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[RM2K3] XENOMIC'S HELP TOPIC
Posts
hedge1
862
hedge1
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CloseSo I'm a bit confused as to what you're doing here, and have no familiarity with X-2's Alchemist class (I'm an old FF1-6 fogey). What I'm basically understanding from you is that you want to switch which abilities are available for Nitori, and there are a lot of variations on the abilities (especially due to items being converted into abilities for her) so you want to know if there's an easy way to handle it.
If I am understanding you correctly, and if her abilities are all based upon some linear progression (such as leveling), then this shouldn't be an issue because you can give people abilities based upon a variable (for the ability, not the person).
First, ensure that all of her abilities are next to each other. They can't be floating all over your database or this won't work.
Second, group them by type. So all of her non-Gear-Shift abilities together, and all of her Gear-Shift abilities together. Ideally there would be the same number in either case, but if not, that's OK as well. Each group needs to be exclusive to each other. If you have duplicate abilities between the groups you may consider having those duplicates their own group, or even just duplicating them in the database itself. Why will hopefully make sense when you see the sudo-code below. If not, you can ask me.
So the database may look something like:
<single target normal>
1000 Ability1
1001 Ability2
1002 Ability3
..
<single target EX>
1020 Ability1
1021 Ability2
1022 Ability3
..
<multi target normal>
1040 Ability1
1041 Ability2
1042 Ability3
..
<multi target EX>
1060 Ability1
1061 Ability2
1062 Ability3
..
So the sudo-code looks something like this:
Find Nitori's level (or whatever influences the depth of her abilities).
Find what "stage" Nitori is in so that you know what group of abilities she has access to.
Based upon Nitori's stage, place in a variable like "Nitori Group" the first ability number from the stage's group. If she was "single target normal," you would store "1000" into this variable based upon my fake database above.
Based upon Nitori's level, place in a variable like "Nitori Depth" the number of abilities in that group she can access. So if she can access the first four variables, use 4.
Remove all of Notiri's spells.
Label 1:
Give Nitori the spell using the variable "Nitori Group."
Add 1 to "Nitori Group."
Subtract 1 from "Nitori Depth."
If "Nitori Depth" = 0, then go to Label 2.
Else go to Label 1.
Label 2:
If you can have some EX abilities and some non-EX abilities everything suddenly becomes much harder, as you're forced to either check what abilities Nitori has currently before changing her abilities (a very time consuming process), or you'll need to dedicate variables or switches to denote which abilities are EX and which ones aren't.
If EX abilities don't actually replace the normal abilities then you obviously won't need to worry and will only need to two groups rather than the four I outlined.
And, as stated previously, if I missed something else that may impact the viability of the outline I recommended above.
If I am understanding you correctly, and if her abilities are all based upon some linear progression (such as leveling), then this shouldn't be an issue because you can give people abilities based upon a variable (for the ability, not the person).
First, ensure that all of her abilities are next to each other. They can't be floating all over your database or this won't work.
Second, group them by type. So all of her non-Gear-Shift abilities together, and all of her Gear-Shift abilities together. Ideally there would be the same number in either case, but if not, that's OK as well. Each group needs to be exclusive to each other. If you have duplicate abilities between the groups you may consider having those duplicates their own group, or even just duplicating them in the database itself. Why will hopefully make sense when you see the sudo-code below. If not, you can ask me.
So the database may look something like:
<single target normal>
1000 Ability1
1001 Ability2
1002 Ability3
..
<single target EX>
1020 Ability1
1021 Ability2
1022 Ability3
..
<multi target normal>
1040 Ability1
1041 Ability2
1042 Ability3
..
<multi target EX>
1060 Ability1
1061 Ability2
1062 Ability3
..
So the sudo-code looks something like this:
Find Nitori's level (or whatever influences the depth of her abilities).
Find what "stage" Nitori is in so that you know what group of abilities she has access to.
Based upon Nitori's stage, place in a variable like "Nitori Group" the first ability number from the stage's group. If she was "single target normal," you would store "1000" into this variable based upon my fake database above.
Based upon Nitori's level, place in a variable like "Nitori Depth" the number of abilities in that group she can access. So if she can access the first four variables, use 4.
Remove all of Notiri's spells.
Label 1:
Give Nitori the spell using the variable "Nitori Group."
Add 1 to "Nitori Group."
Subtract 1 from "Nitori Depth."
If "Nitori Depth" = 0, then go to Label 2.
Else go to Label 1.
Label 2:
If you can have some EX abilities and some non-EX abilities everything suddenly becomes much harder, as you're forced to either check what abilities Nitori has currently before changing her abilities (a very time consuming process), or you'll need to dedicate variables or switches to denote which abilities are EX and which ones aren't.
If EX abilities don't actually replace the normal abilities then you obviously won't need to worry and will only need to two groups rather than the four I outlined.
And, as stated previously, if I missed something else that may impact the viability of the outline I recommended above.
Xenomic
1752
This is how I have it set for her:
*All abilities are learned the same way as other character, via buying/winning/finding/stealing skill books and using those to learn the skills (i.e. find Lapis X to learn the "Lapis" skill, or Antidote X to learn "Antidote".). Normal and EX versions do not replace one another right now.
*Right now, whenever the player equips a piece of equipment that enhances the Stock command (i.e. Chemist, Mirror Items, or both), I have it set in the database to switch those skills out with the same skill but enhanced (doubled healing for skills that heal HP with Chemist, reversed effects that target the enemies with Mirror Items)
(Overall, I was more asking if that would be a better way of handling her skillset compared to what she has right now, or if there would be another way of handling her skillset since...as she is right now, she's one of the worst characters in the game at the current time. X-2's Alchemist lets you learn abilities that are basically Items for free, which is almost what Nitori does except I gave them MP costs for her. I WAS thinking of making them free for her, but I don't want her to be that good. They also got to use Elixir which obviously I didn't give to Nitori. ^^; )
*All abilities are learned the same way as other character, via buying/winning/finding/stealing skill books and using those to learn the skills (i.e. find Lapis X to learn the "Lapis" skill, or Antidote X to learn "Antidote".). Normal and EX versions do not replace one another right now.
