TBS Gamer

Join Date 07/2005

Looking for testers for my weapons, and abilities (unit, champ) balance changes FE ver 1_29

Just what it says in the title.

I will copy a small portion of my detailed change logs into this post so folks can have an idea what they are getting into. These changes can be used in a modular fashion (except Abilities and Spells are tied to each other and must be used together or not at all).

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Excerpt from CoreWeapons.xml balance pass change log...

Conceptualization:

Magic damage and magic resist live in the magic tree. To defend against magic weapons, you need type resists.
Non magical weapons do more damage, but are "repelled" by armor. What a concept, I know.

Ditch armor "type defense" and just make each tier more armor and defensively equalized i.e. the struggle will be weight (and production time) vs armor)

Ditch armor penetration on spears. Make them fast hitters for low damage with no counter attacks (also daggers). i.e great vs. low armor targets.

vs no armor... spears and daggers do most damage (fast init, no counterattacks)

vs some armor swords and maces (swords being great for "tanking units" with extra counterattacks, maces being better to create harder hitting units)

vs heavy armor 2h weapons (high damage to overcome armor) and magic (armor penetration)

magic tree combatants will do less base damage, so they'd be in trouble vs mass unarmored spearmen, but they can increase damage via amulets (etc) and also should be expected to be pursuing mana and be able to use more spells to turn the tide of battle. At endgame... this is even more true.

Weapons are organized by category: trainable (c,u,rare), then nontrainable by rarity (common, uncommon, rare, ultrarare, unique) in the xml, allowing for MUCH easier editing. Weapons in each category are largely equivalent in power, if different in flavor (A shadow sword has armor penetration but is equally as good as a dagger with a huge crit multiplier for the right heroes). In general rare "reward" weapons are better than rare trained units (shop purchased) counterparts, slightly.

Minimum levels have been temporarily removed (Curgen's hammer requires level 10 for damage 56, but the bashing maul requires level 19 for damage 39? What?)

sythe (renamed Scythe) of the void now only has a -50% xp penalty instead of -100%.

Unique weapons are very strong, but no longer stupidly so. i.e. Curgen's Hammer is damage 44 now, and it's the strongest in the game. In general Unique weapons are in the damage 35-44 range, with additional bonuses.

All weapons can possibly drop in a given non unique category, providing more variety. (previously very random what tiny selection was available for rewards).

Weapons shop costs significantly reduced. You will be able to buy trainable weapons for champions. The flip side of this is you won't be getting rich selling old weapons to the shop.

Just to reemphasize... spears no longer have 50% armor penetration. They are for fast hits against low armor targets, which they work great for, in my play testing so far. They pair great with a curse spell, or against archers / early game nest clearing, but they are no longer the only weapon you should be using. Oh, and magic weapons are useful now. Bows are slightly faster as well.

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Excerpt from CoreAbilities.xml balance pass change log...

A GENERAL Disclaimer and overall change summary:

I believe that ALL abilities should be "good" and if there is no tension in a decision, there's no point in having it in the game. All champion perks were equalized to be on par with the best of them. This shouldn't affect the player very much, since they were already cherry picking the "good ones", but should help the AI because all choices will be helpful in some way. If you play a champion heavy game, you may have to bump up a difficulty notch, worst case. Changed Charge to be a "used" ability instead of the start of turn 1.

I nerfed injuries (again) because the goal is to prevent reloading (yes yes, insert long discussion about "just don't do it, ur leet, blah blah"). The injuries as I have them are tiny things, that over the course of the game add up to a banged up hero who isn't automatically resigned to city camping on his first or second death. I actually feel like they give my heroes some flavor now instead of crippling disabilities.

I nerfed the "Lucky" customization trait to help mitigate dodge stacking (combined with a blindness nerf) making units "unhittable".

I fixed a lot of typos.

I BUFFED wildlands rewards significantly. There is actually a good reason to clear out a wildland before the game is already functionally over now. Specifically, wildlands trophies grants +20% growth and one of the following (+3 att, +3 def, +3 hp, +20% gold, +20% mana, +25% fire res, or +25% cold res) to all units defending the city AND all units built in the city. Each trophy corresponds to an appropriate wildland theme.

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complete ElementalDefs.xml changes:

Changed starting year to year 1. I'm sure there's some great story reason for it having been 159, but my sovereign has declared a new era of math friendly game progress estimation.

Unrest from occupation begins to decay 1 turn after city takeover, instead of 5. Small change, but it didn't make sense to me that you couldn't see any change happening after taking over a city, and there was no real explanation in the game. It was arbitrary, and now a new player can see "oh, they will eventually be ok."

Minimum city distances bumped up slightly to help alleviate undocumented "can't build" situations where your cities have grown towards each other too much.

Sov Customization bumped up from 6 to 8. You could actually learn all 4 elements now if you weren't using the Decalon faction trait. If you were customizing you were looking for a specific advantage anyway. I will eventually edit the default sovereigns to match.

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complete TerrainTypes.xml changes:

Increased essence frequency by a factor of 8. Many tiles will have 1-2 essence now. I've seen as high as 3.

Increased river food contribution from 1.5 to 2.0. It was the same as every other "fertile tile" at 1.5 and I'd like to see rivers be better "town" spots to balance off the building issues associated with not being able to build across them.

