Others Shadow over Meridia [v0.6a] [GratuitousLove]

[GratuitousLove]

I think a strategy game like this is very snowbally, where the first few turns are the most crucial to succes.
Not mind controlling the best enemy target each turn puts you at a much weaker position the next turn compared to players that do the most optimal opening.

In the later Hard mode maps, I look at how enemy behaves and look for openings, plan out what I want to mind control for the first few turns. If I can find the optimal opening, the rest of the map becomes trivial once you start building an insurmountable opening advantage like that.

If we get overwhelmed by the enemy, it usually meant the opening wasn't strong enough to capitalize on their options and the enemy start to build up their own insurmountable advantage that can get out of hand.

Chapter 14 Hard, I had to really think how to build the best possible opening as your immediately get attacked by 2 knights + 1 Fencer very early and they start to build more and more knights each turn. You must kill/mind control more knights than the enemy produce each turn or there will be more and more knights than you can handle over time.

Not sure what the best way is to make maps easier, you could lower the enemy income/bases for example to lower how much the enemy snowballs. If a player overcome the first 3ish turns with the same map layout as normal/hard mode, but their own army is in shambles afterwards, it should ease the pressure as the enemy can't build up their reinforcements as fast to capitalize on the player's much weaker army than players using the best possible opening moves on that map.

Reducing map size reduce the impact of the snowball (if the map is small the good thing is, when you reach the snowball point, you've kinda almost win so you don't have to spend 10-15 turn to finish things)
Reducing enemy income is probably a good idea sometimes, or maybe, having more space between enemy bases, so when you managed to capture the first one, the enemy ability to flood you is hindered so you spend more time fighting waves on enemy when you know you already won.

 

[Trickyboo]

Reducing map size reduce the impact of the snowball (if the map is small the good thing is, when you reach the snowball point, you've kinda almost win so you don't have to spend 10-15 turn to finish things)
Reducing enemy income is probably a good idea sometimes, or maybe, having more space between enemy bases, so when you managed to capture the first one, the enemy ability to flood you is hindered so you spend more time fighting waves on enemy when you know you already won.

Yea, I think it depends on the map what you want to change that can change the dynamic of the map.

Chapter 14 got me thinking that you really don't want to give the player too many additional starting units that map on easy/normal, but weaken the enemy snowball potential in their bases/income (or the reverse where the player gets more reinforcements later to respond to the enemies), otherwise you can just build a wall using those additional expendable units you start with and then have Chloe finish the main objective and win that map.

 

[GratuitousLove]

Yea, I think it depends on the map what you want to change that can change the dynamic of the map.

Chapter 14 got me thinking that you really don't want to give the player too many additional starting units that map on easy/normal, but weaken the enemy snowball potential in their bases/income (or the reverse where the player gets more reinforcements later to respond to the enemies), otherwise you can just build a wall using those additional expendable units you start with and then have Chloe finish the main objective and win that map.

Tthat's what I did initialy... Then I got feedback.
You see you and me are probably tryharder kinda minmaxing turn etc in some way.
But when someone that isn't good at strategy game or just want to play without thinking, they don't really focus on taking good trade necessarily, so the fact that the player has no base and the enemy does, mean that in this mission to survive you have to brainwash more unit than you loose on average. If you add to that the fact that Saki is a monster on the battlefield (especialy when she had bonus def because on a forest) you can easily have the player loosing initial forces and have trouble getting back into the game. The is especialy true if your hero like Fionne get hurt (which is more likely to happen in this mission than other because Saki is super tanky, which mean you have to choose between brainwash a unit or get her to hp1 to neutralize her. Which mean you're likekly to have surviving threat.)
Of course the easier mode are kinda abusable in this mission but honestly, is it bad? I mean if one of the mission can be completed in 4 turn on non hard difficulty, I'm fine with it. It's unlikely that it happens by chance on normal (maybe on easy though), so as long as the player made a concious decision about it I think it's only fair they're rewarded.
They didn't choose hard so it doesn't have to be hard.
Of course if all mission would end this way it would be a problem, but I think it's fine here.