*Right now, whenever the player equips a piece of equipment that enhances the Stock command (i.e. Chemist, Mirror Items, or both), I have it set in the database to switch those skills out with the same skill but enhanced (doubled healing for skills that heal HP with Chemist, reversed effects that target the enemies with Mirror Items)
(Overall, I was more asking if that would be a better way of handling her skillset compared to what she has right now, or if there would be another way of handling her skillset since...as she is right now, she's one of the worst characters in the game at the current time. X-2's Alchemist lets you learn abilities that are basically Items for free, which is almost what Nitori does except I gave them MP costs for her. I WAS thinking of making them free for her, but I don't want her to be that good. They also got to use Elixir which obviously I didn't give to Nitori. ^^; )
hedge1
862
Here is how I am understanding you:
Her current setup is as follows:
P
Lapis
Large P
1-Up
Antidote
Echo Note
Eye Drops
Bravace
Soft
Chrono Breaker
Denumber
Mini Hammer
Anti-Mixup
Alarm Clock
Anti-Freeze
Faith
(plus the EX versions of those)
(plus the Mirror version, Chemist version, and Enhanced Chemist version of those)
If the mirror + chemist + enhanced versions also affect the EX versions, then we have 16 normal and 16 EX in her regular skill set, plus another 96 skills in the database to account for the other three variations.
EX, Chemist, and Enhanced Chemist versions are simply all stronger variations of the same "item ability", or Stock command.
Mirror versions, however, use the Mirror command and reverse the effects (damage instead of healing, inflicting rather than removing conditions, etc.)
Am I correct in understanding the current setup?
-
You then propose a "Gear Shift" ability. From your text it's not entirely clear if using Gear Shift to gain AOE abilities will remove "all of the status healing abilities bar Faith/Faith EX" or whether the new version of Nitori will gain the ability to Gear Shift, but permanently lose "all of the status healing abilities bar Faith/Faith EX."
From there you give a list of new moves (beginning with Strength Tonic and ending with Superball) that the new version of Nitori will have (the old version will not have this list). Only some of these abilities look to have an AOE option, so I'm not entirely clear if the ones that don't stipulate AOE disappear when shifting to the AOE Gear or if the ones that don't stipulate AOE become AOE with the AOE Gear, and the ones that do stipulate AOE always retaining the option to be single target or AOE, regardless of the Gear.
You then say "Which would then translate into this." And this is where I'm really confused. I can make guesses as to what you mean by that, and what the list below means, but I'll just ask for some clarification at this point instead.
-
What you're asking of me, then, is to more or less evaluate three things:
1. Does the new skill set sound more appealing than the old, status removal skill set?
2. If the abilities are mirrored, some in the proposed skill set won't work. Is that a problem? How does that affect my opinion of the proposed addition of Gear Shift?
3. Any other comments from me? For example, thoughts on the use of MP for the items?
-
I'm sorry I'm not understanding. Your first post was very detailed, but there were a for parts that just weren't clear to me.
Her current setup is as follows:
P
Lapis
Large P
1-Up
Antidote
Echo Note
Eye Drops
Bravace
Soft
Chrono Breaker
Denumber
Mini Hammer
Anti-Mixup
Alarm Clock
Anti-Freeze
Faith
(plus the EX versions of those)
(plus the Mirror version, Chemist version, and Enhanced Chemist version of those)
If the mirror + chemist + enhanced versions also affect the EX versions, then we have 16 normal and 16 EX in her regular skill set, plus another 96 skills in the database to account for the other three variations.
EX, Chemist, and Enhanced Chemist versions are simply all stronger variations of the same "item ability", or Stock command.
Mirror versions, however, use the Mirror command and reverse the effects (damage instead of healing, inflicting rather than removing conditions, etc.)
Am I correct in understanding the current setup?
-
You then propose a "Gear Shift" ability. From your text it's not entirely clear if using Gear Shift to gain AOE abilities will remove "all of the status healing abilities bar Faith/Faith EX" or whether the new version of Nitori will gain the ability to Gear Shift, but permanently lose "all of the status healing abilities bar Faith/Faith EX."
From there you give a list of new moves (beginning with Strength Tonic and ending with Superball) that the new version of Nitori will have (the old version will not have this list). Only some of these abilities look to have an AOE option, so I'm not entirely clear if the ones that don't stipulate AOE disappear when shifting to the AOE Gear or if the ones that don't stipulate AOE become AOE with the AOE Gear, and the ones that do stipulate AOE always retaining the option to be single target or AOE, regardless of the Gear.
You then say "Which would then translate into this." And this is where I'm really confused. I can make guesses as to what you mean by that, and what the list below means, but I'll just ask for some clarification at this point instead.
-
What you're asking of me, then, is to more or less evaluate three things:
1. Does the new skill set sound more appealing than the old, status removal skill set?
2. If the abilities are mirrored, some in the proposed skill set won't work. Is that a problem? How does that affect my opinion of the proposed addition of Gear Shift?
3. Any other comments from me? For example, thoughts on the use of MP for the items?
-
I'm sorry I'm not understanding. Your first post was very detailed, but there were a for parts that just weren't clear to me.
Xenomic
1752
Correct. The EX versions are also present in the skillset with the normal versions too. Whenever she has anything that gives her Chemist, Mirror Items, or Chemist + Mirror Items, all of those skills are replaced with the same skills, just "enhanced". And yes, that is what Mirror Items does. It's based on the same skillset from Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
Well, a buddy of mine proposes the idea of "Gear Shift", and to just remove all of the status healing items that's not Faith (and replace those with Sake, which cures all mental restriction statuses, and Adrenaline, which cures all movement restriction statuses). He proposes that Nitori learns the basic abilities, such as Faith, 1-Up, P, etc. and to use "Gear Shift" to change between those and the EX versions of them, instead of having both normal and EX versions at once.
