (among a few others) went unfinished, and of those who wanted to do one who hadn’t joined the project at the outset, Soldier was the one that got left behind. Let’s see if we can’t make the best of it, all the same.
2 – What’s a Goomba to a Kaga?
Back in third edition D&D, the one I know best (this explains many of my character flaws), there were two classes. Fighter was your player character class, a skilled combatant with many exceptional skills that were briefly competitive with any magic user. Fighters represented the elite of the elite, heroes, villains, people with a touch of the exceptional. And then there was Warrior. No feats. Nothing special. You had a d8 hit die, a +1 attack bonus and God have mercy on your soul. Obviously this class was tucked away in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. No player needed to know this even existed. Could be worse. In AD&D it was just ‘0 hit die humans’.
That’s the role of the Soldier, as vanilla saw it for a good long time. In FE2, granted, Soldier was a real class… sort of. The proto-armour. Which makes a lot of sense. But this isn’t really how any of us think of it now, in part because Tier 1 armours are really cool and should exist, leaving soldier kind of homeless. So in FE3, and again in FE5, they were just sort of the scrub-level generic soldier. Dude With Spear. In FE5 in particular, you had your weapon fighters and you had These Idiots and the game did not even pretend they were remotely on the same level.
GBAFE comes around and a slight rethink, for the better. Soldiers come in with unflashy, very basic animations. Guy With Helmet. Their shields look like garbage can lids. Do they even have a crit animation? Have any of you seen it, organically, in the process of gameplay? You see these scrawny little mutants in battle and you know even fucking Dorcas is gonna one-tap the poor bastard. They have high HP and nonexistent defence, which feels nice because hitting huge damage figures is fun, and they pose a threat through semi-respectable strength and lances. And through their ability to conveniently self-dispose, opening up tiles for their comrades to also hurl themselves to their deaths like lemmings off a fucking cliff.
Now, they actually do serve a very useful gameplay function! GBAFE vanilla soldiers are… cool and good and useful, actually! But are they a ‘real class’, one you’d want a unit in? Not yet. Still, Tellius rolls around and it doesn’t have the same Zidanes y Pavones approach to infantry design. Nope, everyone gets levelled out. You got your Weapon Knights and you got your Balanced Infantry Classes for each of the four. Myrmidon, Soldier, Fighter, Archer. Simple as. And soldiers were the most balanced of all. They would even get represented through Nephenee, who immediately became an internet darling through, uh, it says here on this palmcard ‘gap moe’. Jesus Christ. It would also get represented through Devdan. Then later Aran, a guy who is basically just wearing the same Daein armour as everyone else.
Still, come FE11, they were happy to leave Soldier as the red-headed stepchild again. Dark Mage is in. We’re getting Fighters and Pirates in the same class set. But soldier? Get real. Get out of here. Still, we were intrigued. We’d had a taste of the forbidden fruit, and we wanted more…
3 – Ace Thelastpromise and His Crimes
It’s pretty common in custom campaigns for a given class to scurry up the totem pole. Archers are the most obvious example; their innate strengths are irrelevant and their innate weaknesses are crippling (and their stats are bad) in FE7/8, but they’re reliably very strong. But soldiers, uh…
Let’s just say they could generally use a little more love than they tend to get.
The first hackrom soldier was Ace. You will notice him at the bottom right of this graphic. Let’s talk about Ace for a second.
Ace is… yaaaawn. Oh, excuse me. Ace is… Ace… mm…
zzz… zzz… zzz…
Whuh– ? Oh, I’m sorry, I must have drifted off for a second. Ace is a fantastic unit if you enjoy doing 7x1 damage. These stats sort of don’t look bad in a vacuum, if you compare him to a cavalier, which has (in this environment) swords and +2 movement. I don’t know, he’s probably not the worst unit in the world? He’s sort-of fast? But he’s only sort-of anything. The novelty here is that you get to use a Soldier at all, which isn’t nothing, but even then it’s treated as a joke. Sharing Ace’s join chapter is an enemy soldier boss who carries the Generic Spear which is effective (albeit FE7 effective) against Soldiers. For some reason it was a real thing in 2011 to really lean into Generic Things as a joke. I did it a lot too, I don’t know why.
