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Yes, I've upped everyone's bases as well as their growths. I'm not sure if you've seen the pictures with all the characters and their join stats. Again, regarding the enemy position, they are not the same as the original game. If you look at the screen shot, there is an armour slayer in chapter 1 (on Normal mode that guy only has a slim sword), one of the archers in chapter 3 has a long bow, etc. Enemy AI and placements have been reworked, there are now groups of enemies that you can't bait out one by one, they wait until you get inside the range of the guy at the back before they attack. There are early promoted enemies, i.e. Snipers in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8, Wyvern Lords in Chapter 7 and Bishops in Chapter 5x and 8. Also new event changes have been added. For example, the lone thief in Chapter 3 now has a door key, he starts moving towards the door by the end of second turn, when he opens the door, the enemies inside will rush towards you. This is to prevent the player from dilly-dallying outside and taking sweet time killing the brigands from the other side of the wall. Item drops have also been changed, like I've said above. You get a lot more stat boosters in the first 8 chapters (you now get 2 Energy Rings, 2 Angelic Robes, Speedwing, DracoShield, Skill Book, Goddess Icon and even Boots). All the promotion items have been changed to Master Seals so you can promote who ever you see fit. Natasha joins with a 5 use Rescue as well. Stronger weapons have been made available to you a lot earlier. Though I realize a lot of flexibility is gone without reclassing, shards and forging, I try to give you more options via the above items as well as letting player early access to Steel+ weapons, which are essentially silvers with more weight and a D rank requirement. Really, I didn't just go and buff up the enemy bases and called it a day. I changed their weapons, placement, AI, events as well as obtainable items and shop items. I've gone through the first 8 chapters on Hard, and I didn't have too many issues myself but that's because I knew what I was doing, which is why I wanted to get some feedback from others.

As mentioned in the above reply, the aim of the design here is to beef up enemy's offensive stats. Enemy defences largely remains the same as in the original game. As a matter of fact, I reduced their defences in the early game (I'll put up more screen shots of the actual enemy stats because right now a lot of the pictures are emphasizing the enemies' attack prowess). It's not a mindless stat inflation, I only buff certain stats to make them better at doing the job that they're supposed to do (which is to deal consistent damage to the player), I didn't make them into infallible tanks. Since you played the DS games, I take it you're familiar with their H5/Lunatic design philosophies. The aim here is pretty similar, it's hard for you to tank, it's hard for you to dodge. But on the other hand, killing enemies are not very difficult due to them having no defence and the weapons having better MT and HIT. Honestly, what's the point of massive adjustment to the enemy placement when you can simply send Seth into their midst and he takes like 1 dmg from every enemy whilst ORKOing them in return? I need to buff up their attack power so that they can actually be a threat. Also, only the first 2/3 chapters have similar placements to the original game, the rest have been changed (though most of the actual maps themselves still remain unchanged). Another thing not shown in the screen shots is that you get access to better weapons lot faster. Slim weapons are available starting from chapter 2, steel/steel+ are available starting from the end of chapter 5 and you can even buy Elfire/Divine tomes at the end of chapter 6. Also, I've added in more stat boosters in the early game, i.e. chapter 4 thief drops an Angelic Robe, Joshua comes with an Energy Ring (you still get the Energy Ring in Chapter 7 as well as the Angelic Robe in Chapter 8, so that's an extra robe and an extra ring), Chapter 8 also has Boots in one of the chests. I think that's should be more than enough to beat the first 8 chapters. Anyways, give it a shot and if you still have concerns, I welcome your feedback :)

