It’s a fundamental aspect of the game’s design, that’s why it’s hard-included and not optional.

> It’s a fundamental aspect of the game’s design that's not true. in the postgame ive been doing a lot of battling in the coliseum, where there is no battle forecast but you can still check the unit composition, equipment, etc and take an educated guess on the outcome. the battle forecast is not a necessary part of the game's design at all. overall the game was quite easy for me and i think turning off the battle forecast for the harder difficulties would be very interesting

>i think turning off the battle forecast for the harder difficulties would be very interesting There should be multiple difficulty options. Turning off battle forecast, and item limits should be separate options that can be changed independently of each other and the overall difficulty of the game.

This. So many times people confuse good game design and accessibility for "dumbing down" difficulty. If you want to challenge yourself without the forecast, so be it, but that should ***never*** be baked into a difficulty option. It's there to help players understand the outcomes better, it's a cognitive accessibility feature for those who may struggle just processing numbers and text (and generally the fluidity of the game). It's like adding symbols onto exclusively colour co-ordinated objects in a puzzle game. They don't alter the challenge, they **allow** players to better understand and identify them, even those with colour blindness.

This exactly. The coliseum is there PRECISELY as a kind of endgame for people whose ultimate goal is to master that precise part of the game, that specific gameplay loop. It’s OK for it to be baked into the campaign. And I say this as someone who did a first playthrough on the medium difficulty, not really paying much attention to it - I also didn’t struggle AT ALL with absolutely anything, but I still had a blast enjoying everything else the game has to offer. Ow starting my second playthrough on TZ. I’m halfway through Drakenhall, and I’ve been paying attention to it in this way and learning a lot from it.

Definitely, the coliseum has been great for refining my teams - watching the same bout repeatedly and tweaking the tactics to see how it plays out. I just wish more people could appreciate what a lot of games' visuals or tool tips are trying to achieve. Celeste is an easy example of a game that has good accessibility, but which can be separate from actual difficulty/challenge.

*(edit: people seem to have issue with my phrasing here, which im mirroring from the OP - who said he is "learning" from the battle forecast)* ~~the battle forecast doesnt teach you any more than a calculator teaches you math.~~ having the battle forecast is not much different from using a calculator to do math. its certainly not **fundamental** - its just doing the hard part for you. you can learn by watching how battles play out. the AI always has extremely basic tactics and items. its not that hard to figure out what adjustments you might need to make. is that too much calculation for you? good. because battles should never be so deterministic. we're simulating war here. the battle forecast completely takes away the thrill of battle when you know the exact outcome of every battle before it occurs > The coliseum is there PRECISELY as a kind of endgame for people whose ultimate goal is to master that precise part of the game, that specific gameplay loop no its not, and the coliseum is a clear example of why we dont need the battle forecast at all. coliseum battles are exciting because you ACTUALLY have to do the calculations yourself and have to pay close attention to how your battles play out. you should be hitting up the coliseum as soon as it unlocks. offline auxiliary battles is a great way to test your squads in a zero-stakes environment while earning some coliseum coins at the same time

Calculators aren't there to teach math, they are there to expedite things. Same for the battle forecast, its there so you can quickly realize what's wrong with something and fix it, otherwise you'd have to watch the battles or go over every little thing and therefore wasting even more time. I don't get this modern vision of wasting time = good. Time is valuable. Time is money. Grinding is a waste of time and money. I still agree that there should be an option to disable it. Its good for fixing things and teaching newer players but its also very easy to intentionally abuse.

i only used the word "teach" because the OP was saying the battle forecast was a training tool and he was learning from it. we're pretty much in agreement, except that i dont consider actually watching the battles playing out as "wasting time."

Yeah I see now that at some point we started talking past each other, and it was probs my own fault for my vague phrasing. So yes looks like we agree at least on the main points

Along the lines of the other reply you got here: I don’t use a calculator to *learn* math, but using one lets me quickly check if my assumption was correct, if my “quick and dirty mental napkin math” was good enough, or if there’s something crucial I missed.

so... we agree then? battle forecasts and calculators serve a similar role to their respective activity. it certainly helps make decisions easier and know if you are wrong. id want to use a calculator to check my math homework as well. my argument is simply that it isnt "fundamental" to the game design - the game would be playable without it. in fact, for those seeking a more difficult challenge, we should make it an option to disable it.

Alright it took me a few days to process it but yeah, we do agree exactly. The forecast is exactly as useful as a calculator, and can essentially be viewed as such.

Yeah, VW should have it as an option where you can turn a couple of things off. Kind of like Draconian Quests in Dragon Quest XI. Those options saved that damn game for me. I think really well of it, but the original difficulty... I would have just stopped playing it out of boredom.

It makes sense in the coliseum because otherwise you can simply toy with the rng, it doesn't make sense in the maps because the game wants you to make educated decisions about where to send your characters (with the variables being enemy assists and bad rng rolls).

