Thanks for all the great and hard work you’ve put out so far, the game is definitely very fun to play even as it is, just needs those few changes like magic being too strong and sleep staff issues early on, I’m looking forward to any change you make!
On a side note, the one thing i love from three houses is spell charges, reminds me of suikoden tactics on the Ps2, which was my first tactical rpg (You had individual charges for each of the 4 tiers of skills/spells), so i’m looking forward too see if it can be implemented in Fe8, if so it sounds like a great idea!
So I’ve been looking over some of the comments again, and some of them made me wonder if there was a misconception that only one unit can visit a church each chapter to learn spells. This is not the case, and the visit remains active no matter how many units visit. I added a line of dialogue to the “tutorial” about the first church to try to clarify that, but I am curious if anyone assumed the wrong thing and missed out on spells because of it.
Also, it looks like a lot of players are choosing to early promote Luke. He is the only initial healer who is ever truly staff locked, but Orville and Vesta are also on much smaller teams to begin with, making role compression more necessary. This has led to me considering three options:
1: Lower the max level of the Deacon class to 10 and raise the max level of the Templar class to 30. This will make it so that Luke doesn’t miss any levels by escaping being staff locked early.
2: Allow the Deacon class to wield Light magic. This poses the risk of making Helen seem redundant in some players’ eyes (just Luke who can’t heal), though she has a more offensive build while Luke has a stat build similar to Clarine. In any case, if I go this route, I will wind up giving Luke’s Photon Burst fewer charges than Helen’s.
3: Leave Luke the way he is because he doesn’t need special treatment, and a lot of his utility is independent of his stats.
I’m open to feedback that will make the game more fun, so let me know if you have thoughts.
I would strongly advise against making the magic limited, some of the early game and almost everything in endgame would eat through your charges too fast without some way to replenish them mid chapter. Using your photo as an example 17 charges on vamp would be eaten up almost immediately on chapter either 9 or 10, i can’t remember which the first blatantly geneology inspired map, rendering one of arachne’s main utilities as a nosferatu tank useless.
Honestly the magic isn’t that overpowered if you look at how they all function. Its only really overwhelming when the enemies have too much variety in their spell types and overlaping ranges and how easily it is to either slaughter or get slaughtered by the enemy based on spell composition.
if anything i would recommend just toning down how far most magic can hit since in fire emblem anything that has good accuracy and can’t be retaliated against is considered op. Also maybe tone down all the damn sleep staves in the last few chapters of the game since you can only really hit them with big bang. Having to deal with 4 sleep staves a turn isn’t fun.
Its also why Melee units are probably considered bad since most of them can’t hit further than 2 range and will be targeted by the 5+ enemies that have photo burst or solar ray since they won’t be retaliated on.
Edit: this addition popped into my head, the guy with the two brave tomes would he screwed over by them having limited uses since they’re initially balanced around him have really bad magic growth since he would most likely actually get the four attacks off.
The only balancing the magic in this hack needs is range, not power or uses.
I understand the concerns that some are having about the spell charge system, but I am aware that most maps are quite a bit longer than a game like Three Houses where the highest number of charges that any spell has is 10 (not counting any skills that give extra charges) and some spells are made almost irrelevant by their low number of charges (2 uses of Aura on top of the inherent limitations of it being considered White Magic instead of Black Magic).
Arachne, specifically, only has 17 Vamps, but as early as Chapter 4, she can add 28 Dark Spheres, giving her 45 total attacks with only her first two spells (and these are just preliminary settings; I haven’t gotten to testing them in gameplay yet). Assuming that she is able to double and one round, that is enough attacks to defeat 22 enemies each map, which is quite a bit for any one unit to do on her own. And she gets her third spell in Chapter 9 (the first “Genaology” Chapter). The idea is mainly to just encourage a bit more thought about which spells are used when. Though a certain someone will retain unlimited spell charges.
To add to that, i am also afraid this might slow the game quite a bit. 22 enemies aren’t really much considering how on some maps later on enemies spawn like 15 per turn…
I understand that the spell charge system is a big change, but what I described are only preliminary numbers. No one has yet played the game with the spell charge system, including me, so the number of charges per spell is still subject to change. If it feels like certain characters don’t have enough charges to meaningfully contribute, then I will make adjustments. I’m already thinking that spell charges might refresh after seizing the second castle in Chapter 9. I know that certain elements of the game were met with criticism upon release, but I am capable of recognizing when something is especially obnoxious (originally, all of the Barons had Aegis and Pavise and would randomly nullify attacks). If it seems like characters need at least one infinite spell to make the game work, then that can definitely happen. But because a lot of the criticism boiled down to saying that the gameplay isn’t tactical enough, I’m trying to change that.
One plus of the spell charge system that I haven’t talked about yet is that it lets me add a little extra individuality to the characters. For example, Lailah has fewer charges of Solar Ray than Helen because Lailah is meant to be a Dark magic specialist who can also use Light magic.
In any case, I’ve made a lot of progress in my efforts to rebalance the game, and I’m hoping that I can put out a Beta of the updated Part One within a week or two. I actually wrote the event script that will handle refreshing spells between chapters today, and it is a doozy at 2344 bytes (now the longest event script in the game, beating out the Final Chapter’s end event). It’s hard to believe that I once thought that getting the churches working was complicated. The Beta won’t be able to continue to Part Two yet (Vincent would never be seen again, and certain items like Luke’s Torch would turn into random junk when making the change). But I’d be interested to see how players respond to the changes before diving into adjusting Part Two.
