Sega Chief

Go with original mode; 1.5 is the latest version but apply the hotfixes from Qhimm if you can.

I always liked Ring of Red; rented it way back and ended up getting to keep it when the local video store went out of business. The fights always felt weighty whether it was a close shave, a curb stomp, or a deadlock and lots of tactical options to experiment with. I didn't know that mechanics didn't knock enemy AFWs back when they hit them, I guess that explains why the enemy would sometimes melt and not others.

Update on current progress, a demo of the Alpha build is currently out with a few people for initial testing; a public release of the demo will be out soon once technical and balancing problems are sorted out.

Harro quad :3

Jenova Vector might have too much HP from what people are telling me; that, or its weaknesses are immediately obvious (Earth and Holy, with Holy only being available from Restore + Elemental; something I added to NT but its very easy to miss). The mod is essentially finished, only bug fixes going in now while I work on FF8 NT. Fort Condor is pretty much the same as ever, but if played 'properly' it can get tricky/expensive. For a fast and cost-effective win, deploy one fighter at the red line, start the fight, set speed to slowest; the red line should be further down now due to your fighter. Deploy a fighter on the red line again, and this'll push it down further; repeat until you're very close to the 2 enemies that have spawned, then deploy about 3-4 fighters in both lanes to quickly overwhelm the 2 enemies. Kill them before any new enemies spawn and the map will be 'cleared' resulting in a win. Fighter refund was set to match their cost so assuming no losses you'll break even on your gil.

Something I saw with Gjoerulv's hardcore mod was that people were finding the early areas to be a wall which put them off the mod altogether. I wanted to avoid that with NT, so the early bosses are designed to ease people into the game, let people experiment with the earlier availability of things like Time and Barrier. That being said, if you're on top of things and hitting a boss' weaknesses then you should be able to blast through them all. Elemental is a key thing for physical attacks, and some strong status ailments will work on a lot of the Disc 1/2 bosses. The crane robot on Floor 65 is an early peek at a later optional superboss; when you return during the Midgar Raid it's more feasible to beat him then, but there's a 3rd revisit to Shinra HQ on Disc 3 when it'll likely be the best time to take him out.

FF7 True Necrosis A small project I developed a while ago, this is a mod based on the infamous challenge-restriction run called Necrosis MO for FF7 that sets up unique conditions under which players must beat the game. The set-up is this: Every character that joins the player's party starts with 9999HP and 999MP; however, all healing has been disabled in the game meaning that any damage you take or MP you expend is permanently lost. To beat the game, you'll need to carefully manage your resources and avoid wasteful MP expenditure or excessive damage. You have free access to all commands and equipment, but bear in mind some effects are now useless (Cure, for instance, will not heal). Sources to raise stats have also been disabled. Here's the link: FF7 True Necrosis Mod v1.0 To install, extract the contents of the .zip and run the installer; specify the FF7/DATA folder of your game's installation. Remember to go into the installer's properties and unblock/run as admin if needed. If you find any bugs or discover a means with which to recover HP/MP then let me know so I can make adjustments. Good luck!

It should be fixed in 1.5; Added Effect Materia ought to come from Red XIII's equipment (I think), while MP Absorb should still be available from the Wutai sidequest.

I hope so, it'll take some kind of hard-code hack to set it up but if it proves impossible then there might be other options. There's code to disable Limits in-battle (Ultimecia's Castle) so some kind of flag must exist to do this which could be manipulated in some way for character AI.

FF9 PC battles run faster as far as I know.

Some things to consider: 1) FF9 has a lot more variance in its output damage than its two sister titles, 7 and 8. This will make rebalancing tougher unless you can find a way to adjust the formula and reduce the range of variance (which I recommend you do, it's not very popular). If you're reworking the damage curve then keep this in mind. An example of the modifier that's attached to damage is shown below (for enemy attacks, player attacks vary per weapon but usually have /8 instead): Bonus = Str + Rnd MOD ([(Lvl + Str) / 4] + 1) 2) Replacement characters like Marcus, etc. gain stats when they level up but these bonuses are transferred to later characters in addition to their own bonuses which can make them OP. If Marcus is leveled high in the swinging cage area, then Eiko will later join with superior stats to your other characters. I'd recommend finding a fix for this, or making it so that EXP or levels aren't available for temporary characters. 3) The game uses % modifiers for damage bonuses & penalties from abilities. While this tends to be manageable early on, it'll get more difficult later on toward end-game. If you can, try and adjust the actual value of bonuses/penalties of things like X Killer, Protect/Shell, Elemental, Back Row, etc. And keep an eye on Reflect too; a full party with Reflect can bounce a multi-target spell at an enemy 4 times without the spread penalty being applied and I think it gains a 2x bonus damage when reflected as well.