Correct, I was looking for something to make her more unique and useful. As she is right now, she's not exactly the most useful character at all (outside of her Water command, she has no offensive capabilities. Her Water command has one AoE Water attack that barely breaks 1000 damage at max level, and her ultimate is a single-target physical attack for 5000 damage with nothing special about it). Granted, she's meant for pure support (hence the Stock command and her having Armor Elemental Bless), but having a few solid offensive options seems like it'd be nice to have (hence Superball and the Bottle Rockets). If they don't have an AoE variant, they will stay the same regardless of what mode Nitori would be in.
1) Correct.
2) They would still remain the same even in Mirror Items mode. So Bottle Rockets will ALWAYS deal damage regardless of what mode Nitori is in. Mirror Items was more or less meant to work with all of the status items she could use and make them offensive but...yeeeeeah. Even FFX-2 didn't have Alchemist with every status item ever, just Remedy.
3) Aye. Like if the proposed changes would be good to keep, anything else that would be interesting to give to her Stock command, MP costs, etc.
Well, a buddy of mine proposes the idea of "Gear Shift", and to just remove all of the status healing items that's not Faith (and replace those with Sake, which cures all mental restriction statuses, and Adrenaline, which cures all movement restriction statuses). He proposes that Nitori learns the basic abilities, such as Faith, 1-Up, P, etc. and to use "Gear Shift" to change between those and the EX versions of them, instead of having both normal and EX versions at once.
Correct, I was looking for something to make her more unique and useful. As she is right now, she's not exactly the most useful character at all (outside of her Water command, she has no offensive capabilities. Her Water command has one AoE Water attack that barely breaks 1000 damage at max level, and her ultimate is a single-target physical attack for 5000 damage with nothing special about it). Granted, she's meant for pure support (hence the Stock command and her having Armor Elemental Bless), but having a few solid offensive options seems like it'd be nice to have (hence Superball and the Bottle Rockets). If they don't have an AoE variant, they will stay the same regardless of what mode Nitori would be in.
1) Correct.
2) They would still remain the same even in Mirror Items mode. So Bottle Rockets will ALWAYS deal damage regardless of what mode Nitori is in. Mirror Items was more or less meant to work with all of the status items she could use and make them offensive but...yeeeeeah. Even FFX-2 didn't have Alchemist with every status item ever, just Remedy.
3) Aye. Like if the proposed changes would be good to keep, anything else that would be interesting to give to her Stock command, MP costs, etc.
Xenomic
1752
Since we're talking about things that could work, how feasible is it to do things like Auto-Med (use status healing item immediately if target is able to act and there is at least one of the status item in stock), Auto-Potion (use least potent healing item whenever target is damaged from stock), and Auto-Phoenix (if an ally is KO'd, automatically uses the least potent revive item in stock to revive ally)?
In adddition, I brought this up long ago too, but is there a simpler way of doing things like No Back Attack/Pincer Attack, Increased Initiative, etc.? I'd like to give some of these as overworld passives if possible, but it seems like it may be really, really annoying to do normally.
(I actually have an entire To-Do list of things for the game. If anyone would like to see, I could post it here in spoilers or something? I dunno, maybe someone will find something interesting to try and do a plugin of or coding or whatever that'll help speed things up and whatnot? ^^; )
In adddition, I brought this up long ago too, but is there a simpler way of doing things like No Back Attack/Pincer Attack, Increased Initiative, etc.? I'd like to give some of these as overworld passives if possible, but it seems like it may be really, really annoying to do normally.
(I actually have an entire To-Do list of things for the game. If anyone would like to see, I could post it here in spoilers or something? I dunno, maybe someone will find something interesting to try and do a plugin of or coding or whatever that'll help speed things up and whatnot? ^^; )
hedge1
862
Nitori:
After thinking about it a bit, I think I'd recommend dropping the "gear shift" idea. It's not a bad idea, but given the confines of RPG Maker, you're stuck with either making Gear Shift waste an entire turn or no turn at all. If it doesn't take a turn, it doesn't affect game play and there's no reason to have it. If it does take a turn, it likely means that people will just stay either always single target or always AOE since the turn cost is so high to switch. That being said, if you added some bonus to switching gears, like a temporary boost to stats or MP regeneration, it might make it worth while.
Alternatively, you could make any gear shift to AOE temporary, but then make the AOE spells cost the same as the single target ones. So you can "gear shift" to AOE for maybe two turns and get a temporary boost in power, but then automatically shift down afterward. And since the AOEs do the same per target as the single target does, there's no reason to use gear shift for the power boost until you need to hit more than two targets, and neither immediately. This feels more like an offensive setup, though, than a utility one, since often with utility you're looking for more immediate help and won't have the turn to waste to "power up."
As I'm looking at the design for Nitori I think you're being held back too much by how she used to be designed and you need to think more about what you really want her to be. Is she a jack of all trades? Defensive? Status effects?
For example, you could give her permanent MP-per-turn recovery, essentially making her cheaper "items" free and thus making her a great long dungeon sustain character that you can just spam abilities with constantly, even if none of her abilities are particularly awesome.
You could make her a status effects expert and give her both mirror and non-mirror varieties for her "items" always, thus allowing her to either inflict ailments or cure them easily. In this case you'd want to return to having single abilities for each ailment rather than the cure-alls you switched to.
You could make her use Gear Shift not to switch between single and AOE, but attack and defense. In this case she'd be slightly weaker than either a pure healer or pure damage dealer, but make up for the difference with her flexibility. And because she has a one turn delay in switching, it means she can be stronger in both categories than someone who could truly do both all the time.
You could make her a jack of all trades and give her healing, attack magic, status healing, and status infliction, but then let her not be particularly useful in any. I feel like she's a bit like this right now. For that to work, then, you'd need to have a reason to bring that level of flexibility at the sacrifice for power. And I'm guessing right now there is no reason, which is why she's feeling weak.
