Insane Difficulty: Man: This game is good - Insane Difficulty

Absolutely loved the review. The thing that stands out in all of it is how MT tries to be a game, and not a mod, so anything that is a thing is vanilla is just challenged in its own way, with a sense of "Why should this even exist?", like say the Soldier Office spam to get better brave and faith, which is certainly not a thing in MT.

This is really a good review to present the game to anyone who wants to play a good FFT-based game, not just a mod. Loving the LP so far Augestein, you've been one of the most active members around, which is awesome. And you've been playing better and better, I'll say.

Hart-Hunt, on 25 February 2017 - 12:16 PM, said:

Yeah, honestly, it's one of my favorite aspects of the game, as it's a type of mod that makes for a rather different style of playthrough.

Thank you! I think this is the most I've ever really played FFT in my life, and the love for it is still going pretty strong -- insane for a game that's so old. It's probably older than some of the members on the site!



This next fight is Dorter 2, and it's a pretty fun fight. Quite a few of the enemies possess the ability to fly making them more difficult to attack with melee styled monsters, so having magical beast or ones that can teleport or fly is the best option here. Ideally, you'd use Rad, Lavian, and Alicia and Ramza as your party here as the last group of monsters have actually become obsolete because they are scrubby children with only a few moves. The new monsters are stronger with complete movesets which will always make things easier.

The guests you have also serve as a bit of a buffer so you can't really get stuck here. Gafgarion is pretty powerful, and Agrias is sporting a much more grand moveset-- of which she can heal hp and mp as well as dish out the damage like before.

The one enemy that you'll need to be weary of is the "Big Bird." He's much tougher than any of the other units on the field, and will be a problem if you let him do what he wants for too long.

As you can probably tell, status effects' accuracy have been increased and are all faith based now, and faith is now the only check (no evasion). This serves several purposes: 1. makes them worth using for the player, 2. brings a consistent rule to the game on what brave and faith handle (exceptions are noted in tooltips), 3. gives the player a couple strategies for handling status with faith/innocent statuses and deciding which units to target first, 4. makes ai units that have status effects actually dangerous, instead of resulting in mostly wasted turns on their side. So if you have high faith units, and go after high faith and/or good compat enemies, you can see very high/100% hit rates happen.

So while status effects are a bit more attractive to and dangerous on the ai now, the attack command is a lot worse to the ai. AI still occasionally goes for a direct attack (like it did against the goblin), and hamedo is still good for berserk strategies or fighting against goblins/other enemies that use moves like seal evil; it's no longer the overbearing force it was in just about every mod that doesn't nerf/remove it.

Not sure if you took note of the way multiple reactions on the same unit work yet. Reactions happen in a priority order, which is mostly hardcoded to their slots. Those with a numbered priority order (0, 1, 2, 3), the game will do a check for presence of priority list 0 in the pre-attack phase. If there is no presence of priority 0 moves, if the move doesn't trigger it, or if the brave check fails, the game moves onto the attack phase. Then it'll check the presence of priority list 1. If that isn't present/fails, it moves onto check 2 and 3 in that order. Many new or recoded reactions are considered "free" priority (noted in tooltips as F). The check for these also happens in the pre-attack phase, but they go off simultaneously to the attack hitting. They are also checked completely independent of the listed (numbered) priority moves, which means they're fully compatible with any other ability, react to anything with the trigger (includes other reactions/multiple times for multihit moves), and sometimes you can get both a free reaction and a prioritized reaction happening in the same turn if both are present (chance for this is br%^2, or 49% for a 70 br unit). In the case of Rough Skin, Gafgarion attacking the thief meant that the Rough skin damage happened simultaneously to the damage he dealt to it, and the healing happened after this hit, which resulted in Gafgarion being at full health after this move.

My post was eaten...

This is the first Extra Battle that I took on where I actually seriously realized that I could beat the fight, as I find trying them in Chapter 1 to be far too difficult. As a result, you get to see me win with relatively little difficulty because I fought it previous when I was so weak (I probably should have kept that recording however).




I will say that most of the fights aren't THIS easy. I'll say that much.

And now we're given the first boss of the 2nd chapter. Gafgarion. He's not terribly dangerous on his own, but his friends are. They have a great ambush going on here, and the extra enemies added makes for a difficult time finding a safe haven spot. The likelihood of Ovelia being taken down or at least stopped from doing anything helpful is quite high here. This time you're left to your own devices as even Delita isn't even close to being invincible. However, if you can save him / Ovelia, you're rewarded with some extra fire power and a revive able unit.

My recommendation? Split up: I can't believe I'm saying this because in FFT it's usually a death wish, but here, staying close to one another means that you're stuck in status effect land. Emmy has actually given you 2 revive bots, so you don't really actually HAVE to take one with you in this case. If you bought Plumes, Agrias can also help with keeping people down and out of the count. And more pressingly, staying close means that Marlboro can drop a meteor on your head and kill you.

This fight isn't terribly difficult with the right setup, but consequently, the setup of the enemies is pretty clever overall. It definitely gets my seal of approval.

