Legault doesn’t have too many maps where he can pick chests after you get him, though. You’re definitely hyperbolizing the number of bad units in FE6 and the idea that you need units to ram their caps to beat a Fire Emblem game is a fundamentally flawed way of viewing game balance.
I didn’t say anything about caps. All I’m talking about is performance
Wendy, Barth, Bors, Oujay, Sophia and Wade are the only units that are really unviable to use in FE6. Because viable and being outclassed are two different aspects of unit balance. Even so, you mention Astore vs Chad but most of the time the differences between the two aren’t meaningful since neither really see combat regardless apart from a few edge cases where Astore has the advantage, but those are edge cases so it isn’t a huge advantage. Plus there’s some maps that are big enough to justify the deployment of both of them.
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Could we have the ability to quote entire posts, please?
Edit: Okay we do now hahaha it must have changed in the last few months, sorry
I kept on deleting a period in people’s quotes to basically quote the whole post before this 
About reinforcements, they’re a way to keep things fresh, with new units joining the fight and the player having to adapt to them. They might be cheaper in comparison to things that change the gameplay like branches, tile changes, allegiance changes and others, but they’re still valid. Could also be that the designer doesn’t want many units on screen at once for some reason, and one should also keep in mind the enemy unit cap. If you want your map to have more than 50 enemy units, you simply HAVE to use reinforcements, it’s not a choice anymore.
Don’t really know how popular/mainstream these are since I rarely play other people’s hacks nowadays, but the following are some things that don’t sit well with me that I see sometimes. I’ll give a preemptive “not to toot my own horn” here since some examples I’ll cite are things I did:
-Prioritizing developer laziness over player enjoyment. I’m not at all unfamiliar with the desire to keep things simple to not be victimized by over-ambition, nor having to settle for something less than what was originally intended, but I think it’s an unhealthy mindset to dictate development and it should be fought against, not readily embraced. The priority should be to make the game as enjoyable (whatever the creator defines as such) as possible, not to cut as many corners as possible.
-Various “personal” weapons. Had my first run with this when working on The Sacred Chairs back in 2018, in which off the top of my head, around 20 units had one. I can understand the theory of wanting to give characters something more personal, but in practice it never really worked for me. That was before skills on weapons, so maybe I’d think differently if my first impression had been more recent. Weapons that have a broader lock though, such as to a classline or bloodline, have more appeal to me.
-Sticking to vanilla objectives with no twists. I’m not saying that all chapters need to have some complex mechanic, usually any kind of “multi”-something (seize, boss kill, etc) is already enough to make me consider it above vanilla. But you can always go beyond and/or add something to those to make them more interesting. A rout chapter that has a score competition also happening, a chapter in which some of your units will hide and stun enemies when they move nearby, a chapter focused on rescuing and preventing the enemy from doing the same (happens partially in FE10 part 2 prologue), or (when the patch is eventually finalized and hopefully made compatible with the skill system) having a 4th team in the chapter to make it more complex, for example.
-Lack of player choices beyond just moving blue units and item management. This goes from simple branched promotions up to actual decisions players have to make, either through choices or gameplay actions, the latter which I find preferable since it’s more organic. Forming a truce with one of the two armies in the chapter, having to conquer a castle but there’s another castle that you can optionally conquer or not which has implications later, exchanging gold/items/units for other benefits such as reinforcements, etc. Tied to my first point, when it gets to the stage of defending no replay value because supposedly no one would ever play your hack more than once, it’s always a shame to see. The reasoning that this is to supposedly improve the experience sounds counter-intuitive to me.
-Lack of NPCs in maps, and I already know this is a hot take from experience. Most of the time that I see, people reduce NPCs to one of three things: An immobile and implicit turn limit, an annoyance, or a “funny”. I won’t deny that these may be mostly the case in vanilla, but I don’t see why you can’t do differently in your hack. In all my solo projects, I have NPCs in every map. The fact that they’re not under direct player control introduces an uncertainty that makes the player have to predict, adapt to and/or gamble with the green unit movements, which is a layer I find unfortunately lacking in vanilla (shoutouts to FE10 for having a few chapters with many ally units). I’ve already seen the “yeah but I don’t play FE to consider green units!!!” talk many times, but what can I say, I like co-op, and blue vs red can only go so far.
-Overpowered reinforcements from behind in more than one or two maps. If that’s the peculiarity that makes the chapter interesting, it’s fine with me. But when it’s repetitive, it stops feeling like an interesting reason for the player to push themselves, and feels more like a lazy way out instead of making something actually fun instead to motivate the player.
-Secret items in the default “stand on this random tile to get this unrelated thing” fashion, especially if it requires a specific character. If you really must have something like this, at least make it obvious (such as bones in desert maps or something off-looking like a ruined house in the middle of a field) and place them somewhere the player would already have to move to, not some corner of the map that’s far from the action.
-Prepromotes that are just better than what your unpromoted units could comparatively be. I think that fundamentally, the player should want to prioritize lower level units and they should reliably (as far as random growths allow anyway) surpass the prepromotes when their levels are the same.
10 Likes
I think it would be interesting to switch the palette of the map or use LOMA to have a map with day and night.
