AnglerStudios:Battle System
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)
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