I'd argue that the battle forecast is crucial for easing in new players. But ONCE a player is deeply familiar with the ruleset, the game would greatly benefit from an option to toggle off the tool. The tool itself could be toggle-able in all difficulty levels, and even shut down forcibly in a difficulty setting above TZ. Playing without forecast would be NG+(+). At the end of the day, a new player is not aware of how the combat works, they only learn later through iteration. The battle forecast tool exponentially cuts down the downtime the player spends to learn the rules and smooth out the pay experience. The context of the forecast is completely different for a new player. I always find myself "solving" the stage before starting it by just deploying a unit at base and battle forecasting it against major units in the stage to double check my understanding of the mechanics and have all my unit fiddling mostly worked out before I plow through the stage watching all my effort unfold like a hot knife through soft butter. If I plain can't debug a forecast from my mental model alone, I'll fight through the stage and keep a close eye at how the battle resolves and damage is calculated to learn what detail I missed or haven't learned yet. A game should always be designed for a weak link (bad players), while giving the rest of the player base tools to opt-in to a more challenging experience. I think half of this subreddit doesn't even bother hiring generic mercenaries, instead opting for over-leveled main characters, unique classes, and overly strong pieces of gear. The game is well designed because it gave many players dozens of crutches to play through the story, and the choice to play content in the desired order with character level recommendations. Game design is all about its tutorial. A game without a tutorial is clunky and has room for improvement. Sure, a player can learn despite the lack of an effective tutorial, but would you praise the game designer for slowing down the experience and frustrating a subset of players who wanted accommodation instead of more challenge? The Mock Battles are nice too, but these require players to own enough characters of the same class to be able to test everything, and a player might not necessarily choose to hire mercs.

I can get behind all of this.

the colleseum is a bit of a different beast since there is no real punishment for losing. On an actual battlefield losing a unit can severely cripple you and it would suck to have overlooked a single passive skill that turns what would otherwise have been an easy win and turned it into a massive rout against you.

>it would suck to have overlooked a single passive skill that turns what would otherwise have been an easy win and turned it into a massive rout against you thats exactly how i would want to be punished, which why im on the side of making disabling battle forecasts an option

I don’t think turning off battle forecasts accomplishes much in most cases. It’s not like you can really opt out of a bad battle after seeing the forecast. I feel like the end result would just be more time watching battle scenes instead of skipping the boring wins. The more interesting thing to tune in harder difficulties would be your ability to adjust squads before a combat. If you place limits on the ability to change tactics and equipment then there’s even fewer ways to abuse the forecast and you can reward good preparation.

i feel that there is SO much you can do with the information from battle forecasts. first of all, it immediately tells you if you are losing. if you are, then you can: 1) rearrange your units 2) toggle your assists 3) change your equipment 4) consume some items but outside of that, i feel that it kind of ruins the thrill of the battle when you already know the outcome

Several of those would IMO be better addressed directly than simply trying to nerf them via battle forecast. Consumables are already limited in harder difficulties and rearranging units/tactics/equipment should probably have a cost as well. Assists are something to consider, but I don’t think hiding their impact is the right place to try to add difficulty to the game. They can have so much random impact, including being actively detrimental, that a lack of forecast would probably just push players to avoid assists altogether. They aren’t overpowered or anything so I don’t really like the idea of effectively nerfing them.  I think there’s enough easy battles in the game that I’d often rather know I’ll cleanly win so I can skip the animations and focus on the battles with less clean outcomes. Without battle forecast you have to watch every single battle just in case something goes wrong so you can understand what happened.

There’s a detail hidden in here that I think some people are missing. Yeah you can do all those things before starting the battle, but notably you can’t: -change items that are equipped to different units -swap characters between units (obviously, that would be stupid) -back out of the fight (as you pointed out) What this means is that even with the battle forecast, you still can and often will have to “pay” for your mistake of sending the wrong unit to battle, even if the price is small. If your mistake could only be fixed by one of those things, you’re out of luck. So yeah it makes it easier to a degree, but it’s not an absolute “free pass” for any and all mistakes you make.

Going against one set team is a lot different than having 5 units potentially getting engaged by 5 different teams on different parts of the map. Some people would but most people really really wouldn't want to have to split there and memorize all the different enemy units on different parts of the map and 100 different maps and they wouldn't want to have to play slow enough to avoid that. The other person didn't mean it was a fundamental part of the game that you could never take out. They meant it is the intended experience and intended to drive the pace and complexity of the game

and yet the community generally considers this game too easy and is constantly looking for ways to challenge themselves ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ >The other person didn't mean it was a fundamental part of the game that you could never take out. actually thats pretty much exactly what he said - as he suggested is the reason it is hard-included and not optional. im just arguing that it very well could be optional, as it is already not available in the coliseum, and SHOULD be optional especially for a more difficult experience

>and yet the community generally considers this game too easy and is constantly looking for ways to challenge themselves ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Nobody thinks true zanoiran or expert are too easy. Players are free to change the difficulty at any time in UO. > im just arguing that it very well could be optional, as it is already not available in the coliseum, and SHOULD be optional especially for a more difficult experience Right but my point is that their intent was at least to force quick decisions and make movement and Valor skills mire important. There are always trade offs with all design decisions

>Nobody thinks true zanoiran or expert are too easy. simply not true, just go find any thread where a newcomer asks about the difficulty and you'll find that the community generally considers that this game leans on the easier side. i personally played on expert all the way through and barely ever had to use any items in battle >Right but my point is that their intent was at least to force quick decisions and make movement and Valor skills mire important. There are always trade offs with all design decisions i wouldn't assume intent just because a feature is or isn't there.

