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Fire Emblem Engage is generous with units and stingy with everything else. Thirty-four characters join over twenty-one chapters, and behind them sit two things you never have enough of: Emblem Rings, which are shared and portable, and experience, which is finite and gone the moment you spend it on the wrong person.
Nearly every decision in the game is one of those two problems wearing a different hat. This hub is arranged around them.
The experience problem
The single most useful fact in this wiki comes from reading our unit pages next to our own ranking of all thirty-six characters. The three units chapter 1 gives you are ranked 36th, 35th and 32nd. Your entire starting party sits in the bottom five, while five of the top eight do not arrive until chapter 11 or later.
Our companions guide lays out the whole roster in join order with each unit's rank beside it, so you can see which early arrivals are worth building. The full ranking with base stats is in the character tier list, and EXP farming covers what to do when you have decided who deserves it.
Where that experience goes is a separate question. Best classes and when to promote handle the timing, all classes is the reference list, and items covers the two seals that make a class change happen and cannot be recovered afterwards.
The ring problem
Emblem Rings are the game's best toys and there are far fewer of them than units. That would be a simple allocation puzzle except for one rule, which our mechanics guide is built around: some of a ring's power stays with a unit permanently after the ring moves on, and some vanishes with it.
Inherited skills are the part that stays. That makes rotating rings through your army early an investment rather than indecision, and it makes skill points, not gold, the currency that decides how strong your team ends up. Skill points farming covers the grind, and best emblem pairings covers who should be holding what while you do it.
If you own the DLC, two pages add to the pool: Wave 2 emblems brings three more Emblems, and the Lookout Ridge event in our quests guide unlocks three bracelets on top of those that are easy to miss entirely.
Between the battles
The Somniel is where both problems get worked on, and it does not open all at once. Our regions guide reads the base as a timetable, with the Ring Chamber, shops, Training Yard and Sommie all arriving at chapter 4 and fishing not until chapter 8. What to do after battles is the short version to run through after every fight.
For gear, weapons works through the four routes to the Levin Sword and prices them against each other, and spells does the arithmetic on Dire Thunder, which turns out to cost twenty-four duplicate rings and 15,200 Bond Fragments.
Starting out, and starting again
New players should read tips first and then the companions guide, in that order. Coming from the previous game, Engage vs Three Houses covers what has changed, and it is worth knowing before you apply old habits to a game that hands out its best units late.
If you are on a second run and want the hardest version, Maddening difficulty has its own page, and the mechanics guide covers what you can and cannot change once a file is started.