I took it as him knowing little to nothing about Browyn as an individual, so he took the next step in attacking her gender to be the next best thing. Kid’s got a real potty mouth with little to no real experience on how to effectively insult an opponent without treading on familar ground. He’s also a raging, snot princling who overcompensates to better fit the impossibly large shadow of his father, it’s no wonder he keeps trying to hammer the point home as if it’s some sacred truth by his own word alone. While trying to appear bigger then himself he’s really only looking foolish and besmurches his father and Palnata simultaneously.
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So i noticed something in the chapter where you have to defeat the 2 groups of enemies and have to protect the merchant Signe. IF you manage (shame on me for this btw) to get signe defeated she has no portrait in the dialoge . Sadly I have no image of that since I didnt think of taking any^^,
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might be minor but im a very visual person so i mention it . out of all characters i find that Nete in battle animations is too white in comparison to her portrait. just find it odd cause pretty much any other character seems close enough to their portraits.
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New Homecoming patch is out, fixing a bunch of small issues and also buffing a handful of prepromoted infantrymen. As usual, if something breaks, you can find an old version in Variant Patches. Definitely getting to the point where I’m feeling pretty confident about where the campaign is, not really anticipating many further changes, so expect variant modes to come out soon.
Homecoming’s reception has been really positive to a degree that’s taken me by surprise, which is saying a lot given that I’m an egomaniac. Thank you all for your comments and support, and congratulations to anyone who has completed the campaign. Rest assured, Team NQR will keep rolling on for the forseeable future, and we’re really excited to keep working on, uh, one thing (expected 2026) and the other thing (expected 2027 or 2028).
(Annoyingly I forgot to fix the above two issues before releasing the patch, but, hey, they’ll be in 1.0.5.)
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Arne posting challenge
He’s been pretty hard to use and risked being doubled by most every enemy, but we’ve persevered. Just hit Chapter 14 and I decided to promote him at 19.
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Is there a change log listing the fixes?
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I’ve made little secret of the fact that Drums of War and Dream of Five are solidly my top two favorite hacks. I adored the intricate geopolitical conflict in DoW and the extravagant aesthetics of Do5, two areas of hack design that creators don’t often seek to revolutionize or push to their absolute limits. So then I was surprised to learn that the core conceit of the then-upcoming Homecoming would be a deliberate shift in direction from the qualities I greatly enjoyed in the prior two games. Player units almost entirely lacking main story dialogue and entirely lacking supports? Pared-down outfits and mostly naturalistic palettes? Boss portraits explicitly designed to be recolored and repurposed? A setting composed of only two nations (sans Sjoersund, which I did not know of at the time)? I was not skeptical that Homecoming would be good, but it seemed to me like many of these choices were handicaps to the greatest strengths of lead designers Parr and Lumi.
I was wrong. Extremely wrong. Unblurred spoilers below.
Woke Up in Another World as FEBuilder's Weapon Triangle Editor?!
Most obvious among the gameplay changes made in Homecoming are the increase of the weapon triangle to 2 Mt/25 Hit and the rounding of <10% hit/ >90% hit. The combination of these changes makes WTA a much more rewarding advantage state and WTA a much more punishing disadvantage state, especially when combined with reavers. When a combatant is brandishing a reaver, one side is almost guaranteed to be seeing 0 hit and the other 100 hit.
Because being at triangle advantage is so rewarding and being at disadvantage is so punishing, that encourages the player to exploit good matchups and avoid bad matchups at any cost. This in turn encourages more proactive strategies and a greater diversity in teambuilding. You can’t make progress on enemy phase if an enemy fighter is eyeing up your myrmidon with a swordreaver, so the simplest solution is to hit the fighter with a lance while the terms are still in your control. And because the weapon triangle is so strong, that also often makes its advantage states better options than hitting enemies neutrally. Like yeah you can use a mage against a general, but if the general has a 1-2 range weapon it’s probably better to engage them with a reaver and one-round them without risk. This is a lesson I found myself continually learning throughout the game, where my dearth of primary lance users made matchups against enemy swordmasters extremely threatening (and my funds drained from paying for swordreavers).