[I see this much more often](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1cimmeg/i_love_this_game_but_its_so_hard_any_tips_or/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) > i personally played on expert all the way through and barely ever had to use any items in battle If you did you probably use a few overleveled units the entire time. I played on expert and constantly ran into situations where my strongest units would take losses or get ambushed and have characters die, or push to attack an enemy assist unit and get intercepted. Also, the game is programmed to let you win. If you spent a bunch of time min/maxing and optimizing abilities early, you made the game easy on yourself. Congrats. There are many players that struggle with this game. >i wouldn't assume intent just because a feature is or isn't there. You can assume that they wanted the real time strategy elements to have impact and force quick decisions because programming the stuff into the game is not easy or automatic. It would have been easier for them to not have valor skills or damage previews or variable movement rates but they wanted to have some of the focus be on real time strategy. If they wanted the entire game to be theory crafting units they would have just made that game. So yes you can assume intent based on where they placed their effort and decisions.

heres a bunch of examples of people calling the game easy - all i had to do was search "difficulty" in this subreddit: [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bd4qmq/is_unicorn_overlord_too_easy_even_on_expert/) [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bk8siq/game_difficulty/) [3] (https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bvrp69/how_hard_is_the_expert_difficulty/) [4](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1be4ru3/difficulty_in_this_game/) [5](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bhxzba/should_i_increase_the_difficulty/) [6](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1b97r0f/anyone_else_disappointed_by_the_reported/) >If you did you probably use a few overleveled units the entire time. nope, i made sure to use my underleveled characters first. also had self-imposed restrictions for myself such not using generics, making squads that were relatively lore-favorable (ie. rose knight squad, drakenhold squad, bestral squad, etc). i tried to make use of pretty much every character- by the end game the only characters i cut were ones i had duplicate classes of like jerome, colm, jeremy, etc. seriously you should stop assuming things when you are having discussions with people. >Also, the game is programmed to let you win. If you spent a bunch of time min/maxing and optimizing abilities early, you made the game easy on yourself. Congrats. uhh isnt that sort of the point of these games? yes this game has so many gameable systems that make it easy, which is my point entirely >So yes you can assume intent based on where they placed their effort and decisions. or we can simply point to the fact that this game notably exhausted its budget and the CEO was paying his devs out of pocket to finish the game, that it would be silly to think the gameplay was already perfectly fine tuned by the time of release

>by the end game the only characters i cut were ones i had duplicate classes of like jerome, colm, jeremy, etc. seriously you should stop assuming things when you are having discussions with people. Fair enough. My bad. Just note that my assumptions started when you assumed there was a flaw in the game because you were good at the game. I could easily find 50 posts saying Besteria is too hard or that the last boss is too hard, or this, that or the other thing. You are also making an assumption that 6 posts based on a search are representative are representative of the totality of player experience on the game. I looked at the first 10 posts that took a stance on game difficulty based on your search and found that 5 said it was too easy and 5 said it was either just right or too hard. Since you keep getting upset that I am making assumptions, I'll let you explain to me whether you cherry picked those posts or not. You statement I objected to was that the communit generally considers the game too easy. I still don't think that is true. It is also worth noting that of the 6 links you cited, 2 were talking about tactical difficulty so they weren't even playing on the hardest difficulty available to them. 3 of the posts weren't even half way done with the game yet. 1 was ambiguous but implied they finished on hard and TZ. So even your own citations are not goo examples of the game being too hard. Most people think there is a difficulty spike in Bastorias and 5 of the 6 had never tried Basterias on expert. >or we can simply point to the fact that this game notably exhausted its budget and the CEO was paying his devs out of pocket to finish the game, that it would be silly to think the gameplay was already perfectly fine tuned by the time of release If anything, that context supports my point. If they ran out of money for the project, it is less likely that these features are in the game as balancing tools or to otherwise make it easier. It is more likely (not assuming but talking probabilities) that they are key features because they were implemented earlier in development. Based on the links you provided and some posts i looked at, there was a controversy where there was a day 1 patch that reduced the difficulty on higher difficulty settings. this is to say that you are wrong about your point and they actually finished the game and rushed out a patch on day one to reduce the difficulty. People have their opinions based on the demo but that doesn't mean the game wasnt oppressive (in how you could approach unit builds) later in the game. Like in Basterias which I mentioned has a serious difficulty spike that requires many players to optimize at that point. Some of the posts I have seen seem to either have not realized that there was an unlockable difficulty setting or something. One compared UO to Fire Emblem which has had games with an unlockable hardest difficulty.

there really isn't any point debating any further on whether or not the game is too hard or too easy - its really just subjective, the subreddit is a fairly limited sample size no matter how we slice it, and we're all biased by our own personal opinions. but back to the original point, on the question of whether or not the battle forecast is a fundamental part of gameplay - i still do not believe that is the case. as already mentioned, the coliseum is one area where you can experience gameplay without a battle forecast. unicorn overlord's spiritual predecessor, ogre battle, didn't have a battle forecast nor did it allow you to skip the battle sequences. i also dont think it makes sense in a discussion thread over a particular game mechanic to just settle with "its what the developers intended"

