Insane Difficulty: Gameplay Videos - Insane Difficulty

In the redesign you have they play the role of Golem buster, so having a Dragon Master leading them would serve no greater purpose most of the time.

I think from playing the game over and over again and seeing Gilbert with his starting Wyrms has lead me to always see Beast Master and Wyverns as companions.

Operation Convince Zombero To Focus On Ogre Battle commences.

Da Playlist!

The first video of GAMEPLAY!
https://youtu.be/pe1gm5Qa1A4

Charlom District. You'll never guess what happens this time!

Edit: I can't get it to embed...

I appreciate the effort. Things like this definitely do help, and I'll be sure to check out these vids soon. For what it's worth, I've been working pretty vigorously lately on the project that's standing between me and this one, so with any luck I'll be wrapping that up before too long. I have had the itch to get back to this project as of late.

Yeowch, skipping a couple liberations really made the start of that stage a bruiser. Though there were some pretty good loot drops on that run.

By the way, you didn't get bugged with Gilbert. I listed the exact requirements on getting Canopus and Gilbert in this forum post: http://www.gamefaqs....-queen/71469899

The key requirement you didn't have there was a reputation of 50 or more when you defeated Gilbert. While the game tries to give you a boost with the events that boost your reputation in that stage, being unlucky or not scrounging all the reputation you can get can thwart your efforts to recruit him.

zombero, on 12 April 2016 - 02:50 PM, said:

I had a funny feeling reputation might be involved, but the game doesn't offer any explanation. Glad to finally have that cleared up, as contrary to many FAQs you can talk to Iuria before doing any of the quest and she has some unique dialogue. That also makes me a dirty cheater because I GameGenie'd him in.

So is the idea that one should try to liberate most/all of the stage, and then do the best they can to protect it? I kinda saw it as liberate your side of the stage, then fight your way through to the rest of the towns. I did note that the enemies seem to largely rush your HQ still, though they send units out to check if you're protecting the flank towns eventually. I notice this mostly in this video, wherein I lose horribly in the pogrom forest.

https://youtu.be/hPRc1vWbS0w

It was very delayed because my emulator crashed at the end and confused Bandicam resulting in the files being cut without properly closing the containers, which is really no big deal except Windows Movie Maker is a Microsoft product and is totally incapable of dealing with a little thing like not terminating a data stream properly so it took me some time to losslessly repair the streams so I could composite them.

I really like the new undead. The fact that they respawn even after taking holy damage eliminates the whole auto-lose to clerics issue, and even with their new vulnerabilities they feel very strong as a variant tank.

Devon_V, on 15 April 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

I won't hold it against you.

Devon_V, on 15 April 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

You may have just not lived long enough or explored far enough to find the enemies who went down the side routes... some of them don't head straight to your base along that path, so you'd need to go to them to find them in a timely manner. As to what's expected from you as far as towns... basically right now you're expected to acquire as many towns as is possible before the first run-in with the enemy. And then to in short order liberate any towns that can be gotten fairly soon after the initial fight or two. Beyond that, liberating more towns is just a bonus, tbh. When I get back to this hack, I'll likely be revamping enemy deployments and morale factor. I'd like for enemies to still only spawn from the enemy base, but for some of them to begin on towns throughout the stage, as well. So the fighting occurs sooner and across more of the map than it currently does. I'd also like for each enemy deployment to have its own expectation as far as how many towns you should have control of, and for this comparison to be visible to the player when they click on the enemy squad. It'll certainly take some work, but I think it's more elegant than the current system.

Devon_V, on 15 April 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

Btw, Clerics now have to earn one-shotting undead, but they're generally expected to be able to do it or almost do it. But this stage comes after Lake Jansenia in this hack's progression, so your clerics were under performing.

The initial deployment on the pogrom forest goes right up the middle. One of the units is hunting the OL, and one of them is headed for the right flank, but the fastest route there still seems to be up the middle. Some of the reinforcements that spawn go directly along the right and left flanks. An aggressive liberation route certainly does make a difference in performance.

I very much like the idea of forces holding some of the towns, especially if they're extra tough, not like the crap units that do it in OB64.

