MONSTERS, STATS, DAMAGE AND BALANCE. A GAME OF NUMBERS.

Oh man, a topic where someone wants me to rant for ten pages about combat formulas? Hell yes. My favorite kind of topic.

First of all, in addition to the stuff you mentioned it being dependant on, a lot of this also depends on how hard you want your game to be, how long you want normal battles to be, and how much you want grinding to matter.

Game difficulty is impossible to get "right". The best difficulty for a game is one that pushes the player almost to his breaking point, but then lets him succeed. But this is obviously very different from one player to another. Chances are, if you're thinking enough about this stuff to start a forum topic about it, you're better at RPGs than most players. But that doesn't mean you have to dumb it down. It's certainly easiest (by far) to make a game at a difficulty level appropriate for yourself, instead of appropriate for someone else - because just by playing it once, you can immediately tell if it's right. You might also consider creating multiple difficulty levels? I generally give enemies higher speed and offense in higher difficulty levels, without adjusting their defense or HP. However, in key battles where the player can die from taking too long, such as a timed boss battle, I might increase the enemy's HP too. I say "increase for harder difficulties" but that's kind of incorrect - I actually create the hardest difficulty first, and then nerf the enemies for the easier mode(s), so that I don't have to do extensive re-testing.

Normal battle length is mostly a factor of how many normal battles you plan to have. Short, frequent normal battles are the norm in many games, with battles lasting about two rounds of attacks from the hero party (i.e., each character attacks twice). This can put more focus on exploration instead of combat, if the battles are easy and mostly just wear down your resources. It gets the player back to exploring before he forgets what he was doing. It also makes the bosses stand out more. However, making the normal battles short means that either you're going to have to create a lot more variety of normal battles for your game, or you're going to have a lot of repetition as the player encounters the same battles over and over. On the flip side, making fewer, longer normal battles, maybe taking as much as 5-8 rounds of attacks to win, will make your entire game's combat more tactical, and will give you more chances to have enemies act like miniature training versions of the upcoming bosses, which I think is a nice way to prepare the player. Pick which way you want your game to feel, and set your enemy defense/hp accordingly.

The two biggest factors that I think affect how much your stats grow by are the amount of character customization you want the player to have, and the effectiveness you want grinding to have. If you make stats to go up by a lot, then fighting older enemies will become an extremely effective way of levelling up - it'll be in the player's best interest to run away from battles in the current dungeon and fight battles from four dungeons ago instead. They might give half as much XP, but they'll take a fifth as long. Also, if levelling up causes your stats to go up by a lot, then grinding enemies to gain levels becomes really important and effective, whereas if equipment causes your stats to go up by a lot, then grinding's effectiveness is sharply diminished because the player's primary way of getting stronger is to find and buy upgrades. Getting lots of stats from equipment also lets the player choose who gets those stats and which stats they get - though if you have a more complex level up system than the basic one, you can get the same result without equipment. Meanwhile, if your stats only go up by 2-3x from the beginning to the end of the game, then the choices the player makes about how to build his characters aren't going to have much effect.

For another giant post I made a week or so ago about damage formulas, see this post.

chrono used a lot of boss attacks that diminish your HP by percent, like dropping it by half, or even 99. so regardless of level that attack is as proportionally devastating. do you think that was part of the success?

How do you know a damage formula is good? It's hard to take it entirely on its own, but I think most games are trying to accomplish a couple goals with one:

- Setting up specialization. At the most basic level, this could be something like letting the warrior do more damage than the healer, making some enemy weak to fire, or letting a character spend more MP for a stronger attack.
- Setting up an overall power curve. How far off the level and equipment strength you had in mind does it take for an enemy to be impossible or trivial?

Just for one example, with a basic subtractive Atk - Def system:
If Def values are close to Atk values, a 10% increase in an Atk value will change effectiveness of that character (measured in the number of hits it takes to kill something) a lot. But if Def values are a few times lower than Atk values, a 10% increase in an Atk value isn't going to increase damage much more than 10%. That may not even reduce the number of hits it takes to beat most ordinary enemies.