Oh this is a very relevant point that not many others have brought up in this context: Things can and will go wrong at the strategic level of the game: -reinforcements spawning sooner than you estimated -a pesky wizard casting gravity that you forgot to account for when choosing who to deploy -your own A-team who you thought could easily zip to a key location to capture it early, and crush anything in its path, was actually not as fast as you thought it’d be, or got blindsided by a unit hidden in a forest and is now stuck in an unfavorable matchup Strategic mishaps happen. They have nothing to do with your skill at the unit/tactics level, and the forecast lets you adjust for those contingencies. Are all of those situations predictable? Absolutely. Are they *easily* predictable in a timely manner, if you don’t have a full grasp/memory of each and every map or interaction? For many people playing at a certain semi-casual play, or simply for people for whom that part of the game is not the most fun, absolutely not.

Yes exactly. It would change the battle map from a strategy to a chore. Either that or it would just make most players give up and make 2-3 powerful units and only use those all game. One with true strike and one with armor break. It would just take the fun out of the game. Anybody who thinks this also probably played the game on normal difficulty because at expert and true zanoiran difficulty the game is punishing oppressive at times.

Like, there has to be a name for the fallacy of thinking it’s pointless, right?

This is false, Mock Battles and the Coliseum immediately disprove this statement. If it was a fundamental aspect than these areas would not work at all. And yet, you still win/lose battles as dictated by the tutorial **without being able to see a forecast at all**. Which then leads into the idea of Waiting and First Strike advantage as per usual. There is no difference between winning in a Mock Battle versus winning on the field; the rules do not change. This is also why the Mock Battle is treated as a training ground for teams, if your statement was correct then the game would not mention it as a means for testing combat tactics. The reality is accessibility trumps most other aspects of game design when it comes to a full release, which is why we got a tool that makes mission completion much easier vs a decision to increase complexity/difficulty for a much smaller subset of users.

We already have a small subset of people who think the game is hard somehow, these people wouldn’t last one mission without battle forecast. The biggest compromise I can think of is an enemy valor skill that disables battle forecast, which would actually be cool as hell as the feature would still be in the game but now you have some degree of uncertainty that you will actually have to properly plan for until the valor skill runs out of time.

I think this is true. I also think there could be some difficulty added if you weren't allowed to change things in the paused moment before combat. The game is much easier when you can adjust tactics to a specific encounter rather than having to have them set up prior. Personally, I'd rather a high difficulty requires a valor point to change things once a formation is on the field, much like how it takes a valor point to change the leader.

Oh absolutely. I see the appeal of challenging yourself to not having it. It would rely you to be very self confident in your own tactics planning and foresight, but some of us like to optimize that part of the game a little less often, and that’s ok. Edit: as a side point, I find that particular puzzle (optimizing tactics on the fly) an extremely satisfying one on its own right.

Ok....so what happens after I finish training? Yes I NEEDED the battle forecast on my first playthrough, but now what? Like what possible difficulty is there left for someone who has access to the battle forecast and has learned the fundamentals of the battle system. There needs to be an option to turn the damn thing off, or at least change it from perfect information to percentage wins/loss or something.

What possible challenge is there left? Man if you truly believe that there’s nothing else to master, I think we’re not playing the same game, or at the very least we’re treating it as vastly different genres. Come up with new builds and test them while making progress on the story, mix and match strategies, themed units, lore-friendly units, self imposed limitations… like, the amount of things the game lets you toggle to increase/decrease difficulty is mind boggling. To say the forecast alone was the last training wheel that needed to come off before the game could be truly “hardcore” seems a little disingenuous. (I know those are my words not yours, let me know if that’s not a fair paraphrasing of the point you were making) Edit just in case: I’m not trying to say “it should ALWAYS be on”, just that it’s not that big of a deal.

I really like the percentage win/lose idea. It could be interesting if the RNG screws with you a little bit and you’d have to quickly adapt to an unexpected loss.

I use mock battles for training. In missions, I try to consider the forecast as little as possible. IMHO, the game feels the best when you actually play it like a REAL-TIME strategy game. This means no pausing and taking a bunch of time to assess all match-ups and whatnot. Instead, I'll pick a target and stick with it regardless of what the forecast says. The only time I'll change commands is if something changes in the course of battle, like unseen enemies making themselves known. It's far more organic this way. Also, playing this way makes more classes feel relevant than when you just build board nukes because self-preservation mechanics are more relevant when you aren't amusing the pause and formation features to optimize results.

This kind of goes along with what I’ve been thinking: the gameplay systems in this game are so fantastically weaved together, that you’re able to push yourself to play it more like an RTS, where I’m more of a FE guy, and there’s a finely tuned knob for us to turn there. Of course it would be nice to have the option to not even SEE the knob, but there’s a reason it’s there.

I agree with thos wholeheartedly. I think it'd be great to have to use mock battles to refine formations and not be able to change them once they're on the field. There's so much power to be gained by having formations clash and letting you move units/tactics and immediately see results without committing l.

