Final Fantasy Hacktics

Ah thanks for the response. I'll probably tinker around with it a bit more later today. That really depends on if things go my way today or not. With that being said I did that write up while about to pass out at my computer, so I'll need to probably examine it again when I have time.

I doubled checked some of the things and you were right. The Mog Knight in that battle does have half MP, I don't know what the hell I was seeing last night. I blame the fact I was exhausted.

Also I understand the logic behind what you wanna do with speed, I'm just curious to why it would drop to 1? Wouldn't it be better to place it higher than even having armor in the first place? I assume that just encourages to use it though I suppose.

Yeah, I assume most of the issues I'm having right now is just having everyone really low level. I'm usually use to having stats to pad what my expectations are for what I was assuming was 'higher' tier job classes. I'm trying to judge everything on it being useful "now" instead of taking account of it down the line. It's hard to take into account the whole thing at the start, but, that's why I'll definitely be playing more either today or tomorrow. The most difficult thing I really see for the mod though is making things usable at the start? I know I felt very overwhelmed at the start since I wasn't really sure what everything was or how I would even use it. Money is a limiting factor in that case and it can be hard to evaluate what they'd want at the start.

In a way, I almost think your mod would work better in FFTA2 in some ways. Since you can lock off progression to different jobs through the missions. Not that you can't make this work, but, just my two cents on the matter.  Anyway, I'll post here again later, I'm looking forward to continuing my playthrough. Any ETA on the next version?

Hey, you probably don't know who I am, but, I said I'd take a look at your mod about a week or two ago. I'm going to do a quick write up about my thoughts and experiences going through the first few battles. I wouldn't take too much to heart since I haven't played this game as much as FFT, but, I don't mind helping you out since you seemed like a pretty cool dude. Anyway, I'm playing this on .64 on mGBA 4.1.

Tutorial Fight:
Montblanc is going full retard consistently here. He's running into enemies and prioritizing whacking them with his staff over actually casting magic. It doesn't make the battle impossible or anything but it is a much tighter fight than I think you're aiming for. I'd take a look into that or just give control to the player if possible. He's going full kupo out there.

I spent a while messing around with my team and noticed that speed drops to 1 on job swap. This isn't really an issue since it reverts once I equip items but it was still something of note. As of the moment I'm feeling quite overwhelmed with as many options there are but I figured you'd want everybody to at least have the option to try anything they'd want. I have a team in mind, usually one that makes Eternal mad, that I'm probably going to use for a while.

Something else I'm worried about at the moment is MP cost vs Growths. At initial glance it seems like they're too high. I know in the original game there were too many abilities that were free and were too influential to the tide of battle, I'm looking at you Smile, but, it feels too crippling at first glance. I'd probably suggest lowering MP costs to half of what they are for most classes with low MP growth. Then maybe take off a quarter with classes with much higher MP growth. Mind you I haven't really played too much yet, so, I'm going to see how it works in battle before commenting on this further.

Flower Picking:
This battle went a lot poorer than I expected. The equipment speed bug I mentioned above does really give them 1 speed unless you equip them with some armor. So guess who forgot to equip their Marche with any armor to reset this. That aside I was only one man down for the fight. It was still winnable, but, it wasn't pleasant. Pummel surprised me and ko'd montblanc turn 3 through a bush. That aside it was just watching the Dragoon clean house with his ice spear since he hits like a truck while the not Time Mage I'm using cast haste on him. That was basically the whole battle.

I really don't think the AI knows how to use incandescence though. The one time it did use it, it was on the Dragoon's ice spear and it failed. Then he never used it again. This is probably due to the fact of the high Mp costs, but, it would be annoying to have him do that every turn. I notice there's a lot of draw weapon skills to counteract this, but, it feels like it's just a bit too frequent when I look at the skill list.

Thesis Hunt
Summon Montblanc made a much more impressive showing here by setting up two kills on the archers here. The archers that preceded to target the tankiest unit on my team and miss both times. I know you can't do anything about FFTA AI, at least last I checked, but, it's just tragic watching things like that. That aside, despite being under-equipped it was a cake walk to out position them and just run them through. Nothing of importance to say here but it does feel like Dragoon's breath attacks are remarkably weak. I know it's only the second battle of the game, but, 3 damage? That feels extremely low.

Cheetahs:
Well that was the first time I've ever seen Ritz or Shara KO'd before. The moogle with time magic, are they suppose to get this in this hack I'd need to read the job changes at the front again, was annoying. The beast also turned out to be quite a threat too, doing 50+ damage to my units. Mind you I haven't really been doing side missions, only story ones at the moment, to get an idea of how the hack works for this little write up. It kind of boiled down to the fact that my Dragoon does a ton of damage. Kind of leaving me to believe I should start shifting everyone into heavy melee focused jobs instead of trying to play around with the high MP costs. Sniper's toxic ability help wear the beast down enough for Marche to finish it off though, so there is that. Turns out poison is good, who would of thought?

