[Augestein]

This is where I absolutely draw the line for this mod and I'm going to be straight up honest. I don't want to play it anymore, so that's it. My "Let's Suck" Playthrough is going to stop at Altima. It's just not fun, and I'm sick of messing with the AI, watching some TV while playing and editing the hell out of my videos so I don't sound bored as fuck, because it's actually not really fun at this point. Anyway, let's talk about the battle.

This is one of the most shoddily designed, unfair, luck based monstrosities I've ever had the misfortune of playing. I'm actually going to start from the beginning so I can just setup how awful this is. I'll start by saying that my Ramza started this battle at level 68. It's pretty significant.

1) The new Vormav 1v1.

Realistically, this sounds exciting, and honestly, everyone that played this game beforehand did want this. I can't even lie and say no one didn't. It's the final confrontation from what is the the penultimate boss. Altima may be the final boss but there's more at stake against Vormav than Altima. Altima is just a force-- a big bad that's hyped up by the villains and the text. Sure, Altima may have more mystique than everyone else, but Vormav has been the scumbag you've been after the entire time and is indirectly responsible for the death of your entire family sans Alma. You've been wanting this: Ramza deserves to beat that dastard into the ground from the moment Vormav arrives on the scene. However...

The battle itself is terrible. Let's begin. For starters, Vormav is the same trash you've been tolerating on every single assassination mission at this point. He's a final stretch baddie that can spam equipment breaks on your characters. While this may have been sort of present in the original, this was not nearly as common of a thing to deal with in Vanilla. Equipment breaks aren't extra difficulty at this point: it's an extra reset when you have good gear on-- or even gear that you can't duplicate because you know, it's the final stretch, so even if you had millions of gold, it wouldn't even matter because you can't buy equipment? So why, on why are you adding MORE equipment breaks here? It just adds an additional aspect to a climactic fight that just shouldn't be there. Plus, if you don't have equip change, this literally means you have to go through 3 extra fights with broken equipment. That's... Stupid. That wasn't a problem in vanilla, it shouldn't be one here. Now in my case, what did I do? I broke his shit. And you know what happens? He starts using skills like "Dimensional Sword" without having a sword. Really? I mean Really? And my favorite part is how it's not able to be dodged. Well whatever, I ended up nerfing his stats to the ground leaving him to flail at me like an infant (might I add that it was like... 6 Power Ruins? I mean is this really necessary to have his PA this high? A Twist Headband / Power Sleave Ninja doesn't quite get PA like that, and he has to wear outdated wimpy gear). It's time I mentioned this, as 1.3 is excessive with this: enemy growths and multipliers are absurd. People that say that you really don't need to worry about levels are wrong. It's a huge problem by endgame because enemies have multipliers so high that they can essentially have whatever gear that want and by around 60ish, rock 999 hp and around 100-300 MP while STILL having around 12-14 speed. These stats don't even feel like there was any real thought or effort put into them, and just seem to be randomly jammed in the patcher as the stats don't even feel proportionate or anything just "let's make their multipliers higher than the players." It's almost offensive to see a KNIGHT class have more mp than a wizard. I don't care if it's a boss, this is horrid balance and reminds me of a games like this:

Spoiler

If you're wondering what's the point of this video, it's to show that the balance in this game is similar to 1.3, where defense hardly even matters, and the only thing that matters are whether you get a miss or a hit because the damage is too much.

Zodiac battle: And a problem begins immediately. Any status buffing equipment is bugged here. Meaning that if you walk in with your nice Save the Queen or Ragnarok, it doesn't work. How could you let something like this get by? If you're going to add extra aspects to the game, that's fine, but make sure it works first. I especially love the part where Vormav turns into a zodiac beast and he literally transforms into the words "Vormav" and a bunch of Japanese text or even just a bunch of floating arms before he actually transforms. You think I'm kidding?

Spoiler

It's like it was made in such a way that no one was expected to actually reach here... Either way, the Vormav battle is a chore and just as much garbage. Huge massive AoEs that inflict status effects on your character and hit pretty damn hard. Wouldn't be such a problem if you know, I wasn't spending a shit ton of time healing units and running around. Also, I must add that I only used 4 party members here instead of 5, and not through choice either. Reis didn't have Move +3 so she barely got to DO anything in this fight. Yes, that's right, this fight is pretty much balanced around the notion of your character having like 6 move. Filthy 5 move walkers can go to hell, because this game doesn't tolerate Move + 2 unless you have the speed of a god. Which, I assure you, you won't, because almost godspeed is still average speed in the land of 1.3. The fight even assures this by giving the boss CT Save to ensure that it goes on longer. Sure, she got to punch him for the final blow, but it meant very little as my Jav II guy could have done this. My favorite part is how this fight took about 53:37 with me frameskipping faster to speed it up, and about 40 minutes of the fight are nothing but the zodiac fight. This isn't fun. You get him in a loop where he acts like a dumbass and it's literally you punching, stabbing, nuking to kill this beast. Specials aren't anymore useful than a generic at this point, as punching him in the face is more cost efficient than anything else. Also, why was I given a Ragnarok as a War Trophy? Even the Onion Knight doesn't want the shitty Ragnarok because Knight Swords are force 2-hands and she'd rather use a shield or dual wield, of which case, is an option REMOVED for some stupid reason in 1.3. It didn't add balance, it just made them weapons that I don't use outside of very specific circumstances (in other words, they suck in almost all instances where evasion is an option).

And finally, we get to Altima. The final boss that we all haven't been waiting for. And it's terrible. The enemy is way too fast (as usual), as 15 speed Bard still manages to be slower than her, which means that any slow class is going to be a punching bag. But that's not even what made me hit the "fuck it" button. Oh no, let's take a look at the patcher instead:



I am NOT dealing with all of that hp. And 175 Multiplier of speed with 70 speed growth? MP growth is too high as well. Want to hit her with slow? Oh no, that's flagged for immunity now. Want to hit her with Don't Act to give yourself a couple of extra turns to swing the fight in your favor or even stop her from doing anything in her first form? Can't do that either. 35 Class Evade instead of 11? The only question that comes to mind is "why?" She already has THE best durability in the game, was there really anything else that needed to make her more durable? Well I'm glad you asked, and the answer is "YES!" Apparently, Arch thought that this class ALSO needed Magic Barrier, which means that every turn that you don't hit her, she recovers 999 hp in addition to being able to reduce damage from having Protect and Shell on, AND haste serves to make an already stupidly fast class go even faster to recover hp. The enemies on the field are of course flagged with immortal, and she can decide to revive them at any moment, which means that even if you wipe them, you might have to do it 2, 3, or 4 more times! Oh joy, what fun. I especially love the part where I'm expected to find any of this enjoyable. I can't plan worth shit because the AI can literally do anything it wants and has the durability to not need to worry about healing-- but has plenty of power to do so. I also love the Rafa style moveset "? Angelic Holy" Which can literally fuck over 1 person, or everyone or even no one.

