Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 (Version 1.1 Released!)

[James]

Armor Attack Powers
Just a placeholder so it will be easy to find, right next to the weapon attach powers. Anyway, it won't be hard to find armor attack powers in the ROM. I checked for sequential body armors and found nothing, so that probably means the weapons and helmets are lumped together. Going to focus on other things for the moment.

[James]

Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.1b1

Download Version 1.1b1

Official Home Page: Destiny of an Emperor 2.0

Playing and Testing This Release
A number of game-wide parameter changes have been made which are going to come into play in the Wu and Wei areas. These changes pertain to tactics and are definitely going to need some consideration. Other considerable changes are being made that affect gameplay from beginning to end, though, and this release is complete through the end of Yuan Shu's territory. If you don't want to play through the beta multiple times while testing be sure to keep a save after Yuan Shu's defeat or wait for the next revision when you reach that point! If you do continue playing, please make sure you pay close attention to your tactics and offer feedback as you see them develop.

Release Notes
I'm at it again! Thanks to some wonderful new discoveries made with thanks to Niahak for his vital research and knowledge and Arakasi not only for prodding me along, but also for taking the initiative and providing some excellent ideas, the time has come to upgrade Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.00 to Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.1. I guess that 2.0 sure makes things a little confusing! This is the first major revision of the first official release.

Project Goals
The 1.1 revision will include additional game balance tweaking but, unlike the previous version, it will not be limited only to battles, armor, enemies and weapons. Tactics have been adjusted quite significantly and some major changes will be made to the ways in which officers appear. Some other interesting changes are going to be made, such as alterations to weapon attack powers. The key focus of this revision is to make your party even more versatile, capable, and interesting. This involves some changes that increase difficulty and other changes that will make things easier.

• Weapon Attack Power Adjustments
• Tactics Learned and Stored Differently
• Considerable Differences Between Strategists
• More Than Two End-of-Game Tactic Strategies
• Tactic Costs Adjusted
• New Enemies, New Battle Surprises!
• New Game Balance Adjustments and Challenges

Are you interested in participating? Please play along with us as beta revisions are released. Improvements made to Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v.1.1 will also be used in the Cao Cao edition which I will be resuming development of in short order (another one of those things we owe thanks to Niahak for -- he's making a very enticing text tool!)

[James]

While haxz0ring hexadecimals James got distracted...

[James]

Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.1b2

Download Version 1.1b2

Official Home Page: Destiny of an Emperor 2.0

Playing and Testing This Release
This revision includes all of the changes made above in DoaE 2.0 v.1.1b1 and is complete all the way up to Shu, including a brand new Lu Bu battle (which will delivery a very different experience from the previous one). I haven't done too much officer swapping except at a few points due to a side effect which causes officers to duplicate. There may be a solution but that will have to wait until Niahak can share some thoughts. If you want to play along go through the game up until you reach Shu and give the Lu Bu battle a shot. A future beta will continue from there.

Release Notes
I'm at it again! Thanks to some wonderful new discoveries made with thanks to Niahak for his vital research and knowledge and Arakasi not only for prodding me along, but also for taking the initiative and providing some excellent ideas, the time has come to upgrade Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.00 to Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v. 1.1. I guess that 2.0 sure makes things a little confusing! This is the second major revision of the first official release.

Project Goals
The 1.1 revision will include additional game balance tweaking but, unlike the previous version, it will not be limited only to battles, armor, enemies and weapons. Tactics have been adjusted quite significantly and some major changes will be made to the ways in which officers appear. Some other interesting changes are going to be made, such as alterations to weapon attack powers. The key focus of this revision is to make your party even more versatile, capable, and interesting. This involves some changes that increase difficulty and other changes that will make things easier.

• Weapon Attack Power Adjustments
• Tactics Learned and Stored Differently
• Considerable Differences Between Strategists
• More Than Two End-of-Game Tactic Strategies
• Tactic Costs Adjusted
• New Enemies, New Battle Surprises!
• New Game Balance Adjustments and Challenges

Are you interested in participating? Please play along with us as beta revisions are released. Improvements made to Destiny of an Emperor 2.0 v.1.1 will also be used in the Cao Cao edition which I will be resuming development of in short order (another one of those things we owe thanks to Niahak for -- he's making a very enticing text tool!)

[Arakasi]

I'm experimenting with some of your more drastic ideas and I'm pretty curious how they'll work out. I did limit Jin Xian to Zhuge Liang, though, and I'm a little curious about how much an officer who knows both Ce Mian and An Sha might impact the game.

Heya, just got your pm but figured I should post on the public thread. Anyway I did some decent amount of playing before with the changes I had made to tactics. (basically did all of Wu, first part of Wei and the final battle with Sima Yi) Just to list again what the ranges were. Plus I'm pretty involved right now in playing LoLB.