So I did find an actual bug: The Sun tarot's damage algo is backwards. It smites holy and does little to evil. Imagine my surprise when I pulled it out in a knight vs. undead fight and my 70ALI guys blew up instead.

https://youtu.be/Q4Zxjp3AzMA

(Recorded this shortly after the last post, but the files screwed up again at the end and I actually lost the entire boss fight)

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Huh. From the looks of things, that algo may be more messed up than simply being backwards o_O. I wonder how that happened >_<. I must've been "lucky" (unlucky) in my test cases for Sun coming out normal when I implemented it. I will have to make a note to check it out, and in the mean time I guess it is useless.

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It perhaps makes too much of a difference. Because this is a hardtype, part of me wants to be like "you have to liberate towns or you will fail". But it could probably be sufficient for liberation to be more on the very helpful side and less on the virtually necessary side.

So what do you think about the idea of:
-Having some of the initial enemy troops start on towns (yep, just like OB64, as you mentioned)
-Giving each enemy troop their own expectation of how many towns you should have to break even with them in morale, and displaying that comparison when you click on that troop (maybe like -1 if you have a 1 town advantage, +1 if the enemy has a town advantage)

Oh and uh... the Muses are not a feature, heh. Apparently that hasn't been fixed yet. Fortunately Muses are not stat-boosted yet, so they're fairly weak, and thus the bug winds up not being a huge deal...

https://youtu.be/-_T0SNLNgjY

I thought you had decided that the early Muses were a cool "gotcha" moment in that one unit. I'm probably misremembering the post.


So basically as the stage goes on, you need more and more towns to break even with the enemy on the morale bonus? The guys on the first towns are scaled for no towns held, while the initial wave from the base is set for 2-3, and the later guys for 4+, so you need to make progress through the stage to avoid being overwhelmed by the later guys? That would certainly make the opening parts of the stages much easier to deal with. I guess it depends on how much of a Hardtype you want it to be. Now that I've got the hang of the morale bonuses I don't think I'll have any more problems with that. I used the undead to set all my "good" units to 80+ ALI so I can liberate aggressively with units that can actually fight, then as night falls have them fade back and the werewolves and undead take over the bulk of the fighting through the night. They're pretty much all Low Sky as well so they can get were they're going.

The big question is how much abuse of revisiting stages do you want? I took the forest out of order precisely to get control of ALI fixing, I abused golems in the borders of Charlom and octopi in the Charlom district to make level 7 Black Dragons, and then used the undead to make level 7 Silvers. All my Clerics are 100/100, and all my Witches are level 9. I have an army of lycanthropes and undead. I have four more level 1 werewolves and a bunch of level 2 amazons waiting for Fullmoon and Dragos stones. All the tools are there to prepare your army if you know what you're doing, it's someone who is less familiar with the game, who just tries to run the stages in order who's likely to be punished by the morale factor. At least that's what I feel right now. If the initial land grab was easier, I probably wouldn't have done as much grinding as I did in the forest, and that's not a bad thing.

I'd say the town defenders definitely need to be beefy, because they're going to be hit by multiple units, and having them be totally vanilla was what made most of OB64 a joke in terms of difficulty. If they had the same rules as boss units where they cannot be knocked back and auto-recruit until you kill the leader that would be interesting.

Oh, two other things I noticed:
Neutral skeletons do black melee damage, but recruited ones do physical. This seemed odd since I thought they were the same unit, unless the change to bosses changed everything. The other thing is that cold attacks damage undead. (Or at least the neutral undead) That just seems weird, unless it's to prevent them from being immune to sea units. (Though I would think one would put fire/thunder weapons on them to counter other sea units anyway)

The change to morale would definitely help to smooth out the difficulty more. As is, at least in a vacuum, the earliest enemies are super tough and the latest enemies are fairly weak. There are some other factors that combat this a little: at the start of your stage, all your squads are fresh, so you're at your peak performance for taking on these harder enemies, and I could have the later enemy squads have significantly stronger compositions (wouldn't say that's the case now). But this really doesn't go far enough to make up the difference. It would also be really great to have some indication in the game that this mechanic exists, so being able to see morale on enemy deployments would be fantastic. So I think it's definitely something I'll pursue doing.

On neutral Skeletons, they do have the same attack as enemy and player skeletons, so I would guess the issue has something to do withcode that overrides elements with equipment and not taking neutral encounters into account somewhere. I'll add a note to take a look at it.