But wait, suppose I manipulate the fight in my favor by having Altima think she should try to Double Sword my Hamedo Bard for way too long! The next form is even worse! This one would be more interesting if it weren't so poorly designed. You might be asking how it could be more interesting? And that's easy, it has 0 PA multiplier. Which IS more interesting as this essentially means that it's always going to cast spells. Interesting you think, until you realize that it's JUST as durable as the first form AND it has Mag.Def Up and Defense Up ensuring that this fight is even MORE boring somehow, AND it has no charge. So kiss any chance of casting a spell ever again goodbye. 190 speed multiplier + 70 growth is so stupid that I can't even begin to fathom how someone could ever have even let this thought cross their mind, let alone put it in a patch and released it for public play.

I think this might be quite literally the worst designed set of fights I've ever seen in my life. So once I get to that video being uploaded, I'm done, and I'm moving on to something else, like a good mod, like this:

Spoiler

A mod that feels like it had more time, effort, and thought put into it. I'm sorry, and I know I'm going to get a ton of dislikes for this, but I think people need to know, 1.3 fizzles out towards the end, and it drops off hard. You spend all of that time learning new tricks, getting better at the game, only for the last fight to remove almost every ounce of strategy and make almost every endgame class useless. Which is something even Vanilla never did. Sure, your Math Skill-- I don't give a damn what class it is because Math Skill shreds the game in two, unit was overpowered, but at least when it got down to it, you could USE a Squire with Math Skill and have fun with it even if it wasn't the most effective combo around, in 1.3, there are less fun combos to make because of how endgame is designed. It doesn't want you to think of clever things, it doesn't want you to have fun using Squire with Planar Magic.

Instead, it wants to show off how "hard" it is, and instead ends up being a glorified mess of a game-- not really worth playing after Chapter 3. There's a lot of little things about 1.3 that gets really lazy towards the end, and it's almost sad -- at the risk of sounding kind of off-putting, I apologize-- that this mod's scope claims to be a more "balanced" and challenging version when the changes don't actually unlock the AIs true potential, it just makes it a broken mess. And before a counter argument is made, let me start by saying that most of the battles are in Chapter 4, story + sidequest (ignoring deep dungeon because those are still "random" encounters at heart and that would actually total more which would help my comparison but make things look worse) total to about 60 (if you include the prologue fight). Which means the marking of the 33rd (and that's still being nice because some of them in Chapter 3 like Wiegraf 2 are pretty lousy) battle you do is rather imbalanced and a wonky mess to play. Because 28ish battles are absolutely not fun IMO (Germinas Peak manages to sort of be an exception for instance), that means about half of Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3 is not fun to play. Which sadly means... half of 1.3 isn't fun to play. And when half of a game isn't fun, that means...

I'd rather play something else. This shouldn't be happening for a mod IMO. If you managed to get here, I thank you for taking the time to read it.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to call this mod a piece of shit or anything, as it shows that it's a product of its time, and was something that was needed to be a bridge to even get a site like this into existence, and I appreciate what it's done for getting me to meet new people, but at the end of the day, if 1.3 was an actual game and not Vanilla, I'd absolutely not even have listed Final Fantasy Tactics in my top 10 favorite games to play. Which is a shame, because I LOVE the original game.

[quadpolar]

Quote

Also, why was I given a Ragnarok as a War Trophy? I can't switch my party around after this, so...

Stopped reading there, you can save after the Vormav fight. I forgot how it worked exactly, but it's the same in vanilla. And yeah, I'd be pissed too if I didn't know this. This is probably where most of the frustration came from.

Also, if you take the time to grind decent abilities on everyone, there are a few strats that minimize risk for Vormav and Altima by a lot. There's always a little bit of luck involved with Altima 2, though.

[Augestein]

quadpolar, on 11 September 2016 - 08:09 PM, said:

Stopped reading there, you can save after the Vormav fight. I forgot how it worked exactly, but it's the same in vanilla. And yeah, I'd be pissed too if I didn't know this. This is probably where most of the frustration came from.

Also, if you take the time to grind decent abilities on everyone, there are a few strats that minimize risk for Vormav and Altima by a lot. There's always a little bit of luck involved with Altima 2, though.

Then you missed the main bulk of my annoyance. Yes, it is where some of my frustration came from (albeit a small portion). You have to quit the game or die and actually reload the game from the main menu. The fact that you don't even remember how it works just sets the bar for how often people actually keep going from there then. And other bugs were fixed -- such as JP Scroll glitch, and new events were added such as Vormav fight. While it was a problem in Vanilla, it wasn't nearly as big of an issue because the game doesn't have you fight a boss for an annoying amount of time only for its second form to kill you with the relative ease.

What frustrates me about this is that it's actually not particularly fun to play however. We've already seen "Awakening" from Finath River, Worker 8, and Zalbag for instance, ?lvl Angelic is a move that now that I can pull up the menu I can evade. But so what? The first form isn't just the thing that's annoying. It's the fact that I'm going to spend about an hour of punching the shit out of Altima 1 again just to get another shot at Altima 2. What's going to end up happening is as I've stated, you buff your PA or MA versus Altima 1 and then beat the shit out of it as fast as you can for part 2 before it does something obnoxious to you. I don't find that fun.

Vormav I already defeated. I obviously beat him, I said as much. It's just Altima is obnoxiously boring to fight from another obnoxiously boring fight. The "lack of save" wasn't what I was complaining about. It was the mountain of hp from 2 forms back to back. I'm not talking about Vormav, I'm talking about Altima forms 1 and 2.

[quadpolar]

Augestein, on 11 September 2016 - 08:57 PM, said:

The fact that you don't even remember how it works just sets the bar for how often people actually keep going from there then.

