Now that several stages are out, I've compiled a list of re-balance and design ideas (actually, it's more like I'm compiling that list right now) based on some of what's been encountered so far. So, in no particular order, here are my thoughts! Feel free to add your own or to comment on these:
-I'm not satisfied with the way elemental weapons work right now. Currently, elemental melee skills (Smite, Chop, etc.) are overridden by physical elemental weapons. This is because I wanted to encounter Paladins using holy weapons and Evil Ones using dark weapons, etc, and if they could get those elements even while using a physical weapon, there was no incentive to not just use a physical weapon. I'll have to come up with a different way to incentivize this, though, because without keeping the element when using a physical weapon, the base elemental property has little meaning for the player. Perhaps weapons could provide a 5% damage boost when using the same element as the melee skill they are being used with (or a 5% penalty in other situations). I'd prefer a mechanic that is more transparent than that, but that's the best I've come up with so far. Something to keep a class wanting to use its thematic weapon element, so that physical element weapons can stop overriding their melee element.
-Kiss's properties could probably use a couple adjustments. For one thing, I'd like to make it more of an offensive buff and less of a defensive one. If Kiss is to be a solid defensive buff, then the synergy of Kiss's damage reduction with healing is a bit worrisome. Especially with how well the defensive buff synergizes with a lone front row monster, essentially buffing the defense of your entire front line pretty substantially. On the offensive side, I'm wary of how Kiss is generally much more effective when used on an AoE attacker. So, in total, I'm considering buffing Kiss's effect on offense, but cutting its effect on AoE attacks in half, and slightly reducing its defensive benefit. Lastly, Faeries should probably start with 2 Kisses. Them only having 1 Kiss is pretty much just a relic of the original game where their base class was pathetically bad, but there's no reason to do that to them in this hack.
-I'd like to do something to incentivize all-flying squads. Generally, flying classes tend to be a bit weaker than their land equivalents (though this is mitigated partially by their terrain advantage in most combat situations). This leaves little reason to use them outside the context of giving sky movement to an otherwise ground-type squad. I'm thinking of giving flying units a combat bonus (sort of like an extension of the in-combat movement bonus) based on how much of your squad is flying. Something like (4 - size_of_ground_units) * bonus. Where size would be 1 for small ground units and 2 for large ground units. This also makes logical sense as the flying character would be less encumbered by carrying some many ground characters by him/herself. It would probably be a rather modest bonus, the goal here would just be to make flying squads more viable, not to make them better than other traditional squads.
-Per Taylor_778's suggestion, I'd like to make elements matter more. They are setup to matter more as the game progresses, with resistances becoming more extreme in the higher tier classes, but they could stand to be substantially more meaningful now. It would also make phys weapons a bit more tempting if an elemental weapon meant dealing little to no damage in the wrong situation, which is probably a good thing.
-I'll be looking for more opportunities to add even more counterplay, in general. One such idea is to have the Samurai class line deal more damage to small classes, and less to large. I'll also be looking for more places to include added effects on attacks.
-Class promotion requirements could probably use some tweaking in terms of Cha and Ali. Heck, maybe the whole system needs a change. Managing Cha and Ali is a lot harder in this hack for a variety of reasons: the difficulty, having to use more squads, having to spread out across the map, and often having fewer enemy squads per stage. Generally there's just a lot of other stuff to worry about on top of having to worry about Cha and Ali. One way I plan to mitigate this is with greater access to Cha+, Ali+, and Ali- items (for a price, of course), but that shouldn't be the primary way. I'll have to think about possible ways to make this a bit easier.
-Make late-stage enemy deployments more dangerous. I've already been doing this to some extent, but it could stand to be raised a notch or several. This is to combat the fact that the player will generally have more morale factor by then.
-I'd like to restructure the ailment formula a bit. Stay tuned on how that will work, as I'm not yet certain myself.
-Water units. I'm nearly satisfied with how they work now, but they might be just a bit too strong in the early game. This doesn't really have to do with what they gain from their movement type, but rather the fact that Octopi get 4 attacks and Mermaids get an early AoE skill. These factors mellow out as the game goes on, so it's really only a concern for the early game. Maybe it should be left alone just so that water units have a particularly strong early showing, though, since there's a lot of pre-existing, anti-water unit bias that will probably exist in the player's mind at that point. Tough call, this one.
-High Sky vs. Low Sky. I'm thinking of scrapping this altogether... again... and just going with "Sky". I don't like having one movement type that is just worse than another, and I don't want to make a single large flier weaker in combat than two small fliers, either. The only possible inclusion for a "Low Sky" I could see is if a single small flier gave a worse movement type than 2+ small fliers or 1 large flier, but my previous attempt to make a change like that caused the game to lag to death.
-A combat penalty for leaderless units. Wouldn't want this to be too big, probably no more than 10%. But this, along with the slower map movement speed on leaderless units, would have the potential to add more kill-the-leader type strategy, and also make having a durable leader all the more appealing.
-Give special characters a small penalty when not leading a squad. This idea has been floated before, but I've had (plenty of) time to consider it now, and I'm definitely liking it. This, along with the bonus they provide as leaders, will provide some good incentive to spread special characters out between squads as much as possible.
That's all I got for now! I still hate all of my ideas for the Giant family, they seem to be an on-going problem child for me design-wise. But other than that and the things listed here, a lot of this hack seems to be coming together. It's a weird feeling to be able to look at this game now and only see a couple dozen or so mechanics that I still hate haha.
