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June 21st, 2007

weewar reflections and ideas

My friends and I have been playing a lot of Weewar recently. It’s like multi-player online Advance Wars on a hex grid. The game is both eerily similar and entirely different than AW at the same time.

In the games we’ve watched, discussed, and played over the last week or so, several interesting observations have been made:

infantry == free money

When we say infantry are overpowered… there really is no easy way to describe just how overpowered they really are. Light infantry cost $75 and heavy infantry cost $100. The difference is that light infantry move 2x as fast as heavy and heavy infantry hit vehicles 2x as hard as light (the game says that heavy have 4x the offensive power vs vehicles as light do… but that doesn’t seem to translate to 4x the damage potential). Infantry can capture bases. Infantry can cross mountains. Infantry get substantial offensive and defensive bonuses for being in heavy terrain. They suffer penalties in swamps, but then again, so do vehicles.

Compare this with your basic light tank. The tank costs $300 to produce, moves like light infantry, cannot cross mountains, suffers offensive and defensive penalties for being in heavy terrain, and will come out hurting very badly if it tries to solo a heavy infantry unit. Two heavy infantry who get the drop on a tank are assured a win. And it’s entirely possible that both units will survive - allowing them to heal up and fight something else.

This is where the game comes down to money. If $200 worth of infantry can beat $300 worth of vehicles, then the player with the infantry has tipped the money scale dramatically in his favor. To further illustrate the scenareo (which is not 100% realistic, but still illustrates my point), I present the following detailed example. Much of this example is just an extension of ideas Adam expressed a few days ago, so I take very little credit here ;)

Player A and player B are playing a game on a very small map consisting entirely of basic grassland, no fancy terrain bonuses here. Both players control two bases and the battle front is incredibly close. Each base produces $100 per turn. Let’s begin the scenareo with $300 per player and no units.

Turn 1: Player A moves first and creates two heavy infantry, bringing his money down to $100. Player B creates a tank for $300, wiping his money out.

Turn 2: Player A moves his two heavy infantry forward and creates two more. He is spending exactly as much money as he is earning, so his balance remains at $100. Player B had $0 coming into this round, earns $200 for his bases, and decides to keep that money in favor of producing a tank next turn.

Turn 3: Player A attacks the tank with his two foremost infantry and almost kill it. He then moves his second pair forward and creates a third pair of heavy infantry. Player B gets his second tank, dropping his balance down to $100. He attacks one of the infantry that attacked his first tank and kills it, but also takes some damage in the process.

Turn 4: Player A moves his injured infantryman back and attacks the injured tank with one of his fresh units. The tank dies, barely scratching the full strength infantry unit. He moves his 5 other infantry forward and creates two more. Player B attacks the unit that just killed his first tank and injures it fairly badly, dropping it down to 4/10 health, but not after taking 3 damage himself. He creates another tank and is back to nothing in the bank.

Let’s take a moment to count score. Money in the bank doesn’t count, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, since both players have similar amounts of money on hand and coming in. However, compare the monetary value of their units on the board.

Player A has 7 full strength heavy infantry worth $700. He also has one more unit at 40% health for a total value of $740. Player B has one full strength tank on the board worth $300 and one unit at 70% health for a total functional value of $510.

Turn 5: Player A swarms the injured tank with 3 of his uninjured units and kills it. He then moves his 4 remaining uninjured units forward, they are on B’s doorstep by now. His one previously injured unit rests for +1/10 health. He creates two more heavy infantry, bringing his population up to 6 uninjured, 4 moderately injured infantry.

Player B has one solitary tank now. He cannot afford another one. He cannot reach any of player A’s injured units to attack them, his only choice is to attack one of the uninjured units, which he does, injuring it heavily, but not enough to destroy it, and not without taking damage himself.

Turn 6: Player A stomps the injured tank, clearing the board of player B’s units. He moves one of his remaining uninjured infantry ont o each of player B’s bases and begins capturing. All of his injured units rest for +1/10 health. He creates two more units, just to be cheeky about the whole situation. Player B earns $200 more, bringing his money in the bank up to $400, but he can’t do anything with it since both of his bases are occupied.

Turn 7: Player A creates two more units, finishes capturing player B’s bases, and wins the game.

