Some hacks make the inventory of enemies visible when you scroll over them, so you don’t have to click them and scroll through pages for their items.
Hacks that add Skills to enemies or make the stats of of enemy non-bosses matter more should also add Skill icons and make their stats visible somewhere.
The sooner the player of a strategy game can get all relevant info needed to make smart decisions, the better. If checking each enemy unit for items and skills takes too long, there’s a chance the player will decide savestating and making a choice without checking every enemy, then loading the savestate if any skill or item or stat the enemy had mattered, will take less time than checking every new enemy.
Nobody complained about the Enemy Attack icon indicators, or the ability to toggle enemy attack ranges on and off. Though I’d personally prefer if enemy attack range indicators were coloured differently so it’s easier to tell at a glance where the overlays are and where each attack range is coming from.
Obviously there’s no such thing as a “Perfect” design, every choice is a trade-off. Even a UI that’s excellent at conveying valuable information might be called more cluttered and distracting than a minimalist HUD by some. But FE isn’t about design minimalism, and the smoother the experience of checking enemies for their stats/items/skills is, the faster they can start planning with this knowledge in mind instead of winging it and brute-forcing it and calling the game broken if they can’t. Enemy attack range indicators, enemy skill and stat and item indicators… What else does the perfect HUD need?
I think checking stats via minimug box is bad. That’s /detail/. You go into their statscreen for that. It becomes annoying to look at if it’s on the main screen and is ugly to boot. That’s why Wii U/DS were the best platforms for a lot of RPGs. You could quickly access a lot of data and info without cluttering the main screen or having a lot of unused dedicated space for the UI.
I think an actually serviceable hack for flipping through enemy units with the L button would be waaaay more important than adding even more info to mmb.
Also, MMB showing every skill is too much especially if you don’t recognize all the icons right away. If skillsys+mmb had like a list where you could edit MMB skill display priority that would be awesome. Like, for example, if a character had Nihil, Shove, and Death Blow, Nihil would show up in the MMB.
Edit: Actually I just realized that the single power rating number would work just fine for the stat representation in the MMB. Since enemies are generally autoleveled by class, it’ll give you a good idea of the stat spread. And you always check bosses anyway.
Maybe I’m imagining a nicer-looking UI in my head but I don’t see what’s “Ugly” about the most important numbers showing up on a HUD element when you mouseover an enemy. New players might not know what skill icons mean, but after clicking it enough times to refresh your memory when it shows up on an enemy or unit you’ll remember and recognize it without having to click it or the unit or scroll through multiple pages of unit info. Letting the player customize a system where some skill icons are shown and some aren’t sounds like too much coding work for a feature most people won’t like or need. Why would they feel the need to hide certain skills from showing up if the skill icons are small enough to recognize at a glance?
The DS games have two screens to display all the unit info they want. All of that unit info could fit onto one screen, with a button to display it. That unit could also fit onto a HUD element.
Perhaps for the sake of efficiency, when you select one of your units, the colour of enemy stats could change to indicate things like “He deals more damage than you” or “He has enough speed to double you” or “He has more luck than you” or “You can deal enough damage to one-shot him without taking counterattack damage” or whatever.
Since the Autosave Patch allows you to go back one turn, why don’t you just take a bite of it and spit it out if it’s not good?
Since it rewinds one turn, the later the stage, the more you have to maneuver a large army, so starting over, even for one turn, is laborious.
The first half of the stage is less time-consuming because there are not so many units.
Still, I think the tempo of the game will be better than taking the time to thoroughly research the status of the enemy in advance to make sure there are no mistakes.
UI upgrades make the process of checking all relevant info (enemy locations, classes, stats, items, skills) as quick and convenient and effortless as possible, so you can start thinking about the strategy side of things faster.
Trial and error gameplay is the death of strategy games not built around that with kaizo spawns aka ambush spawns and protags who canonically have the power to turn back time.