[FE8] Fire Emblem: Drums of War <v. 2 - COMPLETE! 22 chapter campaign!>

[Parrhesia]

Loath though I am to push out another patch so soon, ‘HP overflows to 6’ is kind of a big deal.
So the OP now contains v. 0.64, containing not only a fix to that issue but a few other fixes, tweaks and rebalances addressing the most common concerns I’ve heard thus far.

It’s also in a folder now because I’m tired of it wiping the click count, damn it. That thing fed my ego to an unhealthy extent.

v. 0.64 Patchnotes

Fair warning: I haven’t been able to play the game in this form for a significant amount of time, so it’s a slightly experimental build. I don’t see any reason why things should have broken, but there’s always a risk, isn’t there?

Fixes and tweaks

• Remedied oversight: removed stray crit on weapons that had it in vanilla (reavers, spears)
• Fixed EoA1 arena that wasn’t meant to function
• Installed patch that should stop HP overflow errors
• Fixed flag issue in C4 that made Nei and Ramond’s death quotes mutually exclusive
• New and vastly improved portrait for Etienne, courtesy of RandomWizard. Battle palette has slightly changed to match
• Partially managed to install the better reskin of map UI graphics made by Alusq. Despite the generous help of Contro, the better fonts for HIT/ATK/etc refused to insert
• Added a small incentive to bring a thief to C7
• Fixed the issue where Roxelana’s portrait would briefly become a shadow at the end of C3
• Roxelana’s death quote amended to be more sentimental rather than forward-facing

Chapter 3 changes
Chapter 3 worked fine… if you acted in a couple of specific ways, but was overly punitive if you did not. Clearer communication should help lay out precisely what the map expects of you, as well as making a direct lure more forgiving in a couple of ways (e. g., engaging the southeast monks through the wall now works to trigger the event).

I’ve tested it myself three times. I am still very, very paranoid that something will have broken.

• Slightly weakened monks in the town
• Weakened Auclair, removed his Ridersbane and Purge reinforcements
• Made more explicit that you do not need to kill anyone south of the town
• Southern squad lure now triggered by engagement with any southern enemy (besides the ballistician), not just the leaders

Unit Adjustments
A common complaint was that early units were too quickly outclassed by their replacements. They do continue to hold up very well into the lategame, but we all know that isn’t the most important part.

I tried to give units meaningful boosts without simply homogenising them and patching over weaknesses. Hopefully this spread of slight boosts keeps true to the units while making the prospect of keeping them around more appealing.

Gerhard

• +2 Lv (5 → 7)
• +3 Skl
• +2 HP, Def
• +1 Str, Res
• -5% growth in Skl, Spd, Lck, Def
• +5% growth in Str, Res

Gerhard isn’t a strictly bad unit - I don’t think any of the original Levy are - but he’s a generalist surrounded by Jaro, who is tougher out of the gate, and Alarik to come. Making him stronger all-round should make him a more appealing use of a roster slot, particularly with how competitive they become through the tail end of Act 1.

The growth adjustments are obviously largely irrelevant to his viability; they exist to put some distance between his endgame stats and those of the other fighter, Donagh, in the stats that Donagh excels in. Also, without them, in raw number terms he would have been the strongest endgame unit in the game.

Radu

• +2 Lck
• +1 Str/Spd

Crit rates on normal enemies stop being a factor towards the midgame thanks largely to support networks developing, but establishing a higher baseline for luck should help alleviate those concerns in the earlygame. Making him a little less automatically doubled should help his durability, too.

Vivica

• +2 Lck
• +1 HP/Mag/Res

Vivica’s got the most obvious strengths and weaknesses of any unit in the starting force. I would never do anything so gauche as make her able to double anything besides ironclads. But she was one of a few units to be easily critted, and I felt that making her slightly more reliable would do a lot to make her feel better to use… as someone who has used her on all three test files. It’s possible that I’ll make magi less common in future patches, which would cut into her usefulness in any case.

Petras

• +2 Lck
• +1 Str

Renate

• +1 Str, Skl

Petras’ comically low Luck now starts at mediocre. Both could use a slight boost, which at the very least should make them a little more reliable to train. They’re still good and bad at the same things as ever, and I don’t want to crank their defences any higher.

Jaro

• +2 Spd, Lck
• +1 Skl, Def

Unlike most of the other early recruits, Jaro doesn’t have a particular unique utility or situation he’s tailor-made for; he’s just a strong earlygame unit who tends to fall off into the midgame, and could stand for that falloff point to come a little later and for the peak to last a little longer. I’m less concerned about him being stronger on the surface than Gerhard, since you’re basically paying two and a half silver weapons for him. His growths will still ensure that his weak points remain increasingly obvious as the game wears on.

Felice

• -1 Lv

Felice starts weak and takes a while to get going. Which is appropriate; she’s 16. Still, this should hopefully help the determined Felice deployer get her relevant slightly sooner, with slightly accelerated XP growths. If you need to early-promote a mage, Felice isn’t the one you’d use, anyway.

Pavel

• +1 Lv
• -2 Def
• -1 Skl

I’m reluctant to change Pavel too much, given the tightness of the Prologue - especially early on - but he was just slightly too quick to get going, and I underestimated the degree to which accelerated XP growth helped him basically become a full-fledged myrmidon.

Kirsten

• +3 Lck

Small change made to make her more statistically distinct from Radu, owing to his own Luck buff.

Chasimir

• -1 HP, Mag, Spd

Given his status, Chasimir should be able to walk into the team on arrival - if not, he’s pointless - but he’s just a little too good at present. He’s already the automatic best healer with an automatic monopoly on light tomes; he doesn’t need to be quite as good at fighting as he is, and though he’s fragile, Kadri’s even moreso.

Saszkia

• +2 HP
• -2 Skl

A slight nerf, while making her slightly more distinct from Helje.

[WaywardTroper]

So I got to the end of Act 2 and wanted to put out some thoughts and unit screenshots in a big ol’ text block mini novel

I’ll start with a TL;DR- You know that part in FE9 where all the senators are scheming while you beat up a tiger in a desert and carry a heron for 3 chapters? This is that but 1000% better at basically every conceivable measure

I’ll break it down into talking points starting with:

Plot

+Plot- I’ll admit, first and foremost, there are a lot of moving parts, names and factions that I’ll need a second read through to fully map out, but this is a homerun of a script. Its a take on something like the plot of Gaiden/Valencia, but its clear that the Captain and her mercenary band aren’t in this for a higher cause while everyone schemes around her in a game of 4d chess full of bleeding pawns. There are some staples of an FE plot (Magic swords, gods and manaketes are all talking points) but this is something akin the G RR Martin take on a FE continent, bleeding and baring teeth from quite a lot of the cast

Visuals

+Visuals: I want to start with a little brownie point for the slight recolor to our player sprites; its a lovely teal/seafoam color that does a nice job standing out from the adjusted pallette of the maps. At that, big shout out to the map design. there were a couple that used some vanilla FE8 pallettes and pieces, but a majority of them did a great job selling wide scale battlefields across multiple countries. I wanna give a special shout-out to chapter 3, easily one of my favorite ruined city tiles with a clear design but plenty of avenues to tackle the objectives
-I want to mention the mugs as a seperate talking point here; there were definitely some splices, but the custom sprites were all great, personally favorites being Roxe, Luthor, and Estrelle. and an extra shout out to the senator doing his best impression of emperor palepatine. As soon as the mug popped up, I knew no matter what side of the war we fought on, that man was not on our side

level design/gameplay

+Level design/gameplay: So this scales on the challenging side of the spectrum throughout the first 2 acts. There were no vanilla seize or rout maps, and on top of stats being fairly high on both sides, basically every map had re-inforcement bosses, or a tricky objective to keep you from turtling toward the big chair. Chapter 3 was basically the crucible, and once I got it, the rest of the game revealed itself as much more tactical then some other romhacks I’ve played. It was a touch frustrating, but satisfying for sure