No, I just haven't played the game in a while. I didn't bother to read the entire post, because i.e the point about Vormav breaking your equipment (which is sooo easy to avoid) just seemed like an obvious attempt to cram as many negative points into the rant as possible. Especially since Vormav/Hashmalum is such an easy battle. Yes, Altima isn't entirely fair and Arch designed it that way because it's the last battle. It's not a good argument to trash the entire mod though.

[Augestein]

quadpolar, on 11 September 2016 - 09:50 PM, said:

No, I just haven't played the game in a while. I didn't bother to read the entire post, because i.e the point about Vormav breaking your equipment (which is sooo easy to avoid) just seemed like an obvious attempt to cram as many negative points into the rant as possible. Especially since Vormav/Hashmalum is such an easy battle. Yes, Altima isn't entirely fair and Arch designed it that way because it's the last battle. It's not a good argument to trash the entire mod though.

Then you should have READ the whole thing. You can't really say "oh you're trying to bash the mod" and not even read the whole post. I even said that my biggest gripe is that the game tapers off later on in the game. It doesn't really help to make points against someone's post that don't even make sense with what they said. It's actually completely disrespectful to even go so far to say things like that when you couldn't even be bothered to read my post.

Vormav breaking your equipment is just annoying, it doesn't add anything. Obviously I'm having my Ramza have evasion because Vormav doesn't come with concentrate. At this point, this is old hat for 1v1s or any situation where a person can evade. Slap evasion on and go. I'd like to believe that anyone is smart enough to do this. And it's quite literally what I said, if he manages to snuff through your evasion and break gear, you hit reset. It's just a waste of time. 1v1 fights should not have gear breaks. Yes, that includes the player as well. The fight should be setup around you and the opponent fighting each other. Not seeing which person gets a favorable roll. Sure, criticals exist, but criticals aren't something in the same boat as a gear break. What's the point in adding a 25% chance of having someone have to push reset? This is the exact reason that people pushed for the computer to not learn Mocking Strike from earlier additions, because it doesn't actually ADD anything to the fight to have it happen.

Hashmalum complaints aren't even addressed. My issue is the length of it. I literally mention that he moves around like a dumbass not doing anything IN the post. It's about an hour long battle and about an hour of the fight is boring. That's my beef with it. Do you understand now? Or are you just going to ignore that too?

I start by griping about Altima's hp as more than anything else. It's tedious. It's not fun. Saying it's the final boss doesn't excuse it from being boring. It's supposed to be the final act, it should be a fun fight that tests everything you've learned over the course of the game. Not a luck based ordeal where you're spending more time manipulating the AI to do stupid things like trying to physically attack your critical Hamedo character and the like.

But it's something that's mentioned because there have been equipment breaking enemies in a ton of fights beforehand, and there are more than Vanilla. It's NOT an obvious attempt to cram as many negative points in one post. Please comprehend the post if you're going to bother to respond. I really have no idea why you're so hung up on that as well when I start by saying "it's just a chore." Last time I checked chores aren't difficult.

At this point it's like talking to a wall because it's like you're going out of your way to be obtuse at this point.

[Emmy]

A few things:

1. The Vormav duel event looks like it copied the same faulty coding as vanilla's Wiegraf -> Velius fight. In these fights, the game is coded to remove every character not named Ramza, and when the 1v1 is over, return those characters to the battle without any checks. Important checks that might be helpful for the game to have made for these characters, like innate abilities and status effects, items that grant status effects, etc. The only known way to fix it is to separate the duel. If Archael cares to fix it, he'd have to change the event such that there's a separate victory event when you clear Vormav, and not trigger the variables that allow the player to save/view formation after beating Vormav. Doing this correctly, the game will prompt you to only pick Ramza for part 1, and it'll prompt you to pick a party for part 2. It's an extra step, but it removes that bug.

2. Stats like 5/255 hp can be balanced depending on the way that damage output is balanced. If damage output in the game is higher than vanilla's, those are fine. Evasion is also fine (gives you a reason to use Concentrate or Transparent). Boss enemies with high speed are generally preferred - if their speed is too low compared to what characters have, they tend to not be a threat when alone. Aiming for 2-3 enemy turns per individual character's 1 turn is a fun fight, if the things that the enemy can do to the player are reasonably balanced. Enemies with higher damage output than the player could also be fun (though this mod overdoes that in a way that's not fun). I agree that the fight wasn't designed well, but saying that the stats in and of themselves are not what is making it poor design.

3. A lot of these balance issues straight up, in and of themselves, can't be addressed in modding unless you're willing to stray pretty far from vanilla's design. Changing the game's damage formulas so that spells are as equally useful at any level as possible, freezing speed growths so that CT of spells can be balanced at any level without requiring Short Charge, and limiting Speed granting equipment and abilities (to further balance CT/Speed) and status blocking equipment (so that enemies don't have to deal OHKO's to be threatening) go a long way in balancing these issues. An alternate way to balance speed/ct, if you'd like to keep some growths, is to tie CT directly to the player's stats. An asm hack exists that Spell CT = CT in patcher - character's MA. I'd personally go with Speed instead of MA, but the concept is good. In any case, balancing these issues strays pretty far from vanilla's design, but should be considered for any new modders.

[Augestein]

1. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It's a bug that manifest because of something added to the mod. I don't mind bugs from the original game not being addressed necessarily, but here it's a "new" event that causes an old bug to appear. With Wiegraf it's not so bad because the likelihood of a player having "initial status" is practically nonexistent. By the time you reach Vormav, it's pretty much impossible for this to not happen by virtue that you're at least given Excalibur.

2. I can agree with this. I understand that Archael didn't want Altima to be a punching bag and not able to do anything as your characters with a possible 15 speed sweep the enemy, the problem is that Altima isn't just fast, it has attacks that can OHKO characters or not, and there are actually Ultima demons that join on the field as well (all of which have around 800ish hp, Awakening can undo all of your work, and it has access to Magic Barrier (which yes, you can use Dispel or Heretic strike on, but it's the fact that it basically recovers 999 hp from the start). The issue is that damage output hasn't increased THAT much in 1.3, and for the most part, there are global nerfs to attacks themselves (not the attack command mind you, but in this case, using attack from 1 range risks eating a Hamedo about 70% of the time). Knight Swords for instance are weaker for the most part, and even if they are forced 2 hands (which makes your characters do more damage), it's at the sacrifice of your evasion because you can't use shields, or your reaction ability, because the only way for the innate evasion from the sword to work is with Weapon Guard. And the issue is that a lot of the changes are just rude-- which is some of the reason I'm kinda tired of the mod.