Sprhomknights:
Just a random clan fight I decided to do for no reason. Hilariously my magic users died after their first turn for the again reconfirming that belief. It's kind of a funny cycle. I also noticed a bug where the AI is apparently able to use their spells at half the cost? I noticed the Mog Knight in this map doing that and he didn't have a half-mp ability from what I could tell. That was frustrating watching him speed up everything on the screen. That being said this was a tight one due to bad RNG on my end and them having much stronger equipment than myself. Also are bishops suppose to have such high natural evade? They're rocking 60 evade right now for some reason and I'd just noticed. Dragoon came out on top though and barely won by using the first balm of my play through.

Village Hunt:
More monsters. It feels like they hit remarkably harder than anything but the bishop in Sprhomknights. Nothing else has begun to even get as close as them in damage. With that being said it seems the MP bug, I don't know if it's a glitch or not just weird, doesn't affect them. Since I'm not getting bombarded by the one blue ant-lion with the earth move that does 50 damage a pop to my tankier characters. I swapped everyone to melee heavy focus jobs to improve usefulness around the team. It's been a big step up since now everyone is actually doing something before dropping dead. That being said, the lack of magic was an issue with the rock turtles, but by having poison on everything in my party it wasn't an issue. I used the time between them dropping dead from it to level up on them with the one damage across the board.

That being said that's where I stopped for the moment. I'd been playing for about three hours at this point and I kind of wanna give my initial thoughts on things.

I really like the uniqueness of the jobs that I did try. While I feel like there's some redundant skills across the jobs, see draw weapon and disarm, it's not bad at all. The class I think I liked the most out of trying them out were the Zealots. Blood knights have always been cool and they take it a step further I feel. That being said a lot of jobs don't really feel all that good to use despite being unique.

The magic classes suffer the most here, getting only a few castings before running out of juice. It seems to heavily focus a melee style of combat, at least towards the beginning. Without the tiers of spells slowly ramping the cost up there's very little reason to use any magic early game. This could get better the more I play but it makes it very painful at the start. That and throw in the fact that the range for spells seems to have been shorten, you have many dead squishy mages very fast. Basically making them blitz fodder for my style of play.

Speaking of MP, they seem way too high across the board. The cost/reward of each ability feels too heavily skewed to the cost side. It makes melee a much stronger option, particularly lances with double hand, than magic could hope to be at the moment. Skills are basically nonexistent, and when they are seen it's usually done by the enemy. Which is nasty with the half MP thing some units seem to get. While it does offer AOE in comparison the damage is not good enough to make up for it. To be honest I think your mod would benefit more from MP regen with costs this high, but, I'll let you decide if it's an issue or not.

I know the mod is nowhere near done at this point but it feels really chaotic at the moment. Mind you that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, I would need a lot more experimentation before I could give my thoughts much more than that. This is just from a few hours of me playing while being exhausted so take everything with a grain of salt. I hope the feedback gives you some help though with what to do with this mod. I'm really excited to see where it goes though. It feels rough around the edges at this point, but, any mod this early in usually does.

Quote from: Qwerinty on February 21, 2012, 08:56:37 pm

All aspects of falling down feel way too fast. Megaman has always been a little bit floaty in midair, and it feels like I'm falling faster than a Belmont with concrete shoes. Aside from that, and what Twin pointed out, it feels fine.

Quote from: PrinceRoxas on September 27, 2011, 04:38:58 am
alright alright....this story like about finding Ramza after years...the main character is Cloud,  they had to find him because he's the one who can recover Ivalice...after all, all the shrine knights were revive back and Algus, except  Izlude....well, i'm not good at explaining after all...

And by the way i am new here...and sory...

Ever wanted to watch someone commentate like a bored sloth over a video game? Wanted to watch him do it live? WELL NOW YOUR DREAMS HAVE FINALLY COME TRUE~!

Tonight at 8 EST, I'll be streaming Vagrant Story blind, and to celebrate (I've no clue why) everyone watching is invited to a group voice chat on skype with our members of FFH and anyone else who wants to come along! Commentate, on my commentary, my terrible skills, or the constant amounts of obscenities coming out of my mouth! So, enjoy?

Hopefully the stream will be a weekly thing, but lets see how this bout goes shall we?



Link to channel: http://www.livestream.com/GamesNowTime?t=745404

Name of user who you'll need to add on skype for the voice chat: final_fantasy_hacktics

http://www.youshouldnthavedonethat.net/

Here, the whole Haunted Majora's Mask fiasco, all right here.
Just go to chapters for the video/stories/x post on 4chan.

