Universal infantry shove - your thoughts?

Hello Universe,

I’m the dev for FE: The Divine and Desperate and lately been considering adding the shove command before I fully release act 1 of my hack.

I’ve only played a couple hacks with universal infantry shove (where all unmounted units have access to the ‘shove’ command.) and I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t want to do it just cause everyone else is adding that feature. I wanted to start a discussion about the idea from a game balance or feature bloat standpoint. I’m interested in whether you like universal infantry shove or not, or what kind of nuance you think the system can have.

  • I love UIS - it’s awesome, perfect, no notes.
  • I like UIS - it’s cool and helps balance infantry units.
  • Impartial to UIS - don’t like or dislike it from a game balance standpoint.
  • I dislike UIS - It’s not very impactful and feels like feature bloat.
  • I hate UIS - it’s lame, unoriginal and skill system slop
0 voters

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I don’t mind it as long as the maps are balanced around it.

How so? I agree on that aspect, but mostly I think it works best if the maps tend to be on the larger end.

Personally, I prefer to use a larger pool of “Movement” Skills and divvy them out across all of the classes compared to just universal Shove on infantry.

Myrmidon - Drag Back
Shaman - Knock Back
Cleric - Pull Back
Fighter - Shove
Soldier - Swap
Thief - Pivot
Armorknight - Save
Archer - Knock Back
Pegasus Knight - Reposition
etc.

4 Likes

as a PME participant, Burn it with fire. Every time someone pushes it in that’s an entire skill slot I can’t use anymore to make unique builds that distinguish my character from the rest of the cast.

Now, when you’re NOT running a PME, take it or leave it tbh. I’m sure it helps a lot, but I just don’t find the option to Shove appealing when I could Kill Enemies.

1 Like

Sometimes I think keeping mounts at 7 Mov is a good idea. Sometimes I’m one tile short of everything. If only there were some kind of miracle cure that used up somebody’s turn to boost someone else… Alas…

2 Likes

It’s all dependent on context and how you want the game to play.

6 Likes

There’s a way to make it an undisplayed skill that doesn’t take a slot, the Heroes Movement patch (with versions that work both with and without skill systems)

I think it’s because I started with advance wars, and then later played ffta, but I do not like shove.

From a map-based strategy standpoint it’s too tactical (optimizing a single turn as opposed to movement over several turns).

And from a fantasy tactics game standpoint it’s too dry and technical (I want to explode stuff, not move chess pieces around.)

I understand Fire Emblem straddles the line between these two game styles, but I have the most fun with the series when it more firmly commits to one side or the other. (Or just goes full jrpg like echoes did)

(For additional context, this feeling is not from lack of experience with the mechanic. I’ve spent the most time with FE9/10 of the mainline games and I think almost every FEfangame I’ve played has had it. I utilize it whenever it’s available.)

This comment kind of really made me consider making another hack after the one I’m already working on. Alas, my current one is pretty conservative with the skill system. Although I really like this approach, I’d definitely think about doing something like this in a more skill heavy hack in the future.

I want to elaborate on this thought in a more helpful way for somebody who doesn’t know how to answer this question.

I’ve sort of been planning to make an overarching thread about this idea in far more detail, but essentially, when you’re adding something into your sandbox, you should be adding it with intent, and that includes things that are in vanilla fire emblem.

An example I like to use is rescue. Most hacks have rescue in them, because they’re mostly in the GBA engine and the GBA FE titles have rescue as a core mechanic. However, most FE titles across all platforms do not have rescue. Does this mean that rescue is a bad mechanic that they’ve left behind? No. Does it make those games lesser for their exclusion? No. In Tellius, the games that shove is actually from, shoving is in many ways a replacement for the rescue mechanic, a different kind of way to allow units to be repositioned. One could argue that canto+ is the Jugdral equivalent, a mobility tool to ease positioning burdens, albeit in a very different kind of way.

Most players who include rescue are doing so thoughtlessly. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the wrong idea for their game - if they sat down and thought about it, they might decide rescue is a mechanic they enjoy being in their sandbox, and thus decide to keep it. However, if you haven’t done that thought, than how do you know? Rescue is a mechanic that massively warps class balance and the strategies one can employ for beating a map, and for a mechanic so large in scope, it’s interesting that many hacks simply consider it a baseline part of the sandbox akin to stats or weapons.

Shove isn’t innately activated when you crack open your copy of FE8 to start tinkering, and so it’s viewed as something you’re adding to the game. But you’re not “adding” to an existing game - you’re making a new game, with new units, new maps, new items, new design priorities and fixations and verbs, using the bones of an existing game. You should think about what it is shove accomplishes in your sandbox, what it allows a player to do and whether or not this is desirable to you, and also if it should replace other similar mechanics upon inclusion.

At every turn, design with intent. It doesn’t matter if a player (or a group of players) likes or dislikes shove, because they’re not playing shove, they’re playing your hack, and every feature you add to a hack has interplay with every other feature. If you have designed an entire act of your game without shove being a mechanic, how do you know the maps still flow right? How do you know it’s useful or fun if the game was never designed with its use in mind? Are you adding shove because you like hacks with shove, or are you adding it because you think it’s right for your hack?

5 Likes

I think its really easy to over design around the skill. If done well i think its fine, but if it’s very obviously intended to be used for basically any side objective to be done in a reasonable amount of time I usually take issue with it.

Fire Emblem is a series where I feel like good usage of the action economy is rewarded, but when it feels like a prerequisite to commit part of your actions to ensuring that an objective is reasonably reachable it tends to feel less fulfilling imo.

I also take issue with what it does to unit identity. The more you’re designing and playing around shove, the less you’re actually doing something unique with your units. While yes every unit is technically contributing, they provide less of a unique role.

Also it does encourage larger maps so grumble grumble grumble

2 Likes

A couple of my concerns with Universal Infantry Shove stem from two factors-ish, which might as well be little things, but

1: Shoving non-infantry units (petty non-immersive stuff)

Like I don’t have full check on if it can shove or not shove stuff like cavs/pegasus/wyrms, but it does teeter a bit into the realm of the “less excusable by the setting” type of realism.

Now if you aren’t interested in the “muh realism” explanation, there’s also the part where infantry units being able to shove non infantries helps the shoved more than the shoving ones

Just look at it in the way that I can now push all my cavaliers one or two tiles further ahead in a chapter start, pretty much allowing for a quicker active advance of the usual domineering fire emblem beasts

2: Shoving into/out of terrain (also petty, but consider)

Something important is that usually, most varied forms of terrain costs extra movement to go across - but you could shove someone on it and essentially gain more than one tile of movement in the sense of value - that is something that can perfectly change how effective your map design becomes when you allow the players tools to naturally bypass what would usually cost 2, 4 or even more effective movement to be able to occupy that spot (as well as easing chokepoint formations as well but shhh)

If you try to implement something like Universal Infantry Shove, it would be best to first play on it on a blanket fe8 rom to see how it changes going from blanket vanilla playstyle to having another movement tool available.

2 Likes