Search the Community

FE8 is definitely the shortest GBA game, but it also has the most postgame content. I thought it would be interesting to include part of the Lagdou Ruins to freshen things up. Since it's an experiment and ten chapters of routing monsters might get repetitive I thought we should just try the first five floors after defeating the Demon King. (Then again FE6 endless seize objectives are more repetitive anyway). This will make late game units a little bit better and will let other units have more time to develop and contribute than they would in the faster paced format that ends at the Demon King. It might also lead to interesting decisions regarding Warp conservation since you will want it for five additional chapters. There are really only 31 units, but for the blank 8th slot on one of the teams you can use the postgame units, although in this format the only one you may be able to unlock is Hayden, not sure if there are 200 enemies you can kill before the fifth floor. I also moved Seth one chapter earlier, FE8 doesn't front-load its roster as much as FE6/7 so I wanted to help the early game be a little bit easier. Team structure: 1. There will be four players. There are 32 units to draft. 2. All teams automatically include: a. The main lord, (Ephraim counts as the main lord for 5x) b. Tethys, c. Orson, d. The secondary lord for 8 and 15. 3. Seth may only be used starting chapter 5. 4. The player with postgame units may use any they unlock. Rules: 1. Play on Hard Mode. The game ends after beating the 5th floor of Lagdou Ruins. Defeat the Demon King before entering the Ruins 2. Restricted actions: a. You may not voluntarily deploy undrafted units except on chapters with talk recruitments, specifically 5, 9, 10, 11, 12b, 13a, 14, and 17. b. Undrafted units may move, recruit units, rescue/drop undrafted units, trade between chapters, and dig up items in the desert. c. Undrafted units may not do anything else, including but not limited to: enter combat, use items, take items or have them put in their inventory, visit (any building), rescue/drop drafted units or NPCs, steal, pick, or have a support rank. d. Drafted units may do as you please without penalty. e. Do not enter avoidable skirmishes, the Tower, or Ruins before defeating the Demon King. You must immediately retreat from unavoidable skirmishes. f. Mine/enemy control glitch is banned g. Using extra swiftsoles is banned 3. Defend chapters count the last played Player Phase for turns if the timer is waited out. 4. Map shopping is allowed, including postgame secret shops. Penalties: 1. You may use an undrafted unit as a drafted unit with a 4 turn penalty, per unit per chapter. There is no special penalty for Seth. For the auction format, I've made it simpler, arguably. The automatic team value adjustments for promo items and chapterwise redundancy are removed, though the redundancy function is still applied to the teams as a whole. Instead you can set synergy values for pairs of units manually. For example, you might set a -2 value between Franz and Gilliam, since one of them would need to delay their promotion so their value is lower than it would be otherwise. This lets people cover not only promo item and chapterwise redundancy, but redundant team roles (e.g. flier, warper), route split considerations (e.g. Cormag goes poorly with Innes and Saleh), and pretty much anything you can think of. You can PM me your synergy values with your bids formatted like they are in the sample auction below. If you want you can also choose to set all your synergy values to the median of the values people did submit; in that case just submit bids. By the way, my bids/synergy values are the ones used in the sample, not bothering with mocking up different values and hashing mine to prove they aren't changed. Feel free to try over/underbidding me. Example auction: For some reason uploading the Python files that run the auction isn't working right now, I'll try again in a bit, if need be I guess I'll paste them in or upload them somewhere else and post a link. Edit: yeah I keep getting an error with -200 and no other message when trying to attach these. Main.py AuctionState.py Pricing.py GameData.py

Hey, it's been about 6 months since the last time and I got inspired while learning Python to remake the auctioneer program as an exercise, so I felt like doing another race. Here's the last one for context. For those unfamiliar, the way this works is rather than selecting units one by one, we all bid privately on each character in terms of turn-count penalty, then they get assigned to us along with turn-count handicaps by a program. I've attached a PDF detailing the rationale and operation of the auction. I'll also attach the Python files. Create a text file with your bids each on a separate line (plus an extra 0 for the blank slot) and it will automatically create some random values for the other players and run the auction. I'd delete the line that does rotations in Main.py to save some time while you experiment. Here's the rules, I've bolded some parts that are different from usual. If anyone has strong opinions I'll consider adjustments. I kept the bit about survive chapters becoming rout chapters, the optional Gaiden turn-counts are reduced, Marcus is no longer split into two units, early game penalty is reduced, and what you can do with others' units is generally better defined and restricted. Team structure 1a. There will be five players. 