I added Diagonal Movement to Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust... Now what?

[JasonGodwin7]

Well, I did it. I finally added diagonal movement and attacking into my game.

Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust - DIAGONAL MOVEMENT! DIAGONAL MOVEMENT IS REAL! But with exponential lag.

And now I’m not sure how to balance it. I didn’t plan ahead this far.

The huge lag spikes when selecting someone with too much movement, especially when selecting the 9 movement Paladin… They make me think I should reduce the movement in my game. I liked the low movement in Engage. Unit movement is usually pretty low in other grid games I’ve played like Civilization and Into The Breach, too. I should probably lower unit movement across the board. 9 mov is too much, making that many tiles blue at once is too laggy.

I liked how in Xcom and the only good Fallout games besides NV you can move further if you don’t attack. I might give everyone 3 or 4 move and add a movement option like “Sprint” or “Gallop” that lets you move another 3 or 4 tiles but doesn’t let you attack. Great for the turns when that unit wasn’t attacking anyone anyway. Technically 8 mov if the mounted units get 4 mov and Gallop adds 4. Technically 12 mov if the mounted units get 6 mov and Gallop adds 6. Though I don’t think I could add more with a Stride Gambit or Sigurd Ring.

With diagonal movement, it’s never been easier to slip past enemies without having to fight them. You would need 8 movement to run a full circle around a foe adjacent to you, or 4 movement with diagonal movement enabled. I could give units a “Zone Of Control” that you cannot enter and exit on the same turn unless you kill the unit or have Canto. Breaking the unit also sets the unit’s Zone Of Control to zero until the Break effect is gone.

Balancing offense is certainly going to be a challenge. In a square grid game like Fire Emblem, you can be attacked by up to 4 1-range enemies in 1 turn. In a hex grid game like Berwick Saga, you can be attacked by up to 6 1-range enemies in 1 turn. But in a square grid game with diagonal movement and attacking like Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust, you can be attacked by NINE 1-range units in 1 turn*. And that’s without Attack Stance. My game allows Attack Stance to happen with allies within 2 tiles of the attacker or defender, so one unit could be surrounded and attacked by TWENTY FOUR 1-range attacks in 1 turn. More if any other movement options are used like Shove, Draw Back, Reposition, Canter, and so on to get exhausted attackers out of the way of fresh attackers. Even more if Magic and Bows are used to hit you from more than two tiles away. After all, bows have 5 range in Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust. When you can attack any unit in a 5x5 diamond, that’s one thing, but a 5x5 square? That’s 25 tiles. 24 tiles can be attacked if you can’t move before firing, more if you can move before firing. Don’t get me started on Siege Tomes and Ballistas.

How do you think Fire Emblem should be rebalanced around diagonal movement and attacking? I’m not asking you to design it for me, but if anyone makes convincing arguments for or against something, that might help guide me.

*I mean eight lmao, it could only be 9 if the victim in the center smacked himself with a 1-range weapon. Or things were set up so only the eighth guy attacks with a 1-range weapon that can initiate an Attack Stance attack.

[Fringus]

what was diagonal movement and attacking implemented for anyhow when you were making it
cause yeah if you did just implement it to implement it of course something that game changing is gonna bust your game’s kneecaps.

[2WB]

@JasonGodwin7

How do you think Fire Emblem should be rebalanced around diagonal movement and attacking?

…Not?

If you want to support 8 direction equal cost movement, you simply need an entirely different game design from the ground up for it to make sense.

[LeskLyfeld]

Jason’s last remaining screensaver-mimicking braincell could only think if he could do something that he forgot to think about if he should.

Fire Emblem is not a system that can work well with diagonal movement whatsoever, and all the words you used as of now pretty much only say complete biskit things.

@JasonGodwin7

Balancing offense is certainly going to be a challenge. In a square grid game like Fire Emblem, you can be attacked by up to 4 1-range enemies in 1 turn. In a hex grid game like Berwick Saga, you can be attacked by up to 6 1-range enemies in 1 turn. But in a square grid game with diagonal movement and attacking like Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust, you can be attacked by NINE 1-range units in 1 turn

Complete biskit.

With diagonals, you can get attacked by eight 1-range units.

A square has eight directly adjacent spaces that way.

Thus you can only be attacked from eight squares.

@JasonGodwin7

so one unit could be surrounded and attacked by TWENTY FOUR 1-range attacks in 1 turn.

