The first step is knowing when you get to this part you will know what true suffering is.

If you played through the old version of Tactics Ogre, you can definitely do this lol.

The name of the game in tactics is leveling a good couple levels over the battles in the game. It takes grinding but you can do it in the first chapter with the random battles on the map. Just get into an encounter, kill all the enemies except one, weaken them, and while they run away spend your turns doing actions that get you experience and jp. Stuff like casting chakra as a monk or potions as a chemist.

Once you get into the second, third, and forth acts you'll get access to holy knight characters like Agrias who can do op sword attacks on enemies. Later on Cid all but breaks the game for you.

Some classes I remember being OP are the monk for it's offensive and healing powers. The ninja for dual wield. Samurai for the draw out commands and rare swords that do great things like offense and defense. Geomancer for having access to magic without using MP. And the broken calculator that has access to every magic in the game (save for summons) and can cast on every enemy at once with the right arithmetic combo.

Totally not me getting rolled by a bunch of chocobos

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Arts_of_War_(Tactics)

Unironically read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Don't worry so much about, like, chariots, but try to analyze the principles he's describing. Chariots are units that can move very quickly to harass the enemy. What are your chariots?

Archer/Knight. Just make a fireteam that can shoot the weapons out of the other squads hands.

Mediator/Oracle. I forgot how but they can so stupid damage and have crazy combos.

Monk riding a black chocobo. I don't remember this combo but it slapped.

I remember using Gameshark to hack the game when I was a kid and creating a super OP calculator duel class character and was able to kill everyone on a map(both my side and the enemy side) in one move. It was pretty cool.

I forget how I did it but I was able to find the right stat to use for the calculator and it affected everyone and I used an insta-kill skill that like only one character in the game could actually get.

Also there is a skill that you can't learn normally it's the final boss's skill called All Ultima and it fucking wrecks. I burned up 2 Gamesharks and 3 PS1s playing around with the hex editor finding codes that worked.

Video of All Ultima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0UP1gJHu9g

The first three battles in Tactics are a pain in the ass specifically because you only have squires/chemists. I'm not even sure if you can grind on random battles at that point - but if you can, just run around for a bit and grind using the random battles (they're green dots on the map). The 4 unit cap on battles is only for the first handful of battles.

You can do it if you've played through Tactics Ogre!!! I believe in you.

Use terrain. The stone throw ability has a knock back chance IIRC, and you can use it so that the enemies can't easily get to you. Don't sleep on Ramza's brave-buffing skill. Always do something even if you can't attack so that you're generating job xp. Take Ramza from squire to knight to monk to samurai. Some battles are nearly impossible without the monk's chakra ability, especially mid-game. Grind some easier random encounters until you're comfortable with your abilities and have a few levels. Keep multiple save files, including at least one "fail safe" save after the last big story battle; there are a few places where you can get locked into a really tough series of battles (fucking Wiegraf). When in doubt, make everyone a monk (at least until you get Agrias and Cid). The gunner guy whose name starts with an M is also pretty good. It's been like 20 years since I played it, but man that game was my jam when it came out, and it holds up really well.

Grind random battles. Out of all the bosses in game Belias (second boss) is actually the hardest, it gets easier after that. Use named characters instead of generics, their unique classes fit well, for example Mustadio is excellent chemist AND have his own skills. It gets easier after getting Agrias. It gets MUCH easier after getting Orlandu.

Yeah gonna second what everyone else is saying in that you need to grind. The way that the class system works basically necessitates it since you need to get individual characters levels in one class to unlock a new one which effectively resets their progress so you have to restart. I usually try to avoid grinding in SRPGs (because Fire Emblem elitism brain) but I realised at like mission 5 that I was going to have to. Once you get a bit ahead levels-wise you can skip grinding for a while until you add a new class onto a character. Also keep several save files, there's one or two multipart missions that will fuck you up if you aren't ready for it and you can't go back if you don't have a save before it.

The small party size is a full game thing, it's not 4 units but rather 5 for the majority of the game though. The idea was that FFT wants you to get really invested in a small number of units that you build up in the same way that you would in a normal FF game. (Although the game also wants you to have access to the majority of classes on your party so you can swap when necessary, which means more grinding. I just didn't do this barring a few particular builds in my party which made some maps harder than they should have been, but I think it was ultimately doable.)

Ramza has an ability called Yell or Tailwind (depends on the version you're playing) in his default class. Spam it on himself and enjoy the cheese