FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!

[bcrobert]

Yeah rebalancing formations is specifically time consuming, especially since some missions are intentionally harder than others at the same point in time. But less than half of the 300 numbered missions are actual battles so it could be worse.

[dck]

Welp, been a while since the last post. I had to take a break from this due to some unexpected stuff coming up, and in truth mission rewards adjusted for the new items were annoying and killed most drive I had to get things done.
However I recently set up the missions up to exodus and did a test run through the main ones; even though I may be biased as hell I had a great time, particularly because I didn't even remember most changes I had done to formations and was surprised by most nasty stuff. Anyhow, point is I felt it was good fun and I want it done (so I can play it ), so first release should be imminent now, as I just have to finish side missions available from 8 to 15 (and these are a lot less than 1 to 8) and then bite the bullet and set up the damn rewards once and for all.

[rrs_kai]

Thus as a slight deviation from tradition, here's a moving picture!
https://u.pomf.is/xtsqjn.mp4

How did you get this animation to work? Normally it only works for Llednar's sprite.

@dragoon:
Sure, it's just a matter of setting up parameters for a normal cone ability, then set the horizontal AoE to either 3 for a 9 tiles area, or 5, 6 ,7 etc for an increasingly large cone effect.

nice

[trukxlig123]

How did you get this animation to work? Normally it only works for Llednar's sprite.
nice

I think he added a pointer to "52" below "shrug backward" using bcrobert's modules, but I don't know which animation though. The animation also works with dragoons and templars, life render's animation is similar to jump.

[dck]

trukxlig123 is indeed correct, life render is a palette swap of jump, and works just fine on bangaa units so long as the 52 in the module is actually using an animation. In this case it was just shake head to fit the theme.
It also works for any race doing the same process, however during the last frames of impact the sprite glitches out and is split in multiple pieces until it calls for the landing one. I wasn't very interested in using the jump animation for anyone else though, so I didn't look for a solution.

[dck]

"Imminent" turned out to be a bit of an overstatement, but at last I finally got some time to finish up the mission rewards and the game is good to go!

Right now all content unlocked up to story mission 15 is available, and this roughly accounts for 70% of the game's base battles. Since at that point the player gains access to all character abilities and the best shop gear, there was actually room for a bunch of endgame-ish content too. I'd like for the remaining part of the game to be quite different from vanilla, so updates from this version will probably take a while as I work on the unique classes and attempt to set up all-new encounters.

Hope you like it!

EDIT: the first post has the updated information now, as well as the updated link.

[bcrobert]

I NEED MORE FREE TIME.

The ability changes are very thought out and I love the feel of the unique classes. I need to just stop going to work so I can actually play this through. >_<

[dck]

Ha, funnily enough I haven't been able to start a playthrough myself either.
Well I'm sure becoming an FFTA playing hermit will have its perks!

[bcrobert]

Wait how did you get the 50/50 effect on Rekindle? I don't remember there being any accuracy formulas like that in the game.

[dck]

Smoke and mirrors!

spoiler

It uses the gadget targeting for the 50% part, since there's only one unit it could affect and so it resolves as a coinflip. So the skill is basically 100% heal > gadget targeting instakill > auto-raise.

[bcrobert]

Aha! That's clever. It never occurred to me that gadget formula without AoE is ultimately just a 50/50 hit or miss either way. I always got hung up on the friend or foe aspect of the formula.

[dck]

Yeah, it's really useful once you notice it, even if restricted in use since hitrate display is wrong unless it's a secondary effect.
There is a lot you can do with custom effects honestly, I didn't expect it to be this open to possibilities starting out.

[rrs_kai]

How did you edit text in your mod. The item names and descriptions, ability names and descriptions?

I like many abilities in your mod. Paragon is pretty nice, Un, Deux! with Ambidexterity...4 hits.
Is it intentional that Flans don't have max def by LV.50?

[dck]

General names is just repointing, the descriptions are mostly the old ones rewritten since I don't really need them for anything. Nothing fancy but it works and isn't noticeable from the player side, so I'm okay with it.

Yeah, iirc toughskins have the highest def now, although flans' is so high it's going to be shaving off ~300 damage so in practice they're still extremely resistant to it without debuffing.

EDIT: Since a few people have messaged me regarding the changelog before. There isn't one because at this point most of the changes were about formation problems, with a few other bugs that needed to be fixed (like shoes being broken).
Some balance changes have also been made as well, like fairies losing some speed and particular quests being changed around since unit placement made them silly.

Basically I'd rather keep the changelogs as changes between main versions rather than documenting every little thing.

EDIT2: Oh yeah and totemas no longer have a speed growth, so they don't become exponentially more difficult as you level up. That was an old change I forgot about before I learned to make new monsters, since I wanted them for endgame missions.

[dck]

Alright, I actually had time to try this out myself and I think it's going the right way. The only things I felt needed change were the foreign fiends gaining a few immunities to the and a detail about Exodus.