I can’t be too hard on Blazer. After all, it’s a cliche in romhacks that we all include some scrub with spliced armour from one of the generic soldiers and the joke is that he’s just some dude. I mean, hell, this was also basically Nephenee’s deal. Generally this guy will have shitty bases and a balanced statspread. Now, obviously I am far above and beyond such basic, sophomoric design and would never succumb to just kidding here’s Laszlo.
While it is true that I am God’s gift to FE design and have never made a mistake in my life, let us entertain the thought that Laszlo may not be a particularly interesting or appealing unit. Now, he does have a Prf, a harpoon he can chuck to deal reliable chip damage, and this does come in handy in his join map, where he has plenty of mages and myrmidons to chip at. The rationale was that people who like shitty, dinky soldiers have a training project, but that his bases and Prf mean he’s not a liability. But the end result is he’s just sort of mediocre at everything and doesn’t have any way to stand out from the crowd. Badly designed? No. But a bit spiceless.
Now, Dzeneta has some sauce. She’s an experienced warrior lacking particular abilities, but with her heavily slanted attribute spread, her complete mastery of lances, and her ability to use not only the remaining Harpoon but her own Reaver Prf, she has a very distinct feeling. The issue is that her ‘very distinct feeling’ is up against a lot of other units who are better at ‘killing’ and ‘not dying’ than she is, and Dzeneta ultimately just falls to being undertuned, pinned down at a point where I’m not willing to overtune her. This is just… who she is.
I could post Kahn here too but I’m not going to waste my time or yours. You get the picture. GBAFE and FE9 combined to leave a blueprint, and the blueprint is kind of a trap. Lean into it and you’ll just have a bowl of pasta into which you’ve forgotten to actually add the sauce.
4 – That Like Japanese Carp Myth Thing Where It Goes Up The Waterfall And Becomes A Dragon. Yeah Like Majikarp. It’s Symbolic Or Whatever
So what actually is the class fantasy here?
Forget the jokes, the Generic Spear, the spliced armour. There is a clear and compelling vibe to the playable soldier. Are you a Warhammer guy? You know it at least by reputation, right? Comically punched-up setting of huge, anti-heroic supermen striding the field, alien monstrosities, cosmic horrors, communists in Gundams, all manner of terrors beyond comprehension. And in this world, a lot of people (myself included!) gravitate to… the Imperial Guard. What is an Imperial Guardsman? It is a guy with a flak vest and an assault rifle you can craft within an hour of starting an X-COM 1990 run. It is a hopeless conscript facing up against terrible odds, whose death will be immediately forgotten, and it’s inspiring to think that, with strength in numbers and a little bit of dawg inside, they might just hold the line. Just for long enough.
No, yeah, the model that actually looks nice here was someone else’s. Won best-painted. Came all the way from Melbourne. Nice bloke. God my old basing sucked, I promise I’ve improved a lot as a painter in recent months
… Wait, what do you mean Laszlo takes up an entire deployment slot?!
Yeah, so, uh, the underdog aspect kind of runs up against FE’s game design here. This isn’t 40k where I can push twenty guys up to midfield with the full expectation that they’re there to contest an objective for like a turn and a half, max. This isn’t AoE2 where spearmen are dirt-cheap and highly cost-effective against cavalry. Hell, this isn’t even FE from the enemy perspective, throwing garbage at you because it’s still Guy With Steel Lance, 9 Str and a Dream, and that’s still a 2HKO on soft targets.
Still, it’s a compelling fantasy. Just needs a bit of adaptation. Maybe instead of the exceptional thing being the human spirit or whatever, it can instead be… potential. What I’m saying is, you have here a class with lowish movement and a single weapon type. A class which is almost certainly on paper weaker than your cavalry. So give them the Rutger / Raven treatment and crank those numbers!
There’s an example you’re probably already thinking of. A green-haired earlygame joiner with an unassuming start but the possibility to become a genuine powerhouse you can build your battleline around. One of Luminescent Blade’s favourite units.
I’m referring, of course, to Lawrence from Dragon Herald.
