Insane Difficulty: Ogre Battle: In the Lap of the Gods Download - Insane Difficulty

Enemies came to meet me at Sagebard which was nice and again at Chang'ga. No problems with movement or enemies bugging out. Although trying to catch a fleeing Valkyrie through the woods was funny.

That double Dollmage unit is tough and that unit with the Wildman in front of two Hellhounds is difficult to take out without only killing the leader. Most other units were okay. The Octopus unit was a nice change and the right level of beefiness.

I really felt like I grew stronger as I gained cities, it is a really great system.

Gilbert hit my front line Dragon for 70 damage! Was not expecting that, still only took two units so I guess he's not too strong.

I managed to finish stage 3 before the end of the first day, same with stage 2. Looking forward to Pogrom Forest, such large map in comparison to the first ones, with most of the cities beyond the range of the first battles. Will probably make for some tough early battles or delay tactics.

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Yeah, I believe it's the Blade Lord that starts with one.

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While killing the leader will leave you unable to finish off an enemy unit if you can't push through the enemy ranks to kill them, leaderless units move substantially slower than normal. So if you can push through, catching them shouldn't be a problem.

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Good!

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My basic mode of operation for the early game bosses is: imposing but not actually difficult. They might be actually difficult if you didn't do well enough in the stage and have a completely tattered army or if you don't properly dogpile the boss, but otherwise they should be fairly easy. I want to leave room for actually difficult bosses once you start hitting the ones that have unique classes (Debonair, Gares, etc).

How did the weighting of enemies feel in terms of which paths they took to your base? There are basically 3 different paths the enemies can take (although I technically use 5 map movement routes in this stage), did it feel like an appropriate quantity of enemy squads would take each path?

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I haven't been able to reproduce this issue at all, and looking through the code, couldn't find any reason it would happen. I'll keep an eye on healing targeting as I continue my playthrough, but for now there's nothing I can do. If anyone else is experiencing this issue, please let me know.

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Looking through the code, I'm seeing some adaptations I'll need to make to my custom movement AI scripts...

zombero, on 06 April 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

That's actually how it felt. The idea that he could cut down a dragon in almost one hit was great. He was always such a wimp before.

zombero, on 06 April 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

The majority met me in the middle at Latingurue just like before. Makes sense, especially since they can almost push you off of the city. But what I really liked was when I almost screwed up and saw two units heading towards Sagebard where I only had my Lord unit with a Griffon and Samurai. I had to quickly rush over two support units to beat back enemy. The only other major route I witnessed was the Octopus unit and the Hawk Man unit trying to skirt around Latingurue (the Octopus headed for Bah'Wahl to meet my one unit there).

Overall it felt pretty nice. I might replay it today with a new approach. I feel like my replay of stage 2 went really well, so I'd like to see how efficiently I can run this map.

zombero, on 06 April 2015 - 07:18 AM, said:

I'll update to an entirely new rom and try again. I copied the .srm over so maybe that was causing issues.

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Kay!

Mishrak, on 06 April 2015 - 02:04 PM, said:

Same behavior, see the video.

Specifically 4:10 where the Doll Mage heals a full health wizard while two Samurai are not at full health.

Also 8:29 where the Cleric heals a full health wizard over a 3 hp Knight that's leading the party.


http://youtu.be/xH9O-SWaupA (should be finished processing soon) it's done.

[edit]
Does it have something to do with Wizards? It seems to be behaving normally in other party compositions.

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Yeah, it feels appropriate to still have a primary route. Although the extent to which the enemy splits their troops could expand a bit as the game goes on, as that would probably result in an increase in difficulty.

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I found this to be the main way in which flying has been useful so far, having a guaranteed travel time between two different enemy routes. There hasn't been many cities yet that flying units reach faster than both water and land units, although there are bound to be some. But being able to travel between your two forces was a big asset for them here.

Bah'Wahl didn't feel like an *official* route, so I only had the enemy send enough forces (one squad) that could be stopped by one player squad. On a later level, I might not be quite so nice, but it would be lame for the enemy to surprise you by sending half their army up to a town like Bah'Wahl or something.

How'd the difficulty feel compared to stage 2? I think the enemies in this stage wind up getting a boost from the fact that you control a lower percentage of the towns by the time you start fighting. This could point to a need for me to manually set the break-even point on morale factor for each stage individually in the future.

Honestly the difficulty was about the same. I think it actually has a lot to do with the map layout. Stage 2 has a trickier layout when you think about it. You basically have to cover so much more space just to stop the enemies. With stage 3 there is really nothing you can do because it is fairly linear. Also there are some small mechanics that play into giving us an advantage. Once you get to Latingurue it becomes a lot easier. If you beat the enemy they can bounce out to the water, if you lose you bounce to a plains areas. You are always in a better position to recover from a fight and the enemies that get knocked into the water are easy pickings for an Octopus unit.

The Dollmage unit was a the real standout. Most others were fairly even with my force. If the enemy Octopus unit was able to get into the water sooner I think it would have been a different story. By the time I met with it I had already taken a few cities and, although strong, was taken down with not too much trouble.

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Not for any reason I can think of, but I'll try to reproduce it with a wizard. Thanks for the vid!

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The map layout is not kind to an enemy Octopus unit. The enemy would probably be better off sending a flying unit to Bah'Wahl, but that would result in less enemy army diversity...

zombero, on 06 April 2015 - 03:27 PM, said:

As I've continued this battle I've noticed a trend where the Cleric heals in a weird priority when there's a wizard in the party. It seems completely fine otherwise.

Well, it could have something to do with elementally intelligent attacks, then.

From here

I'm using an SD2SNES + SNES Mini to attempt to play this romhack, and I'm getting weird healing AI issues.

Initially I thought maybe it was an issue with Wizards but after further attempts, it has happened in completely wizardless parties, with two Clerics or One Cleric. They just seem to get confused and heal themselves or a full health unit when there's other units that need to be healed. Not every time, but enough to be a real issue.

On a hunch, I fired up SNES9x v1.53 and loaded the same save file and behold the healers behaved correctly. It also seems to be just fine on Higan/BSNES accuracy. So it seems like the issue lies with either the SNES itself or the SD2SNES.

Well, that would explain why my further attempts to reproduce the issue this morning failed. That's really weird that it would fail in such a way that doesn't crash the game or otherwise ruin performance. All I can think of is something related to ROM size and my use of expanded ROM. But it's clearly executing code in expanded ROM, so why it would just not always execute it correctly is utterly beyond me.

zombero, on 07 April 2015 - 08:50 AM, said:

Is there anything I can do to try and help you determine the cause? I realize without you having a flash cart, it might be more effort than its worth to get it working for a small group of people who'd try to run it on original hardware. However, I really want to play this, so I'm willing to help you figure it out.

Does not being able to play it on cart make playing it a non-option for you?

zombero, on 07 April 2015 - 10:36 AM, said:

I can play it on emulator of course, but it's just less enjoyable and not my preferred method because of the retro setup that I have. I don't want to take away from the development of the mod though, so I'll just deal with it. It's not a huge deal.

No healers. Sounds like you want to ramp up the difficulty.