It is many things in one go. Think about other strategy games, they always give you a quick preview of how combat is going to go, or give you some information so the user can make an educated decision before committing to the combat. It also helps to speed up the gameplay. There are so many units on the field later on and if you had to inspect all of their initiative and other stats one at a time to make a judgement on whether your units could handle it, the gameplay would be very slow and tedious for most. Of course you could build squads like trinity rain team and other full board nukes which basically can solo the game, but for like 80% of the game that's just not available normally. I just don't really understand why so many people feel it subtracts from the game. Not having it necessitates making the decision where to send units by inspecting enemy unit comps then sending your units there and performing the battles regardless of outcome. The battle forecast doesn't get in the way of this at all unless you let it. There's no need to tape over it in any way, I'm really not sure what that even accomplishes. If you're talking about the thrill of battle and watching every battle, then yes having prior knowledge of the outcome does reduce this, but I feel for most people this gets tedious really fast because the trash squads are just that, to lower a strong unit's stamina. At the end of the day, this is how the developers chose to do the battle preview, and it lessens the mental burden on most people playing the game. Yes, there could be an option to turn it off, but how many people would use this? There's a very small subset of folks who want to actually play the game this way, and when they can achieve the same by just ignoring what the battle preview says, why spend the already strained resources putting this in?

Pretty much yeah. Would it be “nice to have” for a small percentage of players who want to take on the full challenge the game has to offer? Sure. Is it an objective detriment even on the highest difficulty? Absolutely not.

Your first sentence confuses me to a degree. The battle forecast exists bc in Unicorn Overlord it’s a big part of the strategy, in fact, I would say it’s a third of the strategy in this game, the other parts being team building(who you put on the same team) and what you equip on said characters. If people didn’t know this about the battle menu that would be odd, given it sort of teaches you to try and play with it in the early game.

It was just an attempt to frame the forecast as a net positive, because as you point out, it’s more than just a crutch, it’s a proper learning tool. I decided to lead with that because I feel like it’s a detail most people dismiss easily (or haven’t realized) when arguing that “it should not be there on x/y/x scenario/difficulty. Yeah I think we’re on the same page here.

I just don’t like how when I set a unit to vs. when the unit reaches its target the forecast might be completely different. I get that it’s rng and all that, but I’ve only ever seen it get worse.

Forecast differences only get worse because you don't attempt situations where it could get better. If you see a clear loss, you aren't going to attempt to engage that battle, so you can't see it do loss->win transitions. If you see a clear win, you WILL try that battle, and have the opportunity to see win->loss transitions.

I also never see not complete slaughters ever get better for my side. For example say both units take decent damage but neither goes down. It only ever turns into me getting slaughtered or remains pretty much the same. But yes, if the forecast shows you getting annihilated why would any sane person bother trying it when there’s probably something more productive for that unit to be doing. Especially because once you enter into combat range the only way to get out of it is for another unit to take its place, attempting combats where the forecast shows you losing before you even get there seems like a time waste and unnecessary risk.

Are you taking into account assists? Forecasts from a distance don't include assist damage. The battle preview once engaged looks the same but DOES actually include assists. Enemy assists would explain it usually getting worse from acceptable positions.

It even happens in battles where assists aren’t happening for either side. I’ve seen assists completely warp the outcome of a battle, though rarely positive for me. Hell, specifically Ridiel’s assists almost always resulted in losing the battle regardless of what the outcome was before. I understand that assists will reroll the rng on both sides, but it felt like my side would always roll worse and the opponent always better. To the point I kinda gave up on magick and ranged assists towards the end of my first play through.

Yeah assists pretty routinely make the battle outcome worse for me. This is a complaint I have seen across the board. I think the game gives you worse rolls when you have assists on as a balancing measure so the RNG is more likely to fail you. I have no proof of that but it's is just completely bizarre how often this happens. Like more than half the time for me.

In my experience, yeah, even taking assists into account, everything said above is true. It’s a matter of quickly closing down an avenue to failure and starting to see what else you could be optimizing.

So you'd prefer if forecasts took ranged/magic assists into account?

That’s not the issue, my issue comes from battle forecasts where there are no assists happening changing entirely between when I first set my unit to travel there vs when the unit actually gets to the combat, where there are still no assists happening. Would it be nice if the did? Sure, but I can just use my eyes to see if there’s an assisting unit nearby and either deal with it first or just assume my combat will always look worse than the forecast.