1b. There are 34 units. One team will have 6 units; the others will have 7. 2. All teams automatically include: a. Hector, b. Merlinus, Ninian/Nils, and Athos due to their unique nature, c. Wallace/Gietz and Harken/Karel as they would only create dead team slots. 3. Bartre and Karla come as a pair. 4. If you get Marcus, he may only be used freely starting chapter 17x. Rules of play 1. The game will be played on Hector Normal Mode, skipping Lyn Mode. 2. Restricted actions a. You may only deploy other player's units on chapters with units recruitable by a specific non-Hector unit or desert items, specifically 14, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, and 28. b. Another player's units under your control may ONLY move, recruit units (any), rescue/drop other players' units (not yours or NPCs), trade between chapters, and dig up items in the desert. c. They may not do anything else, including but not limited to: enter combat, use items/staves, trade/merch mid-chapter, visit (any building), rescue/drop your units or NPCs, steal, or build supports. d. Your units may do as you please without penalty. e. Mine/enemy control glitch is banned. 3. All Gaiden Chapters except 19xx, 23x and 28x must be visited. 23x and 28x are optional, and don't count towards the total turn-count up to 15 turns taken per chapter. The value is shortened from 20 which feels like too long. The last bridges needed to reach Sonia on 28x open turn 9 so even without water transport you can seize in 15. 4a. Chapters 13x, 15, 28, and 31 count the last Player Phase for which enemies are present for turns (or last PP if enemy not routed). 4b. Chapter 26 counts as 11 turns and is excluded from 4a so the player does not need to kill Vaida, and so that Vaida is actually usable. Penalties 1a. You may use an another player's unit as yours with a 4 turn penalty, per unit per chapter. 1b. The penalty is instead 3 turns for chapters 12, 13, and 13x due to forced deployment and to mitigate unfun early game. Exceptions 1. Matthew is free for Chapter 11. 2. Unarmed units may be attacked in Chapter 13x. 3. Lyn, Kent, Sain, and Wil may act freely in the southeast 5x5 box for Chapter 16. 4. Undrafted Thieves may be used to obtain necessary Promotion items. PM me your bids if interested, and post below so others can see how many slots remain. Please format your bids in the following order to make it easy for me to accurately create the bid file (example values given are the medians of the previous FE7 auction): The SHA-256 hash for my own bids is a47d4291ad131a370119711f848893ef99cc909c90ecd120be5b8f63c4377b51. feAuctionDoc.pdf AuctionState.py GameData.py Main.py Pricing.py

Next up, we have Sacred Stones round 2, and Seth is out on probation (useable from chapter 6 onward). Furthermore, the secondary lord and Myrrh are not free; each will be joining only one team as well. This means the final team sizes will be smaller by 1.25 on average (Lord + Tethys + 7.75 =9.75 as opposed to 2 Lords + Tethys + Myrrh + 7 = 11), but final teams of size 11 generally have filler anyway. Plus I never saw a unit I didn't want to crowd source ratings to input into a computer that outputs a number to tell me how good they are. Except dancers, they dynamically change the value of other units too much. But I don't see why everyone should require Ephraim and Myrrh. Oh, and no free rides for trainees in the Tower: if you suck, your presence on a team will not be subsidized. I disallowed some undrafted unit behavior that is normally allowed, like shopping, trading around equipped items on drafted units, picking up NPCs, etc. If anyone thinks this is too restrictive I'd be open to changing my mind. They can still dig up desert items though; blocking that would just create more quasi-mandatory RNG abuse. Team structure: 1a. There will be four players. 1b. There are 31 units to assign. One team will have 7 units; the other three will have 8. 2. All teams may use: a. The main lord, (Ephraim counts as the main lord for 5x) b. Tethys, c. Orson, d. The secondary lord for 8 and 15. 3. If assigned, Seth may only be used starting chapter 6. Rules: 1. The game will be played on Hard Mode. 2a. Unassigned units may move, recruit units, rescue/drop unassigned units, trade between chapters, and dig up items in the desert. 2b. Unassigned units may not do anything else, including but not limited to enter combat, use items, trade/merch mid-chapter, visit (any building), rescue/drop assigned units or NPCs, steal, pick, or build Supports. 2c. Assigned units may do as they please without penalty. 3. Defend chapters count the last played Player Phase for turns if the timer is waited out. 4. Map shopping is allowed. 