Ragefest IV: Trolls & Tribulations

[Maritisa]

except yours is a remake+

like F. exe Platinum Edition

that's why the star is there and why it's all fancy. :D

[47948201]

yes but

shhh

fexna doesn't exist yet

Anyway uhhhh so I know the stream video ended up being glitchy but will it be uploaded at all? I tried joining, but my laptop still doesn't like stream sites, so I missed pretty much all of it.

[MarkyJoe1990]

I'm not gonna upload it. The only appeal is the commentary, which got messed up anyway.

[TheMoniker]

Now we'll NEVER see the ending! Oh well. I'm sure there's plenty of Ragefest videos to go.

[RandomSwordmaster]

Well I have a 3-day weekend free cause I finished finals. *wink wink nudge nudge*

[Augestein]

So I uh... I beat it. And I thought I had it recorded, but it's broken into a ton of parts... So many that they corrupted... . There's a lot wrong with this.

There is no way a person could plausibly do this without savestates without playing this for days probably. There is way too much RNG everywhere for this to be good. Let's start with the map.

The map: The map itself is okay on the outside half, you have a village that you can rescue but requires a flying unit, and there's all sorts of terrain to keep things interesting. there's choke points to slow or detour the enemies advances. The outside is actually pretty good. The inside... However? It's terrible. All there is... Is a straight path, and there's not many pillars to hide behind, and the only thing that's really of interest in there is a treasure chest, which you absolutely CANNOT miss, and there's no reason to NOT go out of your way to get them simply because the first thing you're going to want to do is meet with your thief-- that nets you a game over if you don't meet her. And with a bolting sage slapped in the map, you're going to be in for a hell of a time trying to advance. Most of your turns will literally be in this horrid section here. With pillars *just* out of plausible reach and 2 powerful shamans and knights ready to murder you simply for daring to fight 3 of them. the archer room is mediocre and a breath of fresh air. You can actually beat it pretty easily. The boss... Will be covered when I talked about the enemies.

The enemies: okay, this is where the map really falls apart. Which is insane because there are a myriad of other problems. The enemies are way too powerful. The ones that you first run into are powerful as hell, and the later ones only get stronger. Shaman have absurd defense to resistance ratios. No other enemy has anything to compare to this. Nothing. To put this into perspective, these shamans can OHKO the Town Folk fighter, the myrmidon, and leave the archer at 4 hp. I ended up getting passed this part by taking advantage of the AI, and baiting the greens into fighting the reds while the reds killed the greens which gave me time to defeat the advancing reds down on the bottom that appear as a STACK on top of each other. The archer that has the key? You have to fight the archers with a mage, that if he gets hit by a stray critical, it OHKOs him. And the chapter is over. You lose. That's ridiculous. There's nothing I can do to stop this either. I can't support bonus, I can't use bonds, I can't use terrain... Nothing helps and all it does is screw you over for no clear reason outside of just not paying attention to how much critical the enemies have in comparison to your critical evade. It's just plain luck. Granted it's not likely to happen, but guess what? It did, so I'm randomly given a middle finger because...? That's not good design. It's not unforgiving design, it's unfair design. The LTCers aren't inherently unfair, but really, do they need to be invisible? There's no warning for them really because Bunny says something about not letting people be invisible with her there, and... They are invisible with Bunny there. So ... Yeah.

These enemies are so fast too. You'll rarely if ever double because of how shaky your growths are and how rock solid the enemies are. They have good everything outside of maybe defense. The boss? Dear lord the boss is unfair. I think 80 accuracy was about the most I had, and he's got critical immunity until you steal the iron rune, and Divine so he has a realistic chance of getting a critical on you with the rune yourself. Which means at best you're fighting him 1v1, safely... And that's provided your characters manage to have over 8 speed... Mark and Cam are the only ones that really have a chance to do this. Lilian can as well if you get her promoted (I did, and it was *barely even helpful because of the weapon triangle) and the LTC design not letting me actually GO backwards to collect something I may have forgotten. Or simply not had because you didn't by them... Like the steel bow. It's also annoying how many enemies will waste your turns on enemy phase because they have 2 range while you have... 1 for most of your units.

