New challenge concept for FE7

[TalkGuy]

Hi guys kinda new here so bare with me for.......anything

 

You know how some people play with extra challenge like iron man, LTC, 0% growth rate to make the game more painfully interesting? Recently I just came up with another idea.

Fire Emblem - Hero Mode

Obviously, has its name inspired by a certain Gacha game. In Hero Mode all you and your enemy attack will be a guarantee hit. It will be based on Hard Mode in terms of reinforcement and enemy stats. The only difference is that everyone will have 100% hit rate, regardless of range and whoever they are facing. So remember that Druid with the Eclipse tome near the end game? Yeah he's gonna hit you.

The purpose of this challenge is to basically change the "generic" play style, strategy and units you will invest into. For example, most people love using mage and swordmaster to "dodge tank" the enemy. But with this challenge that strategy will no longer be viable. In a nutshell this challenge basically remove the RNG mechanics during combat. In theory, everything is predictable and all that matters is your skills.

In terms of difficulty, I can't really tell whether it will make the game extremely easy or utterly cancer, or is it even possible to beat the game (stare at Zephiel). I'm still testing the challenge myself, and I would really love to hear what others think about this challenge. I'm still at Ch.13x at the moment and if anyone is interested in giving this challenge a go, I've already included the patch for download. Here is a clip of me playing Ch.13x, which is the first chapter I felt a bit of change of play style for a deathless run.

 

Note: I'm still learning about making patch. So the patch itself doesn't unlock hard mode, you'll need to unlock it yourself, or find a patch online to unlock hard mode.

HeroMode v1.1

Edited June 23, 2020 by TalkGuy
Forgot to specify removing RNG during combat only

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

It's an intriguing concept, no doubt. It sounds super-imbalanced, though - Axes would generally just be better than Swords; Skill and Luck are less valuable; any Hit/Avo supports are worthless; and Terrain and Weapon Triangle have less impact. In short, it sounds slightly harder than vanilla FE, but generally just more boring.

One way to build a "deterministic" Fire Emblem, while keeping it interesting, is something I saw in a Ragefest hack a few years back. In that game, Hit and Crit rates were super-low (on both the player's and enemy's sides)... but, having a positive value meant a guaranteed Hit or Crit. This way, you can remove the RNG, while still having certain variables in your control (terrain, weapon triangle, supports) affect your performance. I'm not sure how this was originally programmed, though.

[deskita]

I wonder if it would even be possible to both complete Battle Before Dawn and get Nino and Jaffar in this mode.

[eclipse]

Since this is a patch, it falls under the umbrella of Fan Projects.  Since it's also incomplete (as in, see if you can figure out how to unlock Hard from the get-go), I'll shove it under Concepts.

[TalkGuy]

On 6/10/2020 at 3:00 AM, eclipse said:

Since this is a patch, it falls under the umbrella of Fan Projects.  Since it's also incomplete (as in, see if you can figure out how to unlock Hard from the get-go), I'll shove it under Concepts.

Thx a lot. Still very new to this forum so couldn't figure out how to post there (for some reason)

[TalkGuy]

On 6/10/2020 at 2:29 AM, deskita said:

I wonder if it would even be possible to both complete Battle Before Dawn and get Nino and Jaffar in this mode.

I saw a LTC run on YouTube the other day and it is possible to reach Zephiel before he uses up his elixir. But I would assume you still need a bit of luck depending on how Jaffar move around.

 

As suggested by Shanty the concept is still very imbalance so perhaps some adjustment in the future would make that chapter more tolerable.

[TalkGuy]

On 6/10/2020 at 1:58 AM, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

It's an intriguing concept, no doubt. It sounds super-imbalanced, though - Axes would generally just be better than Swords; Skill and Luck are less valuable; any Hit/Avo supports are worthless; and Terrain and Weapon Triangle have less impact. In short, it sounds slightly harder than vanilla FE, but generally just more boring.

Thx a lot for the suggestion. I suppose most people enjoy Fire Emblem not solely on the strategic part, but also the "gambit" mechanics where you have to take certain risks for greater rewards. Simply removing the RNG doesn't bring up too much excitement.