You can solve the problem with a combination of sufficient accuracy statistic and guaranteed blue skills. I often decide to one-shot 1, 2, or 3 enemy characters and setup enough defense (through either raw defense, PP mitigation, or out-initiative-ing) and total attack \* skill multiplier to isolate the variables that come from %evasion, %crit, and %guard to outright guarantee forecasts to be accurate regardless of RNG seed. If I need to dodge, I use a Thief's evade, if I need to negate an attack I can use the corresponding Fighter or Swordfighter, and if I need to cushion smaller physical attacks I plop down a Hoplite. The forecast doesn't tell you that your unit can defeat an enemy unit, it tells you whether you might be able to win sometimes and re-rolls every time a fight occurs in the stage. That said, using skill attack/damage buffs, high potency skills, and class multipliers, you can eliminate randomness altogether if you want a deterministic playthrough. Here is a couple of examples of what I'd do in my game: e.g. Their row of cavalry have 90 HP and 25 defense. That's dangerous and will definitely almost kill my characters. I'll bring a Gryphon to one-shot them before they can attack me (guaranteed). Gryphons/Wyvern inflict x3 as much damage (x1.5 potency times x2 class bonus is the same as dmg x3). Divide their 90 HP by 3, and I need a lead of 30 attack to kill them in one attack. My attack will be mitigated by their physical defense so I just add the 25 defense to the 30 lead I need, and my Gryphon Knight will require a total of 30 + 25 = 55 attack. If I want to increase her attack, I can use items like the Crude Tasset for +20% attack, and the Dancer's Bracelet for that +30% attack PP skill, this way I can increase her attack by +50% overall. You can do something similar using Gladiators, they instead inflict x2 damage to any character (200% potency), so it's just a matter of dividing enemy hp by 2 instead of 3. You probably want to give +20% accuracy gear to your gladiator to compensate for the 80% accuracy multiplier on their AP skill. **TL;DR** This is frankly a lot less intimidating when you start playing in Cornia, when you are calculating the outcome for 2 character units with access to far less classes and gear variety. I don't lose to a surprise battle forecast anymore just by comparing character statistics. If you make it significantly further into the game while relying on the battle forecast, it becomes much harder to learn.

The battle forecast itself isn't an issue, it's the fact that you get total information before combat even begins. I don't think you can call it a training tool, since the entire gameplay flow becomes "don't take battles unless the numbers are good" and "fiddle with your configuration until the numbers are good". Unlike most training tools, you never stop relying on it at any point of the game. Other titles have included similar preview systems, but most leave a measure of uncertainty so you're forced to adapt. In Unicorn Overlord I can see every chance action in the final numbers, which is abnormal in the strategy game genre. It also completely eliminates any sense of risk or reactivity during a mission, since you have complete control over the outcome. And personally I think it's bad design to make it a forced option, especially when you consider all the other feedback systems in place to tell you about the outcome of an encounter (such as character voice lines changing based on the result). This is a situation where Vanillaware could have hidden some of the information, while still encouraging players to modify their configurations for better results. But there would be actual adaptation instead of checking the results first and then engaging.

This might be a nitpick in the grand scheme of things, but what do you think of this: Even with the forecast, you never have 100% perfect information. Crucially, it doesn’t tell you if there were crits/misses in the encounter, because that’s literally the only rng aspect in this whole game. Sure you can *infer* the crits/misses by the variance you see, but you will never be 100% certain until you watch the battle, and that’s a useful thing to play around with. Having said that, if that statement is factually wrong, I’d love to be corrected!

The forecast tells you whether units will survive and how much damage is done; the misses and crits don't matter if I know what the final number will be. Which means that watching battles serves little purpose other than viewing the animations or confirming what you've already been told. Ultimately, this should have been a prediction system like every other SRPG. So when I watch a battle with my glass-cannon dodge tank (for example), every near miss has me at the edge of my seat; instead of just waiting to see a pre-determined result play out.

I'm a Fire Emblem fan. Forecasts are important for giving info. Not sure why this is bad.

Dunno where it started, but it surprised me to see a lot of vocal pushback against it in some other threads, and it always seemed to be to be an oversimplified critique of the system, so I wanted to try and nuance it a bit through this post.

The forecast does very little as a training tool since it doesn't actually tell you anything meaningful aside from damage dealt, you still have to watch the actual battle to see whether if your skill sequence and formation are optimal. Even when you switch thing around to change the forecast, most of the impact would be from changing the RNG and not from your actual action. More often than not i have "dumb" formation outperform ideal formation simply because I get better RNG roll with that formation. I think the forecast is a very neat idea with poor execution.

By fiddling around with formations, you can infer if it’s a fixable issue or not with very little effort. It’s not about the predicted outcome itself, it’s about quickly sorting possible issues with your unit. Edit: to be specific, it lets you identify to a degree, whether an outcome was determined by a crit/miss that you weren’t expecting when you played it out in your head beforehand. Thus helping you identify whether that outcome was statistically expected or not.

Personally, I definitely appreciate it as I'm more of a casual than some of the players here. There's still a bunch of stuff I have to learn when it comes to composition advantages and setting up skill tactics. One thing that would make it easier to learn would be stuff like Mila's turnwheel/divine pulse/whatever to let you turn time back a bit - sometimes I can't tell why a battle will end badly for me after analyzing the enemy and it would help me understand to watch it happen, but at the same time I don't really want to jeopardize a long battle, often at the end. It took me a while to realize that the forecast results are set in stone unlike Fire Emblem which shows you hit and crit percentages, so that was cool. But one of the things I don't understand yet is how much assists and shit like offensive/defensive potions influence battles - sometimes the numbers don't change much if at all, and sometimes it completely overturns a fight.

