Correlation between HP and Defense - How to make Strength valuable with no Speed?

Design
1

Now, I’m no game designer, and only just recently got into romhacking, so I’m not making this post as any sort of gospel worth preaching. Instead, I’m posing it as… A really long question. Honestly feel stupid for even making this post but I want to learn!

I’ve been playing through both FE8 and several different hacks as of late, and during my playthroughs I’ve found myself using units that are… Within the lower half of the cast, effectiveness-wise. One thing that has become very apparent, more so than in my usual playthroughs, is that units with high Strength but low Speed are just… Not very good.

The idea is that they’d make up for their inability to double by one-shotting a lot of enemies, but in practice that rarely happens unless the enemy is particularly weak. Even in Sacred Stones, it’s difficult for a unit like Garcia to one-shot most enemies, because the enemies just have too much HP. Even if he surpasses their Defense by a sizable amount, it usually isn’t enough to instantly kill the enemy, and afterward, he’s prone to getting doubled.

In comparison, high Speed, low Strength units barely scratch the enemy with each attack, which obviously sucks for them. There’s really not much you can do about this, they just aren’t going to have very high killing power when enemies have a Defense stat…

But there is something on a game design level that I’m curious about. What if we were to just… Shrink the HP pools, and add more contrast through the defensive stats? Enemies who are supposed to be tanky? Give them even more Defense, but nerf their HP. Enemies who are supposed to be squishy? Nerf their Defense and HP.

This would of course bring its own issues, but I’m curious if there are any hacks that have tried something like this, enemies with small HP pools but a high amount of variability in Defense, and how it turned out, or even just the thoughts of people who are more experienced with game design.

TL;DR if you were to decrease enemy HP pools and make the Defense stats of enemies more extreme (on both the low and high ends), how would that be likely to affect the game? Would low Speed high Strength units benefit? Would low Strength high Speed units benefit? Have any hacks tried this before?

2 Likes
2

Try the hack double or nothing.

But for a simple thing a single hit slow unit let’s them only need 1 hit and if they have good skill or a accurate weapon they can hit hard and easily, however a unit that can double needs to land both their hits to do their damage effectively but if they miss 1 they’ll do alot less damage than the 1 strike.

Basically a slower unit can get all their damage done at once without risk of doing half damage but a faster unit could miss and end up halfing their damage ending up doing less than the unit who needed 1 hit.

Let’s use an example of a str unit vs a speedy unit. The speedy unit would double and could do more damage but they risk their weapon being too heavy or the enemy defenses being too high, a str unit can do alot of damage at once but if they miss they end up doing nothing at all.

TL:DR It’s a case of do you use the speedy unit to do small paper cuts/half there damage on a miss and risk a weapon penalty, or a stronger unit that could miss and do nothing but doesn’t have to worry about defenses that much if they have WTA or good skill.

This boils down to constituency vs power.

2 Likes
3

I’ve been able to make some solid units with high Str and low Spd in my own projects. Bear in mind that I use SRPG Studio instead of ROM hacking for making fangames, as well as a custom class system that uses 40 caps instead of 30 caps.

In my experience, the key to making high Str/low Spd stat spreads viable is to give such characters earlier and more numerous opportunities to pump their raw attack power to the limits so that they can more easily reach OHKO thresholds. One way I do this is giving the player access to Greatlances and Greataxes; although they have subpar Hit on their own, this can be remedied by giving high Str/low Spd characters high Dex. Skills and other supportive options for boosting Atk and/or Hit can also help.

I have yet to try this myself, but I’d also like to experiment with replacing mounted units’ ability to make follow-up attacks with a modified version of Momentum from Engage which increases Atk by a percentage for every space moved (up to 50% higher). This should, in theory, make them highly potent on Player Phase, with their single strikes dealing more damage than an infantry unit making two attacks would. However, not being able to follow up would negatively impact their Enemy Phase performance compared to an infantry unit with enough AS.

3 Likes
4

That’s actually a really good idea. I always liked the idea of mounted units having low Speed, because I feel like it doesn’t make much sense for dudes on horses to be good at dodging and doubling, but at the same time felt like gutting their Speed and doing nothing else to them would just make them really weak, and the idea of giving them Momentum actually feels like it’d work really well for them

1 Like
5

For the most part, FE is all about having enough of something. Enough strength to kill in 2 hits, enough speed to double, enough bulk to survive an attack, etc.

I think the key is just to design the game knowing these benchmarks exist and giving the player tools to reach them. A spreadsheet detailing the stats of every single enemy along with the averages of each playable unit for every map in the game could result in very tight gameplay, but getting that granular is kind of missing the point I feel.

Just giving the player some high might, high weight weapons throughout the game could be enough. High speed units could still make use of them to kill weakened foes that they would otherwise need to double to kill at the risk of a counterattack, but high strength units with low speed would reasonably be able to reach one-shot benchmarks on squishier foes with these weapons.

On the whole, the issue comes down to enemy design vs player tools. The player should always have an answer (preferably multiple!) to whatever they’re facing. In most games the answer is “one-round” far more often than it is “one-shot” so giving more one-shot opportunities can give some value to different units.

On your point about lowering HP across the board, I think that alone would be enough. When it comes to one-shotting an opponent, a point of HP is equivalent to def/res. It’s only on subsequent attacks that having extra def/res starts to matter. Assuming this applies for both player and enemy units, it would definitely make each move matter more and could result in more interesting gameplay if done right.

3 Likes
6

low HP high def either means nothing or heavily increases the chances that a player having stat screwed units will cause them to simply just lose

2 Likes
7

See the idea wasn’t just “every enemy has low HP and high DEF” but more like most enemies have low HP, and DEF is more varied. So say for example in a normal FE game (I’m just making these numbers up) you have enemy DEF on a map ranging from like, 3 to 10, with 3 being the squishy enemies like archers and myrmidons and 10 being the armor knights and such. Basically just take that and make it more like, 0 to 15

Obviously any mandatory or near-mandatory enemies would need to have counters that exist on the map so that it’s not impossible to kill them, but also like, high DEF enemies are supposed to have low RES anyhow, so just bring a mage if you don’t have anyone with a high enough STR stat

2 Likes
8

So many questions that I asked myself, you know how much I have to resist plugging Mistakes? :melting_face:

And it was fun to subvert that to make the player stagger their attack plan instead of always throwing numbers at other numbers to instantly delete enemy shaped obstacles, more in line with other SRPGs.

1 Like