Which honestly? Still is worse than the shields by endgame, so it's still not quite balanced, and actually hurts the knight class itself. It's frustrating, because for the enemy, they have 5 support abilities generally as well as higher multipliers all around, so they aren't affected by global changes that much. And the support abilities are generally some combination of Mag Attack Up, Attack Up, Defense Up, Mag Defense Up, and / Short Charge. Thing is, is that Altima always had a way of being a jerk to you in Vanilla, and while it wasn't terribly hard because you could slow it and then keep it locked down with Don't Act, It's kind of silly that I can have a 19 speed Ninja, and it's STILL slower than Altima, which is a massive problem based on how CT works in Final Fantasy Tactics: hence my "this is more broken than Vanilla." 19 speed would snap the game in two for every enemy in Vanilla. here? 19 speed isn't even fast enough to go first against the boss. You need initial haste and 18 speed to go faster than the boss. That is ridiculous. The average class at my level has around 10-11 speed naturally-- and the fight has an expectation that you slap haste on ASAP and keep it on. That's fine, except the boss can start out by blowing your characters up with Grand Cross because it's actually fast enough to hop over to you use it, and then your characters get hit by it before some of them can even move. And even then, we get to see what it's like to fight an enemy that has a mountain of hp that's not immune to Don't Act. It's in the Colliery. It's the "Protect Reis" boss. And the fight is essentially Altima lite. It's not fun there. Fighting a faster version of it that can do more to you is even less fun.

For instance, Balk having 2 guns hard equipped is kinda garbage, because you can't do it as the player. Okay, if that's his gimmick, fine, but here's the issue, he has 2 Summon Guns and for some reason is immune to Innocent. I mean the reasoning for why he's immune to innocent is readily apparent, but it's just unfair, and instead of allowing the player to think of a clever way to defeat Balk (keeping innocent on him to force him to use Weapon Breaks or other skills like Mimic Daravon), the player is given a DPS rush where they basically have to either kill him before he gets to move again, or trick him into not healing himself on his turn(s). Which is a result of the AI being stupid more than it is you being smart. Vormav was hardly the breaking point for me, it's Altima being a double marathon back-to-back after Vormav, a boring battle after, 4 other battles that are not exactly well designed. I shouldn't find myself playing a video game and using the television as a form of keeping myself able to play a game for the sake of uploading it for people.

It's not like we can't see that Archael isn't apt to do clever things at moments-- IE, making a Setismon Samurai that immediately uses teleport to use Masamune on two other Samurai that have Salty Rage (see that's clever IMO because it's actually something the player could do, and it's not just stacking a ton of innates and status immunities on the enemy), but these things are few and far in-between on Chapter 4. We no longer get clever things like Gafgarion having Steal so if you drain his MP, he starts stealing your gear on the Falls battle thus making a bit of a soft time limit on how long you have to defeat everyone else before you focus on Gafgarion, we no longer get things like mages with Hamedo on to interrupt you from midcharge attacking them. Instead what we get is practically every battle being "enemy goes first and runs across the field at you and using a nuke AoE on your characters." Something that starts as early as Chapter 2 with the White Mage having Short Charge Holy on you, but at least there you can do things in response like silencing her or reflect or even draining her MP!

My intent wasn't just to say "this mod is shit." It was to explain why I don't want to finish it. I didn't realize that I'd have to go in detail so intensely (not talking about you here) or I'd have accusations of trashing the mod.

This is some of the reason I'm just like: No, I don't want to play it anymore. Like I'm burnt out on it, and it's not particularly fun, and I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to replay it on the account that going through it this time brings me to the conclusion that about half of the battles in this game aren't designed in a fun way for me.

3. This might be true, but the issue is that the way they are addressed in this mod is no good. Like, Archael acknowledges that spells have a problem getting off later in the game with your Fire 4 spells, etc... So he opts to make spells faster globally. That sounds fine, but the issue is this: everything in the game becomes faster to the point that the speed increases given to spells don't particularly help. So instead of fixing everything all around, the enemies are given Short Charge or No Charge innately to circumvent the problem. Which makes the problem even worse than Vanilla. What you get is not "don't use Fire 4, you're better off casting Fire 3 twice," you get "Don't use Black Magic for anything outside of Meltdown by endgame." There's also the fact that the player ends up having to sacrifice magic power for spell charge speed while the enemy ends up losing nothing out of it because of the way things are setup in the patcher. Which is counterintuitive of making it a more challenging and balances dynamic.

[Hack Fan]

Augestein, on 11 September 2016 - 06:14 PM, said:

People that say that you really don't need to worry about levels are wrong. It's a huge problem by endgame because enemies have multipliers so high that they can essentially have whatever gear that want and by around 60ish, rock 999 hp and around 100-300 MP while STILL having around 12-14 speed.

This is kinda what my problem with level scaling is. I understand the need for it to be there because you don't want people to just grind levels to success but late games enemies being super strong is the bad side effect. Because they are party level + they end up being much stronger than you and the easiest way to bypass it is to either stay low level so that you have more abilites and better gear or be at level 99 so that the level scaling is irrelevant. Honestly, I'm convinced that it's impossible to beat the game at a mid level and that you either have to be low level or 99. This forces you to have to play the game in one of two ways and I feel like it's really restricting.

Just looking at the end game fights with rofel, kletien, and balk, they are Party level + 9, 8 and 10 respectively and altima is party level + 25. The gap in the party level plus starts out small in the beginning of the game and just steadily increases til it gets to something like this.

As far as the Hash fight, I've always just looked at it as a forced restriction on the fight similar to starting the balk 1 fight poisoned. It sure would be easier to have initial status from equipment but oh well. *shrugs*

[ronlyn]

I must agree with Augestein: Since I beat the whole game, I haven't touch the mod for about a year and a half.. This thing can easily make you hate a mod or the hacking community in general.

