I’m here today to ask everyone with experience what the conventions of a reverse recruitment patch tend to be, or if there are guidelines for it at all.
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How is the “order” of units determined, especially when they appear at the same time? What about characters exclusive to each other, or on different routes of a route split?
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How do you calculate the stats of leveled down/up units? What level are units assumed to promote at?
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How are starting inventories adjusted? Are they replaced with items usable by the new unit in the same “item tier”? What about staves?
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What to do with Prf items? Does a “rapier” weapon stay on the unit moved to the end of the game, or does the new first unit get to use it?
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Do obtained items remain the same, or are they adjusted for the rearranged units? (like weapons that cannot be used yet, or promotion items)
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Should enemies be adjusted? This mostly applies to bosses, or an enemy character that appears in chapter 4 but is not recruitable until they appear again in chapter 9, would they be changed in chapter 4?
I’m curious what RR devs lean towards with these questions. The thing I’d like to know about most is the stat calculations, as the rest is probably more subjective stuff.
Maker of an FE3 RR patch here.
- For cases where characters appeared in a big group, I followed the order their spawn events occurred in. For cases where multiple characters needed to be recruited in one chapter, I went by a mix of distance from the starting position or my subjective feeling on which unit was more likely to be recruited first.
- One edge case ended up being Rickard and Wendell in Book 1. Including Samson and Arran, Book 1 actually has an even number of characters, and Rickard/Wendell wound up being the “pivot” point. Since they join in the same exact spot I didn’t change them.
- I wrote a program to automate the swapping of data, which included stat changes. I used an algorithm similar to FE9 fixed mode to raise or lower bases. For characters who promoted or depromoted, I assumed a level 10 promotion because anything higher produced results I wasn’t happy with.
- One edge case I had to account for was Tiki - I had to put a lower bound on what some of her stats could be, otherwise there would be underflow errors during her dragon transformations.
- For weapons I generally used a weapon that had about the same weapon level requirement. Unless replacement character’s calculated weapon level was too low, in which case I used the item with the next lowest weapon level requirement until I found one the new unit could use. There were some special cases.
- I always gave Tiki and Bantu their corresponding dragonstones, even though Bantu usually joins without one. I didn’t give them any equivalents to the weapons the original units had.
- I left items as-is, including staves.
- I didn’t change staves due to the difficulty in finding a replacement for certain unique staves (i.e. warp). Also, because Elice wound up being the lord, I wanted to make sure she had a supply of staves available to her so that she wasn’t stuck with just whatever she had in the beginning of the game.
- In any place where a thief got replaced, I tried to give the replaced unit a chest key.
- If any character joined with a PRF originally, they kept that PRF in their new location. I added the PRF to the end of whatever inventory they got after replacing the other unit.
- Not every character joins with their PRF. So for instance, Marisha(?) didn’t join with the thief staff in book 2, so I didn’t give it to her later.
- I left the regalia (Parthia, Mercurius) in the same locations but gave the replacing units equivalent weapons to use on top of them. In my case, Jeorge and Astram were replaced by Yumina and Marisha respectively. So they would up with a Thoron and Bolganone (probably due to Marisha lacking the Wlv to use Thoron).
- I didn’t change enemy stats at all.
Other random things I had to change: Elice wound up being the lord in book 1 and 2. Normally this would have rendered book 2 unwinnable since Clerics can’t cross the mountains in 2-1, but I edited the terrain data for Cleric to allow her to clear 2-1.
If I left anything out or there were some edge cases you want to know about, please let me know.
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