Don't mind me, just posting this to see if Celdia is interested in this recolor done by Mando.

Edit: Disregard that last sprite I uploaded, I am an idiot.

I see a lot of songs I would of nominated were already put up, so I guess I'll throw in my two cents here... oh boy is it a long shot.


Land of Confusion - Genesis - October 1986



Easy Lover - Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey - November 1984

Hey....yeah...I tried to log back onto the chat today...and...well...it looks I've been banned again by this nekoluna person again, so if anyone can clear this up it'd be cool.

Updated

Quote from: "Goomba"

spoiler

Probably a bug, then, since she has an ass load of JP for buying techniques but she never casts anything. Maybe the spells are just too low of a probability to be purchased by the AI and we both lucked out.

Quote from: "Goomba"Chimpmaster, did


Spoiler....!

spoiler

the second encounter sorceress actually attack using magic or anything when you fought her? For me all she did was attack for like 3 damage with a staff.

Well I just got done with the mod, and I have to say I was impressed. It took a longer time to complete a battle, however, I felt it to be a bit more filling to beat them, then say any of the 1.3 battles I've been in so far. I'll be dividing this up into different sections, and telling what I felt about each part of the game.

Story

Well, to be honest its a fairly simple story (We're rebels cause shit is bad, lulz) but it doesn't really have to be. Its a classic of a war story, and it still is effective to enthrall the player into the characters themselves and their seemly noble cause. While the demo itself leaves it on a bit of a cliff hanger, it really couldn't be expected that it wouldn't. In fact I'm glad it did to tell the truth, I wish to find out what happens to our portly Gospel and his crew of misfits. Anyway, I'll describe shortly here what each of the characters are, and what I think of them.

Gospel:
The leader of the group to be short, he's your generic war captain from yore. He obviously cares for his units, and they care for him. This is obviously shown in the fact everyone thinks him to be jesus christ to be honest. However, he is a likable character so it really isn't that big of a deal.

Schaefer:
The mysterious guy of the group who wishes to help Gospel for his own motivates. Honestly he really doesn't do much in this demo besides warn Gospel of an attack, and punches a door like the bad ass he is. I can't really say much to be honest besides the fact he really needs his own custom sprite...

Ilya:
You're tough heroine of the group it seems from the opening. She, also like Schaefer, doesn't really play that much of a role yet. Not much to be said, again needs a custom sprite.

John (Generic Squire, secretly the most powerful thing ever of course):
CLEARLY the defining character of this story. I have never seen a character done so well before in my life. Reading his three, four lines of dialogue was the most amazing thing in my life. He's king of the badasses, and a hero to all men. He'll mess you, your family, and your dog up by just blinking. Don't screw with him, that's all you need to know about this amazing fellow.

Music

While it being mostly old FFT music, I did hear a few nice new things I thought. Nothing really much to be said here besides FFT music is still the shit.

Gameplay

Clearly the meat and bones of this whole mod. The whole point of the mod was to somehow include low damage, low hp, low mp, etc and make you use everything wisely in short. To tell the truth, it does this nearly perfectly. It has a wonderful difficulty level, being between the levels of too hard or too easy. It makes you think about every action you do, however, it also won't shove a little mistake down your damn throat either. However, you can't make too many or it will do that, and you're screwed to say at the least. As I said before weapons do low damage, making it that you have to work together as a team to take a foe(s) down. Most if not all abilities cost MP, making it that you have to use them at the best times or else you'll waste them.

For example, in the game both Gospel and Knights have a move that work very much like Shock does in FFT.  To use this to the max effect that you can you would have to critical your own units and use it, which can work out to your advantage or completely screw you over since you really can only use it once or twice by the end of the mod due to its taxing 4 MP cost (by end game the max I could have was 8 and that was with a wizard robe). Ability that don't cost MP usually have low hit percentages in the 30s(example the only revival ability you have pump hearth as its called in game). Making monitoring your unit's hp CRUCIAL to victory to say at the least.

Magic in this game is also a tad bit odd, most of the spells I used were only single panel, and costs 2-4 mp from the ones I had. I couldn't really get anymore of them due to my limited time in game  and due to fact this game not having any random encounters at all, however, what I used was useful. Double for the final battle of the mod which you will NEED ice to overcome.

However, all the abilities in the game that attack enemies sometimes have an odd bug of having a 0 percent chance to hit, but later when you try to use it again they will have percentages and read fine. I'm not sure what's the cause of this, however, this is confusing to be honest and really needs to be looked into.