Why would you ever need to attack one unit twenty four times

Who told you that would be fun design

@JasonGodwin7

After all, bows have 5 range in Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust. When you can attack any unit in a 5x5 diamond, that’s one thing, but a 5x5 square? That’s 25 tiles

biskit

a 5x5 square would be formed by a unit with a 2-range weapon in your whack system

← 2 range

the effective range of a 1-5 range bow user with squares (or also known as 25 ft.) would be 120 squares, or a 11x11 square (-1 for the unit’s space). This is just a 5-range weapon. You’re going to brick roms with shit like 9-mov, 12 range siege weapons or stuff like that. Consider too needing to design maps around not having corners since otherwise units might walk through them.

You don’t even know half the shit you’re cooking, and you’re making design choices based on concepts you hardly have a good grasp on.

Jason, all your ‘concepts’ read more as if you got blackout drunk one day and thought that fitting every piece of the puzzle bucket into the square hole would make things magically work out.

You aren’t coherent or concise enough to be an idea guy dude

[basedusername]

I really don’t think you can balance a game that’s trying to emulate fire emblem around diagonal movement or attacking. It’d require an overhaul of so many things that you’re just developing another SRPG entirely at that point.

Nevermind all the other things you offhandedly mentioned in that post. Sounds a lot like feature bloat.

[CT075]

@LeskLyfeld

Jason’s last remaining screensaver-mimicking braincell could only think if he could do something that he forgot to think about if he should.

@LeskLyfeld

You don’t even know half the shit you’re cooking, and you’re making design choices based on concepts you hardly have a good grasp on.

Jason, all your ‘concepts’ read more as if you got blackout drunk one day and thought that fitting every piece of the puzzle bucket into the square hole would make things magically work out.

You aren’t coherent or concise enough to be an idea guy dude

Whatever you think about the actual design on display here, comments like these are rude and uncalled-for. Please keep them to yourself in the future.

[LordGlenn]

@2WB

If you want to support 8 direction equal cost movement, you simply need an entirely different game design from the ground up for it to make sense.

Yeah, for something like this, you would probably want/need more of a radial movement system, rather than a grid.

---

If you wanted to stick with buffing diagonal movement, I’d probably hard cap it at like [(Move/2) + 1] diagonal tiles with limited movement amounts? (Ex: 4 Move Infantry, Diagonal Movement would effectively be 6 Move (3 down, 3 over). 7 Move (Promoted) Mount would be effectively 8-10 Move (3.5+1 → 4 or 5; that many down and that many over).) This way, it wouldn’t be like you’re getting Move x2 off of a single unit’s movement each turn.

This would especially be important in terms of map size as well. If units are moving 12-16 tiles per turn by sticking mostly to pure 45 degree diagonal movements, you’re gonna need to have very large maps with the amount of distance being traveled. Historically, those haven’t really been… fun, at least in the execution we have to go on. FE4 has lots of dead time between locations and this would likely just repeat the struggles of infantry units in comparison to mounted units in getting around.

@LeskLyfeld

Why would you ever need to attack one unit twenty four times

Who told you that would be fun design

Major Super Robot Wars bosses that try to require your entire deployed squadron to bring them down (YMMV with how broken some cheese strats can be), and part of the fun in doing that is trying to do it as quickly as possible

(Of course, attack ranges are much higher in SRW than in FE to begin with.)

[AlemOwl]

@JasonGodwin7

After all, bows have 5 range in Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust. When you can attack any unit in a 5x5 diamond, that’s one thing, but a 5x5 square? That’s 25 tiles. 24 tiles can be attacked if you can’t move before firing, more if you can move before firing. Don’t get me started on Siege Tomes and Ballistas.

Wait, what!? I guess making bows hit from far away is a way to buff them, but that combined with this thing of being attacked by 8 guys at least at the same time… Uh, Idk, but that kind of thing isn’t really balanced at all.

@JasonGodwin7

How do you think Fire Emblem should be rebalanced around diagonal movement and attacking? I’m not asking you to design it for me, but if anyone makes convincing arguments for or against something, that might help guide me.

Imo I don’t think it couldn’t be balanced around changing the type of movement. The effort is appreciated, but much like some people said here already, doing that would lead to the game becoming into a whole different SPRG altogether.

[Vesly]

This is really cool. Nice job. I dunno how I’d personally design with diagonal movement, but a lot of people have told me that pokemblem doesn’t count as fire emblem because of some mechanic I do or don’t have. I think a lot of people just have a narrow view of what fire emblem should be based on the vanilla fe games they’ve played. Regardless of whether other people consider it fe or not, it’s definitely possible to design a fun game around new mechanics. And sometimes you’ll try a new mechanic and find out it doesn’t work for your design.

