Final Fantasy Hacktics

QuoteUnderstandable, but easy to prevent by ensuring a chemist doesn't have pathetic growths.  Pathetic multipliers, maybe.

I agree with this. The stat growths shouldn't cripple a character, but at the same time I don't think it really makes sense for a character that spent 80 levels as a Knight switching to a mage job suddenly and being just as efficient at it as the character that spent 80 levels as that mage job.

If you think base FFT's growths are overdone, tone them down a little, but don't axe them entirely. The argument here is essentially the same as for the Zodiac compatibility. It adds a bit of complexity to the game that it benefits from.

It's not as if FFT doesn't have an issue of jobs with too little Growth compared to others, but you can easily fix that and, for example, still keep Chemist more of an early-game support unit, by using pathetic multipliers.

As for leveling down... I don't think that's an interesting or necessary mechanic. Its only purpose really is just for relentless grinding and making specific units stupidly OP by abusing best growth jobs. Not my cup of tea.

Overly high Move is another factor keeping spells obsolete in favor of mashing X to win everything just using Attack forever. 2 is definitely enough, and if you're replacing some Movement abilities through ASM I'd even knock it down to just the one.

For Performing, IIRC, the hardcoding associated with those slots just tells it which stat to affect, and how, if using the Performing formula. I've changed the formula in a PSP patch and noticed no issues.

QuoteI instead decided to re-make the event and record the entire thing from start to finish (sorry that its 40 min long).

Quote40 min long

wut

QuoteI figured this might be the only way people here will be able to see exactly what I am doing wrong.

The most that anyone would need is a pastebin of your event script and a few screenshots or uploaded files of everything else.

A 40 minute video is not only noninteractive (people trying to help you can't scroll to specific lines, switch tabs, or use good ol' Ctrl F), but definitely bloated as fuck for something like this.

What? This patch definitely removes the slowdown on the US version. I can personally guarantee that.

Yes, it does.

QuoteAnother variable is always nice, but Zodiac has some hangups. Sure you can invest in a synergy team, or healing can be balanced to not need that. But having to work around enemies because of an unchangable mechanic...especially with bosses dealing too little or much to a unit because of it...ugh. It sounds like a nice and interesting extra modifier, but I can't help but see it as extra work or a nuisance since my first playthrough. Who knows maybe when i get to crunching and testing numbers it will prove beneficial.

Honestly, in a game that doesn't have Defense stats, I do think it keeps things interesting in that you don't just innately know how much damage/healing you'll do at all times (Fa formulas aside). 

QuoteJust wondered if innate jp up would help ai random units with skill variation, too bad but I'll manage

Quoteyou can easily rectify that just by increasing learn percentages for skills and enemy job levels in the ENTD.

QuoteThey don't.  This is why there are no means of destroying Weapons in Journey of the Five aside from an obscure monster ability with no Vertical Tolerance.

Yeah, I thought that might be the case. I don't think it would be out of place on Meliadoul alone in a vanilla mod, considering she's otherwise overshadowed by Orlandu and arrives near the ass end of the game anyway. But it's way too broken to be a generic skill.

Quotekeep in mind before you remove zodiac compatibility is that having another form of variance in battles is a mostly positive thing - it makes different fights of the same battles different.

I agree with this. Forgot to mention that before. I really wouldn't remove the compatibility setup. In random matches, it benefits the player just as much as it screws them over, and if you want to be really particular at the Soldier Office you can get a team specifically designed to have max compatibility with each other, which is absolutely beneficial to the player.

QuoteTo break or not to break weapons, hmm. Having some special enemies with safeguard isn't too big of an issue for me, but i do like the idea of some equipment only obtainable via stealing. I saw a break/steal hack in one of Emmy's xml is it safe and functional? If i could set weapon break/crush to accessory/shield i'd be happy with removing or limiting steal weapon.

You can still get armor & accessories via stealing, keeping the skill relevant. If you want to keep Steal Weapon, the best time to make use of it would probably be in the final chapter, and I'd just recommend slapping it onto a special unit or rare beastmastered bird for that purpose. Keeps it from being generic and too easily available, but doesn't entirely remove it from the player.

QuoteOne more question. If Gain jp-up is innate to all, does that give ai more jp for their random skill selection too?

Pretty sure that's not how that works. I wouldn't give that skill as an innate to every single job, though - you'd be better served by nerfing JP costs. If you come across a job you want to give multiple innates to, you'd have one less slot with which to do so.

QuoteBreak Weapon, Steal Weapon, Crush Weapon. Yea or nea? These are pretty easily abused by the player and make most physical enemies powerless. I feel they are best removed from the player (maybe keep steal weapon for obtaining unique weapons). I'm pretty sure their id slots are coded to those specific skills, so replacing them wouldn't be easy, i think.

