Emmy

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Everything posted by Emmy

  1. Hey there, I'm Jively!

    I recognize you from popping into my stream a few days ago. Do you have Discord? If so, click the "chat" at the top of the screen here. Most of us hang out in the Discord more than talking on the forums. Definitely when you're done with 1.3, check out Monster Tactics for something totally different.
  2. Calculators don't exist, and the game is plenty beatable without mimes. It's OK to not know vanilla inside and out, because you're going to have to relearn everything anyway. Ps1 and psp versions are 2 separate mods. They were made by 2 different people, and thus do different things to the game. I don't know which has better sound, but most mods are made on ps1 version so if you just get that version of the game, it means you can play other mods when you decide you're done with this one.
  3. emm0ji

    emm0ji
  4. Was that screenshot taken before or after ninjasdf worked on whatever was causing the bar bug on the site?
  5. Anything with a charge time, if the AI uses it and moves, moving will cancel the charging of that move. It is something hardcoded to that skillset that I figured out the fix to fairly recently. I put this fix in the spoiler tag below. And it's these "balance issues" that I'm challenging here. Why not be more creative in how you handle bosses? Having it be faith based can allow you to set it to pathetic/0 accuracy with a low faith enemy, having an enemy using non-charge or having no moves with a charge time means that the enemy will be effectively immune. Of course, you shouldn't be doing this to every boss and the move needs to have a use against some bosses. Why punish the player for having access to a useful move by making the enemies immune for a reason that the player won't understand?
  6. Don't forget also that I had made br/fa changes no longer permanent, and 1.3 did not. The reason I did this is so that if enemy uses chicken race on you, it's not automatically a reset; while in 1.3 it is because you can't buff it back and too many battles rely on the rng of reactions going off. Pretty much all the useless jobs need to be rehashed from scratch. I like 1.3's approach to Archer, it however both needs the bugfix fix I made for charged shots, and its status effects need to be more accurate and relevant to more fights. Interrupt (i forgot what 1.3 calls it, but it's what MT calls Interrupt) needs to actually work on bosses or there needs to be a reason intuitive to the player for it to not work on everything. Tying it to Faith is one approach, or you can give it a charge time so that it has a tricky CT to line up. Something that'll make it actually worth getting and not confuse the player (past not knowing game mechanics) when it doesn't work. I also don't care for its roulette like move, when I'd rather have something that is a 100% or nearly so of a minor status that would be useful to use at range. Poison, Blind, Silence, Oil are good choices here, since they can lead to interesting strategies when combined with party compositions. Lancer is an easy fix with my fix. Autolearned jump, and actual skills in the real skillset. Literally anything else in the real skillset would be an improvement.
  7. The reason I downvoted the post that I did had nothing to do with disagreeing with it. There are plenty of things that people say, in this thread and any other FFT balance/theorycrafting thread that I disagree with, some of which I actually upvote due to the person arguing his points in a way that contributes to discussion. When you said something to the effect of "I said it's my opinion" and nothing else in your post, coincidentally that's the exact kind of thing that makes me not want to read anything else you say. I know it's your opinion because you're saying it, and very few things in these topics are actually facts. And since you had nothing else in the post, it didn't contribute to discussion. Yes. You still need to turn skillset 0x12 into a regular skillset, and whatever you put into skillset 0x34 is autolearned. And yes, it will follow equipping the skillset. Any time you have 0x12 as a primary or secondary, you will have 0x34 for free as well.
  8. That kinda requires someone taking real action to make something like this. It won't be 1.3. I hope whoever does it, does so as their own project and not as some kind of legacy project; because with the insane amount of work required, you don't want to be married to decisions made in 1.3 that you don't agree with or that break decisions that you make.
  9. Some amounts of RNG is fun. For example, randomized brave and faith, zodiac signs, and randomized monster stats between male/female variants (the way MT does it, not the way vanilla does it) can make it so that the ai doesn't always choose the same things first. However, having to rely on accuracies below 50% too frequently shouldn't be a thing in a strategy game.
  10. Some Random Comments