From my perspective she looks like a status effects expert, so I'd really focus on her giving positive and negative conditions to allies and enemies. And I'd allow her to do both always (so both Mirror and non-Mirror).
That or I'd use Gear Shift to switch between some offensive set of spells and abilities and a more defensive set.
But it's completely up to you.
Auto-Stuff
To run scripts when a champion is damaged, use:
Trigger: Hero 's HP between
From there you can do Auto-anything, including auto-phoenix. And while it's usually a huge problem that RPG Maker gives a game over immediately when the last person in your group dies, in this case it's helpful since with auto-phoenix you won't even need to check if anyone else is alive in the party. Just check if you have a Phoenix Down.
I don't quite remember if conditions can trigger the Hero HP command, so you'll want to double check that first, actually, just in case a Poisoned character wastes your entire stock of Hi-Potions or something. But I'm fairly confident conditions can't do that. If you check, let me know, as it will save me some time.
There's no simple way of altering the rate of Pincer Attack, Back Attack, etc. If I were to attempt to implement something like that I'd either have my own custom encounter system where I use the "enemy encounter" command to control pincer attacks, etc. or I'd duplicate tilesets where the only difference in the duplicates is the terrain. Then I'd alter the Pincer Attack, etc. rates within the terrains to whatever I wanted. Actually, I guess there's a "set uniform terrain" option in the tileset page, so I guess it wouldn't be that hard to make duplicate tilesets for this purpose.
If you don't want other people to see your ideas, you could PM them.
Also, did you ever check out the reference pictures with variables patch? It helps a ton when dealing with any custom menu or system.
After thinking about it a bit, I think I'd recommend dropping the "gear shift" idea. It's not a bad idea, but given the confines of RPG Maker, you're stuck with either making Gear Shift waste an entire turn or no turn at all. If it doesn't take a turn, it doesn't affect game play and there's no reason to have it. If it does take a turn, it likely means that people will just stay either always single target or always AOE since the turn cost is so high to switch. That being said, if you added some bonus to switching gears, like a temporary boost to stats or MP regeneration, it might make it worth while.
Alternatively, you could make any gear shift to AOE temporary, but then make the AOE spells cost the same as the single target ones. So you can "gear shift" to AOE for maybe two turns and get a temporary boost in power, but then automatically shift down afterward. And since the AOEs do the same per target as the single target does, there's no reason to use gear shift for the power boost until you need to hit more than two targets, and neither immediately. This feels more like an offensive setup, though, than a utility one, since often with utility you're looking for more immediate help and won't have the turn to waste to "power up."
As I'm looking at the design for Nitori I think you're being held back too much by how she used to be designed and you need to think more about what you really want her to be. Is she a jack of all trades? Defensive? Status effects?
For example, you could give her permanent MP-per-turn recovery, essentially making her cheaper "items" free and thus making her a great long dungeon sustain character that you can just spam abilities with constantly, even if none of her abilities are particularly awesome.
You could make her a status effects expert and give her both mirror and non-mirror varieties for her "items" always, thus allowing her to either inflict ailments or cure them easily. In this case you'd want to return to having single abilities for each ailment rather than the cure-alls you switched to.
You could make her use Gear Shift not to switch between single and AOE, but attack and defense. In this case she'd be slightly weaker than either a pure healer or pure damage dealer, but make up for the difference with her flexibility. And because she has a one turn delay in switching, it means she can be stronger in both categories than someone who could truly do both all the time.
You could make her a jack of all trades and give her healing, attack magic, status healing, and status infliction, but then let her not be particularly useful in any. I feel like she's a bit like this right now. For that to work, then, you'd need to have a reason to bring that level of flexibility at the sacrifice for power. And I'm guessing right now there is no reason, which is why she's feeling weak.
From my perspective she looks like a status effects expert, so I'd really focus on her giving positive and negative conditions to allies and enemies. And I'd allow her to do both always (so both Mirror and non-Mirror).
That or I'd use Gear Shift to switch between some offensive set of spells and abilities and a more defensive set.
But it's completely up to you.
Auto-Stuff
To run scripts when a champion is damaged, use:
Trigger: Hero 's HP between
From there you can do Auto-anything, including auto-phoenix. And while it's usually a huge problem that RPG Maker gives a game over immediately when the last person in your group dies, in this case it's helpful since with auto-phoenix you won't even need to check if anyone else is alive in the party. Just check if you have a Phoenix Down.
I don't quite remember if conditions can trigger the Hero HP command, so you'll want to double check that first, actually, just in case a Poisoned character wastes your entire stock of Hi-Potions or something. But I'm fairly confident conditions can't do that. If you check, let me know, as it will save me some time.
There's no simple way of altering the rate of Pincer Attack, Back Attack, etc. If I were to attempt to implement something like that I'd either have my own custom encounter system where I use the "enemy encounter" command to control pincer attacks, etc. or I'd duplicate tilesets where the only difference in the duplicates is the terrain. Then I'd alter the Pincer Attack, etc. rates within the terrains to whatever I wanted. Actually, I guess there's a "set uniform terrain" option in the tileset page, so I guess it wouldn't be that hard to make duplicate tilesets for this purpose.
If you don't want other people to see your ideas, you could PM them.
Also, did you ever check out the reference pictures with variables patch? It helps a ton when dealing with any custom menu or system.
Xenomic
1752
For Nitori:
Yeah, I'm just trying to keep her heavily support-themed, with very very few offensive options. One of her perks, so to speak, is that her exclusive armor all have Half MP Cost by default, so by giving her those (all can be gotten through the crafting system), her costs will always be halved which helps with her horrible MP pool (40 MP when first gotten when everyone else around her level has about 100 or so). Reason being that Alchemists/Chemists are generally heavy-support users (if I could have done the Mix command, I would have but that's impossible to do in 2K3). And yeah, there's almost never any situation in which you'd really need to bring her right now as there's always others that can do more than her with more HP, MP, and everything else.
