That, however wraps back to one of my earlier points, armor ranks.
since you can’t just do stuff like having a silver sword without silver armor also being a thing, which you’d now have to create a leather rank roughly the same as silver for this to make sense.
Which now also creates the issue of bonuses and penalties for attacking say, steel armor with iron weapons or iron armor with steel weapons. It literally makes a bunch of things more complicated then it needs to be.
I don’t know if it is as complicated as you make it sound. It is definitively more complicated than what FE normally goes for, but Tear Ring/Berwick Saga already implemented shields in a Fire Emblem like game, so armor wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. Just have three types of armor (light/padded gambeson, medium/steel chain, heavy/silver plate) with durability. Then the weapon types could interact in different ways with armor types. It could be as simple as a certain type of weapon ignores the DEF bonus of certain armor types.
Except it is that complicated.
You can’t realistically expect bandits or raiders to have access to expensive silver plate armor, and a kingdoms main army wouldn’t have every single armor knight using armor of the absolute highest quality.
There is also issues with inconsistent armor within same weapon classes.
I however would need some more time to organise my thoughts on how to best explain this.
I mean all of that is lore stuff that can be explained away. But yes, silver armor would be expensive in this hypothetical game, just as silver weapons/shields are in their respective games. And heavy armor would be restricted to specific classes (Knights). I think it could be done, but the important question is whether this overcomplication adds anything interesting to the hack.
well, it wouldn’t exactly add enough to justify the additional variables added.
think about it like this, say you attack an armor knight wearing Iron Plate armor and carrying an Iron Great Shield (since shields come in varying sizes as well). how much additional defense do those Items give? does the weapon I’m attacking with cut through the material? is the armor in good condition? can my unit even damage them while their gear is intact? how severe of a counter attack are they going to take? can my armor hold against their attacks? what damage types do nearby enemies have? then you tack on the normal stuff you account for in FE and then you decide whether to attack or not.
does having to factor for all of this sound fun to you? while I do play games with this level of complication, its not something I look for in FE.
I think FE3H had shields too but it’s been a while. Shields can be a weapon type or a class of equippable accessories, haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning towards shields as an accessory type that forbids you from equipping designated “Two-handed” weapons in each weapon category (creating a new risk-reward system. Is it worth giving a character a heavier bigger blade if using it means he must unequip his shield?) and making the “Focus on defending without counterattacking” function into a Combat Art available to explicitly defensive classes. I like that penalty for using higher-damage big weapons more than a speed penalty or high weight. When playtesting trading my Knight’s anti-magic Mirror Shield to the Pegasus Knight was busted so I think Large Shields should exclusively be for designated defensive classes only.
I liked Dark Deity and I respect it for trying new things. And as far as Weapon Triangle replacements go I think it’s a good idea for one because not every unit wields a weapon in any weapon triangle but every foe can have class-based or equipment-based programmed advantages and disadvantages against weapon types. If a game allowed Knights to optionally wear plate, chainmail, leather, or cloth, and there was ever a reason for them to wear anything other than plate, people might call that confusing.
That said calculating 30% and 40% on the fly is more awkward than calculating 10% or 25% or 50%. And what is “Runecloth”, and what separates a “Cleaving” weapon from a bladed slashing one? Why does “Crushing” hurt Chain armour less than “Thrusting”? Take a mace to a knight’s head and the chainmail isn’t going to protect him any better than the steel helmet over it. Why does “Cleaving” get a better advantage over Runecloth than “Slashing”? 5 types of physical damage, 4 types of magic damage, four types of armour, and each armour type not only has resistances and weaknesses, but things the armour class resists extra hard and things the armour class is extra weak too. My game’s got a simpler take on this, you’re either armoured and you lose to blunt weapons or a beast/beast-rider who loses to piercing weapons like spears and bows, or you’re neither plate armoured nor a beast so swords beat you. No special resistances, because that would mean deciding whether armoured resists slashing or piercing or both, and… No. And at the same time it wouldn’t make sense for beasts to arbitrarily resist blades and blunt impacts, or for everyone else to resist spears and blunt weaponry.
I get that Dark Deity wanted to try new things instead of just replicating stuff from the developer’s favourite Fire Emblems 1 to 1, but this system feels inelegant by adding too many damage types and interactions to keep track of. Pokemon’s 18 types are hard enough to keep track of but if some types took Hyper Effective damage from others and some types were not just Not Very Effective but Barely Effective that would just be too much.
Now THAT would be excessive!