The final tally shows player A having not even broken a sweat. He has 14 units on the board and $100 in the bank, compared to player B’s zero units on the board and his useless $400 in the bank.

So… while it was a slightly unfair example, the point stands. Hordes of infantry are worth way more than their equivalent weight in tanks. Put them in rough terrain and the difference becomes even more marked, the infantry may move slightly slower through rough terrain, but they become significantly tougher. Of course, infantry through rough terrain are usually faster than vehicles through rough terrain anyway… What then, is the counter to heavy infantry? An equal or greater quantity of light infantry. They cost 25% less, move faster and hit heavies just as hard as the heavies hit them back. No contest.

Resting is free money. Remember, the only money that really matters is money that’s already been spent to produce units. If you can get more use out of your units… ;)

There are only two other unit types in the game worth discussing.

Raiders (recon bikes) are the fastest units in the game, they cost $200, and they hit infantry as hard as light tanks. They are great at closing gaps, blocking bases, and picking off solitary infantry. A small group of raiders can hit and run a poorly organized group of infantry into oblivion w/o taking any permanent casualties.

artillery

And then there’s artillery. In basic games, there are only two varieties of artillery. Light and heavy. Light artillery cost $400, move rapidly, and have an attack range of 2-3 hexes. Heavy artillery cost $600, move slowly, have a range of 3-4 hexes, and hit much harder. They have very little defense, so once a normal unit gets next to it, the artillery unit is pretty much dead. “Pro” games have a few more types of vehicles, including more two more varieties of artillery, both of which are quite nifty.

A wall of cheap infantry takes time to carve through, especially if they’re rotating their wounded out to heal. Stick a few heavy artillery pieces behind them and they’re unstoppable.

Why did I say that light artillery is ~useless? Well, for one, it only has an offensive rating of 4|4 (vs infantry|vehicles). Heavy infantry have an offensive rating of 3|4 and you can field 4 of them for the price of one light artillery, or you could get yourself a pair of 5|2 raiders for the same money. The other problem with light artillery is that they have a short range and cannot move and attack on the same turn. Thus they must get very close to the enemy to attack anything at all. That, and despite their speed, they’re pretty much incapable of attacking heavy artillery w/o getting blown to pieces along the way.

Heavy artillery have 5|5 offense, 2x the range, and 1 more armour than light artillery for only 50% more money. Thus, for $1200 you could either field three light artillery and have a hard time positioning them in such a way that all 3 can attack on the same turn w/o being exposed to attack themselves… or you could field a pair of heavies and slowly creep across the map flattening all who oppose.

Artillery Positioning What’s the solution to heavy artillery? Raiders. Large quantities of infantry. Anything that can close into short range and kill w/o being killed first.

How do you keep your artillery from being killed? Keep a thick wall of cheaper units in front of them. Remember, you can buy 8 light infantry for the cost of one heavy artillery. Nothing in the game has AoE attacks… so 8 cheap units take a very long time to carve through… especially if you’re able to cycle the injured ones back to rest.

unbalanced dice

One gripe I have about Weewar is that the random factor really is a bit too random for my taste. I like my tactical games to depend more on tactics than luck. Right now… it is too easy to have a run of bad luck and get knocked out of the game for a few bad rolls.

In Advance Wars, the attacking unit always gained an advantage. Healthier units always did more damage than injured units. Not so with Weewar. It is not unusual for a pair of fully healed infantry to attack a raider and both wind up taking the same amount of damage.

Infantryman 1 attacks the raider, does 3 damage, takes 4 damage.

Infantryman 2 attacks the raider - which should now be operating at only 70% power, does 2 damage, takes 5 damage.

To compound the situation, the game’s official documentation says that multiple units attacking the same target from multiple angles get bonuses.

With small numbers like this, slight variations due to a fickle RNG are still large enough to make any such advantage very hard to notice. It is there. It must be. I’ve convinced myself that it is. But the numbers only occasionally support this.

If you could see the dice, maybe? At least then you could brag about the crits when they happen and blame losing an attack on obviously poor rolls.

