Ragefest IV: Trolls & Tribulations

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

i think it should atleast win a graphics award or something, but gosh this does seem like a low blow in terms of writing, despite the map being decently done.

[47948201]

Nondescript is probably a good word. As far as I can see, pretty much everything is good, some things are great, but so far not a lot really "stands out"?

I will say I think it better than you did, especially in terms of the game design. With animations off it's hard to know the odds, but stray criticals are a fact of life, as are enemies moving into slightly different spots. You're a little low on Elixirs, so maybe some Vulneraries might've helped, but it seemed like the kind of thing that's "it changes, so it just seems more difficult because you haven't been in this exact situation, but it's not usually significantly more or less difficult due to randomness"

That is, unless there's actually a strong chance random enemy stats end up beyond the realm of the creators' intents. That was my main problem with an earlier version of Lord Wolfram's game, so I made him change the enemy in question to have static stats. I kinda doubt that's the case here, but... uh...

yeah

[Maritisa]

holy shit that mic echo is bad.

I am so incredibly sorry. I'm pretty sure that's largely my fault.

That part is the salvaged portion of the video, from my end. We had recorded about 45 minutes to an hour or so worth of footage together, and it turns out Marc had his recording on the wrong settings, so the video was lost. But I had a nagging feeling something bad might happen, since this seems to happen to Marc all the time, so I decided to record the screenshared video in event of such a scenario, and here we are.

My mic is kind of absolutely terrible (It's older than me!) and/or Marc overlayed the old audio for the sake of having game audio, hence the echo.

_{^{I really should get myself a good mic one of these days...}}

[MarkyJoe1990]

I will say I think it better than you did, especially in terms of the game design. With animations off it's hard to know the odds, but stray criticals are a fact of life, as are enemies moving into slightly different spots. You're a little low on Elixirs, so maybe some Vulneraries might've helped, but it seemed like the kind of thing that's "it changes, so it just seems more difficult because you haven't been in this exact situation, but it's not usually significantly more or less difficult due to randomness"

That is, unless there's actually a strong chance random enemy stats end up beyond the realm of the creators' intents. That was my main problem with an earlier version of Lord Wolfram's game, so I made him change the enemy in question to have static stats. I kinda doubt that's the case here, but... uh...

yeah

The stats do go beyond the creator's intents by 1 one or points. Because he fine tuned the stats down to the T, this is enough that it completely invalidated his winning strategy when he went back to play it again. He confirmed this to me. This is a perfect example that even the smallest detail can have extreme consequences.

This goes on for the entire chapter as well. No matter how good your strategy is, you are very likely to get screwed over at some point due to the RNG, which is against the rules and, even more annoyingly, could have been avoided entirely. I checked the weapon stats. The creators gave some weapons perfect hit rates, but it didn't cross their mind to remove that unavoidable +5 crit from the spear, or the +8 crit from shine.

I also want to point out that without animations, and with speed running tools, the resulting footage was thirty minutes. That's more than three times longer than the other submissions I speed run. Now imagine how long it takes playing at normal speed. All those crit chances, all those unexpected movements, all that length, as well as the fact that the submission actually demands you play it fast due to an optional boss with super high stats showing up, build up to make this submission unplayable, and any challenge it had completely unfulfilling.

And that bit about crits being a fact of life... what does that even mean? You can't excuse poor gameplay with "that's life", especially when they could have - and should have - fixed it and made it not a fact of life. Ragefest has a "no excessive luck" rule for a reason.

Edited October 29, 2015 by MarkyJoe1990

[47948201]

Okay yeah then in that case, that's exactly what I was talking about. If enemy stats are tuned to be exactly a number, then that enemy should be set to always have those numbers. And while it's 100% normal in FE for enemies to have a slight crit rate you can't do much about, giving enemies weapons with inherent critical rates, without designing the entire enemy around the criticals, without giving the player an Iron Rune, is a bit too far.

(Really, in Ragefest submissions, Iron Runes should be almost ubiquitous. In standard FE, the Lord characters always have great luck stats, and this is precisely why)

EDIT to reply to edit: Yes, but personally, I don't think a 3% auto-failure chance is "excessive luck". Of course, if the creators went and gave every enemy a ~3% crit chance, then it's no longer really a 3% crit chance.

Edited October 29, 2015 by 47948201

[Mekkah]

The map design and enemy placement is really well done and I didn't mind the dialogue too much. However, the fact that your characters seem reliant on their growth rates along with all the other variance is somewhat concerning. I wonder if they have some 100% growths? Either way, with some touching up I think this cold be one of the better submissions overall.

[MarkyJoe1990]

The only unit with 100+% growths is Reisen/Sophia, and it's her HP growth. Everyone else has high growths, but yeah, in theory, nothing is truly guarenteed.

