Suggestions to balance FE

[Rainbow Skittles]

Yeah, and it doesn't mean you aren't allowed to tweak things a bit. It's all fictional, lol. My assault towers didn't actually exist in real life, so yeah (otherwise, they wouldn't be completely my idea).

not to get off topic, but "assault towers" existed in real life, and bowmen used them.

[Anacybele]

not to get off topic, but "assault towers" existed in real life, and bowmen used them.

I'm aware that towers where archers could fire arrows from actually existed. But I doubt they were exactly the same as the ones I came up with. xP

Edited August 18, 2013 by Anacybele

[NinjaMonkey]

this is actually a fantastic way to increase game difficulty while compromising a minimal amount of enjoyability. players would still be happy to do tons of damage and they just need to be more careful because they also take tons of damage.

By "players", I take it that you are actually referring to yourself, right? Because I wouldn't be happy about getting hit for half my maximum HP (or more) for the entire game.

Edited August 18, 2013 by NinjaMonkey

[Vennobennu]

Why do you think that all enemies would have that much attack? It would obviously require some tweaking to account for lower defence values, but that's hardly unthinkable - and there's always Hp growths for everyone. In fact, this system could mean that growth units will take less damage than usual, making them easier to train.

I think it could at least be an interesting idea to have a game where the majority of your defence gains come from Dracoshields and promotion bonuses. It'd be nice for the supposedly defence-focused characters and classes to actually be something special. Imagine if, say, Oswin or Gilliam was your only unit with more than eleven defence for half the game.

Depending on how high the promotion gains are it might make early promoting even more attractive, so you'd have to do something to discourage that. Reworking the exp formula for promoted units and/or making endgame enemies badasses with great stats might be a solution

[Chiki]

i think making them a rare occurrence will fix things. maybe 2 of each type of mounted unit (wyvern, horse, pegasus).

Just one is enough to break the game: see FE9 Marcia or FE10 Jill.

one could get better at blocking an attack or making it do less damage

In Fire Emblem, defense means how tough your body is (this is apparent because you never block any attacks with your weapon).

Depending on how high the promotion gains are it might make early promoting even more attractive, so you'd have to do something to discourage that.

I'd probably make promotion gains very minor--I mean, you don't suddenly gain a bunch of strength and speed and skill when you promote, do you? Though I can see a case for defense going up a decent amount, because you change clothes and could gain some armor (your army will give you more money if you promote, so you can afford some nice chainmail armor or whatever).

[1% critted]

By "players", I take it that you are actually referring to yourself, right? Because I wouldn't be happy about getting hit for half my maximum HP (or more) for the entire game.

FE12 Lunatic-

[X-Naut]

By "players", I take it that you are actually referring to yourself, right? Because I wouldn't be happy about getting hit for half my maximum HP (or more) for the entire game.

Depends on the enemy density. If it's something like HHM or the later chapters of Radiant Dawn, losing half your health in one hit is a death sentence and the game becomes luck-based. But the DS games have generally toned it town, as well as the prevalence of 1-2 range spam, so with careful unit placement you can get away with getting 2HKO'd on a regular basis. It's also less of a pain to see enemies' ranges than it used to be.

[dondon151]

By "players", I take it that you are actually referring to yourself, right? Because I wouldn't be happy about getting hit for half my maximum HP (or more) for the entire game.

my impression is that you either didn't comprehend my post or failed to read it in its entirety.

In Fire Emblem, defense means how tough your body is (this is apparent because you never block any attacks with your weapon).

please indicate to me where in fire emblem does the game say that defense is equivalent to how tough one's body is.

FE7's summary of the defense stat very subtly implies the opposite of what you are saying.

oh here's one thing that i would definitely change: units no longer gain +mov on promotion unless they promote from infantry to a mounted class. promotion bonuses are great and all, but i think that at least half of the incentive to promote comes from the movement bonus rather than anything else.

Edited August 18, 2013 by dondon151

[Chiki]

please indicate to me where in fire emblem does the game say that defense is equivalent to how tough one's body is.

