Will do. I’ll try to give my thoughts as I go.
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So I’ve made a few more small graphical tweaks to the game. I made a new anima icon that better fits with Deity Device.
If you’ve ever edited those icons before or just seen what they look like in FEBuilder, you know that getting the right colors where you want them is kind of a pain because you have to draw it with a different pallet than what the game displays it with.
I also noticed a patch in FEBuilder that lets you change the color of the Sage effect depending on the spell being used, and I couldn’t resist.
Lastly, I had an idea as I continue to mull over the critique that magic is too strong in Deity Device, but I wanted to float it here to see what people think. What if I used the Weapon Triangle Editor to give magic users an avoid penalty when attacked by a Sword, Lance, or Axe? You can have one sided “Triangle” effects, so it wouldn’t be there when the mage is attacking, but it would work lore wise by accounting for the difficulty the mage has in casting while in close quarters combat. I could also give different penalties to different types. Instead of a flat -10 avoid penalty, I could do something like -20 for Light, -10 for Anima, and -5 for Dark. That way, the long range nature of Light is emphasized while lowering the temptation to try to dodge tank everything with speedy light users, so the different penalties by type is my preference right now. I’m curious what you all think of this, so I’m going to put up a poll. Hopefully I set it up right.
- Sounds good, but all types should have the same penalty.
- Do the different penalties by type.
- Don’t change anything.
0 voters
I’m also thinking of using the Anima Triangle that comes with Skill System to give all magic an avoid penalty against Ice Magic. There are a few instances where a certain someone is supposed to be a failsafe, but he tends to have low hit rates.
Is there a limit for supports. I have Helen and Luke at B and C for Arachne and Helen.
Supports are limited to 5 max like vanilla GBA FE. In your case, Helen can form two more supports.
The issue is less about hit rates and more about range and power.
Hitting from far away is one of the biggest reasons magic is so good. I don’t know how much hit and avoid penalties will help because units like Helen still have Solar Ray and all the physical units have less move and smaller attack ranges without enough damage difference.
For example, Vincent with Sturm has great range, which is a niche for him, but he doesn’t do fantastic damage. Ivan has worse range but does more damage close up. Both of these units generally pale in comparison to magic units in both range and power.
Unless the hit rates got absolutely gutted (likes fates breakers), I don’t think the triangle tweaks will make huge changes to gameplay. Personally, I don’t think it would be much fun, either.
I do like the idea of trying avoid penalties across the board for magic use, regardless of magic, as a way to emphasize the cost/benefit of more powerful spells better, but I’m unsure if it would do much to make the game more fun without buffing physical units, too.
Apologies if I misread your post and suggestion.
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The idea is mostly about making magic users less free to use on enemy phase. As things are now, magic users never have to worry about any kind of disadvantage based on what they’re fighting while Sword, Lance, and Axe units do. If leaving Helen exposed made her more likely to take a bunch of hits, then players would be less likely to just throw her out front and expect her to dodge tank while killing everything, and something like Solar Ray would be toned down to taking down one enemy on player phase each turn. This is why I propose giving Light users a large penalty and Dark users a small one, because Dark users are designed to be out front while Light users are meant to be in the back making use of their range.
It’s not really meant to be a huge change as much as it is a way to encourage using units more as a team by giving a weakness to a few units who have the potential to pull away and feel over dominant. One way that I tend to respond to FE games that mix up enemy types and reaver weapons in such a way that my physical units can’t avoid a weapon triangle disadvantage is to just lean harder on using mages as a sort of a “screw it” option. But this would force players to interact more with the weapon triangle. And physical units would be buffed in the sense that they would be more reliable at taking down mages. Past Part 1, it’s pretty common to be at a Leadership disadvantage during important battles, and that extra reliability could be pretty important.
This idea actually came from thinking about Tales games and not Fire Emblem, specifically how the games with Chain Capacity that allow for unlimited Arte use really expose how unnecessary and detrimental Tech Points are in the Tales games. Mages in those games are already balanced by having to make themselves sitting ducks in order to use their worthwhile attacks, so having a point system that limits use of those attacks is unnecessary and just makes Mages feel like terrible party options in the early game. A lot of people here seem to be familiar with Symphonia, so I’ll look at Genis. Novice spells in Symphonia are awful in terms of damage and AoE, and on top that, he burns all of his TP after a handful of weak attacks. Because you have to grind his spell usage to get better ones, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of players bench Genis and never realize the great arena control he offers with his better spells and the resources to cook when he needs TP.
Understanding the Tales analogy isn’t really necessary. It’s just a glimpse at the mental gear turning that produces my ideas. Basically, I thought that bringing the idea of mages being vulnerable in melee combat to Fire Emblem would make Deity Device less enemy phase focused and encourage bringing physical units to the front lines. That’s why it would just be Sword, Lance, and Axe having more HIT when attacking mages without mages losing any HIT. And there would be no effect when mages attack. A more direct buff to physical units such as also increasing damage dealt when attacking mages seems like overkill and would undermine the tank role of Dark users.
