This is another thing that every now and then gets asked about. I’ve explained how to make them before, but was recently asked for an example so I went and made it, so that people can just be redirected here instead of me having to explain this time and time again.
So, here’s said example. There’s now a village in the prologue and a brigand that has the AI to destroy villages. The village has to be “destroyed” 6 times before it is completely destroyed, with a message that tells the player how many times are left.
If you’d prefer to just look into how it was done and figure it out yourself (which is my preference) then that’s all you need, have fun. But I am posting this in the Tutorial subforum, so I’ll go and try to explain the steps, assuming basic knowledge on FEBuilder and eventing.
1) Required patches
You’ll want the following 4 patches: “Add Event: Is tile change triggered”, “Add Event: Convert memory slot value to string”, “Anti-Huffman” and “:Add Event Condition: Tile Change”.
2) Setting up the tile changes
You’ll need 8 tile changes in total for one FE4-style village.
The first one should be the one of the ruined village, as is proper for villages, but with the difference of only encompassing the village entrance and center instead of the entire village. Also, you have to assign a flag to it, in this example that’s flag 9.
The second tile change should be for the village’s closed gates like normal, no difference here.
The next 6 are for each tile of the village as it gets destroyed, starting from the top left. So, the third tile change is for the top left, the fourth is for the top-center, the fifth is for the top right, the sixth is for the middle-left, and the seventh is for the middle-right. The eight can be for the entire bottom row being destroyed.
3) The events
Now, the fun part. The village itself is set like usual, with the difference of being a “seize/visit home” event type, instead of an actual village. Note the flag used as it will be important soon, in this example it’s flag 8. The village event itself can be whatever you want. If you want each stage of destruction to give something different and/or have different dialogue, copy the tile change checks done on the event below.
Next is the “always condtion”, “flag condition”, “AFEV”, whichever way you prefer to refer to it. The flags are important here. The completion flag should be the same one used for the village (8) and the trigger flag should be the same one used for the tile change of the ruined village (9).
As for the event itself, here is the file you can use to import it into FEBuilder.
What this event does is, whenever the village is “destroyed”, it cycles through the village tile changes in the order described previously (third to seventh, so this takes 5 “destructions”), destroying them one at a time, and notifying the player of how many are left until the village is fully destroyed. The sixth time this happens, the village is completely destroyed and can no longer be visited.
And that’s that, now you have FE4-styled villages in FE8.
4) Miscellaneous
This it not the only way to have FE4-style villages. The most elegant way would’ve been done through ASM, by changing how villages work. But events are easier, and that’s why I chose this way.
There’s another way with events, which would be by making the village center actually be a cracked wall tile instead, and giving the “destroy walls/snags” AI to the brigands. Downsides of doing this is that if you have snags/actual cracked walls in your map, then the AI would target them equally, as well as not visually destroying the village gradually unless you went through additional steps, both on the design and eventing sides. You’d also have to worry about enemies being able to attack the village center at range, if they have more than 1-range.
But it does have the upside of using less tile-changes, which is good not only because setting tile changes takes a bit, but also because there’s a limit of 63 traps in a map and triggered tile changes count as traps, which means 7 FE4-style villages at most, with leftover 7 traps.