As to abusing returns to stages: I'm fine or mostly fine with the way it works now. I intend to add a mechanic that will make alignment easier to manage, so the player wouldn't even have to rely on revisiting stages very much. Namely, having dark weapons lower the Ali of good and neutral units and having holy weapons raise the Ali of evil and neutral units. The increase in difficulty makes it harder to control Ali because you have so many other things to worry about, so adding mechanics that brings that difficulty down is warranted.

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Tell that to your Reputation. Sorry. The public (and the Tarot gods) are giving your army a rough shake.

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That WOULD be interesting... and evil... hmm...

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Well, they're only immune to Phys and Black, not Cold. They are, however, extremely resistant to cold. So generally you'd only expect to harm ghosts with physical cold attacks and skeletons with magical cold attacks, and not much damage in either case.

Also I see that witches continue their pattern of feeling underpowered for players and overpowered for enemies... even though I've been through the code and they should function equally. I dunno, could be perception bias, but it seems pretty consistent.

I did notice that the one who wasn't getting anything done was the only one who wasn't overleveled. Although the fact that she was about on par and not getting anything done might be an issue. Stun Cloud is definitely more interesting than Charm/Phantom, but Witches are feeling very vanilla again in that they occasionally do something good, but at least as often they contribute little to nothing to a fight. When they completely blow a stun even a Cleric contributes more. If they were more consistent they would be overpowered though. (And yes, perception bias is real, we want the enemy Witches to fail every time, and want to see no less than one stun per attempt from our own)

Maybe if there were some way that they couldn't fail to stun at least one enemy? Or like, 25% chance to fail, 50% chance to stun one, 25% chance to stun two. So generally they negate one enemy, balancing their own lack of contribution, sometimes they fail, but sometimes they get a bonus stun, and they never just stun the entire unit.

Or perhaps an entirely different mechanism? I have no idea of the degree of difficulty, but if it worked like some of the spells in D&D where the Witch has a "total stun power", maybe just her INT, and it's compared to the INT of the lowest enemy. If hers is greater, it's stunned, then her INT say -30 is compared to the next lowest and so on with cumulative penalties until she fails to get a stun. So a witch is only really going to get one guy most of the time, but if they have crappy INT and she has a decent item she might get two. If she's overleveled, she might get 3. An underpowered Witch will fail regularly against all by the dullest foes. Could play into beguiling fools, but really not being an answer to mages and the like, who die to Archers and Samurai anyway.


As for my rep, I've got that under control. One little stage and I almost got back up to 50. After Valparin and Xenobia I should be fine to pick up the Key and Brynhildr.

During a stage managing alignment is definitely right out, but dropping it is fairly easy and the forest is a karma Houdini for anything that isn't level 9 yet. The holy/unholy weapons would be very useful for spot fixing a unit that strayed a little out of its alignment range though.

I've been playing a lot of Tactics Ogre PSP lately, which also helps fan the OB flames... And I've also making progress on the hack that stands in OB's way, so both good things.

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Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. As such, I'm very hesitant to include safety measures that give a guaranteed amount of success or even of failure. If tweaking the rate does work, maybe stun could have an enhanced rate in specific situations, like extra effective against humans maybe.

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Alas, you only have one more completed stage left. :/ Hopefully it won't be too long before I get back to this. It's definitely going to be my next hack project that I work on, and I'd say absence has made the heart grow fonder when it comes to working on this hack, and your videos contribute significantly to that. It was just my primary focus for so long (making all those system changes) that when it came time to do stages I was just burnt out.

Yeah, I know I'm about to run out of stages, probably why I've been so hesitant to actually start Deneb's Garden. But in the long run there should be more than enough towns, and I can come back for the Key after Kastolat if I need to.

Unmei no Wa is fantastic. I'm still glad that I played the original just so I can say I beat that hateful thing, but the remake is hard without being brutal, and has so much more gameplay. I also enjoyed the revised consistent translations since Atlus's choices aren't entirely consistent between 6 and 7, and some of that was carrying forward errors or changes from 5, where Enix apparently made more than a few mistakes reinserting string tables.

