Glaugust: HPLess System

more Glaugust posting. This time I rolled "HPLess system"
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There is no horse power in this land. The horses are completely weak, with noodle legs that flop as they walk. They are a rarefied species, kept alive at great expense in the private gardens of Aesthete Mayhew.

Some say the horses whisper late at night, sweet words for those who would listen. Lying among fragrant flowers, their lips will retract and the horse will speak of green meadows, blue skies, and the necessity for invading the lower city of Melanoth.

When asked about the horses and their whispering, the good Aesthete laughs and says “pay them no mind” and “aren’t they pretty though”. So far, Melanoth and its clear fountains remain uninvaded.

There is no horse power in this land. Perhaps that is for the best.

Bonus: An actual system
Tally every significant hit your character takes. If something would break a foot or concuss a head, mark an injury tally.

Whenever your character attempts something physical, roll a d6 over your injury tallies to proceed. For example, your Tide Witch takes a nasty fall and cracks a couple ribs. Until the injury is healed, they must roll at least a 2 on a d6 to engage in a round of combat, climb a ladder, etc.

At six injuries your character is incapacitated.

Picture by Erdei Greta

On Keeping Nanodungeons

Here's my quick glaugust take. I rolled 2d6 and got challenge four, number five, "Nanodungeon".

A brief description of the hobby
Nanodungeons are difficult to farm and the best ones are found in the wild. Scraped from under a snowdrift or sampled from the depths of a cave they are flat crystalline structures about a millimeter and a half long. Under a microscope small “rooms” can often be seen. High quality nanodungeons will have a more complex layout with more rooms.

If you are just starting out or have limited time, you can purchase a rack containing a few hundred nanodungeons. After acquiring it, you can place this rack somewhere cool and dark for a few months. Knowing when it is ready to be harvested is more art than science but it may glow or hum.

When you are ready, put on some thick gloves, take the rack and carefully shake it over a sturdy table. Thousands of little “creatures”, some ounces of “blood”, a few sparks, and most importantly, tiny glittering treasure will spill out from the rack. 

This sometimes nasty flotsam can be sifted through for its valuables after it has calmed down a bit. The rack can then be put away until its nanodungeons have restocked itself. If you’re industrious, you might have several such racks, though they can start to interact strangely.

 
Meta: how big is a nanodungeon?
If a reasonable dungeon is say, 40 rooms, then a nanodungeon is 0.00000004 rooms. If a room is a square 25 feet on a side then a nanodungeon is 0.000025 square feet which is 2.3 sq mm. Something like a square with 1.52mm long sides.

This is too small to fully cover a human pupil, which, though it expands and contracts, has a median diameter of about 4mm.

photo by Sierk Horn

The Ancient Billowing Order of Henge Knights

These knights are NOT hedge knights. They are very slender and sneaky and can lift 25 tons.

Did you know that all henge ditches are dug by henge knights? It’s true. They sit themselves right down and drag their armored asses on the ground, leaving a furrow in the earth. It’s very efficient.

These knights tpyically travel in threes and are very dangerous. They sleep only four days a year at anti-equinoxes and anti-solstices. The rest of the time they jealously guard henges of all sorts: big henges, small henges, really big henges (300m+).

They know exactly what time it is and what day it is. They like the color blue. They can and will eat you.

Fortunately there are only 39 henges in existance, so presumably there are fewer henge knights than that. You may never see one if you’re lucky. It’s a shame because henges are actually quite nice looking from a distance. Not many people see them up close on account of the incredibly violent knights, but henges probably look nice up close too.

Henge knights are NOT hedge knights, though their, henge knights’, helmets have little like vines on them. The thin helmet is too long to be comfortable and are laced or partly covered with green. Nothing to truly impede The Efficiency of course.

The rest of their armor varies but they usually carry spears. The chief identifying factor for a henge knight is that they are near henges unlike, say, anyone else with all their limbs attached.

Stay away and stick to the rivers, there’s a good lad.


image taken by "rodw"

Class: Hengesmith

skills: astronomy, religion
starting equipment: shovel, measuring rod, wool tunic

A: Hengiform monument
B: Henge
C: Henge enclosure
D: Trilithon

A: Hengiform monument
With twenty assistants and three months you can make an oval earthwork between five and twenty meters in diameter. The earthwork can be built to have two of the following effects:

a site...
- for accurately predicting astrological events like meteor showers, solar eclipses, or blood moons
- for accurately telling how many days until the next solstice or equinox
- for rest, reflection, and clear mindedness
- that is a simple fortification

You can sketch a perfect oval.

B: Henge
With twenty assistants and six months you can make an oval earthwork between twenty and 300 meters in diameter. It can have two of the following effects:

a site...
- to safely bury the dead
- to cleanse minor illness or disease
- to receive limited visions of the near future
- to ask simple questions of the recently deceased

C: Henge Enclosure
With forty assistants and a year you can make an oval earthwork of over 300 meters in size. When nine people join hands in the very center they can send a simple telepathic message to an individual or small group up to 100 miles away once per day.

Multiple such earthworks can form a communication network. 
 

