Insane Difficulty: New Ogre Battle Hack Progress - Insane Difficulty

Here's an example of condensing palettes from different classes (that's an enemy Shaman):

Shot with Lans' and Warren's classes swapped, because why not:

Got it. 'Might've worked even with Lans, but he was edited already.' This is great work.

I changed all non-weapon equipment to not alter the element on melee attacks for the equipped character. Only one of these items granted substantial Str, and all of them would resist the same element as the wear would now be attacking with, making it all pretty counter-intuitive. Plus I think it was pretty unclear to the player that they were even getting an element to begin with.

I closed an exploit that was present in the original game and previous versions of this hack. Liberating cities/temples multiple times no longer grants additional tarot card drawing opportunities.

Tarots are no longer pulled from cities and temples after a stage has been cleared.

I removed the Tactics Factor from enemies. This means that enemies set on Weak will not longer deal and receive more damage, and vice-versa for Strong. When I set enemy groups to Weak or Strong, it's because of how I want them to target, not how much damage I want them to deal or take. Enemies set to Weak also don't need the extra damage, they're generally pretty nasty on their own, and often the extra damage might defeat the purpose (i.e. if I want to force the use of a sturdy leader... that sturdy leader might die anyway just because of the extra damage). It also makes it more difficult on the player to guesstimate how much damage the enemies are going to deal. So all-in-all I think this is a lot of pros with few to no cons.

Keep the hype increasing.

[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>-[HYPE]>

Physical elemental weapons will no longer override the default melee element of a unit.

Not gonna bother including this in the main topic, but changed tribute gold display to show 0 gold in all situations where you will get 0 gold (stage clear or after first day of an uncleared stage)

Losing the Rebel Base now ends the game in a Game Over rather than forcing a stage retreat. By far the primary reason for this is to facilitate a lot of my other changes that rely on the assumption that a stage cannot be re-fought and that the game cannot be reset mid-stage (meaning retreat, save, load, retry). Chiefly, this is to prevent people from collecting town tributes once, letting the base be taken, resetting the game (clearing RAM), and then retrying the stage to collect tributes again. That being said, I don't mind this change on its own either. This is a hardtype, so allowing your base to be taken should have serious consequences.

Addendum: As a result of this change, the "GameOver" screen now displays for a shorter length of time than before. It actually displayed for an obnoxiously long amount of time previously. So much so that I'd wager a lot of people didn't even know you could load your save again without resetting the SNES. Now it just stays up for a few seconds after the animation finishes.

Went ahead and capped player units to 4 levels above enemies. Meaning enemies 4 levels below a player unit and lower do not grant that player unit any XP. I also removed the 1 XP gained for fighting a battle, and added 1 to the XP gained per kill at most level difference ranges to compensate. A further adjustment to the XP curve could be a possibility, but is not currently planned.

The HP+, Str+, Agi+, Int+, and Luk+ items have been removed from the game. Ogre's Mirror (Ali down), Abyss Shard (Revive Undead), and Full Heal (Heals a unit's HP to full) have been added in their place. This leaves me with 2 freed item slots if I ever want to do anything with those in the future, but for now those two slots have been removed from enemy drop possibilities (the item drop is re-rolled if either of these items pops up, causing you to receive a different item instead). These 3 items were both easy to code and good contributions to game balance, and I wasn't able to come up with anything else that fits those requirements. This could be something I come back to at some point in the future, but for now: it's on to other things!

Moved the item name table and both attack name tables into the expanded ROM space where I can rename them easily. Oddly enough, the maximum length for attack names is 9 characters (9 out of battle, 10 in battle). I say oddly enough, because I can't imagine why the translators chose to name the Nightmare attack "Nitemare" given that they are not restricted to 8 characters. And no attack name in the game is longer than 8 characters.

Tarots that previously gave permanent stat boosts have all been given new effects. The effects are as follows:

Chariot: Cha+1
Justice: Cha+2
Judgment: Ali+2
Hermit: Ali-1
Star: Reputation+
Magician: Reputation-
Luck: (same effect as Fortune)
Strength: Heals the unit's characters
Hanged Man: Damages the unit's characters

Hermit, Strength, and Hanged Man are all new effects.

Tarot card damage was changed to not use Time and Movement Factors. For Movement Factor, I feel like this is a no-brainer. All that including the Lord's movement factor in tarots accomplishes is making the cards weaker in the ocean, desert, mountains, etc. Time Factor was less offensive, but overall, I don't really value there being an optimal time of day to use your tarots.

This counts for both the Lord and the targets, meaning that the only factors for tarot card damage are: the Lord's Str/Int, the target's Str/Int, and the target's resistance to the element involved. Tarot card damage may be subject to further adjustments once I'm closer to the playtesting phase.

zombero, on 25 May 2014 - 04:43 PM, said:

Also "Maelstom" and "Evildead". They certainly seemed to think they had an 8 letter limit.

True that. I don't know how they got that impression...

Went ahead and made tarot damage based on the Lord's level (x4, with a base amount added) instead of Str/Int. This should actually have no significant impact on Tarot damage at all, since tarots already ignored the Lord's equipment and there's now no Str/Int+ items in the game. But what this lets me do is have the Lords actually gain different amounts of Str and Int again!

Maybe they used the same method to name items and skills/spells when they were developing, so they kept it to 8 letters so they could have the item icons in there too? Basically it would just an artifact of a shared naming convention between the two categories. It's part of the reason why hacks can make easy improvements sometimes.