This may sound slightly biased, but I think fixed growths mode are the most fun way to play to play fire emblem. Any time I play without it, I usually spend every level up in fear that I’ll end up with a screwed unit, even occasionally just deciding to reset the chapter if i get enough bad level ups on important units. Not only that, but it introduces a level of reliability, so even what would usually be the worst units can be used.
Whenever playing romhacks, I usually always install a fixed growths mode patch via febuilder, which I am incredibly glad that it is easy to do. One thing I have always wanted to do is port fixed growths mode to other fire emblem games like fe4, fe5, and fe10, or even games like Berwick saga, with little success (assembly hurts my brain way too much). If anyone has any ideas on how to implement this, please do try, hopefully I’m not the only interested in this.
Random level ups are exciting
Fixed growths make the game more fun
0voters
On a somewhat related note, I had an idea to completely delevel fire emblem so you don’t have to worry about training units and preparing kills, which always seemed tedious to me. In practice this would kinda like the game being designed around 0% growths, with enemies that don’t level up along with you besides promotion (some scaling can be involved just as a difficulty factor). Included in this could be fe4s way of handing weapon levels, which i always really liked (weapon ranks being decided by class, promotion and bloodlines). I suppose this would make it harder to design fair maps, but in the end my favorite maps have always been the ones that feel more like a puzzle with many solutions.
So, is this sacrilegious, or am I onto something here? Feel free to berate me for wanting fire emblem to be exactly like advance wars or something.
Yeah I don’t like the idea of puzzles and one way to solve a map, cause there’s ALOT of units in FE with alot of weapons and alot of tiles etc etc etc. Basically there is alot of variables, and if the map is designed to be finished like 3ways, there’s gonna be alot of trial and error before it’s resolved.
Just a reference, I forget if it’s conquest or revelations, I think conquest. Where you need Niles as a Bowhorsemanguy, with Shuriken breaker and something else to pass the ninja hallway of doom, otherwise you just got killed like horribly. THAT’s bad game design.
FE:Fates also had the Pot Level, and the Snow level, and the Boat Level, and Rainbow Sage 1/2/3. Where if you don’t prepare and know the level beforehand you get screwed. Hard. And having only one way to do any of those levels would make me commit harsh war crimes against innocent animals that don’t deserve it.
I know it’s likely not a feasible system within the scope of ROM hacking, but my ideal preference would be a hybrid between pure random growths and something like some RPGs that have guaranteed stat gains. That is, every unit would have fixed stat values at max level but they would have pseudorandom stat gains on a per level basis instead of gaining the exact same stats at a given level across different players’ runs.
This way, you get that feeling of oddball but fun characters during the course of the game, where you might have a Myrmidon proc Def 8 times across 10 levels, but as the designer and for player expectations, you can guarantee that characters aren’t going to end up subpar because each unit will converge to certain values by the end, meaning that you don’t have account for units that got unlucky from the RNG with eyeballing enemy strength on maps.
Just curious, but have you given Advance Wars a try? Units have preset power levels in those games with only slight variance depending on which CO is controlling them. For me, it’s one of the reasons I don’t really like Advance Wars, but you might like it.
Edit: And I just noticed where you mentioned Advance Wars. Even so, I like Fire Emblem for its RPG elements as far as growing units. I’m not big on the reclassing and grinding for and optimizing skill builds of the recent games, but growing a unit from zero to hero is a big part of the fun of the series for me.
Hey Harperers, can you maybe explain how you create that “Fixed growth” patch using FEBuilder?
Couldn’t find a tutorial to use.
Or even better… could you maybe share your patches you created??? For which games did you create those patches?
Anyway thanks in advance for your input.
Install FEBuilderGBA from here, open your patched rom, go to Tools → Patches, install the FixedGrowthsMode patch, and then save your rom.
If it says the patch is conflicting with the skillssystem patch, then what you need to do is double click the
“Start Event:” on the event tab to the right, double click the first event on the event editor, click “Command” on the right of the window that opens up, search for “Flag ON” and double click the first thing that pops up, change the “flag” textbox to EF and press enter, and the box to the right of it should read “Global flag EF”. Then, click insert, write to rom, and save the rom.
You can use this same method to also install any other patches that catch your eye, with the chance of accidentally breaking your rom.
Once you get into the hang of it you can change pretty much anything about the maps and characters that you don’t like. I made a version of FE7 that spreads out the bonus disc items between the characters you can recruit so i could have access to them.
Thanks for responding.
I tried it on 5 ROMS exactly the same steps you describe.
It does not work. Either all the 5 ROMS I tried are somehow preventing this or you missed a step.
I changed the flag to EF
Clicked Insert, write to rom but patch still doesnt work. Saved it, opened again. Still does not work.
Iron Emblem, Vision quest, Eligors Spear, TOTF, Sun gods Wrath.
To be honest I am a total noob with FEBuilder. I can add items, change growth rates and basic shit like that. I just wanted to play with “fixed growths”. I hoped it would be easier
i dont think any of those roms should need to change the flag, thats only for the most recent roms with the recent version of skillsystem. You should just be able to install the fixedgrowthsmode patch and save the rom.
I also tried to do the same as @LexiTV . I patched Iron Emblem with no problem, generating a presumed fixed growth rom (have to further test to see if it’s really fixed growth) since I think it doesn’t use skill system, but Sun Gods Wrath and Vision Quest showed conflicting with the skillssystem patch as you said.
I tried your all your steps up to “write to rom” and “save the rom” (I also save as a new one). But even so, it still shows conflicts and doesn’t let me install the FixedGrowthsMode patch. Not sure what went wrong.
sorry for being unclear, If you follow the steps in the middle because the patch is conflicting, you don’t NEED to install the patch, as the skillsystem patch replaces the functionality of the fixedgrowthsmode patch.
Thanks for clarification, I’ll try again to see if it works.
I guess I’m in the minority (given the vote results above) to LOVE fixed growth mode. Revisiting GBA games and especially playing romhacks (Pokemon Radical Red, anyone), I really appreciate games having fewer randomness and reduced grinding so the main focus is more on combat and not resource management. Yes, I understand hit and critical have randomness as well, but growth determines whether it’s worthwhile to use a unit or not in the first place (from a gameplay perspective). I can’t imagine training a unit to have screwed stat growth.
While I am a fan of fixed growths, I personally prefer stat bracketing, where level ups are still random, but if you’re x levels above/below the average, you will never/always level that stat up. This prevents becoming stat screwed. In pokemblem I made it so if you’re 3 levels below average, it’ll always increase, and if you’re 5 above average, it’ll never increase.