I’ll break this up into two parts for readability (1/2)

[WaywardTroper]

(2/2)

Characters

+Characters: This is a point more-so for game design, but I love the ransom or spar option that popped up throughout. A great twist on the lord recruiting from the lot of folks that tried to kick your teeth in and added another layer of difficulty if you choose an interesting boss over the funds needed to keep everyone armed and in the fight. Having said that, you declined to let us see growths, but I’m 100% positive everyone is roided up on growthes, as in, several characters have personal and/or class growths above 100 if not 200 in stats, particularly Cat and Calista. Considering this is a tight plot, no gaidens and 20-ish chapters with fighting when complete, I won’t be surprised if the last 2 or 3 chapters are stat capped characters clashing on both sides. If the growths don’t do it, the promo gains will probably get you there. I also want to give a special note for the writing that is in place for the journal enteries, the pre and post chapter briefs, and the supports that have been written; This is a fleshed out and diverse bunch, minus all the optional spar characters (to an extent) and I loved how developed and nuanced Roxi in particular was. She could very well be the most nuanced lord I’ve read yet, and her internal trauma and writing with Calista basically carried the game for me
-I’m assuming it was a deliberate decision early in design, but I like the clear intent to give you a Cain and Abel choice for basically every class or role in the party; there were a couple exceptions, your Lord and Dancer being the obvious examples, but before the end of act 1, you more or less recruit your pick for everything from which stronk axeman you prefer, a pre-built general or your preferred armor knight, and even an array of archers based on prefernce. I see this as being extremely replayable and iron man friendly in the long term as a result, and suspect I may have even missed some recruitables outside of bosses

[WaywardTroper]

This’ll likely be flagged as spam, but I’ll wrap this all up with some screen shots and final thoughts on individual characters, but as a neat little bow on all this, I’m eagerly looking forward to act 3 dropping

Screenshots and thoughts on characters

Roxelana fell strongly into the camp of Ike and Hector conqueror lords as she earned that title of The Captain. I’m glad her personal weapon had 60 uses and a fun spin on the usual rapier description. I fed her the clams so she could swing blades without issue in the end game. She could very likely solo the game if she ever had consistent access to two range swords, but as it stands she was a blast to use and a suitably nuanced character in the writing

I love, love, love immediately being handed a dancer, and one that’ll likely be tanky and dodgy to boot. The only thing I hold against her is she couldn’t get the swift soles sooner, and sadly there is no dancer promotion to keep her going into the 3rd act. An auto-include, and I’m curious what mysterious stuff she’s been holding back going into the finale

Catsidhe was, I suppose, the est of this game, but with insane growths and an unbreakable dragon stone, that’s a bit of a moot point. I look forward to steamrolling with her more in act 3 now that she has an arrow-proof shield, but this is a quality manakete for sure

Pavel ended up being an early favorite, both for his mug and being a surprisingly combatitve rogue. I A ranked him with my other fave of the run and they were basically able to frontline all of act 2, even with both early promoting around level 15. The only negative I put toward him is there isn’t much thief utility outside of about a dozen treasure chests, but I suppose the lack of gems to steal was very much deliberate and no one was especially hurting for stats throughout, so take that with a grain of salt

Dzen was an 11th hour addition, but I will never scoff at a playable halberdier, and calling the captain a dumby for not noticing a lever earned her brownie points. The fact that the spar or ransom decision ended up being her choice and not Roxi’s was great. As far as performance, hard to beat a lance-master spread, managed to take on two of the commanders in the final stage without too much assistance with flair

The erudite dark cannon on legs, she more or less hugged behind Renate the whole run and sniped anything that didn’t break on Ren’s lance. I think she turned out fairly speed blessed, but I rarely felt like she wasn’t a liability wielding anything other then flux. At least she was the mage-killer premier to anything that couldn’t be 3 ranged by the snipers

I committed to Felice early after her first couple level ups one me over, but she wound up a bit magic nerfed and surprisingly slow for a mage. She still doubled a lot, and thunder game her a ton of utility, but I had to feed her a band so she could keep up after the swamp, and supports did a lot to carry her as well

Kadri aka mercy is off the menu. The staff exp is thankfully much, much better in this, so she got one of the first couple master seals along side Pavel, and once they both started supporting, it was more or less a strike team between the two that dodged and merced near anything. The fact she had physics staves fairly consitently also went a long way to basically never leaving the deployment slots

I opted for Ren, funnily enough her first level was an HP only dud, but she earned that faith in her over the other armor knights by a wide margin. Its hard to undersell weapon triangle control early game, and if not for her and my preferred sniper, several characters would have died end of chapter 3, to the point she even managed to turn it around and help clear the stage before everyone escaped. She got doubled by basically everything, but shrugged it off if it wasn’t a sage barreling down on her

So, bows are disgustingly good in this, obscenely good, to the point elm bows carried the whole game. She didn’t start with the gun for an arm Radu came out the gate with, but the fact she doubled on everything that wasn’t a swordmaster and was the mage killer most of the time made her contender for top 5 among the cast. Sadly, I missed her supports, and she was a bit of a satellite in the cast, but mechanically the best sniper in my run for sure

So Andrea showed up as a better Sander in every conceivable way with the most absurd personal weapon in the game, so she earned her deployment slot instantly. She only really started to slow once she missed some important strength level ups, but did a good job cleaning up armors, axes, and wyverns the whole run

Donagh ended up sticking after a certain other big axe man missed some speed levels and got some easy support gains with with his brother-in-arms. He did pretty good when deployed without being a liability, but he struggled to deal the hits jaro swung around and couldn’t quite frontline despite being much more consistent hitting and critting

the other half of the dynamic duo, he was carried mostly by the easy support and the quality of bows. I suspect he will be better once you get a brave bow but he was good enough to make the end of act 2 deployment

Best boy/10. I literally can not hate on a recruitable skeleton, but then he also got bows and also came with general tier stats. The only thing I can hold against him was how much of a pain in the ass he was to beat, literally coming down to a last turn kill after feeding Felice a band. I don’t care if he can’t talk, he chose to join us of his own volition and I will stan this man

Honorable mention - Helje came with a solid level and bases, and did flyer things very well. Slim lances are actually very buff, but she just barely missed the cut of last deployment so I could bring more bows into the end of act 2

the other honorable mention: Jaro is good, extremely good, I mean he got a +8 on promotion and dunked on anything not carrying a sword. Even pre-promote he held down The east hall in chapter 4 by himself… but then he missed all the speed levels post promotion and struggled to get defenses. I will likely use him again or swap him in for act 3 now that I have spare speed wings for him, but he still was worth mentioning as the Strongest boi

[Parrhesia]

It’s patch-day, people. But nothing too important; just minor bug-fixes. Unless you’re using Ochulo, you can probably just skip it if you can’t be bothered, lmao. Turns out that he can’t actually promote with master seals as intended. Until now!!! As always, old saves should be completely compatible.

v. 0.66 Patchnotes

• Ochulo can actually promote now
• C3’s opening changed to be slightly more explicit about the objective
• Staring too closely into the ticking object will no longer send you to the Missingno. Safari Zone
• Have replaced the Archer animation with Der/Flasuban’s improved version
• Fixed an error where C4 Ecorcheur fighters weren’t assigned their correct palettes
• Improved C9’s map palette
• Preparations shop no longer marks up prices
• Convoy now available from beginning; juggling inventory in C1 was mostly just annoying
• I think some other things that were too insignificant to remember fixing
• Etienne’s portrait now correctly displays all of the times it’s meant to. For some reason, there’s two of Etienne’s Face in the game, so the old portrait was displaying in a lot of dialogue

Roadmap and general thoughts

Happily, so far it seems like the game is pretty stable. One guy had Saszkia forget her move at the start of her recruitment and sit on a mountain, which I haven’t seen and can’t replicate, while this one time I had a guy hit Renate for 0 damage and have her health display as ?? as the game hanged for a few seconds. But when things aren’t working as intended, it’s generally been down to a fixable oversight.

