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 ?).
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.
3 Likes
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]
1 Like
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
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Fixed the blink frames of Alarik and Catsidhe
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Vastly improved new portraits! RandomWizard’s Felice, Vlak’s Calista and Renate.
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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.
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Added a new Great Knight repalette, by Skitty, and a Wyvern Knight repalette by Feaw.
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Imported new Repository armourer and shopkeep, by epicer
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Vastly improved new maps thanks to RandomWizard. C2 is the only exception; there really isn’t anything you can do with three boats.
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Improved several grass palettes
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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
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All 50 support chains are now complete.
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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.
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Gave infantry units Shove using Stan’s patch.
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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.
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Added a menu option to skip staff + dance animations using 7743’s patch.
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Fixed an issue where Ochulo could wield the dragonstones.
CHAPTERS
2: Contested Waters
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Shifted the Ecorcheurs so the overlap between bolting mage and mercenaries is less oppressive
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Changed reaver Ecorcheur to iron blade
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Weakened bolting mage by three levels
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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
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Added another set of breakable walls
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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
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Delayed arrival of Rioghain’s squad by a turn
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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
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West Champion now drops a door key
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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
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Somewhat changed layout
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Beefed up Luthor’s squad
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Gave Luthor the Zorya Shield (no bow vulnerability)
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Shifted Luthor’s AI to remain passive, and instead summon reinforcements on Turn 20
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Made un-converted dissidents turn to player control on Turn 20
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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
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Granted the Smite movement skill on promotion
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Improved promotion gains (+1 Skl, +1 Spd)
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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
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Granted her the Partiszan, a prf reaver
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Granted her access to Laszlo’s Harpoon
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Granted her the Pivot movement skill
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Increased Str/Skl/Spd/Def by 1
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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
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v. 1.0, with the three remaining chapters playable, and the ending. I think this is achievable within the next 3 months.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Formatting supports to the same level of diligence as normal text, or at the very least having […] tags.
11 Likes
Surprise! It’s patchday again. In my head, I have this down as the Esfir Update. Not because this hack is suddenly going to have an unauthorised cameo, but because I did finally go ahead and start poking at other hacks. And I had ideas.
If you don’t care about the devblog, there’s patchnotes underneath (with more devblogging in them. Sorry); if you only want the patch, as ever, that’s in the OP.
So here’s the thing: the complete list of hacks I’d played before starting DoW in earnest was… um… possibly just five? Granted, I’m very much a product of the era of FE7 hacking, so options were limited. I played TLP, obviously Do5, 7x-isn’t-a-hack-but-close-enough, EN, and this challenge hack that Dondon put out that was to my knowledge never completed or publically released. Of these, I finished a stunning zero. I know Road to Ruin and, uh, Agro’s hack I forget the name of were out, but for whatever reason I just didn’t get around to either.
So with some justice you can say: Parrhesia, that’s really stupid. Everyone knows that you’re meant to take in more than you put out, or what you put out isn’t going to be of that high quality. But it’s a bit different with FE than books. I haven’t played many hacks - have taken a lot of inspiration from the few I had played, both in terms of what I wanted and what I didn’t want - but I’ve made it through at least a chapter of every mainline FE bar 13 and 17, and finished most of them.
I knew what I wanted to differ going in. I knew vaguely what my vision of A Better FE - within the confines of a GBA romhack, anyway - looked like, and I wanted to stay true to that. Now, I definitely suffer from the issue of, ‘I’m overly influenced by Last Media I Was Really Impressed By’, which is healthy in small, controlled bursts. But this was going to be, well, the only hack I’ll ever make. I needed it to be mine, and to forge out its own identity.
Also, more prosaically, by the time I started working on it and having to playtest it over and over again, I was just so fucking burned out on FE, man.
But v. 0.8 came out and I decided, fuck it, I’ll go try out Vision Quest. Deeply uncontroversial take: Vision Quest is really good. It’s cozy. It’s really well thought-out. But there was one specific aspect at which it’s excelled, that in DoW has been a little lacking: crime.
DoW thieves basically work like this. Some maps, you have chests. You will want to open these chests. Now, you can train Pavel, who is an okay fighter from a poor baseline, or you can recruit Ramond, who is a mediocre fighter with great resistance, and then as a fallback there’s Kalevi, who is… not a liability. Either you train one of them as a fighter, or you just break out Ramond / Kalevi on indoor maps. I threw a couple Elixirs and shit on random outdoor guys, which probably won’t make anyone deploy a rogue for that alone, but does reward someone for training one. And look, it’s fine. I don’t think DoW’s thieving situation is particularly dysfunctional.