[JasonGodwin7]

@LeskLyfeld

Why would you ever need to attack one unit twenty four times

Who told you that would be fun design

I dunno, hitting Grima or Garon with everything I’ve got over the course of a painful battle sounds way cooler than 1-rounding him with Chrobin or worse, 1-rounding him with Odin’s daughter while the protagonist does nothing all map.

Maybe some “Blessing of The Goddess” could revive all dead units and turn any deaths during some ultra nightmare map into injuries to give the developers a license to make this map something mathematically impossible for even the most min-maxed DLC-user after a million DLC grind hours to 1 turn clear. Everyone still gets their happy ending in the end, they earned it by beating the ultra hard map just before this one where an impossible challenge with your remaining limited resources was necessary, to contrast the amazing resources given to you in the finale.

[LeskLyfeld]

@JasonGodwin7

dunno, hitting Grima or Garon with everything I’ve got over the course of a painful battle sounds way cooler than 1-rounding him with Chrobin or worse, 1-rounding him with Odin’s daughter while the protagonist does nothing all map.

I can reckon that it happening “once” in lieu of the final boss fight is a point that can be understood, but that isn’t to say that ‘wittling down the final boss’ isn’t a thing already on other FE games, both mainline and fanmade, without requiring diagonal movement and attacking in order to throw attacks in, nor other changes or issues that require overcomplicated workarounds that would usually not exist otherwise within the constraints of FE GBA.

@JasonGodwin7

Maybe some “Blessing of The Goddess” could revive all dead units and turn any deaths during some ultra nightmare map into injuries to give the developers a license to make this map something mathematically impossible for even the most min-maxed DLC-user after a million DLC grind hours to 1 turn clear.

what

why

[JasonGodwin7]

Imagine an Iron Man run of Fire Emblem. You steadily lose men. women. children. You keep going. Eventually you make it to the final boss and oneshot it with Chrobin because your game over conditions are your best final boss killers. Or you get softlocked because none of your living units can kill Takumi before OP reinforcements kill you.

Imagine a zero deaths run of Fire Emblem. Nobody dies, ever, except your enemies. You make it to the final boss and oneshot it with Chrobin. Or the silliest choice possible.

It has to be possible even in the worst case scenario but that makes it too easy for a final boss map. What are they supposed to do, add generic automatic recruits and unlock an infinite grinding level in the game’s final hour after a full game without it?

Or…

Everyone gets revived and temporarily immortal for one hell of a final battle. Every living unit gets their turn to say a line or two and every dead unit gets a line to say “I died, wow, I got better, the Goddess’s power is amazing, let’s go kill satan” or whatever. Maybe everyone gets huge EXP and OP weapons to make this possible even if stat screwed. Maybe your entire army has to split up and kill multiple guys to break multiple shields and maybe it’s a boss rush where all the named bosses come back too with skills making them take less damage from everyone except the character who should kill them. After beating modded Engage with an epic final battle I want to try and top it.

But first I’ll have to find a way to balance this Diagonal Emblem.

Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust - Diagonal Emblem battle

The Priest got obliterated. The enemies knew exactly who the weakest link was.

[cb1052]

Side note on this, I don’t think diagonal movement should be allowed if there are impassible tiles to the vertical/horizontal sides of the unit.

To give an example:

Example

O O X O B
O O O X O
O A O X O
O O X X O

let’s say this 5x4 grid is your map. O tiles are plains and X are cliffs. Under the current diagonal movement system a unit at space A has no issues getting to B, but if you look at the tilesets, the diagonal cliff tiles imply one connected cliff, as opposed to two disjoint ones. It is more intuitive to assume a unit can’t cross a cliff just because they are going diagonally, basically.

If you’re really epic, you should make it toggleable on a terrain by terrain basis. Maybe some terrain can be “squeezed through” and others can’t?

[PolterGhost]

I got randomly recommended this by google and I’ve never been on this forum before, so…

I’ve no idea what your design goals are, but let’s approach diagonals. Grid-based games exist in various spaces, and they all cover the usefulness of grids in various manners. Most, especially those cribbing from Intelligent Systems or Yasumi Matsuno games, use simple cardinal movement. Very few use diagonals, and there’s two main reasons:

Number one, it’s hard to tell how far something can reach when you factor diagonals. You turned a cross shape into a very large box, which makes reading and immediately understanding positioning into suddenly having to assume you’re always in range. It’s one thing if it’s a chess board and a piece can only move on diagonals, it’s another when your Queen can suddenly move literally anywhere in their 8x8 grid.

