How do you all feel about this mechanic?

Design
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So I was contemplating a mechanic where, per map, the first level up, per unit, has boosted growths or a minimum number of stat growths. I see this as an anti-juggernauting mechanic because it gives you a huge incentive to spread exp. Additionally, this also feels like a kind of side objective that a lot of players would probably actually enjoy taking advantage of. What do you all think of a mechanic like this?

And secondly, to someone familiar, how hard would it be to implement something like this into romhacking? (specifically the GBA games)

4 Likes
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I’d feed the first level to my favourite character every map until they max.

4 Likes
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I think this is an annoying solution to the issues it’s addressing.

It penalizes you for catching a unit up in EXP because their not-first levels won’t have that bonus, harming you for having the audacity to want to bring a unit up to par after having not used them for a bit - which is already not easy. I can’t imagine it feeling good to experience either.

The goals are to make players actually feel rewarded for training multiple units and to prevent one-or-two unit runs.

Having enemies with diverse flaws that consistently do real amounts of damage actually does most of the heavy lifting for both of those on its own. If you have a slightly fast enemy with an armorslayer, oop, your knights are dead; if you just have a non-knight unit it’s fine. Add a line of weapons with 60+ base critical but low might and you’ll define a scenario for ranged and high-defense units like archers and knights to shine.

If you then want to make sure that players actually feel rewarded for levelling up units, instead of the guarantee being on first level, why not guarantee rolling multiple stat ups on every level?

Of course, that then brings you back to “dump all EXP on one unit”, but we have a very natural solution there as well, the importance of the level difference in the EXP formula.

In base GBAFE, the EXP formula barely accounts for level differences. Battle EXP only uses one third of the level difference to adjust the base value of 10 EXP, whereas kill EXP uses the whole difference but has another flat bonus of 20.

30 ± (4/3 * LvDiff) does not give you the dramatic fall-off that you want in order to prevent EXP dumping from kills, and 10 ± (LvDiff / 3) for combats doesn’t help this.

Just making the difference matter more hugely stops EXP hoarding - 30 ± (3 * LvDiff) for example means your unit that’s up 10 levels on the foe goes from getting an almost reasonable 17 EXP to just 1.

I wrote a bit much information but deleting work is hard/feels bad

In base GBAFE, it matters fairly little - (31 + Lv Diff) / Player Class Power where almost all classes have 3 power means that a level difference of ten, 25% of the possible range, is an EXP difference of 3. Dramatically raising the importance of this wholly prevents you from investing all EXP into just one or two units.

For example, a formula like 2 * (5 + Lv Diff) means being down two levels lets you get 14 EXP per combat while being up four levels brings you from 10 down to a mere 2.

The kill formula is very annoying but it’s essentially Dmg + (Level * Class Power difference) + Bonuses. The reason why you can get so much EXP on high-level units is because the base kill bonus is 20, and there’s an additional 20 for thieves and additional 40 for bosses.

Because class power is almost always 3, even though kills double dip on the level difference, it does not make a large impact as it’s only 1.33x the level difference.

It’s only not 3 for…
Staff locks (Priest Cleric Troubadour); Manaketes (Fa/Myrrh); and Thieves: All with class power 2, but respectively, can’t get fighting EXP, hard-cap at 20, and are not statted for fighting.
Trainees (Journeyman, Recruit, Pupil); with class power 1.

This class power difference is actually factored in the promotions - Bishops, Valkyries, Rogues, and Assassins have a class bonus of 40 (Level cap of 20 x class power of 2); whereas other promoted units have a class bonus of 60 (Level cap of 20 x class power of 3).

And on both Eliwood modes, Hector Normal, and before the route split in Sacred Stones; if the player’s total class level component is higher than the enemy’s, you halve the player’s, so despite promoted units inherently having a class bonus of 60, they earn EXP almost as fast as an unpromoted unit -

Level 10 promoted player kills level 15 unpromoted enemy:
(31 + 15 - 30) / 3 = 5 combat EXP
(15 * 3 + 0) - ((10 * 3 + 60) / 2) + 20 = 45 - 45 + 20 = 20 kill EXP, totalling 25 EXP.

  • and units a hair above the foe level far faster than if the player was a lower level.

Level 18 unpromoted player kills level 15 unpromoted enemy:
(31 + 15 - 18) / 3 = 9 combat EXP
(15 * 3 + 0) - ((15 * 3 + 0) / 2) + 20 = 45 - 22.5 + 20 = 42.5 kill EXP, totalling 51 EXP.

Level 14 unpromoted player kills level 15 unpromoted enemy:
(31 + 15 - 14) / 3 = 10 combat EXP
(15 * 3 + 0) - ((14 * 3 + 0) / 1) + 20 = 45 - 42 + 20 = 23 kill EXP, totalling 33 EXP.

Like, holy smokes, I hate fe7 for this every time I remember it.

…

Implementing a minimum number of stats per level up is not particularly difficult, the vanilla game even has a system in place for rerolling your zero-stat levels. But only up to three total rolls and it’s not a full reroll every time.