VQ has a lot to steal from the very beginning. You always want someone around to strip people of their stuff; cheap gems, or the plentiful statboosters. They become little mini-objectives in the overall map. Esfir, your first thief, is a decidedly mediocre combatant, over-levelled and bad with swords, but she’s just good enough to contribute - kind of like Kalevi, but she has a lot more to do than Kalevi, who for the most part is there to sit with the gang until the time comes to boost a chest. It never feels bad to have Esfir around. Oh, and a second thief arrived later on, which was pivotal for the chapter of her arrival (is VQ 1-9 the best map in, uh, the series?). Realistically, unless you’re going for an LTC, there is no time at which a second thief is especially useful in DoW; even under an efficiency framework, you probably just carry Kalevi from one flank of C8 to the other. Or use a chest key.
So in DoW, where the economy is such a huge part of the gameplay loop - you’re meant to be basing recruitment on financial considerations, after all! - it felt wrong to not fully utilise Crime as a lever in the overall economy. There was something concrete to learn, here. So now, I’ve gone through the maps. Every statbooster you get is now, in some sense, a stretch goal; none just drop off bosses you were going to kill anyway, anymore. There’s been more gems and elixirs added. Thieves, critically, now have more to do than just ‘open a chest, eventually’.
This is why I always make sure to playtest even relatively small changes…
Besides that, Act 3 has also undergone some changes. Mostly to C12, which should now play a little faster, less chokepointy, and without the discouraging ‘is it time to advance Roxi? Oh, no, here’s more reinforcements’. There’s a little more to be done there, and I think C15 can be a lot tighter, but so far I only have one guy’s feedback to go off, so more changes will come with time.
v. 0.82 PATCHNOTES
MISCELLANEOUS
Technical
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Fixed Ochulo’s description to correctly reference Elisenda, not Esmeralde (her original name)
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Fixed a few stray references to ‘Commoonwealth’ to ‘Confederation’
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Added 5 uses to Agovanje (now 15)
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Significantly reduced value of stat boosters (Swiftsole 8k → 4k, all others → 2k)
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Reduced Angelic Robe boost to 5 HP.
Graphical
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Remembered to update shadow Calista’s portrait
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Surrendered to the fact that I will never fully overhaul the main menu graphics, and re-edited them to fit better with leftover vanilla assets
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Updated Ashwood with a repo mug from PlantAcademy and Levin, and Petrarch with a mug from JiroPaiPai (marked as F2U here).
CHAPTERS
C7: Plain of Scales
- Central sage now drops Physic
- Stealable elixir now moved from central sage to west sage
I removed the dropped physic from the guy in C8, so needed one earlier to compensate. This has the added benefit of giving a way to support Connacht’s group from afar, if you’re pressing hard enough to push into the centre.
C8: Full Circle
- Made Talisman and Secret Book stealable rather than dropping automatically
- Gave the east sage a stealable Red Gem; no longer drops Physic
Rationale in the post. I’m considering giving this map some kind of harder time limit, but haven’t made any steps towards that yet.
C11: Traitor’s Grave
- Moved Tethra’s speedwing (dropped) to a Warrior (stealable)
- Moved Stalberg’s dragonshield (dropped) to a General (stealable)
Rationale in the post.
C12: Loose Ends
- Opened up the chokepoint in the southeast of the map
- Delayed the bulk of reinforcements
- Added a turn 6 looter spawn
- Weakened the guys Luthor’s meant to kill
- Strengthened LuthorSqd
- Gave Picarette a stealable blue gem
I was happy with the chapter in broad strokes, but these changes helps open up the charge through the bottom a lot more, as well as giving more incentives to keep pace rather than just hunker down and weather the storm. A thief now has more to do than plunder chests, Luthor will now attack with significant force rather than having most of his goon squad die to the guys they’re meant to eat, and the problem of Roxelana and Estrelle being penned in by reinforcements too quickly has been lessened. Small changes, but I think they add up to a big difference.
C13: Right to Rule
- Added a line to specify that the coals burn
After a playtester comment, realised that the only way to know the coals burn is to remember that chapter from Eliwood mode. Which not everyone does, because nobody plays Eliwood mode more than once.
C14: Reprisal
- Gave the fortress Marksman a stealable Angelic Robe
You get a Robe significantly before the other stat-boosters; why not get one after, too?
C15: The Reckoning
- Replaced Crimson Eye on mogalls with Evil Eye
- Added a stealable blue gem to the SW swordmaster
- Made the looter spawn two turns later, but much closer to the chest
- Changed palette to add more cohesion
I actually meant to remove Crimson Eye for patch 0.8, but forgot to. Doubly bad because they have 20-21 might all up…
C15 is likely to see future changes as it goes along. I don’t think it’s bad, but it feels like the weak link of Act 3 so far, but - one oversight aside - it’s hard to find obvious changes to make. I’ve played it twice, and one other guy has played it once. At its best, the feeling of a knife-fight where you have to act decisively to make room for yourself to breathe works really well.
Tip for hack-makers: the snow castle tileset is really bad! Don’t use it! But the palette update at least makes it look at lot more visually cohesive.
12 Likes
I love that you’re including this. I love having the option to steal and loot in the early game in Fire Emblem. Absolutely cannot wait for this to be completed! Good luck with the rest of it!
