[Mods] My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

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veriaqa
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by veriaqa »

Then this is the case of broken characters. These characters need to be modded. Either by reducing their rune slots or reducing their PWR stats.
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Shilo
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Shilo »

- There is no need to upgrade most of the spells: Wizard rune on a slot for increased magic mayhem.
- Raising the fiends HP is another solution. A battle is also about durability.
Omnigamer
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Omnigamer »

For the most part I don't really care much for these kinds of mods, but I just want to say that if you really intend to rework everything for the purpose of balance and difficulty, you need to approach it from a game design perspective rather than just tweaking values here and there. Pick a couple of big picture goals and work around those, rather than trying to just draw out fights or hamper/buff individual characters.

For example:
-Define the role of party composition. Right now, pretty much anything can work. Is this something that should be preserved? Do you want to enforce more balanced composition, such that some mix of physical, magic, and support/healing is what's necessary to make it through dungeons and general combat?
-The role of elements, while important, is generally not a big deal outside of boss battles. Is this something that should change? Should there be a focus on carrying enough different varieties of magic to be effective in various dungeons?
-The issue with a lot of the physical runes is that they don't have a lot of drawbacks. If they have drawbacks that make players waver on whether to use them or not, it makes them explore all options rather than going to the most instantly gratifying ones. That said, another perspective is to account for the lack of drawbacks by building enemies around the expectation that they are abused, and giving them the tools necessary to counter them sometimes.
-Status effects are rarely used at all, which limits the effectiveness of some armors, runes, and healing items. If players and enemies aren't given more motives to actually use status effects and related healing items, then consider removing them altogether.
-Don't approach character balance purely from the perspective of stats. Characters all have unique traits, be it available runes, balance, multiple roles, affinities, and otherwise. There's a lot you can do to standardize character utility, but do remember to pay attention to those unique traits.

Good luck.
healme
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by healme »

Hello everyone thanks for the idea and suggestion,
This week is a bad week for me, everything seem to go wrong (work, family, even the modding lol).

Back to the topic. After reading all post i think everyone agree that the physicals aspect in Suikoden 2 is too broken / overpowered.
So the easiest solution is :
* Reduce the effectiveness of Physicals Support/effect rune , like ninjaluc79 said make them RH or LH only.

this ppf patch make Double Beat and Double Strike a RH only rune.
Can anyone help test it if the patch working, like i said before there are around 60 x 3D hex bytes line for each rune.
It work in my playthrough but who know if something wrong so dont forget to make backup
PSOGL2_001.jpg
patches.zip
veriaqa wrote: PS: While you at it, could you mod in some new runes? If you could do it I will PM you the details.
if what you mean is completely new runes i cant, new runes obviously need new animation, new spell script, etc.
but if the spell already exist, we can make it.
for example my new runes, disaster runes consist of Fire Wall, the Shredding, earthquake, thunderstorm. You can even combine the best spell like forgiver sign, judgement, blazing camp and thor.

Sorry this is all i can post right now. i hope i have time again this weekend
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Antimatzist »

The biggest problem of Suikoden is that battles never need more than three turns except some boss battles. It's not "physical runes are too overpowered", because I rarely use them and the game is still too easy.

An aquintance of mine once did a Hard mod for Secret of Mana and he basically changed everything - enemy stats, Char stats, equipment stats, item prices. It's relatively easy in SoM, since it's a shorter game with fewer characters, but Suikoden II is massive. You would need to look at each story arc individually and see what is wrong there and how to counteract this.

In the beginning, this is easier, since you only have a small, defined set of characters available. Later on, this gets more complicated. Just increasing stats of enemies does not make the game harder, but most of the time just battles longer.

i would really divide this in smaller packages like first modding the beginning of the game until the Sindar arc. Some thoughts:

- Changing drop rates. Having one of the first enemies of the game dropping one of the best runes is broken, imo.
- Make the two phases of the Mist Monster more distinct of each other, like one being only attackable by physical attacks, the other having high DEF, but low MDEF or Fire Affinity (making the unite of Rina, Eileen, Bolgan more powerful).
- How to approach random battles? Especially with Jowy, these are easy. Could one simply debuff the Buddy Attack to make random encounters more of a challenge?

