Question about base stats and prepromoted units

[Sazando]

So I'm currently working on a hack for my own intents and purposes completely in Nightmare to reduce headache. It's just to have a little bit of fun and is nothing serious.

It's a hack for FE8 to basically remove the stat caps on all the classes so everyone can grow in each stat as much as I can. For a long time I thought that the stat caps would remove diversity between characters, since all that would matter is reaching the stat cap. Removing all stat caps (except for the 60 HP which I have yet to find out) would effectively make each unit diverse and remove the need to choose one class over another.

This also gave me the idea to start everyone at level 1 on tier 1 (cavalier, myrmidon) of their classes except the trainees. This would give everyone a chance to grow as much as they possibly can. For the most part I just reverse leveled many of the characters' base stats to what they would be at level 1 rounded down (base stats - (growth rates * starting level - 1)) (for example, Ephraim's level 1 speed would be 11 - (0.45 * 3) = 9.35 making his actual speed 9).

Now my main problem is that doing this for prepromoted units would result in several stats having to be zero for many of these units. How would I make balanced base stats for prepromotes? For now I've just put in a few seemingly sensible numbers based on other characters, but they don't seem correct to me. I want the prepromotes to be balanced with other units without making bases too high or too low.

[Brendor]

You could try auto levelling your characters in the LOU1 but I'm not 100% sure it auto levels backwards

[darkkfan]

So I'm currently working on a hack for my own intents and purposes completely in Nightmare to reduce headache. It's just to have a little bit of fun and is nothing serious.

It's a hack for FE8 to basically remove the stat caps on all the classes so everyone can grow in each stat as much as I can. For a long time I thought that the stat caps would remove diversity between characters, since all that would matter is reaching the stat cap. Removing all stat caps (except for the 60 HP which I have yet to find out) would effectively make each unit diverse and remove the need to choose one class over another.

This also gave me the idea to start everyone at level 1 on tier 1 (cavalier, myrmidon) of their classes except the trainees. This would give everyone a chance to grow as much as they possibly can. For the most part I just reverse leveled many of the characters' base stats to what they would be at level 1 rounded down (base stats - (growth rates * starting level - 1)) (for example, Ephraim's level 1 speed would be 11 - (0.45 * 3) = 9.35 making his actual speed 9).

Now my main problem is that doing this for prepromoted units would result in several stats having to be zero for many of these units. How would I make balanced base stats for prepromotes? For now I've just put in a few seemingly sensible numbers based on other characters, but they don't seem correct to me. I want the prepromotes to be balanced with other units without making bases too high or too low.

Try starting the prepromos at level 10 unpromoted. It should still be balanced because of their generally low growths (inb4 someone points out Seth). If your goal is balanced, you could even change these levels so they are higher (e.g. lvl 15 unpromoted) for good promos like Seth and lower for bad promos (e.g. lvl 5 for Syrene). I know there aren't many bad promos in this game (there aren't that many prepromotes to begin with) but this should make for an interesting dynamic if you ever want to apply this kind of thing to FE6 or Fe7.

[Sazando]

Even though I would like balance, it's not exactly my goal since I'm going to increase everyone's growths by like 20 so I want everyone to have the same opportunity to level up the same amount of times. This is why the reverse leveling is so important and I don't want to have anyone with 0 stats nor do I want them to start any higher than level 1. If that's the only way you can think of then I think I'll try it out for a while.

As for the LOU1, could you link me to it? I'm not entirely sure I know what that is.

[Brendor]

if you don't know then you're not using custom events so never mind

[Crimson Red]

there are technical problems with trying to get the stats to not have caps: a character can only gain +31 in a level-up from their class bases, IIRC (something like that anyway, Hex's doc covers it)

[CT075]

you could theoretically remove stat caps by just setting them all to 127 in nightmare (i forget if 255 works, there really shouldn't be any chance that they'll actually hit that cap)

there's doc on the HP cap somewhere

as for autodeleveling, I would probably just calculate the stats by hand and set them that way

[zahlman]

you could theoretically remove stat caps by just setting them all to 127 in nightmare (i forget if 255 works, there really shouldn't be any chance that they'll actually hit that cap)

The problem is with saving and loading the game; the stats get bit-packed in the save data. Hex made a hack that saves the character's total amount of growth to the file, and adds that to the character's bases on load; but that still doesn't extend things very far.