Insane Difficulty: What modifications would you make to the mod? - Insane Difficulty

What the hell. Browser/internet hiccup made me double post.

Check previous page for my last post. Also... delet this.

Some amount of randomization is definitely possible, and necessary to keep things interesting. It is also possible to randomize certain enemies, for example, having a few units on Golgorand randomly switch between being Archers or Knights, just so long as the combination of them doesn't break the sprite limit. However with my experience, if the game is anything with a significant amount of difficulty, people will reset until they get an easier combination of enemies, if there's too much randomization.

You brought up a good point about Chiris/Masamune. I've never been a fan of rare consumables, but I also think they should take some effort to obtain. I'm going to look at if it's possible to make them buyable, but not with an "easy" trigger like story progression. Something like opening the DD or getting newgame+ in my mod.

I can tell you flat out, that changing the formation screen so that you can see where enemy placement is, is either impossible or far outside my coding ability. While it would be nice to see where enemies are before you do anything, or even to see which ones are placed on upper/lower ground on a map like Doguola Pass, if the game has anything significant challenge wise, most people aren't going to beat battles on their first run. So, scouting runs can't (and shouldn't be) completely eliminated.

I was under the impression that the only Chirijaden in the game was acquired using move-find item in the Deep Dungeon. If it is also possible to acquire it by stealing (or catching?) then while it is certainly still a pain in the ass to acquire one and especially multiples it is still in line with other end-game gear (except perhaps that other end-game gear is not required to use character skills.)

How about simply making it possible to Draw Out from weapons you have equipped and perhaps even having the chance to break weapons only apply to non-samurai who use Draw Out? I never understood this silly feature to be honest. Their damage output seems to be fairly balanced in 1.3, even for being unevadeable so if they were too strong in Vanilla to have unlimited uses (I never used one) then this has already been addressed.

I don't think the average player should be able to do everything on their first try, but I do think a talented player who is already an expert in the genre who takes their time to learn the mechanics and play it strategically should be able to (and in the case of insane difficulty I would say that maybe the best 100 people in the world - I don't believe I'm one of them - should be able to go through it on their first try.) Anything above this I consider to be difficulty based on the ability to save and load games. I have fond memories of Mount and Blade auto-saving whenever you close the game and not allowing save games beyond that. This extends beyond FFT, of course; it seems to have become the norm for games, which just makes it annoy me even more.

Some games address this themselves in different ways, in Final Fantasy it has generally been represented by the ability to flee and I think this may be what is needed in FFT.

Give all characters a new ability: Flee. This instantly ends the battle. You keep all characters that were standing - the rest are dead and their gear is gone. All survivors keep whatever JP/EXP they gained and do a brave check: if they fail it's -1. Give Ramza Tactical Retreat for 100 JP which does the same thing without a brave check/penalty. Consider making it a requirement to stand at the edge of the map/specified locations activate it to make it harder to get out.

This would allow actual scouting runs without the need to cheese the game and wouldn't penalize you overly hard if that's all you came to do with the engagement to begin with. (You could essentially just do a tactical retreat on Ramza's first turn, hopefully well out of range of the enemy. Sometimes someone is already down at this point - this means you can't do it 100% safely - for some fights even auto-haste wont be enough - this is good.) After fleeing, the battle keeps whatever randomized setup was generated when scouting. Some fights should not be able to be fled from, of course, such as those where you are fighting your way through a castle (those are also generally the ones where you have just been given the option to save the game, anyway.)

A better alternative to messing with the formation screen mechanics might be to add cutscenes before story fights showing Ramza and a scout (thief, ninja, marksman, etc.) on the outskirts of a given area counting enemies, marking fortifications, etc. before launching the standard formation screen. For story battles the only random element I know of is zodiac signs so a cutscene for a story battle would apply regardless of randomization and player level. As with fleeing it should not be for all fights. Any fight where the player is ambushed (such as Dorter 2 or Goug Machine City) they lose this advantage. I think this would add greatly to the tactical feeling of the game and give a player a better chance at deducing a strategy when choosing which characters to bring and where to place them.) It would certainly be nice to be able to change equipment (but probably not jobs/skills) at the battle formation screen, but I understand if it is not within the realms of possibility.

I have too many games to play, as is. I'll download them all at one point for when I get old.

I would make 1.3 great again.

Replace the tutorial guy with philsov and replace all tutorials with extracts from The One True Bible.