    Velius is actually a bit bugged in that version, to where he's *MUCH* easier than he should be. Reason is when I changed things' skillsets, somehow he ended up with the squid set instead of the set he's supposed to have. This'll be fixed if/when I release a new version. You are right in a lot of things not fully being cohesive. You can blame having to learn ASM as I go and plans for things being made as I figure out if things are possible, as opposed to having the coding skill right away to be able to come up with a cohesive plan from the start. This is part of the reason why I share my stuff - I would like to see what someone else could come up with if they have 100's of things to to pick from in the start instead of the make up as you go strategy. Zalmo was something I ended up nerfing around 7x due to complaints about difficulty. Izlude was always one of those "hit or miss" battles where people either struggle with or wreck it with 0 in between.
  11. Well, most of the problem with status effect rng is that in vanilla, debuffs were evadable in addition to the faith based check, and evasion was stupidly high. When something has a 50% chance to cut through evasion, and another 50% check even if you hit the unit, why bother with status when damage is out of control and you can just kill the guy instead? Get rid of that evasion check and make it faith based only, and you have something that has reasonable chances of hitting in addition to something that a player could feasibly increase those chances further with use of faith status and/or faith increasing moves.
  12. You can have better scaled spells without resorting to making fire 1/2/3/4. The main issues with spell scaling: 1. Spells are linear, physicals are quadratic; yet magic and physical attack growth scale the same way on characters. Let's simplify a spell's formula to ma*15 for this example. A spell like this will outpace ma^2 at ma < 15, and be outpaced by ma^2 at ma > 15. Spells are frequently broken amounts of damage at lv 1, while barely/not at all worth the action to cast vs. using physical damage by mid level. Solution = fix all formulas so that they are always linear or always quadratic. 2. Spells have a charge time, physical attacks do not. Since charge time is the best balancing factor for skills that isn't properly utilized in 1.3, my proposed solutions: Give some physical skills a charge time (something like MT's Flare Blitz makes sense to have a charge time, since it's a physical skill that deals more damage than a direct attack, and also has an aoe), fix speed scaling to allow ct to be used (this can either be done by freezing speed growth, capping level much lower, or making spells faster as a character gains speed). 3. Spells have MP cost, most physical attacks do not. Why not balance MP costs differently? MP costs and character MP growth in MT are entirely balanced upon new statuses (mist/rasp); weakness/strength to Ignite and Invert; use of passive abilities such as Amplify, Siphon, Mind Shield, Pressure, Hollow Mind; use of MP milling skills like Mp break, etc. As such, characters can have thousands of MP at lv 99, yet MP as a mechanic is still important. What you get in 1.3 is "fuck mp, I'm just going to use physical attacks" or "as long as I have enough MP to cast Meltdown with each character, that's all that matters." 4. Range and AOE of spells doesn't matter as much when your characters can have 9 move and you only need to kill one target. Solution = balance movement better, eliminate assassinations. Elemental stuff can be better balanced with more interesting equipment choices, different procs on different elemental spells, different shaped spells (Fireball/Lightning Bolt/Cone of Cold). I don't think vanilla is too hard for early game, however my main issue with vanilla is that early game is much harder than late game. Difficulty should scale upwards as the plot progresses, not downwards. Assuming no excessive grinding, in chapter 1, you're essentially even with the ai. Ai gets units with few relevant abilities, bad equipment, etc. You get units with few relevant abilities, bad equipment, etc. Now what happens in ch 4? You get ninjas, calculators, Orlandu; and the vast majority of your enemies are still knights and time mages with linen robes and only Haste and Antidote learned. I would advise against removing CT altogether. CT is the main thing that makes FFT unique when compared with other strategy RPG's, and is one of the best balancing factors to exist. You're better off finding a way to make it work.
  13. Some Random Comments

    Panthers have No Guard, which turns everything they use and everything used on them that has non-0% accuracy into 100% accuracy. The checks for abilities like Blade Grasp, Runic, Concealment, Bulletproof happen independently of No Guard's (so a character with No Guard will still benefit from those abilities). There are quite a few fights where that ability comes to bite them - evasion is really nice to have in some fights, and some moves like Venom and Baleful Polymorph, you do not want enemies to have 100% accuracy with those on you.
  14. Weird glitch on site

