AnglerStudios:Battle System

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The Proposed Battle System

To see our friend the Battle System please go here: Combat Screen (under construction, I'll do it in the next few days/weeks, I hope.)

Battle System Design Issues

I've had an idea about a fairly useful battle system idea type concept thingy...

If you played Final Fantasy 8, do you remember how enemies were scaled in strength according to your party's level? They would jump up a few levels if you were too high for them, and vice versa. Obviously there were limits, but this ensured that enemies always posed something resembling a challenge anyways (stopped you steamrolling through the same lowbie monsters every time like a zombie just grinding for XP...)

We could implement a similar idea... we could have say an instance of the enemy npc class for each monster, but have it contain like a level parameter, and how strong it is. We can then introduce paramaters for how much strength they gain per level, so their base strength at level 5 is say... 15... and it jumps up 2 points per level. A level 15 group encounters this monster so it scales itself up from level 5 to anywhere between level 12 - 18 (im using broad numbers here since we havent decided on damage scales and stuff yet. Can a level 15 beat a level 18??). So lets say it chooses level 12 (for example's sake). its scaled itself up from its base level by 7 so we add 7 X 2 (7 levels times 2 str per level for scaling) and get a more evenly matched fight. Obviously this would take a bit of fine tuning to ensure the monster didn't become too uber too quickly etc, but that's got to be done anyways.

This would also reduce tedium when your party obviously overpowers the enemies in the area.

Alternatively we could simply reduce encounter rate when your party's too strong for the monsters in the area (monsters too scared to attack... slightly WoW-like but yeah) but this could be fun. Anyways, thats just an idea. Any thoughts? Natoli 20:03, 5 June 2006 (PDT)

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If we went with the first suggestion, the monsters would have to scale up in such a fashion that they would be stronger, but still weaker (relative to the level difference) so there would be an actual benefit in going up levels.

The second one sounds good, though - except it prevents players simply leveling up by slogging through heaps of low levels if they want to. Do we want to prevent that?

RichardS

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Spose there's pros and cons to it. For the first idea, I suggest if we go with it that we could cap the amount that the enemy scales up in difficulty... say 5 levels or so only, so that eventually you'll still OMGWTFPWN them, but they'll still pose a challenge if say, someone gets lost in the forest and ends up in so many random battles that they level up too much. I agree that they'd have to scale to be weaker eventually as you said, but its not like the slime that is attacking you for revenge since you killed his family, friends and 99.9% of his entire race is going to still be as pathetically weak as the others... right?

The other idea... after a few levels in an area, chances are the player's going to start steamrolling through the monsters anyway. Maybe we could/should scale the amount of XP required to level up so that if they decide to continue training there (pure grinding for xp until they're so awesomely powerful that they can one-shot the final boss or something...) that it'll take forever to make any progress. More like dissuading someone from spending 12 hours of their life in one zone killing monsters to get to level 99 or something.

Obviously this needs more thought, but as far as Im concerned continually training on mobs that are too weak is kinda pointless anyway. Natoli 04:44, 7 June 2006 (PDT)

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Maybe we could scale the XP gain to lower according to some scale the higher your level is, sort of like Diablo 2, where you'd only get full XP if you were within 5 lvls of the monsters you were killing, and then would get less and less for monsters too high or low.

RichardS

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Lot of good discussion here.

My initial thought is: Why are we talking about dissuading people from playing our game? Crikey, if someone wants to grind for 12 hours in our game to one-shot the final boss, good for them! That's one way of playing we didn't necessarily foresee, but it's a valid possibility. I fear that RPGs, especially ones like these of such length are already over-prone to repetitive grinding and partial-completion, not to mention they are not as accessible as more arcade-style games. I have the feeling I'm going to have to try really hard when it's done to convince my friends to play it, rather than them wanting to play it. For some, they will only play because I insist, not because they love in-depth RPGs... so if they do play, why make them frustrated and force them to play a particular way?

I think it's quite possible to define a way of modifying the stats of a monster based on level. Perhaps we have an equation field that we can see that determines how to change the stats per level? Perhaps a base stats attributes, then another set of stats that has how much to add per level up to a cap? e.g. perhaps only HP changes as the level goes up, so the fights last longer...

Also, just sort of back to my first point, do we want battles to always be balanced and long? I know I personally like if I can find a nice low level area to blitz through, with a few quick battles that net me a few items and a handful of exp. Sure, that may not be the conventional playstyle, but hey, it's mine, and it's valid. You don't make games to tell people how to play them. You create something they can play however they darn well feel like. If you limit them too much, it sucks, and people stop playing your game.

I'm not totally against your arguments, though. I'm just bringing up a contrary POV. -G01d HaCkEr 05:58, 7 June 2006 (PDT)

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That's a good point - the feeling of godlike supremacy that rushes up your spine as your shatter a group of frail slime monsters with the force of your mightiest weapons is a major selling point in these games.

