Hey, I’ve played a bit further now (Bestowal of a Saint) and after my initially slightly critical post I really want to praise this hack. I switched to normal and promoted some of my units earlier and the maps have become more manageable, still very challenging (Conquest-esque), but not feeling unfair anymore. The story is intriguing as well and I’m happy that the writing has stayed solid so far, with previous hacks I often had the feeling that the writing peters out towards the mid/endgame, because people spend more effort refining the early game.
I just wanted to ask if you could provide a list of Secret Shop locations (unless there’s houses that point them out pretty specifically) and if there’s any more unpromoted characters joining after this point, because I’d love to be able to sell my Master’s Seal without feeling gimped later on
Your last unpromoted character joins at chapter 8 “Alchemist’s Lament” (if you managed to recruit her) so if you have enough items to promote everyone now, then you can sell all your remaining Master Seals.
Should I put the secret shop locations in the first post? Meanwhile, here’s a little hint: all secret shops are in the same chapters as where you get a Member Card.
Last but not least, thank you! I’m happy to hear you decided to give this hack an another chance and enjoy the writing/story!
Hi! You need to install the patch in the download link to your FE8 Rom. If you don’t have a Rom yet, you need to find yourself one. Unfortunately I cannot help you with that. If you’re not familiar with how patching Roms with .ups files work, here’s a guide:
Hello. This hack seems great, though I’ve never played any FE hack. I’m quite inexperienced with this and I really have no idea how to play this on my emulator. I feel like I’m missing something big. (PS new to this site as well.)
“you improve this recruitment? Yes, he needs to be in a barrel. That is a reference to one of the side quests in Divinity: Original Sin 2.”
I couldn’t say, I am still on my first run and didn’t get him and still don’t know how to acquire him. All I now know is something to do with a barrel?
Assuming at least one character can talk to him at least putting that talk on the character profile like we see with other recruitables would not be remiss. It would at least feel like a reward to observant players that obviously /something/ was supposed to be there to look for during the chapter. But until the next mission with the missing unit slot I didn’t even consider I missed anything since I went out of my way to get the pinions at the house and steal the Hoplon Guard.
Considering just how tight the timing is on various sections during hard mode making it rare to have even a single extra action to spare (which was usually used on vulneraries for safety) to even consider exploring.
@Gemini_FrostFlame at least on hard mode yes, if you can spare it. There are a lot of fliers so having an extra anti-air unit is a godsend. Also there are a lot of opportunities to get lots of cash in various levels later on. Unless you are hurting on weapon durability or consumables the unit is almost certainly going to be more useful than the gold. Particularly if one of your units gets unlucky levels a couple times and ends up sidelined quickly. (which happened to both hyledd and elizabeth in my run so far). At least to me it feels like XP is actually a lot harder to obtain than normal. So getting a couple bad levels early on can be terminal for some units imo.
@Zarg again, are all secret shop tiles actually hinted at? I don’t want to have to scroll every tile on every map looking for secrets that aren’t there if there’s explicitly “something” about all of them that should hint at their existence (like the one on the map you get the card). Just knowing that I do in-fact need to look for oddities rather than guessing would be a huge load off. As soon as I saw the card I had nightmare flashbacks to FE7 where I spent the better part of an actual full week of one of the holiday breaks documenting every possible square because the nintendo power guide stated that all the stat-up items had a buy price, and none of the normal shops sold them.
I would rather not have a repeat of that XD
Also, regarding the save the villagers chapter. The fact that the arena is open and operating normally is baffling thematically. I had to reset once because I assumed visiting it would be like the normal roofed villages or the inn. Instead I accidentally clicked fight and lost Skylar because I wasn’t paying much attention (thinking he was ‘waiting’ with a bonus).
But really, if that place was safe enough to still be operating then there was no need to get the villagers out of town. Just have them all bunker up in the arena.
I don’t know how hard reprogramming the actual arena functions would be, but I would think setting a flag to turn it into a fancy-looking village that happened to look like an arena shouldn’t be too hard?
Alternatively if the arena really WAS that safe in-universe it might make more sense for it to be an alternative evac point for the civvies, but maybe with a downside (you have to bribe the people running it to let them in).
Currently playing the aqueduct level. I would request that the paladin be rebalanced to some other spec. Being a high-speed unit at that timing is just really painful. You give us a new recruitable unit who needs both Skylar AND Avanni to talk to. Two of the high speed-growth units. So not only do you have to use them both to recruit him the turn you get him, but it’s timed exactly when a high-speed (everything seems to be high damage in this, so that’s not worth noting) high movement unit comes crashing in.
Just feels unnecessarily oppressive to line those things up together.
Also not a huge fan of the design choice gameplay-wise to have early rear-reinforcements with high mobility on a map with a strict time limit. Almost feels like you /have/ to take the first several turns off to not get annihilated by that, which means the timer is really half as long. While this is good for building the pressure of the situation it feels terrible to see I have X turns, but really it’s like X-4 because of map design choices. If a map says I have X turns, as a player I feel cheated when the reinforcement placement really means “haha no, it’s less than that.”
Similarly Skylar in general feels overtaxed on this map. He needs to disarm the bombs, but is also needed for recruitment, and is also kind of needed as one of your best sword-wielding units to help handle the axe-users. Oh, and there’s a high-value stealable in the middle of the map too (and this has been hard enough without shorting myself cash. I don’t think I’ve ever blown through so many high-end weapons so fast. I picked up one runesword thinking “this’ll be nice to have in a pinch” and it was fully used up less than like 2 maps later, really making me wish I picked up more).
I suppose if at the end of this there is a narrative point about him collapsing from stress I will find it made sense in retrospect. But at least on the gameplay level it feels bad when combined with the other factors in this level.
