Unit Design 101 - Trainees & Villagers 

Conquest Mozu is peak zero to hero and I will gladly replay Fates just to experience that again

I wish they would bring back units with the Paragon skill. Outside of DLC, it hasn't been used since Radiant Dawn. I liked Astrid in Path of Radiance. She starts low level and is statistically roughly even with other units when at the same level as them. But man does PoR Astrid snowball so quickly.

I’m a big fan of zero to hero arcs. Not all trainee’s become hero status but the fact they can match what the rest can do mollifies me. Donnel goes from can’t do anything at base to, could one round an archer by level 10 villager, to having the highest stats of ANYONE in the army when he promotes into mercenary. By the time he promotes to that, he can handle anything in the first arc except maybe Gangrel. I’ve only played a little of FE 8 Amelia is a fun character but I’d argue probably better than Franz with investment (but I think I had a stat screwed Franz). Ross was great, free water walker allowing me to dedicate 2 units to water objectives rather than just Vanessa (who like Franz, was stat screwed), his dual fire affinity with his father makes them a dangerous combo to any horde. Ewan has magic, magic is good. Probably don’t need 2 summoners but it’s fun.

Meg was my one true savior in my radiant dawn run, she was the only unit that could take more than one hit before keeling over. I loathe the dawn brigade.

For me, Trainees in Fire Emblem have two modes, decent units that have some niche usage that makes them easy to train but otherwise they're just a normal unit that levels up quickly or has slightly above average growths, PoR Astrid being the best example of this, and then there's the ideal Trainees like Donnel who an be a struggle to train at all without a lot of effort but result in a character that's not just a little better, but significantly better than everyone else in terms of stats, and I personally like the later more. I appreciate units like Astrid but I love it when a Trainee is tough to train while going through maps, but the payoff is funny numbers.

I always though a cool idea for a trainee would be in a game with awakening/fates style class system, instead of higher growths, give them access to every class. Then they become the most versatile and customizable unit. I think it would be a lot more fun for casual players and hardcore players alike.

Jean is definitely the trainee of Engage, but Anna is not so secretly also that when you look at her insane growths, having 50% Magic, Dex, and Speed. It does take her a long time to actually catch up to someone with better base Magic like Citrinne, but Anna does have the growths to catch up and surpass these units in endgame, provided you invest in her as a fun project

Finally someone bringing up the lottery aspect of trainees. I always bring it up on discussions, specially on Ross vs Garcia. Ross is such a small investment and can give you such a busted and specialized unit, and you can make the decision to keep using him or not depending on the quality of those first level ups. People are really blinded by the averages, like they are everything a unit it.

I liked Mozu the most out of the trainee units. Has a genuine niche in Conquest that makes her worth training due to archer access. In BR/Rev she can still work in other classes due to grinding. Made a good Kinshi Knight in Rev. The Gaiden/Echoes trainees are great too. Very flexible and core part of Alm’s party. I like the FE8 trainees though Amelia and Ewan need grinding to get them past their trainee class. Too frustrating to train them normally.

It never really dawned on me how many similarities there are between FE and Pokemon unit design. I haven't played Pokemon since gen 3, and I get so addicted to my training projects that I never considered using most prepromotes / legendaries. You better believe I went out of my way for Gyarados

I'm a fan of how 3H did it. Like the video said, pretty much everybody is a blank slate and you can do whatever you want with the characters. Obviously some characters lean towards a certain class.

honestly it feels like people are way too stingy with exp, imo; people talk like xp should never go to anyone but someone who can immediately sweep but like there's a limit to how much xp you can get on your carry on any given map before it becomes negligible, there's no reason not to spread it around some, and at that point, why *not* give it to someone with a decent chance of turning out, like a trainee or a villager

the issue with trainee type units is that growth rates fundamentally are not a good way to express the idea of investment. I think having their promotions give more boosts would be better. Failing that, I would give them differnt personal skills.

