zahlman

Out of curiousity, how long is the source for that Java program? Also, don't you take a penalty for Matthew in Ch11 if you did in Ch6? And didn't you say you weren't doing Lyn mode anyway?

Because you have to spend turns on it, duh! Just like those stupid gaidens that nobody ever does during an LTC amirite?

Wait, he didn't get any statups at all from grinding to get Geitz's chapter? Or did you just skip Geitz after all?

"The Will of Good and Evil" (translation of a Chinese title) is a hack for the Japanese version of the FE8 ROM, made by the Chinese FE fandom. The name ChinaFE is often used for the hack itself, but is really the name of the community that produced it. http://serenesforest.net/general/will.html

It doesn't reset? So it gets saved somewhere that isn't overwritten by "Restart Chapter"... heh. But the "B"attle counter does reset... kinda weird. Yeah, I'm not thaaaat surprised. Ch14 was balls even after figuring out a strategy that would actually work, and I tried a couple other variations quite stubbornly. Anyway, guess I might as well start posting chapters. Unlucky, you say? (Alt.: Miledy of Oblivion) 50/276 This was painful because Miledy is amazingly non-durable for a unit that's so awesome for her durability. She has "only" 13 Def which doesn't go very far against other Steel Lance!Wyverns or even a lot of the cavs on the map. She's also slow enough to get hit a lot, and will get doubled by practically everything while carrying Roy even if given a lighter weapon. Oh, and there are a couple of random mages and archers about which can really ruin her day. This map really sucks for clearing with few units because there are a lot of enemies, and since the reinforcements are bound to catch up to a small group, and a bunch of non-aggro enemies are aggroed by large zones or 2-turn range, there are very few enemies you can plausibly skip. Complicating matters somewhat, I didn't manage to grab any of the Elysian Whips previously in the game: Cath got there first on Ch 8, Tate's soldiers got pretty thoroughly pwned, and I somehow didn't get a chance to trade one away from Cath on Ch 12 before she got swarmed. I think there are ways to manipulate the AI to make her open the throne room without recruiting her, but I think I also really needed her to block one of the stairwells. Because I couldn't insta-promote Miledy, she had that much harder of a time with enemies in general. Also, with 8 move instead of 7, I think it would have been possible for her to fly, along the north edge of the map, from just outside the trigger zone to dry land near the arena before the wyverns that start near the castle actually got to her. (She can't really land near the ballista because the Paladins double her even if she isn't carrying Roy.) (Speaking of Ch 12, I forgot to mention (because it's so unremarkable) that I completely ignored Ray. Why would I mention that? Because I have a pet name for him that I like to share at every opportunity. It's "Dugh". You know, Hugh, Dugh and Lugh... ok, fine, it isn't that funny :P) On Roy's side, meanwhile, I've run out of Rapier, Wyrmslayer and Light Brand uses. I can't just rush Flaer by sacrificing Miledy, because even if I could give Roy enough of a headstart to avoid running into reinforcements (hard because the ballistae cover the direct paths thoroughly), he would pretty much tink Flaer. Fortunately, Roy's stats make him almost untouchable by the cavs, even with WTD, if he hides in a bush and uses a light sword. Almost, hence making a complete, precise script for the level to avoid unfortunate accidents. Also fortunately, I have a very lightly used Horseslayer that gives Miledy pretty decent hitrates, an extra point of damage against Wyverns (which sometimes makes all the difference), and the ability to OHKO any cav or even slightly chipped Paladin. I tried many approaches to this level. The first was to try to fly right away along the south edge of the map (Miledy will be in ballista range twice and faces very high hitrates, and takes 19 or 20 damage from them. If it's only 19, she can survive being hit both times with a Vulnerary boost in between), negotiate a path to the Al's Sword village, let Roy fight everyone off and then treck up to Flaer. This... fails spectacularly. Trying to send Roy directly to Flaer also doesn't work, because as mentioned earlier, he can't get the bosskill anyway. The next approach was to wait in the starting area (with Miledy on an ocean tile), have Roy ninja-tank all the aggros and reinforcements, then have him bait the ballista archers, and then have Miledy and Roy tag-team the rest of the map. This was very slow and required a few RN burns to avoid running out of Vulnerary uses. I also hadn't thought about the Horseslayer at this point. Eventually I worked out that I could have Roy go north at the start, have Miledy help him get into one of the bushes in the far northwest while waiting over the mountains, have Miledy cherry-pick a couple of units while Roy tanked the rest, get the body ring, have Miledy draw aggro from the Wyverns near the castle (referred to as "Flaer's cohort" in my notes), fight them on the bridge while outside the range to draw aggro from the northeast cavs, then airlift to the northeast, get to the shop, buy killers and wtfpwn the rest, dependent on Miledy getting two crits on Flaer (to avoid her either dying or taking way too long). The body ring was not hugely useful; Killing Edge was basically all Roy used for the rest of the game, and he only loses 1AS from that at base, so it was basically half a Speedwings (one Speedwing?). Much more useful than the Al Sword overall, though. I was only going for the Al Sword because I figured I'd need it to finish off all the reinforcements without running out of the loadout weapons, but that isn't actually a problem with careful planning and access to the Killing Edge shop. Without further ado, the script I developed (with over 9000 savestates and restarts) and then followed (starting from a hard reset) to make it "official" (hopefully self-explanatory). There are no explicit RN burns, although there are a couple of deliberate waits and reordering of actions to manipulate the RNG, and a couple of places where the RNG state is taken advantage of (e.g. Miledy using the Steel Lance instead of the Horseslayer because it will still hit despite the low display hit%). I didn't record stats for Miledy because she wasn't a drafted unit, but IIRC she got 4 levels and pretty decent stat-ups from them. I don't think anything for the rest of the game felt quite this hellish, although some chapters (14 and 20 in particular) took a stupid amount of restarts just because so many little things can mess up, and some (21 and 22 mostly) required a lot of exploration of alternate strategies to figure out something that worked.

