Insane Difficulty: First order of business! - Insane Difficulty

Alright, I've officially completed and released my SMT: Nocturne hack and Ogre Battle is now my primary focus. For those interested in the Nocturne hack, it can be found here: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3299/ (I haven't been able to get it uploaded to this site yet)

So the first issue I'm looking at on returning to this hack is a potential revision to the current Morale system. Currently enemies deploy from their base and their map movement AI has been modified to essentially counter the player's liberation plans by fanning out their troops to key locations.

The new setup I'm considering is: having an initial round of enemy troops that begin on various towns. these enemies would generally sit on the town or patrol near it to fight off your liberation efforts. The upside of this approach is that it really ensures that battles will occur all over the map, and also starting from basically the beginning of the map. It also really gives you the feeling that you are fighting few enemy territory, rather than just snagging a few free enemy towns before you even run into any of their troops. The downside of this (at least to me) is that there is a certain amount of charm to the enemy sort of starting in the same position you do: with all of their troops popping out of their base around the same time that you pop out your own, and you both try to accomplish your own goals on the map. However, this whole idea is really better suited to a map where all the towns are neutral and you and the enemy are both vying for control over them. It doesn't really make sense that you and the enemy would both be entering the map from opposite ends in order to fight over control of the towns that... the enemy already controls.

So what do you think about these two potential systems?

Should I go for the some-enemies-starting-on-towns route, which I am leaning toward, I'll need to make some revisions to the Morale system. Basically, each enemy deployment needs to have their own "morale" (or whatever this winds up being renamed to) that is weighed against how many towns the player controls. After all, I'd have different expectations of how many towns the player controls when attacking the enemy sitting on a town that's right next to their base vs. when they're meeting enemy troops that were deployed all the way from the enemy's main base. Ideally, this stat would be visible on each enemy deployment, so that the player knows who is favored in a matchup against that squad. I will have to look into the viability of that.

In addition to this, I've learned a decent amount more about hacking since the last time I really worked on this, so I'll be making some updates to my development environment, as well.

i came to hunt you down after witnessing your SMT mod launch on romhacking i was like 'yoo thats the guy who made lavos awakening and praised my sexy giga mutant guide for his mod'

where do i go to give you feedback on your nocturne mod? im hyped to play it. and if there are to ever be any post release changes, you probably need to know asap while the games code and layout is still fresh in your memory registry.

Nice. Just downloaded SMT and I'll check it out soon. As for this issue, I like the idea of the enemy having units on all or most towns. Having a really tough unit on the last town before the enemy base would give a miniboss feel to it. Might be an issue of needing too many units on some of the bigger maps as you'd still need units out threatening towns that have been taken and the player base? Looking forward to more Ogre Battle however you make it work!

Wow. You know, I never actually finished the original Nocturne, but I've heard that it was actually legendary levels of hard. I'm almost curious to try it out without actually having finished the original.

dawnbomb, on 04 February 2017 - 02:13 AM, said:

The best places would probably be over in the gamefaqs forum or in the megaten reddit, there's topics for it in both places. Eventually there'll be a forum here. Hopefully, maybe. Or if you wanted to write a review for it, then there's that romhacking.net page for that. There've been a decent number of people who jumped on it immediately, and a couple bugs were found, though very minor ones. I'm just glad nothing has broken completely yet. <_<

Augestein, on 04 February 2017 - 10:50 AM, said:

That would be quite the experience!

Taylor_778, on 04 February 2017 - 08:54 AM, said:

Yeah, there's only 9 squads to play with and a stage can have up to 20 towns, so they wouldn't quite be everywhere, but there's a lot of possibilities to try there. The biggest hurdle is going to be trying to communicate the modified morale factor to the player so they know how much of an advantage/disadvantage they have against a particular enemy squad in that regard. There's not really any space in the enemy deployment status screen for a new stat, so I'd possibly have to expand the window to make room... may wind up being pretty difficult.

I think the stationing enemies at towns already would create an interesting dynamic, and that does kinda make sense from a thematic standpoint now that you bring that up. I'd love to see how this plays.

If different towns can have different morale levels maybe the towns with units on them could give more morale.

