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

[Parrhesia]

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

• Fixed Ochulo’s description to correctly reference Elisenda, not Esmeralde (her original name)

• Fixed a few stray references to ‘Commoonwealth’ to ‘Confederation’

• Added 5 uses to Agovanje (now 15)

• Significantly reduced value of stat boosters (Swiftsole 8k → 4k, all others → 2k)

• Reduced Angelic Robe boost to 5 HP.

Graphical

• Remembered to update shadow Calista’s portrait

• 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

• 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.

[TheSuzakuSeven]

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!

[Gryffe]

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.

Massive bug

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 !

[Gryffe]

Also, three side notes:

1. 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.

2. 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 )

3. 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 -

[Parrhesia]

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.

[Zarg]

@Parrhesia

There is probably a more efficient way, but on the bright side, I’m getting really good at Fire Emblem.

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.

[Parrhesia]

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.

[TheSuzakuSeven]

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?

[Parrhesia]

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.

[Donlot]

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.

[4bundy]

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.

[Alexmanpersonguy]

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!

[Parrhesia]

Hey.

It’s time.

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

• 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

• Made dragon-slaying weapons cost the same as other slayers

• Made boss recruitment more transparent - now appears in popups, not in dialogue

• Fixed staff XP from not halving on promotion (still gives approximately the same boosts to Kadri unpromoted)

Graphical

• Replaced TLP-style minis with vanilla-style minis

• 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.

• Replaced mugs of Sander, Helje, Vivica and Clio with new work made by Vlak.

• Replaced Kadri’s mug

• Improved mugs for Alarik, Hesterine, Ramond and Sanne

• Fixed Augustus mapsprite

• Added a new Fighter mapsprite by ZoramineFae (marked as F2U by dint of going on their personal repo)

• Added a unique sprite for the hanger (finally)

• Replaced Pegasus Rider and Seraph Knight animations with Flasuban’s improved versions

• Fixed several movement sounds

Characters

Roxelana

• +10% HP growth

• +5% Skl/Lck/Def growth

• -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

• +2 Spd

• +1 Skl

• Upgraded from D to C lances

• 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

• +2 Lv

• +2 Str/Spd

• +1 Skl/Def

• +10% Res growth

• -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

• +1 Spd/Def

• +5% Skl/Def/Spd growth

• -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

• -15% HP growth

• +1 Spd, +5% Spd growth

• -2 Defence, -5% growth

• +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

• +1 Lv

• +2 Def

• +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

• -2 Lv

• -2 HP, -10% growth

• -1 Str/Skl/Spd/Lck/Def

• +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

• +1 Lv

• +1 Str/Skl/Res

• +5% Strength growth

• 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

• +1 Skl/Spd/Def

• -3 HP

Slight reshuffling, in her favour.

Thalassa

• +1 Strength, +5% growth

• -2 Speed

• +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

• -6 HP, -10% HP growth

• +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

• +3 Spd

• +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

• Moved one guy from the start to the middle

• Retooled pod in front of Radu’s village

• Stopped one guy bathing in the creek

• 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

• Moved two northern mercenaries to the south

• Moved one red house to the south

• Implemented squad AI on some pods

• 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

• Lucetta drops Cometfall

• Added press-gang event for Lucetta

Lucetta.

C4: The Cause

• Moved around turn triggers, most prominently;

• Map ends one turn earlier (after EP10)

• Sappers arrive two turns earlier (after PP5)

• 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

• Added… something

• Bolstered Ecorcheur soft-timer

• Made fog palette more distinct

• Corrected combat animation 2 backgrounds

• Improved final event

• Made Jenson stationary, replaced silver axe with francisca

• 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

• Cosmetic overhaul (courtesy of RandomWizard)

• Slightly changed unit positions from north

It just looks a lot better now!

C14: Reprisal

• Cosmetic overhaul (courtesy of RandomWizard)

• Changed map palette

• Fixed armoury/shop not working

• Added houses

• Removed… something

Not counting EoA3, C14 was the last chapter added to the game, if you were at all curious.

End of Act 3

• Fixed Scorn / Redemption duplication exploit

• 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.

[WaywardTroper]

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?

[Rivian]

Congrats on the 1.0 release!
No man can be trusted but there’s no poison mutton in this one.
Hack good.

[Gryffe]

Holy shit LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

[Gryffe]

@Parrhesia

I hate homogenising units, but… if Renate isn’t durable, what’s left?

Nothing, which is why I always bench armor units past the first act of the game.
They fundamentally don’t work.
Speed IS a defensive stat and there’s fundamentally no difference on the defensive plan between getting hit once for 20 damages and twice for 10. On the offensive plan though, not doubling completely tanks your combat prowesses.

The GBA stat caps shoot armors dead, the stats are too flat for their defensive boon to do anything, you’d need to put them on skill steroids to make them worth using.
Like, the reason Louis is an absolute chad in Engage is because he can reach ~50 defense come endgame while everyone else is stuck between 10 and 20, if he capped the stats at even 30 he’d be trash.

[Liemile]

Me on my way to recruit everyone and refuse even a single bounty

[4bundy]

Congrats on the full release! Looking forward to trying out the final chapters today!
One thing regarding

Berenice

Her appearance as an enemy has a different affinity from her playable self and no support with Kalevi shown, is this intentional? I mean story wise the recruitment is intuitive enough if the player actually reads the story

Alright I finished the endgame maps and ran into a few bugs (playing on VBA-M):
The first map ended for me after killing the first boss (the Wyvern), not after killing 3 like intended.

And Endgame map 2 also didn't go as intended:

The Marshall, and a huge wave of reinforcements, were on the field from turn 1, allowing me to kill him on turn 2 from across the wall

Feedback for the final map:

This one didn’t have any bugs I noticed, but the dragons really weren’t as much of a wall as maybe intended, since they are vulnerable to legendary weapons and bows I could simply punch through them with my archers and ignore the senators on the sides, unsure if that’s one intentional way of beating the map, but it felt a little too easy because I could just deathball with my whole army in the middle

Despite the bugs in the final few maps, I had a great time with this hack and I’ll probably replay it with different boss recruitments at some point. Story and dialogue were really good, not just by romhack standards, I called the early chapters “verbose” (and I think there is a little bit too much dialogue in the first few chapters), but it won me over by overall being a well paced story with strong characters and themes, very solid worldbuilding as well. Will definitely be one of the hacks I recommend to people in the future.

[Donlot]

Completely disagree here. Armors usually tend to be some of the best classes, especially in games where most enemies don’t even go past 30 attack much, and the armors you do get tend to have enough spd to not get doubled by most enemies. Best example is FE6-11. Especially On fe9 maniac and fe11 they can solo a good amount of the game.
My Petr and Renate were actually some of my best units here too until they died alongside half my team on the start of Arc 3.