Number two, real-life doesn’t work that way. Basic trigonometry measures the distance between point A and point B, and for a square system we can simply use the Pythagorean Theorem to tell us how far away Point C is with given lengths of Length A and Width B. As is taught in basic geometry, a² + b² = c², so a square of the game grid itself is 1² + 1², with its corner being c². So, if 1² = 1, then 1 + 1 = c². 2 being equal to c times c, we need to figure out what c is to figure out the length of the diagonal, which is the square root of 2, which equals 1.4142.

The reason to do real-world math here is that everyone has an intuitive sense of geometry. We can navigate dark places if we know the general layout, we can throw a ball to go to a specific place, a crow can even figure out when and where to drop objects to get them to break open. Physics doesn’t stop existing just because we’re looking at a 2D game screen, and in this case we’re forced to think about distance and time as part of a strategy game.

Dungeons and Dragons loved its grids back when the 2000s rolled around. 4th Edition has this exact issue where it’s hard to read distances because distances are measured in Squares, and diagonals still count as 1. Realistically, running at a diagonal towards a location takes longer than a straight line across from it, given the same X positioning. If McDonald’s is across the street from you, it’s going to be easier to reach it going in a straight line than it would be if you walked straight down the sidewalk to the street corner and ran in a straight line to it.

3rd edition decided to do the math and instead made diagonal distance equal to 1.5 spaces (similar to the real-world 1.4142, but easier to work with.) So, every time you moved diagonally, you’d count 1-2-1-2 for each step. Increasing the used movement by 1 for every second step means that movement became radial. Instead of a cross or a box that represented your whole movement range, you’d end up with a circle. It’s natural-feeling and readable at a glance.

A balancing factor behind diagonals in these games and others like them is that if my way of egress on my North and West spaces are blocked by full walls, then my Northwest space is also blocked by virtue of those walls touching their corners together. There’s also funny things like line-of-sight that measures a line through spaces and sees what that line cuts through to determine if attacks can be made.

So, the big question before anything else here is: Why do you want diagonals? There’s reasons for design choices, and I’m not sure what the reason is here. If it’s to make movement feel more natural, then you won’t get it from diagonals = 1. You might not even get it from any other caclulations, if things like forests encompass a full space visually (how did that unit move between forests through their corners?)

And maybe another weird, unrelated question, why have melee units attack from a distance away? Fire Emblem, at its core, represents very large areas and large armies by simply having reasonable movement abilities and heroes that represent pieces of the army. It’s something I appreciate Three Houses for, by having your heroes actually lead visible troops into battles instead of abstracting the army as “Marth and his six companions.” Is it literally one bandit versus an entire village, or is it a group represented by one? The answer even depends on the scale, whether you’re doing a city fight, a castle fight, or a wide open battlefield.

Overall, I think I need to know why the design decisions are being made to provide suitable feedback, but I will leave my reasons why diagonal movement needs some sort of limitation on it.

[JasonGodwin7]

@LordGlenn

FE4 has lots of dead time between locations and this would likely just repeat the struggles of infantry units in comparison to mounted units in getting around.

My “Sprint/Gallop” system would help lessen the problems in FE4 map design. If a unit wasn’t able to attack anything anyway, they basically get to move twice that turn just without attacking anything. When playtesting it’s great for getting units to where the battle is happening faster.

[theghostcreator]

This is really neat! Good to see you implementing all the ideas you have, hope to see where this goes!

[WhateverComic07]

Use D&D logic. Diagonal movenent costs 1.5 x normal movement. So for repeated diagonal movement it would 1, then 3, then 4, then 6, etc.

Alternatively you could have the double cost move first, so 2,3,5,6 etc.

Keep the attacking for adjacency alone. So you still only attack in the 4 cardinal directions unless you have more range, like how the game plays normally.

[JasonGodwin7]

It’d be cool to make diagonally moving to a tile cost 1.5x the movement points crossing onto that tile normally costs, but the engine doesn’t support tiles costing a fraction of a point. Which is a shame, I like when roads cost 0.5 MOV.

I could replicate roads costing 0.5 MOV by making them cost 1 MOV, doubling the cost and MOV of everything else, and halving the displayed MOV of all tiles and units. But that wouldn’t play nice with multiplying a tile’s movement cost by 1.5 unless you round up/down which creates stupid inconsistencies.

Although, I have to say, 5-range bows are pretty busted in this game. But still not as busted as some of the sins against Naga I’ve seen in 3 Houses and Engage, probably. I’ve made a few myself.

Fire Emblem: Rising Thrust - DIAGONAL ATTACKING IS REAL

Diagonal Attacking works with ranged weapons now.

Programming bows to have a maximum range of 1+(User’s Strength divided by 5) was probably a bit much. At least their max range is capped at 5. Imagine if most units in this game had 3 MOV but bows were allowed to have 5 max range. That would be insane.