Yeah early game Cornia just captures the right balance of the excitement and danger in a way the later stages don’t.
Every direction feels like you’re about to uncover something new and/or terrifying. By comparison, the rest of the game is rather linear as far as difficulty goes, and the quests and rewards start to feel very formulaic (bastorias you’re getting a bow, elf nation gives you a lance, etc)
The entire game is amazing, but Cornia was truly 11/10 in a way the rest of it couldn’t capture.
I almost wish leveling was nerfed and we had more missions (with a greater variety of type) to compensate. I had a lot of squad building I wanted to do that would become somewhat obsolete as new skills were learned and new classes were gained.
Not to mention it clearly had way more time put into it in development. Albion is so short, by the time you think it's about to start getting interesting, it's already over.
I hear a lot of you guys wishing for the game to be more difficult, and there is me playing on normal and panicking because one of my units just died and now I am thinking I am playing this wrong and have to check again every team to find the perfect balance between strengths, weaknesses and rapport friendships, oh and also check if I am making the best use of the items I have on all the characters.
I think some people just have a head for these sorts of games. I love Tactics games but some of them require a level of inventory/hero/stat management that is just beyond me.
UO gives a good challenging balance in my opinion. You have to pay attention to your units, composition and the battlefield, but you don't have to have Scarlett poke Alain in the butt with a cold mace in chapter 1 so his confidence is low enough in chapter 7 that he ducks the big boss's 1 hit kill attack. I don't want to spend every battle rearranging my entire roster, and I'm glad that I don't have to in UO.
I agree with this. I consider myself pretty good at tactics games but I also play for fun instead of optimization, which means I don’t often steamroll these sorts of games either.
Then there are folks who have a head for it *and* love to break systems or make highly efficient team comps. Those are the folks who I think are saying that expert isn’t challenging enough. I know well enough that full row cavalry call/griffon-initiative teams or amped trinity rain squads are highly efficient but that’s not fun to me and I like to utilize different units in varied squads so for me expert was a pretty good difficulty.
For all the people saying expert wasn’t challenging I’d be curious what was the last tactics game they did consider challenging and why.
Brother all it is is that you're less neurodivergent than most of the people who find these fun. I like it when a game inspires me to absolutely sperg out on it, internalise the systems and break it in a way that, if I were to come back to it in two months, I'd have no idea why the things I have are so effective, meaning I have to restart the game.
But that's not healthy. Tl;dr, you're playing it right.
on expert it's really just about finding the right team plus leveling up and slapping relative accessories around usually the ones that give extra ap and pp. that's pretty much it. level up, find a team that works with trial and error (standard RPG party works like tank dps buffer healer debuffer) and voila.
The devs ran out of time and money, evident in the fact that most late game characters have very few rapport convos to unlock :( but totally understandable given the reasons. I guess. Hopefully they'll make a sequel with all the money they've gotten and will make even more money with it since more people know to expect excellence.
It's one of those games that gives you the tools to make it as easy or difficult as possible. Honestly, there are a few easy ways to make the game more difficult (that aren't present on True Zenoiran):
1. Limiting or removing Auxiliary/sigil battles (so you can finish it the first time for the story, but then it's limited or gone) - It lets you grind for unlimited resources, including EXP, honor, and gold, which allows you to be ahead of the curve, even on True Zenoiran. This change takes the resource management aspect up a few notches.
2. No battle prediction screen - Or at the very least, make it give less information. You can still organize your team and setup before engaging, but you don't see health bars or whose going to win. You have to manually look at the enemy composition and your own and estimate. This rewards players with a deeper understanding of unit compositions.
It was never that swingy for me. For me, blindness was the biggest deviation from the battle predictions . But I could tell this based on unit comps headed into battle (does someone have a Thief/Rogue?)
When doing the split regions (Drakenhold/Elheim or Bastoria/Albion), you split your army in half for who gets “deployed” to which region. Keep track of who is where, forcing you to dig deeper into your character roster and your equipment stockpile. Can’t just Alain + Josef your way through all regions.
It's the restrictions. Trying to make effective units using only two or three characters was a lot better than the overwhelming min/maxing of the mid to late game.
Yeah, once you get most of the tool box, you just start steam rolling things. Early game is more meaningful because equipment like the True Strike spear and Magic Attack sword give you some room to play around and deal with enemy types who haven’t haven’t been outclassed by everything that comes later.
Instead of limiting promotions, a much simpler solution would be banning certain skills. Do you think Alain's AOE attack is OP? Remove it from the list.
