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If I was going to armchair game design this thing a bit more an intention I would have is to retain the battle forecast including the ability to tinker with battles before committing but also making them a bit less... chaotic? I think the battle forecast is essential to the game. One of the things that always made Fire Emblem good is that because its stats were (usually) so upfront and its formulae (usually) so simple, you could pick any two units on the map, check their stats, and very easily figure out in your head what would happen if they fought. But notably, while there's still probabilities and uncertainties involved, you're only ever thinking a handful of procs ahead, an attack will hit, miss, or crit, the counter will hit, miss, or crit, a skill might proc or not, etc. It's small enough to be manageable. But in Unicorn Overlord this quickly becomes untenable. There is simply too much happening in a fight and particularly where evasion is involved certain actions might massively swing a fight one way or the other, and this in a game where fights also have a hard binary outcome in addition to whatever the implications are of both units losing some health. You basically need to always be checking the forecast for various units against various enemies. In a game where unit composition has this many moving parts it is wholly unreasonable to expect people to be mindgaming entire battles. The flip side to this is that that chaos also almost always makes it very hard to draw any lessons or inferences from a forecast that's not what you expected. You basically have to watch the battle play out to find out what actually happened, because your careful analysis of your build and tactics might yield a good answer or it might not and it's impossible to be certain. Nowhere makes this more obvious than when you see the effects different assists have on the outcome of a battle; the damage might be something, or it might be nothing, but the rerolled RNG can completely flip the result, which is often particularly fun when you go to engage an enemy in someone's assist range but since you can't possibly factor assists into your forecast you might find yourself committing to a very different battle than the one you decided to commit to. I think this is kind of a big problem, in that it will cause a lot of people to say it's bullshit, and they'll be right, even though there are logical reasons for the game to work in this way. I don't know how I'd solve this problem! It's kind of a motherfucker! Sorry, usually if I make one of these kinds of posts I like to turn it into a thing where I propose something and lay out why I think it would result in a better experience or correct some perceived flaw or just improve something that I think the developer is Wrong about but on this one I have nothing short of completely redefining how core parts of combat work, like, if guarding, evasion and crits worked completely differently from how they actually do I think you could make a forecast system that then becomes less chaotic in the face of variables and more reasonable to strategise around but at that point we might as well just design an entire new game. I got nothing.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:05
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Personally I think games rely too much on randomness in the first place, as if the possibility of missing is what makes things fun (it rarely is). So just... remove all randomness. As you say, things are chaotic enough anyway with all the different moving parts, so we don't need it. That doesn't even mean gettin rid of evasion or crits either, you just turn 33% evasion into "dodges twice, then get hit once, repeat" or whatever. It's easy to work around and I don't think it makes it any less fun, personally.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:12
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IIRC Battle for Wesnoth does forecasts with histograms, though it's design is far simpler and so there is less wackiness with outcomes.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:19
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Clarste posted:Personally I think games rely too much on randomness in the first place, as if the possibility of missing is what makes things fun (it rarely is). So just... remove all randomness. As you say, things are chaotic enough anyway with all the different moving parts, so we don't need it. That doesn't even mean gettin rid of evasion or crits either, you just turn 33% evasion into "dodges twice, then get hit once, repeat" or whatever. It's easy to work around and I don't think it makes it any less fun, personally. But then you get Into the Breach which is a mechanically clean game but is also really really bland?
