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[RELEASE] Golden Sun: The Balance Age

Started by Caledor, 24, January, 2015, 12:29:46 PM

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Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas

#880
Speaking of speed/agility, do you think it'd be a good idea to make the summoner who's casting the summon have like 0 speed so that all summons always go last? (or even half speed. ; returning back to normal after the summon, of-course.)

If Summon damage was a percent of Current HP instead of Max HP... than Summons going last could also mean even less HP damage as well... but hmm... (Under the situation where you have other PCs actually attacking.) - However, this is more of a food for thought thing than a suggestion... so...


(I really should go back and read more of this topic... I read some, but...... I not really keep updated on it... it's so long, though... we're going to hit 60 pages in... 3...2...1... well, it won't be the next post, so nevermind.)
Golden Sun Docs: Broken Seal - The Lost Age - Dark Dawn | Mario Sports Docs: Mario Golf & Mario Tennis | Misc. Docs
Refer to Yoshi's Lighthouse for any M&L hacking needs...

Sometimes I like to compare apples to oranges. (Figuratively) ... They are both fruits, but which one would you eat more? (If taken literally, I'd probably choose apples.)
Maybe it is over-analyzing, but it doesn't mean the information is useless.


The only GS Discord servers with significance are:
Golden Sun Hacking Community
GS Speedrunning
/r/Golden Sun
GS United Nations
Temple of Kraden

Can you believe how small the Golden Sun Community is?

2+2=5 Don't believe me? Those are rounded decimal numbers. Take that, flat earth theorists! :)

Caledor

#881
Wow, so much input over a single night! Thanks guys! Let's see...

Quote@Summon:  And thus it's entirely possible that people never get to SEE iris.  That's the problem with the system you just put into place
I think the problem lies in how far in the game Iris is obtained more than with my system. Also, if Doom Dragon is down in less than 8 turns, i did it wrong.

QuoteAlso keep in mind that you now have two anti-summon rush tweaks in place now, so this is likely to take some tweaking based on player feedback.
Of course. I was already thinking on increasing HP% damage again on the stronger summons, and it's one of the thing i have scheduled to test for the next release. Player feedback on the matter would definitively help a lot.

QuoteMaybe I should have read this more thoroughly, but quick thought:
What if all Summons were enabled, but that turn number had an affect on its power?
I don't really like it. It's too subtle and even if people had all the numbers they'd still have to make calculations in the middle of a fight to see if a summon is effective or weaker than a cheaper one. Enough to discourage usage of the mechanic entirely I'd say.

QuoteI just thought about it, but isn't it jut possible to give the bosses enough speed so it acts before you if you don't set the djinns ? That way, if you try to summon rush without properly buffing your team, you'd just take too much damage to survive the second turn ?
The speed thing already happens (and if for some bosses doesn't, it HAS to be fixed so let me know). The point is, there's no way mid/endgame bosses (not the super 4) can kill you over two turns (especially given the backup party) if you know what you're doing. And since "knowing what you're doing" is one of the basic requirements for playing this mod, i'd say this isn't really viable.

QuoteSpeaking of speed/agility, do you think it'd be a good idea to make the summoner who's casting the summon have like 0 speed so that all summons always go last?
I see this more of a buff than a nerf. If all summons go last i don't even need to plan my summoning turn: unleash whatever and summon the one you just unlocked (with the djinn unleashed on the same turn) with char with the best elemental affinity, cause agility and turn order aren't an issue anymore.
If you actually wanted to increase the chance the summoner gets killed before he can act, remember that there are djinn that do an amazing job at keeping chars alive for a turn so we'd be back to square one.

QuoteIf Summon damage was a percent of Current HP instead of Max HP
Summons would become worse and worse as battle progresses. This incentives summon rushes instead of planned summons during a battle.

EDIT: There's one thing i didn't consider before about your idea, @Role. I can actually group Coatli and the 7-djinn summons together and have them all unlocked in a single turn cause Coatli doesn't deal damage. Basically the 4 7-djinn summons, Charon and Iris would all be available 1 turn earlier.

Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas

#882
QuoteI don't really like it. It's too subtle and even if people had all the numbers they'd still have to make calculations in the middle of a fight to see if a summon is effective or weaker than a cheaper one. Enough to discourage usage of the mechanic entirely I'd say.
Weaker than a cheaper one... hmm... Depending on implementation... I wouldn't exactly say "weaker" unless referring to damage per djinn requirement. ... But yeah... that could go with what is effectively the best... so I suppose you have a point.
(How exactly would half power for the last djinni go for the highest tier summon currently unlocked on your current turn, anyway? - With the rest of the summon mechanics following your method of locking out the rest, since they'd probably be too useless in most of this theoretical idea anyway... - This is also assuming that you can tell which summon isn't actually at full power, of course.)

