Insane Difficulty: Calimari Navy Video Playthrough - Insane Difficulty

I have a little more time these days, so I thought I'd try and finish my crazy calimari playthrough. Videos 1-18 are the same videos I posted in the video thread, just reorganized here so its easier to follow.


Stage 2


Stage 3


I didn't put the aftermath in, but I recruited 9 octopi .. which should be more than enough for now. I'm keeping my hero in a high sky unit for liberating & for now I'm keeping the giant unit, because I want to make a Titan.

Stage 4
The start was a pain, because I did a ton of fights on land, but once I was able to camp the central water area, it was quite reasonable. There were a few units with multiple lightning attackers that made things a bit difficult though!



Stage 5
I lowered my rep to complete the censer quest, but then found a world card .. so I went ahead and bottomed it out collecting more tarots and advancing my troops up to around level 7-9.



I received a stone of dragos this stage, so I promoted my starting Diana to Dragoner. I still need an undead staff to go with my undead ring though - an early lich will be key. I have to troll Pogrom to fix some alignment issues anyway .. so here's hoping.

Stage 6
My undead did well, but this stage only has 2 enemy groups with white magic (both clerics).


Stage 7


Stage 7 Boss Fight


Stage 8


Stage 8 Boss Fight

Stage 9


Stage 10 - Diaspola
Before the stage I took some time to troll Pogrom to get my Opinion Leader to 100 alignment, then go liberate cities for reputation so I could get the Posha event. Along the way I found a Blood Kiss and a Crown Still no Undead Staff, but those two more than compensate.


Stage 11 - Valley of Kastro
My Vampire unit did a bit better this stage, but he still needs a few more levels to catch up. The unit that really shines is the Princess, Nixie, Shaman, Dragoner, Canopus grouping.



Stage 12 - Muspelm
I was defeated the first time, because I tried to take over one of the lakes & didn't leave enough support at the base. This resulted in my opinion leader getting knocked off the map (a good reason to always have his/her unit be flying!) This video is a lot longer, because I didn't skip the second, third, etc time I fought (most) enemies. I did this because I had a lot of trouble the entire stage & enough of my characters kept dying that my units were changing a fair amount

The Monk + 2x Siren unit was insane with the Siren changes But I also probably could have made a better "anti fire" unit to fight them. Maybe Raven men and Sirens and such.


Stage 13 - Organa
Lots easier than stage 12, due to actual presence of water in strategic locations. A second princess and Slust didn't hurt either..

Stage 14 - Balmorian Ruins
Should have done this stage before Organa I think, as the enemies were 1 level lower.


Stage 15 - City of Milano
Three deaths this time before the boss fights, then about seven more during the boss fight (I tend to not worry too much about characters dying at the end of the stage).

This stage was difficult, but I never felt like I'd lose. Just had to keep on top of things and keep matching up the right unit (skeleton vs the Dragoner + 2x Gold Dragon ... All Phys units vs 3x Samurai Master backrow, etc)

Just level'd up my faeries a bit more in neutral fighting (lvl 13 and 14), but it's too slow. I'm going to have to wait until high level undead are available in Antalia I think (3? 4? stages) then I'll make them into Slyphs. I suppose I could try tossing one into a Princess unit for normal fighting too. Maybe instead of an Evil One, try charming + some huge PHYS item ... it's a thought.


Stage 16 - Shangila
I did find a world card this stage, but didn't get all that much out of it (maybe +3 str, +3 hp +2 int or something) because I needed high reputation for Debonair.

I added my 2 faeries to normal units, so in a stage or two they should advance to Slyph.


Stage 17 - Kalbi Peninsula
I really noticed that I have only one fire sword, but like 6 cold swords. That certainly made this stage a bit tougher. At least I had enough +cold items and +lit items to tank Nixies, Muses and Gold Dragons.


Stage 18 - Antalia

Stage 19 - Antanjl

This is the first new stage. It seemed a little easier than I remembered hardtype being, but likely that was due to the large # of white weapons I have stocked up & the two princess units that kicked some lich, vampire & pumpkin butt this stage.

