I considered changing vanilla affinities for flavor and to shake up balancing, but ultimately didn’t to keep things simple. The reason for this was that I assumed:
Even with changes, 80% of players probably wouldn’t care to look up or keep track of new bonuses, especially when I’d have to put them in the guide because vanilla has no easy way to view them. Accessibility is an issue without wizardry.
The 20% that would care probably already have vanilla affinity bonuses memorized anyway, so this makes their calculations that much easier.
Affinity/support bonuses were a niche mechanic in GBAFE, and I’m fine with them mostly being a little bonus to improve combat. A bonus that’s nice, but probably won’t drastically move the needle too much. I’m pretty wary of over-tuning, feature bloat, and unnecessary complexity or deviation from vanilla, and that philosophy has probably guided my outlook on affinities.
That said, if my hack strayed far from vanilla numbers or had a way to make looking at bonuses more accessible, I’d be much more likely to change up vanilla bonuses and affinities. Since your project is in Lex Talionis, that may well be the case.
Personally I don’t like map-wide or deploy-based support gain, since it removes that aspect of positioning. I think Echoes support mechanics are the best they’ve ever been because of this. No support limit, they build pretty quickly, but they also require good positioning to build them in an efficient manner.
Problem is that it leads to rewarding slower play. Any system that gives the player more points for having more turns vs. more chapters deployed means that the player who is more cautious gets rewarded, which feels counter to the ethos of rewarding fast play.
Unless you are using supports to bolster players who are struggling, I don’t see a reason to stick with any turn based element.
Vanilla GBA mechanics mean you can only get 1 support conversation per pair per chapter, for the record. And with smaller bonuses, sitting around to get an A support in 3 consecutive chapters isn’t really going to help you much. Though Echoes does it where you gain support points for every round of combat that the two characters are near each other, which is a great way to do it.
Yes, but you are still getting them sooner by playing slower.
I agree Echoes is better than GBA because it emphasizes positioning in a more flexible and natural way, but how are either of these better for balance than by deployment? You can cheese Echoes support gains by dragging out combat to farm more points. It incentivizes slower play for faster bonus gains, which is not good design IMO.
You can cheese just about anything by taking it super slowly though. That’s not a support-specific problem, that’s kinda just inherent to FE. At a certain point, some people just want to play slow and grindy and super safe and there’s nothing to do about it unless you want to put hard turn limits in every single map.
Because it removes the positioning aspect of gaining supports. While it may not matter for slow players who grind anyway, it adds another interesting part to the gameplay for players who aren’t doing that. I’d rather have that than just removing a potentially interesting gameplay addition entirely because some people play super slowly.
I can understand that piece. Positioning around certain units to gain supports, if done well, can be a fun way to strategize. However, I think the turn count aspect of this makes it worse from a balancing perspective.
Regardless, it rewards slow and safe play, which I think is less desirable.
I don’t like affinities. Checking a guide to figure out what each support does every time you want to use them (check unit 1 affinity, check unit 2 affinity, check what bonuses each gives, add them together) is tedius and slows down the gameplay, especially when you are trying to stack multiple together. It’s also restrictive in the sense that even though a unit might have 7 partners, only 3 or 4 might actually give the bonuses that unit needs most. Removing affinities and standardizing bonuses removes the homework out of the supports, which I think actually makes people pay more attention to them because they are less convoluted and easier to keep track of.
I get that. I think the bonuses are usually minor enough that it isn’t something you’re going out of your way to calculate unless it is a “do or die” situation or you’re trying to optimize for an LTC. I see it as introducing a small amount of variance that makes a negligible difference.
As for partners, I see that as the point - maybe one support is easier to get, but the affinity isn’t as useful to the unit as another more difficult chain that comes later, etc.
Can get why people don’t like it and uniform bonuses are perfectly fine, too.
I’ve never really paid close attention to the affinity bonuses, being mostly a filthy casual, but I do like the affinities character/story-wise as a little tarot card-esque thing a la Persona. I bet a decent number of people could guess Hector and Lyn’s affinities without looking it up.
I also like how the bonuses of the affinities lend themselves to some tarot reading fun that doesn’t always line up with the face value of the affinity (much like actual tarot). To spin up my bullshitograph, let’s look at anima vs dark in Sacred Stones. Anima gives attack/defense/evade/cevade, while dark gives hit/evade/critical/cevade. Analyzing their differences, anima is more focused on having an effective impact with its direct stat boosts, while darkness is focused on making some sort of impact as it has increased accuracy and critical.
If you look at the characters with these affinities, there’s something to be said for how the selections line up. Duessel, Moulder, Seth, Lute, and Vanessa are all fairly effective units that aren’t out to make great change; they just want to do some shit and make sure the world doesn’t melt. In contrast, dark is represented by Knoll, Orson, Rennac, and Riev. These characters are all relatively driven but all of their goals end up messed up because they aren’t effective enough in their pursuit. Leon’s not in there, having the ice affinity that trades out critical for defense, but that’s also fitting given his original goal, which is to defend his nation from coming disaster.
Anyway I wouldn’t go so far as to say IS planned things out that way, and almost certainly not to my personal interpretation, but I think affinities are pretty fun. If I was worried about support bonuses, I would probably still want to keep affinities for pure character speculation purposes.
The most important thing in my opinion is nerfing the bonuses of the supports since if they are you don’t have to worry too much about how many supports characters can have. I recommend the support’s boost be +1 for Mt and +2 for hit, avo, (crit avo,) and crit, maximum if the max amount of supports is 5. If the max amount of supports is 10 or 15 I recommend the supports boosts be +1 for Mt/Dmg and +1 or +1.5 (rounded down) for hit, avo, (crit avo,) and crit, maximum.
Basically the boost can’t be too high or too low for good balance.
I don’t think the amount of supports matter that much as long as the support bonuses aren’t too high.
As if I couldn’t be even more of a Kaga fan, I find that standardizing the bonuses is best, and making supports fixed, only increased them based on events or something like that. I never got the point of having too many supports anyway.
If you want a number, then C could be 10 hit, 5 avoid, 10 crit avoid. Of course, you could do funnier stuff, like supports that give crit (30 crit for example).
I’m keeping affinities in the hack I’m working on, I really like them. They’re a neat flavor thing. I’m using GBA +Tellius, but I’m removing ice because having ice and water is redundant, and in terms of what personalities they kinda coorelate to, everyone with ice could have anima or dark anyways.
I think a better solution would be to cap bonuses, i.e. no matter how many guys you put within support the bonuses won’t go beyond a maximum amount. The problem with your solution is that +2 or 1 hit/avo/crit avo/crit is just too low for a single support. The only point in utilizing a lone C support would be for the plus 1 might then.
A single support yes, but I think it is typical for players to usually have three.
Not only that but I think that supports should play a minor role for battle anyway, especially since most if not all enemies don’t have supports.