Regdren

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Everything posted by Regdren

  1. Vagrant Story Zenith

    Regdren replied to the_E_y_Es_o_0's topic in Development Discussion

    Follow-up question! Would you also like some feedback from a player who goes into the mod knowing nothing about Vagrant Story? Or is this more of a mod for veterans?
  2. That feeling when I render the video and only then notice that I didn't speed up all of the skill animations. Today we have our second boss fight. Kaiho's main threat was that he can take an AFW from full to zero in one fight if handled badly. His weakness is that you can quickly drain most of his max attacks and leave him vulnerable. Minakawa offers a different problem: if you don't stop him immediately, he'll punch you and end the battle without you being able to do anything. At most he will use 2 max attacks in most battles so you can't really run him out of stamina. Not without suffering followups from all the AFWs under his command, at least. his weakness is that same as that of most Anti-AFWs: if you DO manage to tie him down he will suffer a lot of damage without being able to fight back much.
  3. Watch me completely lose my ability to talk due to a move by the AI. come on, it'll be fun! After playing the game for this long you'd think I had a pretty good idea of what the AI values in its move decisions. But all I know so far is that they really...REALLY hate my medium AFWs. What? A chance to attack my 4-leg at short range? Nah I'd rather attack this medium AFW.
  4. Today, we have a defense mission! With a VERY special sub-objective that is sure to cause an amazing amount of trouble. We have a change in format from now on. I like text a lot, mostly because I don't have to fiddle too much with game sound level versus the volume of my own talking. I was worried that I would not have enough to talk about in these videos but so far: not a problem.
  5. I think that a good tactics game will scare you every now and then. When you learn that your solid formation actually has a flaw, or you didn't pay as much attention to turn order as you should have, or that enemy actually CAN reach you...I'm sure you've been in a situation like that. For me, it's a nice reminder to not be complacent. I think the enemy-as-teacher idea has a lot going for it. From this point onward updates are going to be slower. I started this series with some video stored up, but I haven't been able to make more at the pace I would like. Hopefully I'll be able to explain in more detail when I do mission 8.
  6. We've seen video game enemies do all kinds of impossible things when the game calls for it. This goes way beyond just unique skills that still follow basic rules. We're talking reality-warping, "I'm alive no matter what because the game says so" scale shenanigans. We've seen some of that already in the second map, and we're going to see some of it here too. Maybe this would be a good place for you viewers to talk about what particular rule-breaking enemies annoyed you the most. I'd love to hear your own experiences, whether in tactics games, racing games, chess simulators, whatever.
  7. I'd like to talk a little bit about game design. Why is one kind of unit sealed off until several maps into the game? The anti-AFW is not what I'd call unbalanced. If it takes a hit to mobility from Wire or damage to the legs then it is pretty much useless. For this reason it relies very heavily on its squads, but the squads with repair and cleanup tend to be fragile. Even if it does manage to close in and deliver a punch the damage doesn't match a full battle with other kinds of AFWs. The best answer I can come up with is that very early in the game, neither side has the tools to handle an anti-AFW's battle plan. Very few squads have mines or wire early in the game. Pilots don't aim well enough to reliably push an Anti backwards with direct attacks. Anyone not named Kinsato would have a lot of trouble removing an enemy squad before close combat ended the battle. On the enemy side the problem is less severe due to shaky AI, but even then nothing short of a long range engagement from a 4-leg could reliably prevent a punch. That sort of thing could easily drag out a battle and frustrate the player. And if the player got an early anti-AFW, it could easily absorb pretty much any assault with no fear whatsoever. In Mission 8 I intend to show the defensive power of an Anti even against well-equipped opponents. But we're not at mission 8 yet. Let's look at the next part of mission 7. I'm kind of unhappy about how different the gameplay is from what all of the characters are saying. According to both sides in-story, we executed an ambush pretty well. However from the direction, proximity, and numbers of enemy reinforcements, it feels more like we got ambushed ourselves.