I don’t mind randomness… but the game doesn’t even keep a text log of attacks and their results (much less the numbers involved), and I think that makes the occasional spot of ill fortune seem even more pointless and arbitrary than it might otherwise. It’s not unheard of to attack a unit that you should by all rights be able to kill with minimal injury and wind up losing your attacking unit in the process - despite supposed terrain modifiers in your favor, etc…

Shrug. For now, the wide range of possibilities from the RNG are just one more reason that infantry are superior. You don’t feel so bad when the game throws your infantry away as you do when you lose a heavy tank to bad dice :P

strength in numbers, sometimes

Another thing we’ve noticed about the game is that teamwork really makes a difference. Not only does an alliance mean you don’t waste your time killing each other’s units… it typically means ~2x the units pointed at your enemies.

I recently lost a game rather soundly because I was winning. Yup. Lost because I was winning.

See, it was a four-man match on a square board. Each player started in one quadrant of the board. I started in the NW and made a tentative peace with the player to the NE while I built up units along my southern border. The SW player provoked both myself and his other neighbor, the player to the SE. Meanwhile, NE and SE had some minor tussles but nothing too major.

SW made a mistake and I sort of crushed him up against SE and took most of his bases. This left me in control of something like 10 or 12 bases while NE and SE only had 6 or 7 each. This worried them, so they stopped their minor border conflict and charged west at me. Every turn for 4 turns in a row, my line was pushed back by one hex. I didn’t have time to repair any units, the push was too strong.

When I finally surrendered, I had captured SW’s remaining bases but had lost several of my other bases along the border. Between the two of them, they held 15 bases compared to my 11 - a 36% advantage in production capacity. I had started the conflict slightly depleted because of my successful campaign against SW (who had actually held the biggest army before I overtook him), and their collectively superior income were sufficient to give them an overwhelming majority of numbers.

It doesn’t pay to be too big. One-on-one, I could have mopped up either one of them. Unfortunately, because I had such an enormous lead on either one of them individually, they realized the obvious and allied against me. Like lobsters in a tank who can’t stand to let another one climb out… ;)

I think I could have had a chance at the game if I hadn’t taken all of SW’s bases. In stead, I was greedy and took off a bigger bite than I could keep down.

ideas

So, aside from the issues discussed already (infantry need a good nerf batting and the RNG is too random), there’s only really one problem with the game. It’s written in clingy, needy, zero self-esteem sort of AJAX. It’s the kind of code that feels the irrational compulsion to phone home to the server every time you click a unit to select it. I mean… if you’re going to wait for the server to do all of the thinking, why bother with any sort of client-side logic at all? The game could be so much faster, and the server could handle so many more players if they moved most of the incessant click management logic to the client where it belongs and only sent final moves to the server for validation.

And, aside from that little gripe… I’ve a few other things I’d like to see in the game.

Namely, I want to see a greater variety of units. The game is already a paper-rock-scissors contraption, let’s make units even more specialized, eh wot?

A few new types of infantry, perhaps?

Of course these numbers aren’t really balanced. At least, they’re not balanced any more than the current ones are :P

If we allow flamethrower infantry, we probably want flame tanks as well. Perhaps cluster bomb artillery that randomly hit 2 or 3 hexes adjacent to their target? Maybe some type of AoE that is good vs vehicles but not against infantry? Maybe give a unit the ability to deal damage that tunnels on to the unit behind it, but only on a kill? Rail gun? :twisted:

How about special map restriction options or victory conditions? No artillery allowed, no infantry allowed, no recon bikes allowed? Game ends after 10 turns, with whoever controls the most of the map wins? First player to cap 7 bases wins? Etc…

Fog of war? Probably not. It could work, it does in Advance Wars… but I don’t see it working very well in this sort of environment. It’s too easy for players to share intel, it drags the game out too long if they don’t, etc…

I like the idea of adding shallow water to the game that only infantry are capable of crossing. It would slow them down just as much as mountains would and it gives an offensive and defensive penalty worse than swampland.

If we’re allowing infantry to move in water, how about naval units? That would require a whole new set of maps, but no harm there. Air units? Those would be nice too.

Other terrain types? Jungle is thicker than forest and is the ultimate entrenched position for infantry. Artillery cannot target units in the jungle. Roads give vehicles a bonus to movement but make you terribly vulnerable to attack. Bridges function exactly like roads except they make you even more of a sitting duck.