Had to deal with a real head-scratcher for a few days where AIO seemingly was not writing to the rom properly anymore, until I realized it was actually the testing savestate I did most work on that was corrupted.
I think by now most obvious broken things are ironed out though, so I'll be starting work on the endgame patch a few people have messaged about- and speaking of PMs, I'd like to thank everyone for their feedback and overwhelmingly positive reactions. This hack is something I made for myself and a group of friends, but it's definitely great to hear other people are enjoying it too.

[ChimpMaster]

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.

[dck]

Hey there, yeah I do remember you from the thread. That's definitely a lot of feedback so I'll address it best I can.

Tutorial fight:
The first thing I did when I started changing formations was removing guest units since they're often extremely stupid and dumb allies isn't a fun type of difficulty, but unfortunately it led to problems with their items (and possibly team slot) lingering unavailable in the inventory afterwards. That fight has been revised for next version though, as it's annoying to have him get killed like that and the player's input is too limited.


*Gear and speed:
That's part of the stats change. I didn't want to encourage fiddling with growths for speed gains, so speed has been changed to make it direct who goes first instead of who acts more often. Basically, natural evade and speed are modified by body armor type, with heavy armor having very low evade (10) and the lowest speed (80), and robes having high evade (50) and the highest speed out of humanoid units (90).

When they do get hit, robe users generally get demolished by physical attacks before they start getting some levels and passives in, but their higher mobility lets them stay out of range of most of these relatively effectively. Most buffs/debuffs and support can be used from safety almost always. Attacks demand exposing yourself sometimes, but with the added utility I found the damage to be worth positioning for plenty of enemies.
Regardless, they do start the weakest for sure. This is a side effect of the current implementation of level scaling not allowing me to specify higher levels for the starting members, but as they level up and get more abilities I found even basic mages like black ones were very strong.


MP consumption and leveling:
MP is definitely tight. The idea is that skills are to be helpful but used sparingly early on, although magic units have a harsher time than they should due to level 1 stats (again a reason why I'd rather have a way to set everyone in the starting party to 5 or so). It soon stops being such a pressing issue though, unlike in vanilla, every class gets a substantial amount of extra MP (but zealots).
As an example, when my game was over Marche had been trained as a fighter the entire time, and could use skills with surprising abandon despite the 1MP/level growth even without Half MP or support. Montblanc as a black mage never had MP shortage again the moment he learned aspir, and later on he could share it with just as little care.

On the subject of leveling up, the way the current scaling works is taking the highest clan unit and scaling to that for main quests. Side quests and random encounters, however, give everyone a +3 modifier (+5 for some particular enemies). Although it's a disadvantage, I didn't find it too noticeable and it speeds up the leveling more than a little bit.

Way before the first release I made a tentative playthrough doing only the main missions and I reached the end with Marche barely breaking double digits, so I'd definitely recommend taking on the odd side quest. I noticed characters felt a lot more well-rounded as they reached mid teens.


Herb Picking:
Ha, "not Time Mage, not Sage" etc is what the new classes were named on the version I set up for a bunch of buddies that played the initial release.
And yeah, there's skills the AI can't use yet, although AI tweaks and adaptations are something I'm postponing at the moment.


*Dragoon's breaths:
They use power instead of attack. Although the player abilities may change in the future, I wanted to keep it consistent with the dragon skills that also check resistance instead of def.
Due to bangaa's racial power, the damage is trash early. In terms of power, dragoons are to bishops what white mages are to black ones, so although niche, the breaths can be of use in some situations. Dragoons have a lot of utility already, so it's not a terrible deal.


Cheetahs:
Broadly speaking, monsters are stronger than the average humanoid, although the player almost always have the numbers advantage when the enemy team includes them.
I can't really remember what the other guys were doing with their magic users early on right now, but in my case it was montblanc and the nu mou were basically applying buffs and slowing from safety, then staying at range maintaining action speed until either the damage burst or healing was needed.


*Sprohmknights and gear progression:
Although most encounters have enemies only using items that are available in shops at the time, there some variation every now and then and they can have gear from the next tier (although not often more than a few pieces). That bishop and the gladiator are some of those exceptions!
Incidentally, I'm not sure how this could be missing on your end, but as you can see here that mog knight does have Half MP equipped.

Also, bishops have 50 from their robes and an extra 10 from the staves (which are 2-handed now).


Village Hunt:
The biggest tweak I'd want to do to monsters would be setting their speed to a certain amount without the level variance it gets. At the moment it's hard to set up some of the higher speed monsters so they won't create scenarios that are too unfair, and although it's been addressed somewhat, it needs a more definite solution.

There's nothing wrong with changing to what you find most useful, one of my friends beat it without ever using white magic in fact, but I can say dealing with dragons for example without shell looked like a lot of trouble. Even berserked and slowed they can be a problem, in certain circumstances.
Regardless, one of the pretty good things about the level scaling is it also affects new recruits, so when they come in they can make quite a difference very fast. Makes it less of a problem if you find you neglected something in particular later on.


I think that covers most of it. Chaotic is probably a fair description since the early game is more off than I would like and there's a lot of things that play different than vanilla- I do think it falls into place as you go, though. Definitely curious to see how you find the progression.


PS: Sections marked with a * cover stuff that will be added to the game's rumors next version. I can't cover everything in-game, but since the interface is there I'd rather have most basic things. Other subjects like when shops update should make it in as well.


