Super Famicom Wars rebalance hack test results

This is something I have to resort to using Pastebin on, because unfortunately, too many people out there want to be arbitrary, so I can't very well post this where I'd want, especially when the membership of the Advance Wars subreddit will be all too happy to make things as political as possible while living in a glass house.

Before I start, I will say this as a disclaimer: I realize that Super Famicom Wars is dated as sin. Technically, every single installment of the Nintendo Wars series is to varying degrees, though IMO Game Boy Wars 3, Advance Wars 2, both Battalion Wars, and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin are the least dated by not being so flagrant about it, even if that last one is STILL overhyped. Super Famicom Wars isn't a particularly bad offender like Famicom Wars, Game Boy Wars 1/2/Turbo, or Advance Wars Dual Strike, but things like the intro can only do so much to keep it from showing its age, and it doesn't feel adaptable for hacking. I think Game Boy Wars 3 is going to have the cleanest potential for reverse engineering; Z80 is intuitive enough, BGB provides a Save ASM option to save the ASM into .txt files (granted, I have done that already anyway), and VBA-RR provide RAM Search, so the hacking efforts should prove tolerable. Providing it can get support, mind you. But heck, regardless, I'm for learning 68516 or whatever it's called, if only to learn a harder programming language, maybe hopefully get Octiroc's support.

Right now, though, I'm more focused on balancing within changing given tables, since that is what I can do and that is where I can start. Part of what makes SFW feel less adaptable than GBW3 is that there's fewer mechanics overall to work with, when GBW3 had plenty of sound ideas and no sign of any concepts I find to be worse than a case of YMMV, at the very least off the top of my head. Something I particularly point to for an example is the way SFW's EXP system works in comparison to GBW3's: SFW's plays out as simply giving out EXP equal to sub-HP damage done multiplied by a Bounty value from the defending unit, and that's it. This is actually biased in favor of indirects, which can continually shoot targets that move into range and they'll keep gaining EXP without taking a scratch. I hacked the Anti-Air Tank's base damage against Grunts to 125%, contrary to that idiotic stereotype that I don't want it damaging land units at all, as well as increased the Bounty values to not be nearly as biased against tech units, and the Anti-Air Tank still barely provided the feeling that it was being useful. By contrast, GBW3's EXP system has other factors for combat EXP, in addition to providing EXP for tasks such as Captures, and though EXP gains in general were awful there too, my PALBal patch toned a lot of the factors up. May I also point out that Kill EXP favors direct-fire units that tend to be more desirable for issuing finishing blows.

Still, SFW is what it is in terms of general coding. Editing things within the heightened simplicity of the gameplay does have its advantages. I especially notice how Artillery actually suffers from having only 3 Range if the tech level goes up to involve Rocket Launchers and their 5 Range. This also brings up the math in terms of range difference: Rocket Launcher has ~1.67 times the range of Artillery--and we know how range differences have an easy time being drastic. It's evidenced here too, as Artillery has to position just right and even then if their blocker support fails, it's open season on them. But not so much the Rocket Launcher, oh no. On Bean Island, you can position one to zone both of the enemy's front preowned Cities, making repairs much more difficult, from the Road tile where it won't get threatened by the enemy Artillery. I'm left wondering: why isn't the Rocket Launcher made more useful for sniping support units to reward efficient positioning through frontlining, rather than just pulling safe flowchart?

That brings up the elephant in the room, the reason why I wasn't liking Artillery costing 6000G: they're still spammable in the AWs with high power for their cost, offensive and ESPECIALLY defensive. A whole cluster of Artillery has proven quite capable of mocking flanking efforts. This is bad game design no matter how you slice it. It's not so much that they shouldn't inflict some damage on the tech tanks, given that as I pointed out above, Artillery have awful range, which does at least result in incentive for getting close, something I myself am fond of for encouraging risk. (Another reason to be irked by the "bullshit not a KO" comment.) The real problem is that bringing them down should be cost-effective to more consistently punish them for overextending. If their costs are too low, they're going to be spammable and that will make it easier to create that miserable cluster. However, if their defensive power is kept under control, it would be easier to handle a surgical strike that would blow the nuisances sky-high, preventing the cluster from being a disgusting nightmare. Of course, doing that wouldn't be easy, and I'm the same guy who believes that Infantry can be kept in check without inflating their price tags--although Game Boy Wars 3 has proven that Infantry can be kept in check without inflating their price tags.