Could possibly allow engineering units to terraform the map, changing forest to plains to roads and building bridges across rivers, etc…

Mobile factories? Very slow, non-combative units that can only move along roads and over grass. Able to build units wherever they are for 50% extra cost. Can’t drive and build on the same turn. Possibly cost resources to maintain?

But, what I’d really like to see would be troop transports. Infantry are slow. APC’s are not. They’ve got no offense and minimal defense, but they’re cheap and they’ve got movement like a raider. What better way to deliver your bazooka wielding guerrillas to the jungle outside of your enemy’s base ;)

Posted by Ammon as ajax, games, ideas, numberchasing, play at 12:41 AM EDT

2 Comments »

June 19th, 2007

more tower defense

And… I’ve got more TD ideas rolling around my head. I’ll spare you the verbosity and only post the two good ones though.

competitive tower defense

The idea here is pretty simple. There are 2-4 players positioned evenly around an outer ring. Every player starts the game with a creep generator and sufficient moneys to buy a few wimpy towers. Players may only build within a certain (short) range of another building they control, thus these initial wimpy towers must be built close to the generator.

Generators pump out a constant stream of enemies that flow toward the other players’ generators. These creeps are divided evenly, so in a four player game, 1/3 of each player’s creeps will march toward each other player.

When creeps arrive at the generators, they pound on them until either they destroy the generator, or the generator’s defenses destroy them. If the creeps succeed in killing the generator, it will explode. This explosion cascades out through all of the losing player’s buildings and kills any creeps that get caught in the blast.

Any surviving creeps who were marching toward the losing player will choose a new target.

Creeps will not attack towers, but will attempt to flow around them. Players who wall off their generator will discover that their own creeps turn on them. Very unpretty.

The map here must be pretty small, and towers should have fairly short ranges. There should also not be a terrible variety in the number of towers given to each player - 3 or maybe 4 different models. In fact, let’s just go with some standard tower configurations:

It would also be interesting if players were allowed to build multiple generators. Generators would be expensive, but each generator pushes out a constant stream of creeps to attack the other players. The disadvantage here comes from the cascade effect - if one generator goes down, they all do, and you lose. Thus, players must defend all of their generators from attack.

Also, unlike towers, which we might allow players to sell off, generators are permanent fixtures. Once established, that’s it.

Games should be fairly quick, so I don’t think that any sort of upgrade path for towers is really necessary. If the game starts to drag on, generators will start producing tougher and tougher creeps until players are eventually incapable of resisting.

organic tower defense

This game is similar to the competitive TD idea in that the spread of towers is restricted, and that the creeps hit the base until destroyed. but that’s about where the similarity ends. For this one, we need a little thematic dressing to translate the gameplay mechanics into something that makes sense for people.

Wave after wave of insects attack a particularly rare/precious/yummy sapling as it grows to maturity. The player must protect the sapling by planting and directing the growth of defensive organisms.

The game pauses before each wave to let the player see what’s coming next, and to give them a chance to plant a single new seed. New seed varieties become available every few waves.

When these seeds are planted, they function exactly like traditional TD towers. They have an upgrade path that may be purchased with resources gained as you defeat enemies. But unlike traditional towers, these plants can grow outward to fill arbitrarily shaped spaces.

Thus, with a single seed, it is entirely possible to sprout multiple “towers”.

Creeps come in a variety of flavours, all insect themed:

Now, the caterpillar’s entry is somewhat misleading. All earthbound creeps can attack towers, but caterpillars seek them out. Wasps have no reason to attack towers, so they just fly directly at the sapling. Grasshoppers jump over towers but don’t travel in a straight path toward the sapling.

Different plants will have different growth patterns available, and individual nodes of a plant may or may not be upgradeable. There are three basic shapes of plants I am seeing.

The first is a ’standard’ plant. It has a central node where you plant it initially. The plant can then send out little tendrils into adjacent nodes. These tendrils typically have no active purpose. Once you have branched out far enough from the initial node (usually not a very long distance), you can establish an additional base node that is identical in function to the initial node.

The second type of plant is one that consists entirely of tendrils. These start with a simple base node that is no different than any of the tendrils the plant can throw out. And, no matter how long you grow a tendril, you cannot create any new type of node - only more tendrils. These plants generally exist to barricade and distract bugs.

