Good luck with that. 3H’s map where you reclass Manuela into a flier to break the challenge… It’s a symptom of 3H’s problems.
It’s impossible to balance 3H without rejecting its “anyone can be anything” goal, as that goal undermines meaningful choices with interesting tradeoffs. Recruit Lorenz for Thyrsus to make Lysithea even better, make Lysithea an Armor Knight for 3 seconds to make her tougher, beat the game with less than 50% of your army being from that house, lol why not? Reducing customization, like limiting reclassing to lore-based reclass options plus A/S-Supports, maybe even limiting skill inheritance to class lines, balances gameplay and improves map design. Units can be good AND a challenge to recruit, that’s more interesting than eating food with your waifus and grinding weapon ranks and stats.
Spend Act 1 with each house for 2-3 maps each, learn the game mechanics without reclassing, learn the lore, bond with characters, remove the noble/commoner classes and give everyone lore-fitting classes, then pick a side for Act 2 without 40+ hours of monastery grinding per run. Ashe crying, the Blue Lions watching Lonato throw everything away even his own people over a grudge and losing everything, and Sylvain losing his brother to the Crest system’s dehumanizing cruelty > Claude and Edelgard just being there and reminding everyone they hate crests and bad rulers. Kill a foe during Act 2 to Recruit/Kill/Spare them for different rewards. If killing Lorenz for Lysithea’s new Thyrsus makes me lose support points with the Golden Deer, I’m okay with that, it’s faster than recruiting him for them and then benching him for life. Better for the story, too. And no mobile game farmville crap. Rhea or Edelgard or that Slitherer woman stole the Monastery from us, or maybe it was destroyed or encased in a big crystal, we need to return to a base camp after each mission, a camp that can be anywhere. I swear if the next Fire Emblem game has a stupid Somniel/Monastery we nonsensically return to after every chapter and microgames and mobile game currencies and achievements that reward you with primogems for getting enough achievements I’m not buying it. Give me a menu/single-screen-sized hub area and a limited gold budget for hiring weapon exp tutors and buying and upgrading weapons/armour/skill rings/skill scrolls any day.
Canto, Trample, Summon, Replicate, don’t get me started on the franchise’s most busted skills. How many people get certain skills on everyone because they’re better than any other option unless the unit exists for non-combat roles like being a rallybot or battalion user or stat backpack? Every class skill has to be low-impact or completely unbalanced in their class (and more unbalanced in better classes) because the devs know any number of them (and battalions and OP items) could be mixed together to create something so good it wins the game for you. Fates tried to rein reclassing in by restricting reclass options, and gaining new reclass options became a commitment, something to factor into long-term strategy. It also removed infinite grinding (unless you use the cheat seals). Better than 3H when everyone can be anything.
Each map in Act 1 can be designed for specific unit compositions, and to get new units in Act 2 you beat them and choose to Spare/Recruit/Kill them. No need to grind certain stats/skills on Byleth to recruit them early on. The game becomes ironman-friendly. Would that Swamp map in Conquest work if it was designed so you weren’t overwhelmed and pressured from all sides, and didn’t need a powerful Cavalier, Knight, Healer, and Fighter right when they showed up? It was more memorable than that Bandit Canyon map I turtled through. The game can never do a map where you have to learn how to use fliers to get over BS terrain and get your friends over BS terrain because there’s a chance players at that point in the game have zero fliers on their team. The map could make a NPC join your army for a while to teach you that mechanic, of course, or the events of the map could be important to a flier in your army before you unlock reclassing, but no. It won’t do a map with three chokepoints where you’re overwhelmed until you’re saved by units with clear important niches, followed by a map about rushing to villages(and getting the most out of Elise’s Freeze staff and maybe getting Frozen yourself in the ice level), followed by a map about overcoming enemy chokepoints, followed by the best defend map in the series with more chokepoints and optional villages to rush to, followed by a map about climbing a mountain and experiencing isolated areas where you learn all the flavours of BS soon to come. That’s more memorable than killing generic bandits in a fort or forest or canyon.
3H isn’t just unbalanced, it’s undesigned.
On this site.