Of course, the reason I put this out there is to see what other people who have played the game think, so thanks for weighing in. Right now, adding the Triangle Effects is winning the poll, but I’ll see where things wind up. I’ll probably close the poll sometime on Monday.
Edit: So I thought that mages wouldn’t take a HIT penalty if the effect wasn’t set up in both directions, but they actually do. However, I still think it’s fine for what it’s meant to do. I just wanted to emphasize that this sort of one sided weapon interaction is possible without interfering with player phase usability.
Your reasoning makes sense and I agree that it could help get you closer to your desired result.
However, I think there are other solutions more fundamental that could also help. These don’t need to be mutually exclusive, however.
Ive only played part 1 so far, but what generally made me feel the need to EP was the volume of enemies and their general quality. Because on some maps you’d face enemies in high quantity and generally low quality, the easiest solution to beating the map is to use someone like Helen, Arachne, or Gregory to stack supports and use their big range to counter most enemies.
You’d probably be able to adjust by tweaking enemy strength to be higher and their formations to be less blocky so you face fewer enemies per turn. While I recognize this would be more work to do, I think these adjustments could also help your goal of making magic less dominant, and consequently, using them to great effect on enemy phase.
I don’t think either solution is inherently better than the other, but want to offer another way you could seek to achieve your aims either independent of or in conjunction with your suggestion.
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I wouldn’t really say that the goal is to take away enemy phase combat. I find that hyper player phased gameplay along the lines of Conquest is incredibly obnoxious. I don’t like to control a bunch of wet paper bags who get quickly murdered if I dare leave them within enemy range. Even the tankiest units in Conquest can get debuffed into uselessness or lunge bounced until they die, and it makes trying to play the game feel like a chore.
And I get that the mainstream opinion is: FE4 Gameplay, Bad; Conquest Gameplay, Best in Series. However, the first time that I played FE4, my own reaction was being surprised that I felt engaged despite the game giving me nutty stuff like Forseti. So I don’t really mind the enemy phase games. If anything, being able to do well on enemy phase feels like a reward for training a unit. And I would honestly say that whether most of the combat takes place on player or enemy phase changes by map in Deity Device (again, my experience).
Giving a melee disadvantage to magic users is more about creating some risk to exposing a frail but fast unit to several attacks.
To be clear, I am not suggesting you pursue this route at all. I don’t care much for CQ gameplay either, but part of the challenge w/ magic is that it makes enemy phase easier.
My concern with the suggestions to make magic harder to use on enemy phase is that it doesn’t make other options better, only makes magic worse, which will likely result in the game’s pace slowing down. That is why I recommended some tweaks to enemy placement / strength so that applying a magic user to a problem isn’t the best choice as often.
Regardless, I’m curious to see how it would play out in practice since I’ve never seen what you’ve suggested implemented in GBAFE.
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Thanks for the quick response! Like the hack so far btw. Just wondering, is there a list of spells each character can learn?
You’re welcome. There is a section in the guide on all of the character exclusive items and how to get them, which includes spells. The guide was written for the 1.0 release, but all of the spells that each character learns are the same, except that Calista didn’t have any White Magic/Staves in 1.0 (and a few spell names are slightly different). I plan to update the guide once the full updated version is ready to release. The guide is available from a link in the top post.
I get where you’re coming from. However, I think that most of the physical units are fine the way they are. I don’t really see a big gap in utility between Victor/Ivan/Olga and Helen/Arachne. Sometimes I think that Helen’s biggest contribution is her skills rather than her combat. Victor can already kill most anything he wants by using the Brave Lance he gets one chapter after his join chapter. And Ivan and Olga can be pretty dominant with their PRFs as well. So I think giving a huge buff to physical units would make these units overtuned. Bertram can be kind of underwhelming before promotion, but I’ve never thought he wasn’t worth using. Vincent has great Part 2 performance so far.
And the player’s physical units would get more reliable hit rates against enemy mages, so I wouldn’t say that physical units aren’t made better. Since the physical units are already good in their own right, I think that emphasizing a flaw of physically frail mages would make players more inclined to see the strengths of the physical units.
At the same time, I don’t think this would nerf characters into oblivion either. If Helen supports Luke, (which the game nudges the player toward) they’ll be in each other’s Charisma range any time they’re in support range of each other, which gives them 17 avoid when supporting each other, nearly negating the proposed close quarters penalty for Light. So I don’t really think the game would be slowed down all that much if at all.
In any case, I appreciate you caring enough to give me your thoughts on this. Sometimes I worry that I come off as off-puttingly defensive when I answer people here, so thanks for your responses.
