decreasing the inherent value of units could probably make enemy crits feel less harmful for the player, but that’s a whole challenge on its own
how you make the player value their units less?
You ever played Four Kings or Shackled Power?
Well Technically, You don’t exactly play around the crits, if you design a map with a few killer weapon enemies, you’re banking on the fact that the player WILL avoid attacking them directly or on enemy phase. If an enemy has a crit weapon they’re meant to be attacked on player phase/ from range.
Low crit is an issue because if you leave crit on light magic for example, people won’t associate those tomes as killer tomes, therefore they get screwed over whenever the tomes actually do procc
if you’re that concerned use pure waters; none of this even has to do with the topic anymore
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Yknow I wonder why we’re focusing on the light magic? I just responded to the rng discussion, my point was low crit is bad rng and light just so happens to have low crit. I’m not singling out light magic in particular.
use parthia instead :^)
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And I wonder why everyone is so focused on RNG when the topic is on gameplay elements from hacks we like.
To get things back on track…
I’m a very big fan of the several movement tools that hacks have been using.
Stuff like Eternal Winter’s shields and rampant use of canto/Galeforce and Cerulean Coast’s OP refresher (that got nerfed, iirc) are really fun to play around with.
Sometimes it’s fun to let the player go crazy with movement and throw balance out the window.
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Can you elaborate more on your perspective? Professor Layton has plenty of puzzles, but who would say it’s less satisfying to find a valid solution to them just because there is no RNG-based chance of the game saying no to a perfectly good answer, or yes to a completely wrong or “close enough” answer? Outside of self-imposed challenges like Iron Man runs, all you’re really risking is your time when RNG forces you to reset a map.
If you find a way to utilize your limited resources to beat a challenging map, while expending the fewest resources and maximizing resource gain, preferably with sufficiently clever usage of the map’s gimmick if present, RNG shouldn’t slap your face and tell you no, your plan wasn’t good enough to handle the threat of unexpectedly good or bad luck. But juggernauting with high stat units inherently minimizes the risk of RNG screwing you. Grind to give a unit higher skill, a better crit rate, higher luck, a lower chance of being critically hit, more health and defense, less damage taken when attacked and less risk of death if a crit does happen, a better chance at successfully enemy phasing numerous enemies without any need to play fast and send many frail units to chip down and eliminate dangerous enemies… I’ve seen players optimize the intellectual challenge out of the game by relying on overpowered units to do basically everything for them. People who like playing like that… More power to them. It’s a single player game, play it however you want. But why can’t there be a difficulty option that rejects easy answers like that? No nostanking, no dodge tanking, no vantage or vantage crit builds. That’s one of my game’s design goals. I have yet to hear arguments in favor of units being stat screwed or stat blessed. I don’t believe RNG’s chance to carry the day or ruin your day is inherently tied to Fire Emblem. But this discussion should probably get its own topic so it doesn’t dominate this thread.
I loved Four Kings, never played Shackled Power. Was it good? Did it have any unique gameplay elements?
Also I just remembered, Fire Emblem Storge is a masterpiece. That part near the end where a certain unit gets stronger deserves praise, the last time I saw a game tie a late promotion to the story was Roy, and this game pulled it off way better.
I did really enjoy how player units in Deity Device used magic, and by extension other hacks and fangames that makes use of items limited per chapter instead of per game. I’d rather not remove the long term planning aspect of weapon durability in it’s entirely, but I enjoy having another system of strong, per chapter tools I can make use of.
Also, less gameplay, but I’m glad more hacks have character with glasses now. I’ve always wondered why glasses are so rare in Fire Emblem despite the historical evidence for their existence.
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Making certain tiles being visitable. Not a mechanic used in any rom hack or official game but allow me to explain. If you were to visit a fort, you could have a chance to find an item and same for forests. Outside of that, it would be the usual dialogue of “Nothing seems to be of use here.”
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Higher chance for a fort because it is a building. You could do the same for traps being in forests and forts as well. Have the unit temporarily asleep or poisoned, whatever works.
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Ok, so this is something I’m doing in my own hack, but hear me out. I’ve never seen anyone else do this before.
If you have a skill set to 0, everyone has that skill all the time.
And you can have skills be conditional on certain terrains.
You see where I’m going with this?
If you want, you can make terrain grant skills.
And for my Hack, I used this to make it so that Forts give +2 range to Bows and Magic. Effectively making them a sort of “Watch Tower” terrain.
And if you wanted to go one step further, you could make a custom tileset, and make a unique Watch Tower terrain, separate from the Fort.
Overall, I think Terrain in GBA is kinda bland. It’s really only ever defensive, and never offensive. But giving skills to terrain could go a long way for spicing things up.
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The limit for necroposting is a week right?
So in FE Latino: You Can (Not) Ban, you choose a group of 4 character to play for the next 2 chapter (the group get 2 more character on the second chapter), after which you pick another group for another 2 chapter. (There is more map after you play each groups I think but the hack’s too hard for me). I would like to see another hack where you choose groups of character, either for the rest of the run or alternating between them on the same run.
Also, I know it’s not really gameplay related, but this is important to me. In FE Lat too, each group (and some character within that group) have their own battle theme that plays when you fight with them (or against them, replacing the default battle theme). I would like if each group in a hack have their own music to shape their identity, either as the map music (like FE4’s army theme), or as battle theme, or maybe both!
The “fort” maps were awesome.