Mechanics

Two of the systems this game runs on look unrelated until you ask the same question of both. Recruitment is about who joins your army; class change is about what they turn into once they have. In each case the useful thing to know is not the list but how much of it happens without you. Some units simply walk in. Some need a conversation, some need to live through a battle first, and one pair makes you choose. Promotion is announced by the game but carried out by you, skills grow on their own while a weapon stays equipped, and forging never happens unless you pay for it. This page arranges our recruitment guide, our class change guide and our forging, skills and supports guide along that line, from the things the game does for you to the things it will not.

Eleven units the game hands you

Our recruitment guide covers 34 playable characters, 17 in Alm's party and 17 in Celica's, and eleven of them join with no input from you at all. The two leads are yours from the opening moment of their chapters; Lukas, Gray and Tobin are in Alm's army before he leaves Ram Village, and Mae and Boey are in Celica's before she leaves the Priory. Clair is picked up at the prison in South Fort, Clive at the end of the Deliverance HQ, Mycen at the close of Chapter 4, and Conrad the moment Dolk's Fort is cleared.

Twenty-three you have to go and ask

The next tier costs a walk. Ten characters join as soon as you speak to them: Kliff and Faye at the entrance to Ram Village, Silque at the Mila Shrine inside the Thieves' Shrine, Luthier in the Forest Village plaza, Tatiana in the prison of Nuibaba's Manor, Genny at the Priory entrance, Atlas in a Mountain Village residence, Jesse in the Desert Fort prison, Est in the prison at Grieth's Fort, and Nomah at the Temple of Mila's far side once the water has been lowered. Three more want a prior recruit and nothing else: Forsyth and Python will only talk once Clive is in, and Zeke only once Tatiana is; two others, Kamui and Leon, need Valbar as well as their own survival and so sit in the next tier. Faye and Kliff are also the two exceptions to the party split, because Celica can collect them at Ram Village once Chapter 2 ends.

Seven characters add a condition you cannot talk your way around: they have to survive the battle they appear in. Mathilda in Desaix's Fort, Delthea at the Floodgates (where Tatara must fall as well), Valbar at the Pirate Fort, then Kamui and Leon there once Valbar is recruited, and Palla and Catria at Zofia Port all join afterwards, and not otherwise. Saber is the only recruit who takes two conversations, the first with an old man on the Pier and the second at the Novis Port Inn. Sonia and Dean at Grieth's Fort are the one place the game makes you choose: beating one is the condition for recruiting the other, so an army ends up with one of them and never both.

Promotion: the game tells you, you walk

Class change sits in the middle of the scale. The game does the announcing: when a unit reaches the level its class promotes at, a notification appears and a statue icon sits beside the name. Getting there is your job, because promotions happen only at a Mila statue, and the idols our class change guide points at are in caves and dungeons with enemies between you and them. What happens at the statue is automatic again. Any stat below the new class's base is raised to that base, RES excepted, so a unit with 15 SPD promoting into a class whose base is 18 gains three points while a unit already on 20 keeps its 20. Changing class also drops the unit's level to the lowest the new class allows, which is why the advice is to finish levelling the current class first.

Villagers are the case that matters most, because five of them, Gray, Tobin, Faye and Kliff on Alm's side and Atlas on Celica's, start out as Villagers and have to be promoted into one of the base classes. Our class change guide has them promoting at level 10, with Faye as the one worth moving earlier if she is headed for Cleric. Which class to choose is the subject of our best classes for villagers page: the four men pick from Soldier, Mercenary, Mage, Archer and Cavalier, and Faye alone has Pegasus Knight and Cleric on her list, which is why Cleric is the obvious call while Alm's side has a single healer for most of its story. Its picks run Mercenary for Gray, Mage or Archer for Tobin and for Kliff, Cleric or Pegasus Knight for Faye, and Archer or Cavalier for Atlas.

What accrues while you play

Our forging, skills and supports guide describes several systems that tick over without a decision from you, provided you set them up. Skills come from weapons and shields, and every ring carries Renewal; equip the item and fight and a small bar beneath it fills, but unequip it and the skill goes until that item, or another carrying the same skill, is back in the slot. Each character learns separately, so Alm mastering Steel Blow on an Iron Sword does nothing for Tobin when he inherits the sword. Support bonuses to Hit, Avoid, Critical and Critical Evade apply by themselves whenever supported units stand within three spaces of each other. Fatigue arrives on its own too, though only in dungeons and only after a battle, trimming a unit's maximum HP until you feed them a provision or leave one at a Mila statue. Mila's Turnwheel has a fallback of the same kind: Alm receives it after the Thieves' Shrine and Celica at the start of Act 2, and anyone who missed it is handed it at the start of Act 3 regardless.

Magic and battle skills are where the automatic and the manual meet. Spells cost a little HP on every cast, including counters and each hit of a double, and they carry fixed hit rates that supports and Sages can raise; battle skills never double and must be triggered by hand on your turn, most of them for a few HP as well.

What only happens if you pay for it

At the far end sit the systems the game never touches on your behalf. Forging is done at a blacksmith in a village, and two things about it are easy to misread: the price shown is the cumulative cost of taking a weapon to its maximum, and the bonuses are fixed sets rather than stats you pick. Most weapons can also be forged into a different weapon for a price, often after reaching +1 first, and a rusted piece of equipment turns into something worthwhile for very little. Sacred Springs, found in the Holy Grounds and in dungeons, hand out stat boosts, but some statues have limited uses and some share them, so emptying the SPD statue in the Thieves' Shrine leaves the HP statue beside it with nothing to give. The Villager's Fork, a DLC item, is the most deliberate choice of all: it returns any character except Alm or Celica to a level 1 Villager with every stat intact and movement fixed at 4, which our class change guide suggests for favourites and for units with strong growths, since they stay powerful and gain experience faster.

If you are deciding where your marks go first, our Silver and Gold Marks farming tips cover how the forging money comes in, and the Fire Emblem Echoes guide lays out which of the two armies passes each of the places named above.