See, I was taught that fire emblem is literally unplayable outside of fe12 and 3 specific chapters in fe6, also something about rout being a war crime.
It looks like the winner of the poll is to try the Triangle Effects, so I’ll implement them and see how the game feels. If it feels obnoxious, I’ll cut it. Or if it gets a lot of negative reception on release, it’s pretty easy to remove later on.
I also just realized that I somehow forgot to put Marius’s updated portrait into Part 1 of the current release, so my apologies to MrGreen3339 who made it. It wasn’t my intention to have your great work go to waste! The updated Marius can be seen in Part 2 though. And will be in future releases.
That’s kind of a difficult transition into my next bit. I feel kind of rude asking for more when so many here have already been so generous with their time making portraits for Deity Device, but the roughness of the portraits that I made really stands out now that there are so many much better portraits in the game.
If some artistically inclined members of the community could take on sprucing up the following characters, it would really make a huge difference to DD’s overall presentation:
Calista (1 alt)-Done
Jake-DONE
Nathan-DONE
Glenn-DONE
Olga (1 alt)
Bertram
Lucy-DONE
Gregory-DONE
Vesta
Lailah-Being Worked on by DainofGungnir
Max-Done
Cosette (admittedly a lot of work with 4 alts)-DONE
Midge (1 alt)
Cecily-DONE
The Patriarch (1 alt)-Main Done; Alt in Progress
I’m not really expecting anyone to got through the work of making all new designs. Just improving the shading and colors would go a long way. Though you can go for a new design if you have a streak of inspiration. I was really blown away by LegendofLoog and hypergammaspaces’s take on Arachne.
All I can really say as incentive is that your work would be going into a finished game, so you wouldn’t need to worry about it languishing unused or going toward a game that ultimately gets abandoned. And of course, I would be very grateful.
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I was kinda working on Jake, on and off, but I don’t really think what I was making turned out very good so I’m dropping it, so I’ll leave the work open to others. I think Jake is a pretty simple and already nice design, so someone can probably make him pretty easily if you just resplice and adjust where his parts are, and recolor him. This is a great way to learn splicing for those who’ve not really done it before but want a bit of practice, in my opinion. I’ve never really did much sprite work before I made Victor with the help of Gamma, and Vincent. I think it’s really cool how parts of the community have gotten together and supported Deity Device like this in the visual department. It makes me happy to know that people care for one another to that degree.
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Of course he looks good when his face was taken from Lloyd.
The funny thing is that I’m not quite so hopeless when it comes to making 3D faces. One of the things I did after finally biting the bullet and putting DD up here on FEU was make a bunch of master copies of faces for my railway models that I could reproduce from a silicone mold (because I’m just such a cool person that I make FE hacks AND Thomas and Friends scale models).
These are respectable enough if not kind of creepy unpainted, but I sculpted all of these by hand. Of course, all of the shading is automatic when you sculpt something.
These have some flaws where there were air bubbles in the resin during casting, but they look decent enough.
But if I try to create a sprite in Usenti, creatures like this wind up getting created.
A bit of an exaggeration compared to what’s actually in the game, but that is a real first or second attempt to create Calista.
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can’t wait for the new gaiden map where you fight those goons. nice work!
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Boat maps outdated
It’s time for TRAIN MAPS
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The problem with train maps is that fliers still have a huge advantage.
In all seriousness, sorry for shitposting to anyone who follows this thread for updates on Deity Device. It won’t be a regular thing. I just finished the “Bonus Disc” that will come with the next release. It was more work than I thought it would be, but I think it will be worth it.
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Hey everyone. I just released the updated version that goes to the end of the game. Use the “Current Version” link to access it. There is an additional folder titled “Bonus” that I do not recommend looking at until you have finished the game. But it’s something worth looking at if you’ve already finished the game and don’t care about the updated version. I don’t care if you post about the Bonus, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now.
2.0 Saves will be compatible, but 1.0 Saves will not be compatible.
This version has magic facing a disadvantage when attacked by a melee weapon, and all other magic faces a disadvantage against Ice magic.
The only other engine change I applied is Gamma’s enemy AI efficiency fix because there were some late game maps where it almost seems like the game was softlocking because the AI would take so long to do anything. This mostly fixes that.
There are a few extra scenes and Talk events.
I gave Rangers the same movement cost as Paladins, and female Rangers no longer have Celerity.
The enemy makeup in Chapter 24 is different because the higher enemy growth made the concentration of Rangers near the start too oppressive.
The level and bases of the New Unit in Chapter 22 were raised because it was too difficult to keep her alive with the mostly open map and stronger enemies from past versions.
Overall, the stronger enemies in this version more often had me using spells that I didn’t really ever use other than to test their functioning such as Helen’s Seraph Fire (now renamed “Guardian Star”) or Cosette’s Blizzard, so I think this version makes it harder for certain characters to overpower the late and endgame compared to the initial release.
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