Cr: Luminescent Blade
Lawrence’s start is unimpressive. He boasts a titanic 6 strength, 7 speed, 4 defence. However, as the Norwegian proverb goes, you don’t need to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than your sister. Almost everyone else in DH’s earlygame sucks complete shit too, and of those that don’t (notably Taiga), they generally have side objectives to complete and can’t waste time babysitting your future bench fodder. So there’s kills to be had, and your XP has to go somewhere, and Lawrence, through his low class power, has an accelerated progression curve and is a particularly effective candidate to get those coups de grace in. And it’s a while before you get the chance to bench anyone, so… might as well, right?
So by the time you can bench Lawrence, you don’t want to. And this is DH. Enemies are strong, tough, mean. You need someone around who won’t just laugh in the face of Death, but will spit in his eye, nick his scythe and spraypaint his skull pink. You do not have that guy. You must build that guy. And this garbageman is your best avenue to getting that guy. Can’t get much more zero-to-hero than this. He’s a hackrom soldier, for fuck’s sake!
Oh, yeah, then there’s this dude or whatever.
Kolbane was my second submission to the Dream of Five community project; the first would become Garath. Now, my instincts (aged 15) weren’t about ‘game design’. My instincts were, ‘Strength, Speed and Defence are the best stats, and they gave me a growth total to reach, so I’m going to get there the best possible way’. So in the FE7 vintage of Dream of Five, and its gameplay loop which is best compared to the third circle of Hell, having a unit who just… reliably deals a lot of damage and takes hits well was a Godsend. He was a natural experience target and would generally reward that investment, and if he didn’t, well, deployment crunch would give you a chance to bench him soon enough, don’t you worry.
I preserved much of that identity going into the Definitive Edition. His growths are almost identical, his bases just a little nudged up. What’s changed is… his class. See, Kolbane was originally a mercenary, because Gerik is the coolest unit in FE8. But Do5’s earlygame is full of infantry swordsmen; not least your lord, Rena, but also Chester hot on her heels. And then Tricia got added, and then Cyrille got added. That in mind, literal days before the first public release, I reclassed him.
This is a downgrade. Lances are a pretty forgettable weapon type in Do5, and soldier doesn’t get any perks, not even crit on promotion. Being a soldier is Kolbane’s main debuff. He’s just a guy, the lowest-ranked scrub of your backwater patrol. He’s only there because he sucked at making horseshoes. This plays into his story role, too. Kolbane will keep making sporadic appearances in cutscenes, mostly as the designated voice of the army character (which is a useful role you should keep a retreater for, yourself). But beneath that unassuming visage is strong potential, the sheer brute strength and will to see through this quest to its finale and get the girl. You can keep the class fantasy of the heroic everyman while infusing the character with the killing power to keep up. The class itself does the heavy lifting. Mostly by being an ankle weight.
5 – Speed and Power Solve Many Things
Of course, you don’t have to crank everything.
One approach might be to pump up the speed. The ‘lance myrmidon’ approach, if you will… I mean, hell, I think that’s what DA2 calls the class. It makes an intuitive sense, too. If you want a fast lance class, well… while obviously this is very different in every sandbox, lances tend to be associated with slow (armour) or average-speed (cavalier) classes. Swords have myrmidons, axes have pirates… why not fill the Lance Infantry gap with something fast?
This is where the lance infantry wound up in Homecoming. Scouts, as they wound up being called, were basically a little less fast but tougher than myrmidons (or, indeed, a little faster but less tough than Do5 soldiers), making them a sticky and persistent enemy but one that could be squelched by axemen (or Bronwyn with her reaving rapier), particularly given the environment’s significant weapon triangle and access to the light-infantry-countering Lictor Axe.
On the player side, you got Per, Gower, Fanatic III and Cantref, who were free to lean more comfortably into the speed/defence niche that makes for a very satisfying player unit but a potentially frustrating enemy. Well, except Per, who leaned into sucking complete ass. But he sucked ass memorably.
It doesn’t have to be the full class, either. It can be a single example, and that can be how they stand out. Unlike Kolbane, Seren doesn’t stand out through sheer overwhelming potential. And the circumstances of her join really do say… soldier. But she claws her way to relevance through availability, the best ability; she’s there when most of your army isn’t, and she’s also sleeping with a similarly underlevelled, low-ranked archer you get at the same time, giving each other a +3 attack boost when close up. Seren is, in the greater scheme of things, a pretty mediocre unit, and not all that much better than poor old Laszlo was as a combatant… but she has more clear strengths and weaknesses, and traits unique to her.
