Changing the encounter rate in Lagrange Point for the NES.

[TussockyThree68]

Does anyone know how I might go about changing the encounter rate in Lagrange Point on the NES. I've been playing it here recently and I think it's the main thing holding back the game. I know this might mess up the balance and all that, but I don't even care (Maybe one could just give the player more XP/Money to compensate for fewer encounters?).  I know this probably shows my naivete, but I'm not even sure how to go about modifying something like this, or if it would even be possible. Do you think I would need to learn 6502 assembly to accomplish this? I'm still pretty new to programming, so this may be a pipe-dream kind of project if it requires a thorough command of 6502 assembly.

[Pennywise]

You will need to know some assembly to do this hack right out of the bat, but it shouldn't be anything too complicated.

Now encounter rates in old games probably vary in their methods, but you can use existing cheats to help narrow down everything.

[TussockyThree68]

Thank you for the advice. The thing you mentioned about existing cheats could end up helping me a lot.

[FAST6191]

re existing cheats. I will note several of those usually come about because there is some potion, equip, spell or similar that has such an effect you can capture as a flag for a cheat (equip magic ring, search, unequip*, search for change, equip...). In an ideal world for such a cheat as this there would be a halve/quarter/only stronger type deal but few games of even today, never mind this vintage, have such things. If it is for an emulator driven hack where you can flip this flag every 30 seconds or whatever (possibly with a Lua script) you can get away with something fairly basic.

*be aware some games will only activate the effect when you confirm everything and get back to the game. A bit annoying and I would try just in a basic menu at first but one to be aware of. Same also applies to character selection cheats (and one method of play as boss cheats/hacks) in that you might have to confirm everything to have it lock it in rather than just hover over in the menu.

Beyond that you are going to want to get into assembly. Depending upon what goes it would be on the harder side of a learning project but a good one. In this case find some variable that changes when you get into battle and set your breakpoint on that, work backwards from there and you will find the encounter rate equation. Such equations vary massively between games -- some will be number of steps set after the last encounter**, some will be a dice roll upon entering a given tile (and might be variable there so a forest is higher than a road) or starting next step, some will be a random tile hidden map (step on a line and break your spine) generated after last battle, some will be a timer (possibly only active while moving)... but whatever it is then is usually easy enough to tweak it slightly with a shift or change in multiplier once you know.

**can tell this with a savestate where you can count it and move in different directions.