D: Trilithon
With the help of ninety-nine other people you can shift stones up to twenty-five tons. A site can be constructed with such stones in three years. Such sites can have one of the following effects

a site...
- to permanently bury a powerful evil
- to cleanse and contain disease in a region
- of sanctuary where only the pure hearted can tread
- where true visions of the future can be seen once per year

 

 
Ring of Brodgar photographed by Paddy Patterson

FFTA2 Stat Optimization: Very Pointless But I Did It

FFTA2 or Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is a an old game for the Nintendo DS. It has a pretty dull and featureless plot and is probably the least popular of the demi trilogy. It's not particularly difficult, even on hard mode, and there are a handful of adequate guides and an ok wiki already on the internet. 

Despite this, I spent well over a dozen hours feverishly crunching figures to see the best way to make number go up. Below is the summary, and under that I'll talk about methodology etc. 

summary table sorted by weighted total stats

I've listed the best way to increase a combined weapon attack (WATK) and speed (SPD) or magick power (MPOW) and speed for each race. For example, a classic powerhouse for Humes is to take a base Ninja, and then give it 83 Ninja levels and 15 Parivir levels. The result is a unit that hits both the SPD cap (149) and WATK cap (999), a feat only rivaled by the pure Trickster, which maxes out SPD and MPOW. 

Green highlights are for WATK and blue are for MPOW. The C and D columns are highlighted for visual clarity, as job1 levels are confusingly right next to job2. 

Methodoloy
I ended up with a fairly simple approach, though it took me some time to figure out. So even though I'm presenting my steps neatly here, the process was more messy. 

First, I calculated the best base jobs. These are jobs that give the best combined starting stats. As the speed cap is 149, each point in speed is roughly 6.7 times each point in another stat with a cap of 999. So weighting speed and combining SPD and WATK and SPD and MPOW we get a single figure for comparison. 

For example, the Viera Assassin has a base SPD of 65 and WATK of 77. Weighting the speed by about 6.7 gives 435.81 for a total base weighted SPD+WATK of 512.81. Speed dominates base stat comparison which makes sense as about 1/3 of a unit's total maximum speed comes from its base. For this reason, base jobs are usually fast, even if their WATK or MPOW isn't as good. 


assassins are the best viera base both for fast MPOW and WATK

Next, I used a similar method to evaluate growths, weighting speed about 6.7 times MPOW and WATK gains. 


nu mou growth comparison

Then I "simulated" leveling by making a big spreadsheet with all jobs, to see if a secondary job was necessary to avoid excess stats, as it often is. For example, a pure Seeq Berseker will reach the WATK cap before the speed cap, so by mixing in a few levels from a faster job with lower WATK, like the Ranger, an effective higher combined SPD+WATK can be reached. 

This table is too big to reasonably screenshot, but here is a portion of it anyway.  

I made two big tables, one for MPOW and one for WATK

I had to semi-manually "tune" most level combinations. Doubtless I could have used an equation for this but I'm not sure it would have been much faster. 

I was able to use some heuristics to save time. For example, I knew that all secondary jobs with both a lower SPD and lower secondary stat than the primary job couldn't be optimal. In cases where there were still several potential jobs to tune, I picked the job with the highest speed stat for the race, and then eliminated all other jobs with a lower MPOW or WATK than this job. 

Then I took the jobs with the highest combined scores and make the summary table seen at the top of the post. I thought I was done but there were two edge cases remaining. When optimizing Viera for MPOW or Gria for WATK, the base job doesn't match either of the two "growth" jobs. This is fine on paper but in practice you can't recruit a level one character. Recruits are your clan's average level which is never level 1 even at the start of the game. So in practice your recruits will be, say, level 10 and throw off the arithmetic.

To address this I wrote a script which compares all two job combinations and used it with Gria and Viera. It probably would have been faster to just use a spreadsheet but I thought there were more than two edgecases at first. 

correctly applying level caps was especially fiddly

Finally I added these two practical alternatives to the theoretical best in the summary. They are close to the "mismatch" optimal classes, especially the Viera. There is a level threshold where the mismatch job combination matches the two job combination in strength but I hope the reader will forgive me for not calculating this marginalia. 

Perhaps I would have been better served by simply looking at all two job combinations in the first place, but the approach I took is more thorough. 

It's important to note that this optimization approach doesn't take into account things like HP or weapon defense. Nor does it account for powerful skills like double sword. Still, if you have the patience to only grind abilities on the bench and focus on arguably the most important stats which are SPD and a damage stat, this is theoretically the best way to do it as far as I can tell.  

Oddities

• Even though Black Mage has the "best" growths for Nu Mou MPOW, because the Alchemist hits the MPOW cap with a faster speed, 0 levels of Black Mage are optimal. 

• Even though the Nu Mou Beastmaster has excess WATK, it is still the fastest nu mou, so it cannot be improved upon in terms of SPD+WATK. It probably makes sense to mix in another job with better defense or magic or something if you are wanting a physical nu mou for some strange reason. 

Comparison
There is already a stat optimization guide for this guide on gamefaqs. I think parts of it might be a little inaccurate, however, and I wanted a more robust analysis even if the basic approach of "this unit's growths are good they are probably the way to go" mostly works. 

Misc
That I spent so much time on this is extra funny as I don't like grinding in games, and have little intention of reaching any of these theoretical maximums. There is some satisfaction in feeling like my characters are advancing as quickly as possible but even then I don't like the tracking of fussy details while playing.