Act 2 isn’t requiring as much overhauling as Act 1, probably from a mixture of me becoming more comfortable with the tools, being better at eye-balling what maps should look like, and of fewer players reaching it. Changes outside of minor fixes are likely going to fall into the economy - small adjustments to costs, etc. - and flavour, with things like far more unique battle quotes.

So for the most part, I’ve been focusing my energy on Act 3 and the finale. At this point the hack is looking certain to be 22 chapters, in part because, hilariously, I’ve actually run out of the 50 slots for Boss BGM. Don’t tell me if I can get more. There’s probably a way, but I don’t need to objective creep myself into the grave…

Anyway, Act 3 will be five chapters, of which two are completely playable from start to finish in approximately the state they’ll be in on release, with almost all the dialogue written to boot. A third is mapped, a fourth is mostly mapped but will require a lot of fuckery with events, and the End of Act 3 should be fairly straightforward. It will probably be released in March. From there, with just three chapters left to go (albeit a very annoying coding process ahead, for one of them…) it’s pretty clear that the hack will be able to release by FEE3, whether in the v. 1.0 ‘hey all the chapters are complete’ version or a more definitive v. 1.1 ‘hey all the chapters are complete and also have survived more public playtesting’ state.

As ever, I’d love to see thoughts on how the hack is playing, particularly in Act 2, and if any character seems indispensably good, utterly worthless or just generally underwhelming.

[Parrhesia]

It is patchday again - link in the OP - and a seriously big one this time. This is the major Act 1 and 2 restructure. Dealing with issues such as:

• redesigning C4 and C5 to no longer be such a hump for some players
• alleviating earlygame crit avoid and accuracy issues
• reshaping the economy around a functional prep store that doesn’t just sell overpriced irons

On an FEUcord stream, Bpat basically suggested slightly increasing every weapon’s hit and every unit’s luck and, well, that’s basically what I’ve ended up doing. Special thanks also due to Alex, Xilirite and Rivian, for influential recent test playthroughs. This hack would not be what it is without the insight of fresh eyes.

This is a slightly experimental patch, and while in theory nothing should break… well, that’s the theory. I haven’t been able to stress-test it from the ground up the same way I have with previous patches, so although I’ve checked some things, I can’t quite guarantee it will play flawlessly from point A to point B.

When you’re using the same cheated file to warp around the ROM testing things, it can get a little weird.

Unfortunately, there is a serious bug in the prior patch. Which is to say, that despite two installed patches, it seems like the game really just doesn’t want to handle HP above 63 and overflows past that point. I had tested units with 80 HP. I had not set them to have that HP, saved, restarted and reloaded, and that’s apparently where the issues started. Well, the test file’s Roxelana had 64 HP, which overflowed precisely to 0, so upon taking a move she simply blinked out of existence.

Which is bad.

I’ve left the patches in just in case they’re working for other people, rebalanced the units that cap-rammed HP in the past and reverted class HP caps to 60. Now, on average, units only start to exceed 60 HP at Act 3 levels. Even my Roxelana had been given an Angelic Robe. If you don’t have a unit with >60 (probably >63) HP in the current patch, you’re fine. But just in case this has happened to you, and if this error happens, uh… it looks like the only way to get it to behave is to basically open the debugger through FEBuilder and manually reduce the unit’s max HP to 60… or to never restart a chapter and just use savestates. They’re both pretty unpalatable solutions, and hopefully nobody has to use them. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Necessity is the mother of invention, though. Units were becoming problematically chunky, and the fact that a lot of units hit 60 HP long before 20/20 - when it looks like a more usual endgame level is probably around 15/15 (units by the end of C14 are at around 15/6-10) - is a handy way to discourage lowmanning. Most units fell within the 55-70 range by 20/20, and that isn’t looking like what endgame levels will be at this point.

Oh, and I’ve changed the rating from 13+ to 15+. Probably out of an overabundance of caution, but the increasing theme of prejudice throughout Act 2 likely nudged it into that territory. I don’t think any of it’s particularly out of place for the IP - there’s actual genocide in four of the vanilla games! - but still.

Work on Act 3 continues, but I’ve started to feel a degree of burnout, so I’ll probably take it easy for a bit. A March release is still looking pretty likely, I just think I need to refresh my ideas a bit. Oh, and if you’re tier-list-inclined, I threw this together. Obviously, full spoilers both in that and in the patchnotes below.

v. 0.7 Patchnotes

Item Rework

Not exhaustive, rather a summary of the key changes.

• Iron, Slim, Silver weapons gain +5 Hit
• Steel weapons gain +10 Hit
• Throwing weapons gain +15 Hit, +3 Wt
• Various weight adjustments
• Rewrote and normalised effective weapon stats (mostly increased)
• Fixed oversight where Slim and Steel weapons were not universally E-rank
• Seraph Knight now gives D-rank swords on promotion
• Prep armory now sells Steel and Throwing weapons (+ Luna, Ash Recurve, Mend)
• Map store inventory overhauled
• Changed Sharp Fang’s description to specify that it pierces defence

This isn’t an exhaustive list of changes, but in general hit rates were made better and internal logic made more consistent. E-rank is now more of a hole to be dug out of. Steel weapons were not highly valued by many playtesters largely owing to accuracy issues and the competition provided by improved slim weapons, so have been buffed a little more. Throwing weapons were made more accurate because they’re not good weapons in DoW; they aren’t mulching five enemies on EP, they’re there because your melee unit is two tiles away, so it just feels bad if the desperation move mises.

Chapter Changes

Act 1 General:

• Legionaries (6 → 3), Ecorcheurs (8 → 5) and Insurgents (2 → 1) have luck reduced.
• Fixed issue where the Prologue, C1 and C4 didn’t actually activate Flag 3, meaning their turncounts weren’t logged in the record

If you wanted a developer par time like old FPSes used to have, here you go. But apparently it doesn’t track chapters unless you have the flag in.

Prologue:

• Deserter 89 (Jaro’s ironclads and pirate) gain +2 luck

The guardsmen had a crit chance on Jaro’s pirate, leading to an occasional issue where they would kill him and not allow him to destroy the southeastern village, which doesn’t actually have a provision to be visited (or allow him to fulfil his main purpose, acting as a source of time pressure). This fixes that.

3: Chevauchee

• Central armour/monk squad AI changed from ‘attack if in 2 moves’ to ‘attack in range’
• One armour now has and drops a hammer
• Gisela no longer has a halberd (still has a longsword)

In the previous version of C3, if the player committed to a full central push, the central squad of enemies would jump on them at basically the same time as about four swordsmen. It was manageable, but felt punitive, especially in a hack that generally and deliberately rewards bold directness. Giving them more conservative AI should break up the one real stumbling block of the chapter. One guy dropping a hammer reduces early reliance on the hanger to deal with armour, especially pertinent in the next chapter.

4: The Cause

• Reinforcement waves staggered; fewer, larger waves, fewer units overall
• Recovery mode removed from all units
• Thief AI (not sappers) changed to Move Only
• New break point added to guardhouses
• Replaced sapper thief venin swords with iron swords
• Broken wall HP lowered to 15
• Shading errors fixed
• Nei now only has a ridersbane, which he now drops
• Turn ticker now displays correct count

C4 is an odd chapter. It’s more than manageable if you hold the line at the chokepoints and strike out to kill enemy ranged units, but the way reinforcements arrived made this unintuitive to many players. The point was made to me by Xilirite that the reinforcements not being staggered meant that openings not only had to push through the front lines, but to account for those following in behind.

