I did ask lewd about his thoughts, he called my ideas a grind fest and didnt make much more comment, the speedrunners seem to just enjoy trying to rush the game as fast as possible, and obviously making it much harder would sort of mess up what they doing which is why I think they got no interest. Also another observation is the likes of lewd never play ff13-2, they mainly play just the first game.

Whilst I prefer a game where you udnerpowered when going into a new area and you either have to be very savvy tactically or to grind to get through it.

I will be starting a new run today using a 300x multiplier on CP for fragments to see how that works out. Also no enemy multiplier on the lightning prequel episode, as that fight was stupid when it was made harder and not really a part of the game.

A little update on this game.

This game remains my only game to have this kind of problem on dozens of games I play on my system.

Since I made the thread, I have reinstalled windows, previously was window 7, now is windows 8.1.
Using newer drivers.
Have a new GPU (is now gtx 1070 vs older gtx 970).

Sadly the game is not crash free but I would say its a lot better.

On my current run of the game my save file shows 461 hours although bear in mind this does include it idling overnight when am sleeping and through some work periods.

In that time I have had "ONE" crash in the ruins, One crash just now in the wildlands at night, and thats it. I have had crashes related to cheat engine which brings me onto my next point.

I observed if I crash the game with cheat engine, the graphics settings stay intact, so when I rerun the game, it has the same resolution, same advanced settings.

If the game does one of its random crashes (and this was also the case with all the previous ruins crashes), the game graphics settings are lost, I find that really odd, it suggests to me, there is one of two things happening which I wonder if krisan can find in the code.

Either

1 - The game has some mechanism where in certian types of crashes it deliberatly deletes the settings so the game loads on what is considered fail safe defaults, 720p windowed mode everything set to standard. If krisan finds this code then it can give a hint on whats going on.

or

2 - The game frequently rewrites the settings and I am crashing in the middle of that write causing a corrupted save file, and that is also possibly the cause of the crashes.

I am aware of course my system is overclocked on both ram and GPU (gpu via GPU boost only but also overclocked vram) and that is possibly causing instability, but the oddness is how the graphics settings get reset and LR is the only software on my system that isnt stable which to me points to the game somewhere. The good news is tho that since the GPU change and windows upgrade its nowhere near as bad. On Windows 7 and my older GPU the crashes in the ruins were so bad it was sometimes every couple of minutes.

You buy the weapons from chocolina, the first set are free to buy and require no components, higher versions of the weapons will appear as you progress in the game, they wont be free and will require components, however the components required is more favourable than the normal in game weapons so they easier to get still. All the DLC accessries are available from when you first get chocolina and are free for the first one of each you buy before costing money, you can make delicate and durable variants of those accessories later when you have the components.

I suppose the answer is to unlock it and then reset your stats, inventory etc, with cheat engine.
As always a mod is superior but CE is a working alternative.

I will message you with what I found the best balance and then you can use that as a v1 or something of a balance mod and it can be tweaked from that point.

The table that is the cuplrit is the battle results table that reduces CP per battle, so thats good news as meant I could disable just that without losing the harder fight.

An added note, doing the prologue with 200% atk/mag on caius is a real challenge :) I learnt some mechanics of that fight whilst trying to get through it that I never knew before e.g. if lightning is not attacking orion will jump over the inferno attacks.

So I am replaying the game again currently, still trying to find a way to balance the game well, and here is my latest thoughts.

1 - reduce CP from enemies significantly. I would say 80% at the least, this is to make it harder to advance purely from killing mobs. The cheat engine table I am currently using is supposed to reduce it by 50% but it has a bug that after you exit 003af, it actually reduces closer to 90% which is good.
2 - as a trade off increase CP gained for fragments, this brings the CP advancement similar to FF13 where the game dictates how fast you can develop characters. I am currently doing a playthru with a multiplier of 5x (manually adding extra CP in cheat engine when I get fragment to make it 5x) but as it turns out 5x is way too much, so I will do another playthru after with 3x to see if thats more fitting. I think 1x is too little so it seems the sweet spot I think will be 2x or 3x.
3 - Set all enemies to have 300% hp. You can actually stagger enemies before they die now :) also makes bosses that auto heal a particular challenge.
4 - Set all enemies to have 2x atk/mag, you have to think more in battles as brute force approach is much less viable with these changes.
5 - allow item capacity to grow to 255, the default system is poor in my view, certian accessories are way too heavy in terms of balance.
6 - lucky fragment gain at 777 instead of 7777. (or just give it on first win).

For the capacity gain, the system designed in the cheat engine table is good (selling dark matters and Chronomist, both rare items). But also I would make the 3rd capacity boost in the crystarium +30 instead of +10, so a maxed out crystarium gives you 120 and you get the rest from selling the items.

Adding CP manually in cheat engine is a pain when getting fragments, I did ask on the cheat engine forum if someone could make a table but as of yet no replies, ideally all this could be patched into the game :) but otherwise cheat engine is possible.

yeah is fine sorry, cheat engine was breaking it, I am using the table that makes the gane harder.

agreed, for whatever reason noone wants to seem to do this mod.

someone did make a mod a while back but the guy was more interested in making it louder and the version that reduced volume was broken. Some parts of the game you can barely hear people speak, the music is ridicolously loud.