From a game design/mechanics pov, Suikoden has never really been discussed or explored. There are so many parameters affecting the difficulty of the game, that it's hard to simply change some values and hope that it works. Blacksmiths are also similar - early on, they are basically useless (as their increase in ATK equals only one or two levels), but later on, they provide huge boosts.

Making battles longer also would add more meaning to the status effects, as omnigamer said. Nobody really cares about them in this game. But making longer battles and adding more status effects could make this game really challenging.
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ninjaluc79
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by ninjaluc79 »

The Warrior and Wizard Runes give ridiculously paltry increases in STR and MAG in exchange for a huge chunk of the user's PROT and MDEF, respectively. Maybe these should be revamped in such a way that sacrificing the user's PROT and MDEF is really worth the increase in power. Why bother using Warrior Runes on your physical DD's when you can just slap DB/DS on them without having to sacrifice your PROT to gain more damage? Wizard is only really useful for stacking magic repel rate beyond what the Robe of Mist, Water Amulets, and Cyclone runes on weapons can provide, and nothing else.

I do agree that enemy HP should at least be increased, but it must be increased in such a way that the ally party will be able to defeat a full team of 6 small enemies or 2 large enemies (e.g. Copper Suns @ Cave of the Wind and the Colossus/Bronzem enemies at L'Renouille) in at least 3 turns. That way, all offensive magic spells, status spells like Wind of Sleep and Finger of Death, and status-inducing weapon runes like Sleep, Silence, Poison, and Down would be really worth using, physical DDs won't just roll over the mages in damage output. Why bother using magic when you can just Auto-Battle your way through regular battles?

In addition, maybe the enemy (and boss) levels and stats at L'Renouille should be increased in such a way that it would be unwise to tackle the final dungeon unprepared, i.e. stack your physical DDs with DB/DS/Fury, your tanks with the best armors available, and your mages with the the most suitable magic runes available to them.

Well, maybe, in general, increase the enemy levels enough so that the player would have to grind out a bit for useful rare drops like runes, magic scrolls, and armors before tackling the main dungeon in each story arc?

Very well, shall we dissect each story arc in the game, then?

- The first real main story arc basically consists of Riou, Jowy, and the Circus Trio. Recommended level vs Mist Monster in vanilla Suikoden II is at 6-7 (should be ~8). Riou and Jowy have the Buddy Attack, while the Circus Trio has their own Unite Attack. In addition, Eilie and Jowy have a B affinity to Fire (for Flaming Arrows scrolls), with Jowy having an additional B affinity in Lightning (for Angry Blow scrolls); while Rina has a Fire rune attached and a C affinity to the associated element. As suggested above, one of the Mist Monster's forms may be weaker against physicals but stronger against magic so that the Circus Unite becomes more powerful, and the other form may be weaker against magic but stronger against physicals so that players would be encouraged to have Jowy and Eilie use scrolls and Rina her Fire rune.

- The next one is the Sindar Ruins. The party consists of Riou, Jowy, Nanami, and three random characters. Recommended level vs Double-Head is at 15 (should be ~18-20 so that Riou can unlock Battle Oath and help out the physical fighters before fighting Double-Head). The physical fighters are Gengen, Shiro, Kinnison, Rikimaru, and Hanna; while the mages are Millie and Zamza (while he can be specced as a physical fighter, he will take damage from each use of his Fire Dragon rune, and his options are very limited at this point). The difficulty really steps up once the water inside the ruins is drained, as Mr. Venus deals a lot of damage with his magic, while Salamanders are fast, hit hard, always come in packs of four, and are immune to Fire, which is pretty much the only offensive magic rune in the game at that point. Maybe increase their HP by a lot but make them weaker against physical damage? Maybe make a Muse Area enemy drop Lightning and Wind runes AND/OR have Muse and the Kobold peddler at the White Deer Inn sell all the Level 1 magic scrolls in order to give players more choices other than *Fire and Flaming Arrows before the North Window Arc?