I really enjoyed the early battles where tactics are far more rewarding and magic was a viable solution for some troubles. And then Ch4 appears and everything you have learn so far goes to trash. Sorry but not sorry: I love the idea but no the whole project in general and that's why I didnt insist anymore on the tournement

[Laith]

First off, I agree that it's poorly designed. Not impossible or unbeatable, just poorly designed to be done in very specific ways or to be lucky in general if you want to try other stuff that's not in the spectrum of the specific things to do. Also...

ronlyn, on 12 September 2016 - 06:31 PM, said:

Sorry but not sorry: I love the idea but no the whole project in general and that's why I didnt insist anymore on the tournement

I really think the tournament and the game are two different things... Granted, 1.3 isn't optimized to be used as a AI tournament/arena kind of platform, but the execution and use of the mod in the game progression is different from the one in an AI tournament (mostly because it's generic human units fighting each other, with no exaggerated growths/modifiers, no party + level stuff, no immortal flags, etc.)

[Davzz]

Augestein, on 11 September 2016 - 06:14 PM, said:

I'm done, and I'm moving on to something else, like a good mod, like this:

Spoiler

Uh, what mod were you trying to link to here? I'm just kinda getting an FFT image there

[Bishop]

Augestein, on 11 September 2016 - 06:14 PM, said:

It's like it was made in such a way that no one was expected to actually reach here...

This was the moment I was finally sure that you were speaking tongue-in-cheek in your "Let's Suck" persona ... but the subsequent arguments and agreements with the community had me doubting again. I don't know what to believe!

[Lolwayup]

Davzz, on 12 September 2016 - 10:55 PM, said:

Uh, what mod were you trying to link to here? I'm just kinda getting an FFT image there

He was trying to link a pic of the image used for the Brave New World mod, which fixes everything that was bugged in vanilla and adds some new stuff to better the flow of the mod (like removing rages to only 64) and restricting espers. If you want a full detail of the mod, you can check either a) the download page for Brave New World or b) the forums for Brave New World.

[Achelexus]

I agree that equipment breaking/stealing is just poor design, it would be fine if it was just a disarm/unequip, where you get the item back in the end of the battle, but losing a unique piece of gear is just grounds for resetting the fight, which is extremely silly and anti-climatic. The enemy doesn't get hurt by you stealing/breaking their shit, the rest of the units in the other battles will still have their stuff, and the AI will never run out of equipment, so why does the player have to suffer from it?

Some of your other points, like the Vormav 1v1 fight being boring are kind of unavoidable, you have a game designed around multiple units vs multiple units, there's no way to do a duel like that have any depth and not be bland. I still like the fight for the story-telling aspect and how it fits into the game(much like the Wiegraf del), but gameplay-wise it doesn't really add anything into the game. The Awakening skill from Altima(and some other bosses) is perfect, though, since it doesn't allow you to make the fight a cake-walk by disposing of the minions as quickly as possible to them focus only on the boss. It's as if it's constantly summoning reinforcements and you need to deal with the minions in another way.

I think that most of these issues come from Vanilla FFT itself, it's an almost 20 year old game, with somewhat archaic mechanics and a lot of limitations that don't allow much freedom when modding.

One of the big problems is the lack of proper damage mitigation, with no def or mdef stats, your only choice is more HP and evasion(which is luck based). Healing counts as damage mitigation, but its viable options become scarce as the game goes on, in the final chapters, even Rejuvenate won't outheal most enemy damage, leaving Worker-8 with Power Source as the only viable method of healing(mega potions heal basically nothing after a certain level, and after the damage>MP nerf, we lost the last decent damage mitigation effect).

In fact, magic itself tend to scale very poorly, since it only increases linearly(with your MA), while physical damage increases with both your PA and the Weapon power, but the worst thing is that as the game goes on and characters get more speed, your spells start taking too many turns to charge and cannot be used as well. Out of all the magic classes, Sage is pretty much the only one that still sees some use in end-game, and only due to its powerful area status ailments.

The Brave/Faith mechanic is a mess all around, a character with low Brave is essentially useless, and there's no way to raise it like in vanilla. And Faith is counter-intuitive. Usually you want armored physically bulky classes like Knights and Lancers to have a weakness, and the weakness usually is magical damage, while mages themselves are more resistant to it. It's how every FF, no, almost every JRPG works. FFT just flips it around and makes mages(who need high faith to work) MORE susceptible to magical damage, and not only that, but ailments as well, and did I mention that mages tend to have low HP, low mobility, no access to shields/armor, as well as need to spend MP to do their things? Why would you ever want these classes to have this many negative points to them? If your character isn't going to use magic, you can have its faith be as low as possible, even though buffs/healing also get reduced by it because someone thought it was a good idea.

Frankly, someday I hope that we'll get a more challenging and deep Tactics RPG, but it's such a nich genre that I doubt we ever will.

[Laith]

Achelexus, on 14 September 2016 - 12:08 PM, said:

I think that most of these issues come from Vanilla FFT itself, it's an almost 20 year old game, with somewhat archaic mechanics and a lot of limitations that don't allow much freedom when modding.

One of the big problems is the lack of proper damage mitigation, with no def or mdef stats, your only choice is more HP and evasion(which is luck based). Healing counts as damage mitigation, but its viable options become scarce as the game goes on, in the final chapters, even Rejuvenate won't outheal most enemy damage, leaving Worker-8 with Power Source as the only viable method of healing(mega potions heal basically nothing after a certain level, and after the damage>MP nerf, we lost the last decent damage mitigation effect).

While it may be true that the game is rather limited to a certain extent (being a very old game and all), these limitations can be circumvented with creativity and ASM knowledge.

It might not be the ideal place to promote it this way... But these and more other issues that plague both vanilla and 1.3 are addressed in Monster Tactics; not saying you should play it because of that, but it'd give interesting insight as to what's possible within FFT and the sense of balance it can attain.

But that's another thing: there's few people who know enough about ASM and are striving for balance in FFT, some others are still learning, and the veterans are either working on their own projects slowly or simply not involved at all. Perhaps that's what a difficulty mod like 1.3 needs, especially considering how a common critique is the apparent lack of detail in the last chapter.

[Achelexus]

Laith, on 14 September 2016 - 12:52 PM, said:

While it may be true that the game is rather limited to a certain extent (being a very old game and all), these limitations can be circumvented with creativity and ASM knowledge.

It might not be the ideal place to promote it this way... But these and more other issues that plague both vanilla and 1.3 are addressed in Monster Tactics; not saying you should play it because of that, but it'd give interesting insight as to what's possible within FFT and the sense of balance it can attain.

