FF6 — Comprehensive ATB Enhancement

Final Fantasy 6 -- Comprehensive ATB Enhancement v2.00 by RoSoDude https://rosodudemods.wordpress.com/

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. 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 redesigns FF6's ATB system for improved speed, responsiveness, and gameplay balance. This is accomplished by judiciously pausing ATB to allow the command queue to catch up during long animations. At the same time, the hack doubles ATB speed and quadruples rates for all status effect timers, which now scale consistently with the Battle Speed setting. The execution delay on several basic commands is removed to increase responsiveness, but is maintained for other commands as an element of gameplay balance. The Active/Wait config setting is still fully supported. This hack comes in three distinct flavors:

1. Modern ATB Enhanced: The new standard. Instead of strict ATB pausing during animations, this version allows time to flow during the current animation until someone is ready to act -Similar to FF7's ATB in "Recommended" mode, especially with "FF7 Comprehensive ATB Enhancement" -Battles are faster than ever in FF6 -Agility stat matters without becoming dominant -Menu dexterity is less punishing than in prior renditions of ATB
2. Classic ATB Enhanced: The old version of the hack. ATB pauses during all animations -Similar to ATB in FF4, FF5, FF8, or the "nATB" system implemented by Think0028 for FF6 Brave New World -Battles are slightly slower than vanilla ATB -Agility stat is maximally important -Menu dexterity is crucial for turn efficiency
3. CTB Wait Addon: Makes battles fully turn-based in Wait mode -Similar to FF10's Conditional Turn-Based battle system (see also the CTB Wait Addons for FF7 and FF9) -Defaults to Modern ATB Enhanced on Active mode -Pressing "skip turn" advances time slightly for strategy

The end result should be a more tactical and robust ATB system which can be tweaked to the user's preference using the patches and in-game config settings.

The hack is for non-headered US ROMs (v1.0 or v1.1). It is compatible with other hacks like C.V. Reynolds' Bug-Fix Compilation patch or Revised Old-Style Edition. This hack should be patched on top of those. Several bugfix patches are integrated into this hack to maintain compatibility: -Assassin's Premature Continuation v0.20 patch -Leet Sketcher's Rock Bottom v1.3 patch -Leet Sketcher's Death Row v1.2 patch -Leet Sketcher's Self Sneeze v2.0 patch -Leet Sketcher's Invisible Zombie v1.0 patch -RoSoDude's Quick Fix v1.02 patch

Source files for assembly are included as a reference for other modders.

• -Think0028 for creating the original "simple nATB" hack: -C-Dude for revising "simple nATB" to reinstate the Active/Wait config setting -Lightning Hunter for correcting the patch to work with 1.1 ROMs -Assassin for Premature Continuation v0.20 -Leet Sketcher for Rock Bottom v1.3, Death Row v1.2, Self Sneeze v2.0, Invisible Zombie 1.0 -HatZen08 for Even Gauge v1.1d