[Completed] Pokémon Empyrean [v1.1] (~! Final Arc Released !~)
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StaticShock
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Delta Overpass.
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where can you buy iv candies?
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Hi.
So I have multiple save files on Empyrean due to my enjoyment of experimentation (I rename the RPGXP save file and then switch around the names when I want to change the file). I was wondering if it would be possible to duplicate a save file in order to use a file in multiple ways?
E.g. I want to use my first file and duplicate it, so that I could continue on one file, and then activate the New Game+ feature on the other. Could I do that, or would it save to both files regardless of what I do?
So I have multiple save files on Empyrean due to my enjoyment of experimentation (I rename the RPGXP save file and then switch around the names when I want to change the file). I was wondering if it would be possible to duplicate a save file in order to use a file in multiple ways?
E.g. I want to use my first file and duplicate it, so that I could continue on one file, and then activate the New Game+ feature on the other. Could I do that, or would it save to both files regardless of what I do?
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Okay, all done with Hard mode! Solid conclusion to a solid game. Loved the final fights; I found DEUS much harder than the dreaded W.T., but I think that's because my team was ill-suited to it in particular.
I think I now have a clearer idea about the difficulty weirdness. The crux of it is, as I alluded to earlier, that the difficulty of the regular trainers is too close to the difficulty of the bosses.
Normally when I'm playing a game like this, I want the challenge level to have peaks and valleys; after a boss, we return to (slightly harder) normal goons and wind back up to the next peak. The regular goons in Empyrean.Hard are so chonky that there aren't really any highs or lows from a difficulty standpoint. I never really struggled with any of them, but each one was tiring, and there were a *lot* of them. So, they didn't really add difficulty to my run, they just sort of protracted it. Also, the rewards for beating a trainer get smaller and smaller the farther you go, and eventually they disappear entirely; I really don't need more money, guarded items have to be VERY attractive to be worth the time, and the experience yield is so low at this point that it'd be faster to use the daycare. This resulted in my doing something that I almost never do in any game, which is skipping fights. That said, as soon as I got to a boss I was having a blast again; I had a ton of fun with the Elite Four.
I am of the opinion that the solution is to greatly differentiate the bosses by highlighting their difficulty. I would try to accomplish this by leaning into the boss and miniboss trainers more, and letting the regular trainers be more cannon fodder-y. Maybe it's just that I'm coming from Reborn et al, but I'm excited to climb walls like Crow and Emmanuil. I don't mind spending a few tries on a brutal gym leader, or even grinding up a new dude; I signed up for Hard mode. When I get to the boss room, I want to see something that makes me go "HOLY HELL", because that makes it satisfying to overcome. All of the final bosses, both individually and as a group, were satisfying to overcome. Fisherman Jeremy is not satisfying to overcome, even if his Swampert is technically stronger than my ace, and even if there are 27 of him between me and the next plot point.
Empyrean has an interesting quirk when it comes to difficulty balancing, which is that the GP, shiny factor, and cards make the stats really, really high-variance. The difference between a 5*/plat-card/shiny dude and a normal one is, if my sources and math are correct, roughly a 254% increase to everything, which is about the difference between a level 40 Glalie and a level 100 Arceus. There's a real concern about players being able to basically ramrod their way through things if they've done the legwork (which is sort of what I did; I barely touched anything but my Absol until levels were well into the 100s, but I also caught an unholy number of Absol at literally my earliest opportunity). Nevertheless I'm gonna argue that, at least for normal trainer fights, it's okay to let that happen. It gives the player a chance to feel epic before the next boss puts them back in their place.
So, my suggestions for Hard Mode would be:
*Pull the GP rating of the random trainers into the 0~3 range, inversely scaling with how many dudes they have (and reduce the average dudes per trainer in general; it's almost always three right now)
*Randomize their cards between tier 0~2, biasing heavily toward 1
*Drop their levels to be below the current soft cap
*Take away most of mega stones, so that the player cares when a trainer has a mega
*Take all of the GP, cards, and items off of the "training" pokemon
*Let the bosses be the ones with a high-GP ace or a platinum card. Let that be a special moment. I get the feeling that this might be how it is on Normal? I may go check when I'm less burned out.