Also, a gimmick that uses LOMA to expand the map downward or to the right would be interesting.
In some works, it suddenly started to snow and the screen switched to a snow palette.
Reinforcements can be effective if they appear not only from the front, but also from behind a few of them to surround the player.
In many cases, there are weak units such as Cleric and Dancer in the rear of your army, so even if only one reinforcement enemy appears in the rear, the player will have to think more.
If you want to harass the player more, you can make the Pegasus or Dragon Knight appear in the back.
However, be aware that overdoing this will make the game too difficult.
also important to use shinan to write hints on how to play the chapter.
It is tedious to reset the game or check the data in FEBuilderGBA without knowing who to talk to the enemy with.
If you’re hiding a treasure on the map, you can give the player a hint.
If there is a gaiden condition in that chapter, I think it would be good to explain it in shinan as well.
also use a dictionary(guide) to explain the characters and the world.
You can explain it in the readme, but I think it will be more effective if you explain it in the dictionary (guide) in the game.
Since more and more titles are now equipped with Capture, it might be a good idea to provide a way for players to spend the money they earn from stealing.
The number of works equipped with the Home base system and works that can reset Support have increased.
If you can reset Support, It may want to design it so that you can accumulate Support points faster.
Players will try different units and support.
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skill system, imao.
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also use a dictionary(guide) to explain the characters and the world.
You can explain it in the readme, but I think it will be more effective if you explain it in the dictionary (guide) in the game.
Where would the dictionary(guide) be located in the game? I had this idea that random villages would explain the world and characters, but it felt like it would be so tedious that the player visited this village and now has to click through numerous paragraphs of exposition.
For FE8, it is in the menu.
This item can be changed from the FEBuilderGBA Advanced menu.
This feature is called a 辞書(dictionary) in the Japanese version.
There are also patches like this.
NAME.en=Add unit subscriptions to dictionary terms.
INFO.en=Items in the dictionary(Guide) are controlled by flags, but add unit subscriptions to this condition.\r\nThis makes it easier to view dictionary entries, etc. if the unit is subscribed.\r\nIf you want to use a dictionary to explain the characters, I think you should use it.
When unit joins your party, you can add a detailed description of him to the Guide.
You can also post descriptions of countries and places that appear in your game.
You can make your game more interesting by posting a brief history of the country, and economy, etc.
However, there is a limit to the number of lines that can be scrolled in the dictionary, so you cannot include too long text.
For example, it may be difficult to include long, vertical staff rolls.
I recommend that you use events to create staff roles, etc.
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I KNOW this is a small nitpick but I personally don’t like when huge groups of characters (Or rather, between 3 and 5 of them) join at the same time. I feel it’s always better to space out the recruitment times.
Bonus points if A) They all join automatically without even needing to talk to them or visit anything or B) They’re all acquaintances of one of the lords. I feel like that’s a cheap way to make a huge roster with less unique characters (Out of the games I played so far, only FE6 does that too noticeably but I’m sure a few others do so as well)
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I completely understand.
Personally, I like it more how they do it in vanilla FE 8, where Innes, Gerik, and Tethys are green units, while Marisa is a red unit, and you have to recruit them in a specific order. They don’t all just join you at once
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Legault can do some nice damage and a 30% crit with a killing edge and there’s a chest with one in the map where you get Harken or Karel (that map has many chests). He can also promote into an assassin with the Fell Contract that Ursula drops and he’s certainly a better target than Matthew
although Jaffar just tramples the both of them
The whole point of pre-promotes is to be crutch characters, and that’s not inherently bad since they can be a good anti-soft lock feature. I feel like the problem more specifically isn’t pre-promotes but pre-promotes with ridiculous bases/growths since they can easily become a no-brainer option when considering who to deploy and outshine merely good units.
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early Pegasus knights should have the offensive power of tickling someone with a feather duster, and defences so bad that a vanilla soldier can two shot them.
The belief that Cavaliers and wyvern lords are the only units worth using.
The belief that playing on lower difficulties means you suck at the game.
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you’re talking about project ember aren’t you? You are. That’s the only recent hack with 2-3 range that I can think of. Do you think 3 range would make it better? it makes them vulnerable to every attack except other archers but allows them to stay in the back
I don’t get putting bosses on terrain the designers could literally just buff their avoid and defense and give them a vulnerary or something. I generally just don’t like bosses with avoid and luck because bosses that can dodge or crit are not well designed bosses.
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what difference does it make if it is a buff to their stats or the terrain itself?
I just don’t get why the programmers decided to give the bosses a throne if they could just give them the stats, thrones are unnecessary for bosses to have. I just don’t understand it from a game design perspective
Thrones are usually seize indicators, so if you have a seize map, the throne makes more sense. It’s also easier to give them stats through terrain than just giving them avoid/defense manually. Not sure what advantage there is in giving a stationary boss stats in that way when it ends up the exact same.
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Well, my original comment was directed mainly at avoid/healing from terrain, as it makes fighting bosses slightly tedious and RNG-dependent. I’d prefer, if you wanted a boss to be harder to bring down, that you just make them bulkier while removing the avoid bonus they’d receive from the terrain. I would not recommend 1:1 replicating the effects of terrain on the boss, as this really doesn’t change anything.
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