Edit : The way I think it is, when I'm designing difficulty, it's like if I'm trying to please totaly different persons.
Hard:If someone play hard I suspect they want to have make an effort to win a level, so I do my best do make the game at least somewhat hard.
Normal: I don't think people playing on normal are looking for difficulty, you just want to make it hard enough for the battle to make sense (if you send your archer on the front or do stupid things like that you'll loose, but aside from that you shouldn't need hard concept like walling (except on the defense map but then it's explained in a tooltip that only appear when people select normal/easy difficulty)).
Easy: The game should be easy, but also probably a bit quicker than in normal. So I don't give stats boost because I think it would be bad immersion wise, but I try to ensure that it is really easy to win the missions (and not too hard to have every named character survive)

 

[Trickyboo]

Also are archers difficult to use units for anyone not used to Advance Wars?

I remember when I started with Advance Wars, I very underused artillery (archer) until I found out how easy it is to bait enemies in the attacking range of it and protecting it with an infantry (villager) wall

I dealt with Saki by positioning my archer to weaken her to half hp and lured her in range of another archer next turn to deplete her hp.

I don't know if everyone use archers to their potential, do they need advice how to use them better?
Like if there was a small tutorial where you have 1 archer + 1 villager vs 1 enemy knights to showcase that you can bait the enemy into attacking a villager to get them in archer range.

Without that knowledge, they might be playing too passively with their archer and waiting for the enemy to make a move, which would be too late when the enemy build up too many units.

 

[Trickyboo]

Tthat's what I did initialy... Then I got feedback.
You see you and me are probably tryharder kinda minmaxing turn etc in some way.
But when someone that isn't good at strategy game or just want to play without thinking, they don't really focus on taking good trade necessarily, so the fact that the player has no base and the enemy does, mean that in this mission to survive you have to brainwash more unit than you loose on average. If you add to that the fact that Saki is a monster on the battlefield (especialy when she had bonus def because on a forest) you can easily have the player loosing initial forces and have trouble getting back into the game. The is especialy true if your hero like Fionne get hurt (which is more likely to happen in this mission than other because Saki is super tanky, which mean you have to choose between brainwash a unit or get her to hp1 to neutralize her. Which mean you're likekly to have surviving threat.)
Of course the easier mode are kinda abusable in this mission but honestly, is it bad? I mean if one of the mission can be completed in 4 turn on non hard difficulty, I'm fine with it. It's unlikely that it happens by chance on normal (maybe on easy though), so as long as the player made a concious decision about it I think it's only fair they're rewarded.
They didn't choose hard so it doesn't have to be hard.
Of course if all mission would end this way it would be a problem, but I think it's fine here.

Edit : The way I think it is, when I'm designing difficulty, it's like if I'm trying to please totaly different persons.
Hard:If someone play hard I suspect they want to have make an effort to win a level, so I do my best do make the game at least somewhat hard.
Normal: I don't think people playing on normal are looking for difficulty, you just want to make it hard enough for the battle to make sense (if you send your archer on the front or do stupid things like that you'll loose, but aside from that you shouldn't need hard concept like walling (except on the defense map but then it's explained in a tooltip that only appear when people select normal/easy difficulty)).
Easy: The game should be easy, but also probably a bit quicker than in normal. So I don't give stats boost because I think it would be bad immersion wise, but I try to ensure that it is really easy to win the missions (and not too hard to have every named character survive)

Yea I minmax my turn as much as possible.

Also probably needs to be a way to heal units soon? Fionne is your strongest unit that can OHKO almost anything and nearly OHKO a knight (easy brainwash combo with Chloe + Fionne) I highly prioritize Fionne to avoid taking damage in most of my maps to keep her strength as high as possible to deliver decisive hits each turn. Her losing any hp cuts into her dmg, which would be an irreversible blow to the players power for that map and also causes her to take even more damage over time with the inability to finish off enemies fast.


I wonder how much it helps if Fionne would get hp regen or something on easy/normal mode to make up for every consecutive hit she would take if she start to lose hp + damage in a prolonged fight. The hp regen on easy/normal would mean the player isn't forced to minmax to keep Fionne at pristine condition at nearly all times.

 

[GratuitousLove]

I'm not a huge fan of changing stats or even healing unit on lower difficulty, I'd rather not change the "rules" of the game so if player decide "hey I want to try harder difficulty" they don't have to recalibrate their intuition, to "unlearn" what they learned in easiest difficulty.

Also probably needs to be a way to heal units soon?