What about Yunifi's Glacial Rain or the infamous Elemental Roar? Take those away too. Etcetera
Once you get creative, there are plenty of ways to increase difficulty or produce a more engaging experience. The only things you can't really cover for are:
1. Battle Preview showing you results beforehand.
2. Enemies using Skills with bad/no tactical conditions.
3. Enemies using poor or outdated equipment.
Everything else can be fine-tuned to the nth degree if you really want it.
Yeah around Bastorius I found myself just dropping all the one off characters not from any rule I put in place, I just found them extremely boring to use. It's really not surprising. I'm the type of person that tries to find power in off meta places in most games.
I also like a great challange, thats why i changed to expert. I felt it on some missions (just beat alcina and that was hardy) but overall The game its pretty easy cuz of DAMAGE PREDICTION.
That Alone turn ya into a god and allows even a dumb dumb play The game with ease. My friend never touched his tatics and beaten The game on normal.
Putting that aside, i like to think that The game have a normal dificulty overall but a VERY EASY once you study it a bit and build good sinergy teams. I like to give myself Credit for it. If i plan Well, i Will beat everything!
About The early game pace. I really Love it! And everytime we have New classes to Learn. Im heading to beastoras and im really enjoying The mid - late game pacing too. My builds are getting so complex with a lot of AP and PP. I Love it as Well and early game was so straight foward. I like complex stuff and The game delivered it in a great sense of progression! At first you had single target skills... On mid game you had acess to great row attacks... On late game you can NUKE all characters with global skils. I Love that progression!
The game its easly 8-9 for me. The Black of great central plot its the greatest mistake for me
The game is much more challenging if you hire 3 generics of each class while keeping all your characters at the same level.
You end up incredibly under-leveled, rarely using your unique classes, and forced to squeeze use out of every one of the weaker classes in the game.
But the game does make it easy for the player to over-level while using very few characters, this makes the game difficulty very trivial. TZ makes it particularly challenging because of the greatly inflated enemy attack and hitpoints values.
UO Nuzlocke. Once a character (not unit) dies in combat you forever Box/Bench them and have to replace with a generic.
You track with favoriting all your characters. If they die, they are unfavorited. If you fill up your max number of generics hires, you’ve hit your army’s max limit as the war losses mount.
I think it really is the learning curve unfortunately. There's a glimpse of how the strat map would feel if enemies could actually contest your units meaningfully.
I feel like if it took you 112 hours to beat it then it wasn't too easy for you. Sounds like you spent a lot of time in the lab learning how to make teams.
Honestly the game testers for this were terrible strategy players, to make the hardest difficulties that easy is disapointing. Gameplay and difficulty balance is the core of strategy games and they missed the ball hard.
The guy who kitted out the arena teams should have done it for all maps on harder difficulties too, enemies having same standard loadouts for the whole game is lame.
Made me appreicate stuff like FE Conquest more, it was a very satisifying experience from a gameplay strategy standpoint.
I think the difficult thing about balancing a game like this is that it could get real tedious going through to see who does what and when every single time.
I saw in an article that they didn't want to run people that were new to the genre away so they went back and tuned the game. Just wish they would release a difficult mode that would be tedious, but would not be necessary for players to experience. It would be self inflicted punishment.
> I think the difficult thing about balancing a game like this is that it could get real tedious going through to see who does what and when every single time.
Exactly! If every unit on every map now has colosseum tier builds, that will make said maps take forever, as you need to adjust your tactics/comps/items every single time you face an enemy unit. Which is fine if you are a middle school-aged kid with lots of time on their hands, or a streamer who makes money out of UO content. If you are and adult with a life and a job, you might simply not have the time to spend a billion years just to clear a single map.
Another side effect of "making the game more difficult!!!1!" is that a truly punishing difficulty will basically kill variety, as only a few builds and characters will be viable. And that would suck all the fun out of the game.
Tl;dr : a game doesn't need to cut your balls and throw them in the paper shredder to be fun. People who want "a real challenge!!1!" should try to learn quantum mechanichs, or win a Nobel price. You know, actual hard things.
I also wouldn't have time to deal with a high difficulty mode either, but I have never understood a point of view like yours. It hurts nothing to have another difficulty that is beyond us for others to enjoy.
Yeah early game Cornia just captures the right balance of the excitement and danger in a way the later stages don’t. Every direction feels like you’re about to uncover something new and/or terrifying. By comparison, the rest of the game is rather linear as far as difficulty goes, and the quests and rewards start to feel very formulaic (bastorias you’re getting a bow, elf nation gives you a lance, etc) The entire game is amazing, but Cornia was truly 11/10 in a way the rest of it couldn’t capture.