But that's another thing: there's few people who know enough about ASM and are striving for balance in FFT, some others are still learning, and the veterans are either working on their own projects slowly or simply not involved at all. Perhaps that's what a difficulty mod like 1.3 needs, especially considering how a common critique is the apparent lack of detail in the last chapter.

Care to tell me exactly what Monster Tactics does to fix those issues?

And by the way, what is ASM?

[Laith]

I will put this in spoilers, since I don't want to take up a lot of space in this topic that's pretty much about 1.3, though I already made the comparison. Anyways, what I post will still be there for whoever is interested.

Spoiler

ASM stands for assembly; assembly hacks let you mess around with the inner workings of a game.
Now, I could be a little bit wrong in my definition, but it's not far off. after all, I'm not a technical person myself.

As for the rest, as I already mentioned not being a technical kind of person, therefore it would probably be better for Emmy to explain her mod in detail, the experience you get with MT and the visible changes include:

- Speed divided into tiers that have a certain range (e.g. low tier speed is 3-5), making sure speed is not a complete god stat by making your human units the fastest, or any other unit, be they regular enemies or bosses for that matter.
- A LOT of reaction abilities (almost useless ones, basically, like Gilgame Heart) have been replaced with much more effective reactions, so that there are viable options to choose from, instead of just choosing between Abandon, Hamedo, and Damage Split. Of course, most of these reactions fit the theme of the mod (such as eliminating Secret Hunt, since it's mostly monsters in this mod), but their workings can be mimicked or worked upon for vanilla style mods, like 1.3.
- From what I've gathered talking to Emmy, there seems to be a hidden defense mechanic that's not actually controllable, but makes sure damage does not go out of control by dealing excessive amounts.
- Status effects actually serve a purpose throughout the whole mod (both for you and the enemy, since Ribbon has been reworked to not cancel all status), unlike late chapters in 1.3. (What's the point in having them in the game at all if they'll end up being useless in the end?)
- No battle would be as long as a 1.3 Altima or anything like that, but it doesn't really mean battles are particularly easy in this mod, especially since the modder works hard to make sure bosses and enemy parties have a sense of synergy, to make sure the challenge is still there for you, even if you have tons of options at your disposal, other than just putting a bunch of strong units together working together solely to pummel you.
- The exp formula was reworked to include speed, in a way that slow units can be up to par with faster units, due to the latter being able to take more actions (this was a problem within this particular mod, but it also kind of lets the leveling up experience be more natural instead of a throw stone fest)
- While still outnumbered, you will not see Power Source scumming in enemy parties. While not really complaining about this, 1.3's damage output is so low that Power Source is very common for the enemy to use, and thus rendering the damage you did virtually useless (there are ways around this for sure, but most of the time requires a good amount of planning and very specific setups, crippling players in a way).

I might be leaving essential stuff out, but that's what I came to me right now. But the mod pretty much lets you develop your own playing style without being particularly easy.

I still summon Emmy to explain this a lot better, since I'm not really good at explaining this. Would also be better if you were interested in playing it, as well.

[Emmy]

Achelexus, on 14 September 2016 - 01:12 PM, said:

Care to tell me exactly what Monster Tactics does to fix those issues?

And by the way, what is ASM?

Certainly. I wasn't going to talk about my mod in this thread directly, but since you and Laith both asked me to...

ASM is assembly language. It is what can be used to change things that Patcher and similar tools can't change. If you are interested in learning it, in a more general sense: http://programmedles...rial/index.html Mips is the ASM used by the Playstation, the ASM for other systems is different.

Concerning the points Laith made:

Spoiler

Speed is actually divided in only 3 speed tiers for players - 6, 7, 8. Players can access the Butterknife (WP 1 weapon, speed +1) as the sole speed boosting item. The vast majority of enemies follow this same rule, with a few that exceed these speed values (mostly bosses).

Not only reactions, but support and movement. A long term goal I have is to change every ability that doesn't have a minimum level of viability into one that does. By this i mean, stuff like Jump+whatever, Ignore Height, Move on/in/under water are all redundant abilities that don't need to exist; and are better off being replaced with ones that give characters capabilities that other characters don't have. For example, Marvel Scale (1/2 damage dealt to character if inflicted with a negative status effect), Flee (+4 move if character is critical), Grudge (counter attacks with MP damage). I'm not 100% done with this task, and I'm a beginner coder working alone on this, so bear with me for now. A lot has been done already though.

Secret Hunt is a terrible mechanic even in a human based mod. It's either too douchey or completely useless to the ai, depending on if monsters are recruitable or not; and it's a mechanic that only serves to encourage luck based grinding or save scumming for rare items. Writing optional battles that are repeatable to farm rare items is better, since it rewards playing through the game normally. Also it's kinda fucked up that monsters from vanilla existed whose sole purpose was to be poached (such as the Uribo, who had nothing but a mediocre range 1/vert 0 physical attack, but good poach items. you can't tell me that was created to be any kind of threat, or to serve any purpose other than to be poached).

There's no "hidden" defense mechanic - that is an ASM hack that I added to the game. This reduces the pre-cap damage by XX/FF (in hex), or some number divided by 255. For example something with 50% DR-P that takes a hit from something calculated to 1200 damage will take 600 damage instead. A unit with 0% DR-P will take 999 from the same attack, since the game will cap all attacks at 999 after all calculations are made. These defense amounts are in the tooltips.

Status effects are a major thing that adds depth to the game. Ribbons were significantly nerfed. Monsters have a handful of immunities but not every status ever. But this isn't just to screw with the players - enemies are also vulnerable to status effects, including every boss! While it isn't worth balancing a boss fight around a status like Frog or Charm; stuff like Silence, Innocent, and Slow are frequently built around.

New XP formula = 30 - (speed*2) per action. This means you can no longer beat up a lv 1 guy to grind up abilities (which is fully unnecessary with significantly increased JP gain/decreased skill cost/crystal farming in random battles). But it also means that the guys who are doing the most actions are gaining less xp per action, to better balance slow guys with fast guys' leveling up. I am aware this formula isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than it was.

"Power Source" (or vanilla's Elixir) doesn't exist. A 999 hp/mp heal "Restore" exists, is extremely low distribution, and has a long charge time. Care has been taken such that not every battle is a sandbag fest, though some amount of sandbagging exists. The battle with the highest amount of sandbagging has 8 guys with Full Life. This can be counteracted with stuff like Interrupt, Silence, Innocent, etc. Out of IMO the top 5 hardest story battles in the mod, 3 of them are boss battles, one is an undead battle, and the 5th one has only 3/11 units capable of revival. It's a very different world here!