Shoutout to all the OSRS players who recognize the background music 😎

I admit I'm a sucker for trainees/villagers, I'll almost always use them if given the chance they're really fun to watch develop over the course of a game. I know it's not "optimal" often to do so, but what can i say, I'm a sucker for it. Incidentally, since you brought up Donnel, i find he's a trainee that gets better or worse depending upon what difficulty you're on and *how* you play Awakening. In my first run of Awakening, where i did little grinding being skirmishes, and playing on Normal, he became an absolute combat god for me - i could put him and Lissa (who i married him to in that run) in the center of a map and watch as he mowed his way through pretty much anyone, and i had reclassed him into Mercenary-Hero so he could use whatever he wanted with little risk of weapons breaking. He's also really helped by a pretty solid join time - sure, you gotta feed him kills, but he joins at an early enough point that you can justifiably do so without great threat to yourself, and since a lot of your early units in Awakening won't be getting doubles anytime soon unless they're REALLY Spd blessed, wearing down enemies to get a finisher in is really not all that uncommon at that point. But if you approach Donnel from an "as much grinding as you can to build your units up for harder challenges/DLC" perspective, you quickly realize Donnel's weaknesses - his only standout cap modifier is in Luck at +3, and +1 to Str and Def... and -1 to the rest, so he's not going to be too particularly stand out at max potential compared to units who min-max more towards specialized combat roles. He's also personally hurt by how his only class options are Villager, Mercenary, and Fighter - while great for him to get Armsthrift with his high Luck, his class selection is hurt by overlap (Fighter and Mercenary can both go into Hero, so he loses out on 2 potential skills he'd have if they didn't have an overlapping promotion), and him starting in Villager means he's got a Lance rank that will end up being useless in all his other class lines (and the awful caps of Villager compared to other promotions means you've got no reason to keep him in it). It also shows the weaknesses of Aptitude in a game like Awakening - sure, Donnel is likely to be gaining stats much more often than most units and grow explosively, it does nothing for him once he's all maxed out, making it meaningless to him at that point. Which is why i chuckle when i recall posts that raved about how "You can pass along Aptitude, and turn his kids into combat gods too!" - it's not wrong, but if you're playing Awakening with the goal of turning everyone into combat gods, all Aptitude really does is save on the grinding for one kid. But the funny thing is that, in bringing up kids, you get into the other aspect of Donnel that kinda inverts the curve - Donnel's own peak is lacking at full potential, but he's great for a kid looking to hit *their* full potential. For one is that he's one of a few fathers to pass along Pegasus Knight to their daughters - and thus make her into quite the menace (and also why i think Aptitude can be a poor choice to pass on for a long game-minded player; it's good for the grinding portion, but a of his daughter could instead benefit from skills like Counter, which are exclusive to the male classes). His lopsided caps can also be fixed on a kid with the right parentage - for instance, Nowi already leans towards a tankier capline, so making Nah his daughter helps her in key stats while not really harming her beyond stats she was already iffy in. So while he's a bit lacking on his own compared to the potential of his allies at max, he's also a bit of a meta trainee who can really make someone else shine if they get the same love and attention he did. I just think he's neat to think on, and i love the rascal.

Meg, the ultimate Orange Knight with Alondite.

For me, an ideal trainee unit is one that poses some kind of actual challenge to train up, since it adds a very interesting layer to the gameplay. While trainees who you can funnel exp into with 0 risk tends to not do it for me. A good example of this is Donnel, he is a good challenge to train up, since he's melee locked until level 10. But isn't impossible since you get him early enough where the enemies are still on the weaker side of things. A bad example for me, is Mozu who you can instantly second seal to archer to let her safely, and effortlessly level up off chip damage with 0 actual risk.

There was a miss conception for me about the est-archetype characters being a trainee unit, but they do have high growth which invalidate the mediocre lottery part of the trainee. Also, I consider Gaiden/SoV Est is also some sort of trainee (change my mind)

Jean is probably the most frustrating/unfortunate unit in Engage for me. The concept of a unit who's growths adapt to his class is good. Or at least, it would be good if his paralogue actually gave you a second seal so you can actually take advantage of that gimmick. Actually doing anything besides Monk 10 -> magic attacker is a giant pain in the ass, but then that also runs into the problem of him ending up as a sidegrade to Anna, who's a very controversial unit but overall has a much easier growth period (and I would also argue a better join time but that's another story). Also really annoys me that the kid who's studying to be a doctor doesn't get staff proficiency, which would give him some major upside in Griffin.