The boss's frontline of all phantoms & vulnerability to white weapons also made for a little easier time there than usual. I can't wait to try more of the generals, the twins & endora out again ..

Oh what? Awesome.

Fun fact: The Lich/Ceberus/Black-Dragon-family unit makes an appearance on this stage because Efrate said it was his favorite unit.

An incredibly durable unit that one. Not sure what I'd do without white weapons in fact.

Btw, if you wanted to upload the vids somewhere that they could be downloaded, Archael could add them to the ID Youtube channel where they would likely get more views. Up to you, though.

Stage 20 - Tundra

There's no ocean or lake to catch the enemy forces in this stage. Instead there were two main options: the river at midway point & the coast along the road. I split my forces and tried to both, which was a mistake. I think this stage would have gone much smoother with my navy skirting around the coast while the flying nixies held off the advance forces.

Challenging map - the enemy titans & princesses were particularly hard to deal with. The slyph and muse heavy units caused a few panic stricken moments as well



errata:
- I mention I have two electrical swords dwarven & bizen. That should be dwarven & notos.
- I mention that my princess did better vs the enemy princess unit the second time. Actually, Norn's princess unit (low alignment) got torched by their princess the first time, while Aisha's (hgih alignment) unit defeated the princess unit both times.

Stage 21 - Fort Allamoot

This stage has a central water body - a welcome respite from landlocked levels. The water made this stage fairly smooth sailing, besides that Lich + 2xRune Golem unit which wrecked a few of my units.



After I lowered my rep this stage, I finally picked up Deneb & raised her up to Siren. Now I need to go raise my rep again with all the cities I skipped + Dahlmud Desert.

Not sure how concerned you are about Goth quest rewards, but the star fragment quest is still there for 200K Goth & I also picked up a FONT for 66K.

I wasn't able to do the pirate quest ( I think you have to liberate in a very specific order ) but that is likely in still as well & would net another 200K.

Good to know. I'm not against goth-giving quests, but the amounts could be overkill. I think the most you ever realistically get for beating a stage is a mere 30k in comparison. Please let me know of any other goth sources you find. I had been thinking about replaying this hack and doing some work on it for the past couple months or so. I've gotten better at hacking since then, and there's some more changes I'd like to attempt. So maybe there'll be a new version in the not-too-terribly-distant future! One change I think I definitely would be capable of making now is making unique characters keep their own colors. I could probably do more interesting things along the same lines as witches/sirens, too. One idea that comes to mind is having Ninja Masters get 2-3 attacks in the backrow, one hit-all, and all subsequent attacks being the same as Ninja backrow (including any added by princess/emperor). Maybe getting Kiss to target intelligently and scale with level. Maybe change the Best tactic to do something less silly. The main intimidating factor is getting myself refreshed on Ogre Battle's code.

Glad to hear you might make a new version

That Siren-esque idea sounds quite fruitful for Ninja Masters, which I've struggled to make useful so far.

Kiss would mean I might use the fairy instead of just level'ing them up to 20 via neutral encounters/mop up.

I'm curious what you'd have best do?


Stage 22 - Dalmuhd Desert

The river to the oasis turned out to be a bit of a mirage for this stage. Yes, I managed to fight the enemies in the river on occasion, but their path often went above or below the river, which made it rather hard to fight in the water.

In hindsight, using a boots + summons to get everyone at the oasis at the start would have made this stage much easier (but is a little costly).



Returning to this stage netted 66K from the black orc hide.

Well one option to try would be to have Best hit whatever would do the most damage, but that make take too much of the strategy out of picking strategies... It could perhaps hit the enemy with the lowest resistance to your attack, so then it wouldn't factor in how much def vs. mdef they have and be a bit more situational... It's kinda a tough call, I'd have to think about it. Or "Best" could be removed and replaced with a different type of strategy. Not sure what that would be either. A "Minions" tactic could be interesting, prioritize enemies that aren't the Leader. Though you can have the same result by manipulating Strong and Weak so it doesn't really add much...