    I'm sure it has to do with Chrome's new version. I let everyone know a few days ago.
  15. Enemies having setups the player doesn't is fine. The problem comes when every enemy has every advantage. Immune to all status, high speed, 999 hp/mp, ability to heal this to full instantly, ability to ohko units, def/mdef up, abilities themselves are ridiculous (such as instant kills with long range, large aoe, no mp cost and/or no ct), ridiculous movement, etc. This tends to have the opposite effect as what is intended - it actually makes the game easier in some ways because you know exactly what to prepare for, and many of these enemies have stats so high that the ai would never consider using a status effect. Think of the enemies as playing certain roles in the formation. These can be stereotypical roles like tank, glass cannon, healer; or you can mix and match. Let's say for example you want to create an enemy with ridiculous speed/PA/MA. It should die if you sneeze on it, and have vulnerabilities to a handful of useful statuses like Slow and Don't Act. Then you can pair it with your tanky elixir user that is slow and has very low damage output. Stuff like that. Removing elixirs is fine, but part of the problem here which makes elixirs annoying is that player access to the same item won't help as much as enemy access (even if the player got them). If enemies are just ohko'ing you anyway, it doesn't help you to heal your HP to full, and if they have so much HP that you can't kill them easily, that means an enemy throwing an elixir down will reset your progress. The problem isn't just the elixir itself, but the game's scaling and the distribution of the items. If instead of being an item, it's a move that is rarely distributed in skillsets and has a CT/MP cost/some other balancing factor to it, it becomes far less annoying. Poaching is another issue that's leftover from vanilla that is a terrible mechanic. Easiest fix to it if you want to keep it is to get rid of rare drops. Best bet is to just eliminate it entirely in favor of additional sidequests or even just putting the items for purchase late into the game.
  16. 1. It's more that the only reason Content is easier is because you can grind to overcome battles with sheer numbers (when you can't in standard 1.3). This is the type of behavior that should be discouraged in patches, when you should be rewriting battles to allow for multiple types of strategies and not just a small handful. That will make it easier in a more enjoyable way, instead of easier in a way that allows you to combat tedium with more tedium. 2. The biggest thing wrong with 1.3's scaling is nicely illustrated by the way it handles MP Switch. Because MP switch is nerfed in a way that leftover damage from what hurt MP will roll over into HP, and enemies frequently do enough damage where they can kill someone through MP switch (unless you set up specifically to use it, but any setups made specifically to use it are better spent towards specifically using Damage Split or Meatbone Slash for the better turn economy), it's not very useful for the player to have. However, when the enemy has it, they have far more HP and MP than any player class, and the ability to heal BOTH to full at any given moment. This turns MP switch into effectively a second HP bar for the enemy. What you need to do is change the scaling of the game such that enemies don't have every single advantage. Enemy is tanky with MP Switch and lots of HP/MP to use it? Don't give it the ability to heal to full or deal much damage in one turn. Enemy has a OHKO move? It should have low speed or the defenses of a wet paper bag. Stuff like this will increase variety in the game and thus make it more interesting. Another thing you mention is to make status effects have higher probability to hit. No one's going to go for a Petrify that has a 30% chance to hit when the enemy can just throw a Soft on it. Remove evasion from status effects and make it just a faith based check. That will give the player a way to increase probability of their own statuses, while at the same time being more vulnerable to enemy status (Faith status). And, since you mentioned evasion, lower the evasion given by shields/mantles and don't give so many enemies Concentrate. Nothing should have nearly 100% dodge rates without needing to spend an ability slot (abandon) on it, and you shouldn't need to have Concentrate in so many battles either. 3. Fixing items to not strictly be better than one another can solve this problem. This can be done by spreading out bonuses given by things. That way someone can make a meaningful choice between, say +200 HP, +100 HP and immune Frog, or 0 HP and +1 speed. Also there shouldn't only be 5 abilities you care about. Abilities should all have their uses so that the player doesn't just immediately buy Phoenix Down and ignore the rest of the Chemist set. The change to make xp/jp by battle instead of by action was hard to make, but easy for you to implement (you can find it in my asm pack). 4. Some examples of this are the bad tooltips in the game. Lots of abilities don't tell you what they actually do in their descriptions, lots of abilities are things that affect some units but not others, etc. You can fix this by fixing the text of the game. Tell the player when you make a unit innately immune to something.