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Apr 24, 2024 15:19
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At the very least, it would be easy enough to just have assists run off an entirely separate RNG seed from everything else, so any unexpected effects they have on combat outcomes would be due solely to different HP thresholds changing the way the tactics play out.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:20
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FrickenMoron posted:But then you get Into the Breach which is a mechanically clean game but is also really really bland? Maybe once you've solved it. I can see some value for randomness in roguelikes where you're expected to play them repeatedly forever, but in a game like this where you just beat it once and you're done until you decide to replay it on a whim years later, it hardly matters, imo.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:30
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This is a very different discussion hinged on whether or not you have perfect prediction like we do in Unicorn. When I don't have perfect prediction, I love to gamble on randomness in my strategy games if the consequences are not permanent death or involve a 5+ minute reload. When I have perfect prediction like I do in Unicorn, I agree that the randomness can be strange if you're all-in on the gambit system and approaching the game more like a puzzle. But I have to imagine many people are not all-in on the gambit system and are probably taking the prediction thing at face value and not trying to game it like some of us are! Simply just rolling with it and altering your gameplay after each result seems just as effective a way to play the game as abusing the outcome predictor, and if you're playing that way then I think the randomness is a big factor in influencing your gameplay in emergent ways. After all, it's not like death means anything here.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:38
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FrickenMoron posted:But then you get Into the Breach which is a mechanically clean game but is also really really bland? Into the Breach is one of the greatest games ever made, imo
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Apr 24, 2024 16:23
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Fedule posted:I didn't notice there was an optimise equipment button. lmao. Logically it would just change your equipment by throwing on whatever u equipped stuff counts as something of an upgrade. Why it messes with tactics at all is bizarre.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:32
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Because like 90% of items worth equipping have skills on them.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:33
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Fedule posted:If I was going to armchair game design this thing a bit more an intention I would have is to retain the battle forecast including the ability to tinker with battles before committing but also making them a bit less... chaotic? Strongly disagree. A fully determinate version of the game would turn an already borderline-boring easiness into full blown boring triviality. There's already precious little to surprise you in a map and next to nothing the enemy can do to stop or slow you down as it is. What you're proposing to me sounds like removing one of the only points of tension and friction in the game. You say you need to watch every battle but you really really do not. 4 horses or 4 birds together need next to no management or babysitting. Bird squads are even good against their hard counters. The visible RNG element is cool, and finding out your 100% easy peasy victory is actually a risky engagement where you need to use items or powers to get through is good gameplay and possibly the only thing that keeps every map from just being free real estate.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:45
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4 birds probably shouldn't be that good.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:47
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And come to think of it, the assist not showing up in previews across the map adds a tactical element of map awareness where you need to be aware that sending an army in to fight some foot soldiers while they are in range of 3 arrow towers is a bad idea even if the battle report shows certain victory. You should know it's not because of the map situation. Targeting the arrow towers first is the logical course of action and the game shouldn't have to spell it out for you further by spoiling the ambush assists ahead of time.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:48
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The game being too easy is an entirely separate problem, and randomness does not make it harder because the best teams are also the ones that suffer the least from randomness.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:48
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There are other types of randomness that can factor into battle forecasts that other games have done. Stuff like weather, stat changes based on proximity to other units (e.g. Fire Emblem style assists), terrain bonuses, etc. This game could have introduced stamina as a modifier for stats or had enemies use more of their map abilities (e.g. 20% damage increase/reduction).
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Apr 24, 2024 17:30
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Apparently the latest patch (1.04) also includes a few unannounced features, like postgame fights against fully optimized 6-man parties based around Amalia in each zone, a way to change Alcina's class back to Sorceress (for some unknown reason), and some new settings.
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Apr 24, 2024 17:51
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Khanstant posted:Strongly disagree. A fully determinate version of the game would turn an already borderline-boring easiness into full blown boring triviality. There's already precious little to surprise you in a map and next to nothing the enemy can do to stop or slow you down as it is. What you're proposing to me sounds like removing one of the only points of tension and friction in the game. I did not in fact say you need to watch every battle. What I did say is that you almost always need to watch a battle if the forecast differs significantly from what you expected and you want to find out why. The balance and difficulty beyond that are certainly not products of randomness. It is, I hope you would agree, a little bit surprising that a game that lets you see the outcome of a whole battle's worth of random rolls against any enemy unit anywhere on the map does not account for the known and knowable effect (save, of course, for fog of war) of assisting units at the proposed site of battle. Of course the effect of assists should be a tactical consideration, but the effect of assists can often be completely chaotic in ways other than the fact of the assist, because they also change the outcome of unrelated rolls. I guess I should also note that I also have not in fact advocated for an RNG-free version of the game. All in all this has been a lot of things that I did not say. What I did say is that the quirks the game has are a direct result of how its systems incorporate RNG, and any attempt to address those quirks will require fundamental changes to how RNG works, of which I suppose negating them entirely is one possible interpretation although this then raises many further questions of how you will reimplement all the things in the game that run off RNG, which is, you know, why I characterise it as being a hard design problem. The randomness we do have underlies how several systems work but the nature of how that randomness works on a technical level causes a variety of knock on effects that make that same randomness both significantly more of a factor in the outcome of certain battles and subject to a large amount of both player manipulation and player blindsiding. The systems are interconnected so deeply that changing them essentially equates to making a new game. Also as an aside it's not actually a bad thing that the general difficulty is so low. It's also not necessarily a good thing but as I've said before there's a theory at work; it's that so long as you are earnestly engaging with the game's systems you will be able to push through it. The low difficulty serves a very high amount of applicable strategies that work to the extent that your given collection of ten units can comfortably see you through any mission, even if there are individual spikes of difficulty within missions that still further optimisation can further address. In fact the whole reason I think the randomness causes issues in need of addressing is because the spikes tend to centre around uncertainty concerning which aspect of a plan exactly is failing and make attempts at optimisation far harder than they should be.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:08