I cleared the 3rd area last night (that castle with the crown); feedback from the perspective of a completely blind player: -) The bats hanging around the bridge switch are very tough to beat early on due to their summon + flee behaviour. -) MegaQuake hits like a bus and has a rock-bottom IP cost compared to some of the abilities I was using prior, like Double Slash. I found myself leaning on it heavily throughout the castle sewer. Damage can range from 50 (large enemy group) to 120 (single enemy). Was using it via Maxim. Gameplay-wise, the first area (not tutorial area) was definitely the toughest as formations with 2 enemies were usually too overwhelming to fight initially; I bought a rapier + armour first run, but on 2nd run I went with that passive stat-raising skill which helped a bit. 2nd dungeon turned out great, had a bit of luck with the gauntlet of enemies; ran out of healing items midway but the 2nd last enemy dropped a potion by chance. 3rd area was crippled a bit by Frock + MegaQuake. Got 5000 gold to spend before I clear out and can't decide whether to spend it or save it for next town s:

Playing the mod just now and encountered a potentially serious problem. When you save the game in a dungeon and reload that save, the game seems to 'reset' all puzzles and even your last known world map coordinates. This means that if you save in the room before the first boss, die, and reload that save it becomes impossible to get back across the bridge as the switch resets and there doesn't seem to be any way to flip it from that side: http://imgur.com/a/7nFAg Worse than that, if you use the Escape item it will warp you to what I'm assuming is coordinates 0,0 on the world map: http://imgur.com/a/8cdGZ I'm guessing it's some kind of memory issue; don't have any experience with how the base game is supposed to work though. I was using a U ROM (acquired from CompleteRoms) with the Headered patch.

Reading through the changelog, it ticks all the right kind of boxes; not played Lufia 2 though, would that be a problem if I gave this mod a shot?

That'd be a pretty cool way of doing it.

There is a hack I've got that'll stop magic being consumed when used; it should help with the problem where people don't want to use Magic that has been junctioned.

Fixed levels on bosses could work because then you've got the option there to power up a bit if a fight is proving problematic. Randoms might need to keep their scaling though, because they get reused a lot throughout the game and if the level is set via script, then it means world map enemies would be tricky to set up. The two possible solutions to Cards is to either lock Card Mod behind a high GF level, or to modify the Card Mod results so that they're less game-breaking. I want to go with the latter because the card game is popular and I don't want to undermine it by gating the item side of it right to the end of the actual game. The other Refines should be easy to set up though. I've got draft notes similar to FF7 NT that'll set characters up with strengths and weaknesses. Selphie is being specced as a glass cannon; high attacking stats and speed, but low defensive stats & HP. I'm also re-gearing her Slots so that every result should spit out something worthwhile (so no Thunder x1, etc). For a BNW-style GF system, we'd need to code that in from scratch and an adjustment made to the way in which the Stat+ abilities work (so that they're automatic rather than needing to be equipped). There'd also need to be a restriction of one (or two) GF per character (FF6 BNW it's 1 esper at a time). Then there would need to be a way to limit the amount of stat growth that can be acquired as FF8 has no EXP arcs, it's a flat req value per level with enemy EXP being adjusted based on level difference. The current system I was planning to use was having GF affinity drop when they're used with regular Magic raising it again; for damage, they'll use a SPR-ignoring formula. Idea would be that if you rely on GFs too much then they get slower and weaker, so using them sparingly on high SPR targets would be the way with it. But yeah, I think GFs will need hard hacks of some kind to get it interesting. A limitation on the number that can be equipped at a time would be a good first step. I'm also not sure what to do with stat-progression at the moment, it's just going to be normal arcs that go up with Levels but I'd like to do some kind of system where the player can make character builds again.

D;

I try to implement a curve that cuts down on grinding wherever possible, with the best EXP/AP/Item yields toward the end of the game as an incentive to keep moving forward.

I went ahead and updated NT to 1.5, now that most of the initial bugs and problems have been corrected; you can find it in the Downloads section here on NG+ http://ngplus.net/index.php?/files/category/12-final-fantasy-vii-new-threat/

Who could possibly say

Good idea that; I've been meaning to make modding tuts for FF7.

I had trouble with the original so a rebalance would be great.

Mate, you can't censor the truth; although I'm not going to debate the whore mouth thing.