Dirtfall

Thanks for the responses, think I'm going to skip the DLC - or maybe I'll circle back to it after completing Maddening on its own. It's a weird position to be in with the content, where what's on offer is antithetical to what I want. The Maddening draw is more challenge and DLC seems to be more stuff (which directly reduces that challenge). At least that was my impression of it, wanted make sure before I did or didn't make any purchases. Appreciate the input.

Been playing Fire Emblem games for a while, back when Lunatic difficulty was regularly included. Am returning to Three Houses after a long break. I played through initially before the Maddening update and was turned off by how easy the game was (even on Hard Mode). I've been drawn back in by things I've heard about Maddening Mode - specifically how much more challenging it is. I was considering getting all the DLC waves, but from what I've heard they mostly make the game much easier. Is this accurate? My main attraction to coming back is the new challenge, would I be spending money to water that down? Or is that not a factor and does the DLC add a level of enjoyment in a different way?

I was trying to think of something to say that captured my excitement and and appreciation for all that you've done Aethin. This is what I came up with: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ah, complaints about hit rates... heheh, takes me back to the XCOM boards (I missed a 99% chance! How? I made it the other 99 times!) I feel the need to weigh in on this. The thing to remember is that you're attacking. A lot. And you're hitting. A lot. And it never seems worthwhile to note when it goes your way. If you attack with a 70% hit chance and score a hit twice you probably don't think anything of it, but that wasn't the likely outcome (49%). Hitting three of those in a row is a 1 in 3 chance, but you still probably don't think anything of it. You certainly don't say "I hit three 70%s in a row, these percentages are bull****!" But those are about the odds of you missing a 70% chance. And I'll bet you remember that (probably because the results of that miss were more consequential than the time you hit three 70%s in a row). Part of this is the way the human brain is set up. We're programmed to remember and learn through failure more than success. You want a really easy way to discover this? Start a weekly poker game with your friends. After a few sessions your friends will be bitterly complaining about the hands you won when a lucky card comes up - and you won't remember it at all. But you'll remember every single game you lost when an unlucky card took you down (and your friends won't!). The example given earlier was missing a 92% and an enemy hitting a 23%. Statistically, that is about a 2% chance. That means if you attack an enemy with those odds 100 times you're likely to see that twice. And maybe those two were the first two times it happened! And maybe you actually get that bad outcome 5 times in a row! There's a percentage for that happening too (math is hard)! Basically, if you sit around rolling dice long enough you'll see some strange outcomes. And that's what these encounters between your units and enemies are - rolling dice dozens of times each level behind all the animations. If this sounds like the kind of number theory that would appeal to a gambler, well, yes. That's what it is. That's the appeal of these games, whether you know it or not. This isn't like chess, where the right piece in the right place means a specific outcome. Games like this are about maximizing the percentage of success and minimizing the percentage of failure. That is the entirety of the strategy taking place. Nothing is guaranteed. No matter who plays this game, they will see spectacular victories and absurd defeats. It's going to happen. It'll be with different characters, in different scenarios, but everyone will experience it. The fun comes from looking at a scenario full of percentages stacked against you, then making decisions that begin to push the numbers your way. Then rolling the dice. (You could argue that's what commanders in actual war are doing too) And hey, that's not for everybody. Some people will find that stressful and unenjoyable. I mean, there's nothing you can do to guarantee success. And that's fine, these games aren't for everyone. But let's get it out in the open what's going on under the hood. And know that some people love it.

Thanks for the update Aethin! You are beast for putting in this work. And I agree with the sentiment on the board - take your time and finish at a pace you're comfortable with. Nobody's paying you for this, so I think everyone would rather see a product put out that you're happy with than a burnt out Aethin.

Aethin you badass. Soon the world shall know the carnage of an English Berwick Saga.

Outside interest in the game is certainly ramping up, especially as people begin to see how good it is (and those of us who have played it keep shouting about how good it is). Some of that may have to do with Vestaria Saga as well, as people who get exposed to that game start looking into Kaga's back catalog (which inevitably leads them to you). Aethin, I saw in one of these posts on here or on your blog that you've started teaching in Japan. If those students give you any trouble, just let them know you've got an army of nerds on the internet at your command! Respect for Aethin-sama!

Thanks Aethin. I barely speak my own language well, so I'm sure you've put in more work than I can imagine. Just wanted to be another person to tell you that your efforts are appreciated and Serenes Forest is cheering you on.

Thanks Aggro! That helps clear up some stumbling blocks for me. I've been reading through your and Aethin's guides, they've helped me get a much better sense of the flow of the game. It should say something about Berwick's complexity that after all that, there's still systems regarding something as detailed as horses for the player to figure out.