Marc has a 65% magic growth, and he needs at 11 procs minimum to kill Ciraxis in 2 rounds with Elfire (Ciraxis has 10 res +5 due to throne bonus, and 80 HP, plus the healing factor giving him 8 HP each turn, which means Marc has to have at least 37 attack). Marc has 15 levels to get those 11 procs. You can use the energy ring you get later on if he only got 9 or 10. If he fails to get the neccesary procs, you have to use Reisen/Sophia (0% Luck growth, which means 8% crit from Ciraxis) to kill Ciraxis since no one else can damage him nearly enough except maybe Jimbob's unreliable ~55% hit w/ Hammer, and the enemy reinforcements (triggered by stepping on a tile in Ciraxis's immediate range) force you to clear the chapter right then and there.

It's uh... I mean, I got pretty lucky, all things considered, but yeah... I guess I'll let that speak for itself.

Edited October 29, 2015 by MarkyJoe1990

[Person123]

For anyone curious, the enemies who's stats can be a digit higher than intended are the warrior and the 2 closest wyverns at the beginning. The strat I intended was for Marc to ORKO the warrior while Sophia/Reisen stand in a specific spot to bait out the 2 wyverns.

As for killing me at the end, there's no need to get Sophia/Reisen to attack me. Assuming all characters are still alive, you can easily kill the 3 reinforcements each turn with them while Marc stands in attack range of Ciraxis with Elixir's. It shouldn't take any more than 3 turns at most.

Granted, 3 specific enemies occasionally having a stat higher than intended and the innate crit on some of the existing weapons are inexcusable oversights. At the very least I can take the things I've learned and apply them in the future.

[47948201]

Yeah, that warrior-wyvern part seemed iffy to me, but I thought the idea behind it was cool. It's a double-twist on the bait-n-switch that's so infamous, but it does cut it pretty close to have random enemy stats.

(I say these things but I actually don't know if FEGBA allows fixing enemy stats, though it really feels like it should, especially since you can event a unique enemy character with high bases to be each of those units and set their level to type 1)

All that said though, so far it indeed looks like a nice project in its own right, and a good place to learn things to make use of in the future (as I'm fairly sure all the submitters found). I think the best part about Ragefest is how it encourages people to get out there and make things, so in a way, that's the best result you can ask for.

Edited October 29, 2015 by 47948201

[TheMoniker]

So far, this submission doesn't seem bad, it actually seems very well thought out, but as all you guys are saying, the luck involved, even if its just tiny chance after tiny chance, adds up to make things not always fall into place as they should, with disastrous consequences for the poor, poor player(in this case Markyjoe).

[Nintales]

Well, the best option to avoid that could have been -don't know, not a hacker but seems like so- :

- Giving Mark and Reisen uberly high luck-stat/a Hoplon Guard.

- Not auto-levelling (as far as I remember there's a thing in nightmare to give some level to dudes without having them being auto-levelled even for enemies) mobs but typing their stats. This way there can't be any inconsistency on the stats you want to give to them.

But yeah, as far as I can guess, it doesn't look that bad and seems pretty sadictastic (or is it fansadic?). I kinda like the dialog, and the gameplay doesn't seem to be that horrid yet (I mean, you could have saved Reisen with the weirdo -dunno why you didn't do that- and I really liked the 29 dmg Brave Axe Dude).

By the way, what happens if you choose Sophia? They say "nope" and still give you Reisen?

Edited October 30, 2015 by Nintales

[RandomSwordmaster]

Yeah, that warrior-wyvern part seemed iffy to me, but I thought the idea behind it was cool. It's a double-twist on the bait-n-switch that's so infamous, but it does cut it pretty close to have random enemy stats.

(I say these things but I actually don't know if FEGBA allows fixing enemy stats, though it really feels like it should, especially since you can event a unique enemy character with high bases to be each of those units and set their level to type 1)

All that said though, so far it indeed looks like a nice project in its own right, and a good place to learn things to make use of in the future (as I'm fairly sure all the submitters found). I think the best part about Ragefest is how it encourages people to get out there and make things, so in a way, that's the best result you can ask for.

I do have some sort of theory on how to fix enemy stats. Basically, you set an enemy's growths (both class and individual) to a set multiple of 100, or 0, and just autolevel that way. Since they're guaranteed to go up that amount each level, or not at all, there is no variation for error. You can have 2 variations for some classes, such as Cavalier, General, as they have the F variant(female). Of course, if you want multiple enemies with the same class to have different stats, then wierdness comes in.

[47948201]

That was my initial thought, but I wasn't sure how reliable it was, with mode bonuses and whatnot. In the current FEXNA, it was a surprising amount of enginework to fix enemy growths like that, and that's considering you can have 4 growth rate variations per class (after which you have to just make copies of a class), so I didn't know how reasonable that would be in GBA. (But enough of that)

Since Reisen seems to be a pretty generic druid, I'd guess Sophia and Reisen have the same weapons and stats and are basically the same gameplay-wise. Though I thought, it could be mean to predict Marc would save Reisen and make it so you had to (or at least it was way better if you did) choose Sophia.

