Creating Fire Weapons in Fire Emblem!?

Projects Concepts
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Reading recommended, but TL;DR on the bottom.

Hrm

I can’t say I’m a newbie to the franchise anymore, but I can say that I shudder the second I hear “Extreme prices”. My personal game development philosophy is “Give plenty of resources, plan for them a good challenge and everything will sort itself out”.

The most limiting thing I do to myself is playing without pre-promotes, and only if they feel too uber, like Camilla and Xander, also Mycen and Clive.

Cause after all, what’s the point of giving you something that you’ll only remotely use?

I’d rather put my resources and efforts giving the finishing touches to the mainstream mechanics.

Making it unaccessible would only create either a niche unit or a crappy legendary with limited uses.

(I’m looking at you Mani Katti!)

That’s of course unless… You plan out on these for the long run.

Imagine you are playing for the first time, you’ve got around six units on chapter 1-2 without much weapon diversity and then you go to a village.

They give about 10000. That’s plenty to work with and there’s an armory right there!

You go, look at their wares and-What the hell is this!?

Some Pseudo-Levin Sword capable of attacking from two tiles away while I have NO archers in my rag-tag team! I’ll buy it right awa-

Wut, 7000G!?

Not worthy enough for me, uh-huh.

Then you go and buy more accesible weapons for your army and some vulnerary, that’s good, you want everyone to be nicely outfitted

But then chapter 3 kick in…

Dozens of barbarians come at you! There’s a village you WANT to save because you don’t know what’s in there but it’s right behind a river and you’ll have to divide the forces in the enclosed mountain terrain to advance into the boss, being wary of the reinforcements AND get to the village without being pummeled to death by the overwhelming troops.

All of this is perfectly doable, even enjoyable, you might get a bit salty and ALSO send a goddamn thief to ravage the village from a different place.

You did it, it took 15 turns but you did it. You take a chance to reflect cleaning the sweat from your forehead and you realise… OH MY GOD. THERE’S A SNAG ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER.

A pseudo-Levin Sword would have been pretty useful to cut some far away trees right now, am I right?

Those are choice repercussions BOI.

Its fairly early on the game, and now you’ve learned that the game might reward making some sacrifices on the long term. You feel “Oh, well. Maybe next time” and you go happy and accomplished to chapter 4, now having a new mindset on meaningful resources.

With the above scenario, we must think not only what we give to the player, but when and how he should be using it after obtaining it. I know its hard but, I doubt anyone who makes hacks is a slacker. We can give an interactive experience, let’s spice it up.

TL;DR

For a more tangible example in fates, you get Keaton in chapter 14, guess what’s coming to you on Chapter 19, Kitsune!

If you bench him, like many do, not me included, you’ll have to rely on beastkillers that cost money aplenty. If you don’t, Beastbane Wolfseggner will do short work of them, specially with the Camilla Bonus to his Strength and Defense.

Long term planning. Period. What you give is what they have.

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When it comes to gimmicky classes and weapons, either make them a high-risk high-reward; make’em a bonus thing and/or plan around them.

I don’t want to see more rants about ballisticians, really…

They are tanks! How did they fail to implement what could have been the best offensive support class!?

23

I am glad if I can successfully translate it.

I am thinking that fantasy world view will break when guns appear.
How much can you tolerate in historical firearms?

A. Bow
B. Barista
C. Crossbow
D. Musket
E. Rifling(Rifle)
F. Cannon
G. Machine gun
H. Tank
I. Bomber(airplane)
J. Missile
K. Nuclear weapons

In GBAFE, up to (B) will appear.
Therefore, many people will be able to tolerate B.

For example, if (K) nuclear weapons appeared, the game will collapse.
I think there is a boundary line around (D) Musket or (E) Rifle.

When modern weapons come out, I think that it becomes a military game like Famicom Wars (Wars series).
All SRPGs originate from a game called Daisenryaku(大戦略).
A Daisenryaku(大戦略) is a game fighting with modern weapons.


I think that FE has set the world view of medieval fantasy in a Daisenryaku(大戦略).
in SRPG fighting with modern weapons, there is Famicom Wars(Wars series) in the game also released by Nintendo.
I think that Nintendo’s SRPG has branched into two series while imitating Daisenryaku.

