The Comprehensive Active Time Battle (ATB) Enhancement mod for Final Fantasy VI (SNES) has been released courtesy of RoSoDude.
Writes RoSoDude:
Final Fantasy 6’s ATB system has some notable flaws compared to other entries in the series. ATB is always running in the background regardless of battle animations, so commands can quickly pile up on the queue. This functionally caps the effectiveness of the Agility stat. Furthermore, it enables “Wait tricking” abuse with the Wait mode config setting, where the player enters a command submenu to pause ATB during player animations, but lets ATB resume during enemy animations to gain a turn order advantage. Additionally, most commands have a short delay (0.53-1.07 seconds) before executing which is irrelevant if the delay coincides with a battle animation, but can also make the timing of commands less responsive, often at the cost of strategic depth. Finally, the Battle Speed config setting only serves to make enemy ATB speed slower relative to the player, instead of adjusting the actual pace of battles as the player would expect.
This hack makes ATB gauges and other battle timers (status effect counters, poison/regen ticks, success checks for fleeing) pause during battle animations, similar to the “nATB” system implemented by Think0028 for Brave New World, also available as a standalone “simple nATB” patch. However, this hack supports the Active/Wait mode config setting instead of defaulting to Wait. Since the original ATB fill rate was balanced around battle animation timing, pausing ATB without other changes leads to excessively slow-paced battles. To remedy this, a new ATB fill rate formula is implemented, which equally uses the Battle Speed config setting for both player and enemy characters. This fill rate is roughly 2x faster than the original on Battle Speed 1, and roughly equal to the original on Battle Speed 6. The formula is identical to HatZen08’s Even Gauge, however in this hack the Battle Speed setting is also applied to status effect timers, so their effects are consistent with the turn order regardless of the config setting.
The poison/regen/sap tick rate, the duration of status effects like reflect/freeze/stop/sleep/doom countdown, the success chance for fleeing, the morph command duration, the jump command duration, and AI battle timers were also originally balanced around battle animation timing, and thus acted too slowly with the ATB pause. All of these have been increased in frequency or decreased in duration to account for this discrepancy. The execution delay on several basic commands is removed to increase responsiveness during battle, but is maintained for other commands as an element of gameplay balance. Enemy Agility values are quadratically damped (e.g. 30->29, 99->80, 255->128) for use with difficulty hacks that increase monster Agility stats above 99, since higher Agility now makes a massive difference in turn rate.
This hack is intended to redress all of these flaws. As such, it alters gameplay balance to some degree, but the end result should be a more tactical and robust ATB system which can be tweaked to the user’s preference using the in-game config settings.
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