But you can also lean hard into the vanilla statspread without keeping it down to vanilla numbers. In AUC, which remixes vanilla maps and units, someone had the great idea to bring in ‘one of the guys stuck in a cell with Lucius’. You can see that he honours that statspread, too; everything’s been juiced up a little, leaving him with overwhelming HP and Str, tepid speed undercut by bad Con, and fairly appalling skill, luck and defence. All but HP and Str will only fall further behind with time. Nevertheless, you don’t have to have an extensive knowledge of AUC to see that a guy who hits really hard is going to be useful.
You don’t have to go to that extreme a level to stand out, either. Bosco from VQ has a pretty reasonable looking balanced statline with decent defence and a solid strength lean, but with the Death Blow skill winds up actually having a lot of scope to one-shot fragile enemies, at least on Normal Mode. While still very much being a soldier, and fairly balanced on paper, he stands out and carves out an effective, memorable and satisfying niche for himself.
And you don’t have to stick to offenses, either. Soldier might just be a convenient fix to a usual problem. Do you want 4 movement on armour knights, but don’t want to saddle the player with 4 movement (because 4 movement sucks), but want them to have a big, tough defence unit? Well, you can staple that statline on a soldier just fine. They’re an armoured guy with a shield! Aran is the obvious vanilla example, given that Part 1 of RD doesn’t give you an unpromoted armour knight, and you have to wait around until (promoted) Tauroneo fits the bill, ensuring that you’d never have to deal with an unpromoted armour (though if you did, she’d probably be pretty bad). Asking the chat if there were clear examples of this in custom campaigns, Danielle in Illuminated, Andre from Journeys and Randal from TSOD fit the vibe in one way or another.
6 – Full Circle
So, plenty of ways to make playable soldiers relevant. Just give them something they’re good at. Wow, breathtaking stuff. That applies to literally every class and unit. Mind blown, right? But you can see how the class lends itself to a few pitfalls. So yeah, you can pump up their speed and defence and call the job a good ‘un! Dust off your hands, go home… oh, wait. We still have to slaughter these guys by the bucketload, right?
Soldier, as the designated Spear Infantryman, is a useful class to have around. They’re probably a mainstay class for any organised military, a medium infantry class that fits easily into the game. The player can quickly identify them and their deal and their natural counters, and realistically, in almost any environment, they’re going to be a favourable fight for armours and fighters and an unfavourable one for myrmidons.
But there can be pitfalls here, too. Again, remember that enemies have a different objective to player units. They can launch sacrifice plays. And they have to hit hard. This is where Do5 struggled. Compared to DoW’s fully balanced soldier statspread, Do5 soldiers leaned a little harder into Spd and Def at the extent of Str. This made them not especially threatening (they weren’t fast enough to double, after all), but spongy and annoying to deal with, tough enough to survive an axeman. They became a nuisance class. Inconvenient, when they fit the vibe of so many maps!
This experience had me pivot into Scouts for Homecoming, as aforementioned, but when I brought back Soldiers (and ultimately cut Scouts) for DoR, I slanted them far more heavily into Str/Skl/Def. They’re going to deal well with anyone not fast and strong enough to cut through their statline, but those requirements are very attainable. They’re going to pose a significant threat, and generally 2HKO fragile player units accurately and with ease.
Oh, and they weren’t holding down the fort alone.
Yes, just because you might have decided to bring in real soldiers doesn’t mean you can’t also, separately have a steel lance dipshit who will strike reasonably accurately and powerfully, once, before getting fucking vapourised. Indeed, these units fit very well into Homecoming, ratchetting up the rocket tag vibe, trivially easy to kill with any unit but not someone you wanted to let get a shot off. And if you have a more bulky environment, as DoR is, then having a unit who can be one-rounded by basically anyone is even more valuable, and helps add more texture to your unit placement options. Don’t dismiss the vanilla GBAFE soldier just yet.
7 – Blaming the Tools
But there’s an elephant in the room here. What is a soldier? A footman with lances. What is a lance? Well, the answer to that question is going to tell you a lot about how good it is to be a soldier in the first place.