Complimenting this extremely strong weapon triangle is thoughtful use of Brutal weapons. These comically heavy and strong weapons are strong enough to one-shot frailer units and deal heavy chip to the rest, and their presence makes even the weakest of mooks need to be respected as a threat. Suddenly that enemy grunt with a 0 in over half their stats needs to be dealt with this phase so they don’t walk up and cleave your mage in half. And that goes for brutals in player hands too! Brutal weapons in player hands are extremely fun tools that allow slower units to achieve one-shots on frailer enemies and avoid being doubled by killing on the counter. Brutal weapons also interacted very nicely with the weapon triangle, with the swing in mt allowing for players to hit more one-shot thresholds and the swing in hit allowing player units to guarantee dodges against enemy brutals at advantage.
This constant push for aggressiveness made pretty much every chapter of Homecoming engaging. Every turn there was a triangle matchup to exploit or smart application of Dervish Whirl in order to get the drop on enemies before they could do the same to me. I certainly felt like I played faster than I usually do and that doing so was the right way to play; my final turn count was 195 and I’m proud of it.
The Ontologically Evil Skirmisher Next Door
My first attempt at playing Homecoming (a closed beta some months ago) I bounced off at Chapter 1. I suddenly had eight units join the army in preps, settling in alongside the four existing units I hadn’t enough time to get used to. I was then tasked with splitting the army into two prongs to achieve objectives in three corners of the map. I couldn’t handle it, but I had to force myself to get used to commanding this squad of units I barely knew and get to whatever was next.
And so did Bronwyn.
Bronwyn is the closest a protagonist’s experience has matched the player’s in a hack. She’s dragged into campaign life alongside wholly unfamiliar faces for a country she’s never known. She’s bombarded by proper nouns and the weight they carry - the Black Queen is Bad, the High King and his Accords are Good - and made to make sense of the world around her as she goes on and no sooner. So too is the player, thrust into the messy history of Palnata and Velia, searching for the motivation to root for Bronwyn in her cause.
And things do start making sense. The legion of faces that form Velia’s royal guard shift and fade away until Bronwyn’s handpicked champions stand tall amongst the rest. The proper nouns coagulate into the building blocks that form the world’s storied history and are promptly cut down as Bronwyn’s head is clear enough to take a side in the grand conflict that surrounds her. The player learns the intricacies of the mechanics - remember, cataphracts are not weak to horse-slayers - and becomes informed enough about the world to understand why Bronwyn’s choices matter in key moments.
But even as Bronwyn finds security in her knowledge of the world and the figures that inhabit it, not everything is laid out for her (or our) understanding. And this is represented best by the playable roster. Bronwyn commands some fifty-odd soldiers in her personal vanguard and the majority of them have a single scene - if that - of screentime. There are no supports where the characters speak about their backstories and the player is voyeuristically able to get closer to them. If you’re looking for scrimblos or blorbos in the Homecoming cast, they won’t be found in personality quirks or lore. Emergent storytelling or bust.
This kind of Archanea-style character writing is true to life, at least with regards to Bronwyn/the player’s perspective. Even when working with fifty-odd people in close proximity for several months towards a shared goal, one cannot hope to know each of them intimately. I should know, I work in live theater. There will be some knowledge of everyone, of course, but nothing more than hearsay and gossip. As meaningful as letters on an alignment chart.
“Isn’t that guardian a fascist - the fuck is he doing here?”
“They.”
“What?”
“What?”
Oh, the sky blue highlights in my hair? All natural.
Speaking of being true to life, oh my god. Yeah there’s no getting around the fact that Lumi is at the top of her aesthetic game as usual. While I worried that simplifying the character designs for Homecoming’s player units would restrain her creativity too much, my worries were completely unfounded. Homecoming units ooze creativity and striking visual design at every corner.