I can't remember if the AI will ever make use of Equip Change. If they do, then spreading EC around to NPCs would at least make weapon-removal count as a decent way to make an enemy lose a turn.

Otherwise... I don't know about removing them all outright, but certainly taking them away from generic jobs so that you need to field specific units to use it. Maybe make Meliadoul the only weapon breaker, and one of the birds have the steal skill (possibly even only with a Beastmaster's help). The Knight can keep their armor breaking skills.

QuoteShould i remove Fa calculations? How big of an impact does it really make? I think at most it's about a 20% difference, right? That's rather noticeable. I ask because while I'm pretty happy with vanilla Faith mechanics it always irks me that my lower Fa units can't get good healing from most magic or are harder to hit with buffs.

You're thinking in terms of vanilla mechanics where about the only way to get buffs or reliable healing was to use a caster, and so the only benefit of low Fa was to be an anti-magic tank, at a fairly significant cost. There's a lot of room for changing that around when you're modding the jobs.

Here's a few ideas you might want to think about: Turn the Squire into a buff unit that can only apply their buffs to others. Make some of the Chemist's items apply buffs, instead of there being a million different status cures. Give the Knight some tanky self-buffs like Protect or Regen. Give the Archer some weapon-applied debuffs (such as poisons) and maybe a self Haste or something. Add some range to the Monk's support skills, whether horizontal or vertical, so their shit can actually be used.

You start doing stuff like that, and suddenly a lower Faith is more balanced, and generally more useful, instead of being super niche in a way that's not going to see quite as much use in practice.

Lion, while vanilla FFT generally fails to make enemies learn any worthwhile abilities, you can easily rectify that just by increasing learn percentages for skills and enemy job levels in the ENTD.

If you can write your own RSM abilities or find really interesting ones that work for your patch that others have already made, then yeah, replacing some of the more over- or underpowered skills would be a good way to go.

As for the nerf everything mindset, I believe that mostly comes around from issues with the 999 damage and HP caps. Which, as far as I've heard, can't be smoothly altered without some sort of issues. Even if there is a fix for that, at that point it just seems to me like it would be way more work than just scaling damage down or doing things like reducing the number of weapons that can be dual wielded - both of which are largely just Patcher changes.

There are many, many issues lending themselves to the "too easy to one-shot, no reason to use status effects or cast time skills" problem in FFT. Trying to buff everything up to the level of "unstoppable god monster dual wielding two Knight Swords with Blade Grasp, Teleport, and innate Reraise, Protect and Regen" (let alone the insanity that is Math Skill) really just seems like it would go way out of control. I can't see how that would ever work well without some nerfs to at least the top tier.

Some things definitely need buffs, don't get me wrong. But the nerfs are needed too. Balance cuts both ways.

QuoteThis is just about as detailed as i can be without using pictures.

Don't forget, Xifanie provided you with a picture before. This is a handy time to link it again!



Also, to MrFuzzy:

Quoteyou might want to edit the title of your post...

QuoteOn MP I'm still iffy on physical abilities costing mp. It could make them easier to scale and balance with magic.

Have you played the release chapter of Jot5? Even just the first battle can give you an idea of how MP-based physical abilities work out in practice. Spend a bit longer in the game, and, as both Ramza and the Knight job have MP restoration skills, you can see how useful those are as well.

You might think that making offensive skills have a cost is a nerf, but it's quite the opposite. Because those skills have a cost, they can be useful skills, right out of the gate. None of that Throw Stone or Tackle garbage. Nor do they work like vanilla's Holy Sword skills, which are ridiculously overpowered and completely remove the point of having the character Attack (until they Dual Wield anyway).

It's kind of like how Metroid Prime 2 made the extra Beams cost ammo, but also made them very powerful. It feels a lot better than the 4-beam set in Prime 1, where you'd pretty much only ever switch out of the top-damage Plasma Beam in order to take advantage of elemental weaknesses. And in order to facilitate that, towards the endgame, Prime would constantly throw enemies at you with immunities to three of the four beams. And I don't just mean bosses. It wasn't any more fun than it sounds.

Without a cost on the abilities, they either have to be weak/rarely situationally useful/flat out useless, like the entire Squire skillset (and most of the Knight skillset, and to some degree the Monk skillset with how restricted its targeting was), or they end up stupidly OP - like Holy Sword.

Some general thoughts.

QuoteIn general everything will have higher Hp Multipliers, by 10-15%, and most stats will be slightly altered with stat growths varying between jobs.

