@zarg for some reason if the cav dies, but biserka lives biserka just vanishes when the next map starts.
I’m trying to get a savestate uploaded for you, but I’m getting an invalid file format error.
Yes, I forgot cav-gal’s name drawing a blank for the moment.
Any idea when supports will be added?
Was able to recreate it on a new ironman attempt. However the flags are set, if eizabeth isn’t in your party when you end the map you lose Biserka on the next one.
If this is intended there feels like there should be more of a warning.
@Minnnt
Thanks for the critique! I sticked with the vanilla naming conventions for difficulty modes, which turned out to be a mistake. As such, even a difficulty setting called Normal can be in fact higher in difficulty than what one might expect. The difficulty modes will be named more aptly with the next patch.
The middle-in-the-mountain wyvern was one of the things that map got criticized for, so from version 1.3 onwards they’re no longer there. The first ballista was also removed, allowing more breathing room and space for your units, especially for Ivan to move. The path on the right still requires you to choose your battles, and knowing when to pull back.
Nightmare’s Grasp is intended to be this trial by fire that tests not only how well you’ve built your army/team, but also your knowledge of (GBA) FE. It’s definitely one of the chapters that stand out for their difficulty, especially if you’re dead set on visiting all the villages and evacuating the citizens. This map presents an extraordinary challenge, so by extension completing this challenge requires an extraordinary amount of effort. As is the downside with challenges, not everyone will be able to topple them. Even so, I’ve tried to make sure efforts to do so don’t go wasted - you get items when you visit villages, and you get rewards based on how many people you evacuated.
I’m not saying that a sleep staff on one of the Balor is absolutely necessary for this experience, but I’m taking caution in preserving this “hell on earth” feel of the map. Treading the line between where the map still provides that feel, as well as the fear of getting overwhelmed, while at the same time not being completely insurmountable has been no easy task.
I’m glad to hear you enjoyed the hack despite the frustrations. Thanks for playing!
@Firlz
I know I just said I intended the map to be tough, but that sounds like a lot of resets. Why didn’t you say anything sooner 
?
I don’t think you can attach those to forum posts. You’d need to upload them to Google Drive or something similar and then share the link.
How may runs have you done of this hack already? Your dedication is a bit admirable, I have to admit.
Yeah, it’s intended, but now that you brought it up, I might just remove it.
Nope, other than “eventually”. I don’t like giving arbitrary dates/deadlines.
Depending on what counts as a “run” I used savestates regularly in my first playthough on hard in order to explore stuff so that I would know things about maps without having to play through again to learn them. (so it would be hard to say using this metric)
In terms of “starting over from prologue”? Prior to starting the ironman attempts like 2 or 3.
After ironmans? I should easily be on 30-50 by now. I’ve only had like five-eight attempts make it to map 4 so far, only 3 to map 4, and two to map 5. Haven’t got past that yet.
Knowing what will be happening later on there are certain things other than raw game overs that I reset for, because knowing how the rest goes I know finishing without needing a restart from there would be sufficiently infeasible to not bother.
I lose probably 1/5 runs to the prologue, because the most consistent setup I’ve found still ends up with a 49 hit and a 39 hit on camian on a pillar from the revenant + skeleton boss that if they both hit kill him (the rest of that map is basically guaranteed to work, only a question of ohw many vulneraries I lose).
I lose probably half the remaining runs to random weirdness/unluckiness (eating random 10-20% tomahawk hits on skylar for lethal, unlucky misses on the boss at the end, getting “too” lucky on certain sequences that allow for multiple enemies to attack the same unit in a turn, minor play errors that end up getting punished, and a lot of trial and error stuff to see if I could find better optimizations).
Most of the rest of the runs were lost to optizimizing map 3. It wasn’t clear exactly how greedy I could get without losing consistency, so I lost a lot of runs trying to see whether I could get the elixir before completing the map or get some extra xp off the ship reinforcements/etc. Ultimately almost none of it panned out. The current strat picks up olberich, steals the hoplon guard and just ends the map on like turn 4. And even then I still lose the occasional run to unlucky combat-math greed where I have like an 80% hit chance to just finish off an extra unit before finishing (but if it whiffs it kills my unit if the counterattack hits).
I’m still working on optimizing map 4, so far I have not completed the map with both biserka and elizabeth alive AND been able to reach more than one village. Also learning some of the ai quirks lost me random runs due to he not-a-valkryie getting pulled closer due to physic.
I think ultimately I may just give up on the halberd entirely, and focus on just getting the longsword.
