Collection of FE9 bugs and suggestions

[drugfreechu]

Hi, I have played about a dozen full runs and many more unfinished runs of randomized FE9, here are bugs I've come across and maybe some suggestions/notes I've thought of along the way.

• Enemy cavaliers are sometimes randomized to have longbows, even though they can't use them. So they are effectively useless/free exp.
• The one time I recall my Muarim randomizing into an Assassin, he did not have any weapons as a boss (he might have had them when he becomes an ally though, I don't remember).
• Many bosses will have weapon ranks for weapons they can't use, but could use in vanilla. Chapter 7's Balmer for example always has E staves, even if he isn't a staff wielder. This usually doesn't affect anything, but it does affect Geoffrey, being able to wield bows regardless of his class.
• I had a Cat Shinon whose claw was not equipped when he reappeared in Chapter 18. I wasn't able to re-equip it, so he was pretty much useless.
• For "randomize rewards", the "random replacements" option doesn't properly load when loading previously set options. It still shows it's marked, but if you randomize without changing it back to similar then back to random, it will act as if similar replacements was marked the whole time.
• There is an enemy unit in Chapter 14 whose class is freely randomized despite spawning in the river. So he's just stuck there.

Suggestions:

• Bandit Ike has a very hard time getting past the Prologue sometimes. More Greil nerfs might be nice?
• It feels unnecessary to have playable fliers re-randomize into fliers. I play with an edit of the randomizer that lets them randomize into any class like any other unit, and manually adjust Jill and Marcia's starting coordinates (characters like Haar just walk on water/cliffs during cutscenes if on foot). I've never encountered any crashes with this on emulator or console.
• An option to let Ike and thieves promote normally (and removing Ike's forced promotion at the beginning of Chapter 18)
• Making the currently forced stat bands optional. It's not that significant, but personally I preferred not getting the stat bands every run at the same places.
• There are often way too many cavaliers. Either having a class probability weighting system or making horse units a bit less common would be really great.
• Currently, you get a guaranteed Laguzslayer on C11, and Hammerne on C23. There's also the Occult scroll on C16 if you recruited Stefan, and the Renewal scroll if you decline Reyson's request to join on C18. Including these in "randomize rewards" would be great.
• An option to make Boyd, Rhys, and Oscar not restricted in the early chapters.
• It seems like the enemy randomization declines in variety significantly in the later chapters. There are a LOT of Paladins, especially. Allowing more of a variety of classes in those later chapters would be awesome.
• Wyvern Riders seem to start spawning on Chapter 8 - maybe Chapter 9 would be better. There's usually a couple Wyvern Riders to deal with and it's super rough for an early defensive chapter. Sometimes I can't really deploy mages or healers because of them.

[lushen124]

Good to know. Going down the list:

• Yeah. I think this was me forgetting that longbows are archer/sniper locked. Should be an easy fix.
• Probably due to the fact that the randomizer has some trouble with knives as they aren't a real weapon class and have no rank. But still, probably pretty easy to fix.
• Yep, this one is probably due to these classes having the weapon selection on promotion. In a lot of cases, they need a special "Can Equip X" hidden skill. This probably wasn't removed properly from characters that randomized into a different class that don't or can't use the weapons.
• Hmm... wasn't aware of this one. Probably have to scour the chapter script and add something to forcibly equip Shinon here.
• Good to know. Shouldn't be hard to fix UI issues like this.
• Yeah, I think he's normally a bandit that can move on water. We could adjust spawn locations or we could limit their class pool.