Witches and Sirens could possibly also be enhanced in a similar manner to the Ninja Master... only use Charm on the first turn and use Phantom/Firewall there after. 1 Charm and 2 Firewalls feels a little bit strong, though...

I think Witch & Siren are decent as they are now. The big downside is that charm is often useless when used as the 3rd attack (or even 2nd in some cases). They are definitely deadly for the enemy at times ... I had one of your triple siren units *shakes fist* hit me with 3 firewalls right off the bat this stage & then drop 2 more the next round. But then the next fight they all tried to charm a genius level int kraken and I killed their unit taking 0 damage, so you never know ..

If charm always comes first, witch seems pretty stellar early going: maybe charm the enemy caster before it casts & then get a hit all the next round. That's better than any caster until muse, doll master or sorcerer. Even for the Siren 1 charm followed by 1 firewall seems pretty good. It's only 0.5 less expected firewalls than current & knowing that you get the charm first, makes it a ton more useful. I guess the big disadvantage is trying to use Sirens as first strike potential to wipe someone out. But there are better units for that anyway *cough* sylph *cough*

The more I think about it ... there are tons of times when 3 attacks of firewall OR charm end up being worse than 1 charm followed by 1 firewall:
+ 3xcharm is definitely not as good as 1st round charm and 2nd round firewall.
+ Any combination of 2xcharm and 1xfirewall is not as good as 1st round charm and then 2nd round firewall, except when its 1st round charm, 2nd round firewall, 3rd round charm ... which is likely equal.
= 2xfirewall + 1xcharm ... its debatable except in the case the charm randomly comes first, which is better. I think I might rather have the charm first round than 1 firewall 1 charm 1 firewall or 1 firewall 1 firewall 1 charm. It depends on if I plan to fight 3 rounds or not ..
- 3xfirewall is highly likely to be better than 1st round charm and 2nd round firewall, but not always. Charming an enemy monk, lich or muse first round would be better.

Based on deathlike's mechanics faq it shouldn't be too hard to get 40% charm success rate against many foes & if you boost a witch/siren looks like 50% is possible. It looks like 20-30% is much more likely versus enemy casters though ... which are the best things to charm. A shame I did not get Deneb earlier for massive tarot boosts.

A few ideas for tactics that would be useful:

Best chance to hit (based on agi vs agi or int vs int as per the attack in question). At least somewhat fits the best description & could be useful for units where you have many targeted attacks: siren in back to charm based on int and dragon master in back to target based on agility + melee in front to target based on agility.

Target the healer. You can make it work sometimes with strong and weak alternating, but not always. Particularly if there are 3 characters left, the healer might be in the middle of the damage range. I know this is only useful for like 25% or less of the enemy units, but there are times where I have really really wanted to kill the enemy healer with targeted attacks.

Target the damage dealer. Same idea as above, except target the enemy that has the most hit all attacks or something.

Minions (as above sounds fine to me). I agree it is of limited utility, but it would save tedium.

Some sort of hilarious hack. Like ... based on the first letter of the item the current character has equipped, target the enemy that has a class starting with the same letter Of course you are still screwed vs Shaman + Slyph + Siren + Salamander

The best chance to hit is a good one. I may use that if I can pull it off. Still doesn't feel as tactical as Leader, Strong, and Weak, but at least there are some scenarios where it could be used appropriately. I was thinking a bit more about Witch/Siren and another possibility for them would be to bring Stun back. Before, I didn't like it because bosses weren't immune to it, but I could probably make them immune now. Witches could maybe be Stun->Nightmare and Sirens could be Stun->Firewall... not sure yet. The nice thing about this is I feel like I have a bit too much Charm in the game (Witch fam, Fairy fam, Vampyre, Cerberus). The only reason I have a problem with that is that Charm is particularly effective against large enemies, who, despite my changes, still generally don't need extra weaknesses over small units. Granted the higher Int monsters can be nigh-impossible to charm.