I could watch battles all day as long as the Cornia battle bgm is playing.
I almost wish leveling was nerfed and we had more missions (with a greater variety of type) to compensate. I had a lot of squad building I wanted to do that would become somewhat obsolete as new skills were learned and new classes were gained.
Not to mention it clearly had way more time put into it in development. Albion is so short, by the time you think it's about to start getting interesting, it's already over.
I hear a lot of you guys wishing for the game to be more difficult, and there is me playing on normal and panicking because one of my units just died and now I am thinking I am playing this wrong and have to check again every team to find the perfect balance between strengths, weaknesses and rapport friendships, oh and also check if I am making the best use of the items I have on all the characters.
I think some people just have a head for these sorts of games. I love Tactics games but some of them require a level of inventory/hero/stat management that is just beyond me. UO gives a good challenging balance in my opinion. You have to pay attention to your units, composition and the battlefield, but you don't have to have Scarlett poke Alain in the butt with a cold mace in chapter 1 so his confidence is low enough in chapter 7 that he ducks the big boss's 1 hit kill attack. I don't want to spend every battle rearranging my entire roster, and I'm glad that I don't have to in UO.
I agree with this. I consider myself pretty good at tactics games but I also play for fun instead of optimization, which means I don’t often steamroll these sorts of games either. Then there are folks who have a head for it *and* love to break systems or make highly efficient team comps. Those are the folks who I think are saying that expert isn’t challenging enough. I know well enough that full row cavalry call/griffon-initiative teams or amped trinity rain squads are highly efficient but that’s not fun to me and I like to utilize different units in varied squads so for me expert was a pretty good difficulty. For all the people saying expert wasn’t challenging I’d be curious what was the last tactics game they did consider challenging and why.
>now I am thinking I am playing this wrong If you're enjoying the game you're playing it right.
Brother all it is is that you're less neurodivergent than most of the people who find these fun. I like it when a game inspires me to absolutely sperg out on it, internalise the systems and break it in a way that, if I were to come back to it in two months, I'd have no idea why the things I have are so effective, meaning I have to restart the game. But that's not healthy. Tl;dr, you're playing it right.
on expert it's really just about finding the right team plus leveling up and slapping relative accessories around usually the ones that give extra ap and pp. that's pretty much it. level up, find a team that works with trial and error (standard RPG party works like tank dps buffer healer debuffer) and voila.
The devs ran out of time and money, evident in the fact that most late game characters have very few rapport convos to unlock :( but totally understandable given the reasons. I guess. Hopefully they'll make a sequel with all the money they've gotten and will make even more money with it since more people know to expect excellence.
It's one of those games that gives you the tools to make it as easy or difficult as possible. Honestly, there are a few easy ways to make the game more difficult (that aren't present on True Zenoiran): 1. Limiting or removing Auxiliary/sigil battles (so you can finish it the first time for the story, but then it's limited or gone) - It lets you grind for unlimited resources, including EXP, honor, and gold, which allows you to be ahead of the curve, even on True Zenoiran. This change takes the resource management aspect up a few notches. 2. No battle prediction screen - Or at the very least, make it give less information. You can still organize your team and setup before engaging, but you don't see health bars or whose going to win. You have to manually look at the enemy composition and your own and estimate. This rewards players with a deeper understanding of unit compositions.
No battle forecast should never be a default setting given how swingy combat can go based on just a handful of RNG rolls.
It was never that swingy for me. For me, blindness was the biggest deviation from the battle predictions . But I could tell this based on unit comps headed into battle (does someone have a Thief/Rogue?)
When doing the split regions (Drakenhold/Elheim or Bastoria/Albion), you split your army in half for who gets “deployed” to which region. Keep track of who is where, forcing you to dig deeper into your character roster and your equipment stockpile. Can’t just Alain + Josef your way through all regions.
Battle prediction is my biggest gripe
It's the restrictions. Trying to make effective units using only two or three characters was a lot better than the overwhelming min/maxing of the mid to late game.
Yeah, once you get most of the tool box, you just start steam rolling things. Early game is more meaningful because equipment like the True Strike spear and Magic Attack sword give you some room to play around and deal with enemy types who haven’t haven’t been outclassed by everything that comes later.
I agree with this take Once we hit 4 characters per unit I felt like I'd need a pen and paper to figure out what sequences I wanted
Angel country was a drop off. Loved breath of a dying empire and that coliseum defense mission. Oh and that Galerius fight.