If FE uses modern weapons, it will be closer to the other series you parted.

1 Like
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Let’s say that, if FE would be found somewhere around 1400 D.C., this game would have to be placed around 1600-1800 D.C.

As you say, ranging from a D-E, we can still call it Fire Emblem, and even if we can emulate E to K with magic to an extent, like the double impact Lightning attack replacing G to an extent, the same as Fimbulvetr taking F, Mire taking J or siege taking on snipers, and Ballisticians having the same role as H in many games.

For the last three, we don’t really have them, the concepts are too advanced. INSYS actually made a smart choice with Peg. Knights. They efficiently replace aerial combat forces mixing them with infantry and giving archers the role of anti-air artillery. Still, we can’t really give the role of I to Peg. Knights.

If you’ve paid attention you’ll realise Malig Knights take the honor, with their high Def coupled with Mag and Fimbulvetr perfectly emulating a restricted bomber. What a beautiful unit indeed, especially with the lack of Wyrmslayers in game!

I… Don’t really have anything for K. Book of Naga maybe? K is simply an extremely powerful missile with loads of AOE. Introducing it as weapon would be nearly impossible, maybe a bit more viable as concept with magic like the Dusk and Dawn dragon, but no more than that.

As you can see Fire Emblem had inventive ways of channelling mechanics everyone uses now, maybe even before them!

If we look at it in such a way, introducing firearms into Fire Emblem is simply giving our physical units more varied ways of attacking in longer ranges. Daggers and Shuriken can’t be taken in account since it was introduced as more of a debuffing and support weapons rather than having reliable damage, that’s why they have low might.

Obviously Suzukaze and Kagero are an exception, but that’s purely thanks to his own strength growth, cause the class strength growths aren’t all that good either.

This concept of non-strenght reliant high might fire weapons is the exact opposite of Shuriken, having their power as main staple and nothing else.

Long range physical variety, that’s all we ask.

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Already working on one!

The reason why I so readily post novella-sized responses to people asking about ideas for concepts is that in addition to being food for thought, I like to use this forum as a sort of notepad for these things. There are a lot of concepts that end up never leaving my computer and it’s better to get them out there rather than leave them to rot.

Also, keep in mind that a lot of my ideas are very inspired from Europa Universalis 4, a grand strategy (大戦略) game that takes place in the world from 1444—1820. In EU4, a single military unit represents 1000 men, and there are only three “classes” (infantry, cavalry, and artillery). The amount of soldiers in a regiment is its HP, and when they lose HP from battle or attrition they’re slowly re-inforced from your manpower reserve (10000 or so for a small country; over 100000 for a huge empire); if you end up in a war against Russia or Ming China, the best strategy is often to make them waste millions of men trying to siege down a fortress in the mountains until they’re finally using up their manpower faster than it can replenish and you can take the fight to them. With no manpower, your opponent will have to hire mercenary regiments instead of regular ones; mercs are expensive and will quickly wreck a country’s economy with overuse.

I mention EU4 here to give an example of how much people are just a statistic in that setting. Fire Emblem: Three Houses seems like it will let the player command squads of generic units, but with EU4’s amount of soldiers it is more like Advance/Famicom Wars where the characters who have names and faces are the ones who command the soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. Even Fire Emblem sometimes has scenarios where there are generic blue soldiers in your army whom you only see in cutscenes; when the story calls for a more intimate scene (for example, one chapter you’re fighting against a huge battle and the next chapter you’re sneaking through a castle), no one asks “wait, what happened to the generic soldiers? It’s literally just my ten units on the battlefield now?”.