It’s true that some Homecoming units have relatively nondescript outfits and naturalistic hair colors, but that’s not the end-all-be-all of character design. Every unit, even if their clothes aren’t a standout, has a unique facial structure, body type, pose, and hairstyle depicted in their portrait. All of their features are crafted with such loving attention to detail and make them stand out if their uniform doesn’t.
And that’s not to discount the portraits that are allowed to be outlandish! I love the shape of promoted Bronwyn’s webbed collar and how it contrasts from the rest of her outfit. I love how that same collar on Brecillien’s spirit is transparent and retains that same contrast by utilizing the background. I love how every mage has an unnatural hair color to represent their arcane abilities. I love everything about Nerysse’s portrait. I love the abundance of redheads.
But. Well. Not all of Homecoming’s portraits are unique. Enemy portraits are recolored constantly and even the lesser-used ones will have you guessing “Wait, haven’t I seen Sebille’s King Consort before?” Yes you have. It shares with Baron Tallec’s portrait. And. Well. There’s no getting around the fact that I pogged in real life when Exestan joined the army. That I was happy every time the bald marksman boss appeared. Or realized that a lategame high priest boss had more creases on their face than the similarly-portraited midgame high priest boss. These recolored portraits that I once thought of as lazy or thoughtless became recognizable symbols and useful shorthands.
Learning the True Meaning of *********
Most Fire Emblem games and hacks follow a basic enemy powerscaling structure. You start by fighting brigands, then advance to enemy regular soldiers, then royal elites, and sometimes finally entities beyond mortal ken. It’s a sensible progression, but requires some narrative heft for the shift to lategame bosses to be weighty. Vanilla does with the Four-to-Six Generals-Riders-Hounds that are built up early in the narrative and fought later, but Homecoming’s narrative style makes this approach not work as well. Instead it does something defter using its established aesthetic tricks.
When Absjorn docks on Velian shores for the second time, he brings with him a host of veterans from twenty years past. These veterans serve as his field officers and bosses for the final stretch of the hack. The veterans - Brokk, Eitri, Andvari, Ingelda, Kjaer, Reiftyr, Solblindi, Estrid, (and Dryche) - are standouts for the simple and obvious reason that their portraits are unique. Their legacy from the Prophet’s War is told from the way they stand apart from their recolorable fellows.
And it’s not just their uniqueness in aesthetic that gives these eight (nine) their presence. Brokk and Eitri are red and green horsemen; Solblindi is a pegasus rider known for her ability to talk foes down. The others don’t map onto recognizable patterns as decidedly, but three’s a trend. And yes, I’m dancing around that one nine-letter word.
The use in invoking these familiarities is straightforward. Absjorn led a Fire Emblem campaign twenty years prior, so it only makes sense he has the expected members of a Fire Emblem campaign in his retinue. You know what Brokk and Eitri taking the field against Bronwyn is supposed to impart. You know what Solblindi spitting venom at Bronwyn every chance is supposed to imply. The threat these eight pose is immediately apparent and overcoming them is a fantastic symbol for how far Bronwyn has surpassed those around her. Not only did she beat the soldiers that her grandmother couldn’t, she beat Palnata’s goddamn Christmas cocksuckers. That’s what they’re called right?
Great Men (are Made of This)
All Fire Emblem hacks will poke fun at the tropes and suppositions employed by the vanilla games, but Parr’s works do so with an incisiveness not found in anything else I’ve played. Drums of War took a hammer to the shins of inherently good institutions of power through its propagandizing depictions of Aulestra and Rijesca from the Confederacy. Dream of Five made a farce out of divine bloodlines from the intrigue surrounding Rena. And now here we are twenty years after High King Absjorn’s righteous conquest of Velia.
I’m thinking about Brand. I don’t know what I think of Brand, some few days after I put him to rest far from his home. I do know that Brand did not come from nothing. His glory-seeking, his fury, his petulance, and his rampant misogyny did not come from nothing. He grew up in a house with a father mythologized and was unwittingly made to be some part of that mythos. His task was to wed Bronwyn and have her bear his children, and yet she was the scion of the Black Queen who almost brought the world to ruin and he was the scion of the man who saved it. Why must they share the same punishment?
