Femboy Fantasy Tit Tacs
I really thought slamming my way through Tactics Ogre would prep me for this. I'm only like eight hours in and already I have underlevelled characters I can't do anything with. I haven't even started messing with classes yet, please help. Save me, training battles.
Also why team size so small 
EDIT: Why are black mages evil. Ranged lockon fire attack that kills you.
EDIT2: the best strat for black mages is kamakaze basically. They have a lot of range and can snap to targets freely, so running next to another enemy will result in their multi target fire killing one of their boys.
Your primary skill is determined by your active class, but the others can all be set from all the different classes you've unlocked. This is the key to really breaking the game: pick and choose your ability combos so that they complement each other. You learn skills by spending JP, and then equip them to the different ability slots.
Look at the characters you're using and make sure their stats are well matched. Squires should be high in brave, and chemists should be high in faith, since you're eventually going to make some of them mages, at least for a while. If necessary, move jobs and gear around to make that true; it'll give you an edge, especially early on.
Remember that you can see the move range of enemy units. Use that to isolate one at a time if you can. If you can drop one early, that will very often snowball into a win.
Yeah I finally figured out how to learn and set abilities from the tutorial menu, (even worse than Ogre's already dense ones) and black mages flattened my team (four guys) in a single turn. Good game?
Stats? No clue how to view those, but also I dunno they're level three. Nobody can learn magic yet, I am fighting the guys Wiegraf leaves behind in Dorter and getting obliterated. On 16x16 tiles it almost doesn't matter, plus black mages and archers (which I cannot access currently) are so long range anyway.
I know, you can do it in Tactics Ogre too although it takes more button presses now. They have basically managed to make everything worse than Tactics Ogre - UI, jobs/classes, view getting obscured by buildings, equipment not showing what classes can equip it, I'm literally impressed. Some of these areas were already problem spots in Ogre so the fact they made it worse instead of better is startling.
Brave and faith are the two big core stats. Brave influences physical attack, and faith influences magic. Even though you don't have magic yet, you want your two highest faith characters set as chemists, because the magic classes are accessed though chemist (different jobs have order jobs as prerequisites). You want your highest brave characters as squires, both because they'll be going into physical classes later and because they'll hit harder now. You should be able to view those stats somewhere in your party management in between battles. If you're set up so that your two highest faith characters aren't chemists and your highest brave characters aren't squires, switch that around.
Magic doesn't go off instantaneously, so you can sometimes get to the caster and interrupt them if you are clever with your CT (or use a stone to knock them to a place where they can't hit their target and the spell fizzles). Don't forget to heal if you need it. Buy enough potions to keep you going, and focus fire on the units that are giving you trouble.
Does this matter when I'm level 3/4, but also I just have one default chemist plus another preset chemist. I appreciate the info about stats and classes but I don't think this is that relevant to getting flattened by the Dorter squad.
Sometimes it does, different spells I guess, but also I've had my Ramza get all the way over and attack the shit out of a black mage and their spell goes off without a hitch anyway. I unironically find it more useful to kamikaze the enemy with it. Also what is CT, but stones only have a lowish chance to knockback Idk.
I have like eight potions but when I bring a healer, archers kill her every single time.
It really does matter, even from the start. You'll see a bump in effectiveness if you switch over to having your highest brave units be squires, and it really matters that you're setting up your faith units to be casters later.
Will it let me soak up a basic fire spell without losing half my health bar? 35 damage fire, 28 damage arrows. Most of my units are like 45-50 health.
Lower faith will actually help you there. Faith determines magic damage given and taken. It's possible to abuse debuffs later to get to 0 faith and make yourself immune to magic. Ultima can't hurt you if you're shielded by a hard coat of materialism!
Hey yknow what fuck this game lol
Totally reasonable response.