Welp, it seems I have my work cut out for me here. I kinda left this hack in a state where it is difficult to work on, so I'm going to have to do a lot of foundation-building before I can really have anything exciting to show. I did look into the mechanics of resizing the status window for enemy deployments (in order to add a new stat, "Resolve", "Attrition" or what have you) and it seems doable, if a bit time-consuming. So once I finish all my groundwork, that's probably where I'll start.

Well, I suppose I fibbed a bit, since the real first order of business is getting my development environment up to date! I've finished the first of two major parts of this process (the larger of the two parts) so it shouldn't be long to finish the remainder. I'm giving the Morale Factor dilemma more thought as I go on, since that's the biggest question mark in the design process going forward.

So, one other possibility for Morale Factor's implementation would be to have player's army begin with a neutral Morale. This Morale decays over time and increases when you liberate towns. The decay would be capped such that maximum decay + all towns liberated would either cancel out or leave the player with an advantage.

While being able to see this version of Morale Factor would be nice, it's not as essential as it would be in the case where each enemy squad has their own individual Morale. The problem that arises with trying to make this effect visible is not knowing where to put it... The reputation meter would be a great place, but obviously that spot is taken!

zombero, on 12 February 2017 - 06:21 PM, said:

What are you doing to update it?

Would it be possible for the reputation meter's color to change based on your morale? Or maybe the color of that decorative creature around the meter. We could get extra information without extra clutter.

iainuki, on 13 February 2017 - 05:46 PM, said:

Arranging my spreadsheets better and automating more data writes. Creating ASM injection points so that whenever I want to make new changes I can code in (1) ASM instead of hex and (2) not have to worry about physical space, as I can do everything through relative addressing.

iainuki, on 13 February 2017 - 05:46 PM, said:

Hmm well I'm not positive. It would depend on if the color palette used for the meter is used elsewhere on the map, which it seems like a good chance it would be.

However, I seem to keep drifting on how I want to implement this, thus my preferences have shifted again... Fortunately I have this development environment grunt work to keep me busy so this indecision isn't really holding up progress right now. I'm fairly certain that I'm getting close to where I want it though.

So right now I'm leaning toward giving every enemy deployment a hidden "Morale", "Resolve", or whatever you want to call it stat. This stat will be unchanging, with the exception of sending an enemy squad back to base, in which case it would be "refreshed" (updated to be equal to the Morale of the last enemy squad that was deployed). Enemies that initial spawn on towns would have lower values than those who spawn from the enemy base, and enemies spawned from base would have slightly increasing Morale the later they are deployed (all set manually). What will be visible is some sort of stat that can be viewed on the enemy squad itself. This stat would indicate how the player's Morale Factor (towns liberated) compared to that enemy squad's Morale. The most mundane possibility for this stat's name would be something like "Player Advantage:" followed by a positive or negative number. But I'd like to come up with a better name than that...

I can't wait for the next update, even though I technically have to. I think that will be a good time for me to restart my screenshot playthrough of this mod. As for the name of your morale status versus the enemy, maybe Vigor? Or Will, or Drive if you want to go all anime about it. Or you could just be consistent about the name of the system and just say Morale + or - whatever it happens to be.

I kinda like "Attrition", but I find it difficult to get it to work right. If it's a stat that shows up on enemies then you'd expect lower values to be favorable to the player, but lower amounts of attrition against that enemy would be worse for the player, which creates ambiguity. I could have a "P" on one side of the meter and an "E" on the otherside, but I dunno...

I guess you could just call it Strength + or - whatever. Attrition seems tied to practical things like logistics rather than a state of mind thing as implied by Morale.

Well I figure town control does have practical benefits in terms of supply lines, production, or whatever else might be associated with town and territory control. It's a bit abstract and meta, but has a decent justification I'd think...

In that case maybe Support would be a good word. Just a measure of all the things they're getting from the cities and higher-ups on their side. That might also paint a decent picture of how the armies far from enemy HQ are getting hardly anything to help them even though they're technically the first line of defense against the "rebels". It's hard to play army politics when you don't have much communication with the guys in charge of the region.

Well I got sick and had a good week or so of being busy... but still working on refining my development environment. Progress should be moving a fair bit swifter now. Also, LOOK HOW PRETTY THIS SPREADSHEET IS