C17 sucks

[Florete]

Now wait until Genesis and Cog of Destiny.

The only reason genesis is giving me a hard time is because I either do stupid things [Like forgetting to dance raven after he attacks a wall so I can bust through the wall and kill a mage next turn] or stupid stuff happens [Erk gets sleeped even through I barrier'd him, Hector getting critkilled, etc]

Yeah. That's exactly why. Genesis can be a real bitch.

So can Cog of Destiny.

And Sands of Time can fuck with you as well. I hate Luna Druids.

[Raven]

You just need to be generally lucky for the Genesis chapter.

[Aleph]

Zag and I are doing a run through our fixed stat hack. I've passed him because I've missed a couple of gaiden chapters and have more free time.

I don't know what chapter he's on, but I'm at Cog of Destiny and it SUCKS, despite arena abusing 4 of my units to 11/0 that were behind back in chapter 21 (at least one of which I ended up not using anyway :/) and using mines on chapter 20 and 26 (I'm still terrible at this game). I can PROBABLY tank it with the barrier staff and uber spear (no worries about using the uber spear; not saving it for an arena team!), but I don't want to bother if the rest of the game is just going to be harder.

Is it?

HHM for both of us, of course.

Edit: I just want to confirm the information others have posted about chapter 17:

- Yes, the Silver Sword remains undroppable if the Knight Crest is stolen from the thief

- Blocking the doorway is much more effective

- Rescuing a soldier has always been my method of choice; it's the only way to keep the rascals from going off on their own (I like to save just one thief because I'm terrible and need all the mines I can get)

- Sending Oswin as far left as possible worked wonders for me. I just used javelins. Merlinus was untouched.

- Having lots of mounted units IS good. I brought Kent, Sain AND Lowen with Marcus; Marcus blocked the thief and the other three plugged the reinforcement stairwell.

Funny Zag even made a thread for this chapter considering it was pretty easy and he's better at this than I am. Now, if he had made a thread for Lloyd or Vaida's chapter where Lloyd bum rushes your team and Vaida's incessant reinforcements do the same then I would understand. Except my solution for Vaida has always been "mine the bitch and take her spear".

Edited September 22, 2009 by Xeld

[Mekkah]

Barrier and Pure Water people on chokepoints. Max Spd Raven can double a lot, but not all of the Valkyries. Nini's Grace + Barrier = invincible unit.

[Aleph]

Forgot about Nini's grace. Didn't get any pure waters; for some reason I kept thinking this was a melee chapter (hurf! Not even close!).

Chokepoints are fine, but when I was using them the long range magic users weren't being deterred well enough. Of course, I had some crummy units with me. For one thing Raven is still unpromoted (and so is Erk and Priscilla).

I guess instead of using chokepoints or dropping tanks in the middle of the sea of magic users I should just get all my high res units (who are mostly also healers) in a small block and not bring my loser units.

Or? OR? I could just restart HHM AGAIN and maybe play it right. Which brings me to my next question...

...has anyone made a turn-by-turn walkthrough for HHM? I don't mean like "these are the turns I made; you're welcome to copy them but the RNG will eventually keep you from doing it any more", I mean an outright "Copy this exactly and you will get the exact same results" walkthrough. The one on GFAQs doesn't take RNG abuse into account and therefore can't be copied reliably.

However, I and probably many of you (looking at you, Rolan) know enough about the RNG to make a real turn-by-turn walkthrough that can be reliably mimicked for ultimate lulz. So if there isn't one...who wants to start one? :D

Edited September 22, 2009 by Xeld

[dondon151]

If your hit rates are not exactly 100, then there's always a likelihood that a turn by turn walkthrough will fail.

[Dat Nick]

Zag and I are doing a run through our fixed stat hack.

Ours? Don't flatter me, it's yours. You did all the work, after all.

I don't know what chapter he's on

C27 Kenneth

and Vaida's incessant reinforcements do the same then I would understand.

Vaida's reinforcements aren't really that much of a hassle...

[Aleph]

How would I know? I've never fought them. :P

Anyway, you actually can make a reliable turn by turn. You just have to follow some rules like

- Hard reset between chapters

- Don't accidentally trigger an RN use when moving your units

- Hard reset before playing the chapter over if you have to reset for whatever reason

- Document all RNG abuse you do to a T if you do it

If you do all that I don't see why you wouldn't be able to make a turn-by-turn that works.

[dondon151]

- Hard reset between chapters

Does that make it so the RNG sequence is always the same? I never knew that...

[Aleph]

Like I said somewhere else, the game uses the same seed to start with each time you reboot the hardware (pretty sure soft resetting accomplishes the same thing since the RNG memory is wiped during the soft reset as well, and in any case the executable is restarted so the seeding code will be called again).

This is why the Lagdou Ruins tricks for getting Boots (Swiftsoles, my bad) and the like in FE 8 are possible. The game doesn't use its rand() function appropriately. The hashing algorithm uses data that isn't changed by functions but the hashing method itself, is called predictably and most importantly, generates the same values when given the same seed two different times as it will be in the event of powering off the game/soft resetting.

My hack attempts to remove this exploit by using the game's clock as part of the algorithm.

For reference, the method for obtaining Swiftsoles in hard mode of FE 8 is to enter the Lagdou Ruins, intentionally waste exactly 3 RNs and then exit/re-enter 6 times. Upon re-entering the ruins for the last time, an enemy near the starting points will have a droppable Swiftsoles.

Only re-entering twice will net you three droppable items worth a total of 9900G, easily collected in a single turn if you have all of your units with 15 move like I do.