QuoteI see this more of a buff than a nerf. If all summons go last i don't even need to plan my summoning turn: unleash whatever and summon the one you just unlocked (with the djinn unleashed on the same turn) with char with the best elemental affinity, cause agility and turn order aren't an issue anymore.
Hm? So what if djinn usage didn't add to the summon req until next turn... or also went last? (Also agility=0) ... umm ... I think I'm messing things up... Heheh... (Definitely happens when you try to complicate things more than they need to be. It's not like I explain things exactly the way it should be explained.... so....)

QuoteSummons would become worse and worse as battle progresses. This incentives summon rushes instead of planned summons during a battle.
Good point... (Was mostly a sort of random example to build off of (but not really to add into a hack, of-course) with not much thought put into it.)  Perhaps the Damage Dealt This Round... would probably be a better choice for that hypothetical scenario... But I might not think much on that either. (For right now.) While even /if/ it did work out strategically, it doesn't seem that realistic. Or wait... it doesn't have to seem realistic, these are summons... :P
Golden Sun Docs: Broken Seal - The Lost Age - Dark Dawn | Mario Sports Docs: Mario Golf & Mario Tennis | Misc. Docs
Refer to Yoshi's Lighthouse for any M&L hacking needs...

Sometimes I like to compare apples to oranges. (Figuratively) ... They are both fruits, but which one would you eat more? (If taken literally, I'd probably choose apples.)
Maybe it is over-analyzing, but it doesn't mean the information is useless.


The only GS Discord servers with significance are:
Golden Sun Hacking Community
GS Speedrunning
/r/Golden Sun
GS United Nations
Temple of Kraden

Can you believe how small the Golden Sun Community is?

2+2=5 Don't believe me? Those are rounded decimal numbers. Take that, flat earth theorists! :)

Salanewt

I think I agree with Caledor, although I could also see universal flat percentage increases based on turn count working. Lower summons would be affected less because of their lower power (but they would still be lower regardless), yet summon rushing would still be possible for those who are desperate for some initial damage output on the off chance it helps them win before the enemy/boss kills them. I mean, yes it would exist, but at least you get to keep a potential strategy in place while also nerfing it a bit.

Aside from that discussion: Nice work Caledor! Happy to see the wave patch being put to use as well.
Oh yeah baby, £ me harder.

Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak Adepts stronger.

Yoshi's Lighthouse is a hacking website in progress. Why not check it out if you like Yoshi or the Mario & Luigi games?

VardenSalad

I heavily agree with Rolina on the issue of summons in this case and dislike the gating changes for summons, not the least of which because summons are already borderline useless against the only bosses they should really matter against. Your characters are going to die in one round against those superbosses if they have to grind their way through the fight with progressively fewer set djinn and stats.

And there's no way I'm cool with the idea that I can't unload an Iris on some end-game trash mob to watch the fireworks.

If you don't want minibosses to get tackled the way they currently do, then drop their offense and give them more hp. But besides that, if the plan is to give everything a small chance in the limelight, shouldn't summon-rushing be at least kind of good against something?
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

Quote[...] although I could also see universal flat percentage increases based on turn count working.
The numbers can always be tweaked to make any system work. My issue with that system is that it's hidden. there's no turn count in battle that's actually seen and you'd still have to make calculations during a fight. If there was some kind of window popping up and showing "potential damage" before you actually attacked like in tactics games I'd be totally fine with it.

QuoteAside from that discussion: Nice work Caledor! Happy to see the wave patch being put to use as well.
I'm think I should be the one saying that to you lol

QuoteYour characters are going to die in one round against those superbosses if they have to grind their way through the fight with progressively fewer set djinn and stats
progressively? not at all. you do realize that with Charon requiring 8 djinn you can potentially summon him with only a single tier loss right? It's 2 djinn per character.

QuoteIf you don't want minibosses to get tackled the way they currently do, then drop their offense and give them more hp
Summons still do HP% damage, and you get the full set of 4 around level 20. It would take more than 1500 HP to survive that, which is a 150% to 200% increase. And if I did that (while also lowering offense accordingly) all djinn and mimics would become incredibly tedious cause they wouldn't die but also wouldn't be able to kill you. We'd be back to square one, cause the best strategy would be summon rush till they're near dead and then land the coup de grace the following 1-2 turns.

QuoteAnd there's no way I'm cool with the idea that I can't unload an Iris on some end-game trash mob to watch the fireworks.
I don't think 7-8 turns of defend "just to watch the fireworks" once are such a big deal.