This leads to everyone up to 225 having Li Jian, then everyone up to 245 having An Sha, with everyone 246 and over having Bei Ji.

I put my changeover value for Jin Xian at 242 and Wan Fu at 210. Anyone 210 to 241 has Wan Fu, anyone 242 or over has Jin Xian.

Gui Huan and Tui Lu were both put at 255. So poor Zhuge Liang is the only one to have it now. I should just download the character editor and change his int by 1. Thus now everyone has Yi Xin.

Ce Mian set to a requirement of 236. Thus Zhou Yu has it, Jiang Wei doesn't.

For the tests it really only matters in the Wu/Wei portions of the game. The only issue I have with testing is I'm not really interested right now in playing from the start through to Shu. The content there is pretty well balanced already and these changes don't really do that much due to the region code/tactic limit thing. (like why Jia Xu in Dong Zhuo's army doesn't have great tactics, neither does Fa Zheng. Sure you could level up really high and go into Shu at over level 30, but thats a joke regardless of how you do it since you're hitting 10k health around that time)

So yeah I did Wu, part of Wei and the last battle with the changes. Due to how the tactics work here, these are the options you have. Everyone has Yi Xin.

1) Under 225 (might be 226, not sure what I set it to, it might have been with Lu Su's value): Wan Fu/Li Jian/Ji Mian
2) 225-235: Wan Fu/An Sha/Ji Mian
3) 236-241: Wan Fu/An Sha/Ce Mian
4) 242-245: Jin Xian/An Sha/Ce Mian
5) 246-254: Jin Xian/Bei Ji/Ce Mian

Also recall I am playing this with a maxed out TPs. I'm at 160 or something crazy like that. Normal people playing through will have between 120 and 135. Probably like 125-135 is where most will end up with this mod, due to how good Huo Hu is and how having him will make you get all the TP level ups.

So looking at the above types of tactics and how they worked when I played the game here is how I rated them on how they worked for me.

1) Option 5, still the best. An Sha is expensive and tends to not work quickly on 240+ int guys. Sure Fa Zheng seems to be a beast for me at times, but still often I'll have to go 3-4 times before it goes off. In the end of Wu fight (when trying to do them consecutively) and the Sima fights its really a bad idea. An Sha might get rid of everyone but Sun Quan/Sima Yi, but then you have an issue. You likely have a high int party to get it off, using people like Zhou Yu/Jiang Wei/Zhuge/etc. (quite often I went with 2 of them, sometimes 3) This screwed me once I got to the immune guy. With a lack of 240+ power guys and no Bei Ji, Sima Yi is virtually impossible to kill and Sun Quan ran me out of TPs too with his lower health. Jin Xian/Bei Ji/Ce Mian with power pills loaded up is nice, safe and predictable and very very easy.

2) Option 4. I just don't like Wan Fu that much, and Ce Mian is better than Ji Mian. An Sha is very nice too. It makes for some quick battles, but its useless on boss fights.

3) The other 3 are fine, but well Ce Mian is better than Ji Mian so it pretty much goes down the scale.

I wouldn't mind an option where you could have Bei Ji, Ji Rou and Li Jian for some nice physical based action, but due to how Bei Ji works that really isn't possible. I guess my point is Ji Mian isn't all that useful compared to the tactic that it replaced and the one that replaces it.

As well like you said you're not sure on how Ce Mian and An Sha interact. While it does make some options open for us, I don't think its that powerful. The main thing I think it does is make the game more difficult. Basically if an enemy doesn't have a Ce Mian advisor in endgame they are easy meat. The standard Zhuge tactic just wipes them out, Ce Mian locks down the tactics and then the brute squad goes to town with Bei Ji/PPs. So to make the battles harder in Wu I feel its important that the enemies have one guy at least capable of Ce Mian. I lost to Zhou Yu and Lu Xun several times each because of how they controlled the battle with Ce Mian before I could do anything about it. This is another place where the standard An Sha/Ce Mian is bad. You Ce Mian with your fastest guy, but they jump in front of you and Ce Mian first, then 2-3 An Sha's go off and you've just wasted 20-30 TPs.

This is especially evident in Wu where none of the battles seem to have more than 3 officers. They don't have the number of men to really wear you down, and thus when you take control the battle is over. Sure you can be in Wu and still not have all your tactics, but that won't last til much past the Zhou Yu battle, unless you are trying some minimum level game, with how the hit points are of guys wouldn't be very plausible.

The only way I saw that this weakened the enemy a bit was in the top bracket. Obviously Wan Fu for a 60k hp Sima Yi is more scary than a 5k Jin Xian. If we could find some way to modify the health of that tactic from 5k and 4 TP to like 10-12k and 10-12 tp it would give them a good balance of preventing from being zerged and being good group healing, especially if we put changes in to make Fire/Water group tactics cheaper and thus more usable.