Some of the early game maps are a little "tight" in space giving you little movement which means that you'll have to be more a little more careful with your position. Seth won't be able to destroy everything by himself due to all the enemies having high attack. Also keep in mind that in the prologue Seth starts off with only 13 HP, so you'll have to be extra careful. Yes, Seth can't stand up to the Horseplayer guy (actually, he could if he used his silver lance), but that doesn't mean Erika can't. As for Erika vs. O'Neill, she can totally take on O'Neill if it is a 1v1 fight. Both O'Neill and Erika deal 14 dmg to each other and the boss gets 3HKOd by Erika. Boss hits Erika and Erika goes down to 5HP and retaliates. On Player Phase, just have Erika use a vulnerary to go back up to 15HP. Enemy Phase boss attacks again and Erika drops down to 1HP, but that's fine because on Player Phase Erika attacks and finishes off the boss. You see, the enemy aren't as tough as they seem defensively, they have a lot of HP, but their true bulk is disguised by the fact that they only having paper tissues for armors. Take O'Neill for example, even though he has 36 HP, he only has a pitiful 2 DEF, this allows Erika to deal massive damage to him and KO him in 3 hits (Seth kills him in 2 Hits with an iron sword). As a matter of fact, majority of the early game enemies gets killed off in about 2 hits, that's it. Some of them gets straight up ORKOd or even OHKOd. Take the sword Cavaliers in Chapter 1, they have 28 HP and 5 DEF, a little calculation shows that base Erika exactly one shots these guys; Erika also two shots all the early game fighters (they have 30 HP and 1 DEF, so at base, Erika does exactly 15 dmg per hit to these guys). As for Seth getting ORKOd by the thief, that image was a little misleading, I should probably put up a better one. The thief was wielding a light brand and as you can see above, Seth has no resistance and I also didn't give him any pure water. I believe that thief also happened to proc an extra point of SPD, he should have 13/14 SPD if I remember correctly. But here's the thing, light brand gets the 1/2 STR dmg at range, so if you need to do some chip damage first, just attack him from the distance, base Arthur can do the chip job even without pure water. Vanessa can totally take him at close range and Erika should be able to do it as well. Chip damage + somebody like Seth, Gilliam or even Garcia should be able to finish the guy. One last thing I would like to say is that I think that people are too focused on enemies having high attack, speed and HP, but don't realize just how quickly these enemies fall. Just because Seth can't kill an enemy by himself doesn't mean that it's game over. The rest of the cast are not useless by any means, this hack is designed so that enemies have high attack but low defence, which means everyone of your characters can deal massive damage to the enemies. Take Erika vs. the fighter example from above, Erika KOs the 30 HP fighters in 2 hits, guess what, so does Seth. Do you see the implications here? It means that Seth isn't killing enemies that much better than the rest of the cast (though he's got more bulk and a horse). Or conversely, I should say that the rest of your cast can almost kill enemies just as well as Seth now. Try out the first few chapters and you'll see, it's really easy to kill enemies, but in return, enemies are also very good at killing you :)

Thanks for the reply. Though mind giving me a little more information? Which part does not look balanced? Also, I should mention that my goal is not to balance classes/characters. Some characters will be inherently better than others.

Here's the first hack which I'm currently working on. For simplicity, I decided to start with a difficulty hack to improve the gameplay of FE8. The aim of the hack is to ramp up Sacred Stone's difficulty via map design changes and enemy weapon/stat upgrades. In particular: -Enemy weapons scale very quickly -Enemies have high offensive stats -Weapon hit rates in general have been greatly improved (Hard mode enemies also get bonus +15 Hit) -Enemy AI/placement changes to prevent bait and kill tactics in some maps -Anti-turtling added to some maps in the form of thieves w/ chests/villages and reinforcement spawning (no ambush) -Player units also have their bases and growth rates buffed (except for Seth, who got a nerf to his bases but a buff to his growths nonetheless) -Better weapons are made available to the players a lot earlier via shop updates -All promotion item drops have been replaced with Master Seals -More stat boosters are dropped, obtained in the early game Hard mode is recommended. Though there do exist some differences between Normal and Hard (i.e. reinforcement timings and additional enemies on Hard), Normal is not properly balanced right now since some chapters are the same as Hard while others, especially the first few chapters, are a lot easier (also Normal was not tested). Dropbox Download Link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/djolyst8u86t2gr/AACpWjp2tcQzKswGBg542ttMa Apply the patch to an English FE8 ROM. Change log is provided for download in the link above. Sample Gameplay (Prologue ~ Chapter 1): Some small features added to the hack: -Addition of weapon rank bonus (thanks to Vennobennu's patch) -Hard mode enemy Hit bonus (Vennobennu's patch) -DS style supports - bonuses are added once at the beginning of the chapter - see change log for the chapters required to build support rank (thanks again to Vennobennu) -Fixed enemy stationary range display (credit to circleseverywhere) -Danger zone toggle, use select key by default (credit to circleseverywhere) Current progress: Prologue ~ Chapter 8 has been done Have a try and please leave a feedback :) Also, feel free to suggest a name for this hack! I'm very uncreative :( Screenshots:

Great, thanks! I repointed the animation pointer for the axe wielders to a separate table/list that included the new hand-axes and that worked :)

Not another hand-axe question :p Anyways, I was creating a new 1-2 range axe weapon and I've gone through the custom animation module and assigned it the hand axe animation. However, when I turn on the animation with the weapon, the wielder is still holding a regular axe and the battle could not continue. It seems like whatever routine that is checking the use of the proper hand axe animation is tied to the item id? I've previously tried something similar with some of the staves; I created a separate sleep staff with the only difference being the durability, but I was unable to use the staff at all. If this is the case, does anyone know where this routine is? Otherwise, how do I go about creating a new "hand axe" weapon? (This is for FE8 btw) Thanks!

I was modifying an FE8 map using the PNG converter with Mappy. After exporting the map, I inserted it using the MAR inserter and updated the pointer on the event data table (I didn't forget to add 0x08000000). Now when I start up the game, all the map tiles seem to be mapped incorrectly... So when I exported with Mappy, I asked it to give me a screenshot, and this is what I have (and what I expected): So the PNG shows the correct tiles. But when I open up the map in game, this is what I get: All the floor and wall tiles got mapped to the "blank" tiles, the unopened chests are now opened and all the water tiles turned into some green/white grass tiles (the grass tiles are actually from the same tileset, so the tileset should still be the correct one). It seems like the pointer is pointing to the correct map, but the tiles in the tileset are messed up. Since I was modifying an existing map, I am still using the exact same tileset. So I am thinking that maybe something got messed up when Mappy was exporting the map as MAR. Does someone have an idea what I might be doing wrong? P.S. This seems to be a similar issue to this other post here

So I just tried it out yesterday. The converter worked perfectly :) However I got some new issues with the map I modified, I'll make another post about it. That would be really nice :)

Ok, I'll give it a try :)

How do you guys go about tweaking an already existing map in the ROM? Say if I want to make a few small changes to a map in the original FE8, like moving a chest a bit to the left, adding a few extra blocks of forest tiles, etc. Hopefully I won't have to recreate the whole map.

Grr...Why do I always have the outdated stuff.... The constant is just one byte, correct? And wow, that was a fast reply :D

Hello! Does anyone have .nmm file for the terrain bonuses in FE8 that they don't mind sharing? Also, regarding the staff exp gains, if I remember correctly, FE8 uses a formula that is based on a constant + (staff gold value / 20). Where do I go to change the value of the constant? Many thanks in advance!

That's good to know, just want to make sure nothing else gets messed up if I wish to continue working with the same ROM. Thanks!

Ok, so the issue is: I opened my hacked ROM (FE8) with FEditor, did exactly nothing in the FEditor, then I immediately save. When I go back and loaded my ROM in an emulator, all of my units all of a sudden gained a bunch of stats (I didn't see any pattern to the amount of stats gained). Is this because FEditor is writing the wrong data to the wrong offsets? The units' base stats didn't change, I checked with Nightmare. Maybe FEditor did something with the save files? But when I loaded my backup ROM from before I saved with FEditor, all my units' stats are fine. Has anyone had this kind of issues before with FEditor or am I not using it correctly? Also, I've had other issues with FEditor: if I tried to edit text in the Text Editor, even something simple like adding a letter to a name, the game would crash when it tries to load the unit with the modified name. So far, I've only managed to be able to modify text in FEditor by first opening up the ROM, then immediately save, then open up the same ROM again and then I can edit and save. But as mentioned above, this causes other problems as well (so far the only issue I've noticed is with the unit stats)...