My game will be simpler. “Bladed beats Piercing beats Blunt. Blunt weapons beat armour, Piercing beats beasts and monsters, and Blades beat everyone else. +50% damage per advantage. Bows are their own category but they deal Piercing damage so they beat horses/dragons/furries too”.
Item durability doesn’t affect item performance in my game. Though I COULD create a class of accessories, call them Armour, restrict them based on class and level, give them durability that goes down when hit, and make their remaining durability percentage factor into the damage you take, just as your remaining weapon durability percentage factors into the damage you deal. I could do that, but it would be overcomplicating things, so I won’t do it… Outside of a gimmicky optional challenge mode like 0% Growths. How hard can it be to make an event change a Formula? Can’t wait to see the Streamers and Youtubers take that on. Thanks for trying to make this seem as complicated as possible, you gave me a great idea for a way I could make this even more complicated!
Also you forgot the effectiveness multiplier based on remaining HP percentages.
+2 DEF Iron Plate, +6 Iron Great Shield, and he has 18 DEF. 26 DEF and you’ve got 10 STR and a sword with 10 MT, your target’s Armoured and he has an Iron Lance so you get no damage boost, we’ll assume both units are at 100% HP for the sake of convenience and if you attack you’ll eat a +50% damage counterattack from a 10 damage Iron Lance, it would be +100% if you were on a horse, and I doubt your initial strike would do enough to him to reduce the damage past 15. If you double, your follow-up attack will be nerfed by the severe counterattack damage you take. You could use the Mordhau combat art to make your sword count as a blunt weapon for this attack but it still might not be enough. You’re not one-shotting him even if you double, and if you don’t die to the counterattack it might have weakened you enough for him to take you out during his turn.
Nearby enemies? Theoretically let’s say he’s got two more Knights next to him. Even if you have a Rally unit and a Special Dance Dancer and a STR-boosting buff on you from the Light Mage and a Rapier or Armourslayer for a +50% bonus to let you one-shot this knight, this type of foe really a job for your Mages, your club-wielding Barbarian, your Archer with the Flaming Arrow combat art, and your Great Knight with a sword and mace and greatlance and warhammer and tower shield(the greatlance and warhammer are two-handed weapons so they unequip the tower shield).
Now you are at least starting to see some of what I ment when I was talking about over complication.
As an aside, I didn’t bring up effectiveness for two reasons.
Now, as per further complications, Shields.
Magic as FE uses it actually doesn’t account for guarding worth a damn. A quick ball of fire wouldn’t actually heat metal enough to do real damage to a Great Shield. However this is where material would come into play again, Wooden Shields are prone to burning, iron and steel would conduct electricity while resisting fire and ice magic and silver would have magic resistance but be prone to being easily broken by physical weapons.
This ends up causing the issues to spiral further due to fire emblem only ever working off two damage types, Physical and Magical.
However by altering the triangle to be about slash/smash/pierce you create three separate types of physical damage which ends up making things need to be more complex just to makes heads or tails of it.
Really the issue starts to become less “this overcomplicates fire emblem too much” and becomes “this is too complex for the gba engine” and I have no idea if this could even remotely work in LT or Tac since I’ve never even looked at them.
And here’s the terrifying part, I haven’t really gotten started on how complicated magic would need to be for all of this to work.
So far it’s been working great in Lex Talionis. I’ve got hidden global skills with conditionals based on the user’s weapon category, the foe’s weapon category, and the unit tags of the foe. I copied the Piercing hidden global skill and edited the copy to be for bows since they “Inflict piercing damage” while being outside the slashing-blunt-piercing weapon triangle (because why would bows lose to sword, lances, or hammers? They’re bows, they get vantage on incoming melee weapon strikes).
I wish the engine supported hex grids.
Well like I said, if you want things to be more in line with some form of realism then technically medium and heavy armor actually prevent arrows from doing severe damage if medium to any damage if heavy, and shields were pretty effective at fending off arrow fire.
I mean a phalanx formation was literally made to counter large scale arrow barrages.
There’s also shield rush tactics to consider, hell, you can even just fight with a shield.
It still just really complicates things further then it needs to be unless you want to go for full on realism, but if you want that then whooo boy are you not even close to having this whole damage thing remotely done.
Come to think of it, I DID love the way archers barely damage armoured units in FE3H. Bows should do halved damage against Armoured units and anyone with a Shield accessory equipped! Any objections?
Shield accessories will not make the foe take extra damage from blunt weapons, but the bonus granted by a shield will be lost if the foe’s using a blunt weapon.