3 Likes
Not included in the patchnote but appreciated: every stat having a custom description instead of only Luck, and Luthor’s description being changed. Being a snoopy player I was extremely confused by his previous description when I first saw him in Plains of Scales, and even if I quickly realized it must be a spoiler for his future character arc it was still jarring.
By the way, the description for his custom class ? Amazing. Makes him that much more special.
That aside, two massive bugs to report: the first is that, somehow, after her support with Caitsidhe, Calista’s rank was raised to C while Caitsidhe didn’t get anything. It’s not just a visual bug either, she gets no bonuses for being close to Calista.
Second one: in chapter 14 Reprisal, exiting the game and then reloading it through the Resume function will have a random amount of peasant disappear. I don’t know if they count as saved or not.
FIY I’m using the Rewind feature, don’t know if that causes the bug or even a normal Resume snipes them.
The plot
I was extremely curious to see how you’d untie this tangle of threads weaved throughout the second act. It was very clear Roxelana was starkly opposed to the new regime, and with a dragon by her side and the sword in her possession she had the claims to rebranding Rijesca as Roxelnaca.
I should have expected this development - and quite frankly I would never have trusted a cup from the Margravine - but damn I wasn’t expecting the King to be in on it too, much less Kalista to be bloody Rijesca !
The author’s note shoved in your face regarding Luthor in chapter 12 is a bit heavy-handed but very appreciated ; he’s beatable, like, twice before that so I didn’t expect this time to make a difference, would have escaped without a second thought if it wasn’t for the warning.
It’s appreciated.
I also looove the joke at Fates’ expense for chapter 14 notes, that took me by surprised and I had a good laugh 
In other news, I’ve trained the little one to kill. My cute tentacled cherub ! My biblically accurate angel of destruction !
4 Likes
Also, three side notes:
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Good call on speeding up Caitsidhe XP rate again. She isn’t hot garbage anymore. She still needed 4 chapters of training and heavy rigging to come online for me, so I’d rank her as a gimmick unit still for anyone that’s not rerolling those level ups, but she’s in a way better spot than last patch left her.
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I strongly disagree with the removal of Slayer on Bishop. The purge tome in that specific chapter was something I noticed and played around, it was manageable and that occurence aside Bishop are almost absent from the enemy pool.
On the flipside, this removal is going to make the 0% act 1 final and swamp chapter waaayyy harder for the player now that Kadri and Chasimir have had their damages slashed.
Your reasoning for the change in the patchnote makes it sound like it’s meant as a player buff, but IMO this is waaayyy more harm than good for us.
(Also it’s funny that you removed Slayer because of that one Bishop and then get to chapter 13 where all the legendary weapon deal effective damages against Ochulo and Deadeye ; I brought both without knowing that would be the case ) -
I can’t wait for the true 0% patch, first time I’ll be doing a 0% run ! I don’t know how much extra work those modes represent but they’re appreciated -
1 Like
Yaama, people. Just devblog today, the patch won’t be for a while. I’m working concurrently on changes to Act 1 and on the finale; the third-last chapter is complete, but hasn’t yet been played through properly and will most likely need rebalancing. My process is basically to overtune every new map horribly at first, play and beat the most oppressive version of it, and then remove extraneous obstacles from there.
There is probably a more efficient way, but on the bright side, I’m getting really good at Fire Emblem.
Very excited to unveil the chapter where you fight Missingno.
Anyway, mostly I’m going to be talking about Act 1. I’ve said before that I don’t plan to make any seriously map-altering changes to it, and that’s still the case, but they can benefit from tweaks at the very least. By and large, DoW seems to have been pretty well-received, but it has not been… as uncommon an experience as I’d like, to bounce off Act 1. Intriguingly, one playtester really liked Act 2 after having described Act 1 as ‘the single worst experience I have ever had playing Fire Emblem’, which does make me wonder how he reached Act 2 in the first place.
Honestly, I’ve always admired the energy. But it’s still probably cause for at least a little introspection.
I’m going to go ahead and say that I do Not think Act 1 is bad, that I magically figured out the formula to how to make FE in Chapter 6 and never looked back. But it’s a fine line between something being hard, and something that just isn’t communicating something to the player; and in Act 1, you have few resources, and you might not see the same round pegs for round holes as I did while designing the game.
I don’t want this to sound like ‘oh well people just don’t get it’, so I’ll put forward examples of what I mean. One where the game was unambiguously at fault was Chapter 3, early on. The objective wasn’t made particularly clear, and specifics mattered. It was entirely possible to go through the opening briefing and, without any failure in reading comprehension, assume that the objective was to kill any of the leaders in the south. Working under the assumption that that’s the objective will, in C3, get you murdered to death, because the numbers are not tuned to encourage fighting, they’re tuned to encourage you running like hell to the north.
