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Advice for making my personalized game harder

Started by kamikazetomato, 28, December, 2012, 05:47:20 PM

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kamikazetomato

So I've spoiled myself and added a whole mess of changes with this editor.

-Most psynergy base damage spells now have added effects (causes attack/defense/resist drops, mostly; tried status inflictions but playtesting shows it's way too OP as the statuses practically always hit weaker foes, making you invincible in the beginning)

-When the above psynergy lowers stats, it does 12.5/20 res. BUT now mass-statchanging moves like High Impact raise stats 25 for all (otherwise my non-medical ocd will force me to use two Impacters on a team); I'm considering making this different for the Samurai series (either giving them 12.5 raises or giving everything else 12.5 and giving Samurai 25)

-The Aura series now costs twice as much and heals half as much but has the added effect of healing poison (aura), restore (healing) and everything (cool). It is now in the Dragoon family as well as the Flame User family, replacing cure poison, restore and avoid

-Most physical+ psy (ragnarok, cutting edge) are now multipliers, with first stages at 1.2 and second stages at 1.4

-Mariner and Ranger classes have been vastly revamped to make Piers actually worth using (Admiral has better stats and benefits from the now-multiplier Diamond attacks, Warlock was renamed 'Mage Knight' and replaced its base damage psynergy with Planetary, Plume Edge, Thunder Mine, the ply series and restorers)

-Necromage learns Call Demon and Call Dullahan early enough to be used ingame, but their multipliers are lowered to 1.5 and 2

-Random monster drops are given drastically higher rates (think 1/4 chance of getting Riot Gloves)

-Jenna starts the game innately knowing Teleport (I'm not gonna use it to get stuff early or cheat at puzzles or anything, I just like the convenience of town warping)

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So that's all fine and dandy, but as you can guess, this will also make the game way easier. Which, despite all this, is not what I want! So far I've been raising boss stats and adding turns to foes left and right, but I was wondering if there was any general advice on upping the game's difficulty with the settings I had in mind. More specifically:

-Is there a way to mass-edit enemies so I'm not going through them all individually and changing stats up?

-How do I get rid of djinn-destroying moves like Djinn Storm? Will the game glitch if I just remove it from the enemy's lineup, or replace it with something else, or change the effect of the move in the abilities column (I want to make the bosses super tough, but super tough in a way that takes full classes to use; I've always felt like djinn-killing was annoyingly fake-difficult, given it destroys the very versatility that makes this game great)?

RagnarokEmissary

I wouldn't really know gow to make your game harder but
maybe giving enemies and bosses increased stats and stronger moves would help.

Lowering the stat bonuses of gear and effectiveness healing items might help, too but I wouldn't really know about any of this @#$%, so don't just take my word for it

kamikazetomato

Well by now because try as I might I can't find anything to mass-edit I've individually upped every enemy's HP by 150-200 and gave every enemy an extra move (Dully now has 4, rats!) and the big question is now the djinn killer moves. I really don't wanna get all the way to Karst only to have the game glitch up because I goofed up while shifting her Djinnfest.

Rolina

#3
A big thing to do is to raise the defenses of the enemies by a bit (scale it, though - early enemies may only have 110% their original defense, while late/post game may have 170%), as well as to pull back on those crazy multiplier attacks.  Megiddo is a particularly bad offender, perhaps drop it down to a 2x multiplier rather than 3x, and if you can use ASM tweaks to change the may do 1x, 2x, or 3x damage (and similar abilities) down to less extreme values (perhaps in this case, May do 1x, 1.5x, or 2x damage), that'd be great.  I'd not know how to go about it, though.

Also, try lowering the values of crit boosting gear to prevent you from maxing out on crit rates.

Doing those three things, and nothing else, will actually go a long way towards making the game more difficult, simply by nerfing broken strategies.  The only other thing I can suggest is to nerf summons to do 2% HP damage per djinn rather than the current 3% per djinn they do now, but I wouldn't even know where to begin on doing that.

kamikazetomato

#4
Great advice, I'll definitely make Megiddo and the like less powerful (probably won't change critrates because hey I love that strategy but I'll definitely lower how much damage it does)

EDIT: I actually did some trial-and-error and it turns out switching the Djinn-killing attack effects still drains Djinni from your group: IF it targets your group! But if you convert them to attacks that target themselves, they will do nothing to you.