- Up next is the Highland Camp Recon Arc. Mandatory members are Riou, Jowy, and Nanami. Recommended levels are 18-22. Not particularly difficult, but high-ATK physical DD's and spells/unites that target groups are very useful here, since the mobs always come in packs, Armadillos have high defense, and the KillRabbits have high HP.

- Next is the North Window arc. Mandatory members are Riou, Nanami, Viktor, Eilie, and Freed. Recommended levels vs SDS and Abomination are 25+. This is probably the one time I would not agree to removing Double-Beat early in the game as we need something for Viktor to use (unless somehow we can improve the utterly useless Titan rune) and he's not really a mage so he can't really use the magic runes well. Eilie's and Freed's above-average Fire affinities will be of use in this arc. We might need to ramp up Freed's stats a bit (he's pretty average with LUCK as his highest stat, which isn't really of use) since we will have to use him again for the Toran arc. One notch up in all his stats except MAG and LUCK will do.

- Next is the Two River arc. Recommended level vs Pest Rat is 30+. You might need at least one "anti-boss cannon" mage with high MAG and/or affinities to Lightning. Unfortunately, only Luc and Flik have Lightning affinities of B or higher among all characters with 06 MAG (which has a good chance of getting 100 MAG at level 30) or higher at this point of the game. Rina has 06 MAG, but she only has a C affinity in Lightning; Millie has an A in Lightning while Yoshino has a B but they only have 04 MAG, which only yields a measly 75 MAG (or 6/3/1 MP) at level 30.

- Next is the Greenhill arc. Recommended level for the main battle parts should be ~35. Spells, command runes, and unite attacks that target groups are great in this stage of the game (which is why I tend to use Millie often in this arc). Fire, Wind, and Blue Gate mages are very much welcome in this arc.

- Next is the Matilda arc, coinciding with the Futch and Humphrey Recruitment Arc. Recommended level vs Harpy should be ~40. You will need a balanced party of physical DD's, mob-clearers, and anti-boss cannons (high-affinity Lightning mages with at least 05 MAG) for this stage of the game.

- Whew, it's going to be quite a while before the Toran arc. Maybe we can increase the recommended level vs. Worm to ~42-43, so that the Luca Blight battle will have a recommended level of ~45 instead of 35?

I'll be covering until the Luca Blight battle at the moment since I have work later and I need to get some sleep. I think the reason why the recommended levels are overlapped mid-game is to supposedly encourage players to try out different party setups for each arc. Problem is, options are very limited early game and so players are stuck using the same old characters every arc, which is very noticeable during the Greenhill arc, which only allow you to use youngsters, animals, and Gadget, all whom you probably have trained already during the Two River arc. By the time you get to Matilda, you will be pretty much tempted to use the same characters you used during the Greenhill Arc unless maybe you want to use Fliktor to recruit Futch and Humphrey.

I kind of understand where all these Nanami haters came from. Story-wise, sure, understandable, but I have actually seen players who don't appreciate Nanami being forced into some arcs because she is just a weaker but faster version of Riou gameplay-wise, not because she is annoying in-story. What particular mods we can make so that players would complain less if Nanami is forced into the party during specific arcs? Maybe give her a permanent *Spark so that everyone will attack after her by default, thus giving her more value to the party?
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Antimatzist
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Antimatzist »

I See that the patch has Bern updated to 1.3 at romhacking.net.

Could you maybe include more insightful changelogs here? I think the people who play Suikoden II for nearly 20 years would be excellent playtesters and could give you valuable input.
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Shilo
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Shilo »

Antimatzist wrote:I See that the patch has Bern updated to 1.3 at romhacking.net.

