I'm about to start a vs hacked let's play with a friend

[DomesticHausCat]

Alright so I'm looking for some advice on how to go about this let's play with a buddy of mine. We are planning to hack the game so that the enemy units can be moved. We will play the game as normal with me playing as the playable characters and my buddy playing as the enemy. We have noticed a few things during our experiments of the code we found. For one, we are able to move both the playable units and the enemy units on the same phase. When the Player Phase is over and all units on the map have moved it just defaults to the next Player Phase, skipping the Enemy Phase entirely. If there are some enemy units that haven't moved and we select the "end" option, then all unmoved enemies automatically move until the Player Phase is done, as if the remaining enemies were "Partners" in a Partner Phase. After that it will again be the Player Phase. 

Now to make things interesting, we are planning on flipping a coin to decide who goes first. And for the first phase we will take turns moving one unit at a time, almost like a game of chess. Then we will have the person who went first move all of his units in the second turn and then the other player will go after him. From then on out the remaining turns will play like how a Fire Emblem game normally plays. So the first turn is only to ensure that neither player gets screwed immediately on turn 1.

We will not be resetting the game if any playable character is killed, nor will we reset the game if a bad level up is earned. Likewise, resetting to get good level ups at the base is a no go. Otherwise it would be kind of cheating the experience. However if Ike is killed , it's a game over as usual. (This may make it interesting where I may want to engineer a way to have Ike die and my buddy would be having his enemies run away from him to avoid the game over!) Overall, the goal here is to see how far we can get without getting stuck. If we are confident that a chapter can still be cleared because I made a dumb error or just got unlucky then we will continue to try again until we are sure that we are stuck. At which point my friend will have beaten me! 

I've got a few questions for you guys and some concerns.

First off, which difficulty do you think we should go with? We are considering that the easiest fit would be Hard mode. Hard isn't that difficult compared to other games in the series, so I don't think it would be too bad. I mean even on Hard mode enemies are not that strong compared to your units. Even if crap hits the fan we have Titania on our side and she will be a freakin' godsend. Although we have considered Maniac mode, but that would require a bit more hacking/patching than we may want to deal with.

 

SPOILERS

 

Second, the biggest thing I'm concerned about is Naesala. I foresee no trouble in this playthrough except getting past that chapter 19. That crow has got to go down somehow and so we've got to make a unit strong enough to do it. Or a few good strong units. I know I've killed him before in an Ike solo run before, but this playthrough cannot afford babying of that scale. Another fix could be to perhaps just bum rush the boss. Though I can't see that working if my buddy gets smart. Cause he can just move the boss away and have him confront my forces at the last second. So really it all comes down to killing that crow bastard. What do you guys think would be the best way to go about this?

 

END SPOILERS

 

Lastly, should bands be used to increase stat growths? Also should we go with a fixed rate or a random rate? I'm thinking we should definitely go with a random growth rate just for the fun of it, but not sure on whether we should use bands. It kind of would be fun to not give that edge to the playable characters so I'm leaning towards no bands.

One big important thing to note, my bud is not a big fan of the series. He actually has never played the games before. But he has been watching me play through Radiance for quite a bit because of his interest in the story. He has done a lot of reading on the series because he does find it interesting, more or less he really just likes to talk about it. So he does now how to play at least, but he is by no means an expert gameplay wise. He will make some novice mistakes I imagine, though I doubt he will be as dumb as the AI. That would be miraculous. 

In any case, let me know any other ideas you all may have. I'm open to suggestions. Really looking forward to getting this thing started! It's gonna be fun to see how he's gonna screw me over too. I fully expect him to pull shenanigans like having enemy recruitables like Ilyana running away from Ike, killing off recruitables like Nephenee and Kieran, opening chests and dropping their contents. And if he's feeling really evil, having enemies run away from my dudes on defend "until X amount of turns" chapters. Which of course would deprive my units of exp. :/ We are still in the experimental phase, so any and all input is appreciated! 

Edited September 29, 2018 by DomesticHausCat