EDIT : Can you tell me the Simurions you used for fighting against Alexander (2nd boss) and Wein (champion of the 2nd arena), please?
For the difficulty, I realised after writting all this that it's surely the Active mode with the addition of DynRPG faster battle plugin. Sorry about that. ^^'
QuoteStarting at the area right of Ventura Village, the difficulty starts rising pretty quickly. Suddenly I'm taking half health party attacks battle after battle, always running back to the repair shop and making that guy a millionaire. At least the grinding gets reasonable at this point--my bots were leveling up much more often and that "Is it gonna evolve? Will it learn a new skill?" anticipation is great to feel. But it's not fun that, especially in this area, I have to run all the way back to town just to heal up my team after a few battles
Mmh, that's too bad. :s
I didn't plan to make it so difficult. The first thing I can suggest you is putting the battle mode in "wait". Since I speeded up the battles it can be tricky in active mode if you take too much time to select things, I guess.
It's a shame it made you backtrack that much. Did you mean that while you were fighting against the trainers in Dabulu Woods? Or after that, against roaming Simurions later in the woods and hills?
For the woods, I made a little shortcut with the trunk on the water pool. It can still be anoying so I made an item seller at the end of the area too. For the rest of the woods/hills, since you can switch your Simurions when you want, I think you can just take another one if one is K.O. It's a mecanic I wanted the players to do to advance without the need of an "inn".
I'm sorry for that, especially if it feels boring to backtrack that often.
Can you specify, how many times you backtracked to the repairman to finally access the Lily Cave, please? Thanks.
QuoteNormal attacks start becoming useless during/after the cave.
I tried to make it not that useless. In fact, when I tested it, I use normal attacks most of the time, saving my MP for the boss. Or maybe use one skill to kill quickly a stronger Simurion, like Denelect. And I do this without any farming. That's a shame you felt that. I'm pretty upset with the results. ><
If one day you can do a let's play, tell me! It's much easier to analyse problems watching people play. But since some people told me it wasn't that hard, I can't exactly know what make your walkthrough such a pain. You could say, I can put more healing items on the way, or debuffing enemies stats but it was this way before and people told me it was too easy. It seems harder than it looks to tune things well. (I had, maybe 10 versions of this cave before).
Anyway, you can suggest what you want, I take notes.
QuoteIt feels like the enemies are always getting the first move, even those slow rock-looking bots cast Regenerate before my 120+ speed bots get a chance. A the Row command is such a joke--from what I saw online, it only slightly reduces damage received and given for normal attacks only.
It's possible enemies strike first, especially the trainers' Simurions. But it should be the case with normal battles. The Simurion that can heal itself, (Rockiwa?) it's pretty slow. If it healed itself before your strike it's because all your Simurions attacked at almost the same time while it was almost ready to fight, that's the only way I could understand that.
QuoteA the Row command is such a joke--from what I saw online, it only slightly reduces damage received and given for normal attacks only. It doesn't influence hit-rate
Are you sure?
What I read about it is that it doesn't reduce damage, it only reduce chances to get attacked. So if you put a Simurion in the back row, the enemies should attack it less that others. But the difference is minimal, it's like a 10% chance. Still it's better than nothing but kind of useless, yes.
QuoteAlso I have to use "Wait" instead of "Active"; battles are just not fair otherwise.
Since I speeded up the battle gauges with DynRPG it made the battles much harder in Active mode, indeed.
I plan to make the game in Wait mode by default but I don't know how to do it. In fact, I think the issue is really about this. Active mode, with the addition of DynRPG speed up is hard mode. I should have notified the players about that! I wanted to speed up the battles a little because some players told me they were slow. So they are now 50% faster, but it really feels fast in Active mode.
I will search about making the game in Wait mode by default, and maybe just make it impossible to switch to Active mode.
Sorry about that, I guess if you played all the demo in Wait mode your issues wouldn't have been that big.
QuoteTrading system is pretty cool. No idea how such a thing works in RM2k3.
Did you try it with someone? If you know nobody playing the game, I can send you a Simurions of your choice if you want.
QuotePogasus, upon upgrading, doesn't mention the equips are removed, unlike all the others that upgraded (yet it still removed my equips) EDIT: Might be that I just forgot to equip its stuff back onto it when I added it back to the party.
It's not a bug I think. This message doesn't show up after it showd up 3 times, if I remember correctly. It did this to not bother the player with redundant pop up messages. But maybe it better to let it every times?
QuoteStar Dust healing skill actually MISSED one of my members! He wasn't Blind and the other guy wasn't dead, so...WAT?!
This skill can miss, it's 90% accuracy. That's one of the reasons it can't be used on the maps. It's a "plasma" skills, so I wanted it to feel like something else than a normal healing skills.
QuoteCan you make it so that it automatically removes equips from simurions that we withdraw from the party? The equips still stay on them.
YES! I plan to do this since a long time, now. After playing for a while I realise it's not useful to keep hardware on a withdrawed Simurion. I guess it will be done in the next demo.
QuoteWill we be able to reset the boosts applied to our bots? It's understandable that we can't have 2 of the same bot, but it's also not good that we can't undo these changes either.
Sadly, no. I think it won't be possible. The system is a little too big already. What I plan is, maybe, making a way to reset the potential to 100% one time through to game. But reseting the actual stats seems too hard to do (because this system is not the only one that change stats).
Why do you want this? Maybe I can find something else.
QuoteI haven't tried, but I'm assuming you can prevent an upgrade from happening, much like Pokemon's "Press B to stop evolving." If that is true, what can players do if they reach the max level and the bot needs a level up to upgrade?
No, you can't stop an upgrade. But you can still levels a Simurions to max without make it upgrade. Let say, a Simurion that need good health to upgrade won't upgrade by with levels. If it reaches max level it's ok since upgrading doesn't need any level gains. You just have do to a battle to upgrade.
For instance, a lot of Simurions can upgrade based on their stats (not levels). Ponuma upgrades when its System stat reaches 48 iirc. So you can boost its System stat with items without doing any battles. But if it's 48 or more and do 1 battle it will upgrade even without the need of gaining a level. Hope I explained it well.
QuoteAll in all, still a very fun game. I will always love this and await the next demos/full game!
4 hours? I at least spent 8
Thank you so much! I was waiting for your test!
Sorry again for the fustrating difficulty. I think it's really the Active mode that did that.
Thank you for the bugs reports, too.
8 hours is really big! Hopefully, after that the game story will start to really picks up, so I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the game, next time. (But it will be a long wait, I guess, ince I have to integrate the exploring aptitudes, fully).