on unit weights

[bookofholsety]

lately i've been playing through fe9 again, and something caught my eye while i was poking around unit profiles: i noticed that the help description for the build stat mentioned that "This helps determine the unit's weight." i've spent the better part of the last day doing some testing and sampling and have found that there appears to be a consistent formula, where a unit's wt will equal their build plus a preset value assigned based on the unit's type(s) defined by the icons in box with their build stat in their profile. through a bit of experimentation, i've sort of deduced a fair few of the values already, but there's a few i'm missing for various reasons

my question is, is any of this new information? i'd like to say it absolutely isn't because come on, the game is ten years old, but at the same time the main site makes absolutely no reference to a formula backing weight, nor do any of the other fe resources i know in english or japanese. every resource i can find seems to treat weight like it's a static stat which isn't influenced by any other factors. the only exception i know of is this lp, which mentions something more complex backing it, but it obviously doesn't go into detail. i figure somebody has to know this stuff already, so does anybody?

i know it's really not that big a deal as far as actually playing fe9 is concerned, but hey, it's nice to know things

i kind of have another, unrelated question: does anybody have any idea what discipline actually mechanically does? i've been messing around with ar codes and i've observed absolutely no difference between prologue!greil with discipline and the same greil without it. the game and various resources only vaguely claim that it "controls strength while training" and "reduces stats", but i haven't observed any such difference from normal non-discipline behaviour in action. i'm beginning to think it's just there as flavouring to explain why THE WORLD'S GREATEST WARRIOR has such low stats in the prologue. can anyone confirm or deny?

Edited September 14, 2015 by bookofholsety

[Radiant Dragon]

While the relationship between build and weight isn't new info, there's not much attention given to it because there's no way for the player to interact with the formula at all (aside from Statue Frags). It's just (Weight = Build + 'Class Value'), where 'Class Value' differs depending on the unit's class. Lightly armored units like Myrmidons and Mages have a 'Class Value' of 0, armored units like Soldiers and Knights have higher values (person + armor), then mounted units and Laguz have even higher 'Class Values' (person + mount). Laguz are kind of an oddity, because they have different values for both Build and 'Class Value' depending on whether they're shifted or unshifted. Also, male and female units of the same class are still technically considered different classes, and females typically have a lower 'Class Value' than their male counterparts of the same class. I don't believe a unit's types actually have anything to do with determining their weight, but I could be mistaken.

If class changing existed in FE9, then it might be more interesting, since theoretically a character's Build would stay the same after class changing, and just the 'Class Value' would change. But I would like to see what you can come up with though, because like you said, its nice to know things.

As for Discipline, I would guess that it is indeed just flavor to explain Greil and Boyd's lowered stats in the Prologue. Although, Prologue!Boyd actually has one more point of Skill than the one you recruit.

[bookofholsety]

you might be right in that the icons actually don't do anything and are there just to illustrate the whole thing (it'd make sense, since fe10 seems to use a similar formula and has none), but as far as i can tell they line up really well with what i've observed of the system. my feeling is that even if they don't literally implement the weight boosts, they at least correlate precisely with the "class values"

now, this mess started with valkyrie!mist. compared to other horse-mounted units. assuming no statue frags, mist's build after promotion is 6, which translates to 26 weight because the horse adds +20. now, at first this presents an inconsistency with, for instance, titania. she is also mounted, but her weight bonus is not +20, but rather +23 (that's 8 con vs 31 wt). however, this is where the icons become relevant. mist only displays the horse icon, but titania displays both the horse icon and an armour icon, indicating her weight bonus is twofold: +20 for the horse, matching mist, and +3 for the armour

this prompted me to research classes with the armour icon. now, i quickly ran up against an evident brick wall in that, among those who bore only the armour icon, there was a lot of diversity and inconsistency despite all of these having the same icon without so much as a palette swap, with the weight bonuses varying widely between +1 and +5; this happened even in the same class down gender lines, as you said, with devdan and generics (+4) differing from halberdier!nephenee (+3). now, if i were smart or had any sense of priorities, this is where i would've given up because once again, who cares? :P but then i realised that despite this annoyance, it actually translates reasonably into a series of levels with a logical progression to them both in terms of the class's presentation and in terms of class change progression

• a bunch of beorc infantry classes have no icons and thus zero added weight; these being rangers, myrmidons, swordmasters, fighters, archers, mages, sages, priests, bishops, thieves and assassins

• light armour (+1 weight) is found on lords, heroes, warriors, snipers and bandits. in the case of lords, warriors and snipers, they promote from classes with zero added weight, so there's a bit of logic to that
• mid-light armour (+2 weight) is found on berserkers and female soldiers
• moderate armour (+3 weight) is found on male soldiers and female halberdiers
• heavy armour (+4 weight) is found on knights and male halberdiers
• super-heavy armour (+5 weight) is found only on generals

with this in mind, this seems to very neatly explain classes with horse+armour, all of which fall neatly into one of the armour categories on top of 20 points of horse!

• female cavaliers (read: just astrid) have a total +22 weight, which indicates that they've got mid-light armour (+2) + horse (+20)
• male cavaliers and female paladins (going back to the titania from earlier example) do indeed seem to go with moderate armour (+3), totalling +23 weight
• male paladins, naturally, have +24 weight and thus go heavy armour (+4)

my research into beorc classes pretty much stopped here, since all that's really left are the fliers (each having armour + wyvern/pegasus icons) and given the variable nature of the armour categorisation and the presence of no classes with just wyvern/pegasus, i'm not confident in guessing the weight bonus ascribed to pegasi/wyverns. logically speaking, since so far intsys seems to be favouring nice, rough multiples of 5 as the standard this stuff's measured on, i can sort of guess:

• generic peg knights have 7/23/+16 bld/wt/added wt respectively, generic falcon knights go 8/25/+17 and elincia goes 6/23/+17. being that it makes sense for pegasus armour to skew on the light side (+1 for pegs, +2 for falcons/elincia), this suggests that pegasi comprise +15
• generic wyvern riders go 11/39/+28 and generic wyvern lords go 12/41/+29. being that defence is kind of the wyvern classes' thing, it makes sense that their armour categories would be heavier (+3 for riders, +4 for lords), suggesting that wyverns comprise +25 weight
• the biggest issue here is ashnard. while it makes sense that he'd be a special case being that that's not a wyvern he's on, he displays the same icons as normal wyvern riders/lords but instead clocks in at 14/49/+35. this is probably completely meaningless, but hey, so is the rest of this!

again, i think i'm onto something but i can't really know for sure. of course there's the possibility that your hypothesis is on the money and that, rather than being a matter of multiple bonuses from multiple icons, all classes are programmed with a single weight increase that happens to display two relatively meaningless icons on stat screens. i figure the only way to know for sure is datamining, but i wouldn't know where to begin to actually find any formula, let alone this one specifically, in the iso

i've also done some surveys on laguz classes, but that won't be complete until i get up to recruiting nasir and generic red dragons (i'm presuming that ena is a special case, all things considered) so that could be a while. interestingly, bird laguz actually take a negative weight modifier and thus, with the exception of unshifted hawks, actually have lower weight than con!

tl;dr while it could just be confirmation bias, i do feel there's a pattern to the allocation of weight bonuses which near-perfectly fits the build-type icons in unit profiles

Edited September 14, 2015 by bookofholsety