Started playing the Berwick Saga patch and am very much enjoying it. I had a couple mechanics questions regarding gameplay: Is there any way to switch horses other than Christine's Swap skill during combat? Is there a way to redistribute horses or anything like that in town or in the stables? In the Kingfisher Pavilion, seems as though there are only 8 people that show up in the restaurant and then they are locked there. When I hire new mercenaries, they won't be in the restaurant if 8 people are already there. Is there any way to switch who shows up in the restaurant? Am I missing something about the number of people who can be there? Thanks for giving this a look - Aethin is doing a great job on explaining the game, but the Berwick has a ton of subtle mechanics to it that I'm still catching up on.

Just discovered this project was happening, want to throw another thank you your way! I remember looking into this game many years ago and lamenting that English only speakers would likely never get to experience it. Thanks for putting in the time and effort (and probably tears) that will allow a whole new region of people to enjoy this game.

Hey Lamia. No, not applying more than one patch to a rom that I intend to use. I'm using Lunar IPS to apply the Shin Patch. For my clean rom, the file size is 4,194,304 bytes. This doesn't have a header, so I'm using nsrt 3.4 to open the file and the clicking "add headers to selected" to apply the header, which then has a file size of 4,194,816 bytes (though the "size on disk" value reads 4,198,400 bytes - not sure what that means, why the discrepancy, or how to change it). Once the header is applied I then use Lunar IPS.to apply Shin Patch 1.94, which then has a file size of 4,194,828 bytes (though again, the "size on disk" value reads 4,198,400 bytes - is this causing some sort of problem?). Do those numbers match up with yours? Thanks again for taking the time to help me with this.

Thanks for the reply Lamia. Yeah, with Camus' patch I guess I'm pretty much done due to technical issues; shame I was really enjoying it. As for the Shin patch, I tried your workaround and it just froze once the savestate loaded. I've tried it with two separate roms, which both seem clean (J) to me (playing them for a couple minutes shows they're in Japanese and don't seem to have any tinkering done to them). These same roms have no issues separately loading up any other patches: Gharnef's, twilkitri's, Camus' (mostly, until my chapter 3 bug). None of these patches were applied before or after Shin's patch was applied (I tried them separately just as an experiment to see if they had problems with other patches). I thought Shin's patch had twilkitri's built into it, but am I supposed to apply that first, is that the problem? I tried applying previous versions of Shin's patch to see if that might work but I can't seem to find any. All working links I've found on the internet lead to his forum post in Serenes Forest which has the most recent, 1.94 (which would probably normally be a good thing). Would anyone else mind applying 1.94 to a clean rom and seeing if they have any problems? The only thing I can come up with is that maybe the version that's up right has a kink in it (unlikely I know, but it's the only reason I can think of for why it seemingly has worked for everyone but me).

Hello. Recently discovered the Fire Emblem 4 hacks on this site and, wanting to try the game again, thought I'd give them a go. I've tried Shin's FE4 patch and Camus' Remix patch and been having problems with both, was hoping someone could advise. With Shin's patch I can't really get the game working at all (using the most recent version, 1.94). I have a clean headered version of the game and a clean non-headered version of the game (both of which run fine normally - wasn't sure which one was required for Shin's patch) but once the patch is applied by Lunar IPS patcher neither will run. I've tried it on the most recent versions of SNES9x and ZSNES, both result in the same dark screen. The only way I can get it to run at all is to apply the patch, load up the game in either of the emulators, have the emulator create an .srm file for that version, then close the emulator and delete the patched game. Then I take the original game, change the name to the name of the patched rom but WITHOUT applying the patch (so the old .srm will apply to it) and then load up the game. Somehow this seems to effectively load up the game but I have been wary to make any progress this way - I'm assuming this will lead to problems down the road, certainly once I get past the prologue and the game has to load data from the patch from a rom that doesn't actually have a patch. I'm assuming I screwed something up somewhere, but I'm not sure what. Is there something I have to do other than apply the patch to the game, maybe a setting on the emulator? Also, I've seen that Shin wrote to use ZSNES instead of SNES9x but that trick seems to work on both emulators, is SNES9x really unusable for the Shin patch? I tried Camus' patch as well, have been enjoying it and have made some progress but in chapter 3 I've run into a glitch I can't seem to get around. When Tiltyu and Claude show up in the middle of the chapter, the game suddenly crashes right before Claude's sprite appears on the screen. Tiltyu appears just fine but I hear a horse clopping noise when the game crashes, so my best guess is that this patch gave Claude a horse to ride and for whatever reason the emulator didn't know how to load it and crashed. This happens with both SNES9x and ZSNES. That trick I mentioned earlier about applying the .srm to an unpatched version of the game with the same name doesn't seem to work either (used that to get past a crash at another part of the patch) so I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure if this is a common problem with the patch or if fiddling with the emulator would provide any relief or... I don't know. Anyway, thanks ahead of time for the help and thanks to all those people for doing the work making these patches, hoping to find a way to enjoy them.