The final type is a ‘centralized’ plant. These are powerful, expensive plants that cannot establish new base nodes, and may not even be able to send out tendrils. They are the most similar to standard TD towers.

Players start off with the following plants at their disposal:

They will eventually unlock a number of other plants, which might include things like:

A few quick gotchas before I end.

You cannot build across another plant’s tendrils. Thus, some care must be taken in how you lay things out. You cannot sell off plants. Once you put something down, it is there until it dies.

The outer tendrils of a plant must be attached to the root node or they will die. Thus, if you have a 15 hex long plant and ants cut through the third hex, not only do you lose that square, but you lose the 12 hexes after it.

The exception to this is in tendril-only plants. They have no real base node, so each square of the vine is self sufficient. Thus, the only way to truly kill off a mushroom patch is by killing each and every hex it occupies. However, once a tendril-only plant has taken sufficient damage to kill off one or more hexes, it is incapable of growing further.

Dead plant parts will dry up and cease to function as anything other than a barrier. After a wave or two, dead plants will blow away and you can use their spaces again.

Posted by Ammon as flash, games, ideas, play at 5:15 PM EDT

1 Comment »

June 18th, 2007

guild of miners and gemcutters

Ok, it’s time for some more Walraven ideas/plans/dreams/wishes.

Since it was introduced, mining has been one of the biggest and most popular activities in the game. It’s easy to get into, it’s relatively safe, it practices skills that are later useful in combat, it produces valuable resources for crafting, etc… Oh, and it’s fun too ;)

Mining is so popular that it is traditionally one of THE first activities a newbie engages in - usually at the advice of older players.

The problem with this is that the materials newbies actually need for any of their crafting recipes are best found in the desert area outside of Candle Hill. This is not the safest place in the game. It is also relatively devoid of convenient lumber with which to construct the mine. Your average newbie who wants to go digging for copper is going to take 2 or 3 trips between the forest and one of the mountain ranges in the desert. Odds are high that he’ll get eaten by a lion. There aren’t many lions out there, but after that much travel, the newbie’s bound to bump into something aggro. And at that point in their career, they’re not prepared for it.

So… we need to improve the safety for newbies who want to dig copper in the desert and make it more convenient for them as well. Nobody wants to trudge across the desert 5 times just so they can dig a hole that they’ll accidentally flood two minutes later :P

Second, the city of Candle Hill has a problem. They lack material resources. They lack economic activity. I’ve always planned on spurring this by introducing NPC merchants and quest givers. It is currently easier for high level players to do things for themselves than it is to get another player to do things for them. People have no reason to trade, it’s too inconvenient.

Enter the mining guild.

I’ve always planned that the Miners would be one of the more influential organizations in town. They were originally intended to be a place where players could buy and sell minerals and tools (an open market), where they could get some training, and where they could hire some pack mule type NPC’s to help them with their mines.

They’ll still be most of that. But the new idea expands on things a bit more:

Guild members will have access to special parts of the guild hall, including a private storage room where they may keep supplies safe from other players.

mining camps

The biggest elements to the new mining guild’s operations will all be centered around the mining camps. These camps will be very expensive to build, and will need to be built in rooms with existing mines (owned by the builder of the camp, of course). Players will be limited to the number of mining camps they are allowed to own at once. This limit will be based on their guild ranking.

Mining camps will improve their associated mines in a number of ways.

The mining camp is a large two-room tent with an attached storage bin and a place for vehicles to park (similar to docks). The front room of the tent will be suitable for setting as a home location and the back room will store food and supplies. The storage bin will be accessible from the outside of the building, and is meant as a place to keep ore produced by the mine.

They will come with a total of four npc’s. Two of these NPC’s will be guards that will help keep the mine entrance safe from wild animals. One will be a mining supervisor, who keeps the key to the mine, and the last npc will be a mine worker.

The worker will occasionally wander into the mine, pick up any minerals that players left lying around, and haul them to the storage bin. If he can’t find anything when he enters the mine, he will emote mining actions and will produce a very small amount of ore to bring up to the bin. Thus, any mine with a camp will constantly produce materials (howbeit at a terribly slow rate), even if it has otherwise been cleared out by players.

