I’m finishing up testing the next update to my hack, and I’ve come across some balancing issues.
Enemies start out decently strong relative to the player, but if the player keeps using the same units chapter after chapter, they end up outpacing the enemy. This happens despite the fact that I’m raising enemy levels by 1-2 every chapter (which also increases the exp the player units get, compounding the problem). Originally, I tried just increasing enemy hard mode bonuses every two chapters, but then I found out they can only go up to +15.
Relatedly, enemy hit rates don’t keep up with player avoid as they level up and gain supports. Even characters that are supposed to be slow are commonly seeing numbers below 50. I know of several possible solutions, but they all have drawbacks.
A) Increase the hit of weapons across the board. Leaning towards this, but it also helps the player, and could screw over sword users who must be able to dodge early-game bandits, to give one example.
B) Use leadership stars to give just the enemy units more hit. Feels a bit contrived and unfair, but at least I can scale this across the game.
C) Raise enemy skill stat. I’d need to increase it by a lot for it to make a difference, and I don’t like it from a lore stand point, as certain classes are supposed to more strong than they are accurate.
I’m interested in what more experienced designers have to say about this. I still find the game fun, in the sense that power fantasies can be fun, but when even hard mode holds little challenge by the mid-game, I feel I have a problem.
Raise enemy growth rates. Especially HP (and maybe a bit of SKL) - bulky enemies that can’t be one shot are scary.
Also give enemy bosses leadership stars, as you mentioned.
And last, adjust your enemy placements to put more emphasis on quality over quantity. Quantity of enemies means the party gains levels faster. Less, but stronger enemies slows down the xp gain rate.
You can edit the hit/avoid formulas. By default, the GBA formulas are designed to have avoid outpace hit, as Luck contributes twice as much to Avoid as it does Hit. You can edit these to make luck grant more hit or make some other changes as desired.
You can reduce player luck/avoid gained from supports.
You can edit the exp formulas to reduce exp gained, so players can’t scale as high as quickly.
How do I make it so Luck counts fully towards hit? That was something I’ve wanted to do from the start, but I couldn’t find a patch for it in FEBuilder.
I like the idea of giving enemies extra HP. I experimented with increasing DEF growths by a lot at one point, but it made low STR units unusable. Pincushion-like foes would effect almost everyone evenly. Is there a particular number you recommend increasing it by, vs. the vanilla values? Assuming 10-15 levels of hard mode bonuses on the highest difficulty setting, which is what my game is balanced around.
As others have mentioned, changing the hit and/or avoid formulae can help.
Westrian War has enemy-only leadership stars that give +10 hit but no avoid bonus, which worked pretty well there. Most bosses only had one, and that didn’t feel unfair.
Regarding your EXP snowballing, vanilla fe8 has a mechanic where overleveled units gain significantly more EXP until the route split, and that might be what’s causing your issue. You can disable it with the Adjust Mode Coefficient Experience Gain patch.
If the issue is in the lategame, you may also want to check whether or not promoted enemies are considered to be lv. 10 before promotion or lv. 20 before promotion (for their stat calculations). Vanilla fe8 uses the former for normal mode and the latter for hard mode, but both consider the promotion to have happened at lv. 20 for the purposes of exp gain.
Hey, so, quick question before any of the avoid formula stuff. Have you applied the Mode Coefficient fix in your hack yet? If not, that’s a frequent cause of runaway player scaling that’s easy to not know about if you’re new.
I’ve been using the Mode Coefficient fix from the beginning, that isn’t the issue.
I decided to give every class +25% HP growths, and bosses some leadership stars, and so far in my current play-through, it seems to be creating the perfect level of difficulty. I haven’t gotten to the part where units start promoting, though.
