Just beat the hack, it’s really, really good. I beat the last 5-6 maps in one sitting, wanted to write some quick thoughts/feedback before I forgot stuff.
Good Thing 1: Unit Diversity
Crowns and Thrones generic units are designed better than some hack’s (and official game’s) named units. Every unit has a custom, tailored inventory that is always helpful for a situation without outright solving it, their stats are impactful, but low enough to punish you for just throwing them out without a plan, and the class skills provide an excellent source of unit identity and utility to each type. I love that mercenaries become mobility kings that can give your commanders extra tiles of movement, or save clutch units from overextending. Archers become crucial build-around units, blood tide is so useful for squeezing out some extra damage for a one shot, and their range allows them to chip from spots that maximize the amount of units that can be next to them.
I do have a few small caveats here, though. There were some classes, like the myrmidon, that I just didn’t get the point of, they always seemed too frail and too weak to really meaningfully take advantage of their skills. Other units, like the fighter, are really cool when the player gets to use them, but they suck as enemies, because death blow introduces a lot of rng in terms of damage potential. Another thing is that some commanders imo have really lackluster or lame skills; for example: William, Johann, Humphrey, and Eadgifu. Finally, while this is wholly personal preference, I would have liked to see an additional generic unit type or two for the second act of the game to keep things fresh.
Good Thing 2: Chapter 9
Chapter 9 is, in my opinion, the best map in the game, and one of the best FE hack maps I’ve played recently.
The goals are very simple, defeat a boss, capture a city, move on. The first thing that I really love about this map is the cast: you more-or-less work your way through the entire second gen cast as playables or enemies or both in this map, and this map has a ton of hype reinforcements on both sides.
The second thing that is really incredible about it is how it turns one of the main mechanics of the game on its head. For most of the game now, you’ve pretty much exclusively won when the enemy leadership hits 0 (and then you seize a point or escape or what have you). For this map specifically, even though there are a billion bosses, Hidayat is the only win condition, and I think this is genius. For the most part, Hidayat can be beaten (albeit very unreliably) with most bosses still alive. So there’s this push-and-pull of drawing in and killing bosses at the cost of your generic units, and it is totally up to your skill to determine how reliable your clear is. If you don’t use your tools correctly, you can easily be staring down 5 bosses that are all within 6 squares of each other, but you could also have the opposite, where you’ve already baited and killed the pegasus and wyvern bosses, and you’ve rushed Humphrey’s squad, and you get to swarm the two right side bosses with Reginald’s squad while you wait for Hidayat to rush you.
And finally, I think this map is almost a perfect gameplay-story match. Reginald has to constantly pull out new allies because his old ones desert him, he has to aggressively sacrifice units for tempo, and he needs to take every advantage he can get to win. Hidayat, on the other hand, has basically everything he needs to win, all he needs to do is nothing. But he can’t do nothing, he talks too much and gives away his plans, and he runs into the fray because he wants to be the one to fight Reginald. It’s such a good story for a map.
The Weird Thing: RNG Hell and Weapon Balance
Okay, so after playing the entire game, I think my biggest critique of it is how often you are just at the complete mercy of the rng. Most units have anywhere from 2-10 skill, and most powerful weapons hover around the 65-75% hit rate, while weaker weapons can be anywhere from 85-100%. The main issue with this system is that weaker weapons are almost never used, most generics have very intentionally bad stats, meaning that a lot of your damage comes from using your limited silver and effective weapons carefully (and then cleaning up with more accurate weapons). Especially when you are at a leadership disadvantage, this often comes down to risking a unit’s life on a 40% poleax hit rate, or a 65% zanbato. Some maps make you deal with these coin toss a ridiculous amount of times per turn, and while it is unlikely that all of those hits will miss, I’d rather be guaranteed to hit half of these attacks, then have the chance to hit all of them. This also happens a lot with skills, enemy fighters, as I mentioned before, have death blow, but this also extends to bosses with sol/luna/colossus/adept/astra, and also to Walton, who died an embarrassing amount of times to missing his first attack and not being able to galeforce after.
Perhaps the most crystalized example I can provide is the sleep staff. The sleep staff is a 3-15 range (it should just be 1-15 range, same with physic, but I digress) status staff with 3 uses that shows up in a ton of maps. I think I’ve landed about 6 sleeps of the ~30 I’ve attempted. It’s honestly crazy. The staff has horrible hit, because most staff users simply do not have the magic to use it effectively, and it feels bad no matter what direction it goes. If you whiff all 3 sleeps, it feels horrible. If you hit all 3 sleeps on crucial enemies, it feels like cheating because you only had like a 25% chance max to hit them. Neither feels intentional, and it is so easily remedied by just changing the stats of the sleep staff or the units that use it. If the effect is too powerful, change the sleep timer to be 2 turns. If the uses are the issue, make it 1 or 2 uses.
There are a lot of weapons that also fall into this weird hole. The flanged mace is super powerful, but I would rather it be less powerful and have more accuracy. Siege Weapons and Ballistae have low hit to balance them out, but I would rather they be more accurate and have less uses, so you can just plan to get hit by them.
Granted, there are some ways around this accuracy problem, the immediate one that comes to mind are the mages, but it just feels like there are never enough tools to make any plan completely reliable.
Good Point 3: The Story
I am really tired so I don’t want to type out another super long section, but the story is really good. There’s a lot of solid parallels between characters, the protagonists all feel super different and are all written excellently, and there is a lot of great foreshadowing as well. For how short the hack is, the story is definitely memorable.
Anyways, thanks again for making this, had a ton of fun playing. I would highly recommend it
Though, a lot of other characters do. All Hubert is in Crowns and thrones is a name without a face in the Gluster Family tree since I originally didn’t have any plans to make him an actual character.