Mines with camps are nominally owned by the guild but are managed by the player who established them. The guild maintains a number of supply carts that perform a regular circuit of the camps, providing food and tools as needed. It is possible for players to hop a ride on these carts in order to travel to remote mines safely and quickly.

shipping cart

There is also a single shipping cart that the guild operates to help ease the delivery of minerals back to town from the mines.

At any time that the cart isn’t already in use, the player managing a mine may request a shipment be scheduled by the mining supervisor. A few minutes later, the cart will arrive. The worker npc will unload the storage bin into the cart. When he is done loading the cart, it will return back to the guild, where the load will be quickly dumped into the player’s storage vault.

The guild will keep a 10% cut of all goods shipped in this way, in order to pay for their expenses (ie, keeping the npc’s alive and the carts running, etc…). This is on top of yearly membership dues.

While the shipping cart is stopped at a camp, the supply cart will skip them on the rotation. Likewise, the shipping cart’s arrival will be delayed if requested while the supply cart is already parked at the camp.

Players may not ride the shipping cart.

guild line

Guild members will have a chat line, just like any other guild in the game. NPC’s will also be capable of chatting over this line as well. Announcements of new camps being connected to the network, players joining the guild or being advanced in rank, and the status of the shipment cart will all spam the channel.

jobs

Any mining camp will have the option to hire workers. Both guild members and non-members may take on jobs.

Players will be able to list jobs at the guild hall, requesting x-many of a certain ore their mine produces, and offering a percentage of the profit to the miner. Thus, if I established a copper mining camp in the Candle Hill desert, I could list jobs for 50 copper and a reward of 20%.

Thus, if a newbie takes my job, goes out to the mine, and digs 56 copper, they will be given 11 copper’s worth of cash when they return to the guild hall to report the job done.

Mining supervisors track the player’s progress on jobs. When a player arrives at the mine (probably having come on the supply wagon), they must check in with the supervisor. The supervisor makes a quick check of the player’s inventory and gives them a pick if they don’t have one. He then unlocks the door and lets them into the mine. When the player leaves the mine, the supervisor checks their inventory again and takes the pick away from them if he loaned one. They player is expected to dump the goods they dug into the storage bin. Upon doing so, the supervisor will check them off and give them a receipt for their work. The player must then return the receipt in at the guild for their reward.

These should be enough checks to stop casual theft attempts on the part of diggers.

More heinous thefts (and armed robbery of the camp itself) will be announced to the guild line. It’s not difficult to get yourself permanently blacklisted by the guild for misbehaving.

I don’t remember if there was any more to this idea, I wrote this post several days ago and never published it. So… may as well push it and hope for the best, ne?

update

After referring with Vopisk and Sora a bit on the subject, it’s been decided that a few more protections need to be put in place for mining camps. The following minor changes will be made to the above:

This pretty much obliviates any way of stealing goods from the mine short of somehow scripting a bot to jump on the ore the instant it drops and hoping you get it before the npc does - since the npc should be entering in the grab command before players even see the message.

Posted by Ammon as ideas, mud, play at 1:20 PM EDT

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June 2nd, 2007

ffx2

A few days ago, Penny decided that she wanted to pick up FFX-2 again. We’ve had it since its release, but, as with most RPG’s, we got distracted partway through and never actually finished it.

I found a save, at the beginning of chapter 5 (out of 5), and we played. Well, Penny played. I sat in the room and watched most of the time. And tonight, we finally beat it.

I’m not entirely sure why the game wasn’t better received. It’s got a good story, some interesting and unique gameplay mechanics, great hooks for the pokemonstering numberchasers out there, and a ton of mini-games. Granted, the whole ‘girl power’ theme comes off a bit strong early on, but it becomes increasingly unimportant as the game progresses. Shrug.

We had 74% completion (Penny had skipped over most of the optional content in chapters 2 and 3). Yuna had mastered black mage. Paine had mastered warrior, dark knight, and white mage. Riku would have mastered the singer class, had we been able to acquire its hidden abilities. All three girls were one sphere away from being able to complete their special classes as well. The party was lvl 57-59 by the time the finall boss went down.

I liked the ending - it was just as serious and emotional as the ending to FFX, but much happier. And, yes, we saw the good ending. Not sure whether we’ll ever try for the “perfect” ending, but I think Penny’s planning on doing a New Game Plus replay with a walkthrough checklist now.

