I really like what @Parrhesia did in his hack Drums of War, which imo is still the best hack on this website, by a good amount. Here’s a few things from that hack and others i really enjoyed.
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First of all: Less support partners (most units have 2-3), however you can have as many C or B supports as you want, and one A support. This not only is much more doable for a hack than the 5-8 you sometimes have in normal FE Titles, it’s also arguably more balanced, and since you frankly just need to write less, you can make the ones you do write feel less like filler and more actually impactful to your character. Pretty much Quality>Quantity
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Second of all, and this is imo a major selling point of the hack, and my favorite part about it: After defeating certain bosses you can choose to either ransom them for a few thousand bucks (and money is quite rare!) or recruit the boss (without their Equipment). Although these bosses were sometimes not quite as strong or had quite as much lategame potential as your other units, they always felt useful or had a fun character quirk that made you want to use them.
Examples include: a brigand, an earlygame prepromote General, a Niime-like Druidess and her flying eyeball companion, an earlygame pegasus with overall slightly worse stats than the one you get afterwards.
These recruitments would not be handled via a thracia-like capture mechanic but rather via a simple post chapter event whose only condition was beating the boss in gameplay. These “bonus” characters tended to have less supports (1-2 usually) but still were quite fun -
Alternatively to DoW’s Support System we also have @SaintRubenio’s Amazing FE6 Eckesachs mode, where you play as the Bosses of FE6. In his hack support conversations did not exist and were purely gameplay based. However to still have Characterisation you instead have event based talk convos in chapters. The game will for example tell you before a chapter that “Available Talks: Roarz x Arcardo”, so if you care about these units you can bring them both and have a nice talk that actually fits perfectly into the current chapter and where the story is situated at that point. I honestly prefer this way over most others because you write dialogue where it fits, making it feel more organic, instead of trying to stay within the 3 convo structure of talks that can happen ANYWHERE and AT ANY TIME in the game, meaning they cannot really reference events in the story, and are often relatively Shallow.
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Actually useful Slim Weapons. In DoW slim weapons usually had 1 more might and around 10 more hit than iron weapons. They were generally better but also more expensive on a per use basis. Instead of being a more expensive but worse weapon, which is only situationally useful on certain characters, they became a good alternative to iron for units which needed the hit, might or didn’t have the con.
There is another hack made by Voldemort and his dark wraiths which also had a great way to make them actually useful in having them give double the WEXP compared to iron, have more hit and are cheap, but have less might. The major thing that made them genuinely fun to use was the crit you had on short swords (15). Especially on units with brave lion, like the super hero themed character Miss Victory, short swords were some of the most fun things to use. -
Playable Monsters, Boats, or other Unique Classes. DoW had a Flying eyeball, a Skeleton, and a Wolf
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“Gamerules”: This is a thing Paradox Interactive does in it’s Grand Strategy games like Hearts of Iron, Victoria, Crusader Kings or Europa Univeralis, but a Roguelike hack called Hope’s Trail made by @EAALen also Implemented it in the way of + Mode. Essentially Game Rules are an additonal set of Rules set at game start. In Hope’s trail it adds, iirc, an extra random skill to all of your units.
But this same system could be used for many things, be it disabling Gaiden chapter requirements, reducing growths to 0 for an easy 0% growths mode, Randomised recruitment or classes, making a random event always happen, and so on. -
Enviromental Gameplay: I don’t recall in which hack i saw this, and i don’t think it was ever fully explored. But you could for example break down a bridge and have enemies on it drown. Or imagine first pushing down an Oil barrel down a cliff then using a fire tome to light it and any enemies standing in the oil get lit on fire. Or maybe you’re being hunted by a gang of pirates and completely outnumbered, but as they swim over the river to you, your thunder mage electrocutes the River, doing massive damage to the pirates and saving the day.