Quoteshouldn't summon-rushing be at least kind of good against something?
you're asking the wrong question. the issue is: "shouldn't summon-rushing have some kind of drawback or cost?" Summon rushing means going all-in. It works? Great, one boss down. Walk around till djinn are restored and resume the journey. It fails? I'm dead... Oh, well, I'll just tweak this and this and try again. ZERO drawbacks, ZERO cost. Such a mechanic shouldn't exist in the first place.
Shouldn't summons be at least kind of good against something? YES, ABSOLUTELY. This is what needs to be fixed. Be it fewer turns of waiting, higher base damage or higher HP% damage.

BTW... I'm sure somebody already realized it but I guess I'll say it anyway. If you think that it's mandatory to start all battles with all djinn set cause you can't Srush anymore, you're dead wrong. You can still put the djinn of the backup party on standby, fight normally and then push for damage by switching the char in and insta summon.

Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas

#886
QuoteIf there was some kind of window popping up and showing "potential damage" before you actually attacked like in tactics games I'd be totally fine with it.
I love that idea! (And we should have it as a patch in general.) Should this damage display to the right of the enemy's name you are selecting? (You still need to account for the enemy's defenses, anyway.)

In example, something like:

Faery2 (Dmg: 11)

(Can't say if I'll actually do it or not, though.... But it may be a bit complicated without some thinking. - So it's quite possible this is one of those things I'll put off for a long time... assuming I ever get to it.)
Golden Sun Docs: Broken Seal - The Lost Age - Dark Dawn | Mario Sports Docs: Mario Golf & Mario Tennis | Misc. Docs
Refer to Yoshi's Lighthouse for any M&L hacking needs...

Sometimes I like to compare apples to oranges. (Figuratively) ... They are both fruits, but which one would you eat more? (If taken literally, I'd probably choose apples.)
Maybe it is over-analyzing, but it doesn't mean the information is useless.


The only GS Discord servers with significance are:
Golden Sun Hacking Community
GS Speedrunning
/r/Golden Sun
GS United Nations
Temple of Kraden

Can you believe how small the Golden Sun Community is?

2+2=5 Don't believe me? Those are rounded decimal numbers. Take that, flat earth theorists! :)

Salanewt

Hidden: Oh I know. I mostly just brought it up for the sake of discussion; plus, it's not like it would be the only hidden thing if going by the fact that enemy elemental tables, elemental strengths/weaknesses (barring the number of exclamation marks on a line of text, which is not very intuitive), and djinn kills are also hidden features. But yeah, that would be better with an estimated damage box of some type.
Oh yeah baby, £ me harder.

Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak Adepts stronger.

Yoshi's Lighthouse is a hacking website in progress. Why not check it out if you like Yoshi or the Mario & Luigi games?

Caledor

I didn't mean hidden in the literal sense cause there's ton of stuff that's hidden in this game. the issue is more with the complexity of the mechanic... there are just too many calculations behind... Intricate, maybe? Convoluted? I don't really know.

BTW, for starters i'll make 7+ djinn summons available 1 turn earlier by unlocking 7-djinn and coatli in the same turn. Also, I'll raise HP% damage progressively for the stronger summons.

Salanewt

Okay, that should be a fair trade-off then.
Oh yeah baby, £ me harder.

Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak Adepts stronger.

Yoshi's Lighthouse is a hacking website in progress. Why not check it out if you like Yoshi or the Mario & Luigi games?

Rolina

Just so you know, I plan to start streaming a new game of this starting with TBS tomorrow at 5pm CDT.  You'll be able to get live commentary and feedback as I play though the games.  You can find my channel over at:

https://www.twitch.tv/witchrolina/

Caledor

#891
This is great news! I think i'll be able to to watch it live today.

I've already fixed many things in my playthrough (I'm at Suhalla), here's the partial changelog:
[spoiler]Acheron's Grief multiplier raised to 2,3
Ceres' Legend added damage increased to 37
7+ djinn summons unlocked 1 turn earlier
Raised HP% damage for 5+ djinn summons
Guard and Page line learn Starburst at 7
Bolt User line learns Flash Bolt at 6
Jenna-Menardi dialogue at Mercury Lighthouse fixed
Haures' BP to 320
Various minor enemy tweaks
Minor fixes (Def and price) to defensive equipment
Steel Armor and Knight's Helm are sold at Shaman Village
Warrior Helm is sold at Contigo
14+ (GS) / 18+ (TLA) level djinn have higher HP. 30+ level djinn have 3 turns
Virtuous Armlet casts Ply Well[/spoiler]

Excalibur is better on average at unleashing than Darksword, but the latter is obviously stronger with attack-based psynergies. Remember that Acheron's Grief element is already Jupiter.

I'm currently checking levels at which psynergies are learned.

My to do list:
Mage-like classes +5% HP, -5~10% Defense.
Add via formula hacking a "Magic Resistance" stat tied to classes. Something very simple... it will probably be a flat multiplier that doesn't change with tiers like Luck, that ranges from 90% to 110% and affects base damage taken. Basically, 90% M.Res means 110% damage taken from BD attacks and 110% means 90% of damage taken. This might or might not come with an elemental power boost of all enemies.