Without considering other factors, I don't think I'd say that any set of these is necessarily bad. If the warrior kills enemies in three hits, the game will play differently depending on whether the healer kills enemies in four hits or fourteen, but whether that's an effective choice still depends on what other options you open to the player. Hopefully you can figure out approximately the balance you're looking for.

There's a third goal I should mention:
- Transparency to the player.
Opinions may differ and this varies with visibility into enemy stats, but IMO generally you want your player able to make informed choices about the amounts of damage things will do. This isn't exactly "simpler is better", but that's probably how it'll usually work out.

i love this kind of shit.

but unless i'm mistaken you're witholding a crucial piece of information.


WHAT ENGINE ARE YOU USING?

riposte: implementation is everything

admission: this is 'design & theory', but OP seemed to want practical advice which is, let's be pragmatic, engine dependent.

" until I have some starting points done on the database. "

You mentioned the "database" word two times in your first post. So in this topic, i think, that the engine question matters.

I'm glad you want to talk in an engine agnostic way. That's about the only time I'll get to share anything meaningful.

You wanna know the formula I've used for years, in two RTS games, a final-fantasy style game, and in a fire emblem style game?

Damage = Math.sqrt(ATK)+(ATK/DEF)

I've always been most concerned with the interactions of different level/strength units.

And if you made it in assembly, I would pay to see that show.

Hmm, attack growing faster than defense doesn't actually bother me. Enemies having very different stats than player characters also doesn't bother me - actually it makes me happy, because it allows for more variety in enemies. If both of those things bother you, though, you're probably going to have to pick a damage formula that raises the attack power by an exponent.

In my current project, the damage formula is att*10/def. Starting values for players are about 30 att/10 def. Player attack power goes up by about 50% every two dungeons, while player defense is sort of unpredictable because it doesn't increase with level, and from about the fourth dungeon onward you have to choose between offensive or defensive equipment. Meanwhile enemy stats are so wildly unpredictable that it's tough to come up with average numbers even though I'm looking at their stats while I write this. This happens partly because you keep changing and losing party members, and partly because I am going way out of my way to add a lot of variety from one battle to the next (do you want the stats for the enemy sniper who attacks every other turn for huge damage, or the enemy cannon fodder who does almost no damage and dies in two hits, or the comm guy who keeps summoning allies and has low attack to make up for the fact that he prevents players from healing, or the the medic who never attacks, or the patrolman who casts attack and defense buffs and sometimes becomes invincible? That plus three bosses is my entire second dungeon).

I use a different damage formula for every project. I start with deciding what I want the damage formula to accomplish and then design one accordingly. There are a lot of questions to ask oneself. How much defense does the character with the highest defense have compared to the one with the lowest defense? How much more damage is the character with the lowest defense supposed to take compared to the high defense one? How are the numbers supposed to change when you're attacked by a strong respective a weak enemy?

Often the database values changes as the formula is developed. For example, I may start with "the fighter should have about 200% the defense of the black mage" and later find out that maybe 175% or 225% works better.

Currently, I'm handling defense the following way: Reduced damage = Old damage * attack / (attack + defense). This is done since in my game, for various reasons, the attack and defense value between characters and enemies varies greatly and I needed a formula that that lets defense have an impact even if it's low while still not getting a massive amount of zero damage situations.

I usually make character stats and equipment about equal. There are some variances, agility is usually unaffected by equipment, attack is about equally affected by character and equipment and defense is mostly affected by equipment. To be honest, that's usually done so because of personal preferences rather than me checking what works the best. Still, I design the formulas so that the game works with those premises.

I keep characters and enemies on the same scale. This doesn't mean I necessarily make them have equal values, but I avoid situations like where characters have way more attack than enemies while enemies have way more hit points. If the average enemy has about half the hitpoints of the average character, they will have somewhat close to half the average even near the end game (it may be a little higher to make the game harder and to account for the player have more tricks available.) This is to allow the confusion stat to make sense and I find it easier to plan things that way.

The first step should always be to think trough what you want. I have seen a lot of RPG maker games where the author implemented a stat distribution script, but it didn't work so well because the author stuck to the default formulas and those aren't made for such a level of player control.