All my losses on map 4 have been to when he bosses make it to my team. Also nearly lost one to bad palcement and forgetting about hyledd/ivan and ending turn without acting with them, but I got lucky dodges so it continued.
losses on map 5 were bad placement, unlucky misses enabling xtra attack, and forgetting about the turn 255 spawns and their stats.
Overall MOST runs were less than 20 minutes total (losing before map 3).
Assuming making changes to make ironmanning more approachable/feasible is something you’re interested in, I can try to make some notes on things that might help.
For instance I think the prologue ends up able to be more consistent if the rightmost pillar were one square to the left- that allows you to go from that pillar to the bottom-right most one in a single move wtih cam. I belive this will save an entire action on the archer skeleton in particular (As it will let me lead with cam instead of shortbow avanni to the skeleton’s right, and finish with skylar), and allow avanni an extra square of progress whcih helps keep her away from the boss and gargoyle on the next turn.
On map 2 only thing that really comes to mind is if you could maybe get the speed value of the boss 1-2 lower that would help, simply because it would make thunder+silver lance whenhe’s on swordreaver finish him more consistently.
Also maybe handaxe instead of tomahawk on the top right guard would help too. Given the long-term strategy I think is required to make the mid-late game consistent I definitely need to take all the reasonable opportunities to acquire extra resources available. The current strat enables me to pre-promote cap the entire team except nigel (and maybe avanni) before heading to map 5 by grinding on the gorgon. But I don’t have very much leeway in terms of money (so just abandoning the treasure and gold is a non-starter atm unless/until I start to see exactly how much stat-leeway I have in the middle/endgame. Pretty much every long-term strategic decision is based around assuming I will likely need to be level 20+10 on the vast majority of the team giong into nightmare to avoid losing multiple units that I need.
The current on-paper-routing suggests I can probably lose some combination of elizabeth, biserka, and ivan before nightmare, but not anyone else. And after nightmare I think I can also lose brystrom, agnessa, the prepromote armor knight dude whose name I forget, aelys, the berserker chick, and maybe one of the three of yvonne francis and olberich.
That all is necessary to win on the earliest possible map, because going through the extra two maps likely just makes the run even riskier in the endgame. The finale monsters are very strong, so I’m not sure I can actually survive it without enough of the crew around.
Though part of it will be decided by whether I can grind out enough “extra levels” at the couple points I have to do so to make an even smaller squad still work.
I also need to double-check if I can skip on bringing camian/avanni for finale I. I realized that it might be possible to get a cheeky win with basically skylar, all the units that don’t cause a gameover if they die and a stockpile of runeswords as he endgame (at which point rerouting to de-emphasize cam/avanni and only bringing them on maps they are required might work and save some effort in the early game). Though it will depend somewhat on being able to get both available dumbbells for him and also picking up the silver card and probably some combination of lapis mirror(s) and dragonshield(s).
On the topic of ironmanning:
You can actually have formation where 4 of your units can attack the boss, while one visits the cave. The guarding brigand can be safely chipped with longbow as well. This is from version v1.1, where the boss still had a bit more bulk. Agnessa doubles with guard lance, so it deals a tad more damage than silver lance. Also, one of your other units there can afford to miss.
On version v1.3, if you go for the red gem as well as the cave, you can still have a backup in case one misses. Agnessa uses guard lance again to set up the kill, but with the boss having lowered bulk, you can silver lance incase you want to try to crit him.
If you don’t care about talk convos, Vani might be able to attack the boss there instead of going to the cave. Though after Agnessa attack’s the boss, Cam with base str is enough to finish him off.
Before facing the boss, you might miss some 70-80 hit rates which might not have many backups, or get hit by random 20’s/30’s, of which you can afford to take one. But since its only the second chapter, resetting for those isn’t such a big deal.
I’m happy to discuss these strats more over DM’s if you’re interested.
Hey Zarg, I completed the game where would be a good place to leave feedback?
You can comment here, but if you prefer not everyone being able to see it, you can send me a PM.
I have an announcement to make: I’m going to take a break soon. I don’t know for how long exactly, but expect a few weeks/ a month at minimum. I wanted to let those of you who are following this project and its development to know ahead of time. I’ll also let you know when I actually leave.
The plan going forward is to release one more patch before I go on my break. This patch would introduce renamed difficulty settings as well as other smaller changes. Another, more gameplay-oriented patch, would then be released some time after I return. I was thinking of including hard mode changes to this patch as well, which is why it would be released later.
I know there are people playing hard mode, some of whom are recording videos of their strategies. I want to give them the time they need, so I’m thinking of releasing the other patch at a later date. However, if the need arises, I’ll release two gameplay patches, with the latter focusing on hard mode specifically.