Keep in mind too that originally she was going to be the Edgar/Jeff of the game, which I kinda was drawing back to with her current suggested skillset. I feel giving her the buff items would probably help a bit (though how useful double ATK/DEF/MAG is in 2k3, I don't really know. It never feels like they do much??), and especially with things like Speed Drink (that is one of three ways to give anyone Haste. Hermes Sandals has to be equipped to a character for Auto-Haste, and it's a very rare accessory. Sakuya needs to have her two highest-tier crafting weapons to use Haste (which only targets her) and Hastega (which targets the party, but reduces her stats by a crapton) and the like. Komachi is already the status expert, having AoEs of pretty much all of the common statuses you'd see, and once again with better MP and HP than Nitori too. >_<
For Auto-Stuff:
I have a feeling that statuses like Poison and Regen would affect that. I don't see why they wouldn't, which makes that a bit of a problem aye. And yeah, I know about that game over thing since I had an entire party with Auto-Life die, and it's going to the game over screen as people are reviving in the fight lol.
Hmm...and I use the default 2k3 encounter system too. That's a bit problematic indeed.
I never did mostly because I never use pictures all that often except in my Glossary for the characters.
I'm also not worried about people seeing my ideas since well...they could probably take them and make them better too. ^^;
EDIT - Oh wait, you're referring to having each character that can have the Auto-Ability with a battle event to run that, right? Oh god...that's...just not going to work with all the characters I have. Though I guess I can set it as just one specific battle passive or something for specific characters. @_@;
EDIT #2 - While I'm still deciding on whom to give the Auto-abilities to and what to do with Nitori still, here's a new one. I am working on a boss for this upcoming dungeon that's a 1v1 fight (Marisa vs. PC-98 Marisa). The unique thing about this fight is that Marisa's Steal, instead of stealing items, will steal abilities from PC-98 Marisa which will remove it from PC-98's skillset. In addition, PC-98 Marisa can do the same to Marisa, including stealing her abilities back and stealing Marisa's own abilities, which gives her her own version of them (same name and all that, just not the same power as what Marisa may have). Now, here's what I got so for on this:
Everything from MP Charge on up are PC-98 Marisa's default skills, while everything below MP Charge are Marisa's that she can use once she steals from her. MP Charge cannot be stolen by Marisa at all. Now, as you can see I already have switches set in place for whenever Marisa uses her steal to steal from PC-98 Marisa, and I already have two common events set up for this fight (one for start of fight that sets variables for what skills Marisa has, and one for after the fight that'll return everything (hopefully) back to normal). Now the question here is how to make this work smoothly the other way around, with PC-98 Marisa stealing abilities from Marisa? Stealing from PC-98 Marisa isn't a problem as Marisa will just outright learn that skill for her skillset, no problem. But making sure that Marisa's abilities returns back to Marisa when she steals them back is something that I'm not sure about. I think I can just reuse the variables I'm using for the set-up event here since that won't change at all, but dunno?
I guess what I'm asking is what's the best way to balance this out for both sides?
On that note, the problem with this fight is that this is a point of no return, so you cannot go back to grind or anything once you get to the save point. In addition, you don't have access to Marisa for most of the dungeon anyways to grind even if you wanted to, and not everyone's going to have used Marisa (I know some people that don't use her at all), so there's a big chance that the player can get permanently stuck here. Obviously, I want to prevent that, but what's a good way of balancing this fight around the gimmick as well as whatever levels Marisa may be at?
Yeah, I'm just trying to keep her heavily support-themed, with very very few offensive options. One of her perks, so to speak, is that her exclusive armor all have Half MP Cost by default, so by giving her those (all can be gotten through the crafting system), her costs will always be halved which helps with her horrible MP pool (40 MP when first gotten when everyone else around her level has about 100 or so). Reason being that Alchemists/Chemists are generally heavy-support users (if I could have done the Mix command, I would have but that's impossible to do in 2K3). And yeah, there's almost never any situation in which you'd really need to bring her right now as there's always others that can do more than her with more HP, MP, and everything else.
Keep in mind too that originally she was going to be the Edgar/Jeff of the game, which I kinda was drawing back to with her current suggested skillset. I feel giving her the buff items would probably help a bit (though how useful double ATK/DEF/MAG is in 2k3, I don't really know. It never feels like they do much??), and especially with things like Speed Drink (that is one of three ways to give anyone Haste. Hermes Sandals has to be equipped to a character for Auto-Haste, and it's a very rare accessory. Sakuya needs to have her two highest-tier crafting weapons to use Haste (which only targets her) and Hastega (which targets the party, but reduces her stats by a crapton) and the like. Komachi is already the status expert, having AoEs of pretty much all of the common statuses you'd see, and once again with better MP and HP than Nitori too. >_<
For Auto-Stuff:
I have a feeling that statuses like Poison and Regen would affect that. I don't see why they wouldn't, which makes that a bit of a problem aye. And yeah, I know about that game over thing since I had an entire party with Auto-Life die, and it's going to the game over screen as people are reviving in the fight lol.
Hmm...and I use the default 2k3 encounter system too. That's a bit problematic indeed.
I never did mostly because I never use pictures all that often except in my Glossary for the characters.