Welcome! If you’ve not played a FE rom hack before, this hack might give you a rough time. Still, if you wish to proceed, refer to the guide I linked right above your comment.
Are you sure you didn’t Rescue Ivan (or anybody else) with Hyledd before that happened?
Assuming you don’t have any money left, that is. You’ll get a Blue Gem (5k) from a chest, then 3k from the cave, and a stealable Red Gem (2,5k) before that chapter. That’s a total of 10,5k, and the recruitment requires half the money.
You have Camian (or Agnessa!) wait next to the bottom left barrel. In ver. 1.2., escape markers were added next to the barrel in question.
Nope, not at the moment.
Arenas work differently to other buildings. Even if I set another event on the arena, I’m not sure if it “overrides” the arena’s original functionality.
In my opinion you’re overthinking the purpose of the arena here. The shops are open as well, and thematically it makes no sense to go for a shopping spree, yet it’s possible if you have the time for it. The arena too is just another diversion if you have the time for it.
You mean the lady paladin near the treasure chest?
I could change their class so that they catch up to you more slowly, but the rear reinforcements will most likely stay. They’re meant to push you forward, so in case you have units “trapped” in the water, you need to act quickly.
I could ease up on this a little, such as not requiring him for the recruitment and making the gem droppable. I’ve tried to make sure thieves remain relevant throughout the game, but as you pointed out Skylar is quite busy on this map as is. As for the axe users, you did get a new sword user very recently, not to mention you have other means such as 2-range and Axereavers to fight them with.
Ahhh, the escape markers looked like they were just there for the enemy thieves. Similar to how we had escape markers when we were he thieves in the prologue. I had thought the thieves in the level not going toward them was possibly an ai glitch or me not understanding the priority.
Maybe go with some other indicator to avoid confusion? Using the karkos fruit symbol would not be a terrible idea. Even if someone misses it on their first go around, their eyes would be trained to look for that in future maps once they’ve been through that level, so on a second run it will likely be spotted for that reason (whereas escape would likely only become further cemented as thief escape routes given their use as such in other levels).
The equipment he has is basically worth the money alone, then he’s worth the deployment slot for the next few chapters when a few units are on the bench for sure. In my case my Avanni was kinda screwed so I’m focussing on him quite a bit and he’s better than her.
You can steal some stuff so probably only the bows should be considered. Still, the Ghost bows are like 2500 once you can finally buy them, and even ignoring the other bow paying double-price for early access to that is probably worth it. Plus the unit.
@zarg one thing I am just noticing. This might be due to how FE8 just works, I forget, but the fact that you can’t go back to the overworld once you’ve started a map is kinda crappy. I realized partway through that I really want an Elfire tome (which is overworld buyable), but I can’t go back to the overworld because I saved after a formation change so that I didn’t need to repeat that.
It makes sense in say the middle of a mission-chain where you are going to go multiple missions in a row without touching the overworld not to be able to go back. But when you literally just came from the overworld and now see the map the fact you can’t go back and pick up relevant equipment such as the relevant anti-type weapons feels pretty bad.
Oddly, this would feel less bad if we just didn’t have overworld access at all. At least then it would be in my head to treat every shop like a secret shop where I can’t be sure when I’ll see those items again. Instead the player is basically led to understand and adjust to the fact that we have perpetual access to many of the items, only for that not to be true because you started the next map.
Just a gut feeling on this. Might just be that we need to try and predict what we are supposed to need and buy accordingly?
If I wanted to make sure the player can return to the world map/overworld even during or after battle preps, I’d have to make it so that you can Retreat from each map (like how you can in FE8 but only from grinding spots like Tower of Valni and the Lagdou Ruins). I don’t know what kind of problems this could cause for progression, however. I unfortunately lack the know-how to implement a system similar to Fates where leaving the map preps and returning to your castle - in this case you’d return to the overworld- is possible.
I’ve tried to remedy this issue somewhat by having the newly unlocked shops sell you relevant weaponry, including the anti-type weapons / effective weapons. This is intended to serve as a clue that those might come in handy.
@zarg just noticed the response to one of my earlier notes. Yes, the chest-paladin. Her AI is such that she’ll approach even without anything moving into range, and is exactly the distance away that if you have anything still in that initial zone, because for instance you are waiting to talk to the recruitable, then she is just ramming you in the face as a high-speed unit on the exact turn you need to spend two of your best speed-growth units on recruiting. It almost feels like she’s there to prevent that recruitment. Which feels bad. I don’t see a lore reason that should have to be the case. Maybe switch her with the wyvern next to the berserker. The pally coming in t1 would be fine, lets you use avanni or skylar (if you need them as your high-speed unit) turn 1 to absorb a hit and then burst her down. The wyvern will not have the same doubling threat from high speed and I think will feel more fair. Also might make sense overall that a wyvern comes in the same turn you get an anti-flier unit (who very well could be in range to act that very turn).
Unless her use there is intentional as part of the map difficulty, I think that swap would go a long way to making that opening sequence feel less oppressive without really changing the core of what’s happening on those opening turns.
She is also annoyingly placed in the sense that if you try and rush the wyvern and berserker t1 you are risking her immediately hitting you in retaliation. Overall that appears to slow down early progression to the right (which I think is the intended path to take, given the bomb there), because doing so with a good portion of the cast (at least if unpromoted) risks just losing a unit to her silver sword doubling.
At least that’s how it feels playing this map. I reserve the right to be wrong if there is some subtle trick I am missing outright that solves that issue (I found that to be the case on potential complaints on earlier maps, where after a bit of rethinking the problem I found workable solutions. Given how early this interaction happens and the other map constraints I am not expecting that to end up the case here, though).
