Patch 1.24 brings another major gameplay update with the addition of Plus Mode!
Plus Mode makes the following changes:
All allied units learn a random “second personal skill” when encountered. Gamebreakers such as paragon are excluded from this pool, as well as skills which can potentially end up being useless such as Live to Serve. Promotion skills are also excluded from the pool.
Almost all enemy units beyond the Prologue gain an enemy-only class skill. The final boss is already loaded up on skills, so he gains a slight stat boost instead.
My hope is that Plus Mode adds a great amount of variety and replayability for those who are already familiar with Hope’s Trail - even if you pull some of the same units, their capabilities might be drastically different depending on what they roll as their second personal skill!
It may also be appealing for those who loved the information overload brought by Conquest or Heaven’s Bloom levels of skill spam.
Just like Chaos Mode, Plus Mode is selected at the start of the prologue. Plus and Chaos Mode are toggled independently from one another, meaning you can play with neither of them, one of them, or both of them.
Ok so me and my friend got a hard crash on Chapter 5: Whenever we try to promote Jules, the game seems to freeze when trying to load her Tactician sprite. I don’t know if this is relevant, but that happened on Chaos+Plus mode. The screenshots show her after going Sage instead and another one of the frozen screen when trying to go Tactician (audio was also stuck).
(Oh great, the forum doesn’t let me post links nor upload images. Its an imgur album: /a/Y6b24sG )
Aside from that, this is pretty well made and we are having a LOT of fun with this!!
Ah shoot - I should have realized this would be an issue when someone reported the same thing happening with Warshipper.
The issue is I forgot to give Tactician an anima animation (since Jules is the only anima-capable tactician), meaning the game crashes if you promote to it while holding an anima tome. I will fix this for the next patch, but for now you’ll be able to promote to tactician by simply holding a light tome instead. After promotion there shouldn’t be any crashes even with anima tomes, they’ll just be forced to anims-off.
1.25 is mostly a bugfix patch, but I also significantly adjusted the trainees.
Trainees have been a bit of a thorn in my side; due to their low bases + high-scaling nature, it’s been very difficult to make them well-balanced across all difficulties, as well as between vanilla and chaos mode where their join times can drastically differ.
Additionally, these units encourage putting ‘all your eggs in one basket,’ which is somewhat antithetical to the rest of the game’s design.
All trainees have had their growth rates nerfed, but tier 1 promotion gains have been boosted and made more specialized. This means they will get an earlier and more flexible power spike, but won’t reach such absurd peaks in the lategame.
Of course, I still want them to be more powerful than your average unit if a player invests the resources necessary to raise them from trainee status - but ideally this power will be a little less about raw numbers, and a little more about the versatility they provide.
Tier 1 promo gains have also (finally) been added to the documentation.
Full 1.25 changelog
BUGFIXES/POLISH:
Menu selections which instantly end your turn with no further selection (rally, visit) no longer display at the top of the command menu
Anathema avoid and critavoid debuff: 10 → 5
Focus crit buff: 10 → 15
Fixed a crash that could occur when Jules promoted to a Tactician
Enemy Tacticians and Summoners now have character descriptions
[PLUS MODE] Enemy pegasus knights no longer mistakenly have warding blow
[PLUS MODE] Removed Fortress Defense and Fortress Res from the Plus pool
Mariam’s sage palette now properly displays
Fixed some visual glitches during transitions
BALANCE CHANGES:
Trainee rework - Reduced growths. Tier 1 promo gains are now larger & more specialized (see documentation for details)
Yeah, as much as I love trainees, it is very hard to fit them in while keeping the game balanced. Having a special pretty golden boy to love and shelter and shower with experience is nice, until they turn into a monster and steamroll the game, killing all the fun while they’re at it. Hopefully your redesign of them lets them stay while remaining relevant through their versatility alone.
The regular spawns weren’t too difficult; you just need to get comfortable with conditional events (I mostly used BNE). The wildcard and chaos mode spawns follow the same principle but with the headache of making really long conditionals.
Basically, if you’re comfortable with eventing and navigating through a mess of conditionals and labels, there isn’t really any more to it than that.
After a couple months of iterative polish and additions, I’m very happy with where Hope’s Trail is. There is still some new content rattling around in my head, but I need to take some time to figure out what exactly it’s going to look like & how to best implement it.
For the moment, regular gameplay updates are going to slow down quite a bit, but I will definitely still be monitoring this thread for bug reports & feedback!
I have a reproduceable crash when Mage Knight Curtis procs Sol, seems to crash every time and is tied to the animation. Turning anims off for him allows him to proc it no problem.
I’m also getting weird crashes when both Plus and Chaos mode are enabled, namely when I get a recruit. It generally happens early on if the recruit rolls a Sniper, which I think is Dayle, but because it’s too early to get a promoted unit, the game will lock up. The same crash happens later on when you’re supposed to get a promoted unit, but you’ll sometimes get Avery or Tragan (or whoever it would be in that case; an unpromoted unit you haven’t got yet).
Thank you! I have no idea what could be causing either of these but I’ll try to figure it out. For the second one, can you tell me if this is a perfectly consistent bug, or does it only happen sometimes? (i.e., are there times on chaos+ mode where you’ll get an underpromoted or prepromoted form of a unit and it doesn’t crash?) - also, what patch are you on?
It’s bizarre because I just did an entire chaos+ mode run which included underpromoted Dayle and prepromoted Avery, and neither of them caused crashes. I’m puzzled
edit: one other question, what emulator are you using?
Using mGBA. This was with 1.25, so it may be fixed now. It was a perfectly consistent bug though, but I’ll test again with this new patch.
The issue was that when Avery would show up late game he wouldn’t be promoted, he was still in Knight form, and that would cause the crash. Same with Dayle. Never showed up as an archer, always a sniper - then crash. Will try with a fresh rom + patch though, that was likely the issue.
Ok thanks! If a fresh ROM + save doesn’t solve the spawn issue, let me know, and you can try running it with VBA-M since that’s where I’ve done all my testing.
VBA-M seems to fix issues like these itself where more accurate emulators and official hardware won’t, if you didn’t encounter this bug in your testing that’s probably why.
While I recommend testing with MGBA since it’s the lowest common denominator most people use VBA anyway and most android emulators are based off of VBA. You should probably state that this was tested with VBA though to ensure others don’t run into issues and hopefully use VBA instead.
In terms of romhacking and stuff like that you could say that since it’s more accurate than VBA however VBA is the much more popular emulator. it’s unfortunate that the better emulator is less popular but at least it works (most of the time there’s some weird ai bugs that can happen but it’s nearly unnoticeable).
Hello, the author. I’m a player from China. Your hack makes me very surprised. I like Hope’s Trail very much. I want to translate your hack into Chinese for Chinese players to play. I hope to get your approval
Yes, please feel free to translate it into any language! Let me know when it’s done and I can add a link to it in my post here as well, and give you credit for it in the documentation.