The facts that:

1. Whenever you take damage it's always with your body: you never block a weapon with your own weapon. You tank it.

2. Generals have the highest possible defense whereas mages have the lowest (because Generals have armor whereas mages don't have any).

3. If defense was the ability to block an attack with a weapon, I don't see why Generals would have such high defense since even swordmasters can replicate it.

A way to make skill more useful would be to give a small chance of parrying attacks instead of just blocking them with your body.

[Vashiane]

The facts that:

1. Whenever you take damage it's always with your body: you never block a weapon with your own weapon. You tank it.

2. Generals have the highest possible defense whereas mages have the lowest (because Generals have armor whereas mages don't have any).

3. If defense was the ability to block an attack with a weapon, I don't see why Generals would have such high defense since even swordmasters can replicate it.

A way to make skill more useful would be to give a small chance of parrying attacks instead of just blocking them with your body.

That would be slightly more realistic - most of the classes/characters in Awakening simulate this fairly well, like Chrom lifting his sword to block an attack or a Hero moving their arm to have the attack deflect off the shield attached to their armor. But yeah, that's not a bad idea at all.

Although if anything needs a bit more usefulness it's Luck, which seems to only help out against enemy criticals and some skills.

[X-Naut]

Hit = Skillx2 + Luck/2

Avoid = Speedx1.5 + Luck

Crit = Skill/2 if Skill<20, or Skill - 10 if Skill >= 20, or Skill if unit is a Swordmaster/Sniper/Halberdier/Berserker

A small tweak to the GBA Hit/Avoid formulae, but by reducing Speed's impact on Avoid you improve Luck's impact. Hit rates are generally kept in the player's favor too since few enemies have high Luck. The crit system is literally FE12's with an additional provision for mono-weapon classes, and increases the Luck requirement needed to fully negate crit chance without supports. If more crits occurring frightens you this could be addressed by lowering the crit multiplier to x2.

Skill could be made more important by having it influence weapon triangle bonuses. Like, make the bonus +/-10 + (Your Skill - Enemy Skill), with a maximum deviation of 10. And if you have WTD but are losing 0 Hit, then you get to keep your Weapon Rank bonus!

[CT075]

In Fire Emblem, defense means how tough your body is (this is apparent because you never block any attacks with your weapon).

animations aside (i'll get to this in a moment), i don't actually see how this is implied in the slightest

you can argue that the animations are what's actually happening because there's no indication that they're anything but (well, aside from the "i will stand here and wait until you finish attacking before i take my turn"), and i'll respect that, but personally i like it better to assume that it's more of an abstraction of what goes on in that time frame of combat

at the very least before FE7 and potentially including FE13 at some points, i always figured that the individual units on the map corresponded to groups of soldiers (as opposed to individual people like in fe7 or fe10) and the "HP" was more of the collective healthiness of the troops on the battlefield; as such, defense would then correspond to to ability of the soldiers to avoid getting cut to ribbons etc

1. Whenever you take damage it's always with your body: you never block a weapon with your own weapon. You tank it.

see: animations are abstractions etc

2. Generals have the highest possible defense whereas mages have the lowest (because Generals have armor whereas mages don't have any).

you have a bit more leeway when blocking an attack if your entire body can just absorb it

3. If defense was the ability to block an attack with a weapon, I don't see why Generals would have such high defense since even swordmasters can replicate it.

at the very least in games where generals have those hugeass shields it'd be a bit difficult for swordmasters to replicate that kind of defense!

it's not like the two are mutually exclusive (tanking weapons with armor as opposed to blocking them)

doesn't actually say anything about how the weapon damage is reduced

[Chiki]

you can argue that the animations are what's actually happening because there's no indication that they're anything but (well, aside from the "i will stand here and wait until you finish attacking before i take my turn"), and i'll respect that, but personally i like it better to assume that it's more of an abstraction of what goes on in that time frame of combat

I think there's an indication apart from the animations: consider how much defense mages have compared to generals, swordmasters have to heroes, halberdiers have to generals and pegasus knights have to cavaliers. All of these have one thing in common: the bulkier your body and your outfit is, the more defense you have.

you have a bit more leeway when blocking an attack if your entire body can just absorb it

If you were blocking an attack, why wouldn't you just take no damage at all? Swordmasters, who should be masters at parrying and blocking, have low defense!

doesn't actually say anything about how the weapon damage is reduced

This isn't in anyone's favor.