I have two comments about the end-game experience.

  1. The final boss is wimpy compared to some of the stuff you fight shortly before him.
  2. Mana becomes obsolete.

Cactaur

One of the hotspot missions in chapter 5 has you hunting little cactuars from all over the planet. Once you’ve gathered them together, there’s a wimpy boss fight followed by a big monster attack on the nearby Al Bhed camp. The boss is sufficiently tough that they actually warn you - and ask if you want to evac to your airship and leave the poor desert mechanic guys to their doom (and maybe come back later).

We were about lvl 36 at the time. We left. We did other things. We finished every other sidequest in chapter 5, except one. One that requires access to the little desert camp that was being occupied by big evil nastiness incarnate. I ground some levels and skills and walked into the boss fight at lvl 50.

TWO AND A HALF hours later… the boss finally died - giving us another 1% toward our completion counter, a ribbon, some other equipment we never wound up using, and 5000 xp. Yup. 5000 xp. At lvl 50 you can one-shot mobs worth 1000 xp. Turns out, that boss had over 330k hp. We hit him for 750-2500 hp a swing, depending on how badly debuffed the attacker was at the time. Most attacks were for 1000 damage a pop.

Our reward from the Al Bhed for saving them from the ancient sand demon of ultimate destruction? They made us dinner. Specifically, they acknowledged that the fight took a while and the food was prepared while we were getting slaughtered out there ;)

Cross reference this to the final boss. It is a sequence of five fights, each against mobs that are similar in damage output to the desert monster but don’t do aoe status effect attacks. These final boss fights also only have around 30k hp each, and you can save after the first two. There are some optional mobs during one of the boss fights, but since you can’t take the XP with you this late in the game… why bother?

After watching the ending and making a backup of our saves, it was time for Alanna to take a bath. Penny and I had some confusion about what exactly had happened during the ending, so I beat the final round of 3 bosses again in time for her to watch the last few rounds of the final boss with me after bathing the baby.

So… where’s the balance? I understand that it is traditional for Final Fantasy to have optional bosses of immeasurable power… but they usually at least give a reward commensurate with their degree of difficulty. Ultimate sword of doom, biggest summon spell in the game, materia containing every spell in the game, that sort of thing. For this ultimate boss of doom, you get a ribbon. Now, granted, the ribbon is a nice enough item… it still gives immunity to all negative status effects in the game, just like it has since FF1, but there are much easier ways to get status effect resistances, and those much earlier on in the game too.

And I don’t remember any of those fights being 150 minute long marathons - some are even timed to guarantee you finish them in under half an hour, etc… 2.5 hours in a game that took us less than 40 to complete? I spent over 6% of our entire playtime in that one fight.

Meh.

The other thing I noticed was a result of my gearing up to fight the desert monster. Mana is pointless in the endgame. Alchemists are where it’s at. There’s no way that we could have survived anywhere near long enough to beat this boss if it weren’t for my party’s ability to regen 2000 damage in waves that occur every few seconds… forever.

When an alchemist is combined with a pair of dark knights using their darkness attack (fairly quick to perform, aoe non-elemental hit for good damage, costs hp in stead of mana)… you can just hold the kill button down and watch things die. Yojimbo? Anima? Last five bosses of the game? No problem. Ok, actually, not Anima. I sped things up just a touch by swapping one of the dark knights out for a warrior using excalibur since she was weak to holy damage, but it was the same procedure.

And even if you do use abilities that cost mana when traveling with your alchemist, they can get free ethers. Yup, infinite supply of mana heals during combat. It’s neato.

The only thing that prevents the alchemist from being a complete and total game breaker is their lack of natural status effect resistances and their lowish hp. But that’s easily remedied, and they do have an infinite supply of remedies - so they really only have to worry about equipping resistance to the debilitating status effects :P It also helps that they can’t use their abilities to heal the party outside of combat, otherwise mana really would be pointless.

So yeah. Fun game, should have done better commercially. People who liked FFX and dismissed FFX2 for the initial girliness are missing out on the rest of the story.

Posted by Ammon as ffx2, final fantasy, games, play at 11:32 PM EDT

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