Yeah, imagine how cool that would be if I posted an update on my patreon 13h and 28 minutes ago that added a healers to the game. That would be sooo cool.
Well what wouldn't be as cool is that knowing how evil and greedy I am, it would probably be for patron only until the 15th, but still that would be cool.

 

[Trickyboo]

I'm not a huge fan of changing stats or even healing unit on lower difficulty, I'd rather not change the "rules" of the game so if player decide "hey I want to try harder difficulty" they don't have to recalibrate their intuition, to "unlearn" what they learned in easiest difficulty.

Right, it's probably best to keep the unit stats static and not suddenly have a scout able to beat a knight 1 vs 1 or have units eat more than they can chew on other difficulties.

I was hoping HP regen on Fionne could service as some sort of training wheels to keep her combat potential as static as possible, only affected by different hp value and only gaining advantage of correcting small mistakes of Fionne taking damage.

 

[GratuitousLove]

Right, it's probably best to keep the unit stats static and not suddenly have a scout able to beat a knight 1 vs 1 or have units eat more than they can chew on other difficulties.

I was hoping HP regen on Fionne could service as some sort of training wheels to keep her combat potential as static as possible, only affected by different hp value and only gaining advantage of correcting small mistakes of Fionne taking damage.

Yeah I get it, Idealy I'd do like they did in wargroove, heroes don't loose damage when they loose hp.
The problem is I can't do that because I don't have art for armies. So I can't say "villager are a troop of x villager and when their hp is reduced that's because some of them die" to justify a different treatment for heroes and units.
And pixel art + animation is expensive but like CRAZY expensive and I already don't have the budget to replace scene art so there is no way I afford that.
I think I'll keep it that way for now, maybe I'll add regen on heroes but I'm not sure or maybe only Fionne because let's be honest, it's mainly about her so it could be an ability (but that would mean rebalance every single mission).
Initialy I planned to have an animated power for Fionne, that allow her to act again everytime she make a kill for a turn (but with diminushing damage and movement after each kill). The problem is budget constraint lead me to make the game shorter than initialy planned. But if I decide to not give her this power I could give her regen, I'll think about it.

 

[BeholdTheWizzard]

Some missions are far too brutal.

I'd suggest look at Battle or Wesnoth. In there, a unit standing on a village would slowly heal. Also missions had a turn limit and part of the gold would transfer to the next scenario (they also had max starting gold).

YEah, I want to like this game, but it's frustrating, not relaxing. ZERO room for error.
Your units are dead in 1 or 2 hits. No safety net.
I'm stuck at that frost mage with endless cavalry/paladin spam map and I'm tinking of dropping his game

 

[GratuitousLove]

Some missions are far too brutal.

I'd suggest look at Battle or Wesnoth. In there, a unit standing on a village would slowly heal. Also missions had a turn limit and part of the gold would transfer to the next scenario (they also had max starting gold).

I know the game can a hard sometimes, I added an easy mode in 0.6. (it's patron only for now, patron only versions becomes public 2 weeks after they're released).
I'm not sure if I'll add the ability to heal when standing on building I'll think about it.
I'm not a huge fan of gold transfer, I think it can work if as you said you add a turn limit, but I'm not a huge fan of having turn limit in every mission I think it kills diversity.
The game as it is has some mission with no time limit and some with "factor" that forces the players to act more or less rapidly, and I like the fact that the constraint aren't always the same depending on the mission you play.

 

[BeholdTheWizzard]

I'd probably double units HP or something.
Oh, and the"wounded units do less damage" system is so extreme it makes wounded units absolutely useless. You need to clamp the values and normalize them
The balance/ranges need a lot of work IMHO, as units doing 0 damage really shouldn't happen.

As for the turn limits and gold transfers - those depend on mission and can be set and tweaked however one wants. I urge you to try Battle of Wesnoth. I even made a campaign for it

 

[GratuitousLove]

I'd probably double units HP or something.
Oh, and the"wounded units do less damage" system is so extreme it makes wounded units absolutely useless. You need to clamp the values and normalize them
The balance/ranges need a lot of work IMHO, as units doing 0 damage really shouldn't happen.

As for the turn limits and gold transfers - those depend on mission and can be set and tweaked however one wants. I urge you to try Battle of Wesnoth. I even made a campaign for it

I'm not a huge fan of increasing stats of units, I think it's better if the "rule" are the same in easy and hard to people can get used to the game interaction in easy and they don't have to re-learn everything when playing on hard.
The easy mode will mainly add troops or money for the player or reduce the enemy troops.