If you think about it, the skill stat seems to be a better way to represent "blocking."

[CT075]

I think there's an indication apart from the animations: consider how much defense mages have compared to generals, swordmasters have to heroes, halberdiers have to generals and pegasus knights have to cavaliers. All of these have one thing in common: the bulkier your body and your outfit is, the more defense you have.

If you were blocking an attack, why wouldn't you just take no damage at all? Swordmasters, who should be masters at parrying and blocking, have low defense!

@bold: somehow i highly doubt that a book will be as effective as a hugeass shield when it comes to blocking

if you go back to my "one unit =/= one person" argument this still doesn't matter, since defense slipping will still cause a problem

either way, nobody has perfect skill with a weapon, and it's really ahrd to actually block/deflect things with a sword (can you imagine trying to parry a heavy lance with a comparitively short sword?); this is where the armor comes in. HP doesn't have to correspond directly to "hits taken to the gut" or whatever, can you imagine the state of your arms if you had to block a heavy axe or claymore coming straight down to your skull? once or twice you'd be fine, maybe, but over the course of a fight (this is where the abstraction bit comes in again; one enemy swinging at you once per turn could correspond to dozens of actual attacks blocked) you're sure to accumulate your fair share of bruises

If you think about it, the skill stat seems to be a better way to represent "blocking."

this is true

i do see that i'm handwaving a lot of things behind "it's an abstraction" but IMO that's the best way to look at it without getting into arguments like "why do people patiently wait their turn before making more maneuvers"

i would personally split defense into two stats - "parry" (which deflects a % of damage) and "armor" (which blocks flat damage due to tanking it)

Edited August 18, 2013 by CT075

[Chiki]

either way, nobody has perfect skill with a weapon, and it's really ahrd to actually block/deflect things with a sword

This is exactly the conclusion I want to get to. Blocking is really much more about skill.

I think my evidence is this. Imagine a swordmaster with 0 skill, or very low skill, and 10 def. FE mechanics dictate that a 10 def 30 skill swordmaster would take the same amount of damage as a 0 skill 10 def swordmaster. Which doesn't make any sense at all, to be honest.

This is why I think that, in FE gameplay, defense is intended to be how "tank" one's body is.

[CT075]

a different interpretation that i came up with (although this could also be linked to str) was that as the person fought, they grew stronger and able to wear stronger armor without compromising speed (am i the only one who thinks that swordmasters wear some sort of chainmail jerkin or something)

but yeah i agree with your reasoning for the most part as it applies to units representing single units (i also think that 'skill' is a bad name for the stat considering what it does but that's a side note). if you accept my group combat theory i can't actually see any holes in the explanation

[Chiki]

(am i the only one who thinks that swordmasters wear some sort of chainmail jerkin or something)

No:

because you change clothes and could gain some armor (your army will give you more money if you promote, so you can afford some nice chainmail armor or whatever).

[CT075]

so yeah my new interpretation agrees with what you've been saying on everything except "def only goes up on promotion"

since i would find it hard to believe that any right-minded general would refuse someone the right to use a different piece of armor just lying around (come on, armies have to have spare crap lying around somewhere, fe13 even has people picking it up out of nowhere)

[Chiki]

But then why can't defense just go up whenever you kill an enemy, as opposed to leveling up?

[Snowy_One]

1. Dismounting would solve this problem to a very minor extent--it doesn't make much sense to bring your horse indoors anyway. Though most maps generally aren't indoors in most Fire Emblem games, if I recall correctly, so this wouldn't do much: mounts would still be overpowered as always in outdoor maps.

Another way to solve this problem would be to make mounts from dodging attacks whatsoever. I don't think it makes much sense for a horse to react so quickly (or even understand the situation at all) to someone stabbing them with a lance. Then someone could make Horseslayers more common in the game, which would make it difficult for mounts to do so well on outdoor maps, since they can never dodge Horseslayer attacks. They would still be pretty good, but their usefulness would be limited thanks to having no avoid whatsoever.

