Final Fantasy Hacktics

Quote from: mocliamgtaa on December 20, 2014, 08:04:26 am
I think that relying on luck isn't that fun, for example stealing. With determinism you could roughly know whether you can pull something off or not, instead of trying a battle 10 times waiting for a lucky moment. With break attacks, if breaking took 2 hits, you could then end up in situations where you want to retreat some specific unit away from the opponent knight.

ASM hackers exist, and there are specialists of hacking this game on these forums (if anywhere), so most things are possible (though for some you might have to sacrifice bytes of other functionality). That is also to say that if there are "impossible" things that would align well with your vision of FFT+, it might be a good idea to list those impossible things for potential hackers to see. It is good to separate what your vision is from what is technically possible (because you might evaluate possibility wrong from the asm point of view).

Propositions are one things that might have potential for alteration. For example to bind find-item functionality to them somehow (instead of field).

I think there might not be other projects that aim to somehow keep the game close to the original (how much does this try to do that at this point though?) and have chances of being completed. So good luck with 1.02 in any case.

So wait, you think relying on "luck" isn't fun, but you want the move-find item locations to be randomized?  Most people skip move-find items as they are already for being a pain in the ass, and now you really want to have to search every panel of a field every time you play to make them work, because the guides no longer apply?  Aw hell no, that sounds like the most boring, frustrating thing ever.

Some things I've noticed; sorry if they've already been brought up:

In Tietra's revenge, I noticed she has Arithmetic; however, the only thing she ever used is Wish (or whatever it's called in this version).  I suspect she either doesn't know any magic, or doesn't know any math skills.

Lezales doesn't seem to appear in Lezales' Vengeance; just the archers and chemist.  Don't know if that's intentional. 

Onion Knights' skillset seems borked.  Luso came with some JP in it, so I taught him something like five abilities scattered around the skillset (like Mincing Minuet, etc). However, when I took him into battle, he had the FIRST five skills from the skillset, rather than the five I taught him.  I thought it was somehow just adding a new skill from the top for each one I taught, so I bought something cheap next.  However, taking him into battle again, he didn't have any new skills; still the same five.

Also, I assume it's normal that OKs don't earn any EXP or JP in battle (outside of Move Get JP)?  Basically makes it impossible to earn any JP, and Luso was severely falling behind in level, so I gave up on further experiments. 

While on the topic of OKs, the enemy variety in the storyline missions were a nightmare; each one felt like a boss-level unit.  Germinas peak took me a ton of retries.  Zalbag never managed to get a turn before his weapon was broken in all my attempts.  Dycedarg was far easier to deal with than any one of his guards.  Dunno if you're of a mind to adjust those missions, but they created serious difficulty spikes.

Edit: The Grand Armor is supposed to give Reraise, but it actually gives Reflect.
Edit 2:  I skipped ahead to the end; one of the Dark Behemoths in the Balk 2 fight (I think it's where Balk stood in vanilla) has Ramza's chapter 1 sprite.

Slowly working my way through the Deep Dungeon, so I'll let you know if I notice anything else.

Well that seems pretty cool, then, assuming the Dark spells are modified to not do laughable damage with his Faith.  I don't suppose there's a way to make a skill both Cancel: Dead and add status(es) as well, is there?  It'd be pretty neat to be able to revive enemy units while adding the Charm (and undead) status.

Did Mustadio lose Seal Evil?  That and poach used to be the best ways to deal with undead.  The Necromancer idea seems like it could work, but you'd have to make a bunch of skills uniquely for him if you're planning to keep his faith low, by seriously screwing with their damage/success formulas.  Clearly he can't be TOO focused on the undead, because they're relatively rare and you don't want to just make him a new flavor of useless.  Personally I've never found Zombie to be that useful; using a turn to take a % chance at making a unit harder to heal, then having to kill them (where they can now come back to life) doesn't seem better than just killing that unit outright instead.  If you just want to stop healing, most healing classes can also cure the undead status, so "eh."

I kinda like changes that make him more of a physical-based attacker- change his equipment selection and stats to make him more physically assassiny, while leaving his skills as a middling distance attack/low Faith killer.

Reis as a Blue Mage sounds awesome, though.  I've always wanted a FFT Blue Mage.  Of course, I understand the tricky part is finding enough skills that don't rely on monsters' huge PA/MA stats, since giving Reis stats like that would break every other skillset.

Thanks for the response.  I do think giving the uniques Gained JP Up would help.

Have Protect/Shell been buffed, outside of duration?  I see they were given slight vertical tolerance, which helps a bit I suppose.  Poison still strikes me as a Death Sentence-type status ailment: too slow to make a big difference.