I'm also not worried about people seeing my ideas since well...they could probably take them and make them better too. ^^;
EDIT - Oh wait, you're referring to having each character that can have the Auto-Ability with a battle event to run that, right? Oh god...that's...just not going to work with all the characters I have. Though I guess I can set it as just one specific battle passive or something for specific characters. @_@;
EDIT #2 - While I'm still deciding on whom to give the Auto-abilities to and what to do with Nitori still, here's a new one. I am working on a boss for this upcoming dungeon that's a 1v1 fight (Marisa vs. PC-98 Marisa). The unique thing about this fight is that Marisa's Steal, instead of stealing items, will steal abilities from PC-98 Marisa which will remove it from PC-98's skillset. In addition, PC-98 Marisa can do the same to Marisa, including stealing her abilities back and stealing Marisa's own abilities, which gives her her own version of them (same name and all that, just not the same power as what Marisa may have). Now, here's what I got so for on this:
Everything from MP Charge on up are PC-98 Marisa's default skills, while everything below MP Charge are Marisa's that she can use once she steals from her. MP Charge cannot be stolen by Marisa at all. Now, as you can see I already have switches set in place for whenever Marisa uses her steal to steal from PC-98 Marisa, and I already have two common events set up for this fight (one for start of fight that sets variables for what skills Marisa has, and one for after the fight that'll return everything (hopefully) back to normal). Now the question here is how to make this work smoothly the other way around, with PC-98 Marisa stealing abilities from Marisa? Stealing from PC-98 Marisa isn't a problem as Marisa will just outright learn that skill for her skillset, no problem. But making sure that Marisa's abilities returns back to Marisa when she steals them back is something that I'm not sure about. I think I can just reuse the variables I'm using for the set-up event here since that won't change at all, but dunno?
I guess what I'm asking is what's the best way to balance this out for both sides?
On that note, the problem with this fight is that this is a point of no return, so you cannot go back to grind or anything once you get to the save point. In addition, you don't have access to Marisa for most of the dungeon anyways to grind even if you wanted to, and not everyone's going to have used Marisa (I know some people that don't use her at all), so there's a big chance that the player can get permanently stuck here. Obviously, I want to prevent that, but what's a good way of balancing this fight around the gimmick as well as whatever levels Marisa may be at?
hedge1
862
For Auto-Stuff:
I just did some testing and damage over time from conditions DON'T trigger them. At the same time, any Fight command or Skill command, regardless of what it does, will trigger ALL of them. (Defend, Item, and Escape won't trigger them.)
Examples:
Say you make four triggers (one for each party member) and then use an ability to inflicts blind on a monster. All four triggers will then activate.
Say you make two triggers (one for each monster) and then use an ability that removes blind from yourself. Both monster HP triggers will activate.
Say you make one trigger for a single party member and that party member dies. The trigger will still activate whenever a monster or ally uses a spell or ability. However, if you remove that party member from your party, the trigger will no longer activate.
The same is true of monsters. Even if the monster dies, the trigger will still run. This means that all you need is one trigger to handle all damage cases. It also means that you CAN'T use individual triggers to handle the Auto-stuff. You need to run it all off of a common event script that checks to see if a character's HP has decreased since the last check. However, this has the unfortunate side effect of triggering from conditions because Poison would decrease HP. You can of course get around this, but you'll have to be the judge as to whether or not it's worth it. The only positive is that it's all common event stuff, not battle group stuff. Just one battle group trigger that calls the common event is needed for each battle.
As for Auto-stuff other than Auto-Potion, you should be fine. Just check if the character is dead and in the party and revive them. It won't matter in this case if it's triggered many times. In other words, while Auto-Potion is fairly involved, the other Autos shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
I might as well note that the HP check occurs AFTER the damage is dealt, so it will be an immediate revival or potion use or what-ever (as you'd want it to be).
I'll also note that the last time I did a bunch of custom stuff in a game, I made variables to hold the stats of each character so that I could easily reference them in other scripts. If you continue down this path of some fairly heavy customization for the game, I'd recommend you do that as well. Variables are fairly flexible in rm2k3, but little else is.
-
Pincer Attacks:
The terrain hack for changing pincer attacks, etc. does work with the default 2k3 encounter system. But it does mean making duplicating all of your tile sets, so it's still up to you if its worth the effort.
There is a nifty trick for creating preemptive attacks, however. Weapons have the option for "always attack first." So make a dummy weapon with that checked, and then if you get into a fight where you have initiative, set everyone's weapon to the dummy weapon to give initiative, and then in the Turn Trigger (which runs before you even have control over your characters) swap out all of the dummy weapons for your real weapons. Doing this won't reset your character's ATB, so it's one programmatic way set initiative.
-
For Nitori:
You talk a lot about her limited MP pool like it's a problem. Why aren't you raising it?
It seems like you're out of options for Nitori. As you've mentioned, you have other characters that fill possible niche's and you can't make a proper Mix command in rm2k3. So I think I'll just leave you with three options and you can do what you wish with her:
1. Just raise her stats. This is a straight, boring, unintelligent buff that makes her conflict with other characters. But it's an effective way of making her useful.
2. Split her abilities. In one case she has her not-super-useful Stock command (with all of the chemist bonuses and mirror abilities). But then give her an additional damage skill set that is manipulated using the Gear Shift concept mentioned earlier. You can do any of the suggested Gear Shift options. The point is just that you're giving her a viable offensive option and a gimmick to make her a bit different from everyone else that spams spells.
3. You can use a Conditional fork in a Turn trigger to check "If Nitori uses the Stock command" and then have each use of Stock consume a specific item. You could call the item whatever you want. This way you're creating a cost to her abilities separate from regular MP consumption. And now with a separate drawback, you free her up to have a lot of nifty spells that may otherwise be overpowered.
-
Stat Formulas:
ATK is fairly useful in rm2k3. DEF less so. MAG is pretty worthless. The formulas are as follows:
Physical Damage = Skill Damage + (ATK / 2 - DEF / 4) * (Attack Influence / 10)
Magic Damage = Skill Damage + (MAG / 4 - MAG / 8) * (Intelligence Influence / 10)
Basically, you deal damage equal to half you ATK.
You reduce damage received by a quarter of your DEF.
And both of those values are half again as impactful when dealing with magic.
So if you give someone 400 extra intelligence, they'll probably do around 50 extra damage with a spell, assuming your Intelligence Influence is always maxed at 10 for all spells. Otherwise it will be even less.
You can make the MAG stat more useful, however, by upping the percentage damage done using attributes. I actually always do this. It also just feels nicer to start doing 1000+ damage to enemies with regular attacks.