Addressing Achelexus's points:

Spoiler

1. A mechanic has been added that allows you to buy back your broken/stolen stuff in the "basement" (vanilla's fur shop). This turns an enemy with equipment breaks into a temporary for the fight nuisance. Of course this doesn't help you in the end (but you do get to buy your stuff back in newgame + if something stole from you in the end sequence). This mechanic is slightly buggy in a way Idk how to fix yet - sometimes produces 22 round shields for no reason, for example.

2. I mentioned it a bit above, but I added a defense mechanic. Evasion still exists, and M-ev has also been added for monsters. Healing spells generally heal more than damage abilities deal, since both deal some variation of (Ma+y)*Ma, only the damage spells are reduced by the character's damage reduction and healing is not. Healing also actually matters in most fights, since most enemies aren't doing so much damage that it doesn't matter if you have 1 hp or full.

3. Formulas have nearly all been rewritten. Both physical and magical damage scale quadratically (for example, pa^2, ma^2, pa*ma). Other formulas have been added to the game (such as Endeavor and White Wind). This goes a long way in making a single ability that is equally useful at lv 1 as it is at lv 99.

4. Brave and Faith mechanics are rehauled. Brave now only affects reaction rate and some supports (such as Blade Grasp), does not affect physical damage in any way. While a high brave unit is still more useful than a low brave unit, a character isn't completely crippled at 60 brave vs. having 74 brave. Faith now only affects status effect, healing, fractional damage, Interrupt hit rate. It does not factor into the damage formula at all anymore. However, I added consistency that didn't exist before into status effect usage, and procs or item/draw out (which count as consumable items) are the only way to status a 0 faith unit. This means that you can go for high faith units for high chances of statusing enemies and probably 100% chances of healing each other (assuming neutral/good compat for the 100%); or you could go for mid/low faith units for a lower chance of enemy status effects hitting.

5. Speed is completely frozen. Your speed at lv 1 is the same speed as it is at lv 99. This goes a long way in balancing ability charge times, since this means you won't have characters that outspeed their own spells or requiring short/no charge on every caster at higher levels. It also goes a long way in balancing boss fights - for example Adramelk is also at the same speed if you're fighting a lv 1 one vs. a lv 99 one.

6. Abilities in general are in the process of being balanced to create as many viable ones as possible. Most modders operate with the mentality to remove things. And while some things from vanilla just plain aren't worth trying to balance (like Math Skill), there needs to be enough choices out there for the player so that they don't feel pigeonholed into using one of 2 reaction abilities because everything else they can access sucks.

Concerning 1.3:

Spoiler

Most of these issues are, in fact, carry over from vanilla. There's a limit to what you can do with the engine to balance it if you don't know ASM or have someone writing hacks for you. It's why I said earlier that one must be willing to stray far from vanilla's design to fix a lot of the flaws with its core mechanics or fight design. The engine/AI are excellent (especially for its time period), and it's decently well coded enough to hack, for the most part. A lot of the flaws with 1.3's ch 4 design are carry over from vanilla as well. Unless you're willing to stray from the design of assassinations (and change these battles into bosses or defeat all enemies), there's a very limited number of things you can do with these battles to make them a challenge. Once you've exhausted the "kill this guy before he heals himself again to full" gimmick, every battle with this mechanic feels the same as each other. And with the relatively small size of the maps, and relatively large movement of characters compared to map size, the player isn't exactly prevented from killing the intended target in a couple turns (assuming they know how to get past this mechanic). Thing is, most of these flaws aren't particularly noticeable in vanilla, but become very noticeable once you ramp up the difficulty.

Concerning level scaling:

Spoiler

Level scaling in and of itself is a positive thing. However it needs to be done within a more reasonable range of the player's level. Level +1 (to prevent the bug where the game sometimes interprets "party level" in patcher as being up to 13 levels lower than party) is perfect. Enemies are usually more interesting when their stats are lower, so that the ai chooses non-damaging moves more frequently. Level+1 is enough to discourage grinding as substitution for strategy, but doesn't actively punish people who are in the lv 50-90 range. I use level scaling in my mod simply because it creates a more consistent challenge. Any trash mob becomes stupidly easy if you are overleveled for them, while fights designed around boss enemies using non-damaging moves will wreck players who are unprepared for it and/or don't know what they're doing in general. Setting levels instead of scaling will create an inconsistent challenge, and simply wouldn't work well in my mod.

[Augestein]

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I agree that equipment breaking/stealing is just poor design, it would be fine if it was just a disarm/unequip, where you get the item back in the end of the battle, but losing a unique piece of gear is just grounds for resetting the fight, which is extremely silly and anti-climatic. The enemy doesn't get hurt by you stealing/breaking their shit, the rest of the units in the other battles will still have their stuff, and the AI will never run out of equipment, so why does the player have to suffer from it?

It's not general steals and armor breaks that are the problem here. If you really don't want something stolen from a common enemy, use maintenance. It's a skill in the game to use. The problem is specifically for 1v1 fights. Because equipment breaks in FFT aren't just you losing your armor durability or just armor value. You specifically lose hp for the remainder of the fight. Having an enemy break your gear on a 1v1 when there's going to be a follow up battle is lousy design, because even assuming it doesn't kill you, you've taken permanent damage for the remainder of the fight. So it IS a reset. If Dick the Knight breaks your Power Sleeve, it's no big deal there. The issue is that you've been facing these attacks over and over and over again. While you could argue I could put Maintenance on here as well, you can see why this is kind of unfair at that point. Especially because Maintenance no longer has the effect completely stopping these attacks altogether. The breaks used by Vormav will still damage you. Thus, there's no sense in trying to stop them, instead, you're better off trying to have Concentrate or Attack Up or even Magic Attack Up (there's only two of you, so it's possible to get your CT in such a way to hit him with it) so you can get it over and out ASAP.

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Some of your other points, like the Vormav 1v1 fight being boring are kind of unavoidable, you have a game designed around multiple units vs multiple units, there's no way to do a duel like that have any depth and not be bland. I still like the fight for the story-telling aspect and how it fits into the game(much like the Wiegraf del), but gameplay-wise it doesn't really add anything into the game. The Awakening skill from Altima(and some other bosses) is perfect, though, since it doesn't allow you to make the fight a cake-walk by disposing of the minions as quickly as possible to them focus only on the boss. It's as if it's constantly summoning reinforcements and you need to deal with the minions in another way.

