The Prologue of my rom hack involves choosing a party of 13 from an available 43 units. The main unit can go up to a unit and talk to them converting them from red to blue. From there the party will enter a Lagdou Ruins type campaign.
Where I’m having issues is finding a way to end the prologue so that only 13 units maximum are chosen. I was considering having the chapter end after 13 turns but with bard/dancer units available it could mean exploiting to get up to 26 units before the turn count ends. The other idea I thought of was making it an Escape chapter where after the first 13 units reach the escape point the chapter ends, but I am not sure if you can set limits like that. The third idea was to have a Farina/Rennac type recruitment where the player receives 13 gold and can recruit by giving 1x gold per unit. This is another event I don’t know how to implement properly.
Any help or other ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Hacks such as Bells of Byelen or others that feature intermission chapters make it so once you have recruited a certain amount of characters, the rest of them become unrecruitable and unable to be talked to.
Whilst I am no coder and hold no knowledge over this, I take it that - if you have to recruit 13 extra units, you could either make the game check how many units are there left to recruit, or how many blue/green units you have (if you turn such red units to green).
There is probably some sort of flag usage meant to be done here with checking this, and maybe each recruitment convo could tick a counter (event flag on them?) that makes the total counter go down, and once it hits zero, either the chapter ends, or you get a convo and the recruitment is over.
There’s a patch or vanilla command to check the number of players. For enemies it’s CHECK_ENEMIES which is used in the fe8 prologue, for example, for Seth to say “all that’s left is their leader”. If you don’t see a vanilla command, then search “count” or “players” under febuilder->patches until you find the command you need. Well, you could use counters or flags to count it, but that would be more work, so I recommend the count option.
Just to add to Vesly’s point, if you don’t wish for the chapter to end immediately after recruiting the 13 units, you could set all of the conversations to require a shared trigger flag. Turn the trigger flag on at the start of the chapter, then turn it off once the check returns that there are 13 or more units.