This is interesting, I was not aware the bonuses are different for each chapter. So I did a search and I found a post that talks about hard mode bonuses on FEU http://feuniverse.us/t/fe7-fe8-difficulty-stat-changes/1295 Once I edited out the Hard Mode bonus by making it 0, the enemy stats are a lot more consistent: - enemies with auto-level disabled no longer proc an extra point of stats sometimes (i.e. boss stats are now 100% consistent, at least based on my few resets, previously a boss would sometimes proc extra +1 stat) - enemies with auto-level enabled now have their stats differ by no more than 1 point as far as I can tell Based on what I've seen, it seems that enemies can potentially proc an extra point of stat (as long as they have a growth in that stat) with auto-level enabled. With hard-mode bonuses enabled, they can further proc another point. This led to enemies with same level, class and base stats potentially having stats that differ by 2 points. Anyways, I added the Hard/Easy Mode Bonus to the "Chapter Data Editor.nmm" if anyone just want to copy and paste: Thanks! I found some link that talks about the bonus in more depth (see above). My issue with the Hard Mode enemy stats is that they are not very consistent, even bosses (who have auto-level turned off) can proc an extra point of stat somewhere. And enemies with the same class, ID and level in the same chapter can have their stats differ by 2 points. These are caused by the Hard Mode bonuses. If you set the bonus to 0 in the Chapter Data Editor, then the stats are a lot more consistent (again, see above).

Thanks for the reply! Yes, that I am aware of, however, do you know the specifics: i.e. how does a level X promoted/unpromoted enemy get its stat on Hard mode (assuming growth rate turned on)? It should be some variations of BASE + LEVEL x GROWTH% . And also where to change the formula? Edit: Just to clarify, by "turning on/off enemy growths" I meant setting the enemy character's level parameter to use the one with no growth, the same way how bosses' stats are set.

Hiya, Who knows how the enemy stats on SS Hard are generated? Even when I turn off the enemy growth, there's still a chance the enemy would proc an extra point of a stat. With growth turned on, this variation can be up to 2 points for two enemies of the same class and level. Also, who knows how to tweak the formula for the stats? Ideally, I want enemies to have the exact same stats with growth turned off, and with growth turned on, the stat variation should not be more than 1 point. Thanks! I feel like this must be documented somewhere, there are some for the other 2 GBA games, but I just can't seem to find this one :(

Awesome :) Though it doesn't seem like the gba debugger supports Mac, I might need to install something like wine... Also the second link has been removed.

I see, it appears I misunderstood what "untriggering an event" meant. I thought it disables the event, but it actually makes it so you can run the event again. Thanks dude! Also, a general question for anyone doing ASM hacking: what kind of tools (disassembler/assembler) do you use?

Ah, if I understand correctly, what you're saying is that stepping on the AREA event simply checks if the person is Erika and if not ENUF/disable another event 0xB and 0xB is the one that actually loads the reinforcements? Anyways I checked in TurnBasedEvents for event ID 0xB: Ok so I see that "SVAL 0x2 0x88B41B8" is setting the offset to the reinforcement in slot2, which is eventually loaded by LOAD_SLOT1 after some EVBIT_MODIFYs in label27. The event (0xB) itself tries to run every turn (from turn 1 to 255?) but it gets disabled by the AREA event unless Erika is the one that triggers it. I've got a question here: doesn't AREA events trigger whenever someone moves into it? So if I have Seth move in first (or any other enemy for that matter), then he would untrigger 0xB, and if Erika then moves in after in the same turn, how does the event 0xB gets enabled again for the current turn?

Hey guys, I need some help understanding how the reinforcements are loaded in FE8 Chapter 1 after disassembling it in the EA (V9.11). The trigger condition for the reinforcements is that Erika crosses from the right side of the map to the left. These should be the relevant disassembled EA code: Once the AREA event triggers, it (should) check to see if the trigger character is Erika and then load reinforcements if yes. But there are some puzzling things here, the Event's ID should be 0xA (AREA 0xA label24 [0,0] [7,9]), but it's corresponding ENUF uses 0xB under label24. Similarly, the code IFNOTEQUAL 0x0 0xC 0x2 CALL label26 ENIF 0x0 should check if the person who triggered the event is Erika (Char ID. 0x1). However why is IFNOTEQUAL checking against the value 0x2/Seth (IFNOTEQUAL 0x0 0xC 0x2)? Also, how are the reinforcements actually loaded? The only LOAD1s (not included here) I see in the disassembled code were loading Erika/Seth, initial enemies and Franz/Gilliam. PS. The UNIT data for the 3 enemy reinforcements never appeared in the disassembled file, I suppose it is because they were never referenced anywhere in the disassembled code.

Awesome! Thanks dude! Finally got it working. So apparently the version that I had was V10, the latest one, which also didn't work for you (even though on the disassembled file it says it was still V9.10). I went back and downloaded V9.12 and now it works :) Seems like the latest version has some issues...