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Yes I plan to experiment a lot with this game, but at same time don't want to revolutionize completely the gameplay. More like a lots of small tweaks put together

OK, just finished my third playthrough (the first two were nearly a year ago). It is also the first where I had the N'Mar, so in some parts I did not know what to expect. Since the impression are wuite fresh, here are they. My playthrough was in "hard". When I reached Fost, the party was lvl 15-17 for "A-Team", and 13-14 for the "B-Team".

I seldom used "generic" abilities (fighter, thief, mage), instead I put most upgrades into "special" abilities. If a mage had a few more SP made a lot less difference than having access to lvl 3 fireball. And SP/HP upgrades were still more useful than the rest on the generic page.

I found the Chamby and Draco to be a bit too strong. I only used both of them in the hardest fights, anything else felt to "cheaty". Any one of them could decimate the ranks quite fast. Myrth was not nearly as useful as damagedealer, but was able to heal the whole group at once. For Apolimesho I never found a useful role, the enemies died fast enough even without buffing. I felt the slot was better used by someone who really dealt damage when it came to it.

Thieves were very useful too - I usually had Elenor-thief and Karen in the front-row. They dealt damage, had useful special attacks, AND had the option to throw bombs. Bombs were scarce, which is a good thing, otherwise thieves would be overpowered as well. The tanky qualities of fighters were what I never needed. Even on hard Thieves with medium HP plus Healers (Elenor, Myrth, Potions) were enough. Loren caused a lot of damage too, but the attacks of Ramas and the other fighter were plain underwhelming. Maybe except Trouble, when against fire weakness.

Three fights were hard for me: the vampires in castle N'mar, the demons just before entering Fost's stronghold, and training against Breza. The training should be hard, of course. The other two fights were hard because I tended to spend the Spellpoints in the first battle, and have nothing left in the following ones. Also the three drakes with Inferno III were just plain evil. Please add more like it. Well, maybe I should add Grob, who made me use up some potions.

Some of the sidequests were too easy: outnumbered foes who were two levels below the minimum level the party could have reached at the point at all.

As I wrote above, buffing never felt useful. The same goes for attacks which only gave the enemy debuffs. Nice when a sideeffect of a high-damage attack, but useless on their own.

When it came to choosing the team, I mostly went with whoever I liked (as character). Maybe it is lucky this gave me a strong team, or maybe just suited my playstyle or the chars are balanced anyway. In any case "hard" difficulty seldom felt really hard, without me putting too much thought into finding the "best" upgrades, builds, ...

I notice other people had a bit different experiences. Which may very well be because of other builts and play styles. I hope this may help nevertheless when designing the next few games.

Thanks, I've read it all and was useful. The thieves indeed shouldn't have been able to stay in front line as much as Warriors, though I remember other people had different experiences.
Some generic considerations:
I honestly think the main problem was that there was too much freedom on grinding, so battles would play VERY different depending how much you grind. Having different party members is OK for variety, but in PS1 there were less party members and less members in battle (and less skills), so was easier to balance. I hope that SOTW will be better balanced since will have same amount of party members (eight) and will use that fixed level up points system I talked about in forums and in the blog post.

The thieves indeed shouldn't have been able to stay in front line as much as Warriors, though I remember other people had different experiences.

To be honest, the frontline thieves had a different build from the sniper-thieves. Basically, in the frontline strength was just a little bit lower than skill, while snipers had skill, skill and only skill. Also the items of snipers were geared to damage and speed more than defense.

Which reminds me: In the really hard fights I had it often that my second row (snipers, mages) was killed using spells, and needed to be resurrected from the frontline. The other way round was less common. Possibly the AI analyzed the build and found the weakness.

I should have asked this earlier, but what exactly increases and decreases aggro?

At higher difficulties, multiple enemies dogpiling on a particular character will be enough to kill them, especially if they use heavy single target attacks.

Mainly if you do damage, but also if you heal another party member (this way even healer can be targeted).

Thanks.

I'll probably have to start pumping more strength into my frontliners and instead of skill. It's nice having more turns in battle, but getting singled out by the enemies can be brutal, especially against the cyclopes.

Tip: If someone who's quite useless without mana is out of it, don't have them tickle the enemy for quite useless damage. Instead switch position with someone in the row. An inconsequential action with a delay of 3, and every time it's your turn you get your full dose of regen.

I'm posting this more because I want to see something done about it, as I find it quite silly. I would like for all kinds of regen/degen (from items and buffs/debuffs etc) to have an effect modifier based on delay since previous turn. It's my main gripe with having a turnbased system without rounds. Say if you perform a 10 delay action you get the full effect from regen/degen, a 5 delay gives you half, a 16 delay gives you 160%, etc. I realize it might not be easy to program tooltips that update, but perhaps something for the next project.

You have no idea how I just saved the world by having my magic users dance with each other in the back row...

Also, internal speed differences can create weird situations where... gandalfguy-whose-name-eludes-me has 7 turns of his regen left on himself but he has to recast it anyway because the faster party members are losing the buff, again for lack of these virtual rounds ;p

Ah interesting "technique" I never read of it before, and yes, something to consider for future projects. Actually even SOTW use the same engine as Loren... hmm need to think about something, easiest fix is that movement costs the same as defending action

That would make abilities like Push really strong though. Right now it's mostly annoying when someone shuffles my party around because it's not expensive to fix it. But if I have to choose between a long delay or leaving a squishy in the frontline, and a warrior in the back where they can't hit hard... yeah