Ah yes, let’s make bows EVEN WORSE
Overall this is still going into the area of “too complicated for FE” without VERY extensive overhauls to the gameplay and overall structure.
Echoes had a system where barons took half damage from bows, but it fine in that game due to the fact that it was balanced out by bows being op with 1-5 range.
That being said, even with classic 2 range, I think the half damage would be a benefit to armours moreso than it would be a detriment to archers, as archers aren’t really doing much against armours to begin with. A good way to balance this decision may be to give snipers a 15% crit boost, as many hacks do.
However, I would object to them doing half damage to anyone with a shield equipped. This is a really bad idea and would completely kill the viability of archers.
For example, let’s say originally, an archer deals 10x2 damage and one rounds a mage with 20 hp. If the mage equips a shield, which gives let’s say 4 defence, meaning the archer now does 6x2. With the half damage as well, they are now doing 3x2 for a total of 6 damage. See how the archer has gone from one rounding the mage to dealing less than a third of it’s health. This is only one example, but there are many others like archers not being able to one-shot pegasus knights with shields and many others.
Well, here’s some fun logic for you. The only mounted unit who could plausibly equip a shield would be caveliers, paladins, and great knights. Otherwise only Greatshields would actually confer the full protection against arrows due to their size when in direct combat.
Where as medium shields (like the ones awakening merc/heroes) use would only provide a flat damage reduction of 1-5 depending on quality. I know the flyer shield was wielded like a normal shield in 3-H but technically that shield should be mounted to the pegasus or wyvern’s wings to grant the protection against arrows tearing their wings appart.
Further breaking down things, magic users wouldn’t/shouldn’t use a shield due in part of either it’s size or weight being disruptive to their speed or accuracy, and clerics don’t want them either since they’d have a natural avoid bonus to reflect the usual reluctance of the rank and file to attack men/women of the cloth.
Like I’ve said. If it really is wanted I can seriously crack this whole thing wide open with odd details and logic that never really get brought up.
Well at this point I think we’ve established that JasonGodwin7 wants his game to be an overcomplicated hotpot of realism and overdetailed nonsense. So I figured why not oblidge.
I mean, there are tons of things in fire emblem that are never explained how exactly they work, like tomes in general.
I think aiming for realism kind of misses the point in general. If it were aiming for realism then bows would have far more than even gaiden range and lances would just be the best at everything. I find it strange that there’s a line to be drawn that things should be somewhat realistic but not so realistic that it completely breaks the game (it already does imo but whatever).
Thing is, lances do have exploitable weakness in combat that are defined by the training of their user. Just going off the fact that most depictions of the axes in fire emblem show them being massive, or using two hands to use, it implies the reason they have advantage is due to them breaking the lance when striking since the lance wielder is blocking with the haft.
Plus taking interiors into account most lances are difficult to use in tight spaces remember geneology forcing cavs into using swords during indoor maps?
Now bows, that one is ultimately the most subjective since fire emblem’s map sets never accurately show scale. Where 5 tiles could be anywhere from 5 feet to 5 miles (don’t know what measurements you use but I’d hope you get my point) where as the distance grows, the variables that affect accuracy become more and more detrimental, such as wind, target movement, potential bow slack, draw strength, tensile strength, low to high ground angle, etc.
Actually spears are really good when used by a tightly formed unit in tandem aka the spear wall. But one on one, a spear fighter can be beat by a pole ax or a sword/shield, axe/shield combo. Just hook the spear with the ax or with the shield and close in with a secondary weapon.
Edit: Spears are better than swords (longer version) - YouTube
The sword/buckler types were pretty competitive against spears, other sword styles got destroyed.
Edit 2: After doing some research, it is a bit more complicated than what I describe. It seems like there is an uncounterable move that a spear wielder can use against a sword type unless they have a big shield or are very skilled at parrying. The spear user can go for the sword user’s shins or feet which would be hard to block or if blocked will put the sword user in an awkward position.
When you need a knight taken out you’d never send an archer anyway. This “nerf” is just for the illusion of balance. In my games bows start at 1 range and gain another tile of maximum range for every 5 points of skill the user has. Bows also gain automatic Vantage against incoming melee attacks from any range. No damage falloff. Your attacks won’t do less damage just because your foe is far away. A Pegasus Knight can no longer bum rush that Archer, their intended counter, and expect to win without severely overlevelling the Archer. Furthermore Archers actually have value now that they can hit foes from 2+ tiles away on the same turn, making them superior to Magic users in a sense as their spells take a turn to charge before they are ready. Though if you wish to spend a turn “charging” your bow aka utilizing the gambit Steady Aim, this improves Bow performance to compensate for the turn spent readying your bow. An Archer is no longer outclassed 99.9% of the time by an ordinary melee unit with a 1-2 range weapon.
