So, I’m in the early planning stages of a romhack/fangame, and I was wondering how viable it would be to have a growth booster gimmick. The idea would be that most, not all, but most units would have sub-par growths, and this would be compensated for by giving out abnormally large amounts of stat boosters that, instead of giving +2 to a single stat, gives +5% growths to two stats. There would be, of course, aspects of the design that would work against giving them all to one unit (e.g. side objectives, like recruiting more characters, that require some characters to be alive [and therefore viable to deploy], or map design that encourages splitting the army), in addition to the ones already built in (Stat caps, # of character levels, a luna tome here or there so no unit becomes invincible, etc.)
So I’m looking for advice on: Would this work in theory, what would the numbers (base and starting growths, as well as the number of growth boosts given out) ideally look like, and what game-breaking strategies might I need to account for?
Not really. One of the problems with growths is that they’re random. You have good odds of getting nothing –
Consider units with flat 25%s for their initial growths (which isn’t even that bad except HP) - you put five of an item on that unit because you really want it to level, like, Spd/Def.
It still has only a 50% growth in each, so it’ll end up with a 25% chance of not getting either stat you care about. That’s really bad and basically guarantees that you have no stats on your units for a very long time – 5% growth means 1 stat per average 20 levels!
In turn, giving growth boosters as rewards means that you want to get as little EXP on some units as possible so that you can stockpile them to dump on all the same units so they can become as strong as can be.
With low enough growths enemies have to be weak because there is a much realer than standard chance of accidentally playing “miss all level ups” which is not a particularly enjoyable play experience unless you’ve already got a lot of mastery of that game.
The other problem is that with a growth boost you need to use it as quickly as possible to get the best value from it. Unlike a stat booster, which can give the +2 immediately whenever, potentially can give +2 in… 40 levels.
Then there’s the whole ideology of holding onto these items to dump on a potential unit you’ll get down the line and that unit won’t even get the full value of the boosts most likely given they show up later…
So no, I don’t think it’s a viable alternative. Additional thing to add, sure, but not as a standalone.
You could always take the FE3/5 approach of using Star Shards/Crusader Scrolls. Instead of being used, they’re held so you can only stack a few on any given character. It also opens up the opportunity of trade chaining them around, which is helped by the fact that both of these games allow units to trade more than once each turn.
As for the growth bonuses themselves, Shards give +40% overall while Scrolls give +30% and negate critical hits. Some of them also lower growths in certain areas, such as the Leo Shard dramatically increasing Strength by 50% at the cost of 10% defense. The important thing to note is that the most impactful items give big boosts in a single stat as opposed to small 5% boosts in everything.
Using this approach, early items should give +20% overall in a single stat OR +10% split across two stats. As the game progresses, bonuses should get larger for units (+50% per item by lategame). That way units that join underleveled can make good use of these large bonuses while units that have been around longer were stuck with worse bonuses, but are already trained and don’t have the levels remaining to become unkillable demi-gods like their underleveled peers.
Basically, giving permanent growth bonuses to some units just encourages the player to create a small team of juggernauts as opposed to a balanced team of mediocre units. But held items limit what a unit can do since they can’t hold as many weapons/staves, limiting how many boosts a single unit can have at a given time.
Having a game based around growths is fine, but the opportunity to start juggernauting will always exist. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a problem to allow players to do so, but they should probably work for it in some way. Slapping a few permanent growth boosters on a unit to make them unkillable is too simple, but making a player think about inventory management could help make it interesting. In the end it’s your project, but held growth boosters seem like the way to go.
The cons were already explained, so if you want to make it “viable”, all you’d have to do is focus on addressing those.
To counter the possibility of wasting a growth booster and not getting anything out of it, you can remove the random aspect of stat gains. It’ll take some extra math which is always scary, and some would argue that predictable stat gains are boring, but you’d be able to know what you’re getting out of using said items and so wasting one would be entirely on the player and not the RNG.
To not incentivise leaving a unit at a low level until you can dump all growth boosters on them, you can add a stat re-rolling option. That way even a maxed out unit may benefit from having growth boosters used on them, so there’s no longer a downside to giving a unit EXP. You can add re-rolling regardless of random or fixed stat gains, too.
The main issue with the idea is that it can make any character good at any stat IMO like a mage with high defense or a mercenary with high resistance, which isn’t something we want in a hack because every class is supposed to have a weakness.
Also, allowing any character to have the same 40% growth rate in resistance for example, greatly reduces what makes them unique IMO.
What stops players from pumping their dark mages full of defense boosters and nostanking everything? Maybe each class would need a skill that buffs their ability to do what their class is “Supposed” to do and worse at what they “shouldn’t” be doing, to make wrong-class builds relatively weak.
I like the idea on paper. But it would have to be more of a substantial increase for it to be worth it. I think most people would opt to sell the Afa’s Drops/Metis Tome if they could (It can’t be sold), But they just give it to whatever unit, because 5% is not that much of an increase, even if it’s for all stats.
I think a more interesting way to do it would be having these items boost by 20% on only one stat. But they should only be usable once per unit (one of each stat).
An alternative would be making them temporary effects, by chapter or even turn amount, kind of like food buffs.
You could give a unit +20% speed growth for a chapter only, which could give them a boost, or not depending on your luck, it wouldn’t be too broken thanks to it’s limited duration and it could be a nice little boon for certain units, more of a “lets put a patch over your problems” rather than fixing them completely. If you get lucky you could get a stat-booster’s worth of stats, if you don’t there is always next time. Could even add a 2-3 turn chapter cooldown per unit to keep the players from dumping it all on just a chosen juggernaut. (Note: Absolution has atleast one food item that works like this, remembered it while writting this post, so there’s an example.)
Additionally you could change the buff to only last a few turns 5-10 could be enough to get a few levels, give the players an insentive to play faster, and would mean after a point you could go back to playing the map normally rather than funneling all the exp into Arden…err i meant your favorite character. For this one you could even raise the buff to the realm of 50+% since it’s not like you can guarantee more than a couple levels in that short ammount of time. Once again a patch rather than a fix-all, something that can show you the player had a choice in how these characters grow in power rather than leaving it all to luck.
Give a permanent number tends to be more reliable and useful then a 20-30% boost to any particular growths. The Hodr and Baldr Scrolls from FE5, for example, give a cumulative %15 bonus to strength growths, but with the shaky growths of most of the FE5 cast, it is still easy to miss that additional 1/6 chance of procing strength
What tends to be both more interesting and valuable is have talk events on map that give raw +1s and +2s to relevant stats. A conversation that gives +1 strength in FE5, in this example, is as valuable as potentially 6 levels of coin flips
If you want to stick with growths, 25% is pretty significant on a growths unit, and skills that double or increase growths can be valuable up to a point… maybe something like the class bands from the Tellius games would be a good middle ground to dissect? they give a easy to read positive to specific growths, but they also tally up invisible points towards a guaranteed stat gain on a level?