Your characters:

Global: Everyone's growths are way too low in this. I think I saw 3, 0 stat gains while playing this. Even Fire Emblem 1 had more reliable growth rates. This especially problematic when you look at the boss, that has pretty kick ass stats and your units... Don't. I shouldn't be rocking 60ish accuracy on a boss when there's essentially a turn limit on how fast I need to kill him and if Mark delivers the final blow, I have to waste another turn to seize the thrown as well.

Mark: So , so. If you get lucky with speed, he can be pretty solid, and for some reason, he kept getting defense on mine. He ended with like 10 strength and 10 speed, which was solid enough for most enemies.

Camie: She was alright. Nothing spectacular, but she was especially useful for rescuing and being finishing people off from odd angles outside. Inside, she was another pair of hands to attack things. She could reliably double everything with a Slim Lance, so while the damage wasn't super great for single strikes, it becomes noticeably stronger when almost no one on the team can double. Has res. Has res. Has res. Has res.

Vlad: Starts out as the best unit on your team, and if his growths act dumb, he'll slowly be humbled. He's useful in the same regards as Camie, but trade some speed for strength and some extra defense.

Lili: Great unit. She sucks against magic, but against everything else...? Great. She can crush them. Get her an iron axe ASAP, and you'll see that she's actually pretty solid as a unit because she has high luck, and okay skill growth and speed it seems...? I don't know, mine was pretty solid. Avoid WTD with her, and she's fine. Honestly, I like her design the most out of all the units. She doesn't feel super badass to take on the world (like Vlad starts out), but she's good against what she's supposed to be good against and weak to what she's supposed to be weak against.

Ramis: The most important unit for the fact that you NEED healing desperately here. I managed to beat this before either staff broke, so that's something. His growths are garbage, and he cannot be in range of practically anything physical, and even the mages start doubling him later on, so ... Yeah. He's not durable at all.

Horace: Garbage. Don't even bother getting the village to have Horace get the iron bow. It's not worth it, and you don't have the money to buy and iron bow. Really. You don't. Use him to die when you are in a bind and never look back. I know this was supposed to be a joke character... But he should have been able to fight.

The mage (forgot his name): Your only real 2 range fighter. He's not great, but... He's your only 2 range fighter. So he's decent in that regard...

Bunny: Give her killing edge to Mark. Open all of the chest. Give the Master Seal to your best unit, give the energy ring to the person that's going to fight Mark's rival.

The events: Now these are just unfair. I already mentioned that the village is pointless to save. But here's why, getting a physic staff is not worth so many enemies coming out, that you'll run out of time to do anything else. Getting 1 unit a weapon for them to use is not a trade off for that madness. Also, having village events be "evil" is kind of pointless because all it does is cause a person to press reset immediately. You may as well just have the village instantly kill them. At least it'd stop them from having to push reset.

Enemies that stack on top of each other is lame. No matter how you splice it, and having a thief appear in a spot where she can't move only for a bolting sage to come out is annoying. Especially because... If you get her out of the situation, you now have 5 turns of bolting you have to deal with in a congested area.

LTCers: I feel like THESE should have been the green units that kill everything in sight, not red units that chase after you with relentless fury. And as previously stated, did they NEED to be invisible?

Town Folk: They were fine as an idea, but a warning that they aren't friendly to anyone would have been nice.

Question: Were there enemies that popped out from the stairs? I don't know, I stepped on them to ensure that they didn't come in.

Also: Tip, if you have to have someone reach level 10 because you want them to promote, you should probably have a better EXP flow, or start everyone higher in level so there's a better chance of reaching promotion. I barely got to it in time. Also... Having higher bases with better stats would work wonders too. Think about it. You don't have to leave as much up to fate, and you don't have to worry as much about people having stats come up short.