The presence of a throne also lead to erratic enemy and NPC behaviour. In particular, Ramond’s tendency to retreat after taking a couple of hits was a source of frustration rather than the intended respite. Additionally, changing the thief AI to Move Only should stop them prioritising stealing vulneraries over acting predictably.

Nei was a little overtuned, and now he has a weapon that’s weaker against you but should help in the player’s hands. Breaks sometimes taking multiple strikes or stronger weapons wasn’t really interesting, and adding one more to the guardhouses helps avoid a situation where you’re locked in. The venin swords were mostly just annoying.

5: Gloom of Night

• Added trees to cut off the northern path through the forest
• Changed Guard force; replaced 2/4 bowmen with melee units
• Sidegraded two skeleton archers to ash recurves
• Added reminder text to use the torch staff

C5 had two priority areas: reducing the exclusion zones for fliers, and funnelling players towards the safety of the road. These changes will hopefully accomplish this.

6: Show of Strength

• Changed Carmilla’s initial reaver from hand axe to steel axe

The foolproof method of blocking off the villages is to have a guy wait in front of a sentinel that can’t kill them on enemy phase, since they can only be engaged in melee from one tile. One of Carmilla’s goons had a hand axe, though, meaning he could thoroughly fuck that planning up, particularly given the very swingy nature of his low-accuracy doubling.

7: Plain of Scales

• Reduced Debreszen’s luck and speed

Rivian pointed out that the generics had a hard time reliably scratching the boss they were meant to swarm. They were right. It should be easier, now.

8: Full Circle

• Removed some walls

Again based on a suggestion of Rivian’s. There wasn’t really a point to the penultimate rooms being blocked off from each other - it’s just busy work in getting your rogue across - so the hallway between them has been opened up.

10: Ill-Met by Moonlight

• Adjusted starting position of first squad
• Added line on PP1 to clarify their AI

C10 was problematically signposted, with at least a couple of players torn between pushing through the centre and splitting off down the right, which you don’t have the manpower for. This should add clarity; going the direct route to Dzeneta is like punching through Fargus’ elite pirates. Except that they have good stats, but a vulnerable underbelly.

I was thinking of adding more meat to the reinforcements when they do arrive, but ultimately forgot to do so before pushing out the patch. Oops!

Unit Changes

General

• Establishes cap of 60 HP on all classes

For reasons above. The patches weren’t working, but I think deflating the amount of blood in every unit is a good thing anyway.

Roxelana

• +1 Luck

Roxelana was aimed to be a straightforwardly good unit, where even a below-par version was worth a slot. Kept in check by mediocre speed, a lack of reliable 1-2 range and terrible resistance, but has pretty much everything else you can ask for. A couple more slaying weapons seeded into Act 1 should alleviate overreliance on the Hanger.

Pavel

• +1 Luck

People seem to find Pavel easy and satisfying to train up. The intent behind Pavel is that you either put the effort into him early and get a fairly good combatant when a thief is required, or you get credible alternative thieves towards the turn of Act 1 who are below-par fighters that can still hold their own.

Felice

• +1 Luck

Felice seems like she’s in a good place. People who use her have liked her, and she’s useful in the short-term, too.

Radu

• +1 Speed, Luck, Defence
• +5% Lck growth

Radu gives reliable results and stays strong throughout the game, though his mediocre initial speed tails off badly. I’m aware that +5% Luck growth is a laughably meaningless rebalance, but hey.

Petras

• +1 Lck, +10% Lck growth
• +5% Spd growth

Renate

• +1 Lck

Petras vs. Renate is a question that not even I know the answer to, but by lategame levels he was just so, so far outpaced. This should help close the gap. I’m very happy with where the ironclads are, and most playtesters I’ve seen have used one or the other long-term.

Hesterine

• +2 Luck

With everyone else getting a luck boost, Hesterine - whose stat profile is partly built around notably high luck - gets a push. I’ve heard her described as underwhelming, but I’m not particularly afraid of a horseman needing to be dug out of a hole.

Jaro

• -20% HP growth
• +10% Luck growth

Jaro’s HP was comically high, which was kind of the point of his lategame profile, so he’s obviously hit hard by the HP cap reassertion. But his lategame luck was abysmal. With the recent buffs, he’s basically in the niche of being an earlygame powerhouse, which was always the aim anyway.

Kadri

• +2 Lck

Sander

• +2 Lck

Helje

• +2 Lck

Are you getting as tired of reading ‘+2 Luck’ as I am of writing it? Again, units who were defined by high luck already needing some space to differentiate themselves from the pack - and given their reliance on avoid, were nerfed by the hit buffs anyway. It seems like people are pretty happy with all three units so far. Kadri’s short-term use is obvious but she’s rewarding in the long-term as well, I’ve seen Sander called both flagrantly overpowered and flagrantly underpowered, while Helje… is Vanessa, either going to be exceptional or deeply undercooked depending on how much the individual player uses flier utility.

Goran

• -20% HP growth
• +2 Luck
• +5% Str/Spd/Lck growth

As far as I’m aware, nobody has ever trained Goran. I’m at peace with this.

Kirsten

• -5% HP/Skl growth

As the only marksman with speed worth a damn, but still with more than good enough strength and skill, I think it’s kind of just inevitable that she ends up the strongest if trained. I’m not concerned by it, though.

Alarik

• +2 Lck

Alarik’s base luck was absolutely putrid. It’s a deliberate weakness of his, sure, but he floated well below the baseline. Otherwise, he serves his purpose well.

Chasimir

• +2 Lck

Another unit with scandalously low luck before. Now it’s merely bad, which is fine; he shouldn’t be taking many (physical) hits, anyway.

Laszlo

• +1 Lv, +2 HP, +1 Str/Spd/Lck/Def
• -15% HP growth
• New Prf, Harpoon (45 uses, 7 Mt, 90 Hit, 8 Wt, 1-2 range)
• Can actually be promoted now

It says a lot that nobody noticed that Laszlo was bugged not to be promotable, including me. No matter how you shake it, Laszlo is not going to be a good unit while staying true to his philosophy, and that’s just fine by me. But there’s a lot of wiggle room to make him more usable, as well as to more effectively contribute on his opening chapter for those that don’t ever deploy him again.

I don’t generally use units like Laszlo, but a big exception is Ross, and a significant reason why Ross doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out is the existence of the hatchet. Hand axes are great in FE8; javelins are godawful in DoW. This change means Laszlo can make far more meaningful contributions on arrival, even if he’s still destined for the bench if you don’t take a shine to him.

Kestut

• +1 Lck

Kestut is no Laszlo, and has been working basically as intended since first release.

Saszkia

• -10% Skl growth

FE7rebalance.txt

Elisenda

• +2 Lck

Wasn’t bad from the off, but preserves stat profile relative to Chasimir, the obvious competition.

Ochulo

• -20% HP growth
• Evil Eye received +2 Might, +10 Hit
• Crimson Eye received +10 Hit
• Catalyst promotion buffed by +2 Con (total of +3 for 7 Con)
• Fixed an oversight where his movement was crippled in C9: Bleak Seasons

The one guy who has ever used Ochulo to my knowledge reported that he felt underwhelming even when trained up. He deliberately isn’t exactly a worldbeater, but there’s still meant to be some degree of payoff, largely through his unique utility (being a flying mage, having what is basically FE7 Luna).

I am not afraid of Ochulo ever becoming a unit that dominates the meta, but I don’t want him to be, you know, above mediocre. He’s effectively Elisenda’s freebie. That said, for a lasting buff, may as well boost what are effectively his Prfs.

Last patch, I forgot to knock down Catalyst movement from 5 to 6. Upon reflection, the fact that he can’t use staves, unlike almost all other magi - along with the fact you basically need to glue Defiance to him - means he may as well lean into the niche of being mobile.