Touching back on something else I said, I mentioned the low attack power of weapons, this is a great thing in the ways of making you think, however, I must warn anyone trying to get the full experience of this mod at the moment. Crossbows are damage dealing masters in this mod, they deal at least double the damage of swords in this game, and are a threat to be reckoned with. Still even with this huge benefit the game stills manages to be somewhat balanced, however, I do recommend Kokojo that you do look into this "problem" .

So in short, gameplay wise this mod is amazingly fun. I recommend you download it right now, and play the hell out of it. Just remember not to be a complete dumbass with your units and you'll do great.

Glitches/problems(?)

Generally, while this being a fun mod it does have its share of odd stuff that bugs me a bit. Of course most of this is just me nitpicking a lot, but I'll post it anyway.

Firstly the typos in the game.


Autority is suppose to be Authority.


Why is there a : after quiet?


Seems to be a double space after Squire, and a space before the question mark. The latter of this being very very common in the whole game, I forgot if the FFT font itself does this or not, however, for now its a bit distracting.

And now for the graphical errors of the game.


This one is in the picture itself.


This one might be just me but am I the only one who thinks that Gospel's sprite in here is way too dark compared to the others.


I also really have no idea what the hell happened to that knight down there.

From there, its a good bit of random oddball errors such as descriptions for job and abilities not being right. For example:


Like this for example, every single skill in the "Elemantalist" has this same description besides the last two, who share a raise dead description instead.


And for the sake it says this guy is an Ultima Demon, or at least his jobset does....


And that people bleed blue blood in this magical land.

In conclusion, this is a wonderful fine work done by a man who seems to know what he's doing. I love what we have so far, and cannot wait for more from him. This is easily a must watch, and a award winning mod.

-Chimp

Quote from: "Voldemort"so, has this caused damage to any serious CPU networks???

progress REPORT!

Honestly, we really don't know, however, we do know that we have some serious criminals on the other end of this virus, and we don't know what they'll do. Even if we meet their "demands" if you say. So give it another month or two for something "big" to happen....or if good news happen, nothing at all.

Update, go to first post.

Anyway if you haven't been keeping up, recently a "major" virus was released (depending on who you look at). While this isn't the point of the topic, we might as well be prepared, so let us see if we can do that.

This virus can currently spread a few ways, the two most common now being from visiting websites without having any protection on your computer, and using P2P with an infected file or person.

First go here to check if you have it.
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/in ... chart.html

If you do I'll see what I can do, since you can't go to websites that I will post after that.

Anyway, if you don't you need to prepare.
First go here, and download this.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/securi ... 8-067.mspx

Make sure you check which system you have, which you can check by doing this.
My controls->system, it will show you what you have.


Anyway, now download these programs,
http://www.bdtools.net/ (single computer)
http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

These will let you scan for it, and it will remove it when it does find it.

From there, make sure your virus scan is up to date, and everything else is.

Also I recommend removing auto-run from your computer, which is the major start for most viruses as well, you can do this by following these instructions in this site here.
http://miekiemoes.blogspot.com/2008/11/ ... -asap.html

Go to the link that your operating system has down there.

Anyway, if you have anymore questions, or anything along the lines of that, then please post here or send me a PM. I'll try to get back as soon as possible.

Edit:
Recently a copy-cat virus has came out, using the same method as the conficker virus to try and infect your computer.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=113839
Giving you another reason to patch your computer to make sure nothing happens to it.
Don't worry thought, once you patch your computer then you'll be protected from both.

Edit 2: Well more information about the virus it seems. While not being a mass means of destruction yet.....it seems it wants its infected to download and pay for a certain type of virus software to "remove" the virus. So perhaps its for more of a commercial (assholes in short) means instead of super end world destruction. However, I'd recommend still keeping on your toes for the moment ladies and gentlemen, and make sure to spread the word about the virus as well.
Link:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-102173 ... 7-1_3-0-20

Edit 3:
Sort of semi update really, but doesn't matter. Anyway I recently manage to stumbled upon a whole entire work group dedicated to the conficker virus and its doing. Hopefully it'll provide a little more information then I can, and answer a few more questions. Keep safe guys.
Link:
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/

Quote from: "tithin"

Quote from: "ChimpMaster"

Quote from: "ph33rb0t"This sight has members with a good intellect for debate.

Though some tend to troll when they realize they have lost.

Though intellect in the spam section what was I thinking.

Aye, I believe you, all I said was in jest, just a "terrible joke" if you will.

Chimpo of retro is that you.

I do believe you have me pinned for another, unless this is another joke. Then, as you can tell, I didn't get it.

My dreams eh.....how about we get some pie and talk on that one.

Anyway thank you all for the "welcoming" and I hope we're all able to have a good time here.