Changing Damage formulas

Thank you very much for your help. So, I spent a lot of time pondering and decided I still doubt I know how to do anything complex. Here is what I have come up with in case you or anyone else is curious and I still have to test it.

I always find that in any hack, I have to itemize and value Magic Power to Vigor at a 1:2 ratio. That is, it takes roughly 2 vigor to be a similar raise in damage to 1 Magic power. I realized I may have been thinking too big when I wanted to change everything altogether. Then I had a thought: Why not just divide Magic Power by 2? (Side question here: does the game only truncate the final result? I assume it does. If not, my concern would be that an odd numbered magic power would be exactly the same as the even number preceding it.)

Well, as I understand it, I need to use the same amount of space. I'm not sure how true this is, but I don't know how I'd go about using less or more space than what is already being used. So what I came up with is this:

Spoiler (Click to View)

Code:

C2/2B76: 90 02        BCC $2B7A   (If Level > 0, Spell Power *= 4)
C2/2B78: 0A           ASL
C2/2B79: 0A           ASL
C2/2B7A: 8D B0 11     STA $11B0   (Maximum Damage)
C2/2B7D: E2 20        SEP #$20    (Set 8-bit Accumulator)
C2/2B7F: AD AE 11     LDA $11AE   (Magic Power)
C2/2B82: EB           XBA

Remove one of the ASLs and put in a LSR after Magic Power instead. This will make for a formula that makes magic power scale more closely to vigor.

Now the only issue I have is level scaling. In Physical damage, the level is squared in its calculation and it's not squared in the Magic damage formula. I came up with a similar kind of solution for levels.

Spoiler (Click to View)

Code:

C2/2BA7: AD AF 11     LDA $11AF      (attacker Level)
C2/2BAA: 48           PHA            (save it)
C2/2BAB: 85 E8        STA $E8
C2/2BAD: 7B           TDC
C2/2BAE: AD A6 11     LDA $11A6      (Battle Power)
C2/2BB1: C2 20        REP #$20       (Set 16-bit Accumulator)
C2/2BB3: E0 08        CPX #$08       (If monster then Battle Power *= 4)
C2/2BB5: 90 02        BCC $2BB9
C2/2BB7: 0A           ASL
C2/2BB8: 0A           ASL

What I can do is remove one of the ASLs here again and, to use the same amount of space, divide the attacker level by 2 by putting in LSR there. Then, of course, I can just manually double monster attack powers later if I want to by hand. This doesn't completely solve the problem as the scaling is still kind of crazy being that I'm still squaring, but not as bad since it's a smaller number.

Is there some way I can just remove the squaring aspect altogether though? I see where it looks kind of separated from the main calculations.

Spoiler (Click to View)

Code:

C2/2BDF: 85 E8        STA $E8        (get attacker level again)
C2/2BE1: C2 20        REP #$20       (Set 16-bit Accumulator)
C2/2BE3: A5 E9        LDA $E9
C2/2BE5: EB           XBA            (A = bottom two bytes of the first multiplication
                                      result..  typically, we'll always have zero in the
                                      top byte, so we can ignore it.  but with a 255
                                      Battle Power weapon, Gauntlet, and a character at
                                      Level 99 with 128 Vigor, that product WILL need 3
                                      bytes.  failure to use that top byte in our next
                                      multiplication means we'll lose a lot of damage.
                                      BUG!)

C2/2BE6: 20 B7 47     JSR $47B7      (multiply 16-bit result of [Level * Attack] by
                                      our 8-bit level again, and put the new 24-bit
                                      product in Variables $E8 thru $EA.
                                      16-bit A will hold the new product DIV 256.)

Since it looks like it doesn't directly square the levels (it just takes the product of the level and attack then multiplies by the level again), it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to manipulate it to something less extreme. I'm thinking maybe there's a way to make it pull up something else instead of level a second time? Perhaps I can have it pull up battle power again instead, effectively squaring that? Battle power is a lot easier to regulate by just limiting the player's options. Not sure how I'd do this without breaking everything. I'll have to play around with it.

Edit - It seems my original idea broke the game. I was going to make room for AD A6 11 (calling battle power instead of E5 E8, "get attacker level again") by deleting an ASL again. One thing it did was make the enemies deal a LOT more damage, but when I finally did get a chance to attack, the game crashed Tried calling battle power instead of level earlier on, but alas this just makes the "get attacker level again" pull battle power instead of level. So as far as I can tell, there's no way to separate the two easily. On the good side, deleting an ASL and inputting an LSR for the magic calculation has seemed to work out smoothly.

Edit 2 - All my attempts to cut level stat in half in the physical damage formula using LSR ended in failure. Basically numbers are all wrong coming from enemies and character attacks result in game reset. Tried one LSR (in place of a monster battle power *4 ASL) inserted several different spots around where it annotates a reference to character level stat being called, but no good. Tried some more with magic to see if that was a fluke, but the LSR in that seems to be working right. Not sure why it works in one and not the other. Hmm.