The familiars on C4: Gloom of Night have been reduced by a level to counterbalance the weapon buffs; those on C9: Bleak Seasons reduced by two.

Andrea

• +4 Lck

Their luck has literally doubled to still be among the worst in the game. Luck is just, unfortunately, kind of one of those numbers where you need a baseline of just to function, so characterisation had to take a nap.

Tiimo

• -20% HP growth
• +1 Str
• +2 Spd
• Axe rank reduced from B to C

He’s just a little guy. It’s his birthday. Also his weapon rank was higher than it was meant to be for some reason.

Karolas

• +1 Lv, +1 Str/Skl/Spd/Def/Res

It’s always a really hard balance between ‘this unit is pointless on arrival’ and ‘this unit invalidates the unit of the same type I already trained’. Karolas was functional on join, and for a bit after that, but lacked a real pull to ever deploy after that. He’s slightly too prominent in-story to just be relegated to backup material. A gentle boost to bases should help.

Clio

• -25% HP growth
• +5% Str/Def growth

A gentle nerf to a stat she easily blazed past 60 on anyway, slight boosts to her other strong points. Clio was obscenely strong back when the XP formula was inadvertently still in the game, and has been hamstrung significantly by the XP formula, uh, ‘functioning’. I think she’s in a good place now.

Deadeye

• +3 Lck

Deadeye slots in nicely on arrival as-is. This just future-proofs his Luck a bit.

Catsidhe

• Manakete reclassified to promoted class

Cat’s the hardest character to know how well she’s balanced, there isn’t really an easy or obvious frame of reference for her, but in the current patch she was levelling up insanely fast. Without much care, mine was level 9 by the end of her join chapter. I’ve decided to leave the relative power at 2 for now, but making it a promoted class should slow her ascent down.

[Parrhesia]

Yaama, people. No patch today, but I figure we’re overdue for a progress report. If you’re not here to listen to me ramble for a post, you can safely ignore everything that follows.

To all of you who are left. So I’ve been working on Patch v. 0.8, which is going to contain five new chapters and, of course, various improvements and polishes to the first two acts.

Progress on Act 3

As things stand, Chapters 12, 13 and 14 are complete and have been played through, start to finish. C15 has a map and enemy placements laid out, End of Act 3 has a placeholder.

Sometimes I let vanilla events try and play out anyway to see what happens…

By Act 3, your units are hitting double-digit promoted levels, stats are starting to turn green, and unpromoted enemies are starting to struggle to stay relevant (or give much experience). Thematically, it’s crunch time; you’re a hardened company of killing machines that have seen most of what the game has to offer, so at times there’s more of an emphasis on smaller or split forces. Mechanically, it’s not as if this is a super complicated hack, so as players hit that level of strength it’s been an interesting design challenge to try and keep players on their toes.

Sometimes that means side objectives and stretch goals, sometimes it’s just a matter of having confidence in the player - they have the answers to almost any problem, so it’s time to throw some big fucking problems in. But I’m trying to stay away from the trope of just hurling meat at the player; C4 and C11 are both bigger in pretty much any perspective than anything in Act 3, and the deployment limit doesn’t exceed 15.

Oh, and now that I have the measure of what’s being added and how the game’s shaping up, there’s a little more confidence in adding content that isn’t necessarily going to be seen by every player.

Polish

So while Test Run 3 goes through Act 3, I’ve started a fresh run of the game - Test Run 4 - which is serving a few different functions. The first is that this is an ironman file, to give myself a check and see if there’s anything that really kicks the player in the teeth. It might not be able to account for things I just know are there because I wrote them to be there, but if there’s stray crit rates or shaky hit rates, I’ll find out the hard way. Good news is that early signs are that the v. 0.7 update and earlier buffs to early units has stamped them out to an extent, made things more reliable, and generally accomplished what I wanted them to accomplish. This is the first time I’m actually playing the first chapters since that update, so. That’s good to know.

What’s getting polished, then? Two things: the first is graphics. Look, I’m not a great splicer or mapper and I’ve never made any secret of that. I edit map palettes by using the scroll wheel, not through any actual understanding of colour theory. I throw things together as best I can, and thanks largely to other peoples’ contributions, I think the game, by and large, looks pretty good and pretty distinct.

But of course it can be better, and great news on that front: RandomWizard has generously contributed an updated sprite for Felice, and has also worked tirelessly on improving the maps across the first two Acts, including by improving on vanilla tilesets. The player is finally free from the tyranny of my obsession with pointy roads and squared-off layouts. It really has been the missing piece, and while the maps play basically identically, they just make the experience feel that little bit better.

The other major aspect of polish is cutscenes. So here’s the thing: I’m not good at coding. The early chapters in particular are held together by string. Some of the more complex chapters do still work, but I don’t actually know how. I’m pretty reluctant to change any of the core fabric of the maps. I accidentally gave Radu Pierce somehow, just by trying to move it off Wyrm Knight. The maps as they play now in v. 0.7 will probably play about that way until the end of time. It also means that cutscenes are going to stay pretty simple. There’s a lot more portraits on backgrounds than sprites moving around maps, and that’s how it’s going to be, for better or worse.

But there’s still a lot of things that have been noticeable, but I just haven’t had the time or inclination to hammer out, because hammering out little things is tedious. Still, at some point you have to sigh, go back and make sure that there’s proper 16-frame fades-to-black between scenes, adding […]s to lines, making sure they flow properly around their [A]s. So that’s the other useful part of Test File 5 - if I see something that sticks out, I go and hammer it flat on the spot. And I’m trying to take the knowledge that’s forced me to learn to be a bit more adventurous making fresh scenes, and the fruits of that can be seen through Act 3.

So that’s what we’ve been doing. Act 1 and 2 won’t see many gameplay changes from now on, but they’ll just get that missing coat of paint; Act 3 is pretty close to done, and when the whole package is ready to go, I’ll push it out the door. I’m hoping for it to be done within the next month. In the meantime, please feel free to tell me any thoughts or suggestions.

[Naledge]

Won’t lie man. Your post about how you’re going about making this hack and everything in it are fascinating. It has actually made me want to give this a try. Keep posting because it’s a really good read.

[Gryffe]

@Parrhesia

To all of you who are left.

We all made a promise, didn’t we ? To see everyone through to the end, safe and sound ! What captain would break an oath~ ?

While it’s fun to create a 20/20 monster I doubt it was the intended experience, and only having 6HP was, uh, difficult to deal with.
So I restarted the game !

Chapter 4 on second playthrough: electric boogaloo!

This time I came with a plan. Knowing how good archers are now, I trained both of them. Radu reached a monstrous 17 str which, along with an ash longbow, was just enough to kill the first thief while my other archer took care of the other with a dance. Other key holders just so happen to all have 2 range weapons, meaning they crashed on me in enemy phase, leaving the doors locked for the rest of the map.

Gamestate on turn 3

Discovering that Chasimir can enrol the recruitables helped as well. He went to the right side (droppable door key) while the thief and Baros went to the left. Leaving Roxelana to handle the middle while everyone regrouped.

By turn 7 the boss fell, and then I killed her again next chapter for that cape.

Speaking of thief, Pavel in the prologue can visit the village to the right by waiting next to the river and then crossing it with his full movement next turn but you get no special reward, it’s just instantly destroyed

Also, turns out you don’t need to arena abuse if you feed all the bosses and prepromotes to Roxelana, she reached 20 right in time !

[Gryffe]

Ah ah ah, YES, finally ! I’ve been looking forward to this the entire time ! The best unit, they’re heeereee !!

Aren’t you the cutest thing this side of Rijesca ?! Yes you are ! Yes you are ! You are ! Aaah \o/

Bless my tiny tentacled angel…

For posterity sake, here's my 20/1 Roxelana

She chonky.