Lances can suffer in custom campaigns for lack of reasons to stand out. Axes? Everyone knows axes are the weapon of big flashy hits. If they scale up like conventional FE, they get the best effective weapons, and if lances are the most common enemy weapon as they usually end up being, while swords are relatively rare as is also often the case, they have the most favourable WT situation. And custom campaigns tend to have more reliable accuracy than vanilla, so, yeah, axes rarely need help.
Bows are usually the strongest physical weapon type in custom campaigns. Enemies are generally tougher and more dangerous, so chipping is more valuable, and less numerous, so poor EP is less damaging, and the designer is usually very aware of their weak position in FE7/8 and sometimes overcompensates as a result. Even if they aren’t that strong, they’ll have unique utility and generally be valuable in certain situations… and if they somehow do suck, and you only want one archer around then, hey, they get to hoard all the good bows.
Swords are also weaker than lances in FE7/8, but they generally get more ‘fun’ options. It’s pretty common to see swords get a lot more options to compensate. Magic swords are more routine. So what are you going to give lances? How can a soldier shine without the tools to do the job? Particularly in earlygame, and particularly if you have a… bandittish sort of earlygame, with a lot of unwashed axe users. What classes are your soldiers going to counter?
While it’s fairly uncommon for custom campaign soldiers to keep Con as low as vanilla’s fucking Six, it does have to be said that lances are a potentially hostile weapon type, particularly if you have more light, speed-oriented soldiers. Are javelins going to be particularly viable? Steels? If not, fine, but… are you just going to be stuck with using irons through the earlygame? Are slims viable, are reavers accessible, are there effective options? Or are you just cooling your heels waiting for silvers to turn up?
Of course, there always has to be something at the bottom of the totem pole. If lances are your weakest weapon type, that’s okay. They’re the ugly duckling in Do5. Just make sure they have something to recommend them, and, preferably, some tools of their own. So much like everything else about soldiers, it’s not like these are unique questions to ask. But the middle-of-the-road drift that soldiers encourage and the paucity of clear guidance offered by vanilla can lead, once again, into mediocrity.
8 – Now Watch Me You Crank That Soulja Boy
The thing with soldiers is that there are so many ways to take the class, but the player probably knows what you’re going for before they even lay eyes on a stat. Here’s a tasting menu of some of the stalwarts available on the Repository. What do their visuals suggest to you?
Vanilla. Free XP. Even the spear looks dinky. Definitely a tier 0.
A bit more of a brute. Beefy arms, rougher gear. HP/Str?
Your pure Lance Myrmidon. Spins with grace. Skl/Spd?
A quick, darting animation, but solid armour/shield. Spd/Def?
A very prominent spear, effectively Vanilla taken up a notch. Str/Def?
This is not unique to soldiers, either. And I kind of hope someone else talks at greater length about it. Animations shape expectations, and cohesion between animation, statspread and class vibe helps make things feel aligned and less janky.
So they can be strong or weak. They can be fast or slow. Notably tough, made of glass. Do you get the idea, yet? Vanilla sells the vibe of a class that sucks at everything (but is still functional as an enemy). You can fill it with just about anything and the masses will lap it up. It will seem to fit if you sell it right. So follow your heart, and make right the crimes of the past. Redeem the Hackrom Soldier.
‘“Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.”
– Laozi’
– Parrhesia
Cr: Luminescent Blade
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Despite completing a full playthrough of Westrian War, I did not know this unit existed. I’ve added them to my civilian effortpost.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention convoy access in your list of lord traits. It’s a pretty iconic lord feature, and it’s unit-defining for staffer lords. Lyon (Dark Stone) and Sephiran (Code of the Burger King) in particular come to mind as staffer lords who love being able to pull a +5 Mag S rank tome and a status staff out of the convoy on a whim. Staffer lords in general make more niche staves (movement staves outside of skips, Silence, Berserk) see much more use because they don’t have to dedicate inventory slots to them.
My post has been updated to include more examples from other “hacks” and take out 
the swearing
also i changed most instances of Monk to Monk* because it looks funny and it means i don’t have to remember which hack calls the class what lmao. There are still some notable absences like Tiresias from Hag in White, The or Sanzang from A Vestrian Tale. Maybe someone else could do an addenddeddendum if they wish
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