Run! Run away, I say!
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Got a brand new update today! Patch link is in the main post. Lukee has been doing more great portrait improvements, which you can see below. In addition, I added three new supports to the game: Sally/Jeremy, Elias/Sarah, and Alicia/Zoe. That’s six additional character who now have four support partners each. Lastly, I made a few minor tweaks and fixes here and there. The most notable one is that chapter 6 now has two extra deployment slots, meaning you don’t have to bench anybody for that chapter! Should make it more fun. Chapters 7 and 9 still don’t have full deployment, but I think full deployment would kinda ruin those maps. Enjoy the update!
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I have no idea how to handle chapter 6. Am I supposed to rush the enemies or let them come?
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Walter’s promotion map sprite animation looks a bit wonky?
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Chapter 6 is designed for you to split up. The enemies around Zoe will rush you, while the enemies on the left side of the map are mostly stationary. Just remember, the hero crest guy in the sniper hallway of doom will leave the map on turn 15, so you’ll have to get somebody over there before that happens. By the way, if you’re playing on the most recent patch, chapter 6 has two extra deployment slots, so you can deploy every unit you have. That should make it a bit easier.
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Yeah both Walter and Lionel’s promoted sprites are a little weird and I don’t quite know how to fix them.
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Updated the main post with a new update, just a really quick fix for that stupid hero crest thief in chapter 10 who for some reason wasn’t dropping his item. Also Cindy has a new portrait from lukee!
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Updated the patch link for something relatively small but I think it’s important. I changed the description of normal mode to be what it is in the screenshot below. After a lot of general complaints about difficulty from people playing hard mode, I think this should help with new players enjoying the game more. Also I made Tempest, Quake, and Wardlance have x4 effectiveness now but that isn’t related to the first thing.
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How did you implement x4 effectiveness? Can it be done with FEBuilder?
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Yeah there’s a patch for it where you can change the effectiveness coefficient for individual weapons. The default is always 3, of course. I originally just gave Shieldlance x4, but decided to give it to the other flier personal weapons for fun.
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Just finished the hack last night - I didn’t take notes or anything so feedback will be rather vague.
First, difficulty - it is your design philosophy that’s causing the problems here. FE12 (and frankly it feels like Lunatic) style isn’t always fun when many of your maps put you under constant pressure. I actually don’t think the autolevels for the easier modes either is much of a solution, since hardly any of the difficulty comes from enemy stats, it’s getting run down by enemies that two shot almost everything, unreliable player units, spammed long range mages that one hit your units or their 100% status hits. And the enemy weapon quality is out of control. Brave weapons on everything results in enemy phases that are coin flip after coin flip after coin flip. And too many villages are coin flips too, the Swordreaver one comes to mind as one of the worst offenders since it feels crucial in the following chapters.
Basically, I would never play this without save states, and I hate save states. It feels like one of the Japanese difficulty hacks with slightly more thought put into it and some god stole all the defense in the entire world and gave it to Walter.
Now the good stuff: setting is a bit generic and the story is ok, although in ROM hack terms it might as well be a masterpiece for something that’s not comedy. Moment to moment dialogue writing is excellent though. Your use of red text is fantastic. Most of the characters are pretty interesting and I love the unique weapons instead of personal skills, although many lean into their gimmick super hard and virtually all of them have paper thin defenses.
More specific criticisms:
100% staves: This seems to be done to stop you from just baiting it out with one of the res tank characters, however not all maps are particularly accommodating for this since sometimes the antiturtle stuff forces your army under one or more of them. The AI will normally continue to target low res characters, but sometimes they’ll literally just go for all your characters that can use Restore with Berserk. Berserk is Very Fun. Possible solutions are making Restore ranged so that the forced army splits aren’t the cause of ‘oh my only restore user is unusable’ or just reducing the number of Berserk staves specifically.
Brave weapons: this is probably worst on the chapter where you recruit Marvin. Thank god it’s so short because this map is basically a giant coin flip. You have very few tank characters and most of them are very lopsided, so unless you restart the map a couple times until you can remember what enemy types reinforce in from what directions it’s game over since you’ll just get rushed down by enemies that still two round most of your units, except for Walter. This is really just the culmination of the enemies having super high quality equipment over the entire game, but Brave weapons in particular are very, very annoying since it forces more 50% hit gambles. That said, Brave weapons are almost the entire challenge on the maps that they exist on, so I’m not sure what you’d do instead. It gets old quickly either way.
I actually don’t dislike the idea of crafting the maps the way you have with encouragement for new units etc, but it’s very brutal if you stray from the few solutions (which will often decrease over time as players leave some units underleveled by necessity).
I’ve never actually looked at FEbuilder so I don’t know if this can be done easily, but I suspect some slight base stat increases for player units (mostly speed for the characters that never grow any, and defense for almost everyone) and reducing the quality of enemy equipment might be best solutions for easier modes. Autolevel just makes the endgame a rollover while not addressing the actually hard beginning of the game at all.