I guess in the end I think the changes come down to 2 points.

1) Ce Mian/An Sha isn't better than Ce Mian/Bei Ji for your side, thus it doesn't replace one uber option with another. There are a couple battles it works as well in (like the last battle in Wei before Sima, the main advantage really is that its quicker), but it's more luck dependant and is inferior on boss battles.

2) Allowing people to Ce Mian/An Sha makes for stronger opponents. The only thing really that can oppose Ce Mian is them getting off a Ce Mian first. Well there is one other option that I thought of. It would be strange, but that would be to bring Jie Ce somehow back into play. However it is replaced by Yi Xin. If we set Yi Xin at something like 230, than it could be extremly dangerous if they could dispel Ce Mian with Jie Ce. However I'm not sure which one trumps which, from what I recall you can dispel when under Ce Mian but I'm not sure. Regardless as it stands now the only way for the AI to stop our Ce Mian from dominating is to Ce Mian us themselves. Which is why I like having Ce Mian in the 230s.

[Arakasi]

Similar to how you did Ji Rou for the final battle you could find a niche for Jie Ce. If the enemy in certain battles had officers who could dispell your Ce Mian, it could be very dangerous indeed and we could drop health totals. However since we can only have 1 tactician and not 5, we'd never use that tactic. Unless like I said you did something to make the requirement for Yi Xin very high, which I don't agree with considering early game stuff and how it would affect it.

[Arakasi]

I just noticed I didn't respond to your point about leaving Jin Xian for just Zhuge. Yeah that works and it does make Sima a bit harder. If we're not going to do anything about the fire/water tactics and can't do anything about how much it heals for, its probably better that way. But if we could have cheap group tactics than having a cheap group heal on certain enemy advisors would be powerful. But without one there is no need of the other.

[James]

1) Option 5, still the best. An Sha is expensive and tends to not work quickly on 240+ int guys. Sure Fa Zheng seems to be a beast for me at times, but still often I'll have to go 3-4 times before it goes off. In the end of Wu fight (when trying to do them consecutively) and the Sima fights its really a bad idea. An Sha might get rid of everyone but Sun Quan/Sima Yi, but then you have an issue. You likely have a high int party to get it off, using people like Zhou Yu/Jiang Wei/Zhuge/etc. (quite often I went with 2 of them, sometimes 3) This screwed me once I got to the immune guy. With a lack of 240+ power guys and no Bei Ji, Sima Yi is virtually impossible to kill and Sun Quan ran me out of TPs too with his lower health. Jin Xian/Bei Ji/Ce Mian with power pills loaded up is nice, safe and predictable and very very easy.

You make a good point about An Sha and I've been thinking it through as well. The TP hit you take with a tactician like Zhou Yu combined with the lack of Bei Ji is going to leave you in a tough position on those harder battles, especially with a bump in level requirements (something which was just recently figured out) and a bump in the cost of An Sha. But it definitely will be a lot of fun to have the option of using an An Sha/Ce Mian strategist for parts of the game.

The only way I saw that this weakened the enemy a bit was in the top bracket. Obviously Wan Fu for a 60k hp Sima Yi is more scary than a 5k Jin Xian. If we could find some way to modify the health of that tactic from 5k and 4 TP to like 10-12k and 10-12 tp it would give them a good balance of preventing from being zerged and being good group healing, especially if we put changes in to make Fire/Water group tactics cheaper and thus more usable.

That's definitely something to consider if we're ever able to find the multipliers. The catch, though, is finding just where they would be stored. We might enjoy some dumb luck looking around the tactics in the ROM (as similar-purpose things are frequently grouped together and it wouldn't be too hard to recognize certain patterns) but there's no real way I can think of to go searching for those values because we have no way to measure them.

Similar to how you did Ji Rou for the final battle you could find a niche for Jie Ce. If the enemy in certain battles had officers who could dispell your Ce Mian, it could be very dangerous indeed and we could drop health totals. However since we can only have 1 tactician and not 5, we'd never use that tactic. Unless like I said you did something to make the requirement for Yi Xin very high, which I don't agree with considering early game stuff and how it would affect it.

I've done that, actually.
There's a peep with Cao Pi at Ru Nan, for example, who loves to dispel your Ce Mians. He actually got me killed in one of my playthroughs because he got a bit trigger happy with Jie Ce... and Cao Pi got a bit too happy with his head hunting. There are other officers with Jie Ce as well. It is a nice way to make a general with poor tactics dangerous enough for extra consideration and strategy. One Jie Ce in a dangerous battle can easily undo the control you once had with Ce Mian.

I just noticed I didn't respond to your point about leaving Jin Xian for just Zhuge. Yeah that works and it does make Sima a bit harder. If we're not going to do anything about the fire/water tactics and can't do anything about how much it heals for, its probably better that way. But if we could have cheap group tactics than having a cheap group heal on certain enemy advisors would be powerful. But without one there is no need of the other.

