Factions Overview

by Dale M.A. Johnson

 

created 4/7/06

 

This document outlines what "factions" are, how the engine needs to handle them, and how the user will interact with them.

 

General Explination of Factions

A faction is, in basic terms, a group of units who are on the same side in battle. These units all take their turn together and are controled by the same player (or computer AI). Each faction has their own designated color and banner icon, both of which you can set. In traditional Fire Emblem games, there are three factions: Player (blue), neutral (green), and enemy (red). (Path of Radiance also had a fourth, yellow-colored ally faction.)

 

Fire Emblem Factory will let the campaign creater setup as many as sixteen factions per map. In addition to color and banner, they can also choose a unique turn theme song (the song that will play during that faction's turn), a battle theme (the song that will play when that faction attacks), and a fanfare sound that will play when the faction's turn begins.

 

The campaign creator can also setup which factions may attack each other, allowing multiplayer maps with teams, and even maps where one player controls more than one side (such as in the Advance Wars games).

 

Scope of Factions

Factions are bound to the map. When the battle is over and one team is declared the winner (teams will be discussed later in this document), all the factions cease to be, as far as the engine is concerned. All the characters who took part in the battle will retain any experience, items, and levels they gain, but the engine will no longer keep track of which side the character was on. In order for the character to show up for the next battle (without manually placing that character each map), you'll need to assign that character to a party, which is discussed in another document.

 

Teams

A team is a group of factions. The battle is over when one team is declared the winner. Teams only exist in order to tell the story engine who won, who can attack who is decided at the team level. Whenever you create a faction for a map, you must assign it to a team (for example, the player's faction would be on the "good guy" team).

 

Since the teams themselves don't actually have that much bearing on the gameplay itself, this can make for some interesting scenarios. For example, you can create two factions and put them on the same team, but allow them to attack each other! They can't win this way, since they are on the same team and therefore have the same goals.

 

This is actually quite practical, though it may seem ackward at first glance. For example, let's say the campain creater creates a map for their story where the player must attack two armies which are attacking each other as well. Since the story revolves around the player, it doesn't matter which one of the enemy parties wins since the story is over as soon as the player loses. Therefore, the campaign creator can simplify things by placing both enemies on the same team. If the player is defeated, that means that the player didn't win, and that's all that matters.

 

Assorted Things You Can Do With Factions and Teams

• If you want to have the same song play during the entire extent of the map (such as in Path of Radiance), give all factions the same theme. If it's the same song, the engine will just let it keep playing.
• The same applies to the battle music. If the battle music is the same as the map theme, the music will just keep playing.
• You can set a faction up as a sub-faction of another. This means that the sub-faction will act as part of the parent faction; it won't get its own turn, instead the parent faction controls all its units. This isn't something that you would use often, but the campaign creator can use it to their advantage for setting up events.
• You can set a team to ignore victory conditions. In this case, the engine literally ignores it for deciding who wins the map. For example, on a "defeat the enemy" map, if one of the other teams defeats the others, even if the ignored team is still alive, the other team wins and the ignored team neither wins or loses. This is how you would set up a neutral or allied faction in a campaign.