Work on the second route will resume some time after I return. I can’t say when it will be ready, so no estimated release date or anything of the sort just yet.
That’s all for now. Thanks for all the support, and take care!
Enjoy the well-deserved break! For all my whining, this is a very clean and extremely satisfactory game to play.
Quick heads-up: I have updated the patch in the dl link. There was an issue where some players would experience softlocks in escape chapters. It now has been fixed.
This was not the patch I referred to in my announcement, but I thought this urgent enough to be released on its own.
Was this to fix the bug mangs ran into because he let his last unit die?
Curious what the fix was, was it just get skylar to escape to end the map?
Yes and no. I actually wanted to get rid of this bug when it was first reported, but back then I wasn’t quite sure what was the cause. I actually had a patch installed that prevented game over if the last player unit dies - this patch turned out to be the root of my problems. I had it installed because of special game over event in Tale of Conquest and Blood, but since that map has more units now the patch isn’t necessary anymore.
You still need everyone to escape in Final II, but this time around if the last unit dies, you’ll get game over. I also have a hunch that phantoms can now regularly escape, but I wouldn’t count on that: I used a phantom to escape in For Old Time’s Sake, but I am not 100% sure how phantoms escaping behaves in a map where everyone needs to escape and if it’s consistent between different emulators.
Edit: In short the fix was to uninstall a patch that prevented game over if last player unit is killed, and I’m also using a slightly different escape command/mechanic/ whatever you call it.
Not sure if this is a vanilla bug, but when battles get high enough they just start overriding other parts of the text on the row.
At Chapter 3, I like the challenge so far. There is an issue on Chapter 2, the objective is to catch the ship before it passes but when you defeat the boss, the chapter ends. That could cause some people to miss out on visiting the house. The objective should be catch the ship/defeat the boss to make things clearer.
I had the issue the other way if you kill the captain why in the world are you not in charge of the ship. Getting clarity on the objective is still a good idea though.
@zarg QoL request. Can you please just make the poison weapons iron weapons on Karkos (the one where you talk to bryn)? Feels super duper bad to lose to him green-AI attacking instead of healing (or even doing nothing) and dying the next turn to poison damage randomness. Since we don’t actually HAVE a physic when the map starts and no dancer to really push forward quickly, just losing to shit green unit AI feels super terrible.
Didn’t realize how much it mattered on initial playthroughs, but now that I’m trying to ironman its just abysmal that it happens like that.
Probably asking too much, but alternatively (or in addition) if his green AI could be changed slightly that would help I feel like he should only ever attack if it’s actually going to finish off a unit. I had him get “lucky” on enemy phase in that he only got hit once, but that meant on HIS action he attacked and got counterattacked, which got him dead on like turn 3 with essentially no chance of me doing anything to impact it (might have ACTUALLY been nothing without risking just suiciding ivan)
Just make both promotions items on the bosses droppable. It is frustrating having to constantly check which boss to avoid killing since the sprites look exactly the same on the map. It makes the level more challenging but it is already hard as it is.
I assume we are not supposed to catch the thief unless you want to sacrifice a unit. The additional reinforcements are just overkill on my part. The best change to this map would be to remove the Bolting from the Sage. This will allow you to catch the thief before he gets to his escape point with the worry of being sniped. The Ballistas are less of an issue because most of your units can atleast survive one shot or dodge.
Many issues in this chapter can be solved by putting Brynstrom on a mountain/forest. Some hints on where the Guard Lance is would be good. I was able to find it after trial and error.
If you are willing to sacrifice a green unit, then this level is not too difficult. Reducing the number of skeleton archers would make it less difficult to protect all green units especially since you don’t have your staff user to clear the fog of war.
I want to ask why the Sage with Bolting is there. This chapter is already hard to traverse especially trying to stop the thief from escaping. The boss also moves so the Sage having Bolting is unnecessary. I am still on Turn 2 so I don’t know if there are anymore reinforcements.
When are the breaks in Chapters that you can go back to the World Map?
I am playing on Normal mode and it is the equivalent of Hard mode on mainstream Fire Emblem games that I have played.
Chapter 5
not sure about on normal, but at least on hard it isn’t that difficult to slaughter and march your way north to intercept the thief on the last possible turn without sacrificing a unit.
Chapter 6
Agree on Brystrom. Is honestly super odd that he is standing right NEXT to a forest rather than in one.
Chapter 8
That might be a normal mode exclusive. I don’t recall seeing a bolting mage on this map on Hard. Bolting is generally inaccurate enough that you can probably just dodge-tank it with skylar as he goes through to try and catch the thief.
IIRC world map access is after maps 4, 5, 8, 10, and every map after that before Finale.