Oh, I see how this is supposed to work. Umm... in that case, Darin seems like the kind of guy who could be swayed by any random power-merchant instead of Nergal specifically. Maybe he'd even take it upon himself.

... Nobody mentioned Ephidel yet? Really?

Ah, I guess you don't need to save because you have TAS movies (and savestates?) anyway :P

I don't really have a favourite character, but I thought "Okay, I'll think of Lyn, and see what happens." Then I read the OP and thought: "My village was destroyed by bandits!" "No, Gheb, you are the bandits."

>5:37 >mfw a level 1 Berzerker in the arena has 24+ speed >mfw arena fights wager over 1000G but they don't have silvers ... Yeah. Also, why does it always seem to say Chapter 11 on the save screen? Is that another 1-frame glitch from dismissing the save menu too quickly or something? Yes, Give and Take are green actions (but Release isn't). Strangely, you can't Give and Take in the same turn, although you can, for example, Give, Trade and Attack.

Start by identifying the things you want to change, and how you want to change them. Be detailed and make a plan.

Forget about MP3. It's ridiculously complex even to decode (I don't even want to think about decoding it in ASM) and would probably be more than a GBA CPU could handle in real-time anyway even if it didn't have to do anything else (which it does). The impracticality of having a 12MB WAV file in the ROM is simply a matter of space: the GBA simply can't recognize more than 32MB of ROM on a cart. What music did you have in mind exactly? Maybe someone around here already has a MIDI.

:O HOW DARE YOU It's Beatmania IIDX, and it > u.

I have a few interesting ideas for what draft to do next. Should I start a new thread with a poll, or discuss it here?

I wrote this tutorial on Shrine of Seals (if linking to other FE forums is not OK, just let me know) for using a version control system to keep organized backups. You really should do this; manual backups get messy incredibly quickly. It also makes sure you can always get a clean ROM without having to re-download it from somewhere. (You need to expand and read all the spoilers to understand things properly. Version control is a very useful tool with a lot of functionality that needs a lot of explanatory text.)