  17. If you're just looking for a vanilla-ish but relatively easy patch, these patches are popular: http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11789.0 http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=7182.0 IMO the "1.3 content" changes are the exact opposite type of approach to making 1.3 less difficult than the kinds of changes that should be made. Some things that could be done that you haven't mentioned: 1. Fix the game's scaling and make status effects an important part of the game. The game needs to not punish playstyles other than hyper offense and needs to not invalidate 3/4 of the game's skillsets; especially since status effects are one of the major ways to make the game have more depth than "punch shit" that doesn't require asm to change. If enemies are doing less damage to you but are now capable of don't acting your whole team, for example, suddenly they become more dangerous in a more interesting way. This should go both ways - the player needs meaningful enemies that are vulnerable to status, and shouldn't be able to just null everything with a ribbon either. 2. XP/JP by battle, not by action. This is a change I made to MT that I can't go back to not having after making that change. No more beating yourself over the head for 4 hours to just be able to do something other than punch shit. No more worrying about taking too many actions to beat a battle, and thus overleveling. Of course if you make this change, you absolutely need to fix the game's scaling to not punish you for more levels, since your game will now have a minimum level for every battle. The way I did it was to guarantee that no ability costs more than one battle's worth of JP to get, and action abilities are mostly cheaper than r/s/m including a few free abilities. That way your character is never helpless and trying new strategies is not particularly costly. 3. 100% transparency. Why have an ability that can cancel charging/performing, that doesn't work on units flagged by class, with no intuitive reason for the unit to be immune to it? It's one thing to have an ability that is immortal immune, that the player knows is immortal immune. It's another thing to randomly flag things as immune to useful sounding skills. Why even *have* a skill like that, if you don't want the player to use it? 4. Make bosses other than Velius, Queklain, and Adramelk interesting. Assassinations are generally garbage compared to a well thought out ??? boss, and the other ??? bosses aren't as well thought out here. Zalera is a joke, Zalbag is a punching bag, and Altima is a slot machine. Some of the issues with assassinations can be fixed with scaling/status effects, while those ???'s (and others) need to just be rewritten to have something interesting about them (status effects, nice abilities, etc). Be creative!
  18. I understand though. I've been a bit burnt out from working on it, which is why aside from a few bugfixes, I haven't done much on MT in the past few months. Also, other games...
  19. FFT (vanilla) has one of the worst difficulty curves I've seen. Assuming the player doesn't grind excessively in the beginning, ch1 is one of the hardest parts of the game due to the player essentially being even with one of the best AI's in video games. Both the player and the AI has starter classes and only a few, likely not optimal, abilities learned; random br/fa, and are approximately at the same level. AI has a terrain advantage in Dorter, and the advantage of not having Algus or Delita as its allies. When the player starts to know what they are doing, which usually coincides with when they start to unlock more classes and/or have more abilities learned than the AI, the game becomes easy. AI still is primarily knights and archers and has no relevant abilities learned, while the player usually has access to overpowered classes such as Ninja or Calculator. Outside of a few difficult battles such as Wiegraf/Velius and the rooftop, the rest of the game is trivial. This is the exact opposite of what you want as a difficulty curve. A good difficulty curve is relatively easy in the beginning, and becomes harder in the end. On difficulty scope, the best way to do a high difficulty game: 1. No surprises in terms of mechanics - No "kaizo blocks," traps where the game will softlock if you do something wrong, run killers, things that can't be figured out from in game cues or a faq packaged with the game. The game should be consistent within its own rules. Not everything needs to be spelled out to the player in some genres but it should be easy enough to figure out (for example, spikes killing you doesn't need to be explained, since the first time the player dies on one should be enough explanation). If it's not easy enough to figure out without an explanation, it warrants one, whether in a faq or in game tooltips or tutorial. 2. Absolute hardest stuff should be optional - sidequests are a good place to put borderline bullshit level difficulty, if you must. Some players will say "there's no such thing as optional content" in the sense of, everything must be attempted at some point, but a player should be able to beat the game without doing these. Note that if an item, ability, switch, etc. is required for any non-optional fight/level in the game, that makes it not optional anymore. 3. Introducing a concept and then building upon it - I see this a fair amount in platformers, but this could apply to other genres too. Usually would make the first level have some easy to avoid hazards, such as spikes, pits, or mediocre enemies that are very easy to avoid; and then later in the level and/or in later levels you'd see harder to avoid spikes/pits and enemies that are less mediocre. How this could apply to something like an rpg would be the introductory enemies/bosses designed to teach the player how basic ai scripts work before introducing a more dynamic ai script.
  20. Hello Everyone

  21. Some modders have made cutscene skips as part of all the changes that they have made (such as in FF7 New Threat), or things that speed up the ability to mash through display text (the "cross skip" hack for FFT). I'm sure if skipping cutscenes is a feature of a mod you've played, that the smaller hacks used to do that are available (or could be made as so if you ask the mod creator nicely).
  22. Why so many posts instead of editing one larger one? Anyway, the amount of fixes that were made to it were detailed in the readme. There are hundreds of changes, if you're looking solely at code; and thousands of changes if you're looking at rewritten ai, effects of items, etc. If you want to know exactly what went into this, read the readme. Play the game how you want to. But why not give it at least one playthrough without any of your edits to it, so that you can see what BTB had in mind when making those changes?