Defender class needs to always be put out front in every tactical battle. Big shield, heavy armor; doesn't mean soak it up on the back line and point fingers. Some of these maps have big holes and narrow passes that will cut your back line off from the fight entirely. Even with high initiative, it makes it impossible for them to fight unless they blow rescue just to get up there. Quite annoying. 

I've noticed that I left a bear cub alone for a while and it turned into a Cave Bear with kids eventually that put up quite a fight. Very nice and I loved the idea that I should have done pest control early before it became much bigger problem control. I had a situation where I built 2 cities and there was a monster hut between two towns. When my borders ticked over the hut turned into a fire spewing thing and all the skeletons inside leveled up quite a bit and became flaming a-holes. I love it. This isn't a complaint, just saying "the world is dangerous" is working now for me.  Having to plan around it is what I imagined for this game and it's def there. 

It seems the table for heroes generated every game is a bit pre-scripted. Probably best for balance sake, but as I've said in other places, it just doesn't add to the "legendary" feeling at all. I've started enough games to actually recognize them by name and abilities. This doesn't stop me from experimenting them into different classes or considerations and I don't think it's a huge issue....but.... Some are blatantly worse than others though. One will have a school of magic and a small perk of Amarian Blood, and the other has a bit more to it with more traits and abilities. It's not even a matter of picking the traits you like, it's more that a couple of the heroes flat out just have less overall so they are worse. I like the idea that some are less appealing but in a multiple choice A or B situation my mind is kind made up for me. Even if I were to make them a Commander and shove them in a town, I still have to level them so having them provide even less contribution to the fight doesn't make sense. It's a situation of of being given 2 choices as a character, but up to 5 as a class. One of these choices may or may not be good towards the class I'd really want. Some markedly better and others near useless. Basically: That's quite a bit of RNG.

I've noticed when I move my units sometimes they just bamph to the square with no animation. This also doesn't bode well for hero units that get bamphed to a treasure tile. They flat out miss it and I have to move them back on the tile again to pick it up.

I'm not sure what the marked performance increase implies, but game still seems to bog down as I go on my machine. Starts crystal smooth then just gets a bit lagged as I go. Scrolling has NEVER been smooth in this game for me in FE. I may do some searching on vsync and see what's up.

Really enjoying it though. Keep it up.