Mute Shenanigans

Results of trial run: TPK.

Details: Lost the Golbeze fight. Rosa had Silence carried over from the Calcabrena fight, and even though we had purchased 10 Echo Herbs right before this, there were none in our inventory.

Problems with the Calcabrena/Golbeze fights are a bit harder to debug. With most fights, I record a save state right as the fight begins, so if there's a problem and we lose, I can replay with the current strategy and see exactly what happened. This one, however, is a two-part fight, and the real cause of the problems is almost always in the Calcabrena fight, which gets trampled over when the Golbeze fight starts. This situation is also unusual because the Golbeze fight is one of those exceptions where the borg generally fares better than a normal player. It's actually possible to have all 4 party members back on their feet, and have Yang get in a strike before Rydia steps into the battle, all because the borg is able to input commands so quickly. So if the borg loses here, it's because we ended the Calcabrena fight in a rotten situation.

The root of the problem lies in how status flags are handled in FF4. Some status ailments are wiped when a character dies. Others, it turns out, are not, and Silence is one of those. As far as I can tell, two things were happening:

• When Rosa would get killed in the fight and then brought back with a Phoenix Down, she still had the Silence status and couldn't heal party members.
• In the strategy for these fights, our conditional battle command to use an Echo Herb on anyone with the Silence status comes before the command to use a Phoenix Down on dead party members. I can imagine Cecil, Kain, and Yang all huddled around Rosa's lifeless body, urgently mashing Echo Herbs into her mouth and manually moving her jaw to make chewing motions, all the while whispering: "Please. Please heal us." All with a horrifying, 12-foot tall animated doll standing behind them. Unfortunately, using an Echo Herb on a dead character doesn't remove Silence from them, but it does consume the item.

Solution: The AllyWithStatus and AllyWithoutStatus targets now only look at live characters.