Now, simply making it clearer in the opening briefing doesn’t fix everything, because a lot of people - myself included - don’t put down the game at the chapter transition, but go through the opening cinematic and preparations for the next before putting the game down. So imagine three days between, and this… relatively complex objective, by GBA standards, is suddenly a vague recollection in your head.
To that end, C3’s had a lot of minor revisions to just telegraph the specifics of the objective more and more clearly - while only ever making one change to the objective, and a couple of changes to the enemies. Mechanically, Chapter 3 was always very solid… if you played it knowing exactly what was expected of you going in. So I’m adding the Shinan guide to the latest patch, so that you can always get a more flat, direct explanation of What The Game Wants You To Do.
To be fair, if you have this many promoted units in Chapter 3, you probably don’t need a guide.
And that’s the general theme of Act 1’s Problems. They’re always fine if you know how to approach them, but not always clear about what that approach is, and sometimes punitive when you don’t follow them. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for problems to have intended solutions, particularly in the earlygame when the player’s resources are pretty well known, but the consequences were often severe. Prior versions of C4 were always fine, if you punched through the line and took down ranged units proactively, but the openings were so slim in versions prior to Act 3’s release that they often looked like they didn’t exist at all.
So, chapter by chapter, these are approximately my aims:
- Prologue: Put the player in the hole a little less if they get off to a slow start. Make the Radu village guards a little faster to get through.
- Chapter 1: Make the southeast of the town relevant. Use Squad AI extensively to train the player in fighting it (since it’s used extensively through the hack).
- Chapter 4: Shave a turn off the map. Make things happen quicker. Make the sappers breaking your walls a far more important part of the map.
And with that, I’m hoping that Act 1 becomes a little more relaxed, a little less daunting, and encouraging player retention somewhat more when the first wave of post-Complete activity strikes. But that’s not quite all. Because there’s another aspect where Chapter 3 didn’t quite fit: it doesn’t have a boss recruit. Or it didn’t. She’s already appeared in one of the screenshots above, but let’s formally introduce Lucetta.
“She just kept talking in one long incredibly unbroken sentence, moving from topic to topic so that no-one had a chance to interrupt her…”
So while making Act 3 I realised that Light, as a class of magic, was basically an appendix. Hence two boss recruits who happened to arrive with S Light because you almost certainly didn’t have anyone else who could use the legendary tome, and hence the absence of a ‘Great-’ weapon for it. It happens in a lot of FEs (most obviously 6 and 9 (nice)), and I didn’t want it to be the same way here. Also, Chapter 3 lacked a boss recruit, because I didn’t want to imbalance Act 1 - and because I was impatient to push it out.
But upon further reflection, C4 could potentially get really rough if you go in undermanned. Using some shit units is one thing - it’s balanced around having to bring some meat in the room, after all - but without that baseline of 16 at all? Also, people had commented on an overreliance on Roxelana to kill armour. So, a monk - or more precisely an Adept (but it’s a monk) - as a boss recruit in C3 made a lot of sense, while Light has been retooled slightly to be more in line with the other magic types. Have fun, either with her or the 3000 gold you get in her stead.
So that’s where I’m at, working on it concurrently with the Finale. Of course, I’ve started a new playthrough just to make sure none of the changes break the game, though I probably won’t take it into Act 2 (yet). It’s completed the new Prologue and C1. When 1.0 comes out and I finally get to slap [COMPLETE] on the topic… realistically, that’s what’s going to bring the most attention to the project, so I have to be really sure things are up and running and robust for it.
10 Likes
Speaking from personal experience, I can agree that you’ll get good quite fast with this method. However, if you’re not careful, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword - or maybe that’s just me growing jaded.
1 Like
Yaama, people. Short little progress update, though I always think these are going to be short and they never are.
Ms. Berenguer, I don’t feel so good…
Chapter 4’s overhaul is done, and I finally think I’ve cracked it, no longer feeling that vague sense of worry whenever someone gets to it; that means that it’s a clear shot to the end from here. E-1, E-2 and E-3 should all be fully functional, I just need to play through them now and see what breaks or what’s overly oppressive. I need to do the post-finale dialogue, which will… you know, as expected there’s going to be a lot of it. But I have done the most irritating thing, and successfully set the 46 different ‘If guy shows up to the final battle, they say a line’ moments. Whew. And when I cheated through to the ending, nothing even broke!
I am apparently very consistent.
Like Act 3 but moreso, there’s a design challenge inherent in Late FE, when your units are hulking, unstoppable behemoths… but you still have to leave in contingencies just in case they aren’t. But the finale has a very different feel to the Act 3 maps. While they were more about emphasising the chaos of war, guided primarily by a need to strike back, and ended up having two hostile factions a lot of the time, the finale is you against the enemy, knowing exactly where you stand, with the world - or, at least, the nation - at stake.