I like Brand’s ineptitude as a commander. I like how his temper tantrums solve nothing, kill advisors and chancellors, and make his situation worse. I like how he buckles under the weight of the chip on his shoulder. It’s all a deliberate contrast to Bronwyn, who similarly rails against being the granddaughter of the Brecillien and whose naivete is constantly being broken by the real world. But while Bronwyn retained her compassion and empathy despite the trials she’s been through and the unfortunate hand she’d been dealt, Brand gave in to his hate and mad desire for revenge.
I think I like Brand as an antagonist.
But if I like Brand as an antagonist, holy fuck do I love Absjorn.
If Bronwyn and Brand were matched equals in the world created by their forebearers, that is as true about Absjorn and Brecillien. Brecillien invaded Palnata for power, and so Absjorn must invade Velia in turn. It started off easy to justify: the lands would not know peace until Brecillien was dead, and as such any cost in the lives of soldiers or citizens was worth it to put her in the ground. The rhetoric in their final confrontation centered around the kind of world that Absjorn would build in the aftermath. He couldn’t come up with an answer other than that it would be better than the world he.was thrust into.
And that world came with another required moral justification. Velia, now scarred and leaderless, would be liable to cause further harm if not under strict control. And in the posthumous words of Brecillien, that plan for control required the brutality of a stolen child. He justified the threatening of Sebille and the abduction of Bronwyn as another necessary evil for lasting peace - after all, merely separating a family was better than the alternative of slaying them all. And the atrocities grew. He would have oppressed Velia under the yoke of the Temple of Balance, placed Bronwyn into an arranged marriage with his son, and forced her to bear his son’s children.
He needed further and further justifications for these actions, convincing himself that all of it was necessary for lasting peace. If that peace was built on a broken nation, a persecuted faith, and an abused girl, it was still the lesser evil than what Brecillien had put the world through. But that greater evil was now twenty years in the past, and now his actions had settled into plain wickedness.
And ultimately what is so haunting about Absjorn is that this wickedness, always dressed up as a necessity for peace, is never a black mark on his character. That Absjorn abducted a child and neglected her for twenty years for the sake of marrying her to a man who hated her and forced her to have his heirs is one of the vilest acts one could imagine. But Absjorn doing it does not make him a bad person - it makes him a good person willing to do what’s necessary. And he’s festered in that delusion for years, made him stubborn and unwilling to accept himself as the villain he’s become. And he’s brilliant as an antagonist because of it.
The Third Redheaded Female Sword Lord
So where are we now? This is the third campaign from Team NQR and another definitive smash hit. It’s a clear narrative, aesthetic, and mechanical evolution from DoW and Do5. It’s certainly a lock for my third favorite hack of all time. And yet typing that out has a certain… hollowness to it.
With the third link in this chain now in place, some trends in NQR design are now firmly established. Slim weapons are unilaterally superior to Irons. Armored horsemen are called Cataphracts instead of Great Knights. Classes don’t gain movement upon promotion, save for light magi. Classes generally adhere to vanilla statlines and player units tightly stick to class conventions. Turn-by-turn gameplay is often played with exclusively vanilla mechanics. The narrative centers around a woman given a military command and thrust into situations in which she must take more power for the sake of overthrowing her oppressors and protecting her charges. Said woman is a redhead. Prepromote Champions are bad.
The redhead part is a joke, I know it’s a series of coincidences that Roxelana, Rena, and Bronwyn ended up having that in common. But it’s now clear that NQR is piecemeal innovating on concepts that are already established in prior hacks instead of experimenting with radical new ideas. Prfs for every mage are cool! Sibyls/Hexe are cool! Vorpal and brutal weapons are cool! None of those ideas are as revolutionary as the ransoms in DoW, and I’ve spent every hack since chasing that high.