PS: I'm glad the ending justified why Bunny needed to stay alive for the entire adventure.

PSS: And I have to say, after seeing this new weapon triangle, I am absolutely not looking forward to fates at all. That weapon triangle is annoying as hell.

I have a suspended save right before the ending, so I guess the thing is, would you rather me just give the suspend to Marc so he could in theory, show you guys, or would you rather me just fix the recording? This question is to pretty much everyone. Especially Marc and the author because I don't want to do something kind of mean and interrupt the ragefest stuff by posting the ending or something.

Or not... Apparently the recording with the ending corrupted... This is truly a rage fest. I still have the ending though.

Edited January 30, 2016 by Augestein

[MarkyJoe1990]

I'd prefer that you upload your footage, since you went through the trouble of playing the submission, but... I guess that's not really option given the corruption stuff, eh?

Do you wanna join Ghast and I for the ending? I feel like you deserve it for the trouble.

Also, REALLY nice read. Pretty much says everything I'd want to say about the submission, and then some.

Edited January 30, 2016 by MarkyJoe1990

[FdRstar]

Thank you for your post.So yeah, got too heavy-handed on making the enemies stronger than the usual FE ones. Duly noted.

As for how to record the ending and stuff, I don't know.

[Nintales]

I can't really finish it yet -mainly due to me not knowing how to savestate in this game and getting my butt handed by 40% hits and 80% misses- but here's what I can say already :

- Just like Augestein said, the enemies. But my concern isn't about their stats. My concern is about the autolevelling, making it impossible to clear reliably the early part. Due to the enemies auto-levelling, you can't do a lot of things. Sometimes my strats are easier because that one enemy can be doubled and get way harder for I can't. You should have fixed their stats. This, while still having a relatively hard hack, would have allowed reliability, which is what -I guess- Mark expects from Ragefests. (something unreliable is purely not fun)

- That unreliability also affects your characters' growths. Mark getting an early proc of speed can help a lot against Archers that got 6 speed and Camille getting a proc on speed on her first level allows her to double most of the mercs. The issue? Their growths are not fixed and it's therefore unreliable.

- To end this up, the hitrates. I can get screwed due to Lilian missing her amazing 60% hitrates on Archers or Vlad missing his awesome 80% hitrates on mercs. That's how it goes. In my opinion, you should have taken this like that : 100% hitrate with WTA/Normal and 0% with WTD. (I think that would have just been fixing the WTA/WTD buffs/debuffs by making them at a value like +150/-150 while having base weapon accuracy at around 120)

I don't really care about Killer Axe's critrates though, relying on that is only poor strategy.

The main issue of that chapter is the whole mess of inconstancy that it is. You can't play it reliably.

I hope you'll just learn that lesson for the next one you do -if you do a next one- : If it's hard, make it consistent. This way it will be ragey as there's no real reliance on RNG to win/lose.

The dialog however is really funny. I'm quite unhappy that it didn't make it in the end. =(

[Augestein]

I'd prefer that you upload your footage, since you went through the trouble of playing the submission, but... I guess that's not really option given the corruption stuff, eh?

Do you wanna join Ghast and I for the ending? I feel like you deserve it for the trouble.

Also, REALLY nice read. Pretty much says everything I'd want to say about the submission, and then some.

I have the ending footage, the issue is that when the game was recording, there was a moment where I tried to rescue chain someone with Horace, and apparently the glitch that happened in FEXP caused the recording to get fudged up in a bad way... I still managed to get the ending. I can upload that for now if you want. Heh. I even had a version of your intro I made without your lyrics (heh, I honestly find that theme pretty catchy).

I could do that. When are you two available? I believe based on how you've talked in streams that you and I are in the same time region so there's no problem there.