5. Do not enter avoidable skirmishes, the Tower, or Ruins. Unavoidable skirmishes must be immediately fled from. 5*. Tower is NOT allowed for Amelia or Ewan Penalties: 1. You may use an unassigned unit as assigned unit with a 4 turn penalty, per unit per chapter. 1*. There is NO special penalty for Seth. The bidding system has been upgraded with new, fancy number crunching and lots of matrices (hence the thread title). Check out the attached pdf for a thorough explanation and the txt files for how the system would have worked on the past auctions. Here is the github repo for the code that executes the auction. It isn't required reading though, just bidding as in the previous rounds should be fine. It's not like you need an html tutorial to use this website after all. SHA256 of my bids: C704068DE12BFB256C60A9AEC85AD403BBDEB8E0880D0C1916AED00515CC4ABE Send your bids in a PM like in the spoiler. These numbers are the median bids from the first FE8 auction, which also allowed Tower training, so don't just blindly copy (or do, I'm not your boss). There's also one empty team slot which will automatically be entered as a bid of zero for everyone. I was also wondering about using two bids per unit, one for each route. I'm not implementing that this time, but what do you think of the idea? It seems like you only go Ephraim route if you get Cormag, but that still leaves one team that potentially is misrated. feAuctionDoc.pdf fe8output.txt fe7Aoutput.txt fe7Boutput.txt

The rule about Marcus being free up to Chapter 16 results in Marcus dominating those chapters, overshadowing the earlygame units, and making strategies and turncounts far more homogeneous among the players. There have been drafts [1] [2] that restricted Marcus to Chapter 22 for only the player that drafted him, but why not also allow him to be drafted before that point as well? Marcus before Chapter 22 is still pretty overcentralizing, so I arbitrarily set the divide point at 19x / 20. Earlygame Marcus exists for 11 chapters, lategame Marcus for 18 chapters, which seems very roughly equal in value. Since there are "two" more units now, Wallace/Geitz and Harken/Karel are demoted to "free" again. They would just make dead team slots anyway and make balancing teams harder. The rule about defend chapters is somewhat lame as well. This time, four out of the five will be treated as rout enemy chapters (the exception is Vaida's so you don't have to kill her in Ch26). After killing all the enemies, you can visit, build supports etc. as usual. I'm not sure how best to spice up the optional gaiden chapters, if at all, so this time they're unchanged. Rules of Play This will be auction style again. What's the point of having two guinea pig tests if not to iterate on the method? You can check these [1] [2] threads for more info if you aren't familiar with the concept. I've made a few improvements as well. PM me your bids and post so others know how many slots are left if you want to play. Here are some sample bids based of the prices generated for the last auction. Think carefully. Remember early game units will be more valuable without free Marcus. The change of defend chapters to rout chapters means there are more turns possible to save, so good units have more potential. And lastly, these prices are still somewhat flawed even under the rules of play they were generated for. There are almost certainly over 40 units of inaccuracy in these prices. If you change your mind before the last person joins, feel free to change your bids. Here is a pastebin of the lua script I'll be using. You can run it a variety of ways including vba. You can fiddle with the bids at line 786 to see it in action and test things out. SHA256 hash of my bids: c84903f0bb442ab73c260e870f15008100552ed92c17fd371ad99b3f5a2e35e4

Yep, here we go again, harder, better, equally fast, strength NA. If you saw the last thread you know basically how this works, but I'll put everything you need to know here. There have been some improvements. If you want to know why its an auction and not draft style, the OP here will explain that. And yes, there is another FE7 draft open now, but that's randomized, EHM, and, uh, a draft, so distinctly different in three ways. Four if you count Eliwood mode and Hard mode as two differences. How the auction works Rules of play So if you want in, just PM me your bids. (And post that you did so that others know when its full) Here's a list of the units in recruitment order. Oh, and remember you can bid fractional components, like 0.5 if you don't think a unit will save a turn, but you think it might be useful backup if you don't get enough units by the time they appear. Or 6.5 if you think a unit will save 6 or 7 turns, but you aren't sure which. Unit List Like last time, here's the sha256 for my bids, so you know I didn't change them after receiving yours. b5b62888f8b2c1f593b05e7074f56cdfe594035392b291fdb8124a0a605aa962 I'm pretty excited, I think this time we'll get much better handicaps and it should be a really close contest!