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So things are going smoothly enough, I'm rounding up the remaining fights in the starting region before moving on, but I still can't quite put my finger on what the difference is between the "prioritize X" version of a tactic and the "X" version. The tooltip doesn't make it very clear to me.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:32
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Prioritize X will target that enemy type is possible, or target normally if not possible. Just X will completely skip the action if that enemy type is not present
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Apr 24, 2024 18:34
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The important thing to remember is that if you have Prioritise X set as a target, any tactics lower than that one on the list will never activate unless either you set another target that explicitly can fail if it isn't matched or if the default implicit rules fail (eg: they'll still fail if you don't have enough AP or if you try to stack a buff or debuff that isn't stackable, even on skills that also do damage or have other effects)
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Apr 24, 2024 18:48
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Cattail Prophet posted:At the very least, it would be easy enough to just have assists run off an entirely separate RNG seed from everything else, so any unexpected effects they have on combat outcomes would be due solely to different HP thresholds changing the way the tactics play out. This would be my choice too,it seems like it would be the best of both worlds, but likewise with the assists in-game, I don't know how it would really play out. I'm really liking this game, and I really hope it inspires some more games with similar gameplay.I know VanillaWare normallydoesn't do DLCs/sequels, but there's a lot of possible improvements or innovations you can do with this format. Even just having the enemies try to take back liberated cities, and having you stationed guards be your defence would be great, and a perfect way to use all of the defensive items the game gives you .I don't think I've ever used a mantlet kit, and never will, my common problem is that my units are too slow as it is.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:03
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Mantlet kits are great for assist units when there aren't any towers around. They count as garrisoned points, so with a mantlet your assister doesn't lose stamina and can assist infinite times. It's not something you'll use every map, but it's a neat interaction when it comes up.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:52
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wish there was more of an excuse to use bombs, but they end up getting in the way more than anything, and I don't think you gain exp. from enemies dying from them, so you actually lose out if you use it
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Apr 24, 2024 20:03
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Fedule posted:It is, I hope you would agree, a little bit surprising that a game that lets you see the outcome of a whole battle's worth of random rolls against any enemy unit anywhere on the map does not account for the known and knowable effect (save, of course, for fog of war) of assisting units at the proposed site of battle. Of course the effect of assists should be a tactical consideration, but the effect of assists can often be completely chaotic in ways other than the fact of the assist, because they also change the outcome of unrelated rolls. It's definitely surprising, or was at first, same for the visible RNG being rerolled when manipulating things like unit position or whatever. There is a dissonance between being generally given reliable info and in this common circumstances, not. However, given that most battle conclusions are a steamroll given the incredibly generous difficulty, finding out I sent my best birds into a risky spot and I need to use my items and powers to survive or thrive, provides more of a scramble to overcome than anything else in a map. Seeing the RNG ahead of time is super weird but I came to like it. Usually games hide it, but many of them are still exactly manipulable in the same way. Plenty of games you can make a save take 2 steps and try a thing, reload take 1 step and a hop and get 2 different but predictable outcomes based on your next action, or unpredictable ones so long as you do anything each reload to advance the RNG. I'd definitely want to see this general game framework explored with other approaches to battle and where the tactical considerations come in to play, and with a different RNG nature and if they changed enough other things about the game I'd wholeheartedly agree, but as it stands the bits of chaos and bad situations are one of the main sources of intrigue and risk. Old man squad has never died but the closest they ever came was picking bad fights with too many arrows around and with my own assists only making it worse. It's certainly not elegant and it does stick out because of their approach to RNG show and tell. It could be designed away with other changes made with it, but for what I have now I'm glad there's something risky and messy I can't just know I will steamroll through before I even start.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:06
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A pretty simple balancing point would be to have the assist RNG run on a different track than the rest of the battle. So it only changes the outcome if it contributes to a kill.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:09
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Deified Data posted:So things are going smoothly enough, I'm rounding up the remaining fights in the starting region before moving on, but I still can't quite put my finger on what the difference is between the "prioritize X" version of a tactic and the "X" version. The tooltip doesn't make it very clear to me. Others have explained it, but pay close attention to the descriptions. They plainly say whether or not the action can fail to trigger if it doesn't meet the criteria/if there are no valid targets. For the heck of it, I gave one of my mages the staff that allows them to do a physical attack. It's silly, but I'm glad they have the option.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:09
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GateOfD posted:wish there was more of an excuse to use bombs, but they end up getting in the way more than anything, and I don't think you gain exp. from enemies dying from them, so you actually lose out if you use it I'm pretty sure bombs do give XP. IIRC they're one of the tools people use to powerlevel when they sequence-break into Bastoria right after rescuing Scarlett.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:11
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Swordmasters and Virginia got a big buff in the last patch, alongside apparently most of the description skills being corrected.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:22
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Got a quest to upgrade a class but don't seem to have the option to do so - is this plot gated?