Could you maybe include more insightful changelogs here? I think the people who play Suikoden II for nearly 20 years would be excellent playtesters and could give you valuable input.
The hardcore mod is separate from healme's project on Suikoden 2. I'll make a better changelog with next patch.
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Shilo
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Shilo »

Horaa!! What's up with your mod, Healme? Don't quit on me, Ya hear me!!
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Antimatzist »

Oh OK, thought it'd be the same
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by _Pesmerga_ »

Hi there! I'm a long-time fan of the game and I'm really hoping this thread isn't dead. After a recent playthrough, I found myself wishing the fights were longer. Using advanced techniques, you can pretty much win any boss battle in 1 - 3 rounds.

My experience led me in search of a mod for Suikoden 2 on EPSXE. I tried Choirboy's mod but it makes the game intensely annoying instead of fun. Nobody wants to get smeared by FurFurs... that's just... why? -.- ugh

Anyway, in answer to your original request for ideas, I have a simple idea to make the game more fun without re-balancing the whole game. In my opinion the game is nearly perfect as-is, the fights just need to last longer and be a tad more threatening. Below, I have recommended enemy stat changes both before and after your showdown with Luca Blight:

Pre Luca Blight:
- Increase all regular monsters' HP by 50%, damage by 10%, and status effect chance by 30%
- Increase all boss HP by 200% and increase damage by 10% and status effect chance by 25%

Luca Boss Fight
- Increase the HP of Luca's guards by 100% and increase damage by 10%
- Increase Luca's HP by 500% and increase damage by 20%

Post Luca Blight
- Increase all regular monsters' HP by 100%, damage by 20%, and status effect chance by 50%
- Increase all boss HP by 300%, damage by 15%, and status effect chance by 25%
- Give the Beast Rune Boss +500% HP only, he already does plenty of damage and status effects as is. Its anticlimactic when I KO him inside of 2 rounds though...

This will allow players to use multiple runes and powerful combos without breezing by everything. Regular monsters should be a little more sturdy and maybe get some attacks in without being utterly absurd. Those monsters are just meant to wear you down between boss fights anyway. The higher HP bosses means you'll have to last longer, so bringing water runes and medicines becomes more important. Things like scrolls and darkness runes are suddenly very useful for clearing up annoying monsters instead of just clicking "auto".

The only other thing I'd love to have, although it might be complex (idk I'm not a programmer) is to be able to have full player control for all the war maps, and be able to actually choose whether to retreat or keep fighting. This wouldn't have to change the story, but when I go to rescue Ridley and I get lucky, wound Luca's unit and crush most of the other highland units I find myself wondering why the heck we're running lol sorta wish I could keep fighting them even if it had no impact on the story. Just to feel like a badass :-D
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Pyriel »

I see two issues with that. Firstly, flat multipliers usually don't end up balancing too well. At the very least there are often things that should be excluded from it. I'm thinking the rats and the djinn in "The Witcher 3" as examples. With level-scaling on, those things become impossible. The rats because instead of an endless swarm of level 2 rats that die from a stern look, and do barely detectable chip damage, you now have endless hordes of rats at your own level that each take about a third of your health per attack, and require several hits to kill. What you're proposing isn't as extreme as all that, but I don't think it would be much more successful.

(For the second issue, I'm assuming that when you say "all regular monsters" you actually mean "all" and not just things encountered from that point on if you only follow the story.)

The second, larger issue is that this game doesn't have a bestiary with phases really. There might be multiple copies of an enemy for some reason, e.g. if it appears in multiple areas or if Konami planned for enemies to change somehow. Generally, though, if you go back to an area after liberating Greenhill, say Ryube, what you run into are the same enemies as from the beginning of the game. I can see two ways to alter them dynamically without touching engine code. One would be to create a new area module, edit all the monsters in it, and then make sure all the scripts that load that area switch modules depending on where the player is in the story. That would be a lot of work. Another is to make room in existing modules, create new copies of the enemies, new formation tables, and new encounter sets with attendant logic to use them at different phases. Again, a lot of work, and probably not possible in many cases due to space limitations. Konami didn't provide anything else that can be used to facilitate "enemy phases" on a wide scale.

