Mega Tact v0.5a released!

[Mogri]

If you've been following Mega Tact's development, you're no doubt thinking, "What? So soon?" If you haven't, you're probably wondering why you should care.

The Big Deal is that the Mime job is now finished. That means you can now use all 20 generic Jobs. And there's more -- check out the Mega Tact news post. If you haven't dabbled in Mega Tact yet, this is a great time to start.

What's up next? Mostly meta improvements: team inventories, more battle format options, stuff like that. Once that's all wrapped up, we'll bump to 1.0 and open the floodgates: all units available, including unique jobs, monsters, and Lucavi.

[Meowskivich]

I'm glad to see this getting so much constant attention lately. I was always curious about the thing in the past.

[Nathan Karr]

I "tried" once but couldn't do even one battle and the meanings of all the equipment and abilities were opaque to me since I never played the original FFT.

[Mogri]

I "tried" once but couldn't do even one battle and the meanings of all the equipment and abilities were opaque to me since I never played the original FFT.

Yeah... the game in its current state is not very accessible if you never played FFT. That said, the Reference tab can get you up to speed. Use the filters to pare down your options to the generic units and their toys -- there is a lot of information there that you don't need.

In order to do battle, you need at least one qualifying team, and in order to have a team, you need to create a unit. When monsters are released, there will be less for a novice to worry about: you can just pick a monster that sounds cool, put in a level, and you're all set. For now, though, there are a lot of decision points. Here's my recommendation for creating a unit from scratch:

• From the Jobs dropdown, pick something that sounds good. If you picked a mage job, change the gender to Female.
• Under Equipment, change the setting from "All items" to "All buyable items plus Materia Blade."
• Press "Refresh/Preview."
• From the secondary skillset dropdown, pick something that matches your Job -- so magic for a magical job, physical stuff for a physical job. Or go crazy and pick something that you have no idea what it does.
• For the reaction ability, just pick one that sounds cool. Most of the reaction abilities are useful to most units. A few are niche or just bad, but these tend to have lame names like "Counter Tackle," "Catch," or "Caution."
• For the support ability, a safe but unexciting option is (Magic) Attack UP or (Magic) Defense UP. Two Swords is also very good for fighter-types.
• For the movement ability, pick the highest available Move +X.
• Pick the option at the bottom of each equipment dropdown, except accessories, where you want the second-to-last (Feather Mantle). Your job may not have all inventory slots available. Don't worry about this.
• If your character is female, you now have bags in one or both hands. Replace them with something that's not a bag.
• Hit Save.

Hooray! You have a unit.

Currently, you can't put a unit into a battle if its stats are too high. In the near future, the unit's stats will be automatically lowered instead, so you're almost always going to want Level 99 and 97 Brave (the maximum for both stats). Faith is a different matter: increasing Faith increases the effects of magic for the caster and the target. Casters always want high Faith (outside of some gimmick builds), but for physical units, low Faith is usually better unless you have support magic to use on them (such as White Magic or Time Magic).

[Kajitani-Eizan]

Sweet! Time to test some Mimes :P

Out of curiosity, will there be future support for alternate rulesets? I imagine it might be more difficult to dynamically implement some of the mechanics changes recent (haha...) Super Tact tourneys have had, like the Courageous and Cowardly tourney having Brave affect all physical damage, or Kiyomori only providing Protect OR Shell... but simple number tweaks (like nerfing the hell out of Draw Out) might be doable. There might be other complications, too, like what if you want to ban X-Potions? Throwing anything other than Balls/Shuriken? HorizontalJump8?

I imagine that's far down the road... congrats for now!!

[Mogri]

Sweet! Time to test some Mimes :P

Out of curiosity, will there be future support for alternate rulesets? I imagine it might be more difficult to dynamically implement some of the mechanics changes recent (haha...) Super Tact tourneys have had, like the Courageous and Cowardly tourney having Brave affect all physical damage, or Kiyomori only providing Protect OR Shell... but simple number tweaks (like nerfing the hell out of Draw Out) might be doable. There might be other complications, too, like what if you want to ban X-Potions? Throwing anything other than Balls/Shuriken? HorizontalJump8?

I imagine that's far down the road... congrats for now!!

Yes, the plan is to support different rulesets. This includes data changes (adding new abilities/items/units or changing existing ones), but not core mechanics changes (Brave acts like Faith). I may add in the Brave rule separately, but only because I like that one

Banlists are a separate issue -- I think down the road I'd like to make them user-defined. Come to think of it, allowing user-defined rulesets would be awesome, too. It would certainly save me a lot of data entry.

