raics

Feedback and Suggestions

599 posts in this topic

6 hours ago, jullian29 said:

is it possible to rework the poison mechanics? have a percentage based damage like 5% for the normal and 10% for envenom, and revert the intervals to normal but with a longer duration, in that way players will be obligated to use cleanse. the damage it does is honestly nonexistent all throughout the game

Poison lasts a long time so it adds up, if you poisoned 4 enemies with the cloud and it ran its full duration it's 600 total damage which isn't too bad even in endgame. But yeah, the urgency to remove it isn't really there and I would have reworked it a long time ago if it didn't require digging through assembly, meaning it will have to wait, better to do the easy stuff first.

Edited by raics

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What you're saying is about poison in the player's hands, though. The real problem is how the AI uses it. Enemies would work better if they simply didn't have access to poison. It's doing them almost exclusively harm.

Edited by Valenhil

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I suppose it might help as a band-aid if it did a bit of damage upfront too, the way gravity flux does. Not percentage, though, a fixed amount of non-resistable damage + a low scaleable non-elemental base so it might do something in endgame.

Also, if I shift that fixed damage upfront it will make the AI treat it as just another damage spell and will use it whenever a regular AoE spell does less damage, which will usually happen on tough units where poison is the most useful.

Edited by raics

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Hello raics,

Do you think you could point me to the appropriate address for the Lord's stats in the 03e8 file in the hex editor? I love your mod, but I hope to exercise some autonomy over the Lord's stats. By the way, are the stat tables in the readme for the different classes out of date?

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Yeah, they're somewhat out of date, it's a bit of a hassle so I haven't been updating them. It isn't a terribly important information anyway and you can see it ingame too.

Lord's stats start at 83c7a and go like this

3c 4b 14 19 12 16 12 16 12 16 12 16 12 16 12 16 12 16 12 16 1e 0c 03 08 02

3c is the HP base for the class, and 4b is growth per level divided by 10, so lord class has 60 HP at level 1 and gets 7,5 per level. Then you have base and growth for MP, STR and the rest of the stats in the usual order, after that 1e is RT, 0c is base ATK and 03 is growth, so lord has 12 + 0,3/lev, then you got the same for DEF. Movement range is on 83c9f and it goes up and down by 4, not 1, so 19 is movement range of 5 and 15 is range of 4.

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Thank you very much! I'm having trouble finding it at the address, though, and searching for the hex values you mentioned doesn't seem to turn up anything. I suspect it has to do with how my installation indicated a size mismatch for my ISO and necessitated I rebuild my ISO before patching =/. Any ideas for how I might fix this? 

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On 4/17/2018 at 1:43 PM, mario2000 said:

Found a bug. Ars Magna and Herbalism are switched when you go to craft.

this, are we really supposed to get Ars Magna combination recipe before Herbalism? story wise

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25 minutes ago, jullian29 said:

this, are we really supposed to get Ars Magna combination recipe before Herbalism? story wise

You should be getting consumable crafting recipe first as of last patch (though it will say ars magna), that's why they ended up reverted which will be fixed in next patch, whichever that one is. When I get to editing encounters you won't be getting ars magna from a story battle and will only be able to buy it from deneb in postgame, you can't use those spells before their level anyway and the cost won't be overly high so there's no hurry to fix it.

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39 minutes ago, mario2000 said:

Gave Arycelle a Siege Bow, seems like bows can no longer shoot past their displayed maximum range. Makes me kinda sad.

Just siege bows, that way they have the range advantage only when shooting uphill, it's intended.

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hover draft magic mp cost is too much, 30 mp for just 1 target :(, comapre it to drift or ascend which are more useful

and having an action animation instead of an item for the ward skills sounds more appealing

Edited by jullian29

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Hi, I`ve been playing your mod for a while and I must say that I love most of the changes that you did, how you made most classes unique, so great job on that. Although there is some things that I think ruined the game a bit, like the access of all units to most consumables that heal status ailment since version 0.89. I love to add these spells in my strategies but right now they are nearly useless. They are difficult to aply unless you are a magician which is not really a problem. The problem is that every enemy can and will use an item and heal them in the next move so why bother. I have seen how after I risked a turn with a 40% chance of triggering charm it worked only to see how the charmed enemy heal himself the charm with an item. Or how difficult is to silence a magician or healer because they are in the backrow and have high resistence (as it should be) and once you manage to do it the next enemy will heal them with an item. So again why bother to use them to begin with. I think those item should be behind the field alchemy so enemies don´t abuse them, it makes healing magic way less useful as everyone can heal them and the status ailment magic become very situational that are mostly useful again monster unless they have human allies to heal them with items.