-
Marisa:
From a balance perspective, I'm more or less gathering from you that you want PC-98 to be a copy of Marisa at whatever level Marisa is currently at. Here are my thoughts on that process:
First, changing monster HP is fairly trivial during battle. That means you can always make PC-98 match the max HP of Marisa (or be some percentage above Marisa's HP). I don't remember if numbers appear on the screen when you decrease a monster's HP using events, but I do know you can change System 1 to something where all of the text colors are blank (invisible), thus allowing you to alter the HP values in secret.
As for the the abilities, if you set PC-98's intelligence stat to be really low (like 10) then all of her damage will come from the base values on each of Marisa's abilities. Since she's stealing those abilities only if Marisa has them, that should mean that the two have more or less equal damage out put, with the exception of PC-98's base abilities. For them, then, you'd have to just restrict them based upon Marisa's level.
I just did some testing and damage over time from conditions DON'T trigger them. At the same time, any Fight command or Skill command, regardless of what it does, will trigger ALL of them. (Defend, Item, and Escape won't trigger them.)
Examples:
Say you make four triggers (one for each party member) and then use an ability to inflicts blind on a monster. All four triggers will then activate.
Say you make two triggers (one for each monster) and then use an ability that removes blind from yourself. Both monster HP triggers will activate.
Say you make one trigger for a single party member and that party member dies. The trigger will still activate whenever a monster or ally uses a spell or ability. However, if you remove that party member from your party, the trigger will no longer activate.
The same is true of monsters. Even if the monster dies, the trigger will still run. This means that all you need is one trigger to handle all damage cases. It also means that you CAN'T use individual triggers to handle the Auto-stuff. You need to run it all off of a common event script that checks to see if a character's HP has decreased since the last check. However, this has the unfortunate side effect of triggering from conditions because Poison would decrease HP. You can of course get around this, but you'll have to be the judge as to whether or not it's worth it. The only positive is that it's all common event stuff, not battle group stuff. Just one battle group trigger that calls the common event is needed for each battle.
As for Auto-stuff other than Auto-Potion, you should be fine. Just check if the character is dead and in the party and revive them. It won't matter in this case if it's triggered many times. In other words, while Auto-Potion is fairly involved, the other Autos shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
I might as well note that the HP check occurs AFTER the damage is dealt, so it will be an immediate revival or potion use or what-ever (as you'd want it to be).
I'll also note that the last time I did a bunch of custom stuff in a game, I made variables to hold the stats of each character so that I could easily reference them in other scripts. If you continue down this path of some fairly heavy customization for the game, I'd recommend you do that as well. Variables are fairly flexible in rm2k3, but little else is.
-
Pincer Attacks:
The terrain hack for changing pincer attacks, etc. does work with the default 2k3 encounter system. But it does mean making duplicating all of your tile sets, so it's still up to you if its worth the effort.
There is a nifty trick for creating preemptive attacks, however. Weapons have the option for "always attack first." So make a dummy weapon with that checked, and then if you get into a fight where you have initiative, set everyone's weapon to the dummy weapon to give initiative, and then in the Turn Trigger (which runs before you even have control over your characters) swap out all of the dummy weapons for your real weapons. Doing this won't reset your character's ATB, so it's one programmatic way set initiative.
-
For Nitori:
You talk a lot about her limited MP pool like it's a problem. Why aren't you raising it?
It seems like you're out of options for Nitori. As you've mentioned, you have other characters that fill possible niche's and you can't make a proper Mix command in rm2k3. So I think I'll just leave you with three options and you can do what you wish with her:
1. Just raise her stats. This is a straight, boring, unintelligent buff that makes her conflict with other characters. But it's an effective way of making her useful.
2. Split her abilities. In one case she has her not-super-useful Stock command (with all of the chemist bonuses and mirror abilities). But then give her an additional damage skill set that is manipulated using the Gear Shift concept mentioned earlier. You can do any of the suggested Gear Shift options. The point is just that you're giving her a viable offensive option and a gimmick to make her a bit different from everyone else that spams spells.
3. You can use a Conditional fork in a Turn trigger to check "If Nitori uses the Stock command" and then have each use of Stock consume a specific item. You could call the item whatever you want. This way you're creating a cost to her abilities separate from regular MP consumption. And now with a separate drawback, you free her up to have a lot of nifty spells that may otherwise be overpowered.
-
Stat Formulas:
ATK is fairly useful in rm2k3. DEF less so. MAG is pretty worthless. The formulas are as follows:
Physical Damage = Skill Damage + (ATK / 2 - DEF / 4) * (Attack Influence / 10)
Magic Damage = Skill Damage + (MAG / 4 - MAG / 8) * (Intelligence Influence / 10)
Basically, you deal damage equal to half you ATK.
You reduce damage received by a quarter of your DEF.
And both of those values are half again as impactful when dealing with magic.
So if you give someone 400 extra intelligence, they'll probably do around 50 extra damage with a spell, assuming your Intelligence Influence is always maxed at 10 for all spells. Otherwise it will be even less.
You can make the MAG stat more useful, however, by upping the percentage damage done using attributes. I actually always do this. It also just feels nicer to start doing 1000+ damage to enemies with regular attacks.
-
Marisa:
From a balance perspective, I'm more or less gathering from you that you want PC-98 to be a copy of Marisa at whatever level Marisa is currently at. Here are my thoughts on that process:
First, changing monster HP is fairly trivial during battle. That means you can always make PC-98 match the max HP of Marisa (or be some percentage above Marisa's HP). I don't remember if numbers appear on the screen when you decrease a monster's HP using events, but I do know you can change System 1 to something where all of the text colors are blank (invisible), thus allowing you to alter the HP values in secret.
As for the the abilities, if you set PC-98's intelligence stat to be really low (like 10) then all of her damage will come from the base values on each of Marisa's abilities. Since she's stealing those abilities only if Marisa has them, that should mean that the two have more or less equal damage out put, with the exception of PC-98's base abilities. For them, then, you'd have to just restrict them based upon Marisa's level.