PPS: Since it's been like a month since last update I might as well add some silly thing I was working on a few days ago https://u.pomf.is/yyyvgn.mp4

[ChimpMaster]

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?

[dck]

Hah, well "Long Night" was named in somewhat similar circumstances and I wouldn't recommend taking the name as a suggestion.

About speed, it basically boils down to how the game handles base stats on unit generation. Stats can vary from 95% to 115% of the specified number regardless of the unit having literally zero growth. I need to look more into a way to keep this from happening, as it's the main reason enemies are such a pain to place in a given speed bracket.

FFTA2 never clicked with me the way the first one did, so I never felt the drive to work on it at all.

Oh, and regarding the next version, it'll be months so I wouldn't hold my breath. The main reason the current version covers such a large amount of content is that I wanted to be able to properly experiment on endgame stuff without feeling pressed for time, and there's a ton of experimenting yet to do.

[Visage]

I've been playing this hack recently, and I think it's pretty cool. My criticism does get somewhat harsh here, but it's only because I'd like to see the hack be better. If you disagree with my opinions and/or want me to stop, I'll stop bothering you 

Before I start complaining, I'd like to point out just how much I enjoy the fact that Thieves and Stealing don't exist. Having them in the game adds a lot of really weird issues, not least of which is the fact that money is utterly irrelevant to a sufficiently-opportunistic thief.
Having to manage my money was a welcome change.

The Paragon's "Un, Deux" skill does not ignore Damage>MP. The R-skill is greyed out in the combat preview, but it still activates and works.

I dunno how much you can do about the AI, but a Moogle Gunner in the mission to free Koringwood softlocked the game by using Double Attack and attempting to attack something outside his range with the second attack.

The effectiveness of healing seems to be significantly reduced by resistance. This makes it very hard for White Mages to keep themselves alive, especially early game.

The Paladin's "Prayer" skill is pretty great, but it only prevents auto-revival if you don't kill the victim with it, since apparently the buff-purging happens after the damage.
I don't know if that's intended or not, but I was certainly a little put out when I killed Babus with it and he got back up 

I have to say the way the level scaling works is... perhaps a little off-putting to me? Making it so the enemies are always higher level than you certainly does make the combat more interesting, but it can also feel a little cheap just how strong they are compared to you.
A good example of this is the S.O.S. mission; it's quite possible for Ritz and Shara to be dead or incapacitated before they even get to act.

Perhaps I'm just not very good at the game, but I found myself having to do some battles over multiple times, or progress a little and come back later (The ice-making wizard dude in particular sticks out to me.)
...I'm actually becoming kinda convinced Adrammalech is unbeatable without 3 Bengaa abusing Wyrmtamer and some dudes reviving people. All of the enemies are ridiculously tanky, and anything but a breath attack will just oneshot most units.
When Giza Plains was attacked, the strategy I ended up using was poisoning everything, draining the Titania's MP before it gave anyone Auto-Life, and having my Sniper use Conceal so that I would have one unit still living when the monsters died to the poison. Even with this strategy, there was a rather low probability of success and I eventually resorted to savestates because I was getting sick of replaying the mission.
It's also worth noting that the enemies always being very strong makes it much harder to catch monsters than I think is entirely reasonable, but that's quite possibly intended.
If you're balancing the difficulty with savestates in mind, I think you should reconsider; the RNG in FFTA is not predetermined at all so, so you could just savestate-abuse until literally no enemy hit you and you never missed. In which case there would be no difficulty high enough unless the enemies all got guaranteed-damage attacks.

Having all new recruits be the same as your highest level character is cool, and makes sure they're relevant, but a lot of the attachment to units that happens in the base game just kind of evaporates as a result.
If you have a character who has learned a whole bunch of abilities, generally the preferred strategy is to level them back up to usefulness, rather than just kicking him. In this hack, there's a decent chance that you'll receive a replacement who's liable to be higher level after any given mission, and all it takes to bring the new guy up to snuff is piddling around in menus for a bit.

I think the scaled enemies should just be the same level as your highest, probably a little less, with recruits joining you at the average of your clanmates' levels to give the older units a fighting chance at being kept.
The only one of my starter units I still have at this point is the human, since Duelists are awesome and therefore he's almost never not useful.

However, I've got a possibly-better solution... It seems to me that the enemies in every encounter scale to you, so the main difference as you go through the game is only two things: number of times you can use abilities, and the number/quality of abilities (and their associated gear items) you have available.
Why not just remove leveling up entirely?
The gear-based progression will be there anyway, and ability use at low levels is already a bit of a balance issue/concern.

With the removal of leveling, you could balance all classes' base stats such that they have a good amount but never too much MP to use.
The only issue I can see with this is that you lose the ability to multiclass level your units and average their stats, but the base classes have varied enough stat focuses that you can generally find your preferred balance of stats anyway.

Particularly if you went with the removal of leveling, I think I might be willing to try and help you find/adjust the stat generation code so that you control what the stat variances are.

PS: Sorry for the wall of text, and thanks for making the hack!