Insane Difficulty: Calimari Navy Video Playthrough - Insane Difficulty

I might regret this, but speaking of other opportunities for changes, here are a few things that can be abused

• Goth quest rewards out of proportion to the new stage income levels (I'll try to comb through a FAQ and give you a list of these)
  
• Revisiting areas like pogrom forest to fish for undead ring/staff/dragos/blood/etc. I don't think it's an issue for the xp or alignment fixing: the xp is really only useful for characters that are far behind & the alignment fixes are necessary IMO.
  
• Retreat can still be abused to chain enemy units to death, but it's not ridiculous like before. Now you need a monk unit ... so you can do 1 round of damage, take 1 round of damage, heal & then retreat. I don't know that it is a real problem, but to make it harder, you could always up the retreat damage requirement (may not be necessary with all the other changes).
  
• Constant item swapping to give the appropriate elemental damage type to targeted attacks and/or the best resistance buff to defend against massive damage of one type (like 3x siren or nixie units). I suppose you could not allow item swapping during the stage That would certainly make it a LOT harder anyway. Dunno if it is necessary, but thought it worth mentioning.

I could just disable retreating altogether! It's kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor positioning in a game where position is supposed to be super important...

I'm not too worried about the class promotion item finding. It just lets the player have multiple strong units instead of a few, and I'm trying to encourage multiple units. Though, as to XP, what I may do is lower the minimum XP you can get from a battle from 1 to 0.

Also not too worried about the EQ swapping. It adds a lot of strategic possibilities. My least favorite thing about it is the time consumption of swapping items every round. I would almost just as soon give the player infinite copies of every item they have, but I wouldn't want them to automatically get 5 copies for an entire squad. :/

That goth list would help a lot!

Dollmasters could probably use a little help (their Dollmage counterparts are pretty much fine), but I'm hesitant about having a front row heal in the game... they would have to be pretty situational in front. This also doesn't really help 'em out in back, where they could still use a little bit of help. Though maybe being a bit tankier would solve their issues, there.

After watching your latest LP... it's probably not a good idea to absolutely disallow retreating...

Another random idea: Instead of having towns never pay tribute gold, I could have them pay tribute gold on the first time you collect taxes on a map. This would encourage scrambling to take the towns. I'd still want to implement the morale system of getting stat bonuses from controlled towns, but this would add even more incentive. How often would you say you make to the second tribute screen?

Random and rather unimportant question: What do you think of the randomly palette-swapped units now?

Making Doll Master tankier might help quite a bit. There are definitely many situations where I'd be ok with doing less damage if I took less damage.

WRT retreating .. yeah, the last two stages (including the one uploading now) have been pretty brutal. I can't imagine not retreating.

I think I am taking 3-4 game days to finish stages usually, due to the slow speed of water units. A high+low sky setup might be able to do it significantly faster. That's the one big downside I see to awarding tribute on the first day - it encourages more high sky + low sky units.

I don't mind the randomly palette swapped units really. Its nice to have some variation & at this point in the game, I just assume that its top tier of any appearance regardless of color Some of them look odd, but some of them look quite cool.

Heh, yeah, at first I hated the palette swaps, but they've kinda grown on me. They're admittedly awkward, at times, but some of them come out really cool.

As to the liberation goth and high/low sky units: True, though fast liberation is supposed to be the main purpose of those units... they just happen to be great at everything else, too. Though if I lowered the speed of fliers and upped the speed of special terrain units: that could certainly help some.

Ah that's true. If movement speed was more balanced, then I would not worry about the liberation gold being another reason to always use high/low sky units.

Stage 24 - Shiguld

Another hard stage, though not as many deaths as the previous stage. The biggest worry was the speed of those high sky dragon units - they flew circles around my poor retreating kraken.

Alright... bit of a newb question, because I haven't played in awhile and don't remember: If a unit gets wiped out, do those characters get deleted or are they revived after the stage?

Addendum: One of the more stressful decisions in SNES ROM hacking: Playing the game through a variety of scenarios while observing RAM and trying to guess which RAM locations the game probably never uses so I can hijack them. Here's hoping bank $7EE000 is as safe as it looks.

Interesting detail on the sequential attacks implementation. Sequential attacks are, say, having a Ninja Master use an AoE skill on its first turn and then targetted skills every turn after. The detail is how Emperor cards would affect these units. I'm basically looking at two options: it could repeat their last action performed (or perform their first action twice, if no action has been performed yet) or it could continue their final type of action. The princess bonus would always continue their final type of action (unless I added another action in the sequence to prevent Princess cheesing of an awesome final attack), but for the Emperor card I could see a bit of strategic implementation with letting players choose which attack they want to get extra times.

Dead characters lose all XP that level & are revived after the stage. It's a pretty decent penalty IF you don't have replacements for them. It can still be a huge pain if a unit is half dead & you need to walk all the way back at slow speed. If that group is already close to the base, then the cost is pretty minimal.

Given the cost of revive & heal, I typically choose to let some characters die and replace them from my ranks ... which is one reason I keep tons of level'd up characters around.

So yes, the difficulty could be significantly increased if death was permanent or at least carried over to the world map so you had to use a 25K revive item/etc to get the characters back alive.

For the Emperor & units with varied attacks - I think having the extra choice about which attack to double would be fun & add another strategic choice.

I'm not sure that I'd want a perma-death penalty, I kinda like the idea of being able to cannon fodder weaker units without too much penalty. Perma-death seems like it would be a nerf to using large numbers of units, which is naturally something I want to avoid.