RichardS 05:36, 8 June 2006 (PDT)

--- Yeah I'll give you that much... farming Deadmines in WoW in the space of 20 minutes is still fun occasionally :P Natoli 10:34, 9 June 2006 (PDT)

Status Effects

Do we want multiple status effects to be on a character at once? I'd say yes... but do we want a limit to this? An idea I had for status effects is to have a spell that can remove ANY status effect (except death of course) - but the catch is it will only remove one - whether its a negative effect or a positive effect even! This can add some more strategy to the battle too... if you have beneficial effects and no negative ones, casting the spell is stupid since you will lose a benefit.

Now, the question to this is... do we select the removed effect at random or have a priority system (so it removes "worse" negative effects before less serious negative effects before beneficial effects)?

What say you? Natoli 20:33, 6 July 2006 (PDT)

I don't think they should be removed at random, but I think we'll have to choose between a priority system or a choice. Random seems to arbritary to be fun. A priority system wouldn't be bad or anything, but a choice can be strategic. But then again, maybe its too much freedom (and perhaps hard to program).

At any rate, I think we definately need more than one status effect at a time. In fact, that been incorporated conceptually into the battle system design we discussed (I'll get around to putting that all up eventually...).

And I reckon we could have more than one type of spell - one which cures only one effect, and one which clears everything, good or bad. And perhaps one that erases one at random?

RichardS 00:35, 18 July 2006 (PDT)

Hmm... every RPG I've ever played seems to have a spell for each status effect, so I assume we're going to do that too anyways... but adding one uber-status repair spell that can backfire could be fun :)

Another idea for this sort of thing is, admittedly, something I saw in WoW but its still cool. Basically they group their status effects in different ways... like there are different types of poisons that can be removed with the cleanse poison spell... many types of diseases that can be removed with cure disease... and a spell that works on all of the same type.

Only thing is that we probably wouldn't have enough status effects to warrant that... unless we created multi-purpse spells that cleaned say... 3 effects but ONLY if they were of 3 selected types... (say one that can cure poison, drunk and paralyse, and a different one to dispel sleep, confuse and slow or something like that).

Natoli 20:25, 1 August 2006 (PDT)

Some quick, good points on stats, especially poison:

• Poison should take a percentage of your health off per 'tick'/turn, rather than a fixed amount. This makes it always affect your characters the same.
• Natoli suggested that we have a minimum health level where Poison cannot kill your character for a few turns, since that can be a particularly frustrating thing to happen. So, say Poison takes 3% of your HP per turn, if you are on 3% or less of your max HP when Poison goes to do it's thing and subtract the 3%, it instead adds one to, say, a 'grace' counter, and doesn't subtract HP. Just an idea.

--g01d_HaCkEr 20:32, 1 August 2006 (PDT)

I reckon those are all good ideas. I'm just wondering if we want Poison to affect Characters equally at any level or not - I mean, we could argue that the stronger you are, the longer you can hold out. I'm not fussed, though. I particularly like the 'cure poison' curing poison, drunk and paralyse and all other logically connected effects.

RichardS 00:53, 6 August 2006 (PDT)

Levelling and stat increases

Quick question... what style of stat increase do we want as the characters develop? I was thinking that different characters could have a different multiplier for stats... so that we could get something like a swordsman's strength increasing by a factor of say... 2 or 3 per level... while a mage's strength could be equal to half (or even less than half) times his level. This would be fairly easy to program (and could possibly result in storing less data since the stat calculations can be done "on the fly"), but it results in a linear character progression. This may or may not be a bad thing... though it could cause balancing issues end-game. Of course... if enemies progressed in the same fashion the balancing issue could be nonexistent. Just wanted to see how you guys felt abouot it... because its probably REALLY inefficient to say, store stats per character per level to a max level of 100 or something. Another bonus to my propsed idea would be that we wouldn't need to have a level cap... well... not until we start getting overflow errors on character's strength values at level 704657 anyway :P Any other ways we could possibly see character progression? Even a more complex formula or such? (maybe randomising it to a degree that they get stronger in their primary stats, but not always by the same amount?)

Discuss :) Natoli 21:25, 6 July 2006 (PDT)

That's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of... if we did go that way, it'd have to be a slightly more complicated formula than 'x2', at least some of the time. I reckon we'd still want a cap, but now we can put it whereever we want and not have to write out the stats all individually. We might even move the cap as the characters progress.

Balance would be an issue, but that can be overcome in playtesting. I hope.

And the slightly randomised stats is a good idea too... I think that, if you could do it, you should go for that.

RichardS 00:34, 18 July 2006 (PDT)