I already planned to reduce the cost of the fire/water tactics. Well, to an extent. I made Huo Shen and Shui Long quite a bit cheaper. They are wonderful tactics but they just don't get used much later in the game because your TP is too precious for preserving control of a battle. Thanks to the increase in soldier counts later on they aren't quite as powerful (though they can still tear things up when combined with Bei Ji) so I've made them much more enticing. It is a change I've made in the name of having fun.

Earlier tactics, though, like Da Re, have become more expensive. I'm not sure if you actually made use of Da Re while playing through, but it can do absolutely incredible things to the enemy when combined with Bei Ji. Also, you were learning it somewhere in Shu. Ma Chao, even with his soldier boost, bursts into one glorious fireball and dies when Da Re is used properly. The fire tactics can also be pretty powerful earlier in the game (like Yan Re). They aren't quite as wonderful going through JIngzhou, though.

I'm starting on Jingzhou in my Cao Cao mod right now.

[Arakasi]

The problem really with the game is all these changes kind of remind me in ways of how LoLB works. They make things harder by just making you load more. If enemy gets off Ji Rou, reset since there is no way you can beat Sima Yi with 60k health at 50% damage. If an enemy gets off a couple Jie Ce's, reset because you've now run out of tactic points. If the initial enemy you're going for gets Wan Fu'd, reset since you can't recover from losing that 20-60k damage with 5 people still up, especially since you've likely burned Power Pills to get them. It's all pretty silly in the long term, because while its harder there is really no way for us to actually deal with it or play better. We still do the exact same thing, it just takes longer/more tries to win.

Due to the inflexibility of the tactic system at least regarding our advisors and the issue we run into with TP limitations (and none on the enemy plus 5 advisors to our one) it gets really stupid very quickly. It would be better if things were tuned less tightly, but then it just becomes too easy. It's all very annoying really. At least thats the good thing with not knowing how to set immunity. At least we can An Sha a bunch of battles before struggling through 5-6 insane ones. (3 Sima battles, Cao Pi twice, Sun Quan if you do it right)

[James]

The problem really with the game is all these changes kind of remind me in ways of how LoLB works. They make things harder by just making you load more. If enemy gets off Ji Rou, reset since there is no way you can beat Sima Yi with 60k health at 50% damage. If an enemy gets off a couple Jie Ce's, reset because you've now run out of tactic points. If the initial enemy you're going for gets Wan Fu'd, reset since you can't recover from losing that 20-60k damage with 5 people still up, especially since you've likely burned Power Pills to get them. It's all pretty silly in the long term, because while its harder there is really no way for us to actually deal with it or play better. We still do the exact same thing, it just takes longer/more tries to win.

This is true to an extent but as we're going along we're learning new ways to add strategy and make things a bit easier where it counts. For example, adding a control tactic in place of Gui Huan is great. I'm making the swords more powerful and I'm even boosting the Halberd to 255. I hope to make the fire tactics more useful too. Better officers are available (especially in the Cao Cao version where you've got incredible officers as you go through the game).

There is a bit of a trick to balancing things out at the end, though. There are some other really tough battles in the game where things can go sour quite quickly, but for the most part many battles are actually quite fun (at least I think they are). I don't mind making the final battles really really challenging, though (and I'm always open to feedback on this). It is a sort of fitting retro-esque end to the game.

On specific note, Ji Rou can be really harsh. If that is used early in the Sima battle, for example, you might as well just restart, but you can recover if it is used a bit later. Jie Ce, on the other hand, is not as bad. You've played through with enemies using Jie Ce and many other people have too. Quite a few noticed but it wasn't the sort of thing that just breaks battles. It is just a curveball.

I hope to work in variation and strengths that balance this out and add strategy.

Due to the inflexibility of the tactic system at least regarding our advisors and the issue we run into with TP limitations (and none on the enemy plus 5 advisors to our one) it gets really stupid very quickly. It would be better if things were tuned less tightly, but then it just becomes too easy. It's all very annoying really. At least thats the good thing with not knowing how to set immunity. At least we can An Sha a bunch of battles before struggling through 5-6 insane ones. (3 Sima battles, Cao Pi twice, Sun Quan if you do it right)

There's no sense worrying about the aspects which we can't change, of course.

The last Sima battle is brutal. Period. But some of the other battles you mentioned were really fun (at least they were to me). I adore the Ru Nan Cao Pi battle. It is really tough, but I think I got just the right balance there. You can beat it pretty consistently if you use the right strategy but there isn't much room for mistakes. Curveballs like Jie Ce in that battle, and some extra dangerous tactics, turn it into a little bit of a roller coaster ride.

Sun Quan's battle is going to be quite different in the next version.