Obviously the current formula works and I’d be fine playing another iteration of these ideas in DoR, but part of me wants to see a bigger swing from a team of developers working on their fourth hack. Cause, well, it’s your fourth hack! That’s a number nobody else can claim, why not swing for the fucking fences at that point? I certainly have faith.
Wow that was a lot of words. I’m not showing my full team but I quite liked these three.
Thank you Parr and Lumi for providing yet another incredible experience. If anyone’s read this far and hasn’t played Homecoming yet, you should do it.
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Incredible write up. Thank you so much!
There will be a project made in parallel / likely to finish before DoR, where I take gameplay design lead rather than Parr, so look forward to that one! There’s some plans for DoR to include some of the custom stuff I make for that project as well, but modified to fit DoR’s needs.
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What’s DoR ? since i can now promote
is there a recommend level of when to promote someone. early or later?
DoR is the working acronym for the Drums sequel, it may be changed later it may not, we’re not set in stone on it
In my experience 13-15 is generally good enough to promote, I both eased up on exp dropoff curve from the do5 formula and the game’s a good like 6 chapters shorter. Some characters will end up promoting at like 17 anyway due to seal availability so you can probably determine who you want earlier/later promotions based on that
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Ah yes, my favorite hack of 2026 - Drums of Roar.
On another note, a bit of help if you don’t mind - I’m still terrible at Fire Emblem and got my Shaman fellow killed on Chapter 2 on player phase. I have the Turn Reset Resume function turned on, but whenever I suspend and then hit Resume it just goes back to the point right after he got axed. Am I doing something wrong?
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Was it on prior to this happening? The way it works under the hood is that it basically tells the game to stop autosaving progress with every action, only at the start of turns. So if it’s only turned on midway through a turn, the single Resume autosave is still at that point.
Do not use suspend as that will still create a suspend save. Either soft reset or turn off the console/close the emulator.
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Gotcha, I’m pretty sure that was it. I’ll have to break my Cerulean Crescent habit. Thank you!
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I’m all done! I was hoping to finish this before the year was out. As agreed, here’s final Arne.
He is uh… not particularly good, but I think that was intentional. He is certainly usable however. I really wish he had more defense, though. He was always getting shredded.
As for story:
Story Spoilers
CHAPTER 18 IS INCREDIBLE. The ludonarrative of choosing your team for that chapter and then trying to hold on as long as you can is just amazing. I lost some great units and characters that I liked there, without quite knowing that I would. I wanted to go back and make some changes, but I couldn’t! I just couldn’t! And sitting with that decision was just awesome. I’ll miss Gildas and Coretta the most. (I don’t guess Gildas would have kept up anyway with my army and his speed growth).
One thing I will say though- that’s definitely the high point of the story. Everything else felt a little flatter after Ch. 18. Maybe it’s intentional, maybe it’s just natural for an event such as that. I don’t really mind either way, but wasn’t sure if anyone else felt this way.
Facing the Palnata retainers as mirrors of Fire Emblem tropes was fun. Thanks for the hack!
BTW, is there a way to recruit Alrewas? I always figured there was something up with him, but I couldn’t figure him out.
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Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed!
In chapter 9 dont kill any civilians that were escaping with him. After that he’s available in the house in chapter 13
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Speaking of the person in the spoiler, I’m now in the chapter where they get recruited; this is a minor bug, but since I know you guys wanted things to be as perfect as possible, I wanted to let you know that whenever I recruit them the screen turns blue for half a second. It’s happened maybe 6 times in a row now (again, I am bad at Fire Emblem)
Oh, and it goes without saying that I’m LOVING the game!
Edit: Well now I have a separate problem in the same chapter (chapter 13): I’ve cleared out all the enemy units, but the dang thing won’t end. Here’s a screenshot:
I’m using Delta on my iPhone if that helps!
Well, that’s now two people that’s happened to, despite it having literally no coding reason to happen. I’ve kludged a backup rout event and run a train through C13 with my endgame team to confirm it works, but since I was never able to replicate it to begin with, I can’t be sure. That means it is patchday.