Yeah, I think it kinda deserves a DQ, BUT I still kind of like some aspects of it, it's just some of it makes it a bit of a swing and a miss from the compounded problems.

Thank you for your post.So yeah, got too heavy-handed on making the enemies stronger than the usual FE ones. Duly noted.

As for how to record the ending and stuff, I don't know.

Yeah, they are a bit too strong. Especially because it's clear that they have better growths than the your units.

I can't really finish it yet -mainly due to me not knowing how to savestate in this game and getting my butt handed by 40% hits and 80% misses- but here's what I can say already :

- Just like Augestein said, the enemies. But my concern isn't about their stats. My concern is about the autolevelling, making it impossible to clear reliably the early part. Due to the enemies auto-levelling, you can't do a lot of things. Sometimes my strats are easier because that one enemy can be doubled and get way harder for I can't. You should have fixed their stats. This, while still having a relatively hard hack, would have allowed reliability, which is what -I guess- Mark expects from Ragefests. (something unreliable is purely not fun)

- That unreliability also affects your characters' growths. Mark getting an early proc of speed can help a lot against Archers that got 6 speed and Camille getting a proc on speed on her first level allows her to double most of the mercs. The issue? Their growths are not fixed and it's therefore unreliable.

- To end this up, the hitrates. I can get screwed due to Lilian missing her amazing 60% hitrates on Archers or Vlad missing his awesome 80% hitrates on mercs. That's how it goes. In my opinion, you should have taken this like that : 100% hitrate with WTA/Normal and 0% with WTD. (I think that would have just been fixing the WTA/WTD buffs/debuffs by making them at a value like +150/-150 while having base weapon accuracy at around 120)

I don't really care about Killer Axe's critrates though, relying on that is only poor strategy.

The main issue of that chapter is the whole mess of inconstancy that it is. You can't play it reliably.

I hope you'll just learn that lesson for the next one you do -if you do a next one- : If it's hard, make it consistent. This way it will be ragey as there's no real reliance on RNG to win/lose.

The dialog however is really funny. I'm quite unhappy that it didn't make it in the end. =(

Save stating is a matter of copying the suspend file that's made, and putting it somewhere else or naming it something that's not suspend so you have a state when you recording.

It's their stat growths more than autoleveling. Autoleveling is actually a standard procedure in handling scaling enemies without having to hard code all of their stats. I have no idea how hard that is with FEXP, but it's annoying to do for standard hacking-- if you even have the space, and even more lousy if you're just plain programming it. The issue is that the growths that they have are good enough to warrant discrepancies that can throw subsequent attempts into the trash. There's a huge difference between a mercenary having 6 speed at base, and say the level 3 one having 8 or 9. One can double Lilian with a steel axe and leave her for dead... And the other just tears through her hp in a bad way. However, the way the terrain is outside, you can ignore this.

To ignore that, I actually moved the Peg.Knight to the left of the mountains which prompts the archer to actually find Mark a bad target if he's on the mountains and waste 2-3 turns running over to the Peg.Knight only to have her move across the mountains AGAIN which causes him to have to run through the forest with the merc, which gives you like... 5 turns to kill everything and get the map under your control. No matter what. It's literally that hallway that's the problem because the enemies are higher in level and you can't rush but you have to because if you don't LTCers will kill you and you have absolutely no advantage here outside of the doubled edged green units. Variance on stuff like that is good, because it actually stops you from thinking that you HAVE to have enough speed to double that one archer instead of merely using the terrain to your advantage-- and how much or how long you do it is based on the randomly generated stats. I actually... Kind of like that aspect of the hack. I'm not even joking. FDRStar can make some hellish good maps if that already solid skill was harnessed.

No arguments here. The growths of your units are... Horrible. I have no idea what they are, but 0 ups are definitely trash tier. Having the enemies scale is so they don't just become dismantled when you get further. They could be hardcoded, but they don't need to be though. This can be remedied by pumping everyone's stats higher and fudging the caps. Archer has 15 skill cap and 100% growths at level 1 with base 5 skill? Cool. 10 levels he's rocking the cap. There are many ways to do this, so I'm not going to say that a person needs to do anything on that end, just that the final result is reasonable.

