I haven't played FE4 (I really need to...the fan translations are good, right?), is that anything like the base in FE9/10? Because I loved the base in those games. The barracks in Awakening just aren't the same...
It's different. You have a main base and you have to protect it. If it's captured by the enemy, you loose.
You can also capture castles to use them as your base. Yes there are a gameplay feature to capture buildings and it's a very strategic.
When a chapter begins, all your characters are in the base and the chapter doesn't begin unless characters start to go out of your base. You don't lose turns when you are in the base either.
This is what you can do in a base:
- Deploy your units. You can hide unit in the base any time and use it as a shelter.
- Fight in the arena to gain experience and gold. You can also recruit some particular characters in the arena.
- Buy/sell items
- Stock up items
- Repair your weapons. If a weapon reaches 0, it doesn't disappear and you can repair it with your gold.
- Speak with the fortune-teller who will give you hints about affinity between characters
- Evolve your characters who reached level 20
Your base looks like this from the inside:
As you can see, its function is far more important in that episode. FE4 remains by far my favorite because it did everything right and oddly enough it had the most advanced gameplay system in the entire series. Really an awesome game.
Also there wasn't any limit regarding the number of characters to use during a battle which was awesome. You never had the painful dilemma: which character I'm going to use in this chapter :/
TBH I didn't check the translation and only played the Japanese version.
Also, why is the option to optimize equipment for all of my characters always grayed out? I feel like at one time I was able to hit L for "Manage" while on the inventory screen (on the map) then "optimize" and it would basically "optimize all." Now that option is never available to select. By I can go in an optimize each individual character, so it's not like they are all already optimized. Puzzling.
Optimize actually doesn't optimize a shit.
I did it once to see and had to re equip everybody because the so called optimize screwed everything lol