  8. Sega Chief: yeah I think that bit with the mechanics was a very nice touch from a design perspective. Their attacks would be a lot less useful if they pushed the enemy out of their effective range. I agree about the weight as well. There's something to be said for slow, clunky war machines and the impact of everything they do. Speaking of less obvious game mechanics, I just recently found out something about the Recover command. I was playing around with my movement options and discovered that the time penalty seems to be doubled if you execute a recovery after moving. I saw the time to next turn jump by one hour if done standing still, while it jumped to two extra hours after a move. I plan to talk about this more in a future video, but for now I'll just say that I might adjust some of my strategies to account for this.
  9. It's time to move on to mission seven! The enemy is done with being a mostly-helpless stomping toy and has some dangerous ammunition this time. hopefully the next few videos will show the problems and solutions involved. Also: is this format of one post per video okay? I noticed that others are more like one post with the full playlist and don't want to annoy people by flooding the update list. Let me know if I'm causing any problems.
  10. I agree that removing speed growth is one of the best ideas for balancing the game. Aside from not always having to level up characters in classes with good speed, it makes CT balance much easier. You can set CT knowing exactly how fast every character class is, and maybe try some interesting things with it too. Just beware of + speed gear. It's probably best to keep a tight rein on that stuff. Removing power sources or nerfing them somehow would also be great. Maybe if the game was consistent and made them useable only by Worker robots on both sides of the field instead of just yours, we'd have a better situation. That could make it more of a rare problem to face instead of what we have right now. I have more thought on nerfing that thing but I'm not sure if it would be overkill. Vanilla calculator needs to go. Maybe use that slot for some weird custom class. I wonder if a blue mage could be made using the game's inbuilt "learn when hit by something" mechanic.
  11. As mission 6 draws to a close, I'd like to thank those who have watched my videos so far. it's really nice to have an audience for this sort of thing. My brother informs me that the original script was probably supposed to be "Gulag" instead of "Prison Camp", but an overly literal translation made things extra ridiculous. I love funny-bad translations though, so no complaints here.
  12. If I had modding skills, I'd try to bring the Civ 2 advisors into the other Civ games. Elvis lives!
  13. Although I made fun of it, I wish more escort missions were like this one in Ring of Red. It is exceptionally easy to manage. Ring of Red's maps are pretty cramped. There's often a road or bridge and moving away from that puts you in terrain that delays turns by a lot. It makes for some tough decisions that I enjoy overall.
  14. Can't you wreck auto-potion users with Zombie? Granted, that is a rather niche solution. Maybe there needs to be more than one class that can inflict zombie status. Edit: just realized that an auto-potion user can also just gear for zombie immunity. So your solution is probably best.
  15. Ok, I'm definitely slipping. I have plenty of content to upload, maybe I just need to use Google calendar or something. Today we have every gamer's favorite scenario: an escort mission! I think the reason i like green squads so much is that they are unique enough to change the way I approach things without being hideously overpowered. Even the later ones without glaring weaknesses are often built so that I can't take advantage of all their features at once. Really makes me stop to think about how exactly I want my units to behave.
  16. One of the things I like in Ring of Red is that it has side objectives which don't snowball nearly as hard as in other games. Collecting all of the squads gives me a lot of setup options i wouldn't have otherwise, but they don't skyrocket my stats to absurd levels. John is stuck at 420 HP and a token patch of armor through the whole game, so I can't afford to no-brain it through later missions no matter how well I do early on. Next time we're going to see a new member of the force. Jun uses a light-AFW that is much less straightforward than that of Kinsato, and will take some good planning to use properly. I saw what a good plan looks like once, I'm sure that's all I need to come up with something myself.
  17. If I recall correctly, poaches are more important in 1.3 if you've been trying to run low level. That was my playthrough style, and I saw a pretty long list of gear that was better than mine. But the sheer time sink smacked me in the face and welp, there were other games I could play. So that's what I did.

