Sadie Gets a Life 0.3.1 Dev Log, 2026-04-23

It's been a fairly productive week with a lot going on in-game. I'll cover a few of the highlights that you can expect from release 0.3.1. The inevitable bugs are, of course, the lowlights.

A New Party Member

I won't spoil it too much or include any pictures, but Sadie will get a new party member. The quest to get this member is quite long--in fact, I'm still working on it right now. It'll take Sadie and company across several tiers and the broader Freistadt region, but I think it'll be worth it and I hope you will as well.

With this new member, we're going to unlock quite a bit more content and unleash mid-game Sadie on the world. Take from that what you will.

A Book Quest

If you helped out the Isekai Order in Svetlanda, to the point that you saw Crassus & co leave town, you'll want to visit the Adventurers' Guild in Act III. Sadie will receive a book. Reading this book is a bit of a challenge, though, so you'll have to help her out. There are six progressively more difficult mini-games to beat in order to read the book.

What kind of a book, you ask?

A dual-purpose book that comes as a gift. If you checked out the Isekai Order dialogue in between missions in Svetlanda, you'll have a good idea of what this book is. But what it does, you'll like even more.

Sticky Fingers

Another update that I was able to sneak in is that Mallory's Steal skill will now be more powerful. First of all, there will be items that can help her steal things more often. Second, her Steal skill level will affect the probability of stealing successfully. For most normal enemies (at least the ones wearing pants!), Mallory has approximately a 50/50 chance of stealing something. For more powerful enemies and bosses, that probability drops to around 25-35%. By end-game, you could see these probabilities jump by a good 30-35 percentage points, making Mallory much more useful. Now, will you be able to steal more than pocket change? Maybe. Depends on the heart of the cards.

More Nerfing--of Enemies this Time

I received a comment regarding the sheer number of turns it took to beat enemies near the end of Act II, in particular the North Side Gang leaders. I initially defended the fight by saying that I wanted to replicate that 1990s JRPG experience of big bad boss fights being a bit of a slog. Furthermore, the North Side Gang is the most brutal gang in town, so their leaders will, by virtue of video game logic, be similarly tough.

But then I dug into it a bit, especially because I did have a nagging feeling in the back of my mind when I created all of the 0.3.0 savefiles. For me, the ideal fight against mooks should take a reasonably skilled player between 3 and 8 turns to complete. Fewer than three turns and you're just overpowered. More than eight and each fight becomes a huge time sink. Unfortunately, the majority of Act II fights were going well beyond that point, but I wanted to find out exactly how far.

Nerd alert warning: I'm going to start getting into propeller-head territory soon, so I'll give the upshot here. 28 separate enemy classes have been nerfed. The most extreme nerfing is the Royal Thorns Elite, who loses 3900 HP, 10 defense, and 10 magic defense. North Side Gang Elite Enforcers also lose the same. The North Side Gang leaders "only" lose 1100 HP, but their defense goes down by 75 and magic defense by 70. Aside from the leaders, I knocked down basically every enemy once you meet the MCM Enforcers in the middle of Act II. I think this will make the play experience a good bit better, keeping fights in that 3-8 turn range much more often.

Propeller-Head Time

To validate my back-of-the-mind feeling and the commenter's criticism, I ginned up a tool that takes a party layout and uses Monte Carlo simulation. I'm not using the exact game mechanics that RPG Maker has, so it's not a true battle simulation, but I did include the skills, equipment, weapons, and other capabilities that each actor has. The Monte Carlo simulation is completely random in nature, meaning sometimes, the choices will be great and sometimes they won't. But when you run 1000 simulations, that gives you a meaningful distribution of results.

The simulation takes a specific party that I define. For example, here's the party that I have going into the NSG Leader fight.

If I face that party off against two Royal Thorns Slicers and two Royal Thorns mooks, we can expect something on the order of a negative binomial distribution: it has a central peak and looks kinda-sorta like a bell curve, but is necessarily bounded at 1 (can't beat an enemy in under 1 turn). Here's what it looks like, post-nerf:

What's important in this visual is not the median or the mean, much less the maximum. The reason for this is that players are considerably better than the simulation. The simulation literally spams skills randomly and cannot set up turns. For that reason, I focus on the minimum number of turns and the top quartile of results because you're better than random chance. Thus, for this common troop near the end of the act, it should take a Sadie-Mallory-Dinestra-Karin combo somewhere between 4 and 7 turns to defeat the group. You could get closer to 4 (or even below 4) if you go all-out. If you try to preserve TP and MP, it's going to be more like 7 turns. Prior to the enemy adjustments, this was closer to 10-12 turns.

I can also look at combat estimates as a whole.

What this is saying is that there are 156 separate enemy groups in the game so far (including some 0.3.1 stuff that isn't out yet). Of these, 106 are on target, meaning the min is >= 3 and Q1 is <= 8. 32 of these are marked as "too easy," but many of those are Act I groups, so of course they'll be too easy. 18 of them are marked as "too hard," meaning Q1 is > 8. But that's not all bad.

If we review this set, the MCM Leadership is a battle players can't win. Same thing goes for Trenok and Heev. Both of those are purposefully impossible battles. In between the two is the NSG Leaders, which I've already described that I'd like to be an old-school slugfest. It now takes about 18-33 turns to beat them. This is down from ~60-90 turns prior to the nerf. I think that does a great job of keeping those foes challenging without forcing you to dedicate 45 minutes to beating the boss.

After that, we have two boss fights (MCM Leader and Rogue Mage) and several fights against elite enemies. I think it's fair for all of those to go beyond my 3-8 turn desire. And looking at the minimum values, you can still beat these enemies in 8 turns or fewer, though that probably depends on a bit of luck.

Last up, we have the question: okay, if a troop needs to be nerfed, what does that mean about the enemies? That's what one last page is for. Here, I break down the troops and see which enemies make the most sense to nerf.

In this case, there are still a few dozen candidates to nerf, so in a moment of generosity as I write this post, I'm going to knock down a few more. (Which is another way of me saying that I tuned this against roughly how Sadie and company look at the very end of Act II, so I probably didn't nerf enough.)

Long story short, the benefit to me having this app locally is that I can validate my first-pass enemy definitions and make sure I'm not re-introducing this problem later.