Video game lessons learned the hard way

I'd disagree, attack jets will turn your life into a nightmare and scout helicopters with repair monkeys will outlast tanks in Battlefield 4.

Nevermind the last years october's patch made life even easier for both by nerfing everything that could resist those things.

Crypt Of The Necrodancer

• You will come to hate spiders.
• Swordmasters won't jump back and thrust unless you hit them when they're adjacent to you.
• Killing a miniboss in Dead Ringer's room before all four are summoned causes that bell to stop ringing.

Addition: guard/soldier/ninja disguises do not pass a close inspection. Stay as far away from the still-live guards/soldiers as possible and under no circumstances approach them closer than five meters. In the case of ninjas, do not get spotted at all; all the disguise does in their case is that instead of shooting on sight, they run up and yell at you in Japanese for not being at your post before realizing that you're not who you're supposed to be.

...but at that rate, what's even the point of being disguised?

Silvania Saga:

• Just because this game is a Fire Emblem clone doesn't mean you can play exactly like the game series. Learn the differences. At least there is no permadeath, which is a blessing because some chapters outright require baits which will kill them.
• Always check ranges and weapon effectiveness all the time. One slip up and one unit is defeated. In case of Regulus or Spica, game over.
• Grind Spica because she is mandatory for chapter 13. If you can't or don't, let her sit somewhere for the rest of the chapter.
• It's better to sell almost broken weapons than hoarding them.

edited 27th Aug '16 12:21:07 AM by murazrai

I usually find a civilian, hide the body, and appropriate the uniform.

Like that first mission in (I think 2) where the delivery man with the flowers can get you through the front gate.

Fire Emblem Fates:

• When determining if a unit can survive hits, don't forget to include skills like Poison Strike and Grisly Wound in that determination.

And if the AI has even 1% crit or skill chance, assume it will happen if it would kill your character. And a 70% chance of hitting anything yourself should be taken as a 50%, for the same reason as before.

Ain't that confirmation bias? You roll for a lot of attacks in an FE game, and you probably don't remember all those times everything went according to plan.

Because when RNG decides to be bastard and you don't have redundancies, your party will fall like a house of card. Doesn't matter the AI cheats or not.

Perhaps, but after the fifth or sixth reset because someone got taken out when the RNG decided they should miss on a 70% shot, you start to question things.

This is particularly bad in Fates, where - as I noted before - enemies almost never move without someone being sent to lure them out. Which means someone has to risk enemy attack.

One thing I've learned is to never trust in-game percentages. Quite often they don't show the practical percentage, since they might skip certain modifiers or caps, or simply have a different algorithm than what the actual action uses. Very obvious in games like the Civilization series.

Final Fantasy XIV: More of a "huh, that's interesting" than a hard lesson learned, but if you join an in-progress Palace of the Dead group, your temporary level will get bumped up to match the rest of the group's.

The Manga Works (one of Kairosoft's newest simulation games): If your publisher wants you to work on a series for a manga you've submitted, don't start working on a new one until you've fulfilled your contract. When it comes time to submit a new chapter, you might not have enough PP to put together a good chapter.

Crusader Kings 2:

Pay attention to what you're really doing when you declare war on people. When you want to remain someone's loyal vassal, don't go waging subjugation wars on enemies with the same tier title as your liege. You'll stop being a loyal vassal and start being an independent lord with nominal equality to your former leader.

And unless you've been very careful or your liege has been very stupid, you probably won't be anywhere near an actual equal.

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

• Niles and Odin starting out closer to the western village is a red herring. You need to send Corrin + Retainer to the west while they deal with the soldier to the north.
• Enemies won't attack unless they deal damage, or inflict a stat down to allow damage.
• Just because you can engage a group doesn't mean you should.
• Sometimes, the best way to deal with a situation is to tactically withdraw to drag out the fight.
• Just because a physical unit can't get directly to Elise doesn't mean she's safe. The AI can set up a dual strike to get at her, and her garbage defence makes it pretty much as potent as a direct attack.

x4 That was nice for Square

Crypt Of The Necrodancer:

• No, it's not a good idea to trigger the Shrine of War with Dove.
• If you somehow kill a miniboss as Dove, it respawns.

Any game with block puzzles:

BLOCK PUZZLES MUST DIE.

Even Tetris?

That's more a puzzle game with blocks. We're talking about Tower of Zosma, Vagrant Story block puzzles.

Don't forget Lufia 2's World's Most Difficult Trick, but at least that one's optional. (It had 121 steps, I think.)

Well I hated the pillar moving puzzles in Golden Sun "1"...

By the way, if ever you want a game that is entirely block puzzles, it's called Sokoban.

Starbound:

• For your second or further characters, you can spend 500 fuel to travel to your original farm/mansion/hub, but you will usually need 500 fuel to get back, should you want to.
  • If you don't fly back, take into account of which nearby planets are already visited. You wouldn't want to fly to a solar system only to find out that one of your other characters had already dug the hell out of it.
• You can "grind" questing in a village until you find an Engineer crew member or two, then you can turn the game into Farmville for a while as you wait for the Engineer/s to do their magic.
  • Do not refine all your ores, you will regret it.
  • Just remember that enemy groups spawned by this quest (and their "Pokemon") will not only be harder than usual encounters on the same planet, but will also massacre any nearby NPC's that aren't designated hostages.
  • Having village that is next to a nearby random neutral or evil structure (e.g. Weird Lab, USCM Prison, Sewers, beginner Mines) is the best choice for questing. This includes communities that you yourself created.
  • The Avian Temple biome is the worst village ever... the villagers' houses sometimes only have doors on one side and no doors on the other.

edited 30th Aug '16 2:59:45 AM by Malco

Final Fantasy XIV

• Much like in certain team-based shooters, the only way to reliably ensure that you don't get stuck with a healer-less group in Palace of the Dead is to go as a healer yourself.

Ōkami

The bear in the forest is a greater foe than Yami could ever be.