Also turn Cactetagarion into a plot point.

Quote

This sounds good. I don't use Musty much as is, so a minor buff could be good.

Quote

Not quite sure what I'll do about this. There was a mod that made all jobs have the same speed growths/multipliers, which was an interesting idea, but I feel like it completely neutered speed as a stat, actually making the game less complex and interesting. Understand that my default position is to make minimal changes to the mechanics of 1.3, but add features that give the player more options. So what I would prefer to do is modify other aspects such that they can compete (such as cutting down the charge time of wizards, or giving them higher MA so it's worth waiting for spells.) Then again, I will probably make two versions: one where I don't mess with enemy growths and one where I do.

Quote

I don't mind the idea of making those items slightly more available, but I wouldn't want to do it in a random battle, whereby infinite items could be obtained. Also, while rare equipment being broken makes me reset, most battles with equip-breaks tend not to be very long (the exception maybe being Adramelk, but I just give all my guys maintenance for that), so I just figure it as part of the battle parameters that should affect my set-up

Quote

Agreed. Outside of my scope here.

Quote

I've looked into it somewhat, and it has some interesting things (like werewolves) that I may add, but I'll check it out further.

Quote

So, I'm trying to imagine a circumstance in which I would ever use this instead of resetting (a viable option since the beginning, cheesy or not). I feel like this doesn't really add anything to the game except to make an already common practice (resetting) more "honorable" by making it an in-game feature. But hey, if it's easy, I might implement it.

Quote

I've got my best men on it. This mod will be second to none.

Good thoughts. What others do you-all have? New items, new classes, new enemies, new/altered battles?

New items: I LOVE STATUS INFLICTING ITEMS, they serve well until oracles/mediators are a thing. Of course, please don't do silly things like an item that applies haste/Protect/regen, just keep it at "situational items" (Oh, and please make it so phoenix downs just add reraise: It must be done)

New classes: I'm.................very comfortable with 1.3 classes: each one has a purpose in the grand scheme of things, they just need little tweaks. Example: Oracle should have all of his spells on AoE and medium/good accuracy, so the Mediator don't cumber-stomp him when appears with better status effects without mp cost

New enemies: that's up to you, but if you can add more monsters it would be awesome

new/altered battles: The more, the merrier.............if they have a good design (PLEASE: don't make another ghost of fury ragefest)

For the sake of emphasis, I'll say something you may not want to hear: a big osrt of what makes 1.3 poor in terms of design is the growths and multipliers. My first change to it would be straight around that.

My second change would be changing status immunities: No more "immune to everything" enemies. No more Ribbons and the like. Make balance be balance, and not be negating parts of the game.

Also, a part where you could get ingenious? The DD is a joke. 90% of the battles (not exaggerating) are the same as the next one. You could create brand new battles there with more mixed units.

Last thing: Change enemy only skillsets to be more than just damage. A goos example to follow is Quek, his enemy only skillset is kind of clever. A bad examole though, Zalera.

Quote

That's the thing though, speed as a stat is as powerful as it needs to be when multipliers are aptly applied. Going first is powerful enough to dictate the direction a battle goes: the difference between being proactive and reactive makes a large difference in the direction a battle goes... I mean, Chess of all things has entire strategies dedicated to simply being able to go first, and consequently entire strategies are developed around the act of going second based on the first person's moves. Let's not underestimate that at the very least. When people say nerf multipliers, they mean no enemies with stuff like say "Ghost of Fury" having 160 multiplier for speed and a growth multiplier of 75 (lower is higher) ensuring that even if the player leveled up as a thief, they are ALWAYS slower than it. Even worse, is that multipliers to this level ensure that this thing will double some of your slower units. Which means that it becomes completely noticeable that one of your units is actively contributing less. That's... Unacceptable. Also, don't forget that equipment is something else that could be used as well. Instead of having a ton of classes have clothes / hats and helmets /armor, mix it up a bit. Let's try that for a second:

clothes / hat - Thief
clothes / helmet - Squiare
armor / hat - Geomancer
armor / helmet - Lancer

see? Just by changing the equipment options could change a lot of things about how people equip classes. You could also use it as a balancing act as well with careful consideration. You don't have to do this, but it is something to consider as another variety sort of thing.

I can already tell you that if you take a "make spells faster" you'll end up with the same problem that 1.3 did. It made its spells faster, and to compensate for that, units were made faster, and then units ended up being so blindingly fast that we ended up with in 1.3. So the speed ended up more awkward than Vanilla where you had things like "I'll use Charge +20, but only after I hit an enemy with stop... Wait... Why am I doing that again?"