7743 has a very good point about technology changing the way the setting works. I believe FE10 has crossbows, and those work similarly to the concept of guns (high might, but don’t add the user’s strength) I described earlier. Additionally, I think magic is underrated as a long-range weapon; there is an entire weapon triangle for magic already in the game and the base games barely take advantage of it. In many FE settings, all mages combined are as rare as a single class except for in the token mage/church country or dark mages in the endgame. Sure, magic isn’t a physical weapon, but if your goal is to give range to more physical units, I would add weapons that can actually use the strength stat (more bows, hand axes/javelins, slingshots, martial artists who can do a hadoken, etc). Even just making archers more interesting would be more effective (when I read “fire weapons” in the thread title, I originally thought it meant stuff like fire arrows until I clicked on it). You could add catapults/trebuchets as another sort of ballista that does splash damage (you would need to make a lot of changes to the game for this to work, though). If you’re going to put guns in your setting, you need a strong narrative reason (does technology go against the will of the gods? will magic survive, or can it adapt to make new spells that can stop bullets? do dragons/manaketes now fear humans because they can be taken down by a single volley of gunfire?) as well as a mechanical one.

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First of all, how come I never heard of that game it sounds amazing? Is there any english patch or emulator? What console?

Second, I technically made this thread for fun with the sole purpose of researching how to introduce more fire weapons in the game without wrecking the formula, history reasons non-withstanding. I never said it because… Well, it was more fun that way! This has been my only hobby for two days!

Now, back on main topic, what 7743 said was on spot and no one will deny it, but let’s look at China for a second. While most of the world erased bows from the army as early as 1600 or so, China had the COMPOSITE bow, much more effective than normal bows except for not enduring weather conditions on other countries and that’s why it didn’t spread its use, likewise happened with a couple models of rifles in history I can’t recall right now.

This composite longbow was way more compact than others and the favorite of cavalry for the time. They did have firearms, but they were mostly used as armor-piercing weaponry, not relying on it but employing it effectively since, again, long reloading times.

But the cons for bows kept piling up, it was hard to train for archery and produce enough arrows for everyone; anyone could learn a fire arm effectively in a fraction of that time and copper bullets were cheaper and easier to produce. Fire arms win again! Poor bow…

Anyway, I think I proved my point. I earnestly believe it can be done! Maybe! 50% sure of it!

Next point, as you may know, I dislike Fates settings and history as a whole, and the maps of any route that isn’t Conquest are laaaaame, but the mechanics are simply beautiful, complex and deep yet easy to grasp and abuse for anyone with half a brain.

Magic was perfectly implemented, with each spell having specific utilities. The magic triangle wasn’t useful the way it existed, so they got rid of it. For me, thinking that a mage will be fighting mages most of the time is delusional, so having one type of magic having advantage over others while logical, wasn’t all that useful. Being transformed into categories like normal weapons made them easier to use and gave many more reasons to have a great variety of tomes in one unit, aside from Nosferatu. (I literally referred to Tharja as Nosferatu for quite some time)

Now, if we help Arch finish the weapon Hexagon, forget ALMOST everything I said. Fates mechanics are cool. My opinion, can’t help it.

Next, the actual thing with ranged physical weapons. Hand axes are a staple, the same as their low accuracy, but since barbarians, fighters, pirates, brigands, their defense is made out of TIN-FOIL. Not giving them a chance to use all that strength without automatically dying in retaliation would be sad and unfair.

As for the Kodachi…Man did I hate that weapon! It was simply, odd! It actually killed my suspension of disbelief the first time they appeared, and that’s pretty damn hard! I don’t want to give the CLASSES more range, Myrmidons are way too useful already. I want to give the ranged array of UNITS some more variety, just for the kicks. Again with the Shurikens, they were good but lacking. In a game with weapon uses as a mechanic, clerics with Enfeeble staffs are more viable as debuffers, and without being debuffers Shurikens become pretty useless in comparison.

Having an alternative for ranged weapons means they would need to fill the exact main role, in a different way. Fates kind of did that too, too a lesser extent and it was kinda funny. Yum had pitiful hit rates compared to bows, but gave bonuses to Rest and more. They relied on the Archer’s class high skill to hit anything at all, which is why I never gave Niles a Yumi, ever.

Bows lacked this bonuses, but were a lot more reliable as a whole without forging.

This is what I want to do with basic firearms, give a new way of approaching the same problematic and making the most of both.

Also, I liked the idea of the catapult but that remains closer to ballisticians terrain. We’ll eventually reach that.

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I’d love to hear more about that on the future. Call me once there’s a beta or you need help. I’ll do as much as I can!

Good luck.