This reminds me of how in Thracia your maximum hit rate is 99% so you always have to be aware of that 1% miss which happens a lot more often than I anticipated.

On 6/10/2020 at 1:58 AM, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

In that game, Hit and Crit rates were super-low (on both the player's and enemy's sides)... but, having a positive value meant a guaranteed Hit or Crit.

I'm a bit confused. Does that mean as long as your hit/ crit is larger than 0 you will always land the attack but most of the time you have 0% hit? Do you remember the name of that hack as well?

[deskita]

I think the ragefest hack mentioned is f.exe. Here's a link to the video if you're interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS-ur95ZYW4

 

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

12 hours ago, deskita said:

I think the ragefest hack mentioned is f.exe. Here's a link to the video if you're interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS-ur95ZYW4

 

That's exactly it! I had forgotten the name, thank you for finding it.

18 hours ago, TalkGuy said:

I'm a bit confused. Does that mean as long as your hit/ crit is larger than 0 you will always land the attack but most of the time you have 0% hit? Do you remember the name of that hack as well?

The one @deskita just shared a link for. I'd suggest watching at least a little, just to "get" how they do hit and crit rates. Conceivably, such a system could be implemented in a more traditional Fire Emblem title (although i'm not sure how, exactly).

[TalkGuy]

Update for the concept:

Considering the avoid bonus given from the terrain is no longer beneficial, they now gives more def bonus in return. I'm thinking of using thracia as a beginner reference, since they give the highest def bonus from all the one I had play. I might make some adjustment in the future but now I'll need some testing.

 

To compensate the loss of usage for low attack/ high accuracy weapon they will receive changes in terms of power/ weight and durability as well. For example, weapons with same tier (such as steel lance and steel axe) will have the same attack power and high atk weapon (eg: silver blade with high atk but low hit rate) will be heavier. Although with same atk power weapon triangle(WT) will have extra effects in terms of actual damage(I believe it's +/-2 for actual damage). This will still makes the WT mechanics some what relevant. Once again I'll need some testing to see whether I'll need to amp up the difference or not.

 

Unresolved problem:

There's a lot more mechanics became useless in this challenge (eg: support/ tactician bonus and stats like skill/luck) than I anticipated. While I could make up some compensation for those as well I don't really want to alter the game too much. The original idea is to bring up a challenge to see if others are interested, and to fulfill my interest to see if the game is beatable if one have so much bad luck that every combat with the enemy hits your army. I was even thinking of making all hits with WT disadvantage miss in order to magnify the WT effects in combat. But doing changes like these kinda turns it into a ROM hack, but with very low efforts, which is not the original idea of this mod. I'll try whatever I can to make it look more interesting, but ultimately I'll avoid too many changes as possible.

 

Future plan(s):

• Will start working on enabling hardmode from the get-go
• Find a better way to manipulate hit rate
  • FYI: Currently to ensure 100% hit rate I just edit the weapon hit rate. In theory no hit in combat should be lower than 100% (once I've removed avoid bonus on all terrain) even when a 0 skill unit faces a max skill swordmaster(30 skills). The problem I'm having are the staves. Currently staves will take their hit rate attribute into account(I just gave them the siege tome ability). But since resistance has so much impact on staff avoid it is impossible to have 100% hit rate when using staves on anyone with max resistance. One of the potential workaround is to give the user lots of magic power when equipping a staff, the side effect is that now all staves that with the MP/2 range will turn into Thracia staves, meaning they cover up the entire map, which I don't think it's a good solution. Therefore I'll need to find a better way to ensure guarantee hit for both staves and weapon.
• Probably won't add more changes to avoid turning it into a low effort hack, instead of just being a new type of challenge for vanilla FE game

 

TLDR;

Def bonus from terrain are now amplified. Weapon attributes were altered to compensate their loss of advantage/disadvantage in terms of hit rate. Other than fixing some existing problem or altering existing modifications there won't be anymore changes.

 

A newer version of the patch will be released later on. Just need to finalise and complete the changes.

Edited June 22, 2020 by TalkGuy

[TalkGuy]

Newer version is now available for download, feel free to give it a try if you're interested