You could argue that GBW3 does use Materials to prevent spamming Infantry in the first place, but that's only one part of the equation; the key part is that about every unit contributes well to curbing infantry spam. It's telling that even the Humvee--the freaking Humvee, a unit with barely an MG and not even having the defensive typing to completely sponge rifle barrages because it focuses on being anti-armor shock--is capable of contributing when it can potshot damaged Grunts from terrain cover. Most other units have either more attack power against Grunts, defensive typing that prevents the MGs from doing any damage, efficient utility favoring tech units, or any combination of those 3. It's not like Pawns in Chess avoided capture against committed attacks--they generally owe their freedom and ultimately their effectiveness to usage of psychology-inducing support to prevent those attacks at all.

I'm bringing this up because I changed the Anti-Air Tank's base damage against Infantry in the balance hack to 125%, and it still can only do so much. The thing is, if the Anti-Air Tank gets damaged at all, its usability drops like a lead weight, as the 1HKOing ability gets exponentially harder to manage, and outright impossible at 5 HPs. At the end of the day, the Anti-Air Tank is best described as a combo unit: it can manage attack chains, but you often do NOT want to finish your chain with one, and there's no getting away with spamming these guys--the regular tanks will see to that. There has to be alternatives to removing Infantry from play so that they can't freely clutter the map against decent gameplay.

During my first test, I caught onto one unit not seeing use: the APC. Arguably, this thing is worse than it was in the AWs, because at least there it could resupply ally units. Here in SFW, the APC trades that for an auxiliary MG, which in theory makes it more useable, but that primarily works better in Game Boy Wars 3 where it could terrorize an early game setup that doesn't consider Bazookas or the Humvee, or even a risky tech option, because the APC is the least expensive Armor unit in GBW3. In SFW, vehicles aren't so hard to afford before long, so the APC's MG gets walled. Not helping the APC is that compared to GBW3's transporting speaking for itself, SFW's is the same with AW's except with Loading a transport immediately ending the transport's own turn, not to mention that transported units have their HP capped at the transport's own HP. Even without that idiocy, however, the lack of sufficient combat purpose is the APC's undoing, simple as that. Further rebalancing accounting for the cause, that tanks and artillery are ultimately centralizing anyway, tones up the APC with both a lowered cost and increased power, with the hope that it could allow for more efficient flanking from just-fast-enough combat while stopping FTA from the Recon.

Oh, and I wasn't sure how to tone up the Heavy Tank--what I would want, of course, is something that can deliver the sort of incredible punch that even the most stringent of formations would surely feel, something that would be better emphasized by the 4 Movement Power. What I wouldn't want is something that would become polarizing in land battles, even though 4 Movement Power has definite problems such as, of course, delay in even reaching the front lines. However, I was able to do something now: give it 7 Vision in Fog of War. This isn't the most incredible thing because all of the Vision values are toned up, but with the Heavy Tank, 7 Vision means seeing any Artillery piece whose range it can move into, making it easier to protect from free damage if you need it going where Vision could be short in supply and high in demand. Nevertheless, I do wish to have first strike to balance around, at the very least to see how to make sure simple first strike against this behemoth wouldn't be too powerful--it IS a 4 Movement Power unit after all, so it can't very well get first strike a lot.

There's bound to be a few more tests. I can't expect SFW to be the best game to hack, and I will admit Bean Island isn't the best map ever, nor is SFW's AI incredible, but if nothing else, figuring out how to make the game less bland without outright radical changes such as involving subtraction defense can still be good practice.