[FE 8](Full-Length) [COMPLETE?] Eligor's Spear version 3.0 (46 +1 Chapters)

Yes but there aren’t any dialogue for them.

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on the one sense I agree going in blind on the hardest difficulty and running into that situation could be frustrating.

On the other the difficulty made it all the more satisfying to overcome, and why should someone expect that they can blind-run a game on its hardest difficulties without running headfirst into obstacles like that? That sounds more like other hacks/games were poorly designed than any fault of this one.

That would be sort of like complaining that in FE6 you didn’t manage to unlock the true ending on your first playthrough because you didn’t know you would need all the superweapons. Duh? That’s sort of part of the point?

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It comes from, and bare with me now, how this community understands difficulty. From what i understand, have seen, and have played, this would be right at home for people who actively enjoy H5 reverse, or that one hack SotF.

Most hacks i’ve played have had some niggily bits here and there but difficulty wise been in line with average FE difficulty. This hack can sometimes make you feel like you’re using base level dawn brigade against the trained greil mercenaries.
Due in part to how outclassed the player tends to be. As such alot of the community here just defaults to hard more, which in this case is actually lunatic or more comparatively lunatic+ on some accounts.

To be frank expecting the player to be 100% optimal in their approach or to abuse savestates which is how the dev has apparently said is how its ment to be played isn’t good design from the outset. Some maps in this hack are so strict on what you can and can’t do safely that it borderlines on unfair. be it overly powerful reinforments to staff spam some maps just seem like they are hard for the sake of being hard instead of hard but fun.

Either way its just my two cents, I’m just the kind of guy that finds oppressive difficulty just for it’s own sake isn’t fun.

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If Lunatic (previously named Hard) is too difficult, you can try lowering the difficulty, which the game allows at the start of most chapters.

I think one of the returning themes in the hack is that you are faced with overwhelming opponents in desperate battles. The difficulty really captures that feeling well, and works for the theme.

The dev has commented on that the following:
“I haven’t said anything about save states, but then again I have no strong feelings one way or another. I can also see why people would feel that way.”
This comment is not on FEU, but on a certain video. I can link it to you in DMs if you want.

I can see that, but I don’t fully agree with it.

It gives more meaning to the roles the units have. You can’t just move them towards enemy aimlessly and expect the outcome you want. Enemies having more than one weapon/or effective weapons makes you think how you want to face them on EP as well.

Sure it can feel like its limiting, but by the point those are becoming more common, you have more units to work with.

Maybe you have other options you haven’t tried out or tested? If you are so keen on putting a unit with WTD against the enemies he faces, I’m pretty sure the blame isn’t on the mercenary, myrmidon, or berserker.

As far as I have played, the very first couple of chapters are more “strict” on the ways you can complete them, and thats because at that point you don’t have too many units to work with.

Can’t be solved with that strategy. In my experience, I’ve run into situations for example; where a simple 1 difference in def can affect how enemy behaves, yet in every situation there has been a way to play around that should I need to reset later.

Overall the growths in the hack are pretty generous, but I can understand that not levelling something in a couple of levels can feel like getting stat screwed, when the enemies scale pretty fast. I still stand by what I said earlier about there being ways to play around those stat screws.

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Ok, for one everyone seems to ignore the baseline of my examples. When i gave that defense example it was structured as only three units exist on this field. There IS no other options. Hence comparing it to a puzzle. Please note i didn’t say anything about positioning or what weapons he had, the myrm and merc could have had lancereavers for heavens sake, and only that he had to survive both of their attacks but couldn’t due to not having either enough health or defense where i chose to use defense since berserkers on average have iffy defense.

As per the savestate comment, i’ll give you that one. I just heard it somewhere and believed it with how much this hack ramps up.

Also he hack creator has at least once stated that sometimes all changing the difficulty does is change the enemy placement or reduces the number of starting units on the map, NOT lower their stats.

The only point i’ve been trying to make is, since the lunatic maps are more puzzles than fights, making the intended solution stat dependent isn’t good design. And I am stating this with no particular map in mind, just as a general idea for some consistency for the player on lunatic specifically. Since a strategy that worked in one run may not work the next if a units stats varied too heavily.

Which is why I suggested static levels for lunatic. It was just an idea, i didn’t intend this to turn into some big debate with me having to explain ideas that were pretty simple and straightforward and have them twisted into a dang pretzel.

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  1. Mangs didn’t play Lunatic (well he did play first couple chapters, thought it was called Hard in older versions)
  2. He missed a lot of objectives, including an extra character in 3rd chapter
  3. Frankly he’s not very good of a player and he does let’s plays so there’s definitely some entertainment factor at play as well

Main problem is that since enemy stats (except speed) change on each reset, the optimal strategy also constantly changes; but because it’s annoying to check enemy stats after each reset (and you don’t know what the reinforcements’ stats will be before they appear) it’s more convenient to just settle on a strategy and brute force victory with resets.
 

That’s the thing though, the game is puzzle like, but since there’s RNG it’s not as if you can expect to just make a strategy and follow it 100%. Even if the stats were the same every game, there’s still hits, misses, and crits.