I like the fact that a wonded unit deal proportionaly less damage with hp loss. The fact that a unit with 20% hp deal 20% make it easier to grasp what's going to happen.
Unit with low hp aren't useless, they can't really deal much damage, but sometimes it's enough to finish a low hp unit, or they can be used as a well to protect your archer or other fragile important unit. Besides once you unlock healer they can be healed.
When you see a unit dealing 0 damage, it doesn't really does 0, it means the damage has been rounded to 0.

I really think adding goldis not worth sorry. It wouldn't be useful in most mission since I don't want to add time limit in most of them, and even less if you take into account that sometimes theway the story unfold mean it wouldn't make sense to carry over gold in some mission.

I might try battle of Weshnoth at some point, but I'll probably have a huge amount of work in the next months. (I'm trying to keep my 2 update/month schedules on my games + I'll try to release SoM on steam at some point which mean I have lots of extra work for now.)

Edit : I'd be very interested to hear your feedback on the easy mode when you play it.

 

[BeholdTheWizzard]

I'm not a huge fan of increasing stats of units, I think it's better if the "rule" are the same in easy and hard to people can get used to the game interaction in easy and they don't have to re-learn everything when playing on hard.

I'm not talking about stat changes based on difficulty.
Rather that the values are such that any unit can do SOME damage to any unit have some staying power and utility.

In other words, a basic footman doing 1 or 0 damage to a knight, and a knight 1-kit killing a footman isn't conducting to fielding different units. Your basic footman is only good as a distraction. It's a race to get better units. When I say normalizing values, I mean making stat differences less extreme

I like the fact that a wonded unit deal proportionaly less damage with hp loss. The fact that a unit with 20% hp deal 20% make it easier to grasp what's going to happen.
Unit with low hp aren't useless, they can't really deal much damage, but sometimes it's enough to finish a low hp unit, or they can be used as a well to protect your archer or other fragile important unit. Besides once you unlock healer they can be healed.
When you see a unit dealing 0 damage, it doesn't really does 0, it means the damage has been rounded to 0.

While damaged units performing worse makes sense, it might not be a good machanic. The damage nefr should be slight and/or clamped.
Any percentage bonuses are problematic when the values are low.
+10% damage when a unit does 4 damage?

Addendum:
Another neat thing BoW does is that it gives each unit more character and presence. Every unit has a name. Basic units get experience and can upgrade to a higher tier (scout->knight->paladin) and the upgrades can branch (apprentice can upgrade to white mage, redmage or silver mage).
Units that you are left with at the end of the scenario are added to the pool of units you can call in the next mission/scenario. They are recruited from the keep/barracks like regular untis, but are more expensive.
Units can also have traits like Healthy (+2hp per turn regen), fast (increased movement), tough (more HP), etc..

Heros can also upgrade and their upgrades can be more complex (depending on scenario)

 

[GratuitousLove]

I'm not talking about stat changes based on difficulty.
Rather that the values are such that any unit can do SOME damage to any unit have some staying power and utility.

In other words, a basic footman doing 1 or 0 damage to a knight, and a knight 1-kit killing a footman isn't conducting to fielding different units. Your basic footman is only good as a distraction. It's a race to get better units. When I say normalizing values, I mean making stat differences less extreme





While damaged units performing worse makes sense, it might not be a good machanic. The damage nefr should be slight and/or clamped.
Any percentage bonuses are problematic when the values are low.
+10% damage when a unit does 4 damage?

Addendum:
Another neat thing BoW does is that it gives each unit more character and presence. Every unit has a name. Basic units get experience and can upgrade to a higher tier (scout->knight->paladin) and the upgrades can branch (apprentice can upgrade to white mage, redmage or silver mage).
Units that you are left with at the end of the scenario are added to the pool of units you can call in the next mission/scenario. They are recruited from the keep/barracks like regular untis, but are more expensive.
Units can also have traits like Healthy (+2hp per turn regen), fast (increased movement), tough (more HP), etc..