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dropbox link to zip file containing:

DIRECTIONS.txt

CoreAbilites.xml changelog.txt

CoreSpells.xml changelog.txt

CoreAbilities.xml

CoreSpells.xml

wpns balance design document.txt

orig wpns data.txt

revised wpns data.txt

CoreWeapons.xml

ElementalDefs changelog.txt

ElementalDefs.xml

TerrainTypes changelog.txt

TerrainTypes.xml

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ah0qfi4s5c461r/FE%201_291%20MY%20Mod%20Work%20Public.zip

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Good ideas!

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Test game, Large random map, 7 challenging AI, challenging world, default settings except sparse heroes playing as Tarth.

Starting spot was 4-2-3 grain, materials, essence. Opted for conclave due to essence. The low materials yield and extra +10 unrest from tarth's faction seemed to give me a bit of a slower start. With only Lady Irane and the initial champion and a golem managed to clear out enough safe space for another city and sighted 3 more spots.

I guess I got greedy trying to put down unrest and bump up production capacity, because Resoln snapped up 2 of the city spots I had seen, and Magnar snapped up the third. Good job brad AI! It was going to be tight quarters then, so be it. I trained up 2 units of spearmen with fast +init, finesse +3 vs slower initiative units, and brute +3 vs lower level units, and started making my way towards Resoln. I needed to clear some trash en route to bump up the spearmen a level before we arrive.

When I arrived at the first Resoln city, there were 2 armies composed of 1 pioneer and 2 militia in each army just outside the city, and 1 unit of militia defending the city. I declare war, all units dump into the city except the pioneers who flee in different directions. The militia are club wielding no trait goons whose only saving grace is the resoln faction +20 dodge. It's now or never, since if Ceresa shows up I'm going to get annihilated.

Once the assault has begun I can see that the city also has 2 innate militia and an archer (groan). When the dust settles my champion and 1 spearman troop have made sacrifices for the good of the kingdom. The spearmen did VERY well against the militia, the lack of armor on Resoln's troops definitely making them weak to fast hitting low damage (which in my modded files has no armor penetration). Of course, there was a lot of whiffing involved, and perhaps I should have taken the accuracy trait to that particular engagement. My champion walks out with some minor scar, but nothing debilitating.

6 clubmen + 1 archer vs 2 spearmen (trait boosted) + 1 golem + 1 champion + sovereign = 1 spearmen + 1 golem + 1 sovereign victory

(fast forward 50 turns)

I'm not playing as aggressively as I could, since I need combat to test the changes and that means I need some wars. I have eaten Resoln (early) and Magnar (just recently) and spent the intervening time developing infrastructure, making the kingdom contiguous (anything to help with that unrest penalty), and making treaties with the remaining players. Since I have more power rating and cities than the AI all treaties benefit me more than them, snowballing my lead. I make a note: mod the game so that treaties give BOTH parties the sum of their combined gold/research times 5%, so that treaties help both parties but the losing party more. Ah well, a project for another day.

I am in the process of fully exploring the map with mounted scouts so that I can better assess what's going on overall, and then I'll pick someone to poke with a stick and push out equivalent weapon tier troops as whatever they bring to bear. I'm hoping that the AI will bring FORT boosted troops to the war, but we'll see what they've got. They all hate each other (I might possibly have paid Gilden to attack Pariden ) so I'll just pick whomever will give me the most consolidated position to pick on first.

--- to be continued.

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continued game log for fe1_29 weapons balance changes

Turn 158, game functionally over at this point. Concurrently picking away at all 3 wild lands, and 1 war with Krax.

The lowered weapon costs worked nicely. Selling weapons as loot is not as lucrative, which is good, AND equipping a hero with current tier technology weapons is also fairly trivial, cost-wise.

Spears, combined with finesse trait are wickedly fun against all but the most armored opponents. If I was playing as empire and had curse (or mass curse) they'd be unstoppable.

Maces and Swords both worked well in their respective roles (maximum damage dealers and tank-type units). There was no glaring best weapon with the right trait picks that I could tell.

The weak hero traits that I buffed didn't seem to swing the game all that much. My heroes were about as strong as in vanilla, the AI heroes seemed to have a lot fewer injuries so I can only assume they were more successful with these changes.

It was nice to see a larger variety of rewards from fights. At one point in the early game I got a Krax 1h spear and I was truly torn between that and a warhammer. There were several fights that I changed champions' equipped weapons to better counter my monster lair opponents, and that was an enjoyable change of pace from vanilla.

I didn't see any random hero reward dagger drops, but based on spears I am thinking daggers will be useless against heavily armored opponents like dragons and platemail armored endgame troops. I'm ok with that though, I think.

Going to quit this game and restart a new game at a higher difficulty to hopefully provide a more protracted war experience.

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+303

I tried to checkout the version you have listed in the first post, but it says the file has been deleted form dropbox.

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I would like a "throwing Spear" with say a 3-5 square range or thereabouts. The dagger is ok but a spear would be better. Too many melee weapons, needs more ranged weapons. You could make them like Roman Pilum attacks. Used once as a ranged weapon then can be used again once enemy is elminated. (pulling them out of the bodies of the dead).

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I updated the file last night and changed the designation (filename) from 1_29 to 1_291, and the dropbox link changed. The OP is updated and here is the link to the 1_291 version:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ah0qfi4s5c461r/FE%201_291%20MY%20Mod%20Work%20Public.zip

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+303

Thanks, Im going to checkout those typo fixes.

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+303

I've gone through everything you have done, merged in the typos and I'm looking at a few of the balance changes for future updates. Thanks for all the great work!

It's actually pretty tough to have the game be modable, but I'm so glad we did when we see people doing things like this to improve and make the game their own.

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