I do love the trainee units and villagers. I'm a little less of a fan of the Ests. I love seeing the growth of a unit from barely scraping by to being an invaluable part of the team. As covered in the video, stats are great, but it is fun to develop a unit into a niche that you pick. The flexibility and customization aspect is really quite a novel characteristic.

I love ALL MythrilZenith videos!!!! ❤

In a sense Fire Emblem is a game of contradiction. On one hand there is the RNG based growths, which can make the exact same unit turn out quite different on same setting but different playthroughs. On the other hand the game is kind of scripted where every chapter has to be designed based on a rough gauge of how the player's party is like in terms of power level. This is one reason for base > growth argument, because the game is not a real sandbox mode (compared to games such as ffta, where the player has much much more customizability), thus the game has to restrict growth units and make their upper limit not too absurd, yet at the same time they cannot remove rng growths because tbf thats one of fe's main attractions. Trainees are the awkward one amongst this contradiction: on one hand they are popular as players can feel the satisfaction of trainee's high customizability, be it in terms of class path or how well their stats can turn out, on the other the developers cant make them too customizable becuz they may break the game otherwise.

Donnel and Mozu strike a pretty good balance. Donnel is stronger, while Mozu is more versatile - her defenses will be average at best, but she makes up for it with better class access. Donnel is very strong once he gets going, but he is limited to only 3 promoted classes, compared to Mozu who can access up to 8. Even when they are superior statwise to other units, Donnel can never fly or use magic and has access to only 3 promoted classes, while Mozu can only access one of multiple pieces to the most powerful late game builds - she can only get one of Vantage, Sol or other damage stacking skills. And she can't use shurikens with any of the above. Technically, most of the Dawn Brigade are trainees, which makes Meg and Fiona... I don't even know what. Infants? Wendy is Bors, if he joined 7 chapters later - I swear for the longest time I thought she has superior growths, but no, they're comparable, so she's not a trainee, she's just bad. Good thing about SS trainess is that they are in a very easy game so you can get them to lvl 10 in a single chapter, if they don't turn out well, just drop them. Overall, trainees don't work very well in a free-form class system. Both Cyril and Jean got nerfed heavily to accommodate for them being able to access any class, to the point where you question why have them at all. And that's another reason why I don't like this system.

I wish FE would try to make trainees the anti-Jagens, low powered units with low bases high growths that gain xp rapidly. Only problem is that theres no "cap" to how much you can train a unit in a single map. Although I love Mozu, I would have liked for Fates to make a system where trainees (lets pretend theres more than one) gain tons of xp just from assist attacks/guards, but their level cant grow too much in a single chapter. Meaning they effectively generate xp rather than "steal" from the main army, at the cost of a deployment slot and having to babysit a weak unit. But honestly a system like that would be cool in general because tons of FE games are easier to low man and that goes against the spirit of the game.

About carrion even before getting the paragon sword he joins in a perfect chapter to train him were are only weak brigands in comparison to selphina's scrub squad that join just one or two chapters later than carrion are in a worse class and the enemies of that chapter can easily kill them if they get overwhelm by the wyvern riders

The chad Shining Force that got trainees right at the second game. FE attemptrd them a lot more and it still struggle immensely. To me the fundamental problem ia that FE is a benchmark game. Unless you design a game where only a fully level trainee met them they will never amount to anything more than people shooting themselves on the foot for fun. FE gotbit right the first attempt with Master Knights. Trainees should not get just slightly better stats, they should get unique classes that are just better than anything similar. Master knight is an example, Slade's ninja is another. The super trainees from SS are a cute idea but utterly failed.

I wonder if we'll ever get a trainee unit that's actually considered good

I personally don't see a problem with an unit that you invested a big amount of resources being able to steamroll challenges, it actually feels good, even. there is a special feeling when my armour knights finally get over the threshold to get no damage from most physical enemies and i can just put them to tank an entire army on their own. Talking about armor knights, its really a shame how underwhelming gwendolyn is, not only she joins at low level with low stats on a problematic place for her to train, her growths also aren't good enough to justify training her, and even if you do she will still be weaker than both her brother and barthe... so whats the point? Bors and Barthe are your tried and true bulky armour knights, so why can't wendy shine if i invest a big amount of time on her?

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Ah the most divisive unit type. Optimization be damned I'm always gonna use Jean in Engage cause it's funny to see a little british boy tear through the battlefield with a Killer Axe on Maddening.