With that said, after reading the descriptions four times, I still can’t figure out for the life of me how the combat manuals work. May somebody give a simple, clear explanation on it?
Think of Combat Manuals like how TMs in Pokemon used to be. They're consumables that you can use to teach units particular skills, that you can have on hand without giving up barracks space.
For example, say you have eighteen Firs taking up Barracks space, but you don't want to send them away because maybe you want to teach a bunch of future units Glacies, so you have eighteen slots in Barracks being wasted. With Combat Manuals, you can combine all of those Firs into a single slot in barracks with 18 uses, freeing up 17 slots in Barracks. You now have a dedicated Fir Combat Manual space in Barracks that you can continually add to as you summon more Firs in the future.
The
big part of this is how Combat Manuals can still be enhanced to 5*. It sounds like that at the cost of never using that particular unit, you can cash in 20000 Feathers to promote a Combat Manual to 5*, get access to the 5* skills that come with it, and keep feeding it copies of the same unit at lower rarity, that still add to the total, since the 5* Manual is the base. For example, you can create a Subaki Combat Manual, promote it to 5*, and now as long as you keep giving it a steady supply of Subakis,
you have a permanent resource to pull Quick Riposte 3 from. That is a significant boon for players, both veterans and starting.
At the same time, Combat Manuals can also merge into the corresponding unit and work the same as merging that unit anyway. If Combat Manuals can be collected via rewards, they can actually bring in Alfonse, Sharena, and Anna Combat Manuals and we finally start "merging" them that way, via the Combat Manuals.
Combat Manuals has a lot of potential.