This is when a trend in MT's design starts, which I personally dislike. When I think of a mod using fixed classes (monsters), then I tend to believe that their skillsets will be role-orientes - A character will be able to do 2 or 3 things well. But in chapter 2 onwards, monsters are able to do too many things to actually be independent of each other. Many monsters are able to revive, cure, deal damage and status really well, which simplifies the tactical aspect of the game a lot. However, Emmy also evens this out with all of the rest that can be done to the onster families: Different R/S/M, Move, Jump, Speed, HP, MP and many other things.

The amount of content added to the game is astonishing and it's well implemented. And it makes it a must play. But I feel like the tactical aspect suffers a bit because of what I say. And because of high move / jump in general, but it's not as bad as in 1.3 fortunately.

Hart-Hunt, on 12 March 2017 - 08:29 PM, said:

I think some of that might be because of the sheer number of enemies on some maps and because she doesn't want you to feel that you HAVE to use Ramza. who has 2 skillsets, so she gave monsters a bit more abilities to help take away the whole "this is a chocobo, it heals" aspects that existed in Chapter 1 for instance. And it's definitely nice to have more than 1 monster type that can res, because it kinda sucked having to take the Chocobo around so much and not try out other things because no one else could revive. Statuses I think are done this way to keep certain monsters in check because so many monsters have various things that they are immune / not immune too. I'd have to keep playing to say for sure.

Movement could afford to be a bit lower ... Or perhaps range. Not really sure on this one.

Ramza is required for most battles (something I currently can't change). However I didn't want this to be the Ramza and Agrias show, where the only reason monsters are worth using is to have a warm body for the ai to target. Also as Augestein said, some of the later/optional fights have a lot of units (up to 4 vs. 12). And if I made it, for example, that only the Chocobo and the Tree can revive, many people will feel pigeonholed into just using those units for every battle regardless of what I give the other guys. I'd rather have a scenario where at least 70% of the available options are viable options for any given battle, and things like smart choices and execution are emphasized more. Making skillsets that are 100% unique from each other in the sense of, only one thing can revive, only one thing can cast reraise, etc and actually making none of these types of moves requirements for any battle requires a *much* lower difficulty level to shoot for in order for it to be fair to the player.

As it was said, most of what makes monsters unique are their r/s/m combinations, stat distribution, mobility, innate status/resistances, and moves that are exclusive to a few monsters (Self Destruct, Ulmaguest, Trap the Soul, etc.). Speed is inversely proportional to survivability. MP is balanced entirely on the presence of status effects, r/s/m, and a few gimmicky moves. Some moves could probably get a range cut, and some monsters probably could get a movement nerf, but I think it's fine the way it is for now.

Yeah, that's why I keep using Ramza simply put because I don't want to be certain that he doesn't fall too far behind.



I have one thing, I don't like Icicle Spear. It's very rude. It has pretty high damage, it can attack multiple times, and it can proc silence. It's so good that even the computer doesn't want to use anything else really. This fight is pretty short honestly. Oh, and Agrias was pretty bad here too. That cliff does wonders for making her have a bad time in the chapter.

This fight is pretty easy in my opinion. Dancing Chemist are actually pretty funny.

This fight is all over the place. You'll go back and forth with the enemies as you wage war against it and its revival. Trees are especially annoying with their bulk and pretty much a "STOP USING ONLY PHYSICAL CHARACTERS" unit if you've been using them for this whole game. One thing that I'll take note of, is that this really highlights two things:

1) Guest REALLY don't suck when you have control of them and it is an absolute godsend. I cannot stress this enough, you can really rely on these units when you can predict what they are going to do. It's nice that I'm not basically using the guest as bait to buy me time for extra turns but instead, contributing party members.

2) The extra moves that Agrias was given are great. Even without attacking she still has usefulness. And she pairs up really well with Chocobo units. Mana Battery + Mana Bomb is a great combo. Not gamebreaking by any stretch of the imagination but a good way to have a chocobo attack and be ignored because it's doing 0 damage when the enemy has a turn, only for you to give it MP just before the bomb happens.



I will say that even though I called the fight annoying in the video, I didn't mean that I necessarily hated the fight, but more like "annoying" in the back and forth. To be honest, I quite enjoyed this fight. I like the fact that there really wasn't much space to say there was a definitive point to really say that I "won" until the enemies were pretty much all dead. That's a nice touch.

But there are two things that I'll take note of: Don't Act having enemies still move even though they were hit with Don't Act is incredibly annoying, even if all they do with their turn is buff themselves, and two, Caution needs to be fixed in the fact that it says "_Unit_ Joined!" After you used it. Even if the event for causing them to join was removed, it just seems kinda strange and bizarre. At the very least, change the text so it doesn't seem so buggy.

And yeah, numbering is getting tiresome because I usually use "0" when counting personally, but I know a ton of people that get annoyed by that, and my numbers were getting screwed up because I kept swapping between battles and parts.

PS: Someone count how many meteors I dropped.

This is one of those maps that you don't get to really appreciate because the moments you actually have to fight on the map are squandered by the fact that it's so early in the game that no one really does anything interesting with it.

I wish those Lamia didn't fly though...

P.S: Those turtles taking their sweet time to move can go die in a fire.