Additionally, I would consider lowering the power of GP and cards, just in general, so they aren't quite so polarizing. Perfectionist that I am, I'm pretty much souped up with shiny stuff, but I can see a less stubborn player struggling mightily. I think GP becoming 1.05/1.1/1.15/1.2/1.25 and cards becoming 1.1/1.2/1.3 is actually perfectly reasonable, and that would still yield almost an 80% boost over a normal pokemon -- still massive, but no longer insurmountable (I do like seeing those giant numbers, though -- Absol just passed 1600 attack ^~^). Then it might not feel quite so mandatory to have every trainer be 5*/Shiny-Card on every pokemon.
Anyway, there's my five-paragraph essay. Thank you again for putting this game together; Empyrean is a beautiful piece of artwork, and I very much look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
I think I now have a clearer idea about the difficulty weirdness. The crux of it is, as I alluded to earlier, that the difficulty of the regular trainers is too close to the difficulty of the bosses.
Normally when I'm playing a game like this, I want the challenge level to have peaks and valleys; after a boss, we return to (slightly harder) normal goons and wind back up to the next peak. The regular goons in Empyrean.Hard are so chonky that there aren't really any highs or lows from a difficulty standpoint. I never really struggled with any of them, but each one was tiring, and there were a *lot* of them. So, they didn't really add difficulty to my run, they just sort of protracted it. Also, the rewards for beating a trainer get smaller and smaller the farther you go, and eventually they disappear entirely; I really don't need more money, guarded items have to be VERY attractive to be worth the time, and the experience yield is so low at this point that it'd be faster to use the daycare. This resulted in my doing something that I almost never do in any game, which is skipping fights. That said, as soon as I got to a boss I was having a blast again; I had a ton of fun with the Elite Four.
I am of the opinion that the solution is to greatly differentiate the bosses by highlighting their difficulty. I would try to accomplish this by leaning into the boss and miniboss trainers more, and letting the regular trainers be more cannon fodder-y. Maybe it's just that I'm coming from Reborn et al, but I'm excited to climb walls like Crow and Emmanuil. I don't mind spending a few tries on a brutal gym leader, or even grinding up a new dude; I signed up for Hard mode. When I get to the boss room, I want to see something that makes me go "HOLY HELL", because that makes it satisfying to overcome. All of the final bosses, both individually and as a group, were satisfying to overcome. Fisherman Jeremy is not satisfying to overcome, even if his Swampert is technically stronger than my ace, and even if there are 27 of him between me and the next plot point.
Empyrean has an interesting quirk when it comes to difficulty balancing, which is that the GP, shiny factor, and cards make the stats really, really high-variance. The difference between a 5*/plat-card/shiny dude and a normal one is, if my sources and math are correct, roughly a 254% increase to everything, which is about the difference between a level 40 Glalie and a level 100 Arceus. There's a real concern about players being able to basically ramrod their way through things if they've done the legwork (which is sort of what I did; I barely touched anything but my Absol until levels were well into the 100s, but I also caught an unholy number of Absol at literally my earliest opportunity). Nevertheless I'm gonna argue that, at least for normal trainer fights, it's okay to let that happen. It gives the player a chance to feel epic before the next boss puts them back in their place.
So, my suggestions for Hard Mode would be:
*Pull the GP rating of the random trainers into the 0~3 range, inversely scaling with how many dudes they have (and reduce the average dudes per trainer in general; it's almost always three right now)
*Randomize their cards between tier 0~2, biasing heavily toward 1
*Drop their levels to be below the current soft cap
*Take away most of mega stones, so that the player cares when a trainer has a mega
*Take all of the GP, cards, and items off of the "training" pokemon
*Let the bosses be the ones with a high-GP ace or a platinum card. Let that be a special moment. I get the feeling that this might be how it is on Normal? I may go check when I'm less burned out.
Additionally, I would consider lowering the power of GP and cards, just in general, so they aren't quite so polarizing. Perfectionist that I am, I'm pretty much souped up with shiny stuff, but I can see a less stubborn player struggling mightily. I think GP becoming 1.05/1.1/1.15/1.2/1.25 and cards becoming 1.1/1.2/1.3 is actually perfectly reasonable, and that would still yield almost an 80% boost over a normal pokemon -- still massive, but no longer insurmountable (I do like seeing those giant numbers, though -- Absol just passed 1600 attack ^~^). Then it might not feel quite so mandatory to have every trainer be 5*/Shiny-Card on every pokemon.