Oi! I happen to be 30 myself. >_<

Does it involve RNG abuse? Because I'm ok with that if others are, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work right in the desert anyway. If it doesn't, I can't wait for the details. :) Honestly, it wouldn't have been even for me, except that it was right there anyway with my strategy. Base Roy only loses 1AS from killers. Oh, that makes sense. I totally derped and thought you were talking about the staff, even though you don't get it until Ch16 and wouldn't have anyone qualified to use it anyway. You'll laugh, but on the runthrough I ended up going with for Chapter 22, I got the A support on the turn before the bosskill. They should have had plenty of opportunity to do it while running back from the second switch, but I guess I forgot to set them adjacent during that run. Although honestly I should have tried harder for it early. I realized eventually that it actually makes a massive difference - +7 accuracy, +15 avoid in a game where hitrates are often not that far from the 50% mark where it makes the most difference due to double RNG system, and which is more than the difference WTA/WTD makes (+10 each way)? YES PLZ. Not to mention attack +3 (better than attack +1/defense +1 from WTA/WTD) and crit/crit evade (not that crit evade is a big issue, but getting random crits with ordinary weapons / making killers more reliable is always welcome). I also had a runthrough where I got the support and then was going to claim the throne, but Cecilia died to the mooks in the throne room. Obviously that's not allowed, since it erases the support from your display. Actually, the one I kept involved some pretty insane dodging luck on Cecilia's part, but she could have avoided the need for that by not failing as much earlier on. I really found myself wishing there were more Elixirs in this game. (Yeah, yeah, 12x. I almost qualified for that, and it was hell to do so. Not to mention, good luck actually getting the stuff before the thieves do in a Roy solo.) Also, before I start posting turncounts and summaries and stuff, I feel the need to share this screenshot from my epilogue: 66 "L" (whatever that actually means) from a single round of combat. Pretty sure Rose didn't even get a critical on that runthrough unfortunately.

... Except the Japanese name would be ロウエン, and Rowen isn't any more accurate of a romanization of that than Lowen is. It's not what appeared in the official Nintendo translation, it's not what appears in official Nintendo character art, and it doesn't even appear in the ROM's debug data, even though that does coincidentally contain some other bizarre L/R switches ("Sirence" (the staff/status effect, presumably), "Elic").

I would strongly recommend doing that the other way around. I'm sure you can figure out why without too much effort. With your team, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a way to go north, get the Body Ring, wait for Percy to leave, and then zergrush the rest, though it might take a few more turns. But it might not really be worthwhile for a Body Ring anyway. I'm having difficulty picturing your rescueskip technique FWIW. Goddess Icon is lol anyway. Ch22 40 turns. Total 524 assuming I didn't completely derp on my addition. Details later.

Omg it's alive. I'm actually almost done now. Brief summary: 13 was probably not as bad as it seemed to be while I was figuring out how to do it; 14 was annoying and took a lot of retries; 15 was actually kinda fun (but still took a lot of retries); 16 was just plain long; 17-19 were a joke by comparison to everything else I'd struggled through to this point; 20 and 21 were asdf and 22 is currently more asdf but I'll get it eventually. Also I actually had gotten to Ch16 once and then accidentally loaded a Ch 14 savestate and had to redo it again. But that time through I shaved quite a few turns on Ch14 so yeah. I also did a fair amount of long-term planning to try to raise enough funds for as many stat boosters in Ch21 as possible, then realized you need a flier to get to that secret shop Whatever, I got 2 robes each for Cecilia and Roy in Ch16, and the Ch20 one went to Yodel as insurance. Will: I take it Roy got the Angelic Robe for you too, any other stat boosters yet?

Don't worry, Kam, we all know you're utterly unfixable. Seriously though. Uhh... send me a patch and I can *try* to figure out wtf happened. No guarantee that it's possible to fix things even if I do figure that out, though.

Wait, 100s can miss? But 0s can't hit (easily testable with RAM hacking)...

I support this. As Furetchen implies, both ways of doing things have their own challenges, and I suspect they shouldn't be directly compared, as long as technical merits are being considered in judgment.

Seriously, who ever thought it was a good idea to allow for that possibility?

It was Hex. I'm pretty sure Hex has those skills, considering they're the same skills that would have been needed to find the staff EXP calculations.