Concept: Preparations Screen Revamp

Pipe dreeeeeams and mock screeeeeens.

Renamed “Trade” -> “Supply”, “Fortune” -> “Tactics”, and “Save” -> “Config” because reasons. If there’s anything I don’t talk about specifically it’s probably explained in the original post, I’m only going to summarize the additions made in this second draft.

Pick Units: In the original concept, I wanted to display a Class Type breakdown of the player’s party here. People generally seemed to think that was useless, though, so I figured that perhaps breaking down the party based on weapon type distribution could be more helpful?

Also, it’ll show the little exclamation mark on a thief if there are treasure chests in the chapter. A green exclamation mark will be shown to indicate non-lord characters that have ‘Talk’ events in the chapter.

Supply: The presentation here is largely similar to the original concept; I’ve added arrows onto this screen, which would indicate whether the value represented is higher or lower than the what value was at the start of the previous chapter. This would help give new players a sense of their resource management from chapter-to-chapter; here, I got some gold last chapter, but spent more in weapon uses such that my Net Worth still went down. This clearly indicates that my resource pool declined in value over the last chapter.

In the Supply menu, I’ve kept the exclamation mark display when someone has a weapon in their inventory with uses < 25% of their max durability. This gives players a visual cue when they are deploying units with low weapon uses. I’ve also included a concept for a built-in Repair shop; especially in a game like FE7, where you can go several maps without seeing an Armory, this function would be incredibly handy. In FE4, you only had to pay the (cost-per-use * (max uses - current uses)); this means that repair is Net Worth-neutral. In order to balance the availability of Repair in a more standard FE game, it’d make sense to charge [(cost-per-use * (max uses - current uses)) * 1.5], akin to FE6’s built-in shop. This would give Repair more of a selective application (whereas in FE4 you were meant to repair everything), based on the availability of gold blowing it on repairs, in the long-term, is less beneficial than buying and acquiring new weapons.

Tactics: I’ve also added the arrow mechanic to the Tactics summary. Some of the numbers have changed here. Instead of Avg. EXP Gain, I felt that providing a sense of “EXP gained per Turn” would be more beneficial - hopefully, this would help players be more conscientious of how they distribute EXP on a turn-by-turn basis. The Kills:Turn ratio gives further context, giving the player a sense of roughly what to expect when they engage in a turn of combat, so they can plan their own actions ahead accordingly around the expectation that I’ll get roughly 3 kills for every turn in combat (I guess the player could throw these numbers off and make them useless by turtling for support gain, tho - it’d be best to replace that with FE9’s support growth mechanic which gave a set amount for deploying two units on a map together).

Also included in a concept for a Base convo menu, because why not? Replace Augury with the thing we all know we really want. Mostly I just wanted to see how it’d look in GBA.

I’ve also added green exclamation marks to the support screen to give a visual cue for units who have a pending support waiting to be activated. It’d be neato if they could activate the conversation in the menu, too, but #pipedreams.

Check Map: Gives various details about the map. Information is all fairly standard. Since FE7 maps have either villages or chests (never both), that bottom line will display the number of villages/chests on the map. The rest of the info provided is pretty basic.

Config: And finally the pièce de résistance to my pipe dream, Config would allow players to modify multiple difficulty settings before each chapter. Difficulty, rather obviously, toggles you between Normal and Hard mode. Gameplay toggles between Classic and Casual. Growth toggles between Random and Fixed (based on this proposal by Crazycolorz5). Variance toggles between Curved (2 RN for battle calculations) and True % (1 RN, ala pre-FE6 for the veterans out there). It’ll display all of these settings in the Command help when you hover over config, and also show the total amount of Turns Taken for the LTCers out there.

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Turns taken: 420. kek.

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