For the FE3H system, it kinda make sense if powerful spells only have a few charges. It makes the player have to be wiser in using their spells, not just use whatever best they have in hand, which in turn, add the depth of the gameplay itself.
If you really concered about the number of charges, well, maybe you could increase the number of charges for starter spells (fire, lighting, wind etc) and give only a few charges for a strong spells (aura, killers, long range) and staves (rescue, warp, hammerne, silence, sleep, berserk, fortify) or decrease the number of enemies during the map where only magic units are available.
Also, maybe you could increase the growth rate and base stats for the pure physical units, to increase their usability. I feel their stats just bad in general compared to the magical units who tends to have impressive/at least slightly above average stats across the board while the physical units tend to have several really bad stats.
As for the depth of character related to the spell charges, I have to totally agree with that. You’re doing a great job there. I just can’t fathom how a dark mages can match clergy’s light magic lol.
Last and least important, due to very personal opinion, maybe you should scrap Adelle. I don’t know, everything about her is just seems so pointless. No plot relevance/significance but also poor battle performance (yes she has Astra and Duelist blow, but her STR is so impressive that I want to delete her right away, the stage she comes in has 3 summoners, tons of lance users and she is most probably replaced on the next few chapters due to the fact that a lot of the cast has better usability and or more plot relevance).
The physical units generally have comparable growths to the other units. Not counting his 2% magic growth, Victor has a total growth sum of 335, and most of the other physical units have 330 total growths. The units with the highest growth totals are the hybrid units like Olga and Bertram who can use both their strength and magic stats to attack and healers because of a quirky interaction between two patches causing healing to scale off of strength instead of magic, so a unit like Luke needs some strength even though he’s a “magic unit.”
I’m not sure if you were counting characters like Olga and Bertram, but I’ve consistently used them throughout the game, and Olga in particular is often one of my best units thanks to her massive attack speed and ability to hard counter most magic on player phase. I also use Victor pretty consistently. Ivan usually does a lot of work during Part 1 but isn’t very impressive in Part 2 (but the same can be said of Arachne). That being said, Ivan and Victor will have higher starting levels and bases in the update, and I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but Bertram will start with a Paragon Sword in his inventory. Anyone with at least a D rank in swords can gain double exp with it equipped.
About Adelle...
Adelle is kind of joke unit, the kind that streamers and Youtubers like to throw on their teams to try to hype their playthroughs: “Look, I am using this terrible unit-Are you not amused?”
Her supports are generally jokes about how annoying a person who was obsessed with swords and could not think about anything else would be. And even her entry in the unit slideshow at the end of the game is a joke, saying that she managed to become the best swordfighter in Celesia, but records of the war have few mentions of her contributions. This is meant to be a joke about how the Myrmidon/ Swordmaster classes are rarely all that impressive compared to other units. Adelle might be able to be useful if someone manages to promote her to Ranger, but getting her there would be such a chore that I don’t know why anyone would do it.
I don’t really think that her being in the game is hurting anything because she’s never required for anything. And she’s there for anyone who really gets a kick out of using terrible units.
i made her a ranger and she became one of my better units for killing low defense units and fliers, espcially long range targets. I’d say the fact that in the base game, she’s one of the few units to be able to use bows, and the fact that rangers get celerity makes her pretty useful if you’re willing to put in the work
I’m aware they are stronger. I didn’t say she was the strongest, why did you think I said that?
The fact of the matter is that while she’s not as strong as they are, her move is far better, and fliers will die to arrows anyway, no matter who is using it. Her range is a useful trade off for slightly less damage.
For pulling this off, I tip my hat to you. It’s pretty cool to hear about people getting something out of characters that I didn’t think were very good. It’s also nice to hear people getting more out of the whole cast than a lot of the early feedback reflected.
I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve decided to release the guides that I wrote for the game. These reflect the currently available version of the game and will have to be updated later. I wrote the character guide before release, and my impressions are pretty different than a lot of the early feedback. The link is at the bottom of the initial post. Beware of spoilers if you are a new player.
Adelle might be able to be useful if someone manages to promote her to Ranger, but getting her there would be such a chore that I don’t know why anyone would do it.
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I promoted her to swordmaster to keep her in character but whenever I get back to the game I will be glad to bench her and never see her again.
One of the things that could be done is to give the mages very basic spells with infinite uses, maybe even generic spells like in the base fire emblem games, stuff like Infinite use fire without the bonus against cavalry, etc, just so players that don’t play all that fast don’t get stuck, otherwise the charge system may be a nice incentive to give players so they aim for lower turn counts, since an important part of their army will slowly lose power over the course of a map as their spells run out of charges.
I wanted to make a post to announce that I uploaded a patch that can be used to view the unlocked support room. It can be found from the same link as the guides. The patch is not suitable for normal gameplay. It’s based on the Part 2 ROM, and it has certain items changed around, so there would be oddities if you tried to use your save data from the existing patches with it. It’s a Part 2 ROM because I haven’t yet imported the text for Vincent’s supports to Part 2, and I’m not ready to release those supports yet.
Unfortunately, Lucy and Lailah were unable to support each other because having that amount of sass in a small area could cause the universe to implode. I also apologize in advance to any Harold and Adelle fans for the nature of their supports.
The Beta won’t be able to continue to Part Two yet (Vincent would never be seen again, and certain items like Luke’s Torch would turn into random junk when making the change). But I’d be interested to see how players respond to the changes before diving into adjusting Part Two.
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