ROM Hack Question about Etrian Odyssey II - Heroes of Lagaard (EO2) Skill Data

Shoukon_Tuskweather

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The background is, I noticed that although some skills cap at Lv. 5, they still have data for Lv. 6 to Lv. 10.

I managed to look into the numbers in an unpacked and decompressed file called "playerskill".
By comparing the numbers with the Skill Guide in GameFAQs by Dr. Fetus, I think I can work out the "simple" skills
However, there is this kind of skills that seems rather complex, and I dunno where to look.

These skills are HP-based skills, skills that give different multipliers/modifiers depending on how much health you have.

.

Let me take Landsknecht's RiskCut as an example, the numbers in the raw data are as follows:

13 00 01 00 04 00 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 0A 00 00 00 0C 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 06 00 00 00

I take that 13(hex) denotes that it is the 19th(decimal) player skill in the whole game.
Disregarding the 00s, the following 01 denotes the action type "TP cost" (where 02 is damage multiplier, 03 is speed, 04 is accuracy, 0A is healing-related, 12 is infliction chance, 64 is damage buff, and many more).
The values 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 (decimal) denote the TP cost for skill Lv. 1 to 10 respectively.

.

Then the next "line" is what I don't understand:

00 00 19 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 09 00 00 00

I cannot figure out what is action type "19", but it seems the other HP-based skills have this action type (e.g. LifeAxe, also Ronin's Clarity)
As for the values of Lv. 1 ~ 10, which are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9... I wonder if they are pointers of some sort.

I tried to take a look at another file "playerskillhprate" because it has "HP rate" in its name, but unfortunately I cannot make heads or tails of those numbers, either byte by byte, or two bytes by two bytes.

.

I would be grateful if anyone can give me some pointers where to look.
 

FAST6191

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Missed this at the time.

I am not entirely sure where you are heading with this. Talk of caps usually means devs programmed in things but found during testing or something that it was overpowered, or players did not play things the way they wanted (did not explorer later styles or something) and so blocked them in software. Uncapping things then being something some do in scenarios like this.


As far as understanding what random stats tables mean tou have two main approaches, maybe three.

1) Static analysis of files is fine. However you have the game right there that you can treat as a black box (put numbers in, get numbers out). Edit them and see what happens, worst that will happen is the game will crash and you can just revert and start again. Changing one variable at a time is best, however if there are a bunch of different characters you can possibly change one variable for each of them.

2) Coding analysis. Stuff like https://www.dragonflycave.com/mechanics/gen-i-capturing (which is but a minor variation on this) is not usually made by carefully observing things. Set a breakpoint (this is for the GBA https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ but the basic idea applies to all devices really) on the stat you are interested in and the game will likely calculate it right in front of you if not when the game loads in the first place then whenever it needs to calculate after a level up, character swap, maybe weapon/armour/... swap or whatever else.


3) Split the difference. When you level up you will see numbers change. Make cheats to fiddle with experience or whatever is used, set it such that levelling is easy (you don't have to make a cheat https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial that goes to 9999999 or whatever experience and instead just one battle or whatever below the next level up and go from there). You also have savestates in this to do things many times in case you miss, be careful with savestates and DS games though, especially for things like this; if the game has the table in the files you were looking at already loaded when you make a savestate it might not load your changes.
 

Shoukon_Tuskweather

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Thank you for the detailed suggestion.

I probably wasn't precise enough, and made the text too long so it might be confusing.

In EO2, some skills can only be levelled up to Lv. 5 in the game, but with Cheat Engine, I can find the address and set it to Lv. 6 or even up to 10, but higher than Lv. 10 is likely to be no good.
upload_2021-8-8_7-31-58.png

Sometimes Lv. 6~10 is stronger than Lv. 5, sometimes they are weaker, probably because the values for Lv. 6~10 are some placeholders or copy-and-pasted from other skills. Since they won't normally be accessed in the game without cheating, the developers probably didn't bother with them, which is understandable.

By looking at the tables, I can understand most of their values, translate them to human language, and can tell which over-levelled skills are stronger and which are weaker.
As for the values I don't understand, like the row with grey numbers below, which I suspect has something to do with damage multipliers just like the "dmg" row,
upload_2021-8-8_7-36-48.png

I think I will just do what you said - change some values and see the difference.
I will change the skill level to Lv. 6, see what damage it does, then try Lv. 7 and so on.

I might not be able to get precise values, but without intensive knowledge, I guess it is the only way for now.
 
Last edited by Shoukon_Tuskweather,

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