The game is puzzle-like, especially earlier chapters, but there isn’t a specific solution you have to use. Sure, there’s probably a select few solutions the author came up with, but there’s room for more, and just because the author thought of some ways to beat a chapter doesn’t mean that there’s no better way.

And again, the optimal solution changes depending on the stats and how the RNG goes, and that’s intentional by the author.

The main problem with thinking in terms of “this game has a single solution to the problem” is that theoretically you could win without any strategy at all, you’d just need to get lucky enough (save state abuse enough), and it’s understandable why save states become a crutch to some people since that’s much easier than trying to think of other ways to win.

There is no “this is the strategy to win”, but rather “this strategy is more effective and has a higher chance of winning” and “if so and so happens, you have to change your strategy like this and that” and there might be some situations where you end up with a small possibility to win, that’s just how it is.

But that’s why I said earlier, do you mean in terms of just being able to complete a chapter or trying to get every possible objective as well?

Because obviously you can get every objective and that’s hard, but simply winning is like 1/10 as difficult or not even that, so there’s way more leeway in terms of “solutions” that work if you’re simply trying to win.
 

Anyway, like I said, you can very easily turn on fixed growths for the player units with FEBuilder. Personally I’m not actually a fan of getting average stats and it goes against the spirit of this hack imho, but atm I’m using exactly that because I’m re-recording chapter strategies and too much variation just makes that task impossible.

And I get that it can be scary, but trust me, just make a copy of the Eligor’s Spear rom (speaking of which, if you haven’t played the hack in some time, get the latest version) and open the copy in FEBuilderGBA, all you’ll need to do is go to Tools → Patches → search for “fixed growths” → press “Install” → wait a bit → save and you’re done.

Even if somehow something could go wrong, you have a backup version and it’s fine.

 
Also, by the way, regarding difficulty. Yes enemy placement is different between the versions, item drops too, but there’s also a +2 hard mode bonus on most maps, some have +1 or +3 or maybe even higher. Only Nightmare’s Grasp doesn’t have any hard mode bonus, but Normal (called Easy before difficulty name change in v1.33) always has -2 easy mode penalty.

So in each chapter enemy placement is easier (or at least intended to, theoretically some chapters in an ‘easier’ difficulty could end up being more difficult I guess), and enemy stats are lower as well.

The unfortunate side-effect of different enemy placement is that strategies on a chapter doesn’t translate from one difficulty to another, so if you lower/increase the difficulty on a chapter you might have to re-learn how to play said chapter and it’s also hard for me or others playing on Lunatic (called Hard before 1.33) to give advice that apply to lower difficulties.

 
Lastly, I’d highly encourage you to check out https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfzNmVk2fYbSvJz7tClNsZw and maybe Astaroth records (crappy video) strategies for beating Eligor's Spear maps if you still don’t believe there’s multiple ways to beat a chapter. And again, these are under the restrictions of getting every objective, so there’s way more leeway if you simply want to complete a chapter. (Though I highly encourage to get as much as you can early since it will give you more tools for later chapters)

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Ok, i get it. My idea was stupid and i suck at fire emblem. Either way i’m done with this, last thing i needed was three people telling me I’m an idiot with multi-paragraph replies.

I was just making a suggestion for the sake of consistency.

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Nobody is calling your idea stupid or saying “you sucked”. We are simply stating that the chapters might have solutions you haven’t yet tried out, or that even if you get mildly stat screwed on certain units, you still have ways to play around.

IMO promotions (and the utility they can bring in the long run) play a bigger role than couple of stats here or there in a chapter. Just because your unit deals one or two less damage per round (because you sure as heck ain’t gonna be doubling that much) doesn’t mean they become bad or useless or anything of that sort. Sure, the chapter might take a turn or two longer to beat (unless its a survive or one with a turn limit), but its still doable. Expecting 2-3 stats per level up, anything better might give you opportunities to clear the chapter faster, but does that necessarily matter?
For example when I was doing the chapter Slumber Disturbed, a fast clear required Avanni to IIRC have higher than average str/speed, but who cares if its done in 16 turns instead of 14, when both ways to clear are “consistent” if their required criterias are met?

Yes, average growths on your units as well as enemies could make it more consistent and maybe to the point that there feels like there is only a solution, since every run could technically be played exactly the same. But there are consistent strategies even when there are some flactuation in yours, and as well as enemies stats.

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Like i said, I’m just kind of burnt out on this topic.
It was just an idea since even with guaranteed stats there would still be the variable of ease of access since for example an axe heavy map makes it difficult for lance locked units to get exp with the high enemy scaling. So you would still have to use the stat boosters accordingly.

The fact that the enemy stats vary so much on every restart basically determines your strategy at the start since every turn is crucial especially in some levels (Nightmare’s Grasp).

I think the unit slot should be increased atleast for the early chapters (allowing full deploy of all your characters) just to ease the difficulty a bit. The random stat thing can remain, IMO …

Getting supports early in the game helps massively but is hard to do because some of the early chapters have turn limits so maybe make it easier/quicker to gain support levels.