Also on the weapon skills: Pass and Smite are very boring. Pass was useful a grand total of once the entire game, running past some non-moving generals in the Teodros catacombs map, and that wouldn’t have come up if I didn’t give him the boots. The weapon has the redonculous crit but it essentially is just a busted Killing Edge most of the time. Smite I never had a use for - shove/smite are more useful in early/mid game. Compared to other unique weapons these are really underwhelming, and if they weren’t massive stat sticks they’d be in the convoy. Also since you mentioned Rewarp not being useful as well, it’s more that, what are you doing with Jeremy once you warped him somewhere stupid? He’s useless for combat and any staff you’d want to use after Rewarping is either ranged already or you needed to use that same turn. Interesting, but ultimately has no use case.
Sorry for the vent, it’s pretty weird liking a hack this much but also wanting to punch its face in.
Edit: Oh also some sort of in-game hint that you should use promo items ASAP would be nice. Most hacks tend to be built around the opposite since they’re full of end game stat inflation while this is more… deflated.
Edit2: Also the music is :chef’s kiss:
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Well I’m glad you, uh, enjoyed it…? Haha, I’m guessing you did play on hard mode, at least. In terms of design philosophy stuff, I tried to make it similar to FE6 hard mode. Though I think you saying the swordreaver village in chapter 2 is too difficult to get is a bit telling to me, since it can be very easily saved with Zachary (or anyone) baiting the brigand before he destroys it. Now, as for whether using Zachary heavily in earlygame is a “specific solution”… Yeah? It is earlygame, after all. Kinda gotta use your jagens.
100% staff hits are something I ain’t budging on, because I hate when the player’s status staves miss. I did this to try encouraging the player to use their own status staves more, particularly against enemy siege users and status staffers. In vanilla games, they’re usually the best targets for these things, but their high res means you never get good hit rates on them, and that always bothered me. So you basically get three ways to handle enemy status: restore, kill the staffer, or hit them with your own status.
Lategame braves do have ways of dealing with them that don’t involve constantly gambling, like Shelby, Vin, Yufin/Alicia with nosferatu if they’re buff enough, hell Marvin himself is pretty huge, etc. Personally I find chapters 24 and 25 to be kinda easy, since 24 directly tells you where Marvin is gonna be, and 25 can be done at whatever pace you want, though 24 does want you to have torch staves which can be bought in chapter 23 (I figured that having them be sold at all is enough to tell the player that there’s at least one more fog map coming up).
The lower difficulties were admittedly a complete afterthought on my part, and were added to the game super late. Personally I’m not too broken up about going back and making them more mindfully easy, since the game was always designed to be difficult. It can be made easier on any mode if you decide not to go for certain side objectives and stuff anyway (I recall one person skipping all the houses in chapter 19 and baiting everything with phantoms, for instance).
Yeah I was unsure of what to do for Cordatus and Bellua. Something like Fleuret is completely defined by its skill, while these two are more like just really strong regular weapons with a little bonus ability on them. I’ve tried thinking of more interesting skills to put on them, but haven’t been able to come up with something that I liked. Rewarp, on the other hand, I do really like even if it’s not practical most of the time. Though I have buffed Jeremy a tad, giving him some slightly better magic, so maybe he’ll be able to use it a bit more safely?
I feel like I don’t really need a hint telling the player to promote early. The player should be able to see for themselves “hey, my units are struggling right now… maybe if I promote them, things will be easier?”
Always good to see appreciation for the music. Sonic music rules!
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I think I found the problem with Walter’s promotion map sprite animation. If you go to his map animation sheet on FEBuilder on his promotion class’s “Moving Map Animation” section, you can see that the sheet is misaligned at the very end (the three animated map sprites when the cursor is on the class).
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So I started playing this game after reading most of the feedbacks and theres one thing I can say, where is the hard part? The game is honestly, very good, its been a while since I’ve had a very challenging FE Romhack since Dragon Herald. All in all the game is awesome, the personal weapons are a welcome addition w/c made the game really interesting, especially Vin’s personal weapon, it basically makes him a very effective bait throughout the chapters because of the +100 Avoid on his weapon, sincr thats the only thing he’s good at because of his low strength growth. And Sally is just a beast, I used her to clear a chapter ALONE. Anyway, great job on the game! Hopefully we get another romhack from you soon.
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Dragon herald isnt that challenging compared to four kings (but its unit portraiting and story is very good , map is fairly well, the difficulty isnt too high)
In late game, you will find lawrence a death machine
He could single handly crush final boss
Four kings mostly forces you to calculate the enemy ranges (since most enemies have high hit rate and high damage) and expose none of your units (welp until late game or except if the unit is tanky) in 2 of enemy ranges
Also, most units in four kings have weaknesses and near vanilla growthrates, but enemy curve is pretty high
Also, bad rng will punish you, (yeah I had to restart once cuz the npc died in ch2X sth
Did you get really good growths sally shouldnt be able to take hits
Welp if you put nosferatu thats another matter
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The FEE3 video for Four Kings is now public! I hope you all enjoy it!
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Fire Emblem: The Yonko.
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DS map saves are here! With that thing Vesly talked about, Four Kings now has DSFE-styled save points! I’ve added them to every map in the game, except for the shopping maps and the trial maps. Just select Save when you walk over one and it’ll save your game. Then next time you reset, you can select Resume on the file select screen and you’ll be right where you saved! Note that I did remove the Suspend option from the game to do this, but that shouldn’t be a big deal. Enjoy having DS map saves! I’m definitely super happy about this. My love for big maps is completely validated!
As per usual, I’ve updated the patch link in the main post, so make sure to download it up there to play the game with these save points!
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That was quick, haha.
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