AMERICAN Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (A rebalancing mod)

[superaielman]

Just finished Sharom border up. Couple of notes:

Definitely increase the number of enemies in each map a little. Also, could other players check to see if they can get the gnomish nugget? I couldn't get it to trigger.

[Nephrite]

Fixed a few bugs and uploaded a new patch.

[Nephrite]

There is now an .ips for both Headered and Unheadered roms in the main topic.

[Nephrite]

Just wanted to remind anyone interested to please give this a try and give me feedback!

[TigerKnee]

I can't get the patch to work, it tells me the ips file is corrupted/truncated.

In case it's a problem with my rom, I tried a couple of other Ogre Battle patches and managed to get them working but this one refuses to, for some reason.

[Nephrite]

Hmm, let me see what I can do about it, I can just post a rom with it. Thanks for trying.

[Nephrite]

More direct link later.

[TigerKnee]

Playing the Thunder Lord. Can't remember how to control Alignment/Charisma and stuff, it's been years since I last touched this game. Kind of leaving me low on Knights.

Holy crap at Lake Jeltennia. I'm not very good at this game but the Tigerman gave me a lot of problems with 3 Lifesucks and the center town gets flooded really quick and I lost it once which I hope doesn't tank my stats too much. The fact that the only two temples are REALLY far away means if you don't have a flyer you will probably have issues reviving dead guys (unless you stocked up on revives, which I didn't)

That's all for now.

[Nephrite]

I forget if you can buy Sunbeams that early, but that should help a lot with the Tiger men.

[TigerKnee]

Stuff:

I completely messed up on recruiting Deneb I think, which is kind of annoying, because I spent an hour intentionally tanking my (extremely high) reputation only to misread the directions somehow and not get her. Oh well. Since there isn't a "Gameshark Deneb into army" code I can find I just decided to Gameshark my reputation back up to like 3/4 full.

What happened to Ice Giants? I can promote to Titans immediately at level 10 it seems.

Mage having no alignment requirements (that I can see of) to promote is so convenient, since they have a tendency to murder everything in sight and drop to 0.

My army is extremely lop-sided with way too many knight since they're the most common free recruits that come with storyline characters apparently. My most common set-up is something like

2-3 knights in front
1 Angel line/1 Gryphon/1 Valkyrie line in back (obviously not all three but a general mix)

I really do need to develop a powerhouse "evil" squad so I don't have to worry about tanking my powerful high alignment squads.

I really hate cockatrices. I seem to have the sort of terrible luck where the first dude to get petrified turns out to be my AOE damage dealer or something, making me lose the fight.

I think Wyrms need to promote into wyverns a tad bit faster. Gilbert was dead weight until then.

[Nephrite]

If you want, there's a Gameshark code you can use to recruit anyone I'm pretty sure, just change the digits to Deneb's and recruit her that way.

Ice Giants do not exist anymore, they were used as an upgrade from the Siren class (the Witch promote)

I could see dropping Wyvern promote levels to 10.

The actual class changes are all in the first post, by the way.

[TigerKnee]

Giant changes aren't listed, I think.

I have a level 10 witch that can't promote because ironically her alignment is at 51. You need to actually kill people to lower alignment, right? I'm thinking that I have to downgrade to an Amazon and find a low level neutral to kill before switching back or something, right?

[TigerKnee]

Quick stuff:
The first stage against Gares still has a bunch of front row wizards IIRC.

Siren is apparently Low Sky. Could be intentional but I'm thinking this is probably a leftover from its base from the pixie unit.

I have a generic Hawk man at level 14 with exactly 50 ALI and it can't change into either Eagle or Raven man, unless I'm missing something...

[Nephrite]

Sirens and Banshees are both Low Sky (it's sort of a joke about them riding brooms, kind of)

I... totally fucked up the Hawk Men, I forgot to have them promote correctly. I just now fixed it, here's a re-uploaded version.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8244840/OgreBattleNeph.smc


As for Giants, here are their updated stats:

Giants are unchanged, but you can find more of them earlier on.

Fire Giants get 4 Melee up front, 3 Fire Attacks in the back. 5 Strength per level, 1 int per level. 57 physical resist now, they also promote at level 8, 0-40 alignment.

Titans are magic-focused Giants, they get 3 melee up front and 2 int gales in the back. They get 3/3/5 (int) for stats. They promote at level 10, with 55-100 alignment.

There is that very small alignment area where you can't promote them but you can buy alignment pots from the first town, so... EDIT: No I didn't, I'm going to change that... hum dee dum.

[TigerKnee]

Bahamut only has 3 colds, not 4 like the patch says.

I haven't seen any Sirens available to be promoted to Banshees yet. I can't find them listed in the patch list either.

Also, I might not see this to the finish because it's getting kind of boring, though that's more of a limitation of the base game rather than this mod. We'll see how it goes.

[Nephrite]

Faerie - Replaced with Siren class, promotion from Witch. 2x Fire or Charm up front (Cerberus) 1x All Magic in the back. 4 HP Per level, 5 Int per level. Promoted at level 10, 0-50 Alignment. Black resistance 55, White Resistance 35.

[TigerKnee]

Very quick round up. Now that Skyrim is out I got a feeling I'll probably forget about the game eventually.

I kind of prefer Ice Giants to be the one staying instead of Fire because of Snow movement but 4 clubs is nice. Never really got to use Titan. Probably outclassed by Dragons if one is willing to train those.

Ravenmen > Vultan as far as I'm concerned. Having 1 more melee attack doesn't beat having one more "Hit-all" attack.

Where are the stats for banshees? Can't find it on the front page.

Witches kind of have a hard time lowering their alignment, seeing as how they can't kill anything. Once you do manage to promote them though, they're basically palette-swapped Mages.

Well, this isn't a "balance" issue but one thing I got to say is that a lot of classes feel kind of samey. I mean, yeah, Princess was overpowered with her "give everyone +1 attack" and Witches suck in the original, but that sort of thing kind of gave the game character since there's not much in the game system for differentiation.

Currently there's really no noticeable difference to me on whether you're using Ravenmans, Liches, Sirens or Mages as your back row "hit-everyone" dude and most front-line slashy guys feel the same because there isn't any stand-out best or worst class anymore. So, great for balance I guess but I don't know whether that makes things actually interesting. Maybe I should have used the vampire/werewolf/tigerman line more? Those seem to have interesting changes but eh.