I think you are doing great with these mod but these need more testing

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Buff and status spell cost is standardized currently so I probably won't reduce it but it might become multi target. Hover is a pretty decent status, though, you're getting movement over all surfaces and +1 jump.

Shutdown status effects are so powerful it borders on abuse and statuses are much more common in the mod, due to the way spell accuracy scales they tend to become more accurate in late game so the opportunity cost for using them is lower too. Therefore, status removal had to become more accessible too, and for everyone or it wouldn't be fair, it's good if status effects are situational now because I've seen a full field of bewitched units fighting one another or deep in sleep nobody can wake them up from.

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There is a bug with spellbooks. The recruit skill that it gives doesnt work, no matter what it's always 0%. For comparison, I took the appropriate recruit skill as an actual skill and tried both that and the item version. The skill worked fine, the spellbook didnt.

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3 hours ago, The Ancardia Codex said:

There is a bug with spellbooks. The recruit skill that it gives doesnt work, no matter what it's always 0%. For comparison, I took the appropriate recruit skill as an actual skill and tried both that and the item version. The skill worked fine, the spellbook didnt.

Right you are, most likely it's because the skill level is considered to be 0 when used from an item. It isn't a problem for most other skills because they still have some chance to work or some range even if their level is zero but recruit skills are based on a non-standard formula that's hardcoded into the effect (the chance to hit field lists 100%) instead of called from the formula list so there isn't much I can do about that at the moment, regretfully.

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I love the amount of work you've put into making every weapon feel powerful and usable. In my vanilla run I stuck to only a few weapons, in this mod however I've tried to have a unit for every weapon type and have yet to be disappointed.  Even if the recruit skills are bugged I still love using spellbooks, the enfeeble on hit and value from stats makes them feel good and I can't wait to see the finishers. 

 

If I hit endgame and feel like something is lacking I'll be sure to mention it but for now you're hitting it out of the park. Good job!

Edited by The Ancardia Codex

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Could you by any chance point me to the hex address of the generic base stats in the 03E8.bin file? I wanted to try tweaking a few things (namely playing around with base RT a bit) but I'm finding myself a little lost.

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2 hours ago, Icemephit said:

Could you by any chance point me to the hex address of the generic base stats in the 03E8.bin file? I wanted to try tweaking a few things (namely playing around with base RT a bit) but I'm finding myself a little lost.

Sure, generics start at c59aa and the race template table is 64 fields wide, on that address and the following one is the base HP amount, then you got the base MP amount, then growth for HP and growth for MP. After that you have the eight main stats in their usual order, first the base amount and then growth for each one, and after that is RT. All generic races have four templates and are listed in this order, human male, human female, hawkman, lizardman, lamia, orc, skeleton male, skeleton female, ghost male, ghost female, faerie, gremlin, pumpkinhead, dragon, hydra, gryphon, cockatrice, octopus, cyclops, golem. All unique and named characters have separate racial table entries.

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(related to 0.90a)

Raics,

Great work you've done here. I've been working on a rebalance of my own, having been ignorant of yours... I find we shared a lot of similar thoughts about several issues, though you've clearly ratcheted these things up to level 10 compared to where I'd taken it so far!

Only found this mod this weekend, so haven't exactly done extensive testing... only two separate runs into the mid chapter 3 (one law and one chaos). Have not had the chance to play with beasts outside of griffon and octopus, or any of the "humanoid" faerie / gremlin / reptile yet.

My personal play style is to start from scratch, run through the story to the end toying various builds in vanilla, pretty much never do POTD / CODA for context. And then doing it all over again from scratch (new save, no wheel).

So, from a not-at-all min max situation blinding rushing through the story, I feel the following:

  • Magic Damage scales really weirdly compared to weapons from a leveling perspective. Chapter 1 is the worst, at the start of chapter one magic is completely OP and does double the weapon damage. By the end of Chapter 1, though that has flipped and weapons similarly outclass magic. It would seem this is because weapons have received two fairly significant upgrades in the form of 2H variants of weapon types, and then another upgrade on top of that in the shop by the end of the chapter, meanwhile upgraded armor on enemies has effectively nerfed magic damage.. The introduction of the AOE spells halfway through helps mitigate this somewhat, but that's offset by strengthen becoming available around the same time.

    This only really starts to stabilize a bit towards the end of chapter 2 when augment element ranks start to make some headway, higher ranks of spells start showing up. By Chapter three things seemed to have evened out; and maybe this is okay because the casters have utility they can focus on until the later chapters make the magic damage more viable. Just feels unsatisfying to treat them as buff bots for half a run.