The thing that literally got me was just the hallway. The outside is actually really reasonable outside of the village. I'm not even kidding. It's just super unforgiving. Also, remember that axes are at WTD against archers, that's why Lilian has 60% hit on them. She can fight cavaliers, the pegasus knights and the knights. She's actually the best unit to fight those, and the knights and horses are some of the biggest time wasting enemies present.

The dialog is cute. I like the father daughter relationship from Bunny and Mark. Bunny really looks up to her father, and Mark trusts his daughter more than anyone else. Ramis is kind of a smug jerk... Actually, some of the characters are decently fleshed out all things considered... It was one map!

[47948201]

That is a good point--even if it's disqualified for the contest overall and anything like the Strategist award, it had plenty of clever moments, especially with the dialogue(despite being, again, unpolished). I was amazed at how long it took Marc to realize he wasn't Mark, and while people have gotten used to it from how long this has taken, I think most people had some reactions to Lilian, Horace rewriting stuff on the status screens was great, etc.

[MarkyJoe1990]

Either today or tomorrow, I'm gonna try to beat Pwntagonist's submission and move to another submission. The question is, which one?

VOTE AND MAYBE IT WILL INFLUENCE MY DECISION

Also, for those of you who have wanted to download the MarkyJoe Outro Theme, NOW YOU CAN! Check my signature!

... Or click this.

[RandomSwordmaster]

given the poll results, i put up a final updated version of my hack to address some issues of crypticness, and fix a description.

The bug where (censored) keeps talking after the convo that takes place after his death finishes isn't fixed, I have no idea how to get rid of it.

[MarkyJoe1990]

Hoo boy...

So I played more of Pwntagonist's submission and, I gotta say, this one's the real deal. There's actual, very carefully thought out design here that feels like the result of hours of playtesting. It's another one of those "Do a very specific string of actions" submissions, but unlike the others, there's no RNG bullshit (I played the wrong patch, the actual one fixes some issues), and everything's consistent. Despite the glitchy cutscenes, Pwntagonist shows some very good knowledge of the game's engine and how to play really well.

For this, I'm gonna need to step up my game and think very carefully on how to play it.

Edited February 1, 2016 by MarkyJoe1990

[MarkyJoe1990]

So. If the new video template bothers too many people, I'll change it back to the old one.

[47948201]

It's kind of weird at first but you get used to it pretty fast, I think. And so if this aspect ratio is more correct, then~

Yeah I kind of got this impression right off the bat when I saw the submission, but this looks super tight--honestly, moreso than mine. Looking forward to what else it's got in those long purple sleeves.

[Avraxas]

Nellie looks like a Knight Crest.

Alan is a Soldier.

Nellie is Alan's horse.

TAKE NELLIE TO ALAN AND PROMOTE HIM

Edited February 2, 2016 by Avraxas

[MarkyJoe1990]

Well yes. I'm assuming that's what I have to do, but...

Well, I was more concerned about getting the Money Man under control, honestly.

[Avraxas]

That's fair. Promoting Alan probably wouldn't do much against the Money Man in the current situation.

[RandomSwordmaster]

inb4 mega promo gains

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

inb4 mega promo gains

only one way to find out!

[the cool guy]

That is a good point--even if it's disqualified for the contest overall and anything like the Strategist award

Does it even have to be since it wouldn't win anyway for obvious reasons?

[Mekkah]

taking into account that 1-2 range sure is difficult

[MarkyJoe1990]

RandomSwordMaster/LumaSwordMaster!!

Are you around?

EnderSlicer12 is off today. We can do your submission, but I recall you being available at specific times.

[RandomSwordmaster]

I'm still at school! I'll be home in an hour and a half!