As for buffing/debuffing, I agree to an extent.  But there are basically only two buffing classes- Time Mage and White Mage, so it somewhat limits your setups.  At the execution site, the mooks are too spread out to effectively debuff outside of a Dancer or Arithmetician (which you are not likely to have outside of excessive grinding, and their debuffing potential has been severely restricted at any rate).  Your team is spread out so buffing up is also difficult, and if skills like Haste are made single-target, that'll make buffing even harder.  And Gaf is a huge threat and can't be neutralized outside of a concentrated damage rush, which you can't do if you plan to steal from him.  Take too long attempting to steal and you just get overwhelmed by sheer numbers.  It kinda encourages just resetting if you don't get a steal to land on the first try or two (and honestly, stealing or breaking his weapon is the only real way to neutralize him, so you can ignore him until you've thinned out the rest of the enemies a bit.  Focusing your entire team on killing him for three rounds while he heals himself on your blood and you get swarmed by his backup is a recipe for disaster).

At any rate, it was just those one or two battles that seemed a bit much.  Even Vanilla had frustrating battles.  I did notice you seemed to make saving Rafa (both times) much easier, so that was nice.

So is the master guide still accurate for 1.01c?  The topic says it was updated for 1.02, but that doesn't appear to be out yet.

Thanks for making this mod; I've been having a lot of fun with it.  I'm a few battles into Chapter 3, but I'll give some thoughts so far:

I think the Hesitation spell has been nerfed a bit too much- it costs more MP iirc, and hits only a single square.  Meanwhile, the Sleep spell costs the same JP, casts at the same speed, has an AoE with vertical tolerance, has the same accuracy, incapacitates for much much longer, and only costs 5 MP more to cast.  Edit:  I see now that they are both listed as 25 speed in the ability and help menus, but the Sleep spell is actually slower in gameplay.

Also, I thought I read in one of your threads that the Oracle Life Drain spell was supposed to be added back, with a MA*WP formula, but they don't have it in this version.  This makes Oracles pretty much completely useless against any boss characters, since they're now all immune to every status. 

Speaking of that, I personally found the Execution Site and Gate of Lionel a bit frustrating.  My go-to strategies were always to damage-rush Gaffgarion down, or put him to sleep until I got things under better control; but with his Def/MDef Up and immunity to everything, neither is an option anymore.  Since the Execution Site isn't even an assassination mission and you're heavily outnumbered (and I'll be honest, I wanted to steal that sword), it was all a bit much.  At the gate with my magey Capricorn Ramza, Gaff was doing well over half my health with a single attack; if I hadn't saved up my JP for most of the game to get Teleport, I probably would've been screwed.  Once again I don't think I could kill him through his buffed defenses, or even get to the switch with the limited movement abilities remaining in the game.

I really enjoy the quality-of-life improvements, like equipment being available in all stores and reducing the level requirements for some jobs.  However, would you ever consider including Gained JP Up back in a basic job, or even better, making it innate on all jobs?  I know you've mentioned that errands are now 1 day to compensate, but I feel that doesn't quite make up for it for a few reasons:
1.  Special units can't go on errands.
2.  There are a limited number of errands, and most errands seem to give out ~90-150 JP, while  getting to decent job levels can take 1000+ JP.  It's just not enough JP to make any substantial progress.
3.  Errands are usually best reserved for jobs that are basically worthless until you get a bunch of skills, like Arithmeticians. 
Plus, a lot of the basic intro skills, like Haste and Hesitation, now cost more JP.  Most of the skills that have been lowered in price are usually pretty worthless.  Also, WotL increased the job level requirements to open new jobs over the PSX version, and between the higher requirements and the lower JP gains, it's taking me forever to open jobs.  I've focused my characters down either physical or magical paths, and several battles into Chapter 3 I still haven't unlocked Ninja, Samurai, Arithmetician, Mime, Dancer, or Bard on anyone, and in many cases I'm not even close.  I just don't enjoy grinding.   

Of course, these are all just balance and preference issues.  I haven't run into any glitches or errors that I've noticed.  The mod's been really good all around, so don't take all this as criticisms.  Thanks again.

Edit:  Other stuff I've noticed- the PSX KO 2.0 changelog says Rafa is supposed to have Calc unlocked, and Marach is supposed to have Ninja- but they both came with level 1 Heaven/Hell Knight and level 1 Chemist.  Marach also came with an Acacia Hat and Onion Glove, which is probably a mistake.
The speed and MP cost information for a lot of the summons don't match between the ability menu and the help menu entries.
The Stall mediator ability has an AoE, but it's listed as a single-panel attack in the help menu.
Bard's Magical Refrain speed doesn't match between ability menu and help info.

Ok, that's all I've noticed for now!