Thanks all of the feedback.
These are the latest experiments, though I still haven't tried some things that were suggested. (Like the colour differences Steven said, which, indeed, are two different palettes. I just prefer the look of the uniform browns though.)
Add +1 hero sprite.
Alt. version
Portrait + BG
as far as I understood it, the battlebackgrounds were composed out of a bunch of tiles -
you can see the horizontal lines really clearly and if you look, you see that the same texture patterns repet themselves quite often too.
It looks like it, but it's actually a complete image that you can extract and insert with editors of the game.
That background is looking great of course, but will you incorporate the turf blocks that serve an actual gameplay purpose? The color and rendering I know will be on point, so I would think at your level, the challenge would be in balancing art elements with game art practicality. I wonder how feasible it would be to create transition assets that would work for all possible combinations ( or at least ones that have the possibility of being displayed at once) so that you could have both this seamless background, and still show the unit's tile identity.
I'll def. try to experiment, but it doesn't really feel like it will work.
Fire Emblem, Shadow Dragon for the DS did away with the stands and I barely even noticed them. There was one case where in an indoor castle a unit stepped on a water tile, and in the fight, it showed the background of a sunny lake. Still, I only noticed because I was being ultra observant.
Personally, I would do away with the stands.
However, if there ever was a simply perfect solution it would be this; Background mode, and stands mode (With the blacked out battle map shown above in the mock-up.), which you could switch to and from in the options... If only one could turn the stands off in background mode. (Maybe it's possible to hack this in.)