I expanded the ROM size and am working on having as many and as large of command sets as I want. The original size limits were pretty restrictive and a couple bosses had fewer attack options than I might have liked. But since I'm still working on framework viability, I haven't thought too much about which units I'd want to change. One thing that could be nice is giving Dragon Master the ability to use each of the dragon's weaknesses (fire, ice, white) intelligently in the backrow (still as ranged str attacks... which fair a *little* better against dragons than int). Though, I don't think the game currently has a ranged str white attack (Cold Eye is still melee iirc). If you have any other units that are hard to find uses for or any other changes you think would be good, be sure and mention 'em.

Other changes I'm considering:

-Tarot bonuses are clearly abusable. And if I removed, say, the ability to re-draw Tarots (from captured cities) then the player would be encouraged to get the most of the one-time bonuses, which could mean reseting for Worlds/better draws/etc. I'm not too sure on how to fix this without removing the bonuses entirely... which may be what has to be done. The ones that currently give +stats might have to be converted over to Rep/Cha/Ali. If I were to get rid of re-draws, then maybe I could come up with some other bonuses that aren't too broken. Bonus XP, goth, a treasure, or something.

-Town liberation incentives are still not the best. Partially to compensate for the above change, and primarily to make the game feel more tactical, I'm considering having each liberated town on the map give the player units +1 to each stat until the end of the stage. That way, the player will be encouraged to sprawl out and maybe the game will feel more like a war.

-Scaling bonuses on things like terrain, dragon/beast master, alignment, etc. All of these bonuses should probably triple over the course of the game, since you wind up with 3-4 times the stats you start with, generally. 5x for units that are all cracked out on Tarots *cough*

-Movement changes to make high/low sky less good and specialized terrain more good. Basically have low sky only be as fast as normal movement, but on any terrain, and raise all the non-Plains movements up to current high sky tier. Then take high sky down a peg as well. Those movement types are just toooo good. And the specialized terrain types could really enhance strategy by being stronger than they are now. Especially if those bonuses scaled all game.

Addendum: Although, I just realized that scaling terrain bonuses (even with taking High Sky down a peg) would make top tier enemy dragons even more terror... God help us all.

Stun + Firewall sounds even better for Sirens. Variety is good & I miss seeing that effect.

The Dragon Master change sounds very cool. The class is already pretty strong, but this would make the back row attack useful in more situations & add more dragon related flavor.

The other challenged class that comes to mind is the Doll Mage/Doll Master. There is the druid idea I put in earlier. Also the unit might be salvaged by increasing their affinity to golems - since golems are so awesome already, this would make it tempting to use the Doll Mage/Master for support effects.

There are also some classes that feel a little outdated by endgame, but the majority of them serve their purpose admirably through the rest of the game, so it might not matter. Wyvern is probably the easiest one to point out when you compare it to top tier dragons. The 'normal' male melee classes seem to get crowded out when you use large beasts and you get 3x dragoon + 2x general and now you can get a few dragon masters as well. That at least happens slowly over the course of the game though, so I don't think its as big of a deal.

I really like the combined impact of the 4 changes you mention. It seems like the game would be much less exploitable & more strategic.

I think tarot stat bonuses have to go ... I was going to try another play through without any tarot drawing myself, but if other minor bonuses replace the stats, I think that would be even better. XP, Goth, treasure sound good as minor bonuses. Since healing is at a premium, maybe a partial or full heal for a unit could also be a random liberation bonus? I suppose this could be done by just including heal items in the treasure *shrugs*

Removing Tarot stat bonus + adding liberation bonus seems like it would add tons more strategy to taking/holding territory in stages. Right now it seems like the strategy is either hold one city or advance in one linear direction toward the enemy, ignoring other cities.

The scaling terrain (and alignment) bonus (in combination with the sky unit movement nerf) also would help offset the loss of the tarot bonus, but only if you use the right strategy in deploying your troops.

Stage 23 - Ryhan Sea

Definitely the hardest stage in quite some time. 12 character deaths & 2 full unit deaths marked the way here.

The 3x siren, 3x nixie, princess + 2x valk and seraphim + 2x titan units all kicked my ass a few times & some of the other units did not go down easy either ... those dragon masters and slyphs.



errata: I somehow shifted my emulator window slightly to the right during the play, so there's a sliver of windows visible :| I'll be more aware of this next time.