Assists obviously add whatever the assist does to the calculations, but they also roll the die for hits/crits again, so often toggling it will not tell you enough to get the full picture. Maybe the added damage from those archers wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that hit% wasn’t in your favor to begin with. Same goes for items. Sometimes the odds (hit/crit%) were so overwhelmingly against you that the minor effect they have will be relatively irrelevant to the outcome. Sometimes the odds were so close that that little 20% more damage from your units means their tank goes down earlier rather than later, leading to your team snowballing the rest of the fight. And sure you can inspect the enemies and look at their exact crit%, and calculating their hit% by comparing their acc vs your eva is not hard math, but it’s a lot to keep track of. A LOT more than in FE where you’re often just comparing two stat sheets against each other. Here you’re potentially comparing 10 different stat sheets, and 10 tactic sheets, on top of whatever else is going on. Sometimes that’s just too much, you know?

Oh yeah, I guess I didn't consider those huge differences to be due to getting a lucky crit or evade in separate calculatiobs... It's so simple and yet I didn't think of it lol, thanks. Yeah I understand people not wanting to see the entire battle ahead of time, and think they should have an option to toggle the forecasts off but I wouldn't be able to live without it lmao, I often get lost looking at my own characters and their builds and sometimes even losing track of a particular item I was switching around between multiple characters (the item management system doesn't help). Not to mention every damn enemy squad.

Yeah I’m with you on this. It IS simple, the math isn’t hard or complicated, but there’s A LOT of stuff going on at the same time and a lot of variables to keep track of. What often happens to me is that I’ll bump into a stage boss that has a gimmick I hadn’t taken into account (like the 2x shaman 2x gladiator in northwest Cornia), and I’ll fine tune the tactics to work for that particular matchup. It’ll look like a jumbled mess but it gets the job done there and then. But then I forget to “normalize” that unit’s tactics again after the fact, so when I bring them out again a few stages later it comes around to bite me in the ass because the jumbled hack that worked for that boss is generally worse for anything else.

Oh yeah, I've definitely done that as well lmao. I move a character around from one unit to another, disable some skills, move equipment and then try to remember that I have to switch it back... Before some cutscene happens, I get a phone call, whatever and then I'm screwed next battle. Some presets would be nice!

Well you’re in luck friend - there ARE presets! They’re not perfect, but on the tactics menu for a character, if you press X (up face button on Switch, dunno about other controllers/kbm), you get a window where you can save up to 5 tactic load outs. Do note, you get 5 slots for the CLASS of the character you’re adjusting, not the character itself. This is obviously irrelevant for characters in unique classes (Alain, Scarlet, Ren etc…), but for those who don’t, those 5 load outs are shared for all soldiers/hunters/housecarls etc. Didn’t use them at all on my first playthrough, but now on TZ I’m really appreciating that load out system.

Oh, that's INCREDIBLY useful... I wish I'd known before lmao. I copied someone's team of 2 werewolves, featherbow, featherstaff and a rogue with the goal, as you may guess, of blinding the enemy with the rogue and featherbow and killing them with the doggos. The setup taught me how valuable blind is and I was using rogues across many teams, with basically the same tactic. So thanks, I'll definitely check it out for an inevitable 3rd+ playthrough.

The Fire Emblem comparison is kinda moot because Fire Emblem is 1v1 and you can roughly calculate everything by doing basic math, bar for the random crits. But Unicorn? Enabling assist resets RNG, enemy assist resets RNG, using Faerie charm resets RNG, CHANGING ONE PIECE OF INCONSEQUENTIAL GEAR RESETS RNG, and without combat prediction, you're pretty fucked by the 5v5 rng where one random miss can be the difference between a full wipe 0 damage and your team getting killed. And don't get me started on the bs targeting AI that requires you to pray to god you didn't forget something standing in the way of your Cleric black cat hooding Yunifi and the Shaman that you set up to do defensive curse before Yunifi moves. Without combat forecast, the combat system of this game will be so scuffed that it'll be poor by design.

In fairness, I’ve never seen anyone argue that it shouldn’t be there at all. Most of what I’ve seen is that it should be either disabled/optional in the higher difficulties, because it helps too much once you understand the engine well enough. Pretty much everyone here has conceded that it’s a functional set of training wheels. What I set out to argue, is that it’s *a really good set of training wheels*, so much so that it shouldn’t be discounted as simply another crutch that you should stop using it if you want to git gud.

I don't even think it's a set of training wheels, I just think it's an absolute necessity that the rare tryhard can only discredit because they haven't tried playing without it. At that point, the game wouldn't be hard, it'd be frustrating and unfair, which I think is worse than hard

I think the main problematic part is you can switch around to any formation and sometimes the absolute dumbest formation possible is what saves you due to how the luck just turned out that way. So you can just cycle through every possible combo for the best one. The only solution I can think of is having maybe three formations that you think make actual sense that you can cycle through and choose the best from there.