Now, if you’ve beaten Act 3 - though it’s not exactly a spoiler if you haven’t - you know it’s setting up towards a big, decisive clash. There’s one issue: GBAFE sometimes struggles with big, decisive clashes. So I’ve had to do all I can to make it feel big and decisive, without simply crowding the map with 50 promoted enemies. I like FE8 a lot, but Darkling Woods didn’t feel big and decisive, it felt tedious - and tedium is the most effective killer of tension.
Honestly amazed that getting functional endings wasn’t a massive ordeal.
Part of this is basically setting the final clash in two parts. If Act 2 was the update that interacted with friendly generics a ton, and Act 3 was the Hostile Third Faction update, Endgame is where I really start to burn through all my unused Global flags. If the accepted way to fit an FE4 map into GBAFE is to make 1-2 castles into a chapter, could I not simulate a larger field by splitting it into two chapters, with one influencing the other? So as a result, between whether or not you hire the mercenaries and what you choose to do in the map leading up to the crescendo, combined with the mechanics of the crescendo itself, where a side objective tears up the map if left unaccounted for, no two experiences are going to be the same. There’s even a couple more old friends who might show up…
But that’s a lot of being impressed at my own cleverness. The fact is that I’ll need to play it, and play it a few different ways, to gauge if it’s going to be fun no matter what variation you end up playing on. At the end of the day, if it ends up a victory lap, the spectacle alone should hopefully be enough to make it memorable.
A sneak peak into the thrilling conclusion of FE: DoW.
Final note, I’ve made a few updates to events. First, almost all cutscene tracks now fade in rather than just play over, because I prefer how it sounds. Hopefully to the people who actually know music, I don’t just sound like the guys who try and make everything run at 60 FPS because ‘it’s faster, so it’s better’. Second, I added the ~Map clear!~ jingle to the end of almost every map, because the lack of clear feedback for [THE GAMEPLAY SEGMENT IS OVER] always bothered me a little.
Third, I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a long-contemplated change, to go back and improve the boss recruitment screens. It was often hard to contort dialogue in such a way that conversations ended with someone directly saying “Hey, so, do you want to turn this person into money?” to say Yes // No to - in fact, there were a couple who I genuinely couldn’t, so Yes became recruit, and that’s an irritating inconsistency. Also, tapping A to scroll through text quickly could often just accidentally liquidate a new recruit. Finally - though in an ideal world, there’d just be a statscreen viewable - it was easy to simply just… not remember anything about the new recruit. You might even have been wrong about who it would be, and memorised Cillian’s or Lasker’s statline only to end up with… well.
This does mean that one of the screenshots in the OP can no longer occur in-game. No, I’m not going to swap it out. It’s true in spirit, damn it!
So I’ve settled on making this the new way forward. It’s always in this format, Yes is always recruit, No is always liquidate, skipping cutscenes leads directly to here instead of to the conversation leading up to it, the Judgement theme only and always plays on liquidation, the Recruitment theme only and always plays on… you guessed it. And there’s a little summary on what units do well. And I don’t need to contort dialogue to fit that format, though, like, that’s kind of irrelevant now since I already have.
I went through and tested all the events and they all seemed to work, though it’s a fiddly enough process - since I usually had to copy all the Yes events to the No side of the equation, and vice versa - that I might well have thrown something up. But the right music always played, the right dialogue always played, No always gave money, Yes always gave the guy. In theory it should all work.
All in all, I think 1.0’s going to be released in the next fortnight. Maybe even in a week. And then enough people will, in theory, play it, that the sheer wave of feedback will lead to a big patch coming out of FEE3, and the major variant patches along with it - the easier Story Mode, 0% growths, -00% growths, T90 patch, uh… do people care about Reverse Recruitment? I could do that. Anyway, I’ll discuss these in a later post, mostly the easier mode. For now: soon.
13 Likes
Man you always impress with your decisions and ingenuity with implementing things. Sooo excited to play this from beginning to end. I’d love to see a reverse recruitment patch down the line once people have been able to play and firmulate opinions on the game. Just a quick question, what -are the -00% and T90 options?
3 Likes
So, when it comes to 0% growths, there’s two different ways to take it. One is pure ‘I will try to beat the game with base stats on everyone’, but I’ve also seen it interpreted as, ‘I will try to beat the game with the worst possible level RNG’. Normally that’s the same thing, but for units with 100+% in a growth, a worst possible level still gives them something. In DoW, there’s a few units with over 100% growth in a stat (mostly HP), so the alternative patch would reduce them to 100% and all other growths to 0%. It’s a pretty minor difference, but it’s pretty trivial for me to just make both and let people use whichever they prefer.
As for the T90 patch, there’s an Age of Empires 2 streamer I watch a lot who has a well-meaning but lightly blood-boiling tendency to change team colours in almost every 1v1 matchup to the default blue vs. red, which does avoid colour clashes (like blue vs. cyan, or green on a forest map, or orange on a desert map) but does get repetitive. How that relates to DoW is that, instead of the Cyan player and Purple, Red and Green faction colours, which sometimes change depending on story considerations (aka, Exiles wear red whether they’re on your side or against you), the T90 patch would strictly use the default GBAFE mapsprite colours; blue for the player, red for the enemy, green for allies, purple for ‘hostile to everyone’ third factions.
