Hack proposal:

[Zenko]

This is a hack idea I thought of... I would probably be able to do it myself, it would likely be quite tricky though, and I'm not sure I have the time/motivation. :/
I think it would be awesome for any patch and it would definitely be useful for tournament patches.

To do:

• Make Speed, PA and MA 4 times higher


• Make all stat based formula be reduced by 4 times at the end of calculation


• Increase maximum Speed to 99


• Modify Spells Clocktics, Status Clocktics and Player CT to 2 bytes (0-65535 instead of 0-255)


• The Player's turn would resolve at 10000CT


• Quick would be set at 32768CT instead of 254CT (byte limit)


• Make the game read all Clocktics based skills/status bytes as set in FFTPatcher and multiply that value by 10


• Make speed or add an item stat that reduces spellcasting charge time????


• Modify or stop using all Exponential formulas (ex: PA*PA*Brave/100)

Basically it would end up with:

• Softer damage ouput


• Softer stat increase from items and reaction abilities


• Far higher reduction of 2 units getting at 100CT and the first player gets the turn just because of how the game works

We can easily do this because normally PA/MA/SP range from 6 to 20-something in humans... we can just cut the formulas and the monster stats to adjust. Not only that but the spells CT are normally very low as well; too low. Compare a 2CT spell to 3CT, sure it's 1 more, but the difference is an increase of 50%... that's a LOT. Plus Short charge will cut a 3CT spells to 1CT because it rounds down.

[GeneralStrife]

That sounds like it would be really hard to do

[Zenko]

Given that you do not have the logic to understand how the game works and that you don't even know how to ASM hack to start with, your opinion of the difficulty to make this hack is pointless. I've had a lot people before say "oh this sounds easy" when it is actually very hard or "oh this sounds hard" when it's actually a very simple hack.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

To do:

• Make Speed, PA and MA 4 times higher


• Make all stat based formula be reduced by 4 times at the end of calculation


• Increase maximum Speed to 99


• Make speed or add an item stat that reduces spellcasting charge time????


• Modify or stop using all Exponential formulas (ex: PA*PA*Brave/100)

I don't see the value in a lot of these ones.

Multiply PA/MA by 4, divide end damage by 4 - What does this do particularly?  Also, you can simply better balance stats to begin with.  You don't need to make obtuse formula or odd divisors to make damage scale better.  Just sit down with lvlsim and a calculator and rework the numbers.  I've had no problem producing far softer damage outputs without strange modifiers for PA/MA/WP.  This change just outright seems worthless and a waste of a hacker's effort when the patch maker can already soften damage via math if they care enough to put effort in. 

Maximum Speed becomes 99 - I can kinda see why you'd want this, but 50 already seems like more than plenty.  If this change ends up being easy to do, I guess you could go "Why not?" since you're not forced to use anything above 50 if you don't want to, but I don't know if it has the value to warrant if it does become a long ass process.  Which, with Squaresoft's code, could easily be the case.

Means of reducing Spell CT - again, this seems more like something any mook with a calculator could handle if they cared.  If you have a full story-game using this hack and they want to have large amounts of speed growth over flat speed tiers over the course of the game, I could see the value of Spell CT accepting Speed, though.  You could make CT become something like (((100[00]/CT)+Speed(/2?))/100[00]) if you wanted a Speed/Spell combo CT, though.

PA*PA*Br/100, PA*MA*Br/100, etc. are shit Formula and shouldn't be used when it comes to softer damage.  (PA+Y)/2*PA, (MA+Y)/2*MA, (PA+Y)/2*MA, and (MA+Y)/2*PA are all a lot more serviceable, and with using normal PA/MA and not the personally unnecessary multiply/divide system you proposed, I've had no problems balancing them out.  Using your new system, you'd also probably not want to use *any* formula relating to Speed at all, but that's common sense really.

One thing I recommend is trying to make even PA/MA/Speed less desirable.  I'd say do this by changing Haste from Speed = Speed*3/2 to Speed = Speed + X + (LVL/Y), where X and Y are constants based on the user's Speed system for Speed.  For PA/MA, I would do this by moving the Attack UP, Defense UP, Magic Attack UP, Magic Defense UP, Martial Arts, Elemental Boost, Elemental Half, and other related routines to after the final damage is decided, instead of making them a modifier to XA1.  The issue here would be being able to tell when the formula is a "to hit" formula such as Hit_(MA+Y) or Hit_(PA+WP+Y), but a flag check can do that.  (I've already discussed making this change in his Formula Hack when it's completed, and he seemed to agree with me since it both makes even and odd PA/MA/ values more level with each other and means lower-end percentile modifiers are more relevant.  Aka, I could have Attack UP be 15% instead of 34%, and it would still have a relevant effect because it's modifying end damage and not XA1.)