Honestly, it's way too easy to get close to 999 damage in FFT as is. Buffing HP wouldn't go as far as nerfing damage output would.

QuoteI am wanting to assign certain, hell maybe most, monster skills to counter flood so that when equiped with cf innate the monster will retaliate with something more interesting than a standard attack.

That's... not how CF works, though. It's set to use one type of attack depending on the terrain you're on, and I'm not sure it can be set to choose from more than one skill per terrain. Even if it could, you'd have goblins casting Flame Attack or something on the correct terrain? Couerls using mindflayer skills? I really don't know what made you think that was a great idea, but it's not. You're way better off setting one or two monster families to have Counter Flood and giving the rest different Reactions such as Bonecrusher, CT Save, etc.

QuoteThis one is simple. I just want some experienced opinions on whether MP regen is a good game mechanic in Tactics; whether it be natural and innate 5 or 10% from ASM or through the 'Mist' status provided in other ASM.

I think it is, as long as it's not overdone. Mages really early in the game are nearly useless without a supply of Ethers since they run OOM so quickly. This problem repeats every time they advance to the next spell tier (or they just keep casting the weak version).

Jot5 includes a lot of ways for players to regain MP, and also makes quite a few non-mage abilities cost MP as well. That balances out the MP issue between physical and caster jobs, makes skillsets like Holy Sword less ridiculously OP, and helps keep abilities more useful than simple Attack commands.

QuoteText editing-what happens to the space?

I believe there's a limit on the overall text space, and a limit on the space for every individual section. Removing the kanji from everything should usually give you enough space to get creative, but I never dove all that deeply into it. I do know Xif had to change some of the load functionality for some text in Jot5, breaking one section up into several smaller ones that all load separately, to fix an issue we came across.

Pretty sure the answer in both cases is just "through ASM". You can do some of what you wanted without it, but you can't change the weapon type's formula (though you can change the specific weapon's formula to match Holy Sword skills and it mostly perfectly matches the sword damage formula) or sound effect, IIRC.

And if the ASM to do that doesn't exist already, it would have to be made.

Is that still happening in EasyVent 2.0? Because Raven changed quite a lot with that one. So if you're not using it yet, you should be.

Useful to know.

Can you add the words "save file" to the topic name and mark it as Solved? That'll help others find it with a search if they ever encounter the same issue in the future.

The only thing I found, looking over a few pages of search results, was that one of the previous people with your question asked this:

QuoteDoes the european version have anything to do with it?

I suggested experimenting with a North American ISO (which is the type I use), and they never returned to the forums after that. So what region are you using? Given that there's not a lot of support for any FFT version other than PSX, it's dimly possible the Patcher auto-corrects regions to NA or something equally weird.

Also, most sites aren't "fishy". The top Google results for downloading games are usually the most trustworthy. If you're downloading ISOs off small sites with suspicious descriptions/tags, you might have an issue, but big rom sites usually keep themselves clean.

You shouldn't need to do anything special to allow that to happen, which means you've got something broken along the way. I'd suggest reacquiring a clean copy of your ISO and making sure to download the newest version of the Patcher.

First: Did you try searching for that phrase? I'm seeing quite a few results, some with promising fixes.

Second: You necroed my six year old topic to post about an issue unrelated to it. This confuses me. 

Eh... what would that really accomplish? Ramza would still be heading into Ch. 2 with allies that way, and you'd be removing Lavian and Alicia for no real reason.

It also seems to make less sense, to me. Don't forget that Ramza's bumbling around for Ch. 1 isn't what his brothers wanted him to be doing. Zalbag was more sympathetic and didn't seem aware of the plot to have Elmdor killed off, but even he would've taken his knights back after Teta was kidnapped.

If your angle is only that the Academy generics wouldn't have been loyal enough to follow Ramza after the end of Chapter 1... well, don't forget that Balbanes, Dycedarg, and Zalbag were pretty important nobles, and Ramza showed decent promise. There's a whole lot of reason to suck up to the Beoulve family at the start of Chapter 1: see Algus for proof of that.
And those generics were present for everything Ramza was. They saw the horror of that little civil war. Nothing's stopping them from becoming disillusioned the same way he did. They may very well have preferred to keep following Ramza instead of getting caught in such a bloody, backstabbing mess.
And, of course, don't forget that Ramza did rather well at earning loyalty. His party members by the end of the game include a Count, the princess' personal knights, multiple Church personnel, a prominent engineer from Goug, monsters, a robot, someone from another world, and a pair of assassins. Even Delita still works with him throughout the game, despite obvious problems if their association is ever discovered by the Church.

To me, it just seems like you're looking to fix something that isn't broken with that plan.