Hi everyone. I've lurked here and wanted to join a draft for quite a while, but there were a few aspects of drafting that kept me away. 1, balancing the draft positions is difficult to get right. 2, drafts can take a long time to start. 3, teams are often quite similar with limited variety, especially the first picks. So I thought an auction would be better, because it solves all three of those problems. This won't be an auction of arbitrary points, though. This will be an auction of turn-count handicaps/penalties! E.G. you can bid 15 turns on Vanessa or something. If no one else bids that much, you get Vanessa for your team, but you also add a 15 turn penalty to your final score. Seems more interesting than arbitrary points to me. Heck, you can even bid non-whole numbers if you want, like a tenth of a turn on Marisa or something, makes the decision for lower tiered units slightly more meaningful. Just so long as the bid is non-negative! I don't want everyone putting like -1000 for Marisa as a joke, and then suddenly someone wins with -999 and has a negative total handicap. If there's a tie, all tieing players get the unit and the handicap they bid. To join, just send a list of the 28 draftable names and bid amounts via PM (making it a sealed auction on all characters is the key to starting quickly). Also post that you did so that others know how many are in. "Woah, slow down there! If you're participating, won't that just allow you to snipe bids as you please?" Nope, because I can post this: 07caf4b83e502fdef21a381f34609d262b4d288c970bdb3f86be603b30bf7731 That is the SHA-256 hash of my bid. It would be pretty much impossible to find a string to match that hash other than the string I used (much less a string that resembled a valid bid!) so I'm stuck with it and can't change it after learning the other player's bids, effectively "sealing" it. After teams are determined I will post the text I hashed so you can hash it yourself and verify. Now that I've introduced the concept, perhaps I should explain *how* this addresses the three problems I listed. [spoiler=1, balancing the draft positions is difficult to get right.]This is solved automatically by making all the players symmetric, by having all bids be "sealed". There's no advantage to going first, because *no one is "first"*. Players can join in any order and the result will be the same. [spoiler=2, drafts can take a long time to start]This way only takes one PM+post from each player, not 8 posts (1 to enter and 7 to select team members). So 3 actions versus 23 (subtracting OP) should be much faster. Heck, I've seen a draft take about 11 days to get started! [spoiler=3, teams are often quite similar with limited variety, especially the first picks]In a draft, the initial sequence of picks is nearly fixed. However, this way someone could get both Vanessa and Franz! (with a hefty penalty to compensate). What different strats become possible with both? What different strats become necessary without any of the top 4? What about a team with no warper, or a team with two or even three fliers? How often do you get things like that in a draft? Plus, teams are not necessarily made of 7 units! (although I will recommend a method to keep team size reasonable). Moreover, you actually have a decision to make about each character. You don't just first pick Vanessa because she's obviously best, you actually have to evaluate what she's worth. And also, an afterthought: [spoiler=4, we can learn some interesting stuff]The ranking of the top is fixed, the ranking of the bottom is nearly irrelevant, and only the middle is debatable in a meaningful way. But there is so much more we could learn about "how good" each character is. The actual turns a character can save is, of course, dependent on the other team members. But having an actual number, even an imperfect one, rather than just a rank could reveal some interesting things. We all know Vanessa is better than, say, Ross, but what about Ross and Artur together? Is she "twice as good" as Ross, "thrice as good"? Who knows, but if it turns out that the best results are obtains by bidding X on Ross and Y on Vanessa, we'll have a kind of answer that's more than mere opinion. Maybe we can try making Seth, Tethys, and Myrrh biddable another time too. OK, one last thing: team sizes. Very small teams and very large teams, while mathly "fair" (since no player is disadvantaged by randomness, but only by the decisions of the players), would possibly lead to a worse experience for all parties. Initially our bids will probably vary wildly too, so unbalanced team sizes is a likely outcome. If the people participating don't object, I would propose a simple Team Equalization Process, which would cap team size at X = average team size + 1 (so some variability still possible). If there are no ties, X = 8. After the teams are first made, any team with more than X members will lose the member(s) it bid least on (alphabetical tiebreak, A leaves before Z). Then all those characters will reenter the bidding pool, available only to those that haven't already lost them. Their handicap will become the average of their old handicap and the new winner's bid. This process will repeat until every team has X or fewer units. [spoiler=Example auction with super arbitrary, inflated numbers]A B C D <-Player 36.06 42.66 45.11 38.32 Vanessa 41.14 38.20 38.82 38.53 Franz 31.45 33.64 40.86 39.51 Tana 30.11 43.38 29.55 33.88 Artur 39.50 36.19 35.11 28.46 Garcia 35.04 40.79 36.13 36.85 Gilliam 34.10 33.27 27.29 33.83 Lute 33.33 34.96 32.77 36.06 Kyle 28.77 32.87 30.17 32.25 Saleh 29.55 29.44 32.42 31.43 Moulder 27.28 30.39 27.95 33.60 Ross 31.53 30.03 27.74 33.79 Forde 24.97 27.73 25.68 30.05 Natasha 26.60 26.15 28.75 27.61 Joshua 29.38 23.00 23.98 24.83 Gerik 23.59 24.55 21.53 23.49 Cormag 20.33 23.08 24.79 23.98 Colm 23.04 21.17 26.87 19.97 Dozla 20.60 25.45 18.39 21.50 Innes 21.88 19.46 22.73 17.63 Neimi 21.08 14.47 21.26 18.46 Amelia 19.94 17.39 19.39 18.38 Duessel 20.27 19.41 17.85 19.61 Knoll 17.90 17.53 14.96 18.95 L'Arachel 15.61 14.40 17.09 15.41 Ewan 16.57 15.18 15.18 14.59 Syrene 14.22 15.93 13.50 12.53 Rennac 14.89 12.91 14.24 13.70 Marisa A: Franz, Garcia, Lute, Gerik, Duessel, Knoll, Syrene, Marisa, total handicap 215.78, 8 members B: Artur, Gilliam, Saleh, Cormag, Innes, Rennac, total handicap 182.97, 6 members C: Vanessa, Tana, Moulder, Joshua, Colm, Dozla, Neimi, Amelia, Ewan, total handicap 259.88, 9 members D: Kyle, Ross, Forde, Natasha, L'Arachel, total handicap 152.45, 5 members Now average team size is 8, and player C has 9 members, so C loses Ewan, C's least valued. Next Ewan goes to A, and Ewan's handicap becomes (17.09 + 15.61)/2 = 16.35. Now A has too many though, so A loses Marisa, A's least valued. Marisa goes to C and her handicap becomes (14.89+14.24)/2 = 14.565. C, of course, has too many, so again Marisa must be sent into the pool, this time to D, and her handicap becomes (14.565+13.70)/2 = 14.1325. Now the final teams are: A: Franz, Garcia, Lute, Gerik, Duessel, Knoll, Ewan, Syrene. handicap 215.78+16.35-14.1325 = 217.9925 B: Artur, Gilliam, Saleh, Cormag, Innes, Rennac. handicap 182.97 C: Vanessa, Tana, Moulder, Joshua, Colm, Dozla, Neimi, Amelia. handicap 259.88-16.35 = 243.53 D: Kyle, Ross, Forde, Natasha, L'Arachel, Marisa. handicap 152.45 + 14.1325 = 166.5875 (Neither Ewan nor Marisa go directly to D because, in the event multiple characters reenter the pool, the order they are sent could otherwise cause arbitrary results. E.g. Ewan and Ross reenter a pool, and a player E with 7 members would get them next. Which one? If they can't be sent to a player with 8+, this is arbitrary, based on who sends first. If they can both be sent to E, then back to the pool again, then who E gets is uniquely determined as their most desired. We could uniquely determine via alphabetical or recruitment order too, but that's arbitrary in its own way, albeit non-random. I used alphabetical tiebreak for who gets sent *from* over-filled teams because I couldn't think of a better way.) [spoiler=Standard rules of play]Drafting: 1. This draft is for 4 players. 2. Eirika/Ephraim, Orson, Tethys, and Myrrh are free for all to use. 3. Seth is banned from all use. 4. The game will be played on Hard Mode. Rules: 1. Undrafted units may recruit characters, rescue undrafted units and NPCs, trade, visit Shops and Armories and dig up items in the desert. 2. Undrafted units may not do anything not listed above, including but not limited to meatshielding, building Supports, and opening Doors or Chests. 3. Map shopping is allowed. 4. Skirmishes/use of the Tower or Ruins is disallowed. Skirmishes that are blocking your path may be activated and immediately fled from. 5. Defend chapters count the last played Player Phase for turns if the timer is waited out. 6. Amelia may be leveled to level 10/1 and Ewan to level 10/5 in the tower. All items gained from this must be tossed. Penalties: 1. Undrafted units have a 4 turn penalty, per unit per chapter. 2. Seth has a special 8 turn penalty per chapter. That's it! If you're interested, send that PM, make a post, and let's get started! Teams Judge Wargrave: Garcia, Kyle, Ross, Forde, Moulder, Natasha, Joshua, Colm handicap 50 (.515), turn-count 115 Eggclipse: Rennac, Knoll, Duessel, Ewan, L'Arachel, Syrene, Marisa handicap 12 (.3) General Horace: Cormag, Neimi, Innes, Dozla, Amelia handicap 13 (.6675), turn-count 129 Carmine Sword: Vanessa, Saleh, Artur, Franz, Tana, Gilliam, Lute, Gerik handicap 124, turn-count 91