Randomly stumbled across this hack and decided to give it a go because i was intrigued by the whole recruiting bosses mechanics, and the huge playable cast. Been doing blind Ironman up to chapter 5 now and i gotta say i am really impressed.
The gameplay is super fun. The difficulty is great, the objectives feel unique, and every time you feel like things might be getting too easy/boring, the game steps things up again and keeps you on your toes. The huge cast makes it very ironman friendly, and even the story is alright. I haven’t looked at any growth rates, but so far every character feels useful, and the choice whether to recruit or ransom bosses actually matters.
As someone with German/Russian/Ukrainian roots, i also really enjoyed seeing German and Slavic character names in the mix. Especially the latter is somewhat rare compared to others.
My playthrough so far went a little like this:
Get an insanely good Pavel
Get an insanely bad Hesterine
Have Goran die due to not realising there were pegasi there
Realising Jaro is really good
[Not Pictured]
Having Jaro die instantly due to not realising there are reavers on the left (Castle map)
Pavel becoming even better
[Not Pictured]
Pavel dodging a fatal hit from the elfire mage, then from Ramond, then hitting an 89 to kill him on player phase… only for me to realise i couldn’t kill the last swordreaver guy there, leading to his Death
Being one turn short of killing the Sage Boss
Also getting an Insanely good Petr.
Losing Pavel and Jaro was definitely tough, but i managed to get most of what you could get, and still got a good amount of people to continue.
4 Likes
On Donlot’s recommendation I also gave this hack a try and I have pretty similar sentiments, I like the grounded and nuanced story a lot so far even if it can get a little verbose at times.
I did encounter a few small bugs though:
Petras getting instant S rank swords after only having E rank before promotion seems like a bug at least.
There’s a blue bishop in the bottom right corner in this scene (chapter 4 Intro), probably Chasimir who is mispositioned somehow.
And here I can visit an invisible armory on the enemy ship.
6 Likes
Really enjoyed my time with this hack up to the current release. Gameplay is very solid and a story that makes you want to see what will happen next. Looking forward to the next few chapters!
3 Likes
Hey.
There’s still some polish. Some mugs are going to see upgrades. Inevitably, there will be bugs to hammer out. And as more than zero people use nobodies like Goran, we’ll see if they’re actually flagrantly overpowered and need to go a few rounds with the nerf bat.
But this is v. 1.0 of Drums of War, 22 chapters, complete through to the epilogue, credits scroll, final turncount. Link in the OP. Enjoy.
Old saves should all work. However, if you have a save file at End of Act 3, I highly recommend restarting the chapter. You get a silver card now and one of the village rewards is better.
PATCHNOTES
Technical
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Overhauled light magic; Divine now A in line with Fimbulvetr/Fenrir (renamed Frodafridh to fit name scheme, distance from vanilla quasi-steel connotation, and be less generic), Aura now S in line with Arcfire/Vortex, new Cometfall (anti-armour/cavalry) available at C tier
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Made dragon-slaying weapons cost the same as other slayers
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Made boss recruitment more transparent - now appears in popups, not in dialogue
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Fixed staff XP from not halving on promotion (still gives approximately the same boosts to Kadri unpromoted)
Graphical
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Replaced TLP-style minis with vanilla-style minis
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Replaced leftover vanilla recolour bosses with repository mugs: Nei by LaurentLacroix, Stalberg by Ambrosiac, Wainwright by Der, Nileirich by JiroPaiPai, Cillian by Nickt, Loren by XVI.
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Replaced mugs of Sander, Helje, Vivica and Clio with new work made by Vlak.
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Replaced Kadri’s mug
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Improved mugs for Alarik, Hesterine, Ramond and Sanne
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Fixed Augustus mapsprite
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Added a new Fighter mapsprite by ZoramineFae (marked as F2U by dint of going on their personal repo)
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Added a unique sprite for the hanger (finally)
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Replaced Pegasus Rider and Seraph Knight animations with Flasuban’s improved versions
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Fixed several movement sounds
Characters
Roxelana
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+10% HP growth
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+5% Skl/Lck/Def growth
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-5% Res growth
Roxelana’s received almost no boosts while other Prologue units have received huge ones, and while other armour/cavalry-slaying options have proliferated. Obviously some tiny shifts in growths are basically irrelevant, but it helps future-proof her and maintain her approximate stat silhouette.
Petras
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+2 Spd
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+1 Skl
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Upgraded from D to C lances
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Probably fixed the issue where his promoted sword rank could become S
Petras is bravely forging towards having Almost Mediocre speed. Wow! Anyway, weapon ranks are tough when split between three types, and when you’re slow as hell, so I threw him a bone there as well to make sure he can take up the Greatlance / Lacplesis / Nibelung when it’s time. I mean, my main test file’s Renate struggled to hit S in anything, and that was from a C base, so…
Also, I assume the reason for his sword rank becoming S on promotion was because he’s set to have an E, while Ironclads have a D at base. It was probably some underflow thing.