The problem isn't their movement, the problem is they get movement AND solid stats. Someone suggested making bows effective against them, it's also possible to make it so they can't enter/deal with certain terrain types at all, or to simply reduce their growths by 50-100 total.

2. Flight is maybe the biggest problem in the game, but I think it has the same solution as 1: dismounting and no avoid. I can't imagine arrows missing a huge target very much, so the same solution would apply here.

Flying units, oddly, are a lot closer to balance. Not only do they have a weakness to bows, but they tend to be either slow or frail. Keeping this mindset will likely lead to balance. Maybe make it so they can only rescue light units/no rescuing at all and they'll probably end up balanced.

3. I always never understood why archers couldn't attack from very far away--I mean, isn't that the point of archery? Why can't you attack from, say, 5 tiles away, but with much less accuracy?

I'd try to solve this by introducing Crossbows like FE10 back into the game, and doing a similar thing FE10 did by giving Marksmen the way to attack from 3 tiles away, but further: I'd say making a limit around 5 tiles away would be good, but with highly compromised accuracy. No accuracy compromised when the opponent is right next to you (with a Crossbow), -10 from a tile away, -20 from 2 tiles away, -30 from 3 tiles away, -40 from 4 tiles away, and so on.

Agree, though I favor 2-3 range with it going up to 4 with longbows and 1-2 with crossbows (which shouldn't be stat-independent).

4. This is easily solved, and I think there are two possible solutions. One could be to make Jeigans disappear from normal and the above modes entirely, leaving them only in easy mode. Another way could be to have the Jeigan retire from old age after a certain point in the game, like around chapter 5, and let the player know that he's going to leave soon so he or she doesn't rely on the Jeigan too much.

Also you could give Jeigan's negative growths.

5. This is one of the most unbalanced things in the game--without them LTC playthroughs would have a hard time existing. But I never really understood how you could just throw your Wishblade over and over again at an opponent with no consequence whatsoever, and how Hand Axes just magically spin into the palm of your hand even when you're a level 1 Fighter. I think an easy solution to this is to make it so that there are no valuable weapons with 1-2 range, and also make it so that Javelins and Hand Axes have 1 use each. This is probably a very weird solution, but I can't really imagine a person carrying a bag of 25 Hand Axes or Javelins (the common number of use for Javelins and Hand Axes) and just throwing them over and over again at an opponent.

Just make them unable to double. That will fix the 1-2 range problem right-out.

[Constable Reggie]

Also you could give Jeigan's negative growths.

This is incredibly stupid. I don't have to explain why, do I?

[Snowy_One]

Why is it worse than removing the jeigan outright for multiple chapters?

Oh, also, RANGED SWORDS! PLEASE! Wind Edge/Sonic Sword/Tempest Blade. Not using a MAG stat or attacking RES. Just stop ignoring swords in general!

[Constable Reggie]

It removes any sense of gratification there is for using a jeigan, and basically make them unfun to use (since a) stat downs aren't exactly exciting, and b) they're getting worse as enemy stats are getting better, as compared to enemy stats reaching, then eventually surpassing as usual). Having a unit's stats go down after use is far worse than simply retiring the unit after a set period.

Edited August 18, 2013 by Constable Reggie

[Snowy_One]

Alright. A solid-enough reason. You've persuaded me. I suppose one can also look at the Burger King as an example of a Jeigan done right (well, I'd argue the 'right' part, but he's a lot better balanced than Seth... and the BK is utterly invincible too boot!)

What about the ranged swords? Remember, they can also use throwing knives in place of 'magic' blades.

In fact, what about the weapon triangle balance in general? Swords suck not just because lances are the main enemy weapon-type, but because they simply lack damage compared to their counterparts and have excess hit which really isn't needed? How would you suggest balancing them without making them mere copies of each other?

[Chiki]

Swords should be a lot better at "blocking" attacks than axes.

I might make a project on making Fire Emblem mechanics a lot more realistic and post it later.