But it isn't unavoidable. You don't need to make Vormav's class a class with Defense Up, Magic Defense Up, Attack Up, Short Charge, a multiplier of 200 (so his health is essentially double normal health), a speed growth of 85 and a multiplier of 135 (the same as a Ninja), and the Maximillian Armor which has Protect (always) on it to ensure that physical attacks do absolutely shitty damage and then the Ragnarok to grant always shell to ensure that he has shell. This literally means that if you attack him for say... 100 damage, you'll do 44 without any form of boosting equipment or attack up. To compare that, if he did 100 damage to you, it'd be 133. Which means that tanking literally isn't an option. It literally becomes dodge or die. So it's not just bad because it's a 1v1, it's bad because it's not short and sweet (like Wiegraf's 1v1 was in Vanilla for comparison), and it's literally a stack of cards against you which leaves you in a position where you're literally at the mercy of the RNG no matter how good you are. Sure, you can drain his MP as a strategy, but that only stops him from blowing you up, he can still hit you, and you'd need perfect evasion for that, and if you had that, he'd use magic on you, and there's not really a setup now to avoid both perfectly. Especially because he has Move + 3, and he's as fast as a ninja. Does this fight need to go on that long? No. It doesn't.

Which would sound fine if Altima wasn't a mountain of hp. It goes on for such a long period of time that it goes from being tough to just plain irritating. It adds to a level of tedium, instead of an intense fight, you get an enemy with way too much speed, hp, and best of all, no evasion (it has innate concentrate) except for magic. And at least the first time you see it, it's on Finath River which is an enemy that you can kill quickly, and the other one, Zalbag is fixated on Ramza, so if you keep Ramza up, Zalbag doesn't use it. Worker 7 has it, and I think that's kinda messed up there, but it's still better than Altima, because Altima seems to be designed to bore you. You can even avoid Altima's Awakening as well. You can do this this by Berserking the demons and lowering their PA to joke levels, but then you have an annoyance factor of enemies that just keep attacking and wasting more time by doing miserable damage. So no, you can shut down Altima's Awakening easily. It's just doggone annoying that you have to do this in the first place.

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I think that most of these issues come from Vanilla FFT itself, it's an almost 20 year old game, with somewhat archaic mechanics and a lot of limitations that don't allow much freedom when modding.

Which I concede at the bottom of the first post. It's an old game, and there was some limitations, but some ideas just have no business being there.

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One of the big problems is the lack of proper damage mitigation, with no def or mdef stats, your only choice is more HP and evasion(which is luck based). Healing counts as damage mitigation, but its viable options become scarce as the game goes on, in the final chapters, even Rejuvenate won't outheal most enemy damage, leaving Worker-8 with Power Source as the only viable method of healing(mega potions heal basically nothing after a certain level, and after the damage>MP nerf, we lost the last decent damage mitigation effect).

That's an issue of formulas more than anything else here. Instead of making damage get higher, and higher, it should have petered out around chapter 2 or 3. The issue is that Chapter 4 seems to be aware of the flaws of FFT: Vanilla, and instead goes nuts with it. Everything is an exaggerated version of Vanilla. So speed being a minor problem in a standard game now becomes a significant problem, and PA being the superior form of offense for the most part is now "PA makes magic suck by the end." There's still some use for spells, but you have to use it for very specific reasons as of now. Something like Call of Power, another FFT mod, handled this by lowering everyone's damage output.

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In fact, magic itself tend to scale very poorly, since it only increases linearly(with your MA), while physical damage increases with both your PA and the Weapon power, but the worst thing is that as the game goes on and characters get more speed, your spells start taking too many turns to charge and cannot be used as well. Out of all the magic classes, Sage is pretty much the only one that still sees some use in end-game, and only due to its powerful area status ailments.

Agreed. And that's why it really doesn't make sense why characters have even MORE speed than they did in Vanilla. To compare this, Altima's (keeping with her for example) multiplier is 175 in 1.3, and it's 113 in Vanilla. And every boss is made to be faster than their Vanilla parts. I understand making Altima faster, but 175 is excessive. Especially with those gnarly growths. White Mage actually has use too, but only for Life and ReRaise really. I suppose Protect and Shell can be useful if you get lucky with compat too. Black Mage can be useful for Meltdown and mass AI manipulation. Like I said, the problems in 1.3 are pretty much all of Vanilla's magnified.

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The Brave/Faith mechanic is a mess all around, a character with low Brave is essentially useless, and there's no way to raise it like in vanilla. And Faith is counter-intuitive. Usually you want armored physically bulky classes like Knights and Lancers to have a weakness, and the weakness usually is magical damage, while mages themselves are more resistant to it. It's how every FF, no, almost every JRPG works. FFT just flips it around and makes mages(who need high faith to work) MORE susceptible to magical damage, and not only that, but ailments as well, and did I mention that mages tend to have low HP, low mobility, no access to shields/armor, as well as need to spend MP to do their things? Why would you ever want these classes to have this many negative points to them? If your character isn't going to use magic, you can have its faith be as low as possible, even though buffs/healing also get reduced by it because someone thought it was a good idea.

Brave/Faith is an okay mechanic as an idea, but it's poorly thought out. There should have been more reactions that functioned like old Move Find Item and we'd have something that was okay. As it stands, there's no reason to have a low Brave unit. Characters like Rafa and Beowulf essentially get two reactions and that's it. Faith, faith is something that adds a bit of flavor that would work if mages had consistently higher power than physical units. Faith was essentially something that made you more apt to be affected by tide turning abilities. If there were more mag power faithless attacks like Samurai or even Geomancer to a certain extend, I'd be more happy with faith. As it stands here, it IS just weird.

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Frankly, someday I hope that we'll get a more challenging and deep Tactics RPG, but it's such a nich genre that I doubt we ever will.

One can dream.

And thanks guys for the discussion. I'm happy to see that people want to talk about stuff here.

[Achelexus]

Emmy, what do you think about making Brave/Faith be based fixed depending on the class instead of the character? It seems a better choice than having the player spend a long time checking generic recruits to finally find one that has good enough stats. And if you could get this sort of control over these mechanics, it would open more possibilities such as gear that increases/decreases brave/faith by a set amount.