Patchnotes
- Removed Oxford comma from Eskuldur
- Calvados’ Gift: 60 → 65 Hit, 20 → 12 Wt
- Scouring Hex now correctly gives weapon rank
- Fixed villager mug inconsistencies in C3
- Gildas now correctly Game Over condition in C9
- Maris now correctly not Game Over condition ever
- Kludged potential solution to C13 softlock?
- Fixed Brokk’s attack/defence lines having different flags
- Fixed C22 tile error
- Fixed C24 floor tile that was erroneously brace
- Took one look at unfucking the order of items, sighed, kicked the can down the road
… in all that I forgot to even look into the blue flash but that’s one beyond my understanding or ability to replicate, too.
All the best.
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So I haven’t actually played any of parr/NQR’s hacks besides this game. I got back into FE relatively recently and asked around for a good game to jump back into the hacking, with homecoming being the one I liked the pitch for the most. I worked my way through the game, had a pretty good time, and thought I would give a review since it’s new.
I’m mostly gonna cover how I feel about gameplay, but to give some quick thoughts on the story, I liked it. Liked Bronwyn & Anghara as characters, dialogue was well written and got some chuckles out of me, and while most people highlight ch 18 (which is fair, it is a great standout) I’d also like to note one of my personal favourite scenes: the ch 17 opening text scroll, of all things, which I felt was very well written.
Core mechanic changes
The most immediate difference that sticks out with HC is the GIANT weapon triangle. +/-2 might and 25 hit is such an extreme that you essentially have to play around it whenever it’s relevant. This creates a system where you can nearly always push for at least high 80’s in hitrates on your side & sometimes push enemies all the way down into a flat 0, despite enemy quality not being that low. (well, more like single digit hitrates that get rounded down, but I’ll get to that.) I’m all for this change: it makes enemy weapon types in a formation something you have to heavily consider both on player and enemy phase, allows reaver weapons to be very strong while having equally impactful counterplay since they still double the WT bonuses/penalties, and makes strong, inaccurate weapons (namely brutals) a lot more of a consideration than they normally would be.
The other major core change is hitrate rounding, which I’m a bit more mixed on. Being able to make enemies with brutal weapons or generally shake-y hitrates drop down to 0 feels very satisfying and is an entirely positive change to me, but rounding to 100 hit from 91-99 is more down to personal taste. This mechanic, combined with luck giving 1 hit per point, supports being free, and the aforementioned WT bonuses, makes getting to 91 hit pretty reasonable already, and gets to a point where you can revolve entire strategies around having 100% hit in most or even all your combat for a chapter while still being able to play quickly.
Now I personally really like being able to create a rock solid strategy and plan it out with perfect results, especially since you still have to actively push for high hitrates by utilizing WT, supports, etc. Which makes it still feel rewarding to hit the rounding threshold, but it comes at the cost of high risk-high reward combats being either nonexistent or very clearly the wrong choice, and means you run into far less “play by ear” situations where you have to consider what you would do if you got a particularly bad miss. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, per say, and I definitely don’t mind it, just that if playing the odds and lockpicking your way out of bad luck is something you like, homecoming doesn’t have much of that.
Oh, and turn off rounding for crits. I wanna see those 1%’s and I wanna have a heart attack when they actually happen.
Tl;dr: I like the high reliability but if someone told me they wanna gamble instead, I’d get it.
Player unit/class design
Unit design lands most of the time. A vast majority of units are at minimum decent while also feeling distinct between one another, both between classes and units within the same class. Mages in particular feel individually unique because of all of them getting a prf to mess around with, but other class quirks like archer’s exclusive longbows, pegasi’s high res taking advantage of magic swords, or every monoweapon promoted class (except one) getting unique advantages to compensate make the classes that are normally differentiated by just stats have some extra spice to them.
