Pretty much just a random thought I had. Honestly, I really think that Sacred Stones, and the GBA games in general did soldiers dirty. C’mon, “Average soldiers possessing no special abilities.” that just sounds bad. And they are, so when adding a playable soldier to my hack, I’ve got a few options.
Make the playable soldier have really good bases, to compensate for the bad soldier bases, and risk an overpowered character early on.
Buff soldiers, and just hope that no balancing nightmares come out of that.
Give the character really good growths to compensate for bad bases, and risk him having too much power by endgame.
Suffer knowing that he will forever be bad.
What do you guys think? Any ideas on what you would do to make soldiers good? Or even just good enough?
The Radiant games were pretty nice with it, just making Soldier an actual class and not just fodder. Gaiden as well, probably, though in that game they were also tier 1 armour knights.
So I’d say give the class itself actual stats.
I mean, playable unit bases don’t have to match generic class bases, you can just give your playable soldier base stats equivalent in power to other units. Base stats are class bases plus personal bases. Unless you’ve implemented reclassing based on class bases, there’s nothing stopping you from setting the personal bases wherever you want to bring the total in line with other units even with low class bases. And even if you do have class-base-based reclassing, you can just make playable Soldier a different class than enemy Soldier with different bases.
Of course, if you’re making a game of your own and not just a rebalance, you can rework class bases however you want because it’s up to you how you want enemies in those classes to function. But if you’ve already designed things around enemy soldiers being super weak fodder guys, that doesn’t stop you from making the playable one’s stats normal.
If you’re including a playable Soldier in a game where enemy Soldiers are still basically “Goombas”, I’d give any playable Soldiers personal bases that put them on-par with other party members. Lances are actually a pretty good weapon type, generally-speaking, so provided your Soldiers are also on-par in terms of promotion options, it shouldn’t be difficult to make them worth using.
This is assuming, of course, that you want your playable Soldier to “fit in” with the other characters in terms of how good/viable they are.
There’s not really anything wrong with having a class that’s intended to be throwaway training fodder. However, if you don’t want that, just give the class actual stats. Tellius does a fine job with this already.
Personally what I do with soldiers is chop them in the face with my fighter, or blast them with fireballs, or even slice them up with my myrmidon… whatever works, really
The fact that they’re kinda weaker as player units means you could make them a sort of pre-promote, like Ross Or Amelia, except you’d have to use a Knight’s Crest or a Master Seal, which, in the base game, not sure how many there are to go around to use two promotion items on one unit. But, technically, if they start at level one, that’s 59 levels to gain experience, which is more that Ewan and them.
If you intend to make soldiers playable, just change the class altogether and give them stats comparable to other classes.
Soldiers are bad in vanilla FEGBA because they were never intended to be playable.
Crazy thought but how’s yall’s feeling for axe halbs? either lance and axe halbs or just strsight up halberdiers with axes. I guess it’s not a soldier question but yea
more on the topic of soldiers with a serious response this time. I’ve never really found playable soldier all that useful honestly. I guess the more common idea is that they’d be less tanky knights that can double and be more of a trainee-ish class that needs some babying before they turn into a chad halb. But not only do i dislike babying units, unless it’s fe6 with sophia because funny meme unit, I also just always liked knights and generals better. They can tank and in many hacks get buffs like 5 move (which is a sin lmao) or more weapon types. if you make movement skills like shove or reposition a common universal thing like fe9 their lack of movement can be somewhat negated as well so yea.
My opinion about soldiers
You can say that soldiers are the same than Knights but weaker right ?
What about myrms and mercenaries ? They are basically the same class with different stats
So we can do the same with soldiers and knights
Making soldiers with less attack and defense but with higher skill and Speed
Or even easier
Take a myrmidon class and copy it
Then change the name by Soldier and Swords by Lances
Done
You have a Soldier that could works as well as knights
Then we can take this other idea
If knights have their own direct promo ( General) and one common promo with cavaliers ( heavy knight ) then we can make soldiers have a common promo that would be Paladin and fit so good and another one that could be a direct promo unmounted
Mmm
Like Dragoon
I have seen around here some animations of that kind of soldier that is basically ephraim with jumps
“Tierra Maldita” hack has their own Soldier that promotes to Dragoon and it’s a good class
It’s all up to you if you want to make soldier a better unit or just delete it cause it usually doesn’t worth it
That’s my opinion
I hope you like it
A strategy game isn’t about having perfect balance it’s about having deliberate asymmetric design choices. Having a definitely worst class that gets phased out for better enemies to fight is a great way to have a progression in terms of a difficulty curve.
Personally, a big part of the appeal of soldiers for me is the fact that they’re the average Joe of the army.
If the base line soldier is a combat god from the get go, it feels a bit like it’s missing the point, in my opinion.
Personally I feel like having a soldier join early with slightly lower stats, but who ends up into a typically balanced unit with maybe 1-2 above average stats would be great, especially if those early maps are designed in a way where you have to make the most ouf of the soldier’s limited bulk by giving you even frailer units for them to protect.
Keep them as is, don’t use them as enemy units, and make the recruitable one utterly dogshit with a promotion that DECREASES stats. It’s the only way to truly balance them
I like the Donnel/Mozu approach for a playable soldier. On both sides, they tend to have mid or low stat spreads, but your soldier is a rookie with potential to prove themselves.
I like the idea of soldiers becoming ranked “specialists”, like your average spear boy either promote into various flavors of spear-chad (fast and light spearmasters, heavily armored phalanx types, high mobility mounted boys, etc…) or different flavors of soldiers promote into Lieutenants, Captains, Majors, etc, and they pick up a second weapon and stat spread when they re-class