  18. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Regdren replied to praetarius5018's topic in Development Discussion

    Yeah, the sort of limits on the highest spells as I described above would need to be transparent to the player for any meaningful decisions to happen. it would take a huge amount of work and balancing and I don't really see how it would be worthwhile from a practical standpoint. Better to just keep the spells balanced enough that the basic combat system isn't broken by them. it's just fun to throw ideas around sometimes.

  19. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Regdren replied to praetarius5018's topic in Development Discussion

    Wow, I was only joking but I think it's amazing that the mechanic could be a real, possible thing. Maybe not in this game though. One issue is what you described, the other is that players would just only use it for the final boss. Or at least that's what I would do. *side glances at my supply of untouched elixirs at the end of every game I play* Though if I was going to go with that mechanic, I would link it to the extradimensional shenanigans in the story line. Any time those gates to the Boss Dimension open up and scoop out towns or whatever, the leaked energy makes high level spells possible. A limited number though. Any time a story event like that happens the "supply" of super magic should be set to a specific amount rather than stockpiling it up. Gives the player more incentive to use what they've got. As for the monsters, well they LIVED there, they're soaked in the stuff so they have their own reserve. And the final dungeon is actually in that dimensional space so the power spells can be cast without limit. Wait, am I actually suggesting this as a game mechanic? I swear I wasn't serious at first. But looking at it now, it seems at least a little bit interesting. What do you think?

  20. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Regdren replied to praetarius5018's topic in Development Discussion

    Maybe we could pull a page from the Adventurers comic and have Meteo stop working after enough casts. I mean there are only so many meteors in local outer space, right? I kid, I kid. Even though I'd love to see a game actually do that. The point of bosses and other encounters being weak to innately powerful spells is definitely an issue. As you say, we don't want these encounters to be "solved" too easily. The only solution I can think of that wouldn't make such spells useless would be to give very powerful spells a cooldown similar to items under your new system. Then we'd need to worry a bit less about some of the things you mention. Granted, this might be less of a drawback in random encounters, but at least in that situation you'd still have to charge up the MP. That would give the random monster some time to do devious things before the Holy or Flare or Meteor or whatever else.
  21. The reason I stopped playing FFT 1.3 was due to reaching the point where poaching became available. The impression I got was that I HAD to get all of this important gear but actually doing so without overleveling was a huge time waster. In the forums people were talking with a straight face (straight...text? what to you call that sort of thing on a forum?) about how it's find to just edit your file and add those things to your inventory to conserve your sanity. I will admit that my motivation was not helped by the stories of absurd things that would happen from that point onward. As for the question of how to make anything other than hyper-offense valuable, I do think increasing the effectiveness of status is good but just removing enemy elixirs is a huge step in the right direction. I don't care if that would make hard mode easier, that item single-handedly makes a large part of the game's skillset non-viable.
  22. Oops, looks like i'm a day late. The enemy squad setups slide yet another step towards competent. It's not so visible right now but as things progress the AI will do things that I previously thought it not capable of. They're using that smart trick BY ACCIDENT, I'd say to my self in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. What do you mean the tricks I learned in the first two full maps won't carry me through the entire game?!

  23. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Regdren replied to praetarius5018's topic in Development Discussion

    The idea wasn't exactly to make any element convertable to any other element, but I get what you mean. Didn't know about some spells being balanced around being one particular element. Maybe a better method for game flavor would be for some elements to be easier to access through weapons and others easier through attack spells. And you seem to be doing something along those lines already.

  24. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Regdren replied to praetarius5018's topic in Development Discussion

    I was checking your comments about the wealth of elements and poverty in methods to use them. I don't especially mind that some elements are easier to use than others; that's a way to make certain spells more special. But I agree that it should be restricted to one or maybe two elements. No reason for water to be super-exotic, as you said. Would it be possible to make relics or other gear that changes attacks of one element to a related element? For example, your ice spells and attacks now deal water damage instead. Or your lightning attacks now deal wind damage. I said this with no clue how difficult it would be to code, so if it's not feasible I'll understand. I just wanted to throw the idea out there.
  25. Mission 5 is my second chance to try a hybrid build. This time the base machine is more suited for the job so maybe I'll have better luck this time. I find that two anti-soldier squads are needed to do that job with any effectiveness, so the third gets AFW-killing duty. Enemy AFWs that are stripped of squads are much less dangerous, so I think this ratio will work. This wild chase gets more absurd by the minute. Cover story or no, I can't believe anyone will think the South Japan government isn't involved in this raid and infiltration. We're not being subtle, and we're using the very latest South Japan war machines. It's a miracle that our "sneaky" beach landing hasn't started a full scale war already!

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