[Parrhesia]

Glad to see you back in the game and enjoying a second run! I think you’re still operating off an older patch - the lingering arena and HP overflow issues were fixed in the latest one, and also more importantly, I don’t think Ochulo can promote in that patch (another oversight, I just forgot to add Familiar - and, until a patch later, Soldier - to the list of Master Seal classes). There’s some other nice buffs for him, too…

Thanks as well for highlighting the Prologue river crossing issue. Fortunately, that’s going to be fixed in v. 0.8.

---

Minor update on v. 0.8 while I’m here, I guess. My pseudo-ironman run has marched to the gates of C11 (RIP Kirsten and Clio), making various small fixes to maps and dialogue along the way. It was Melledoneus who first advised me to start using [A] tags more carefully, after punctuation rather than cutting off sentences midway; it took me a while to actually, uh, do that, but it’s made a hell of a difference, I have to say.

Even if I could fix this glitch, I wouldn’t (maybe). Good thing ‘level’ is a palindrome.

While most changes to the actual meat of the chapters are fairly minor, there is one significant change I decided to make, and probably would have made earlier if I hadn’t just assumed it was SkillSys’ dependent: specifically, using Stan’s movement skill patch to give all infantry units Shove. DoW cleaves pretty close to vanilla GBAFE, but there’s room to offer the player a couple more interesting movement options. Shove isn’t as good as Reposition or Swap, but the kind of option that clever use can sometimes find a way out. Most turns probably won’t involve you Shoving someone, or at least as something other than an afterthought, and that’s the way I like it.

It also offers a boost to infantry units in general, and also gives an option to help out a couple of units who I didn’t just want to make stronger. As a result, Tiimo gets Swap because he is the kind of worm that will throw someone else in the way of the enemy as a human shield, and because he is, this will shock you, not a very good combatant. Dzeneta also gets Pivot, which I felt fit her characterisation as a veteran whose experience makes up for her awkward stat-spread (she’ll also get a Prf, which is starting to enter the territory of blatant favouritism, but hey; there’s a lot more obvious powerhouses who join around the same time as her). Following the same train of thought, there’s also FE5-style unlimited trading courtesy of aera. A DoW turn shouldn’t have infinite possibilities, things should always be pretty easy to work out in your head… but sometimes, punching someone forward a tile is what you need.

Drums of War might be the first Fire Emblem that allows you to construct a Peasant Railgun.

I will say that I don’t entirely understand the skill’s inner workings as coded by default, but I think the only gamebreaking thing is averted - you can’t Shove NPCs, which would break Ch9 (or at least necessitate coding game over events on range conditions.) Similarly, the couple of times that Seize is the objective, there’s had to be some tactical walls around. Suffice to say I’m shoving everything I can, and nothing’s broken yet… even that bloody southeast Prologue village.

The other subject is an announcement. Something seriously mindblowing. Thanks to a patch from Vesly, as of patch v. 0.8, some enemies…

… in Fire Emblem: Drums of War…

… will be red.

This just looks WRONG to me now.

So I’ve been thinking about team colours a lot. I play a lot of RTS (1080 Elo in AoE2 ranked, baby), and a thing I love in campaigns is where the team colour helps with the visual identity of a certain faction. Across 25 years of AoE2, every time Burgundians show up in a campaign, they’re violet. In Starcraft 1, when you - blue - switch to support a rebel faction, you adopt their red colour scheme until they betray you, at which point you revert to blue. There’s the FE9 boat map where the enemy goes incognito and wear this one-shot brown and gold colour scheme, and then in FE10 there’s really strong national identities through colour - and then light infantry units get represented by Mercenaries, who always wear the same reds (in 9) or browns (in 10).

Probably nobody but me notices or cares, but I like it. It’s fun. And because I’m, I guess, just that type of person, I’m also irritated by inconsistency. I’m unironically a little tilted that Lordaeron starts out with blue in WC3 before switching to the game’s frankly horrible off-white, and that Blizzard somehow fucked up the exact same way in SC2, stop giving multiple factions blue, you already had a core Protoss identity centred around gold with blue being a splinter faction, why are the Dominion and Raynor sharing fucking sky blue, I–

So I overthink a lot. That’s why, from the start of DoW, various factions have been associated with various colours. Confederation blue, Exile red, Rhiannon green, Ecorcheur orange, Aulestra purple, misc. grey. I think it’s a useful visual reminder of just who’s side you’re on at any given moment, it helps emphasise the variety of Federal forces and just how significant a threat they are, and it’s the kind of fun novelty that is completely harmless at worst. This is why the enemy is purple throughout the current patch: it’s a semi-common enemy colour (e. g., TO: KoL, where your guys are blue/green and their guys are red/purple), and you spend a fair amount of time beating up blue guys on behalf of red guys; a purple enemy is a little more ambiguous as a result.

Now that said, there’s some strong reasons to not fuck with mapsprites too much. One, FE is about reading threats at a glance. Staring at a map trying to remember if yellow units aggro on ultraviolet units isn’t really a layer of complexity the game needs. So despite bringing up Starcraft 1, and the obvious inspiration case, in DoW, the player is going to stay teal, and green units are never going to be hostile. Two, less important, the entire interface is built around teal vs. purple. Fucking with that would lack visual cohesion.

If the entire above sounds really stupid and self-indulgent, good news: when the patch reaches [COMPLETION], I do plan to go back and make a variant patch where it’s always Blue (+ Green) vs. Red, hostile 3rd faction being the Link Arena Purple, including interface element theming, none of this fuckery. But in the interim, all there is to know is, you’ll sometimes fight red, you’ll twice be allied with them.

Why would green units be hostile? Well, an accidental recurring theme in Act 3 has been the reoccurence of Third Faction being hostile to everyone, through the 7743 patch. Like the Shove patch, that does lead to some edge-cases I don’t fully understand, but who doesn’t love a bit of monster infighting? Anyway, I’m off to get my shit pushed in by C11. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re probably about a fortnight away from Act 3’s release.

[Gryffe]

I am playing on the latest patch actually, not sure why you would assume otherwise ? It was sad seeing the arena destroyed properly this time, but alas ! It is for the best !

Also hey, someone else knowing about the peasant railgun !

@Parrhesia

Probably nobody but me notices or cares, but I like it.

Funny you’d say that, reading through the Chapter 6 cutscenes I was specifically thinking to myself "hey, these enemies are wearing blue but their sprite is still violet ".

[Gryffe]

The one downside to not having Growth Rates displayed is that I don’t know how lucky this level up is, but I’ll choose to believe the growth item I gave Ochulo is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here !

Speaking of, since you’re one of the few devs talking about the behind-the-scene logic in the game, what’s the thought process behind this very unusual, if not unique, choice ?
It’s a bold move and I imagine one that wasn’t taken lightly.

[Parrhesia]

At first it wasn’t really a deliberate decision, just kind of the default; none of the vanilla FEs let you see growths, after all. We just know them because they’re talked about a lot, because they’re well-documented, et cetera. I’d have to go out of my way to add them, and I just didn’t feel it was necessary.

So now knowing it’s pretty doable, I’m still going to keep them hidden. The way I figure, I don’t want convenient growth rates to overshadow other factors in unit selection. I like the idea of there being an element of uncertainty with any new unit in the playthrough, that there’s always a bit of mystery to a character. What are they offering to you immediately? Will they pay off? Most importantly, do you like them (or at least their portrait) enough to roll the dice on bringing them next map?

I work basically on there being no unpleasant surprises. A few characters have unexpectedly good growths, but there’s not going to be a situation where you’re left with a unit who seems good - or even seems outwardly bad in a way that it seems clear they’ll have good growths - is secretly a trap to use who is doomed to mediocrity. Every unpromoted unit has at least 310%, and there’s no completely non-viable distributions; outliers are usually unexpectedly high, not low.