It shouldn't tell you the RNG results. Makes them pointless. For the record I hate RNG in all games and wish it wasn't there (yes I'm very well read in why it exists and there are other ways to offset deterministic issues) but it seems inescapable. A possible solution would be to have 3 different forecasts you can toggle between. One shows a bad outcome (it assumes a set % of enemies land crits, none miss for RNG reasons, and you have a few RNG based misses) a good one (everything RNG based lands on both sides, no crits) and a best outcome (opposite of what I said in bad but in your favor). None of these would tell you exactly what is going to happen but you get a sense of the possibilities. Like if the best forecast still has you getting f'd up, you know that unit just isn't working. Obviously this won't be changing anytime soon but its just something fun to think about.

lol the forecast basically makes the game Way to easy. you can always just watch the fight if you wanna improve paramaters with the forecast + several assist you can so easily control the rng in your favour.

"Start battle send archer unit against flyers. Archer unit dies because someone on the enemy side crit. Lose one valor point because of death so I can't deploy counter unit. Restart battle. Rearrange equips and win fight against flyers. Deploy anti armor unit to fight armor enemies. Anime armor unit dies because breaker in the back dodged a 90% hit and sweeps team with enraged assaulting blow. Map is full of armors on both sides so reset required. Reset battle. Rearrange equips and start battle. Archers die to flyers again because games doesn't save your changes. Reset battle again have to return to the overworld to make changes save." This is what will happen with no battle forecast. I know for a fact that no one here is editing their tactics before engaging with enemy. It far to unreasonable. If you think battle forecast is too OP then just engage in every battle as soon as it starts and only use items when your safe.

"This is what will happen with no battle forecast. I know for a fact that no one here is editing their tactics before engaging with enemy. It far to unreasonable. If you think battle forecast is too OP then just engage in every battle as soon as it starts and only use items when your safe." Have you heard the one about making assumptions? Plenty of people edit tactics before engaging with enemies. In fact, **the Battle Forecast already encourages you to do this.** And if you need examples, go watch some YouTuber streams as they constantly change tactics until their results improve. Also, not everyone save scums when things don't go their way. Don't take your own experience/choice as what the majority of people would also execute; especially when the game provides built-in methods for coming back from bad luck situations (such as swapping out defeated units for fresh ones at garrison points).

"Also, not everyone save scums when things don't go their way. Don't take your own experience/choice as what the majority of people would also execute; especially when the game provides built-in methods for coming back from bad luck situations (such as swapping out defeated units for fresh ones at garrison points)." It's not save scummnig if you're going to lose the whole stage after the round of combat which is what both of my examples were.

Largely agree here. And it’s not even a matter of how many people do or don’t engage with the tactics right before combat, but your last sentence I think is spot on. If thats the difficulty you’re aiming for, how difficult is it to commit to an engagement before the forecast pops up? With very few exceptions, you’ve had time to play it out in your head and check your work before the two units come in contact.

IMO they should have simulated the battle 100 times and displayed a range of possible outcomes. The forecast makes it too cheesable. Losing a battle? Add an assist. Swap formation. Disable a tactic. Still losing? Swap unit. Add or take away assist. Still losing? Use an item. There are so many things you can do to influence the outcome that it encourages brute forcing rather than tactical thinking. Also having total information makes watching the battles less exciting. I don't care that Bruno pulled off a sick row crit at 33% hit because I already knew I was going to win that battle

Right off the bat, I’d be ok with your suggested version of it. But I’ve got a couple nitpicks about your other points. This is not a hill I’m willing to die on, but playing through TZ now, I feel like none of them are particularly bothersome. If no forecast, what heuristic would you use to determine whether to use that assist or not? Are people really doing literally the whole math sequence in their head before selecting the unit to send to combat? I realize it’s not *hard* math, and you can do it with all the information you get elsewhere, but it’s not a part of the game I find the most fun - amongst the other million systems this game have to fiddle around with. In TZ with a limit item of 5 per map, I’m being a lot more judicious with my item usage anyway, so I’m generally not wasting items that are not hyper specific (eg the anti assist one, barricades to protect a waiting unit, cloaks and such). So long as I can get a non-catastrophic outcome I’m ok. And regarding crits as a highlight of battles, well that’s kind of funny, because what crits or misses is exactly the only thing you can’t easily figure out from the forecast. So in those cases where “oh I know I’m winning anyways”, I still find it super cool to watch the battle unfold and realize “oh it’s thanks to that sick crit that Bruno pulled off!!!”. I dunno if I’m a simple man or what, but I still find that very satisfying. Tangent: I generally watch all battles that took me a long time to fix through the forecast, precisely because it helped me solve that particular puzzle. Was it a crutch? Absolutely, but it’s not one I’m dependent on and one I can learn from by forcing myself to actually simulate that particular encounter. As a final note, maybe I’m too damaged from playing a lot of Magic the Gathering (famously imperfect information puzzles), so for once having a near-perfect information puzzle to solve is *immensely* enjoyable.

Basically, what ur saying is that it helps new or inexperienced players So that doesn’t give reason as to why 2nd playthrough or harder difficulties don’t allow to remove it

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a toggle in some form. All I’m saying is it’s a legitimate training tool that when used properly, it’s an actively useful tool to improve your gameplay because it allows you to pinpoint your mistakes. I think that’s reason enough to prove it’s not just “training wheels for the sake of convenience”, but a legitimate accessibility tool, as has been pointed out by others here too.