Yep. The part that most people miss about speed and charge times in FFT (hint: and about stats as well, only that speed is more visible because of how central it is to the engine) is that it has to be balanced in an integral way. If you take 1.3 and make spells go faster, it will make spells too strong. If you lower speed multipliers, spells will be too strong. If you make spells slower, it will be the opposite.

Also Augestein, the analogy with chess applies to a lot of things in FFT (as it should) but it doesn't with magic, because of the charge times. In FFT's small relatively small maps (compare with Tactics Ogre for example), most of the time, a slow team of mages will take irreversal control of a battle, because you'll go after everyone and be able to mass cast (bonus points with AoEs). That's such a broken strat in 1.3, that when learned to use right, it will carry you through chapters 1-3 and part of 4 as well (I learned all about it in my challenge).

Augestein, on 22 November 2016 - 07:04 PM, said:

We've all done that... Haven't we?

There are so many possible modifications to the game. But let's not mix personal wishes here.

Which should I consider will be a good change? Only 1.

1) NO JP, NO EXP.

Jobs / Abilities / Levels should be managed automatically as you advance in the game. I can, for example, after beating Mandalia Plains, grind JP until I get hamedo. It is possible, but I won't do it because game difficulty will drop so much in its first 3 chapters and because I don't have the time to do that, even if playing at 180 FPS and fast forwarding everything as I've been doing everytime.

Why not just unlock certain jobs / abilities? You can learn mjolnir and magic attack up and you will easily beat chapter 1 and 2. So let's lock Mjolnir until it is considered a non-op ability.

But really, having units using potion for about 3 hours is not fun. You can't learn Hamedo by just playing the game, mission after mission. You must waste time in random battles. When you get Rafa / Malak, again, lets start the potion party so they can get this advanced abilities. Reis? So late in chapter 4 she must start from zero.

Let's focus on 1.3's difficulty and not in the grinding part =D

I am just a noob. Played back in 2012 and got stuck at Elmdor and quit. I came back this year 2016 and now I got stuck in DD. That's way too much for me. I still have units I wish they had teleport / hamedo / move+3 but I am way too tired to start the potion party.

Thanks for this game! First time post btw.

Some amount of JP costs is required for pacing. I'll just use Monster Tactics as an example of pacing here. The way I've balanced JP costs is with a lot of free abilities (so that people aren't spending time in a random in a class that can literally do nothing yet), and just enough JP costs overall such that costs to unlock classes makes sense and so you don't have everything that the class has to offer right upon unlocking it. They are low enough that I can set any human enemy character to master a class, and that if you want something specific (such as Teleport or Hamedo) it's only a few battles or 1 crystal from a relevant enemy to get it. JP per action has been increased to be equivalent to having Gained JP up in vanilla, without having to dedicate an ability slot to it. Now, how this pacing works, if you switch classes frequently, you should be able to have every class unlocked (but not mastered yet) by ch 4 start. You will probably have every class except for Bard/Dancer, Ninja, Samurai, Blue Mage (calculator's replacement), and Mime by ch 3 start. This is without grinding. Monsters automatically get every ability they have, and are "unlocked" via plot progression.

Now, to create a system like you described, where abilities are "locked" until they're no longer OP, both requires an ASM wizard (if possible at all), and isn't worth the time it would take to code, when you can just fix vanilla's formulas so that things are roughly equally useful for the whole game. Special characters might be worth these kinds of changes, except that IMO their main issue is joining so late in the plot that it's a chore to raise them. To fix that, they should ideally join in ch 1 or 2 so they have a chance to grow with the player; or if joining in ch 4, be monsters or have a later class unlocked upon joining and JP costs actually balanced to properly pace and not encourage an absurd type of grinding.

This comes out of nowhere but: it is possible to asign classes unlocked and initial jp of special characters when they join?

Yes.



The box that the arrow points to is class level. The box next to it is the class that the character has unlocked. You can also, as usual, change zodiac sign, brave/faith, etc. I've set up JP costs such that 5 lv of a class is enough to master any class, so here you go...

Hey y'all, so I've made a lot of progress on the mod, working on a lot of graphics changes right now, but I should be ready to release it in a few weeks.