There’s also one specific character who knowing their growths would change the way people think about them from the get-go, and just introduce a very meta-gamey element to using them that I feel is a better challenge for second playthroughs.

I’m not completely obsessed with keeping them secret, of course. When the hack is complete I’m open to submitting the numbers to Cromar Bot, and obviously they’re all just an FEBuilder check away. But I’m comfortable with keeping them hidden, and suffice to say that, at least on paper, all the growths units are very viable on average.

[Gryffe]

I’m moving on to chapter 8, so I thought I might as well introduce the team !

Team

Who cares about the weapon triangle if you’re indestructible anyway? Her one weakness to magic aside, Kalaste is an unstoppable juggernaut who only fears said magic insofar as its users can reach her before she reaches them.

That recent patch to hitrate hit her hard, as Calista isn’t that durable really and relies on dodging her most dangerous foes to hold chokepoints, but still a unit that can reach level 20 in the prologue and dances to duplicate your allies.
Also her A support with Roxelana is amazing. In fact every support I’ve read is amazing.

Infinite ammo

It flies. It shoots eye lasers. It’s one of the rare mage of the game. It’s chonky with that impressive HP stat. And I can’t wait to develop a support and see what Ochulo has to say !
Watch out for Bishop though.

Also known as Miss Sunk Cost Fallacy. I’ve realized that Chasimir at base is better than her unless you spend ages training her to almost 20 a little too late and now it feels like a waste benching her sooo…
I’m nothing if stubbornly wrong when it comes to Fire Emblem.

His support with Felice had him grow on me as a character, but that wasn’t needed to convince me to keep using him when he’s such a beast of a man.
Foes crash on his power body before his arrows tear them asunder.
He’s been stuck at 9 speed forever but recently had a sudden growth spurt in that regard. Honestly I should probably just promote him at 17.

Yeah, who’s gonna bully her now, uh ?!
Nothing special to say here: you want a speed demon who melts flesh with her mind at 3 range thanks to thunder ? Well there you go !

… Shit. Forgot to steal the elixir back in chapter 7…

He’s really falling off with that speed that stubbornly refuses to grow ; high defense is meaningless if you still get doubled - but fortunately unpromoted enemies are still made of molasses.
He’s going to fall catastrophically hard in the second half when promoted enemies have better Con and higher might weapons but it’s okay because I got his A support with his war buddy and it’s so touching You can rest now buddy.

Gerarhd’s here to pick up the slack anyway. He’s “just” a mini-Roxelana for now, but post promotion his access to bows and the Con to double with them will make him a killing machine.

I’ve neglected her lately and she also got a couple bad level ups - definitely doesn’t compare to the one from my previous playthrough rocking 15 Str and higher defences. But it’s still a tanky flyer with ton of utility. And besides, I need to build her support with…

What’s better than one good Pegasus Knight ?
Two good Pegasus Knights !
Can’t have enough of a good thing, right ?

[Gryffe]

Caught a typo for the first time in this entire script.

The way supports are handled seems kinda fucky too ? IMO every unit has so few support, you should give them unlimited one (unless it messes with paired endings or something ?).

[Parrhesia]

Thanks for catching that.

Supports are unlimited Bs and only one A; the Bonds screen just displays it as remaining partners rather than the vanilla remaining conversations. The new patch will mention that in the tutorial message in the prologue.

By the by, v. 0.8 will be out within the next week. All the ‘mainline’ content is done; I just need six support chains, some codex stuff, and a handful of minutiae.

[Gryffe]

Right, that clarifies it ! Helje’s name appeared green in the support menu, so I thought she was really locked out of it - if it’s just visual bug it’s fine.

Would have been a shame to miss that A support.

[details=“Chapter 11”]
Was super excited to get the manakete, only to take one look at her character sheet and realize she’s bottom of the barrel.
I guess it’s better this way, since Roxelana would feel bad leading a kid to battle, but damn she’s terrible. Unless she gains +2 stats per level up I don’t think she’s worth using (definitely useable, don’t get me wrong, but unless you messed up and have free spots in your army you have no reason to pick her ever).

What’s left, 10 chapters ? She’ll barely be useful until the last three at that XP rate, and while coming with a Prf legendary weapon is nice I’m expecting to have a few S rank weapons for the rest of my army by then so it’s certainly not a unique trait.
Meanwhile I’ve crippled my forces with a garbo unit for half the game hoping she’ll eventually be useful.

The only bright spot for her is that 14 slots seems to be the norm, and trashing 1/14 of your power to grow isn’t that big of a deal. If the game was still at 10 slots she wouldn’t make the cut, even for fun.
At least you didn’t make her available for chapter 10, that would have been a horrible first impression.[/details]

[Gryffe]

Well, it’s been a blast and I can’t wait to play the rest !

[Parrhesia]

Act 3 has now been released! This patch contains:

• 5 new chapters
• The complete roster of 45 characters
• All 50 support chains complete (Support Viewer in main menu slightly buggy, but all should function in-game)
• Another clean place to pick up
• Another clean place to leave off
• Various improvements to Act 1 and 2

Patch is linked in the OP, patchnotes follow below! As always, I have played through the new content at least twice through… but as always, things can find new and exciting ways to break, so please do not hesitate to bring errors to my attention.

PATCHNOTES

MISCELLANEOUS

Graphical

• Fixed the blink frames of Alarik and Catsidhe

• Vastly improved new portraits! RandomWizard’s Felice, Vlak’s Calista and Renate.

• Big Bruno’s Oleg recolour has been replaced by a Repository submission from Sphealnuke. Vaivar’s Beyard recolour has been replaced by a Repository submission from Vlak.

• Added a new Great Knight repalette, by Skitty, and a Wyvern Knight repalette by Feaw.

• Imported new Repository armourer and shopkeep, by epicer

• Vastly improved new maps thanks to RandomWizard. C2 is the only exception; there really isn’t anything you can do with three boats.

• Improved several grass palettes

• Removed a few outline pixels from Roxelana’s shoulderpads, because it created a very distracting line when she stood in front of new Calista.

Mechanical

• All 50 support chains are now complete.

• Removed Slayer from Bishops. I was torn on this one for a while; its retention in the game was deliberate, not just an oversight. Then the Purge Bishop on C6 oneshot Ochulo.

• Gave infantry units Shove using Stan’s patch.

• Added FE5-style unlimited trading using aera’s patch. These two changes may yet be rolled back, but given the stripped down nature of non-SkillSys GBAFE, I figured it would help add slightly to the player’s options, as well as improving infantry units across the board.

• Added a menu option to skip staff + dance animations using 7743’s patch.

• Fixed an issue where Ochulo could wield the dragonstones.

CHAPTERS

2: Contested Waters

• Shifted the Ecorcheurs so the overlap between bolting mage and mercenaries is less oppressive

• Changed reaver Ecorcheur to iron blade

• Weakened bolting mage by three levels

• Slightly nerfed the pegasi and switched out the short spear for a ridersbane because they killed Kadri on the ironman run and I tilted- I mean because Helje had trouble reliably killing them.

There was a vicious and unintended stat check in the revamped C2 due to the convergence of mercenaries and the bolting guy. There’s already one strong reaver enemy to keep tabs on in that ship. Besides, that pod is meant to be a large part of the reward for saving and bringing Helje, so having a guy who countered her ran kind of antithetical to that. Weakening the bolting mage not only makes her a little less threatening, but also means that anyone who reaches her in melee - and has thus basically ‘solved’ her section of the level - simply annihilates her.

3: Chevauchee

• Made the ‘kill noble’ reinforcements significantly stronger

I don’t generally like death reinforcements that roll in as just insanely strong enemies that can’t be touched… but I think this map can get away with it, given that there is no way you’ll ever fight them unless you’re camping the enemy and that it’s explicitly meant to be the core of the Aulestri army. Again, if you play the chapter normally, it’s unchanged.