I hilariously discovered this by giving Punch Ant Djinnfest, but with the effect of causing a 90% barrier (because that's what I'd want to replace it with to keep things tough), and my Jenna solo fight lasted like 40 turns.

But yeah, trial and error shows that other attacks still hurt Djinni so I'd better just switch em up. I now doubt that switching attacks will cause Dully or Karst to freeze, so away I go (with a severe sense of hope).

Misery

Here are some ideas I have for balancing my own future hack:

-Make healing cost much more PP, so you have to be more strategical with using it and have to buy healing items.

-Keep enemies that give good rewards far away from areas where you can heal. It's less meaningful though if you have teleport from the start, so consider having to do something to earn it.

-Make the better equipment throughout the game buyable in the store's artifacts section, and make it expensive. The stuff you find in chests should just be decent. Exceptions are final equipment and stuff you get from events.

-If you want unleash-based equipment setups to stay available, make other equipment that is powerful enough to consider using over crit boosting gear.

I don't think it's possible to make summons balanced, personally I plan to remove them completely.
First time I faced Dullahan I thought Djinn Storm felt like fake difficulty too, but keep in mind you have a party with 8 characters, and the ability to instantly revive anyone to full health. Having your djinn drained can be thought of as a debilitating status condition, and you usually have to switch out or protect the affected characters until they've gotten their djinn back. Since Dullahan acts according to a pattern, there's effectively a "cooldown" on the skill, otherwise it would be completely broken and he could wipe you out in no time.

kamikazetomato

My thing is, there's ways to make bosses difficult without destroying the biggest strategic tool you have, aka class builds. It's not just debilitating, it's fun-ruining. Games are supposed to be fun. Challenges are fun. But a boss that takes away what I see as the entire point of Golden Sun's combat gameplay is, by my definition, not fun.

In any case, yeah, summons are summons, but I think it's simple enough to keep them in the game and just not use them. They're essentially an omnipresent easy-mode option, and if you wanna take that route, more power to you, but I prefer customization to spam.

VanishMantle

In both my GS1 mod and my WIP mod for TLA I focused first on balancing psynergy so everything was useful at any time. I made sure Mono Classes were just as good as the others. I then balanced monsters around my changes often play testing a boss fight or segment of the game for hours to get a sense of what players would expect. I tried the most broken strategies i could think of when testing and then mad subtle changes to the bosses. I also added variety to both enemies and bosses. Like for my Moapa fight he and the two knights Spam curse inflicting moves and Moapa himself can shave off 100 PP with unique moves that also have status effects that are equally crippling.

The key is to test things out and see what you think may be the most broken mechanic you may have come up with. Sometimes you may just need to leave something broken in and then balance a later portions of the game to where that one skill or ability is no longer broken or OP. This will make players change things up when they realize a specific skill doesn't work or isn't working as well against one boss or group of enemies.

Most importantly have a set goal in mind of how difficult you want your mod to be. This will help you gauge a bosses skills. Like my King Scorpion sports 3 turns and one of his most deadliest moves is a multiplier of 2 with the chance to lower defense by 12.5% and he has 450 attack power. So it can clean house very easily but I made sure the player had tons of options for beating the fight to where it did not feel like it was impossible.

I hope this helps you out some.

Aile~♥

@VanishMantle: It's funny how similar our custom Moapa fights are. I had Moapa spamming an item that inflicts Seal and deals 100 damage to the whole party, while the two Knights spam an item that inflicts Curse and deals 50 damage to the whole party. Hope you brought Elixirs, 'cause it's a long way back to the previous town.
[sprite=16, 6, 0]:P[/sprite]

Lloyd: Easy as pie.
Genis: Sweet!
Presea: ...Sweetie pie...
Zelos: Let's not start on this again...

[spoiler=epic mindscrew][/spoiler]

VanishMantle

@Jamie: I actually Worked some things into the game to make it a bit easier on the player to counter this. Moapa has a move that can inflict Curse 100% of the time to the whole party. It was an intense fight especially with that curse timer hack as well.