[MarkyJoe1990]

So far, this submission doesn't seem bad, it actually seems very well thought out, but as all you guys are saying, the luck involved, even if its just tiny chance after tiny chance, adds up to make things not always fall into place as they should, with disastrous consequences for the poor, poor player(in this case Markyjoe).

Well that's the thing. Because of the way Fire Emblem is, You can have a very well thought out submission be completely ruined by a single small variable. Hell, if you were to fine tune a submission to require a very specific strategy to work, it can be utterly ruined by a single point of speed preventing you from 1RKOing an enemy you need to 1RKO.

That's kind of what happened here. You can tell that this submission uses the Corruption Of Roy/F. EXE approach to design. I think the difference is that CoR had Iron Runes and way more leeway, and F. EXE completely removed randomness.

Ah, speaking of which, the authors told me that they used The Corruption Of Roy as their main influence, and to that I say... God dammit. I really hope it didn't influence other submissions.

Well, the best option to avoid that could have been -don't know, not a hacker but seems like so- :

- Giving Mark and Reisen uberly high luck-stat/a Hoplon Guard.

- Not auto-levelling (as far as I remember there's a thing in nightmare to give some level to dudes without having them being auto-levelled even for enemies) mobs but typing their stats. This way there can't be any inconsistency on the stats you want to give to them.

The designer doesn't need to go to these extremes. They just need to know the worst-case scenario enemy stats and accommodate for them. Take note that high luck = high avoid + high hit, which might be something the creator wants to avoid.

But yeah, as far as I can guess, it doesn't look that bad and seems pretty sadictastic (or is it fansadic?). I kinda like the dialog, and the gameplay doesn't seem to be that horrid yet (I mean, you could have saved Reisen with the weirdo -dunno why you didn't do that- and I really liked the 29 dmg Brave Axe Dude).

There's really nothing about the submission that is explicitly bad. If you ignored the luck factor, it's at worst extremely rail roady and the dialogue is... well, I'm kinda surprised people are receiving the dialogue so well. I wasn't fond of it.

As for brave-axe-whatever-person, let's just chalk it up to me being stupid.

By the way, what happens if you choose Sophia? They say "nope" and still give you Reisen?

Very slight dialogue changes. The most notable being that Ciraxis is surprised by my decision of choosing Sophia over Reisen. Sophia is statistically exactly the same as Reisen, but starts two spaces right of her. The only benefit to choosing Sophia is that you get to skip the opening cutscene, since it defaults to her if you skip the decision.

It's one of the main points I look at when judging the writing as manipulative, because the characters get almost no screen time to make me organically care for them, and hinges on the assumption that I will be emotionally invested simply because "Oh no, Reisen and Sophia are in danger." Thing is... If Reisen doesn't act and feel like Reisen, I can mentally separate the pixels from the emotional attachment I have to her.

Edited October 31, 2015 by MarkyJoe1990

[RandomSwordmaster]

Don't worry, my submission has zero margin for error in enemy stats :)

Any place where there is variability in enemy stats is intentional. (you will see why when you play it)

Edited October 31, 2015 by RandomSwordmaster

[47948201]

God dammit. I really hope [Corruption Of Roy] didn't influence other submissions.

whoops

uh

enjoy the new last part of my first map

[the cool guy]

Don't worry, my submission has zero margin for error in enemy stats :)

Any place where there is variability in enemy stats is intentional. (you will see why when you play it)

whoops

uh

enjoy the new last part of my first map

This is gonna be good. Or not. Hopefully good.

[RandomSwordmaster]

This is gonna be good. Or not. Hopefully good.

I hope so too. My hack was inspired partly by F.EXE. LUCK CANNOT SAVE YOU, MUAHAHAHAHAHAH

[MarkyJoe1990]

Just dropping in to let you all know that I'm editing part 2 today. I might also do part 3, which shouldn't take nearly as long since it's a single, clean run of the chapter.

[MarkyJoe1990]

Video's up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsaLyOZkzmQ

[47948201]

Yeah, gameplay-wise if it's fine with some savestates, then I'd call that perfectly fine--that's what the rules said, after all. It is a little unfortunate how much more baitnswitch it has--the first instance was pretty clever, but the rest assumes you have to rush, which apparently you don't.

That said, though, if what you did were actually the intended strategy, I'd say 10/10 easy on the gameplay front, that really had you scraping the barrel in interesting ways. But I also agree that while pretty much everything is solid, it really does lack charm somehow. Could be an interesting point of analysis how that's the case.

EDIT: for those who didn't see, the last post of the previous page is part 2 of Title Here by Ash and Ciraxis.

Edited November 4, 2015 by 47948201

[Person123]

Yeah, the second half also has some serious pacing issues. I wasn't happy at all with how that section turned out, but I'm bad with deadlines.

[47948201]

Yeah, fair enough. Despite being a bit empty towards the end, it doesn't feel too rushed, so you pulled that off pretty well.

[Person123]

It's a shame I couldn't show off the intended final boss though. It took way too long to implement for it not to be seen at all lol. The last part had to be cut because time was running short; not to mention part 1 was much too long as it is.

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

deadlines OP pls nerf