天下制覇

This week too shall pass.

Apparently Romanesque went up for pre-order yesterday. The day before? I don’t know. Nobody tells me things. Support the official uncensored genitalia etc etc, yada yada. I’m pretty sure they want the master up within the next couple weeks and about 98% of (what I know and/or have been told is my responsibility) is left is the credits images which I will be doing this evening, but things move at the speed of red tape and business, so don’t look at me for a date. I have no idea either.

 

I’ll fill up the rest of the space by doing a ‘quick’ overview of something Doddler mentioned on Twitter a while ago in regards to Seinarukana because I find mechanics interesting. If you don’t like math, go annoy someone else. I guess it probably counts as a glitch, but it’s really more of a scaling problem. Stripping things down to a very simplified level, the base damage of an attack in the game is either a constant or a percentage of the target’s current HP. That number then has a bunch of multipliers attached to it from things like unit stats, terrain, fortifications, and buffs. Unit stats are the really big one, as most start at ~2 and by level 99, are about 5 with about a .5 variance on either side. So if a percentage attack of 20% is used by a unit with a 5 multiplier to its attack, it will do 100% of the target’s current HP.

Every character has defensive skills that can reduce that. All defense skills are purely numerical and most characters (and enemies/bosses) top out at around 2500-3000. There are very few skills over those numbers (most units have much weaker), and numerical-based attack skills are about in line with those numbers. They receive the same multipliers as attack skills can (albeit from different stats), so the maximum they can block is about 10,000-15,000 damage in ideal situations. The core problem of all of this is that HP grows much faster than everything else, and at extremely high levels, will be in the 50,000-80,000 range; even higher for bosses. If an enemy has 60,000 HP and you’re using the aforementioned 100% attack, even if it defends, it’ll have 75%+ of its HP knocked off in a single basic attack.

   

These aren’t hypotheticals either. Because of the terrain, the way units are stationed, etc, there are enemies that will hit for 135% of the PC’s current HP as their lead off attacks in battle and continue to do so for each round. That extra 35% is more than enough of a buffer to keep almost any normal defensive skill from outright killing a unit at full HP. There are a few special defense skills which block damage outright from certain elements, and the difficulty is “Super Hard” so that on its own might be forgivable, but the problem cuts both ways. 

Players can take advantage of it too (maybe even moreso because they can deliberately use buffs to abuse it) and massacre things, especially things with boosted HP like bosses. It cannot possibly be intended for the player to be able to take off 80%+ of a late game boss’s HP in the first attack on the supposedly hardest difficulty. The enemy also doesn’t have the opportunity (nor the AI honestly) to block these kinds of attacks in the same way as the player does, least of all with giving the player the option to either fight being able to see what attack skills the enemy will use or what defensive skills they’ll use (but not both). Even if the enemy could adapt, taking advantage of holes in the enemy’s defense is a “working as intended” mechanic.

 

It’s very clear that percentage skills are not meant to be that powerful. The clearest example are the very limited set of Anti-Defense attack skills. They’re (I believe) all percentage attacks which cannot be blocked by a defensive skill (or reduced in any way), but also don’t receive any multipliers whatsoever. Every one of them has a major limiting factor, usable only once per battle, costs a high amount of mana, etc. Two examples, a spell that does 16% of HP as soon as the battle begins, and a 6 mana attack (eg usable normally once every third round) that does 50% of a target’s HP. These come toward the end of skill progression, whereas the basic percentage attacks that do ~20% but can be defended against are generally at the start so are cheap and more freely usable. On high levels, these ‘powerful’ skills are extremely and embarrassingly eclipsed by their supposedly much weaker cousins. Even the lowest level of those skills which you were using back on level 8 will be doing significantly more damage than this ‘ultimate’ skill you got on level 95.

 

To reiterate though, this is a cumulative issue because max HP grows much faster than everything else, so it gets cumulatively worse the more HP goes up. I haven’t looked much at the math for the lower level using the skills available at the time, but I’m pretty certain that it’s much more correctly balanced than on the highest levels/highest difficulty. Percentage skills might certainly even be generally than the numbery ones. These skills do become weaker to the point of useless when enemies/players are at lowered HP, but by that point, the numerical skills are more than enough to finish them off. There are videos out there of the last boss of certain routes being killed in three rounds on the highest difficulty without even using particularly optimized setups. Poor thing didn’t even last as long as a commercial break. Players are also much more able to take advantage of it because of both bosses having boosted HP, exacerbating the problem, and generics always starting at full HP so the attacks are pretty much always maximally effective against them.

 

The change made was to put a cap so that damage in either category (physical or magical) of a percentage damage skill can’t exceed 50% of a target’s HP. There are skills that hit for both in percentage damage, so some units still technically can hit for 100% of a target’s HP, but that will only kill them if there’s no defense skill mitigating it. That means a general nerf to high level damage all around as almost every character has some skill that hits for something in the 15% range (before multipliers) for either physical or magical and a larger nerf for the especially broken ones that hit for both. Those skills are still very overpowered and broken, but at least they’re slightly less broken now with minimal effect on anything but the highest levels during the highest difficulty when the issue hits the hardest. The real fix would be to rebalance every single unit’s HP growth, but honestly, we’re localizing here. A change like that would be a testing nightmare. I heavily suspect that they were probably meant at some point to do a percentage of the max HP like the anti-defense (and healing) skills do, but that would have probably an even bigger impact on every difficulty.

 

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle. G I JOOOOOOOOOEEEEE!