VardenSalad

Ok, by hacking it into the game, those summon rush functions you added moved out of my knowledge of the game from the editor into the code.

"For those interested, the functions I used to kill summon rushing:
http://i.imgur.com/GDTjiIx.png
http://i.imgur.com/enOlu78.png
http://i.imgur.com/agHPTFP.png

080B05E4: Called at the start of a battle, sets the current turn (02006000) to 0.
080B05F4: Called at the end of each round, increases current turn by 1.
080B060C: Called every time the Summon Flags (0200024C) are altered, it backups them into 02000248 and then sets the available summons depending on turn number."

I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to screw around with how quickly summons were added, I would be changing the first function to list the first turn as 8 or 3 or whatever I felt comfortable leaving it at and/or changing the second function to increase the per turn count to 2 or 3 or 5 per turn.

I really don't know how to alter those functions, though. Basic testing shows it's beyond what the editor is doing and I don't know anything about changing game code.

If possible, would you be willing to show give a quick step by step explaining how to even access the area you're changing?
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

#893
I'm assuming you don't want to make the whole thing slower.
Anyway, it's ridiculously easy to tweak and extremely flexible. All you need is your VBA emulator with memory viewer, your Windows calculator and a few info.

First, set up your screen like this: http://imgur.com/58HykcB
The sequences of bytes at 080B0648 are the "filters" the 3rd formula (the one at 080B060C) uses to "restrain" summons at each turns. Basically the game generates available summons as usual, but then i force the result to pass through one of these filters to limit summons. This means that by tweaking the filters themselves, you can do whatever you want with it.
Each sequence of 8 digits is a filter (4 per line) and they are used in sequence each turn.
Turn 0 uses the filter 000300FF, Turn 1 uses 000F0FFF and so on... each turn after turn 6 (filter 1FFFFFFF) is treated as being turn 6. (Might be turn 7 or 8 on your ROM due to changes I've already done to mine for next release. And 1~2 filters might be different from my screen. Don't worry, it doesn't change anything for you).

How to generate your custom filter(s):
The windows calculator makes the whole thing a joke. If you set it up exactly like on my screen, all you need to do is to click on the zeroes on the upper half of the calculator. Each digit is a summon. So, if you change a digit to 1, it means the summon is enabled by the filter; if you leave it to zero the filter disables the summon.

From RIGHT to LEFT:
Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter
Ramses, Nereid, Kirin, Atalanta
Cybele, Neptune, Tiamat, Procne
Judgement, Boreas, Meteor, Thor
Zagan, Megaera, Flora, Moloch
Ulysses, Haures, Eclipse, Coatlicue
Daedalus, Azul, Catastrophe, Charon
Iris.

The last (leftmost) 3 digits MUST remain 0. Now, you have just generated a filter. Paste the value that appears on the calculator in the memory viewer and you can start tweaking another one. Don't remove filters (you can add them but it doesn't change anything). When you've created your final filter (every summon enabled: 1FFFFFFF), paste it on the remaining filters as well.

When you're done save your edited ROM from the memory viewer. Click Save, (Address is 08000000, Size is 01000000) OK and you're done.

Obviously, if you want to test that you've done a filter correctly, the fastest way is to paste it on the turn 0 filter, enter a battle and check the summon menu (put a single djinn on standby before entering the battle).

VardenSalad

Thank you. Your walkthrough was very easy to understand.
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

I'm glad. By the way, how did you tweak it? I'm curious.

Rolina

#896
Stream had some hiccups at first, but after that it went well.  Got all the way up to Vault, so the tutorial stuff is over.  I'll be streaming again tomorrow at the same time - hopefully minus the hiccups in the first hour.

VardenSalad

Not sure what I'm going to do yet; probably accelerate to have the "super boss, but not Iris" summons available on turn 3,4, or 5; toss-up on 4th level straight ele summons and eclipse/haures/coatlicue; ulysses is in a weird spot because he uses 4 djinn...

I really don't know what I'll do yet other than that I am 100% sure that Iris will be available turn 1. Being able to change when they show up is pretty powerful. I could easily end up with your distribution. I'm just really happy that I'm even able to change it if I'd like.

Never forget why you started playing.

Chronotakular

Wow, I got busy for the passed month or so and I come back to some serious discussion!

Glad to know you guys are super passionate about this. It's super cool reading all this and viewing everyone's opinions!

Caledor

@Varden: maybe you're just used to summon rushes. if you start battles with djinn all set there's no way you'll end up summoning 7+ djinn by turn 3~4. In fact, it's very likely i'll forgot about this change while playing cause I know I'll never notice it myself. But yeah, like I said it couldn't be more flexible, you can literally do whatever you want with it.