Renate
- +2 Spd
If Renate doesn’t get her first point of speed for a while, she can actually get torn apart pretty fast by Aulestri mercenaries and such. I hate homogenising units, but… if Renate isn’t durable, what’s left?
Hesterine
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+2 Lv
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+2 Str/Spd
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+1 Skl/Def
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+10% Res growth
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-10% HP growth
So, funny story. I was most active in the FE community back in 2010-2013; in this era, early cavaliers were extremely highly-rated. And that was the understanding of the meta that I took into DoW. Trouble is, meta’s evolved, and pulled a little way back from Movement Is The One True King. Most players don’t seem to use Hesterine, and a few have said she’s downright poor. This should kickstart her a little. The Res/HP swap helps separate her from Goran.
Vivica
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+1 Spd/Def
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+5% Skl/Def/Spd growth
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-10% HP growth
Just needed a teensy boost. I’m trying to make it so that a couple of the magi have a bit more mixed bulk this patch; Vivica is one of them.
Helje
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-15% HP growth
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+1 Spd, +5% Spd growth
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-2 Defence, -5% growth
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+2 Resistance, +15% growth
Despite nominally falling off long-term, Helje was slightly too effective as a straight-up combatant, and was in need of some more specialisation. Reinforcing Helje’s role as the more classical pegasus knight also helps differentiate her from Saszkia. It makes her slightly less of a juggernaut on C2, as well - she can no longer take on three pegasi and the bolting mage on one EP without a chance of death.
Goran
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+1 Lv
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+2 Def
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+1 Str/Skl/Spd
So take the early cavalier talk from Hesterine and then factor in that LITERALLY NOBODY HAS EVER USED GORAN. INCLUDING ME OVER FIVE RUNS. This might make that more likely.
Kirsten
- +1 Str
Another ‘victim’ of standing still while others get things. Actually, in large part this is because she had the same strength and speed as buffed Goran.
Alarik
- +5% Str/Skl/Spd/Def growth
Alarik has had one more reported user than Goran. He’s apparently Whelming. I have made tiny, scarcely-noticeable shifts to his growths to fix everything immediately.
Lucetta
- Exists
Added Lucetta for a few reasons. There wasn’t a C3 recruitable - because C3 was added after the rest of Act 1 and I didn’t want to fuck with it too much - and while the all-hands-on-deck feel of C4 was something I wanted to preserve, I didn’t want there to be insufficient hands on deck, which a low-recruitment ironman run could easily wind up with. And there weren’t many magi, and there weren’t any primary light users until Valentrix and Sanne, who were mainly added to be S-rank light users. For light to be anything other than the poor man of magic types, there needed to be a monk.
Saszkia
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-2 Lv
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-2 HP, -10% growth
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-1 Str/Skl/Spd/Lck/Def
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+5% Str/Def growth
Saszkia, by contrast to Helje, mostly held her ground, but became slightly lower-level and marginally weaker from the start. The two pegasi were just a little too samey and a little too good. They’ll always be high-tier, I mean, they’re pegasi who are decent combatants. But a little nerf feels appropriate.
Ramond
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+1 Lv
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+1 Str/Skl/Res
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+5% Strength growth
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Amended oversight where he couldn’t steal
Kalevi
- +2 Defence
Slight buffs to the promoted thieves, leaning into their niches. Ramond’s meant to be a relatively good damage-dealer, Kalevi’s meant to have poor offensive capabilities but be tough. A trained Pavel will still outperform either.
Clio
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+1 Skl/Spd/Def
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-3 HP
Slight reshuffling, in her favour.
Thalassa
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+1 Strength, +5% growth
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-2 Speed
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+4 Defence, +15% growth
No longer alone in being a mounted wizard, so she needs to make some distance from her competition. She can take a hit a little better now, and dish it out a little more, too.
Estrelle
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-6 HP, -10% HP growth
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+5% Skl/Lck growth
HP was meant to be a weakness for Estrelle before, but with the reduction to a cap of 60, she was basically on par with most of the cast, and thus overpowered as a whole, with averages at --/20 comfortably ahead of any other character.
Sanne
- +2 Mag/Spd
- +1 Def/Res
Sanne’s actually pretty underwhelming for the finale, and she doesn’t exactly get much time to shine; she’s also only one of two magi without staves, and the other flies. This bolsters her pathetic speed to merely poor, and boosts her mixed bulk and power, meant to be strengths. She might see further buffs down the track, but at this point she’s at least good enough to slot into E-2’s 18 slots, especially since there’s a good chance she’s your only Skadar or Soplica user.
Berenice
- +225% Luck growth
I wonder if anyone actually reads the patch notes. No word of a lie, though!