Heros can also upgrade and their upgrades can be more complex (depending on scenario)

1) I might boost some unit a bit but I'm not sure yet.
As weak as it looks the villager (I think that's what you mean by footman) is probably the most important unit to have in an army, they are extremely cheap and it's probably always better to get 2 villager with your 2 barracks and keep some gold next round than to try to get another unit and skip a barrack production, they can capture, deal damage to weak units like scout, spearman archer or healer/mages and wall for your archer or other valuable units. Yes they can't hit knight at all but well a knight 8 times the price. You might be at a point in the story in which you don't have access to spearman that are a good in between unit so it might looks a bit strange balance wise, but I wanted to delay the appearance of spearman to later in the story because you unlock them by capturing a forge.

2)The thing is in this kind of game defender have a huge advantage, you are closer to reinforcement and you can retaliate with archer etc. Because of that I really like the fact that having the first hit give a good advantage to the attacker, since the defender usualy has a positional advantage.
That being said I agree that my game balance feels a bit off until you have most unit unlocked, that being said the MC is supposed to be just a girl fighting an empire so it's normal that she is at a disadvantage (or at least would be if she didn't have her power).

I don't plan to add upgrade for unit, this isn't an oversight it's a choice. I want my game to be hard on hard mode, and the problem is if you can take your upgraded unit with you, then the game because either too easy, or a tedious process of optimizing every turn to know which unit will gain the exp to be usefull in later missions and I don't like that.

Initialy I wanted to add upgrades for heroes, but well... Budget constraint, a hentai game with a super niche gameplay is probably not going to get me any money, so I can't afford to work on it for 2 years to get it exactly how I'd want it to be (I hope I wrong but I don't think I am unfortunately).
I have this bad feeling that it's almost impossible to make a really good hentai game if you go for niche gameplay, because it takes a lots of time, and the fact that it's a hentai means you can't just make a super good game and hope for word of mouth to help it sells, people usualy don't talk too much publicly about their favorite porn game. Again maybe I'm wrong, but I'm too poor for this kind of risk, as much as I love this game, becoming homeless to perfect it isn't worth it so no fancy hero upgrades sorry.

 

[Trickyboo]

I'm fine with nothing carrying over between maps, that's how Advance Wars and War Groove main campaign do it. It gives a better balance between maps and no risk getting softlocked by missing something in previous maps.

You have a sense of progression during maps as you build up your economy + army.





Villagers are very valuable because they are cheap and weak and enemies prioritize them.

If you could choose between 4 Villagers + 4 knights or only 5 knights, you fighting against multiple waves of 2 knights coming at you at a time you come out better if you picked 4 villagers + 4 knights:


4 villagers + 4 knight situation
Wave 1: they 2 kill of your villagers, you kill both their knights with your 4 knights,
Wave 2 they kill 2 more villagers and you kill the 2 knights again. You still have 4 knights, some slighty injured and only lost 4 villagers so far.
And if you keep producing 2 villagers each turn and occasionally a knight to refill what you lost so you can keep fighting off endless waves of 2 knight, steadily build up your knight army and only lose 2 villagers + slightly injured knights every turn


5 knight situation
Wave 1,they kill 1 of your 5 knights, you kill 2 of theirs
Wave 2, they kill another of your knights and now you only have 3 knights left, so you can only kill 1 and weaken the second
Wave 3, they kill another knight and now you only have 2 left and it goes downhill from here as you keep losing a knight every turn. Even if you can buy 1 knight every turn, you never get anywhere as you also keep losing a knight every turn if you don't have any villagers protecting them.

 

[Guerrilla!]

New Free Build is Live on the Patreon! <3 Wooooo!

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[GratuitousLove]

New Free Build is Live on the Patreon! <3 Wooooo!

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I'm a bit busy right now but I'll update the OP tomorrow.

 

[GratuitousLove]

I edited the OP with 0.6a version.
I hope you'll like this update.

Some missions are far too brutal.

I also added an easy mode for the game, if you thought the game was too hard sometimes, I'd be happy to hear your feedback about it.

 

[Guerrilla!]

I edited the OP with 0.6a version.
I hope you'll like this update.



I also added an easy mode for the game, if you thought the game was too hard sometimes, I'd be happy to hear your feedback about it.

1) we WILL love it <3

2) extra yay!

 

[Azi VonVeil]

it LOOKS good but some of those tags scare me, corruption, mind control, slave all sound a bit rapey to me..and there is a dude in the preview...so how much of the hetero if any can be avoided? is there any rape(or rape adjacent?) or is this just an OP female MC having her way with all the pretty ladies?