Implementing a system for checking if it’s a unit’s first level of a map, however, is much harder, but only because you need to store that information somewhere, since you can’t compare it to the save file level. We already have save modifying done in multiple ways, you could also track it within the event flags instead (though that would prevent your chapters from having the full possible number of flags available, so you may not want that).

6 Likes
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I should note that I don’t think this mechanic needs to harm Est-archetype units. You can just adjust their growths such that they can still catch up. As for Iron Manning and needing to train previously benched units, I could see the problem there for sure.

However, the intent of a mechanic like this wouldn’t be to punish or diminish certain playstyles. As with most mechanics, I think you need to design the game around it to make it friendly to already existing strategies and archetypes. I see it as more of an incentive not just to use your respective Seth or Robin, and neglect all the other interesting units you could be using. Additionally, this is a way to guarantee that your project units will actually be stronger than the prepromotes down the line when they arrive.

I agree with you when it comes to the EXP formula for GBA. Though I love these games, they are very flawed. I think the developers didn’t realize how strong prepromotes were. Maybe they thought they just “stole” experience as well.

As for the coding part of it, that makes sense. That could be harmful in the grand scheme of making an entire rom hack. Implementing bonus experience is probably more practical.

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I refuse to address juggernauting or other such play styles in any significant manner. If someone wants to ruin their own fun they’re free to do so. Smh.

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I’m not sure this would be possible to implement in romhacking. In Lex Talionis it would be as easy as giving each chapter an event that triggers when somebody levels up, which removes a hidden growth-boosting skill from all player units after they level up. Add another event for each chapter that, without warning, gives everyone the hidden skill again for the next chapter. Or look into how the “Bonus EXP always gives 3 stat boosts” code is programmed.

However I fundamentally disagree with this as a solution to the juggernauting problem. It’s too exploitable and it misunderstands the problem while making it worse. Micromanaging EXP is already a tedious process that often encourages you to stop trying to win fast, and start having less fun grinding (potentially grinding for hours) to make the game easier in a fundamentally uninteresting way. You’re encouraging players to ensure their best character levels up first each chapter for maximum reward which will cause their stats to get even higher.

You don’t want players to spread their EXP or think about their EXP, you want them to use their whole team in interesting plans where every unit’s potential is brought out, even if that potential begins and ends at using a Staff or Personal Skill or Rally or Gambit or Movement Skill.

When a Unit gains a Skill that fundamentally makes you rethink how you use them and what you and your whole army can get out of them, that’s so much more interesting than gaining +2 Strength or a conditional +2 Damage or a 12% chance to do 999% more damage than you ever needed to do.

Don’t design player stats to spiral out of control so much you can render the enemies and strategy irrelevant like a Maid Camilla user. Give player units lower growths and lower stat caps. Add interesting mechanics so you don’t need stats relatively on par with your enemies to kill your enemies and survive attacking them, like repositioning allies and earning bonus turns and Breaking enemies and earning and spending Mana. Give enemies skills that let them threaten everyone they attack, even units designed to be OP like Camilla or Xander or Seth, and put them in threatening combinations with interesting terrain and meaningful time limits.

I once played a Fire Emblem game that would allow the protagonist to spend 4 training sessions with any unit in the army after each battle. Nothing stopped you from raising the protagonist and overpowered Jagen’s Defense even more and turning them both invincible. +4 defense per map cleared… That’s like a 400% defense growth on top of whatever these units gain from levelling up, which was usually more than 3 stats per level up because of course everyone’s growths were buffed, when big number go up it feels good. I was on max difficulty, level one enemies had HP in the 50s, and I was still one-shotting them on chapter one while invincible because vertical power progression is an illusion.

This hack also had Bonus EXP. Nothing stopped you from pouring it into your units who are already the most OP and far ahead of the intended level, except for a minor reduction in EXP gained per BEXP spent. These units gained even more levels between battle as a result because this game wasn’t playtested at all and I had way, way too much BEXP.

Juggernauting is what happens when enemies aren’t threatening enough, and the game isn’t asking enough of the player. Even units designed to be good can’t be everywhere at once, turn limits and maps with multiple objectives are needed to force the player to split up their death ball and stop baiting foes in one by one and safely killing them while milking them for maximum EXP and WEXP and healing EXP and staff WEXP.

This might be solving the Gordian Knot with a bladed sledgehammer but my Fire Emblem game doesn’t let players gain EXP or WEXP during gameplay. Cutscenes and player choices do that.

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The simplest solution to juggernauting imo is to have exp granted to all living units deployed at the end of a chapter instead of on attack/kill.

It’s important this exp is not divided by number of units or the issue continues.

Ik this isn’t easy implementable into gbafe, but I actually think that having op anime-esque units is baked into the very identity of FE and has been since the start. Ie. I think juggernauting was intentional by the developers.

2 Likes
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i like the idea but the game would really need to show which unit hasnt gotten the level up yet directly on the map or i would ignore it outside of my favorites and project

i woudl also lean more toward a minimum number of stat rather than an increase because its odd tha the “optimised” play is to only ever give one level and a slight exp gain increase (base GBAFE is 30 so move it up to 40)

another idea to add to yours would be to gice units a move and maybe con growth but only for that special level up

1 Like