Yeah, that's the approach I took with Emperor. Pretty much the only scenario where it might be abusable if I had a small unit using Quake. And the only scenario I could imagine with that is if they, say, wasted their first turn (something like Vampyre's sleep) and then on the second turn used Quake, and that was their only attack. So it's kinda like charging up a major attack. But even in that case, Emperor wouldn't be *that* abusable, and I'm very uncertain that I will be including such a thing. Does sound kinda neat, though.

I expanded the ROM and moved the tables for random-choice attacks and sequential combo attacks to the expanded region. I can now have up to 16 of each and up to 16 types of attacks in each. In the process of looking at doing the same for elementally-intelligent chosen attacks.

Seeing that Fogel fight makes me sad. I should probably see if I can get a fix in for letting recruitable members have higher stats in their enemy form than their ally form, because I can't really make him any stronger as an enemy without making him OP as an ally right now.

The computer is getting revenge for Fogel in Fort Shulamana. Don't worry

The Dragon Master + 2xLich back with a Tiamat up front is decimating me.

Stage 25 - Fort Shulamana

The start was brutal. Between the two Tiamat units, I thought I was going to have most of my forces routed, but with a few boots and heals, I was able to survive the start. After that I managed to get the appropriate counter groups for most of the harder enemy groups, but this level was still quite challenging.

The comparative speeds of high sky dragons vs my kraken is still the hardest thing to deal with. I need to send out the low sky nixie+princess units more often to just see what is coming up next & get into the right position for it. That or clump all my forces in one place (but that seems rather boring).

Previa was just as hard as I remembered, but I had the benefit of more dragon masters & more ice/white weapons than the last play through.

Tier 4 dragons are dicks. I'm thinking I need to nerf the defenses on Sylph and Princess some more, really enhance the tradeoff for their awesome destructive power. Possibly also lower Lich's defenses some. These combined with an upgrade to Doll Master defenses could help Muse and Doll Master standout as tankier DPS options. How are backrow Evil Ones working out for you?

Also, you aren't use Tarots at all, right?

Ack! Well, you saw my Princess get 3 shotted by the Tiamat group. I suppose she doesn't face that level of danger commonly .. though that is largely because I have a Monk in both Princess groups for 3x heal all. The Sylphs don't get that many attacks back to them, since they wipe the enemy out first, so I would agree more there. Liches definitely rock for their combination of offense + magic defense, but they should to some degree IMO.

I should try converting a top tier Monk or Siren into a Muse. My current Muses are after thoughts & hardly used, so I am not sure if Muses are really hurting that bad right now. Between Dragon Master (Rauny) & Princess (Norn, Aisha), I have made all my named female characters into something better than Muse ... except Deneb, who is a Siren. I should probably convert her as well.

I do agree that making Doll Masters tankier than (most) other casters would make Doll Masters much more useful. Liches should be somewhat hard to kill IMO from a lore perspective, unless you use white or maybe fire.

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Evil One is working great for me, but then I used a huge HP starting wildman as my Evil One & he's gotten pretty much every world tarot bonus. So I am not sure if it's the best test case The key for the Evil One is that he can do decent back row hit-all to help the 2 Sylphs take out casters & is tanky enough to swap front line if I am in the water & want to get 3xMaelstrom from the Kraken. Flexibility like that is key for Kraken units, but I am not sure it translates as well for most other army strategies. You could argue that Devil > Evil One in back most of the time & Raven Man > Evil One in front defensively (from an evasion perspective).

Yeah, Evil One's role seems niche, but at least it's there. And in the front, he's no worse than paladin/samurai/ninja master, generally speaking.

So to the high/low sky liberation stuff: do you think non-flier units would have trouble reaching a town to liberate it on the first day? Obviously, from a morale system perspective, the sooner you liberate them: the better. But for now I'm just worried about being able to actually reach the towns in time for your first paycheck. And I mean with a normal army here, not with an all-water army.

It depends on the map. Flier units will have the advantage on maps with tons of mixed terrain. Even if their top speed is nerfed to 6/5 for H/L sky respectively, a plains speed unit goes from 7 (if you boost them) to 1 to go over some river & that's true to a lesser extent for forests, mountains, etc.

For maps that are more uniform sea, desert, forest, plains, etc then the fliers won't be the liberator of choice. They still will be pretty good in all those situations though.

Even without the changes, I think non fliers can liberate some towns on the first day on many maps. Though if the strategy becomes "liberate as many as possible in a lightning push & hold on" then likely players will have a variety of liberation units. I am not sure about holding more than 2 or 3 points of attack though.

Stage 26 - Shrine of Kulyn

A mostly water stage - even more so than Fort Allamoot. There were some difficult fights to be sure, but the movement speed & terrain bonuses helped a ton. I also managed to get my first flying kraken unit.

Krakens riding dragons. Gotta take a minute to let the sexiness of that image sink in. I remember fighting those Dragon Master + Tier 4 dragon squads. That shit is rough. So much beef, but so much damage. Definitely encourages swapping EQ every battle. Would really like to implement that system that lets two characters hold the same item so long as they are in different units, but the implementation seems insurmountable. And they would have to auto-de-equip items when removed from a unit, which might not be desirable.

Previa's Devils in stage 25 had one sexy palette swap. The white-suited Ninja Masters in Luvalon's unit were pretty cool, too. Luvalon takes no guff from phys... though a Rune Golem Quake might be able to scratch him. Just 4? more to go! How will the mighty octopi stand against Stage 30?