Suggestions:

• I don't think Greil himself is actually nerfed at all. I nerfed Boyd because he was the harder of the two for lance users. And I think I got past Greil as a Fighter pretty alright, but maybe Bandit is just enough worse to make it difficult. We can definitely nerf him a bit in the interest of preventing immediate softlocks.
• This is a holdover from GBAFE. I can understand Marcia's shifted starting position, but I can't think of a good alternative for Jill's starting position. Maybe on the land part of the map? Either way, it's good to know that the game will just make characters walk over unpassable terrain if scripted to do so. That would unlock every other flier from being locked to flying classes. I assume this works for Janaff, Ulki, Reyson, Tibarn, and Tanith too?
• This, I haven't figured out yet. I know Ike's promotion is covered by a hidden skill, and I think Thieves, by default, have no promotion and that Volke's is a special case (though I'm not sure how that works). But I'm not sure if promoting Ike early has any repercussions later on. Do you happen to know what happens by default if Ike were already promoted by the end of Ch. 17? Not sure what other logic needs to change.
• Do you mean randomizing the stat band locations? We could make it an option. It used to be a random reward by default, but people wanted them consistent, so I removed them from the pool.
• That's probably because there's 4 different flavors of cavaliers, one for each weapon type. We can tweak the probability of cavaliers specifically if they're too much.
• Shouldn't be too difficult if I can find where in the script these items are defined. I think before, I only had a surface level understanding of the script when I first wrote this option, but I know quite a bit more now so it shouldn't be too hard to find these specific rewards for randomization.
• I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean you can deploy Oscar/Boyd/Rhys in all of the early chapters? I could look into it, but at the moment, I'm not sure what controls this.
• Again, this might be because, much like cavs, there's 5 flavors of paladins, so scaling this back down to 1 to keep in line with the other classes is probably enough to address the issue.
• Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard to adjust. Maybe Wyvern Riders on the one defense chapter is a bit unfair. :)

[drugfreechu]

For Ike promoting before C18: I just 0 out the UnitClassChange (around 0x87E in C18's script file). This hasn't caused any issues as janky as it might seem. I don't do this for Volke's class change, but I have never had any issues with him promoting when he's already promoted. Although for this one, I can't really remember if I just habitually say "don't hire" so he doesn't get promoted. Regardless, 0'ing out C19's UnitClassChange would remove this possibility anyway. (As a side note related to this: Even if you remove all instances of EVENTCC, Archer Ike still can't promote normally. I have no idea why considering other archers can promote just fine, and Ike can promote freely as any other class. I really tried to figure out why this happens but idk, I think this is important info if you do remove Ike/Volke's non-promote skills though)

For unrestricting Boyd/Oscar/Rhys in the early chapters: Yes that's what I mean, letting them be deployed in those chapters. My personal solution to this is simply to remove their PID's from the script files for the chapters they're restricted in, but I'm pretty sure that makes their dialogue get skipped over or something. I haven't noticed any more significant side effects from just doing this, although I haven't done nearly as many runs applying this.

For the stat bands: I personally liked when they weren't guaranteed like in vanilla. Consistency in inventories just takes away from the randomizer experience slightly, I think. But I understand other people do like having them in the same place every run, so making it an option might be cool.

For fliers starting locations: Yeah, none of the upgraded units cause any real issues when made into non-fliers. The only slightly bad thing is that Janaff/Ulki/Reyson stay out of the map when they are green units in C17-4, if they can't fly over the trees. They get recruited afterwards anyway though, just won't come to help in that chapter if they can't fly. While not necessarily needed, I'm sure that could be fixed with simple spawn coordinate changes. I haven't touched Tibarn or Naesala, so I'm not sure if they would cause any issues.

I just have Jill spawn on the boat itself (I put the coordinates to 16/12 - 16/12, not really optimized, I just wanted her to be on the boat) which is a bit weird since she sort of materializes onto your team, but it's worth it to allow her some class variety imo.

[Vennobennu]

WRT Thieves, their fourth class skill, "SID_EVENTCC", does indeed prevent natural promotion. Delete that and they can promote like anybody else.

Relatedly, the Black Knight's and Ashnard's blessed armor is controlled by a skill - "SID_WEAK_A" - on their classes, which is the second class skill of BK!General and the fifth class skill for King Daein. The current solution of letting A/S-ranked weapons pierce the blessing works well enough in practice, but for the sake of simplicity it may be worthwhile to remove the blessing skill instead. I have a fork of this repo which implements this change (and also adds support for modifying the fourth and fifth class skills).