4: The Cause

• Added another set of breakable walls

• Removed two archers from the guardhouses; gave Micah an ironclad bodyguard

The sappers exist to help funnel reinforcements to you, but I decided they could use another path to open up just in case you’ve fallen back to the southern chokepoints. I may switch up the timing and get them to act a turn earlier, in future patches, but that wasn’t the version I tested, so I didn’t want to chance it yet.

Until now, the map started with 11 NPCs, and so a southwest archer frequently blinked out of existence. Rather than dealing with that, I’ve decided to give Micah one guy to protect him, just for a little breathing room in case someone slips the net.

7: Plain of Scales

• Delayed arrival of Rioghain’s squad by a turn

• Set Rioghain and her rangers to delay movement by a turn

This actually would have killed the pseudo-ironman file! C7 has never been a hard chapter to me, so in my run I took it pretty slow and pretty casual. It turns out that if you take it pretty slow and pretty casual, the turn-based reinforcements, range-based reinforcements and boss-kill-contingent reinforcements can all end up jumping on Connacht’s squad as they’re still rounding the southern tier. Part of that was my own error, but giving a little more breathing room should help avoid that eventuality.

8: Full Circle

• West Champion now drops a door key

• Slightly changed layout

I thought I’d done this. Oops. Chances of an actual softlock are pretty slim, of course, but best to avoid the possibility. The positions of things have slightly changed as a result of the graphical overhaul.

C10: Ill-Met by Moonlight

• Somewhat changed layout

• Beefed up Luthor’s squad

• Gave Luthor the Zorya Shield (no bow vulnerability)

• Shifted Luthor’s AI to remain passive, and instead summon reinforcements on Turn 20

• Made un-converted dissidents turn to player control on Turn 20

• Luthor’s death now an alternative win condition (you still Game Over if two dissidents die)

I really like Ill-Met, but it suffered from kind of petring out. Luthor would generally chase you, and you would generally murder him - and maybe if you don’t have archers, you can’t anyway? There’s ways to outpace him, but you’d have to be going pretty hard from the get-go.

So it wasn’t really working as an anti-turtle incentive, more just kind of an awkwardly placed extra boss that might or might not hit you in a position you were ready for. Now it’s more straightforward; you don’t want to fight Luthor, you don’t want to fuck with Luthor, and the tide of reinforcements will destroy you if you linger too long. But if you do ambush and massacre Luthor, well, more power to you.

I am never going to touch any of the flags in this chapter. If I even ever think about them too hard, it’s going to softlock. It uses counters, for fuck’s sake.

End of Act 2

• Redeployed tactical profanity

Look, swearing in FE is obviously jarring. That was, in context, the point. Roxelana is recounting the worst thing that has ever happened to her, the shadow of it has hung over the entirety of Act 2, she’s having a Bad Time. But still, it had some free real estate in my head because I was worried that, for some people, it would take them out of the scene entirely. And of course the general rule of ‘try not to make anything potentially memeable in serious scenes’. At least I can stop overthinking about it now, and instead overthink about if it’s too overwrought in general.

CHARACTERS

Hesterine

• Starts with D lances

Hesterine got fucked over by javelins (and, to a lesser extent, slim lances) being D-rank, which was always the intent from the start but for several patches I straight-up forgot that throwing weapons were E-rank in vanilla. Without them, she goes from being a mediocre combatant who makes up for it with versatility and movement to being, well, a mediocre combatant.

Vivica

• Starts with C dark

Same buff, different reasoning. Vivica never doubles, so by the end of Act 3, mine still hadn’t reached S Dark. If the Prologue-joining dark mage doesn’t reach S Dark by the time you get S-rank Dark spells, um, who can? Well, Elisenda and Sanne can, but that’s not the point.

Jaro

• Granted the Smite movement skill on promotion

• Improved promotion gains (+1 Skl, +1 Spd)

• Fixed an issue where he gained XP at an insane rate when promoted

Test File 5 is using Jaro, and he’s an Act 1 powerhouse who starts dropping off distinctly in Act 2. Which is where he’s meant to be at. That said, this should help sustain him a little longer, even if he doesn’t stay at the peak.

Kadri

• Corrected class movement to 5

I’m honestly kind of amazed I never caught this.

Laszlo

• Granted him access to Dzeneta’s Partiszan

I wonder if Laszlo’s any good by now. He’s been doing better in C4 at least.

Elisenda

• Improved staff rank to B

Elisenda’s entire thing is being a prepromoted wizard with fantastic Magic. Not allowing her to use Physic with it just makes her simultaneously a worse Chasimir, and an inadequate Chasimir replacement. With that fixed, it gives her a clear edge on him if you’re willing to spend the money.

Tiimo

• Granted him the Swap movement skill

Tiimo’s a worm, frankly, so being the one unit who can retreat and shift someone else into the front lines in his stead seems to make sense.

Clio

• Improved sword rank to A

Weapon growth in DoW just really isn’t fast. Clio wants to use lances a lot (where she starts with a D rank) because they’re, uh, better than swords. This means that mine, at least, is pretty far from being able to use S-ranks in either by the endgame.

Thalassa

• Corrected class movement to 8

Kind of amazed I never caught this, either. Like, the test file has trained both.

Dzeneta

• Granted her the Partiszan, a prf reaver

• Granted her access to Laszlo’s Harpoon

• Granted her the Pivot movement skill

• Increased Str/Skl/Spd/Def by 1

• Increased lance rank to S

Dzeneta’s deal is this: she’s basically what Roxelana would become if the events of the game don’t happen, an experienced and respected militia commander. She’s not meant to be an outward powerhouse (poor str, merely good spd/def), rather an experienced old hand (sky-high skl/lck, relatively high res). Giving her a trump card against axemen and a movement skill should help this characterisation, as well as help her stand out when a lot of the recruits around her are a lot more overtly powerful. That said, 15 Strength was just not cutting the mustard for her. You’re paying two and a half silver lances for her services and she comes into a point where deployment slots are really competitive; she just can’t be a little underwhelming out of the gate.

Catsidhe

• Decreased class power to 1 (aka, faster experience gain)

An entire map of basically feeding Catsidhe every kill in C11 got her to level 4. That’s just a little too slow. When manakete counted as unpromoted XP growth was crazy; hopefully this is a good halfway solution. It seemed to make an appreciable impact in the ironman run before her untimely death halfway into C12.

With this change, against the first general in C11, she now gets 33 XP for fighting him and 61 for killing him. That feels about right.

ROADMAP

• v. 1.0, with the three remaining chapters playable, and the ending. I think this is achievable within the next 3 months.

• v. 1.1, with those chapters given polish and various other fixes. This will be when I finally call it [COMPLETE]. The Acts 1 of v. 0.35, 0.6 and 0.8 are barely recognisable as each other, so I do want to give the Endgame a shot in the public sphere first. This is likely what will come out with FEE3.

• With the release of v. 1.1, patches including: an easier difficulty mode (+ Casual), Pure 0% growths (no idea if this is possible, but hey), Pseudo-0% growths (aka 95% becomes 0%, but 105% becomes 100%), and ‘T90 Mode’ (restoring the blue/red/green mapsprites, along with other blue vs. red themed HUD elements).

• Graphical updates! At some point, I’m potentially going to transition to minimugs over TLP-minis. Most of the FCs and repo mugs in the hack already have minis done, so it’s mostly a matter of hammering out proper minis for all of my own splices. Touchups to a number of my own splices, especially some of the dodgier frames, are also overdue. It’ll possibly be in the final product, but probably not in 1.0. It’s a consistency thing, at the moment; I do genuinely think TLP minis look basically fine, if properly anchored under the chin, so it hasn’t been a high priority for me.

• Formatting supports to the same level of diligence as normal text, or at the very least having […] tags.