Unit-wise, almost everyone felt like they were either competently viable or at least were made for specific types of players to have fun with, which is pretty impressive considering this game has a noticeable amount of units & classes that are at 5 move when the standard is 6, but are kept viable through personal weapons (archers & mages) or staff/magic access. (high priests and, again, mages.) Mounted promotion being less common combined with the large deployment slots also keep infantry as a whole feeling relevant, and while a good portion of the mounted units are strong, only the wyverns feel strong enough to be overcentralizing. (And said wyverns rip through your gold, which gives a pretty reasonable incentive to pass over them if, for example, you play on the slow side and burn through resources on reinforcements/routing every map.) It feels like most of the units throughout the game have at least some point where they are usable/trainable. Most.
5 move melee classes getting extra weapon types to compensate is a cool idea in concept, but it simply isn’t enough in execution for anyone besides maybe Davett in the earlygame. Sentinel also has the dubious honour of being a monoweapon class with… zero benefit? Which is bizarre since they also have noticeably lackluster promo gains, which makes using anyone from the classline feel like a direct downgrade from even a cav, let alone other promoted units.
Mind you, that is about 5-7 units that feel underwhelming in a game with ~50, so it hits a lot more than it misses. The biggest hits for me were Trefor/Rattler for how much they get out of proper support positioning for several chapters after they join, Eskuldur for her opportunity cost creating a very interesting decision, Bethan for her convoy & prf gimmick, and all of the fanatics on novelty & recruitment alone.
Tl;dr: Most of the units are pretty cool and even a generous 16 unit slots per map wasn’t enough for me to use all the ones I liked.
Map design
Going over map design as a collective, I would call a vast majority of them pretty good. They reward aggressive play, have a wide variety of enemy classes that both keep threats diverse & encourage effective weapon usage, and do a good job of simultaneously challenging the player while giving them reasonable wiggle room.
The only maps I had noticeable issues with were ch 9 (with its large block of suddenly moving stationary enemies) and ch 22. (6 turns of a fine defend map followed up by a very bizarre shift to defeat boss that is liable to either die instantly or cause a unit death on EP.) Otherwise, maps bottom out at solid and top off at very good, and I wouldn’t even call the bottom maps particularly bad, just more on the mediocre side.
The notable highlights for me include ch 6 for its breakneck pace & fun to approach starting rooms, ch 8 with its more puzzle-y bottom half complimenting the maps more standard top half very nicely, ch 10 for being surprisingly fun to play aggressively for a survive map with no boss kill, and ch 18 for reasons i won’t fully go into, but if you know, you know.
My only issue with the map design is the sheer size & deployment count. While each map is individually fun to play, there’s not a whole lot of smaller maps in size or deployment to give the player a breather, with ch 20 & debatably ch 12 being the only ones. A couple of more truncated maps would’ve helped would’ve been nice, though I don’t think it’s a glaring flaw by any means.
Tl;dr: Maps are pretty damn good, but sprinkle in a few more small ones here and there.
General combat flow/enemy quality
This will be one of the quicker ones to describe. Enemies are generally in the 1/2rko range with the right matchups, and usually are either very vulnerable to certain effective weapons, have exploitable weaknesses baked into their statlines, or both. Offense-wise, they usually do high enough damage to represent a large threat, regardless of how good their hitrates are. This makes the game generally lean towards a player phase focus with enemy phase centered turns/strategies still being an option with some planning, and allows you to rip through armies fairly quickly if you know what you’re doing, despite the large headcounts in a lot of maps. While some enemy types could’ve been annoying just based on their statlines (namely scouts and myrms/swordmasters) you always have strong tools to get rid of any enemy type, making everything feel manageable, yet threatening.
Tl;dr: Killing enemies feels good and I like when they can also kill me.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this! The entire game across the board was very polished and properly thought out, with my gripes being fairly small in comparison to the game’s strengths. I could definitely see myself coming back to this in the future, and I’ll be keeping tabs on team NQR’s future hacks.
That’s all. Thank you for making this!
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Removed Oxford comma from Eskuldur
how could you do this to the oxford comma when it’s done so much for us while asking for so little in return?
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