    Or maybe I was just doing something wrong.
     
  • Knight does a good job at meat shielding / zoning, and has more utility in the form of access to "cleanse" spells. Terror Knights do a decent job of being the Yang to Knight's Ying.
    Similarly Dragoon and Beast Tamer, fill a role related to beasts (countering or enabling them) and have a degree of utility / flexibility built in there.
    Warriors at least have an option to use a ranged weapon.
    Spellblade has obvious utility, and Vartan is basically a flying spell blade with weaker damage on spells (El Colas Winds broken good).

    All of these have a fall back pattern, "if I can't reach the enemy to melee, at least I can do Xxx" that mitigate any movement or positional lackings
     
  • Berserkers, however, feel underwhelming compared to the alternative early to mid game "melee" classes. Berserkers lack that fall back pattern, and innate wade does little on most terrain to help with that problem. So I find them twiddling thumbs too often. 

    Would love to either see their movement increased to 6, or be given a Dash (move +3 this turn for using TP).
     
  • Similarly, Rogues ability to lay traps and other things do give them a fall back pattern, and steal is a unique ability... though given my play style probably offers limited usefulness.

    That said, would also love to see their movement raised to 6, or given Wild Hunt (which I feel is entirely unnecessary on Ninjas and should be removed, Ninjas have enough of a fall back pattern and safety as it is I feel).
     
  • Love the attempts to make the skill level ups more reasonable. However, I would suggest the following based on my personal expected frequency of action:

    Further increase the MELEE weapon skills to 128 (Not as bad as vanilla, but ranged weapon skills still leveling significantly faster than their melee counterparts even with counter).
    Further increase Beast, Dragon, Undead to 96
    Further increase Sacred, Demon, Golem, Reptile to 128
    Drop Anatomy to 64
     
  • Someone else comment that status effects were too easily remedied by the AI. I tend to concur. I like that the buffs/debuffs have impact, and would prefer to see them less easily remediated. TBH if Knight's and anybody XxxProof were the only people able to cure some of the debuffs that'd be fine by me. As it is, any debuff I land is more like "make a random enemy unit waste their turn doing nothing" regardless of what the debuff is as one of the AI will invariably cure it.
     
  • Warlock I tinkered with but... weird class at the moment, still trying to absorb information in this thread about how to use it.
     
  • Excited to get to play around with Necro, White Knight, and other "unique" classes... May actually do POTD and CODA again after all these years :D

Disclaimer: I'm perfectly capable of applying these above changes myself, and I likely will in the future to my personal copy. But I will at least finish one of those runs through Dorgalua before mucking with your work.

Great job!

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Thanks for the feedback, there's a lot of people that love this game and thought of modding it but the process is kinda awkward without any tools, maybe one day we will have some available. I've included a fair bit of the changes based on community feedback but it's ultimately done according to the way I think the game should work, it shouldn't be hard to tweak to your liking but you should obviously wait for some kind of a finished version as things are prone to changing, items and skills shifting places would especially make it tricky to keep up.

About the feedback, it probably isn't possible to give magic a smooth powerup curve, weapons come in many tiers and magic typically has four or even just two, that meant it powers up in rather large steps and tends to flag a bit right before the next upgrade. That can be fixed by having only one spell of each kind and scaling it by stats alone but that eliminates the RT control and simplifies the mana management aspect that make mages more interesting than other ranged attackers. That said, compared to archers, mages are probably having more consistent damage output and are a natural counter to beasts which are fairly vulnerable to spells and don't TP from getting hit by them like normal attacks, if we add their other tricks it's kinda hard to directly compare mages to other classes. The game also uses a damage formula that makes it really sensitive to tampering with stats, in several previous patches magic resistance was just a notch lower and it made mages disgustingly oppressive.

It's true that some classes lack a fallback action, but in this game it isn't a serious drawback because it doesn't tempt you into wasting RT on unnecessary actions, so a berserker or a dragoon are classes that are very focused on doing their thing as opposed to those like spellblades or warlocks that can always find something to do. The damage scaling is probably a bit off currently because VIT is too high, I'm trying some things with it to release in a minor patch this week and if it all falls into place it should make berserker more effective indirectly.

I'll likely get rid of racial skills altogether, even if they level easier you'd just never use anything other than anatomy because of the enemy composition and that can't really be fixed without turning this into monster tactics, there are way too many racial types in the game and the rank system means they can't function even as a situational equip because you have to invest hard into a possibility to maybe use it sometimes, and that never worked out in any game. It doesn't really add anything to the game and will also solve a few other minor problems so it should be a good thing in the long run.

I'f you'd like to chat a bit about the game you can join the discord too

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