Just played through the first 3 chapters. There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of stuff, and think this has a lot of potential. The highlight was Chapter 2, which I’ll go into more later.
Chapter 1
First off, I’m going to ask you to download some basic Quality of Life hacks. It should be fairly easy to do. I’m going to be assuming you’re using febuilder, and if you’re using buildfiles, I can provide some help there too, if you need it.
In the patches menu, you’re going to want to look up “dangerzone”. This’ll let you install a hack that allows the player to press select to see every enemy’s range.
In addition, to communicate AI more transparently to the player, I highly recommend installing this asm via EA to show enemies that don’t move. In addition, a couple other nice-to-haves are going to be the patch that automatically sets game and text speed to fast, and MMB, or Modular Minimug Box.
With that out of the way, I thought Ch1 was easily the weakest chapter. Your two starting units don’t have vulneraries, and it’s a very slow bait-and-switch chapter, simply baiting one enemy and killing them. The map also feels overly large, and I think that you should just give the vulns to the merc and fighter rather than have the archer carrying them. I also think enemies have too much 1-2 range, which isn’t really needed.
Not much else to say than that, since it’s relatively inoffensive besides being quite boring. I think you should apply whatever mindset you applied with your chapter 2 here, since like I said, I think that chapter is really good!
Also, I didn’t read the dialogue (sorry!), just not my thing. I’m sure whatever you’ve written up is great, though!
Chapter 2
I was really just… stunned by this chapter. Great antiturtle, good split objective, paced well, an interesting mid-chapter event, it’s got it all! Cannot express how well done I feel this was, gameplay wise. My biggest suggestion would be to change it from rout to kill boss, as I feel that fits the chapter better, but the boss is going to be the last enemy left anyways, I suppose.
I think in terms of other, more minor things, the enemy composition felt a bit strange. I didn’t really feel equipped with the right tools weapon triangle-wise on both sides of the split, with sending the two sword users + the bow left and the lance + axe up. Obviously, I still managed to survive, but I’d look into making the enemy composition a bit more conducive to the player party, though perhaps hold off on that before getting a second opinion. The soldier could also use a vuln to start, though not necessary.
I also feel like the 1-2 range is a bit excessive here as well. my archer is not that powerful that he needs to be getting countered all the time, hah.
In terms of units, I really felt that the myrm was quite frankly just worse than the merc in every possible way. I think she should have something to set her apart, since they’re both speed units, but the merc just has better bulk and offense, and the enemies are not a huge threat (which I might consider upping their hit/attack power by a little), so she ends up feeling quite lackluster. She even has worse wrank!
I think that the slim sword could use more uses, since I was running decently low on uses here. I guess I could trade the iron sword over, but the myrm would be useless with the slim sword, so I decided to keep it as it is.
Other than that, nothing really else to say. Fantastic job!
Chapter 3
I felt this chapter was between the previous two. Not as great as Chapter 2, but quite a bit better than Chapter 1. I felt like this one definitely has a lot of potential, but is hindered a bit by the execution.
First off, I’m not sure whether you expect the player to split here. If you do, then telegraphing the mage before the first turn would probably be wise. If not, then disregard this.
Overall, I think this map suffers from really passive enemy AI and a very constrained map with a lot of 1 tile corridors. The enemies just don’t really move, and the lack of a clear display makes it difficult to play around this as well. I’d recommend redoing the fort area of the map to make it a lot more spacious.
Big fan of the lot recolor res thief, by the way.
I think the chest keys being single use is kind of annoying, since they end up scattered amongst units. I’d just make them 2 uses.
The throne boss with a tomahawk here is SUPER annoying. He’s super dodgy to the point where I can’t even get 70 displayed hit on him, and does a ton of damage. I think the damage is okay, but I’d recommend lowering throne avo to 15 or something.
My last comment is going to be concerning the fleet and units that come with it. I thought this was really cool, thinking it’d be an anti-turtle, but instead the 2 pirates charge and the fleet and myrm stay stationary. I think instead of having them be a side objective I have to go back down for, just make them both anti-turtles, having the myrm charge you and both of them not drop anything so the player doesn’t get the wrong idea. For this, maybe delay the event by a single turn so people have a better chance of avoiding them.
On another note, I felt the armor way outclassed the soldier here, with his superior lance rank, power, and durability. Not sure what you could do to make them more equal in that regard but something to think about, especially since the very tight and chokey nature of the chapter meant the armor was in front along with the merc whereas the soldier lagged behind for the most part.
This chapter definitely had some cool elements but I felt the main problem was the overreliance on stationary enemies.
All in all, very impressed by what is here and hope to see improvements + more chapters soon!