Quote

I agree, I also tend to think that 1.3 classes are well designed as far as skillsets. What I was referring to when I said more classes was adding other special job classes, e.g. paladin, alchemist (not the renamed chemist of other mods)...

Quote

The reason I suppose that I may not want to hear that is that it sounds like watering down the mod (at least in the absence of some additional insight on how to compensate for the lost stats and to re-buff enemies). Recall that there were past versions where certain aspects of the mod were actually more difficult than they are now, but I tend to agree with Arch where he said that 1.3 has been nerfed enough. What I'm working on is emphatically an ID mod, I'm not going for 1.3 content or even monster tactics, although I am looking to preserve the difficulty but with more variety. Bottom line is that the AI will never be as resourceful as a human player, and should have superior stats to compensate.

Quote

I completely agree that too much immunity makes things boring and should be used more sparingly – even arena battles in which you can't invite, steal, collect crystals or treasure are not that fun. And yes, end-game battles can seem pretty repetitive. So I will probably remove some boss immunities to some minor things for more variety.

Quote

So I agree a little less about this one – I actually think ribbons are a balanced-ish high-tier item in the sense that they are can viably compete with speed headgear, making the player choose between +2 speed and status immunities (or hp in very rare cases). If I were to change them at all, it would be to remove maybe 1 or 2 immunities from them.

Quote

Absolutely. I look forward to reworking the DD pretty thoroughly, with some awesome battles, and I'll be adding some interesting units. I'm also contemplating only having 1-2 battles per floor.

Quote

So this is good, this is more the type of advice I'm looking for. More of this.

Quote

Ok, I've been trying to get a concrete sense of what people specifically want when they call for lower multipliers (or how that would play out without modifying tons of other aspects). Obviously the GoF fight is a flaming beacon of absurd multipliers, but it's also an optional fight in a sidequest that you can bypass with another fight (as I assume most do), so in this context it kind of assumes the role of hyperbole to exaggerate the badness of 1.3 growths. I absolutely get your point on this one, and I don't anticipate adding GoF type fights. But let's talk specifics. We've been through how you'd like lower HP for Altima, which doesn't seem unreasonable. What other story enemies are too fast/strong? Let's talk about how I might reduce their multipliers without making them too easy. I'm looking for minimalistic changes that solve some problems but generally preserve the difficulty (or increase it by making broken player strategies less viable).

Quote

Sure, I guess the problem is defining what balance is, since we have a few different mods with very different philosophies regarding it. So, a word on balance - unfortunately we don't really have a consistent reference point with regards to what it means to “balance multipliers” - that balance didn't exist in vanilla, most say it doesn't in 1.3, and the other solutions referred to seem to involve more of a solution that's as much neutralizing as balancing. Perfect communistic balance, where everything weighs nearly the same, is boring, and I'm frankly impressed with how well 1.3 does with being difficult and interesting, and in many important ways, somewhat balanced, although there's still some room for improvement. Besides, there are some ingenious strategies that we have seen in 1.3 due to its difficulty (a good amount of which can be attributed to high enemy multipliers), strategies that would never had been created if this mod was more tame.

Quote

So, I'm sure you can see how statements like this can be confusing from a balance perspective, when compared to statements that others have made that multipliers should be lowered to further benefit wizards/mage units. I might have wizards/mages use a different formula that makes them less OP early on, but more useful at higher levels than they are now. Another idea that I had was to slightly nerf their MA multipliers early on, but have better late-game gear available for them.

One thought I had was to lower the enemy level advantage – maybe have enemies be +1 or +2, but no +25s, to lessen the punishment for playing the mod at medium levels.

Well........ what if each one of us gave you a piece of mind?

For me, balance it's that both the player and the AI share they same amount of advantages/disadvantages. I mean, yeah both parts have the same skills/jobs/equipment, but when it comes to gameplay, the AI will always have an edge in the fight since it can use advance tactics like reflecting spells, disable important members of your team or even predict your moves BEFORE YOU ACTUALLY REALIZE WHAT IT'S HAPPENING.

There are several ways to tackle this and for me, Monster Tactics has the better one thus far: since you can tooltip EVERYTHING, after the first time, if you actually care to analyze all the whole thing while checking details like "X spell cannot be reflect" or "this monster can bypass Hamedo", the next time you are on equally terms with the game's AI when it comes to predict actions and nullifying possible paths like "whelp, I miss that 70% petrify, guess I'm going with plan B (ruins the monster's day with a well placed toad casted one turn before)"