This fight is one of those fights where I could honestly see this being a wall if you were too reliant on one strategy. Luckily I am not, and managed to cruise through this fight pretty easily. The main thing I can say is that I'm happy to see that Emmy actually makes use of where the enemies start to their utmost advantage.

One thing I really want to comment on his the fact that I'm glad that we aren't seeing "Knight, Knight, Knight" pretty much every fight that has enemy humans.

I found this fight to honestly be the easiest fight in all of Ch. 2 so far.

This is an interesting fight where the powerful boss is... Actually not terribly powerful in the offensive ways. So instead, the key is to kill the minions to prevent the boss from buffing all of the minions and having them destroy you because of it.

It's a different style of fighting, I love it.

I have to say, I'm not a huge fan of this fight. Enemies that constantly run away are just annoying like that. And it leaves a bad taste in my mouth because everything in the fight is so tanky outside of the pudding monsters that anything short of petrifying them is a pain. But rather than just be like "I HATE THIS" with no explanation, let me explain first:

The setup is actually fine, but the way the fight shuts down physical so much I'm not okay with-- we just had a fight that did this literally one fight ago, and I haven't seen a fight yet that has had bias for physical monsters as of yet. This makes me a bit worried about the differences between physical and magical monsters in this regard as -- while I like the idea of fights encouraging certain things, it feels as though physical monsters right now are only there to compliment magical, but aren't able to stand on their own very well.

Most every monster that's physical and doesn't have a ton of move is severely hampered here-- enemy defenses cause reduced damage so attacking with anything short of magic is pretty weak unless you run up and punch an enemy in the face-- of which you're dealing with evasion so it's not a very good idea. Gust have blade grasp so physicals are pretty lackluster as well. Depth 1 water poisons your characters, so you need to be careful where you stand, and it heals some of the enemy characters. That's not so bad as it literally means that you need to be mindful of where you stand as well as the enemy (a nice change of pace), but it also means that monsters like the Goblin that rely on short range physical attacks are at a severe disadvantage-- again.

PS: Gust are just annoying. Having an enemy that can inflict undead/innocent, heal itself through a blood sucking inflicting move that will in turn cause the enemy to kill itself by attempting to suck on the gust is... While clever, probably one of the most annoying things I've ever seen in this game so far.

I watched your video. A couple points:

1. Seal evil works on everything, not just undead. This was to return some consistency in the game (faith = status) and the vanilla formula didn't use faith. It was also to make Seal Evil useful on more than just about 3 maps of the game.

2. Morbols have Poison Heal, which outpaces Regen. Along with this map, that's why that one was able to go from small amount of hp to full in the matter of a few turns.

3. I wouldn't say this fight *only* shuts down physical attacks, just the ghosts because of blade grasp. Puddings are magically/elementally defensive, and morbols are overall tanky. Innocent doesn't block all magic, just healing and status. Easiest way to deal with the ghosts is Holy elemental moves, Mold Breaker (bypasses Blade Grasp), or to catch them on a turn when they're not Innocent for a Petrify.

I do blame a lot of your issues also on the map itself. Anything short of Terrain Mastery, Float, Fly, or Teleport *really* struggles to navigate the map due to the obstacles/2 deep shit water, especially if they're not immune to Poison. The obstacles also block line of sight making it hard to make Mustadio as useful as he should be here. Poison is really potent in this mod (never wears off, 1/4 hp) so a lot of your trouble was with dealing with the poison.

Emmy, on 15 April 2017 - 06:06 AM, said:

Emmy, on 15 April 2017 - 06:06 AM, said:

I know it works on a lot of things, that's why I started using it more later on, but at the time, it's just one of those things that's been ingrained in your mind so much that you can't help but think that. I just don't like that I finished the map by petrifying darn near everything.

2. Yeah, I noticed, because 1/4 heals are far stronger than regen's effects. No problem there, otherwise the move wouldn't have much use, and poison wouldn't be very useful. It's pretty powerful in this mod, and I'm thankful for that, don't get me wrong.

3. Yeah, that's why I ended up petrifying most of the ghost there because I felt that they were really annoying here. Like the least annoying thing to fight in this map is actually the puddings hilariously enough. And even with them being resistant to magic, you can still hit with with Don't Act, and leave them poisoned which still does enough damage to them, and because the things have magic, it's difficult to actually not be kited by them unless you kinda cruise for one like I did with my goblin.

Believe me, I would have cured the poison if I felt like there was enough time or if I knew that I wouldn't have to jump inside of the swamp again. It's honestly my least favorite fight in Ch. 2 by far. Monster Tactics shows why this map will forever be my least favorite map. The blocking of line of sights is probably well done, but terrain effects plus that is... Ugh,. and poison kicks your brother, your sister, and all of your friends so hard that I'm going to agree with Ramza's sentiments about the place.

I like this fight. It's a different style of battle in the fact that it's yet another map that wasn't used in the original for fighting. It's great. This time I don't have much to say on it because I did a post commentary this time around and most of what I say is actually in the video.

I played poorly, but this fight is fun as hell. I actually was talking a mile a minute here. So no need to say much more.