Domovoi
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+3 Spd
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+4 Res
In practice, terrible speed, luck and resistance made him downright fragile. He was genuinely a liability in E-2; the initial mid-bosses - of whom there are three, with 10 aggro range - dealt 35x2 to him with 100% accuracy. Let’s see how this shakes out. They don’t double him anymore, at least. He might see further buffs down the track, maybe in more a Michalis kind of role.
Chapters
P: Muster
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Moved one guy from the start to the middle
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Retooled pod in front of Radu’s village
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Stopped one guy bathing in the creek
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Implemented squad AI on some pods
This chapter is held together by string, and I’m reluctant to change it much. Still: if you got into the hole in the first couple of engagements, it could be very hard to recover your pace. Adding squad AI - which has been in the hack for ages, but wasn’t when I was making the first chapters - allowed unit placement to just get a little smarter. Squad AI is a significant part of current DoW, so it made sense to help teach the player how to handle it in the first couple of chapters.
C1: Kick the Nest
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Moved two northern mercenaries to the south
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Moved one red house to the south
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Implemented squad AI on some pods
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Fixed tavern event
The south of the map was pretty barren before, but this map is tight enough that there was not much room to maneuvre. Squad AI made the flow of enemies more natural, but also made the north more dangerous, so moving two guys to the south fixed some issues with a single stroke.
C3: Chevauchee
- Replaced north-squad monk with Lucetta
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Lucetta drops Cometfall
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Added press-gang event for Lucetta
Lucetta.
C4: The Cause
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Moved around turn triggers, most prominently;
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Map ends one turn earlier (after EP10)
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Sappers arrive two turns earlier (after PP5)
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Weakened walls to 15 HP
It isn’t a major update unless I try and tighten C4 in some way. Last update got it most of the way there, but I wanted the sappers to be more prominent and break more walls to force the player to plug more gaps. After a playtest, I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked it; I had to reposition several times around the map, gaining and losing ground; the battleline is far more fluid than it was.
C5: Gloom of Night
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Added… something
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Bolstered Ecorcheur soft-timer
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Made fog palette more distinct
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Corrected combat animation 2 backgrounds
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Improved final event
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Made Jenson stationary, replaced silver axe with francisca
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Removed troubadour reinforcement; levelled up cavalier reinforcements
I’m pretty happy with where C5 is at, but it was pointed out that the fog palette was too close to the base. So I did what I do, opened up the palette and scrolled up once across all the greens and all the blues. Estrelle was intended to be a timer, but she’s killable. I decided to let that remain the case, but now four level 8 swordmasters start moving a couple turns after she does. There’s no way that normal flow of gameplay should ever see them - they start several turns behind spawn, and only start moving on turn 13 - so it’s primarily to preserve there being a timer element. Jenson was one element of chaos too far in the final rush, so now he sits still like the other bosses; you’re on the clock anyway, so. Finally, the Aulestri hurry-up reinforcements were a little too weak. Less so, now.
Ended up being far more changes than I thought, but it works, so. Also, I finally went to the trouble of making the Estrelle duel happen as battle event cutscenes.
C8: Full Circle
- Fixed a loophole where couriers could potentially escape without triggering the game over event
It’s set to trigger if they stop in the room, but if they were in just the right place, they could run through the room, escape, and not trigger the event. Now the escape point is in the corner, the doorway counts as part of the blue room, and Vaivar’s back couriers start a tile farther away to compensate.
C12: Loose Ends
- Repositioned some southeast enemies slightly
Specifically, made the armour block off the newly-widened hall diagonally, and made one lurking marksman able to be attacked from 3-range from starting position.
C13: Right to Rule
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Cosmetic overhaul (courtesy of RandomWizard)
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Slightly changed unit positions from north
It just looks a lot better now!
C14: Reprisal
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Cosmetic overhaul (courtesy of RandomWizard)
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Changed map palette
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Fixed armoury/shop not working
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Added houses
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Removed… something
Not counting EoA3, C14 was the last chapter added to the game, if you were at all curious.
End of Act 3
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Fixed Scorn / Redemption duplication exploit
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Added Silver Card (equivalent)
Decided that since it’s the final stocktake, fuck it, you can splash what’s left. Sell those 9-use iron lances guilt-free, my friend. Without it, you can limp to the end, but silvers become a treasured commodity. I know, because the test file… predates this change. Sigh.
17 Likes
I see a typo in the patch notes there, I think that you meant “2” instead of “5” for bernice
Congrats with the 1.0! Hopefully you only have to drop a couple minor updates to bug fix and refine from here!
Edit: considering several maps are built around covering big, Thracia style battles, maybe more incentive for movement strats would give the Cavs more utility? Enemy thieves or secondary objectives like villages and rescuing green units or something along those lines?
Congrats on the 1.0 release!
No man can be trusted but there’s no poison mutton in this one.
Hack good.
4 Likes