My game removed RNG-based crits and missing.
Good call, I removed that.
Why are all these enemies standing next to exploding barrels and who left all these ammo crates lying around? Video games are so unrealistic. But also some video games are too realistic because I have to reload my gun and personally I detest that so realism is objectively bad and too much of it is objectively bad. Ding
And why does The Incredibles never explain how his powers work? What a plot hole. Ding.
But in all seriousness…
Some people like adding more realism to their game if it results in taking the game closer to their desired experience. Some people like taking those mechanics out.
Just look at survival mechanics in Fallout NV, and the Time Limit in 1 and 2. Some mod the game to remove them. Some mod Fallout NV to add nutrition mechanics, heat mechanics, realistic needs and diseases, and more. There’s nothing inherently wrong with realism in a video game so “too much of it” isn’t the problem. If you think I’m adding too much complication to the moment to moment decision making of my game, you’re welcome to feel that way.
I don’t think I’m even adding that much. A realistic needs and diseases system, Oregon Trail style travel segments between locations where your best combat units can die of dysentery, weapon and armour piece durability negatively effecting the performance of these items, a morale system where if too many of your guys die or you let your guys get hurt too much or you sacrifice one guy for another too often or you make other morally questionable decisions on the battlefield or you work your guys too hard without buying them delicious food and treating them to time in the spa your guys just quit or kill you on the spot, adding a Birthsigns system where units, including enemies, get unique modifiers to their attributes based on their Birthsign and who they are fighting and what month it is and what phase of the moon it is, altering the game state based on the season and time of day and moon phase and whether it is raining outside, this stuff would be subjectively excessive according to my tastes.
I want to make the game I want to make in accordance with my artistic vision, and I’ll understand completely if it’s not to everyone’s subjective tastes. I enjoy it when games ask me to triumph over seemingly impossible odds by making me plan ahead and think things through. I enjoy it when games have harder modes and harder mods. I might make balance changes to my game after it is released to tune it further in line with my vision, once I know what people found too easy or too hard.
I could add an Easy Automatic mode where your stats are inflated and weapon advantage and armor disadvantage are removed and you don’t have to look at who you select and send them to fight before attacking. I’m sure a mode like that would help people appreciate the story and characters without needing to look at who’s fighting with what to know whether a move’s good or not before you make it. This might sound sarcastic but I don’t mean it that way, I wouldn’t be against adding that.
How often do fangame creators give their games a “Hyper Hard Mode” designed by the community? I don’t think a 0% Growths Protagonist Only No Attacking Death Difficulty run would be possible in my game, but I’d love to see people try.
Then why are you asking for critique?
You have a vision. You don’t want to change it.
That’s good! It means you have a direction.
But you posted it and asked for thoughts.
And the thoughts you get outline the problems that people have with that system.
It is up to you to choose to do something or not with that information, but understand that when you don’t or ask question after question, people are going to be displeased and annoyed that you value this over that because it’s very apparent.
A developer never does. It’s your baby. Noticing you’ve strayed too far is hard, because you’re so deep in the weeds of the blood of the project.
This sort of thing becomes apparent when, in defense of a system, that you have to bring up another system. I don’t think the example you’re using is a bad one, and even enjoy it at a glance, but the required interplay between systems to make them feel good means there’s high complexity and FE just doesn’t have that as a base assumption. It’s incredibly minimal on these elements.
Well, I’ll admit I was kind of being hyperbolic based off of the original concept then using what little details you’ve given since.
I personally only ever really took umbridge with you wanting to put axes in the slash category when normally/historically they are blunt and even gave examples of how some of the weapons didn’t explicitly work in that system.
Its kinda of just spiraled out from there. at least with me.
I can’t exactly find something to quote to contextualize this so this is just sorta randomly picked.
Really most of the comments now have been “but why though” in their approach, but I’ve at least tried to be somewhat understanding with how a lot of this stuff would work mechanically. I mean it’s why I even gave
this whole idea on how medium style shields would balance out compared to tower/greatshields.
I can honestly, and I mean this with trying to sound like a jerk or with any kind of undertone, give you a slew of ideas for realism without sacrificing much in the grand scheme of things.
Like, since it hasn’t really been discussed, magic and its interactions within itself. I still don’t know why people haven’t tried to make light and dark triangle like the anima triangle.