My support triangle of Skylar, Camian and Avanni basically carried me through the early chapters. One of the monks(Olberich) does not have any supports which reduces his usefulness, though he is still a good unit.

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Map 4 (well I guess 5 including the prologue? The cyclops map) is the place to grind supports in the early game. Once you’ve finished dealing with the “wandering ai” units you have essentially all the time in the world for building supports so long as you leave the non-wandering units for last (IIRC there’s promoted doggo, eyeball gorgon, skeleton archer, tarvos, prepromote spider, and a gargoyle who can be left alone until after the bosses and reinforcements are all dealt with)

Due to how supports, work, the map can pull “double duty” since you can grind the current map’s supports, and also have high enough support to immediately support on the following map as well.

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Thanks for the tip. I will focus on that chapter to build supports on my next playthrough.

Getting supports early really helps. It remember doing it for the Hard Mode of the original FE Games.

The monk not having supports sucks because when he evolves with Slayer, he really helps with the monsters.

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That’s also a solid level for some grinding if you’re up for that.

The gorgon that spawns counts as a promoted unit for xp purposes and is standing on a fort. So once you’ve cleared out all the other units who might engage you, you can safely just eat the 6 stone uses to run it out of attacks and then just attack it from 2 range to gain XP while letting it heal. If you kill the skeleton there as well you can drop units up on the elevated area adjacent to grind melee unit xp as well.

I’ve been utilizing this as a core strategy in my ironman attempts. Once I get to that part of the map getting the entire squad other than agnessa up to 20 prepromote on that level is feasible if you buy enough weapons during setup.

Since you also can have both knight’s crests, an orion’s bolt, a guiding ring, and a jolly roger you can start map 5 (with the ballistas) with 5 units already cap-promoted.

Might be theoretically feasible to double-cap promote olberich/nigel if you have the money to spend on heal staves by using the non-wandering doggo and unit placement on the upper-left part of the map to take damage that you can heal consistently.

quickmath suggests promoted heal staff averages 7xp per use? So that’s ~ 9 heal staves worth of activations in addition to whatever tomes it taks to get to 20 prepromote to full-cap either of the casters on that map.

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Finished the game on Lunatic Mode.

Grinding on the Cyclops Map really made Nightmare’s Grasp way more beatable.

I didn’t know there was a Final Part 2 or 3.

The last time I played on Hard Mode, I killed Eligor in Final Part 1 and it skipped straight to the epilogue.

Biserka is surprisingly good and so is the mercenary.

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Summary

If you weren’t aware, there are two different part 3s. Based on your choice in part 2. They are very very different in how they play out both lore-wise and mechanically on the map.

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How do you make the choice?

All you can really do in Part 2 is wait to die or attack Eligor and escape?

Summary

There are action tiles in front of eligor and eskelios- think the trap tiles from the earlier map.

I forget which one you wait in front of to do which, but one of them goes to the kill eligor ending that I assume you saw, and the other has you side with eligor against eskelios.

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Ok, I will check that out if I still have a save file at or before Final: Part 2

Thanks for the information

Haven’t posted one of these in a while, huh? I guess I should start with news regarding the second route. We – that’s right, there’s a writer in tow now, SeaPineapple123 – have been working on writing/rewriting the second route. It’s shaping up quite nicely. Those of you who’ve been digging through the patch might have seen maps that are intended for this route. All I’m going to say is that there will be changes. SeaPineapple has also been working hard on supports. I’ll wait until we have at least the majority of them done before I start implementing them to the game.

I’m well aware FEE3 is looming on the horizon, but frankly the timing isn’t all that great for me. “Don’t expect this project to be there but be pleasantly surprised if it is” is probably how I would describe my attendance to the event.

As for the gameplay patch I mentioned before my break, the plan is to finalize the gameplay for non-Lunatic difficulty settings, meaning after that point no more changes will be made. I’m itching to start working on the second route (and balancing is Sisyphean enough as is), which is why I’m going to start wrapping things up. Another round of player unit buffs is also in consideration. I was thinking Kevran, Danval, Aelys and perhaps Lexie would be on the receiving end of these buffs. Agnessa’s PRF is also in the works, but I haven’t decided yet on what it does.

I’m planning to increase Kevran’s Speed growth. He doubles reliably off the bat, but a couple of bad level ups can ruin his streak. As for Aelys, an increase to her base Speed might be what she needs. I’m not sure how to buff the other two though, at least I’ll replace Danval’s Steel Blade with something more useful.

Supports - gameplay-wise, that is - will be added as well for those characters that didn’t have any. A highly(?) requested feature will also be implemented with this patch: the ability to return back to World Map. It comes with some caveats, though, such as being able to go back only from chapters you entered through the World Map. For example, you could retreat from Chapter 3 Karkos Mountains, but not from Chapter 4 Slumber Disturbed.

In addition to all this there will be other smaller miscellaneous changes. That concludes this update post. Thanks for reading!

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Take your time with the project.
Thank you for informing us about the situation going on and the FEE3 scenario.

Given the time to settle on the difficulty level for the players to enjoy, you will have Eligor’s Spear as a completed ROM hack and a great experience.

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