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Apr 28, 2024 01:36
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you have to get your Renown up to a certain rank to do it
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Apr 28, 2024 01:42
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Any reason not to promote ASAP?
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Apr 28, 2024 04:06
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Deified Data posted:Any reason not to promote ASAP? Challenge I suppose? I promoted my units in reverse priority order, saving Alain, Scarlett, and Virginia for last. Promoted units are the actual intended power level for these units -- the 1 AP/PP versions are the "tutorial" versions of these units, the game is clearly designed around characters having 2 AP and PP by default.
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Apr 28, 2024 04:15
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Once you have ten units of four characters each, and possibly earlier, promotion is virtually always the best thing you can spend your honors on. Promoted characters have more base AP and PP, which means your units can get more done and undertake more complex tactics. Promoting becomes especially urgent once your characters start reaching around level 20, as that's when promoted classes start getting skills that base classes don't.
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Apr 28, 2024 05:21
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It was a mistake to go to Elheim first before stepping foot into Drakenhold, now all these fights are super easy lol. Oh well I'm sure it'll catch up soon.
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Apr 28, 2024 20:08
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Bongo Bill posted:Once you have ten units of four characters each, and possibly earlier, promotion is virtually always the best thing you can spend your honors on. Promoted characters have more base AP and PP, which means your units can get more done and undertake more complex tactics. Promoting becomes especially urgent once your characters start reaching around level 20, as that's when promoted classes start getting skills that base classes don't. TEN units? I've been running around with 6, I can't use all these guys. Just about to finish up Elheim. Anyway I gotta say that the Optimize button for Equipment is even worse than it is for Tactics because it is actively unhelpful. It tries to load you up with as many different skills as possible instead of just loading you up with equipment with the highest stats which would actually be useful as a 'default' you could tinker with. 'Give me the highest weapon in the tier and bangles/bracelets shields to match' would actually be a useful button.
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May 1, 2024 06:54
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I think I finished the game with eight when not using any mercs, mostly due to availability on gear. I suppose you could make those last squads just full support squads but I didn't find support attacks to be too worthwhile.
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May 1, 2024 14:16
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I used all the slots in some capacity until I got to 5-unit squads, at which point I had 4 groups of map destroyers, 1 group of 3 archers, an all beast team (surprisingly balanced on its own) and an all angel team. The final slot had remnants of old teams. The archer team was the only support unit, but they actually did very well on their own. Defensive archer and medic archer are interesting archetypes.
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May 1, 2024 17:18
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bewilderment posted:TEN units? I've been running around with 6, I can't use all these guys. Just about to finish up Elheim. Haha I had the same reaction. I'm also staying at 6 and one of those squads is just a pity squad of people I like but aren't good enough for real armies. Still, handy sometimes to have an extra thing to deploy bc I end most missions with an excess of energy anyway
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May 1, 2024 17:39
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The game systems mean quality is enormously more relevant than quantity and almost no maps really force you to stretch across multiple fronts in a way that is actually demanding(and even if they did cavalry leaders + movement speed buffs move so fast that they might as well be teleporting from point to point), so there's not really much incentive to make more than 6-7 units beyond feeling like it.
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May 1, 2024 17:48
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Yeah, I basically only used 5 squads for meaningful combat for the entire game. I eventually had 7 5-unit squads just because I had nothing else to spend honors on late game, but the last two squads were only ever really on base guarding and occasionally picking up items duty.
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May 1, 2024 18:22
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