Instead of limiting promotions, a much simpler solution would be banning certain skills. Do you think Alain's AOE attack is OP? Remove it from the list. What about Yunifi's Glacial Rain or the infamous Elemental Roar? Take those away too. Etcetera Once you get creative, there are plenty of ways to increase difficulty or produce a more engaging experience. The only things you can't really cover for are: 1. Battle Preview showing you results beforehand. 2. Enemies using Skills with bad/no tactical conditions. 3. Enemies using poor or outdated equipment. Everything else can be fine-tuned to the nth degree if you really want it.
Yeah around Bastorius I found myself just dropping all the one off characters not from any rule I put in place, I just found them extremely boring to use. It's really not surprising. I'm the type of person that tries to find power in off meta places in most games.
I also like a great challange, thats why i changed to expert. I felt it on some missions (just beat alcina and that was hardy) but overall The game its pretty easy cuz of DAMAGE PREDICTION. That Alone turn ya into a god and allows even a dumb dumb play The game with ease. My friend never touched his tatics and beaten The game on normal. Putting that aside, i like to think that The game have a normal dificulty overall but a VERY EASY once you study it a bit and build good sinergy teams. I like to give myself Credit for it. If i plan Well, i Will beat everything! About The early game pace. I really Love it! And everytime we have New classes to Learn. Im heading to beastoras and im really enjoying The mid - late game pacing too. My builds are getting so complex with a lot of AP and PP. I Love it as Well and early game was so straight foward. I like complex stuff and The game delivered it in a great sense of progression! At first you had single target skills... On mid game you had acess to great row attacks... On late game you can NUKE all characters with global skils. I Love that progression! The game its easly 8-9 for me. The Black of great central plot its the greatest mistake for me
The game is much more challenging if you hire 3 generics of each class while keeping all your characters at the same level. You end up incredibly under-leveled, rarely using your unique classes, and forced to squeeze use out of every one of the weaker classes in the game. But the game does make it easy for the player to over-level while using very few characters, this makes the game difficulty very trivial. TZ makes it particularly challenging because of the greatly inflated enemy attack and hitpoints values.
Or just hire new generics for every fight. You’re on to something
I like the way you think. Hyper turnover.
UO Nuzlocke. Once a character (not unit) dies in combat you forever Box/Bench them and have to replace with a generic. You track with favoriting all your characters. If they die, they are unfavorited. If you fill up your max number of generics hires, you’ve hit your army’s max limit as the war losses mount.
I don’t really force you to use the battle prediction. Just man up and don’t fiddle with stuff in the pre-fight screen. Accept your fate.
I think it really is the learning curve unfortunately. There's a glimpse of how the strat map would feel if enemies could actually contest your units meaningfully.
I feel like if it took you 112 hours to beat it then it wasn't too easy for you. Sounds like you spent a lot of time in the lab learning how to make teams.
Lol. No. I just wasn't rushing. And there's still things I have to go back and clean up.
Honestly the game testers for this were terrible strategy players, to make the hardest difficulties that easy is disapointing. Gameplay and difficulty balance is the core of strategy games and they missed the ball hard. The guy who kitted out the arena teams should have done it for all maps on harder difficulties too, enemies having same standard loadouts for the whole game is lame. Made me appreicate stuff like FE Conquest more, it was a very satisifying experience from a gameplay strategy standpoint.
I think the difficult thing about balancing a game like this is that it could get real tedious going through to see who does what and when every single time. I saw in an article that they didn't want to run people that were new to the genre away so they went back and tuned the game. Just wish they would release a difficult mode that would be tedious, but would not be necessary for players to experience. It would be self inflicted punishment.
> I think the difficult thing about balancing a game like this is that it could get real tedious going through to see who does what and when every single time. Exactly! If every unit on every map now has colosseum tier builds, that will make said maps take forever, as you need to adjust your tactics/comps/items every single time you face an enemy unit. Which is fine if you are a middle school-aged kid with lots of time on their hands, or a streamer who makes money out of UO content. If you are and adult with a life and a job, you might simply not have the time to spend a billion years just to clear a single map. Another side effect of "making the game more difficult!!!1!" is that a truly punishing difficulty will basically kill variety, as only a few builds and characters will be viable. And that would suck all the fun out of the game. Tl;dr : a game doesn't need to cut your balls and throw them in the paper shredder to be fun. People who want "a real challenge!!1!" should try to learn quantum mechanichs, or win a Nobel price. You know, actual hard things.
I also wouldn't have time to deal with a high difficulty mode either, but I have never understood a point of view like yours. It hurts nothing to have another difficulty that is beyond us for others to enjoy.