I've actually been trying, with little luck, to get the Saturn version of Ogre Battle working. I'd heard that, unlike the PSX version, the Saturn port actually had enhancements, yet screenshots of it are rare. The best I've been able to do so far is get into Stage 1 with glitchy audio, but the game crashes when it attempts to enter combat with Warren. It also crashes on the Wild Man during the Entrance Parade. All I've been able to see is that the Lord has a 32 color palette which was used to better differentiate areas of the sprite and improve shading, the Fighter's colors were tweaked to make it obvious that he has pants, and the Cleric has an entirely different sprite that isn't all poofy. That and the map sprites are like OB64.

The Saturn version also loads drastically faster than the PSX version, which is sad.

Yeah, I'm liking Tactics Ogre PSP a lot. The only complaint I have is that the game's balance is completely broken (it'd be a good hack target BUT WE'RE NOT GOING THERE) which unfortunately seems to be the case with every Ogre game. In order to enjoy the game, I had to create a rule for myself that I'd never field more than one of the same class in any battle. I also try to use a variety of weapons, but am not quite as strict on that front. Previously, I had played a few stages, then started over and made a party of all archers. The archer class is super broken, and the XP system heavily rewards using as few classes as possible (which is horrible). That playthrough didn't last long though because it was so easy and boring. But yeah, when playing the game with the rule I set for myself, I'm lovin' it. The style is great, story is great, customization is great, the system is interesting, and goddamnit I love Quest/Team Ivalice. Seriously, if those guys could just outsource their balancing, they would have exclusive claim to the best games on the market.

Ooo... I'd be interested in seeing some screenshots from the Saturn version if you'd be up for taking any. The fact that the PSX version pauses the restarts the stage music every time you pause and unpause completely disqualifies that game for me, so I've barely even played that one. The game feel also just feels largely lost in the PSX version, and I'm discovering lately that game feel means a lot more to me than I realized. In FFT, for instance, the timing and forcefulness of your enemy-slaying attacks is just so satisfying, it feels great, and Tactics Ogre has a lot of that same feel, too. Attacks in the PSX version of OB feel floaty and detached. I don't know if any of that is making sense.

Early PSX had some pretty abysmal load times. Remember when Square re-released FF1, now with load times! Loading on disk-based systems has been a bit of a thorn in my side in my Nocturne hack. Since loading is infrequent on these systems, generally everything important is kept in memory at all times. This means in order to refresh changes to enemies, items, skills, etc. I have to reset the game and load a save file and then get back to the place I was trying to test (savestates won't work, because they'll load the same RAM state that they saved). However, just last night I got past that problem by making a script that writes my changes to the emulator's RAM rather than just the game disk, which should up my efficiency tremendously.

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Well, hopefully you do finish, I've been enjoying the show! Between the vids, Tactics Ogre, and some design talks for the hack I've been having: I'm keeping my interest at a simmer so it'll be ready to boil once Nocturne is done. I think I am pretty sold on the idea of having some of the initial wave of enemies spawn on towns, rather than from the enemy base, which means the first thing I work on will probably be getting morale to show when clicking on enemy squads in-game. Just need to come up with a term that fits for a comparison of your army's morale vs. that enemy squad's morale... attrition? I dunno.

If you're looking for a new term for the comparative effect of city ownership, how about supply? It would be intuitive to see that an enemy squad has an advantage if they're better fed and have better-maintained gear than you. It could also justify the loss in reputation and end-of-map reward as time passes. The townspeople won't like you as much or be as inclined to reward you if your men and monsters sat around using up everything the cities could possibly spare.

I considered using supplies, but I dunno... I feel like "supplies" implies a more complex mechanic of supply routes and zone control. Liberating a town on the other side of the map from an enemy squad doesn't seem like it should hurt their supplies, but it would hurt their morale. It still could wind up being the best term though, I'm just pointing out the issue I have with it. Another term I was considering was Resolve. Still haven't found one I'm in love with, though.

Been gone a bit, but how about Siege? I'm not sure how you want the damage bonus to work for enemies, but I'm thinking something like the damage bonus is always the same when they have it, but it takes more liberated towns to break even with units with a higher...siege.

[EDIT] Or maybe just 'Liberate x.' Also, it could also affect AGI and turn order. Some % increase to strike first.

Anyway, that was a great catch on the Sun card. Out of all the things I tried to test, that was not one of them. I've only used a Sun card twice in my life, and the second time was to make sure I didn't hate them. I did.

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The Sun card was much more useful than the original game back when it worked properly, I swear!

I dunno... I don't feel like "Siege" or "Liberate" are very intuitive terms for what the effect does.