Trying to make your own modules, without access to the development tools would almost certainly lead to stability issues with the game. With enough effort you could make it work, but it wouldn't be simple by any means. Editing the existing modules as described above would come with some similar issues because you'd have to change a good number of pointers, and if copying the data pushed beyond the size limit for area modules, you'd be forced to switch to a new module or give up.

You could also break into the pre-battle routines and add hooks to multiply everything after checking the appropriate flags are set. Since you want fractional changes, like 10%, that would involve a lot of code to approximate floating-point math, (the PSX isn't natively capable of doing x * 1.30 in a straightforward way). You're probably looking at inserting a couple hundred lines of code somewhere, fighting against rather limited space, to make those decisions. And I don't know offhand if there's even a good way to distinguish between a regular monster, a boss, and a player character in that code.

This last option would be the easiest method to accomplish it. It'd need quite a bit of research and testing, but a few hundred lines of injected code is easier to work with than millions of lines that have to be realigned due to module edits. But it's a lot of work for a rather unexciting set of edits that just make enemies a bit more durable and marginally more annoying.

Somewhat tangentially, I'm not certain that "inflict status chance" exists in a way that could be edited as proposed. It's not something I've looked into, or if I have, I don't remember it, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a hard-coded value in the engine, or something embedded in an enemy's AI.

Anyway, all-in-all, I think the best way most aspiring modders can go is to think about how to make each area appropriately challenging when it's first encountered, and just adjust the appropriate enemy instances in place. Unless you have a good bit of technical know-how. Otherwise, you'll end up doing a lot of work on paper, only to run into a brick wall of technical complications and limitations when you try to implement them.
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by KakCAT2 »

Actually there's a 4th option which may be easier. Do the modifications for the first part of the game, and before (or after) killing Luca, in the sequence after the point you can save your game, lock the game with an "Insert CD 2 and reset your PSX" message. (just a shame there's not an automatic save point there)

Then do the same process of changing stat values with a second copy of the ISO and add an "Insert CD 1" message in the starting script of the game.

It's a ridiculous out of the box way to do those changes, but probably a lot easier. And you could modify the values of the initial sections (i.e. Ryube) to more challenging enemies (I mean like 1000% FurFurs :) ) without affecting the balance of the final stages greatly.



Unrelated to the method (as you wouldn't need to multiply values, just modify the current values) , multiplying an integer by 1.30 doesn't require floating point. Just multiply by 130 a divide by 100. It will work as well as the floating point version except if there's overflow (which is unlikely for low numbers like HP) and rounding (i.e. you may get 5752 HP instead of 5753)


In any way, doing that modification even finding the easiest way to do it will be very hard.


EDIT: After rereading the original message I've realized that the only advantage of this 2-CD method would be adding the 1000% furfurs in later stages. All the requirements are met just changing the data in 1 CD.

EDIT2: I can't remember now if the R3000 had divisions to divide by 100. Anyways, you can just multiply by 166 (which is 128 * 130/100) and divide by 128, and use a right shift to do that division. (that would give you a 129.6875% instead of 130% which is close enough I suppose, and would shave a lui out of the code)
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Pyriel
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by Pyriel »

Yeah, I thought about that, but I didn't find it particularly satisfying to have essentially two copies of the game with different stats so that CutRabbits could get more powerful. It sort of fits in with the simple option of individually updating enemies, though. You just foist some of the responsibility off to the player.

The PSX instruction set has multiply and divide, but no floating-point. There are dozens of ways you can approximate fractions, and if you can get a PSX dev kit, even an unofficial one, you can use the compiler to help you out instead of needing to know what magic numbers to use to make 30% happen with a multiply, etc. My point was that you could pretty easily back yourself into a corner where you were changing your plans for enemy stats because you lack room for the instructions required. And having to work around the lack of floating-point only adds to that risk. I don't know how close the pre-battle module is to its particular limit, but several of the area modules were within several hundred bytes. If it's 40KB away from the limit, it's probably not a concern.
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Re: My Suikoden 2 modding, need some opinion/idea/suggestion

Post by karlmarx_14 »

where can i download these awesome ideas . i want to test it
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