This is all way in the future, though. More immediately, I'm planning on an overhaul to the pre-battle interface (i.e. units, teams, and battle setup).

[Kajitani-Eizan]

ah, for the performing CT thing... i only remember it being a thing we tested in FFT back when developing JunkTact. i can't say for sure though, so it should probably be tested in FFT again. (especially the charging thing, which i assume would work the same way as for performing, but who knows?)

[Mogri]

One feature I want to add is Job-specific unit icons. My thought is a 10x10 overlay that can sit on the top left of the icon; something simple: black and white and representative of the Job.

Here's what I had in mind for the icons. I'm open to suggestions.

• Squire: an axe? Least sure about this, since the class is totally nondescript
• Knight: a shield
• Archer: an arrow
• Monk: either a karate gi (with black belt) or a head wearing a headband (think Ryu)
• Thief: a head with a robber's mask
• Geomancer: a leaf or a globe
• Lancer: a spear
• Samurai: a kabuto
• Ninja: a shuriken
• Wizard: a pointy BM hat
• Priest: a Glabados cross
• Time Mage: a clock
• Oracle: a yin/yang
• Summoner: a summon flame orb
• Calculator: a head with a mohawk
• Bard: an eighth note
• Dancer: a rose
• Mime: a striped shirt
• Monster: a monster face
• Demon: a demon face
• Special: a star
• Lucavi: the Zodiac symbol

If you're interested in creating these icons, post your attempts here. I'd prefer B&W, but if you want to try colors, go for it. Remember to make the background its own distinct color if you aren't making a transparent image.

[Kajitani-Eizan]

here's what i've got so far, please use if you like them and/or edit as needed :P

[Mogri]

Ha, those are pretty sweet.

After some experimentation, I think I like a white outline around the icons. With the outline, the mini-icons are 12x12:



(I did a little cleanup on the shield icon, which I thought was a bit too busy.)

To give an idea of what that might look like in-game, here's a quick mockup:

[Kajitani-Eizan]

Sweet!

I've got some more, if you want them:



As I imagine these are slightly (but hopefully not extremely!) less obvious than the other ones, let me list what these are supposed to look like, going clockwise from the upper left:

Virgo zodiac (Lucavi)
Fox mask (Mime)
Yin Yang (Oracle)
Speech bubble (Mediator)
Glabados cross? (Priest)
Axe (Squire)
Leaf (Geomancer)
Dagger (Thief)
Ultima Demon head (Demon)
Chocobo head (Monster)
Shoe (Dancer)
Ribbon (Special)
Fist (Monk)
Potion (Chemist)

Personally, I'm a bit unhappy with some of them, mainly Summoner, Squire, and maybe Thief... please edit as needed :P

EDIT: Another possible idea for Summoner might be the horn on their heads... I might give that a whirl and see if you like it if it seems I can get it to work out

[Mogri]

Yeah, I'll do some editing and/or reworks on some of them.

On reexamination, the actual Glabados cross is probably not very recognizable, so the Roman cross is probably better from an icon perspective anyway...



Slight reworks to the Monk, Thief, Priest, ribbon, and Chocobo icons plus an alternate for Thief. Also a Glabados cross that I won't end up using. I don't love the Mime -- it's not obviously mimey if you're not very familiar with FFT -- so I'll see what I can come up with for that, too.

[Kajitani-Eizan]

oh haha, that's what the cross is? i was thinking of the one from vagrant story.

gruff chocobo looks spruced up nicely and actually looks happy now! i think the masked man icon for thief is a lot more distinctive. maybe even shift the dagger/sword/whatever to squire, or make the axe one-handed? somehow that axe icon seems inappropriate to me for the lowly squire :P

EDIT: yeah, i tried to make a mime shirt but it didn't seem to look quite right... then i tried a face with mime facepaint, then i was like, huh, this looks kind of like the female mime!

[Mogri]

Here's version 0.6a! The new feature that will have the biggest effect on most players is that units can no longer be rejected from a battle. If a unit would be illegal for the battle's format, it is automatically adjusted. For equipment, that currently means that the item is removed; in 0.7, the item will be replaced with something appropriate (which may not be optimal, but will probably be better than nothing).

The effect of this change is that you'll generally want to set all of your units to level 99 and, in most circumstances, 97 Brave. When you register a team for a battle, you'll be able to see the changes that were automatically applied to each of the units.

The other big feature is the updated unit icons... which is no surprise, if you've been paying attention to the thread. These icons are not necessarily final, so if you have suggestions for improvement, please offer them up. Currently, the Job-specific icons are only shown on the battle map, but 0.7 will probably make them more universal.

A more complete changelist is available on the news page.