Anyway, there's my five-paragraph essay. Thank you again for putting this game together; Empyrean is a beautiful piece of artwork, and I very much look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
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You can duplicate your save files and experiment. The game will always only read and write to the Game.rxdata file as the main save file (there are backups, but they are never loaded automatically)
Thanks for the feedback! I need to save this essay somewhere to reference it when I finally decide it's time for a new update :) That being said, I didn't think much about the curve and regulating the chonkiness of the regular trainers compared to bosses that are supposed to be the actual peaks of difficulty. It's something to always keep in mind. If not for this project, then a future one.
Scaling is something that can be fixed relatively easily, and further nerfs of GP and cards are an option, but a lot of players would view this as "I wasted a lot of time on this, and now it's nerfed, and now I'm angery" so when changing a mechanic I usually try to think about the existing players and the ones that are yet to start. But I'm sure there's a way to consolidate.
StaticShock
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Move Reminder can be found in the Pokemon Centre of almost every town/city.
IV candies can be bought from Asutra City's Research Centre (one of the vending machines). They have all the IV candies there except Speed. For Speed Candies, go to Candy Shop in Roarin Island.
Same here. On my first playthrough, W.T was insanely hard and I had to reduce the difficulty to easy whereas back then I basically defeated DEUS in one attempt. But in my latest playthrough, DEUS was harder than W.T lol (although that was only due to bad type matchups). I'm glad I had an Omuran Ursaring though, it is a beast and destroyed both DEUS and W.T.
Also, what are you talking about? Fisherman Jeremy is clearly the most powerful being in the game. :P
_________________
Btw, @Stochastic, I have a few questions :
1) The Anabelle used for the fusion with the Rapidash - Was it the player character's mother or was it Anabelle Sukuyomi? I know it's mostly the former since she recognized our character but just wanted to confirm.
2) In the alt future, it's mentioned Zedra killed 2 other Empyreans. Were these Zimean and Aksha?
I'm really hoping you continue this game. So many loose ends that I'd love to see concluded. :(
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You're right, of course. Any balance change will end up making some people unhappy, although in this case you'd at least be nerfing players and enemies by about the same amount (actually for hard mode you'd be nerfing enemies more, since most players aren't going to go straight for 5*; I had a 5* before I fought Ashy). I'd actually be more worried about the non-traditional Big Boss Battles, which would require rebalancing to account for the lower player stats. For what it's worth, I did actually take the time to 5*/Platinum Card my entire team and, well, I already did my spiel (although I will add: if card boosts were a little flatter, platinum cards could be made much more accessible without breaking the game).
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Hiya! First off, gotta say. Loving this game! Been playing Pokemon since I was five years old, on a GameBOy Colour. Really caught the gist of what it's supposed to be! But, my problem, is where the heck do I fin this Shadyman for the Metorite shards to turn them to whatever gets crushed for a key? I found all four, got all the info(I think this is the same quest) for Willie and Hessa, Got the cloth, called the dude, and obtained the coin. I've scoured Sylvenpelt Hotel on a tip from a friend, but only 315 and BLitz's rooms are unlocked. Did I miss something?
UPDATE: Funny story! I found him after getting to that special Island with Hessa and the white haired man.
UPDATE: Funny story! I found him after getting to that special Island with Hessa and the white haired man.
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at seaside vista at my house the computer asked for a password can anyone tell me it ?
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what happens after u complete all the post game quests ?
can u get shiny during gp fusion ? or not ?
can u get shiny during gp fusion ? or not ?
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Hello ! I accidentally throw the mining kit. Is there a way to get it back ? Because I can't buy it anyway and I can't have the shards 🤷*♂️
Thanks
Thanks
StaticShock
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Have you tried loading a backup save?
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Probably a stupid question but what do you do in the future after beating the league? I've gotten to the plantation but it doesn't seem like there's anything to do there.
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So i am trying to get a 5GP Pokemon but after breeding the same pokemon for a while all the EV of the pokemon just become 0. So is this just a glitch or am i doing something wrong?
StaticShock
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In the alternate future, there's a side quest related to Ambrosia that you can do and one with Ashen as well. Also, there's a sparring trainer who employs level 150 Blisseys but charges $200000 per fight. You can even shinify your Pokemon for 1 million.
Main purpose though is the Prism Tower. Beat that and you'll get one of the ultimate items.
_______________________
Btw, what are Dark Celebi's BSTs?
Also, @Stochastic, missed opportunity to name Dark Celebi's 'Time Skip' move as King Crimson! xD
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