Xenomic
1752
Auto-Stuff:
Oh trust me, I already have variables for all 28 characters and all of their stats heh. Seeing as I use things like HP/MP/Stat+ % and Absorb/Return Damage and all that jazz, I'd have to have them. So Auto-Potion would be the heavy one to do? Or you talking about Auto-Med in that one?
Pincer Attacks
Ehh...sounds like too much for that. I'll probably think of something else for overworld passives for those characters...if I come up with anything that is.
Nitori:
Because she's meant to have a super low MP pool. That's how I WANT her to be. I think it's not so much the regular abilities that are the problems but EX versions (regular abilities are like...5 MP, 10 for Lapis, 20 for Faith/Large P. Most EX abilities are like 50 MP. When she has probably about 60 MP or so). I haven't reworked the EX abilities yet, but probably won't until I redo her skillset anyways. The 3rd option sounds neat though I don't think I'd be able to do that very easily hm...unless I made it be one specific thing in general.
When her skillset gets revamped is what I think will do it for her. She's probably going to get all of the buffs (Protect, Bravery, Faith, Regen, MP Regen, Haste, etc.), which Chemist would double them from 25 turns to 50 turns, and Mirror Items will just make them inflict the status on the enemy. I might drop the EX gimmick though outright, or just use Gear Shift to do that (though not sure if there should be a Gear Shift version of Haste lol. That sounds TOO good...).
Stat Formulas:
For most of my stats, they're set to 100% at B, 200% at A, 50% at C, 0% at D, and -100% at E (Poison/Gravity is 300% at A, 200% at B, 100% at C, etc.). Physicals are 500% at A, 250% at B, 100% at C, etc. Of course, this would mean I'd need to rebalance skills again probably but...
Marisa:
Well, she's not exactly a copy. Despite what level Marisa's skills are at, PC-98 Marisa's version of the stolen skill is always static. I'm thinking of dropping the HP from 25,000 to something more manageable for a 1v1 fight, though Marisa in this fight can hit upwards to 1500 damage with her 98 MP cost spell so there's that (about 600-800 with another skill that's about 26 MP).
When the fight starts, PC-98 Marisa will have access to Galaxy, Mystic Illusion Laser, Little Devil, Rise Laser, MP Charge, and Steal. The first 4 abilities are what Marisa can steal from her to use (though they honestly suck in Marisa's hands). Throughout the fight (I have it set to Turns 20x + 1 I think. Or was it 1x + 20? Basically supposed to be once every 20 turns), PC-98 Marisa will attempt to steal from Marisa (50% chance of happening, much like with Marisa doing it to PC-98 Marisa. I may change the chance to something lower though, not sure yet), being Magic Missile, Illusion Laser, Narrow Spark, Meteonic Debris, Master Spark, Grand Stardust, Devildom Torch, Orreries Sun, and Green Spread. No matter what level these are at, whether level 1 or level 10 (max), it will be the static for PC-98. I have most everything set up for the fight EXCEPT for getting the stealing to work right. I'll probably post up a screenshot of that if you need to see what I'm trying to do.
Funny that you posted this, as I was just about to ask something but now completely forgot what I was going to ask. Hurrr...>_<
EDIT - I think what I was going to ask was about the current boss that I'm working on while waiting on what to do with PC-98 Marisa (if you still need those screenshots for what I have in the database, do let me know please). Here's what I got:
Spirit Magic Stone:
Encircle: Inflicts Eject.
Zombieja: Inflicts Zombie to the party.
Regenja: Doubles Regen level.
Full Life: Fully revives one ally. Instant death to a character that has Zombie.
Ignis Fatuss: Major Ghost damage to one target.
Spirit Magic Stone will always have "Auto-Regen: 1% Max HP", which is what Regenja will double each time it's used. When dispelled, it will just go back to this. I'm thinking 25,000 HP will be good enough for this fight. Now, here's the gimmick of the fight. Zombieja inflicts Zombie to the party, which will reverse the healing effects on the party (some things that use battle/common events will bypass this though. I don't know if reversing revive abilities will work or not honestly). This is done via the ResistControl plugin which I will use to set the Cure attribute from 100% to -100% on those under the status. With this in mind, the Spirit Magic Stone will then attempt to hit a Zombie character with Full-Life/Arise to instantly KO them (I MAY need to run a battle event in order to even do something about it inflicting Instant Death if I can't via other means which is...going to be annoying. I COULD use Full-Cure instead I guess but hm...). With that in mind, Zombie will also make the target weak to Ghost/Undead attacks, which Ignis Fatuss is, which already does a lot of damage but spells certain death to Zombies. Encircle removes a target from battle completely.
Now with that in mind, the thing about this is I have to balance it for THIS fight and for a fight with it and the other Magic Stones later on (though with that one, I may adjust the stats and abilities to make it fairer there). You are forced to use any four of the following characters for this boss fight: Aya, Momiji, Nitori, Remilia, Patchouli, Meiling, Sakuya, and Hope. Things to note is that Remilia and Hope are the only two who will be immune to Zombie status from this party (Komachi, Suwako, and Mokou are also immune but you don't have access to them here, and Youmu is 50% resistant but also unavailable). In addition, Hope is immune to Eject AND has an ability to bring back all Ejected allies, and also has Fairy Circle which restores 30% Max HP and bypasses Zombie.
So there's that. Does that sound balanced enough of a boss fight? Any adjustments you think it could use? I know you don't exactly know the characters and their statistics themselves (though you've already heard enough about Nitori heh), but yeah!
The other question I was going to ask involves Hope actually, but I'll wait until the other topics have all died down and are done before going into that. Like Nitori, she needs a bit of a skillset update but in a different way. ^^;
Oh trust me, I already have variables for all 28 characters and all of their stats heh. Seeing as I use things like HP/MP/Stat+ % and Absorb/Return Damage and all that jazz, I'd have to have them. So Auto-Potion would be the heavy one to do? Or you talking about Auto-Med in that one?
Pincer Attacks
Ehh...sounds like too much for that. I'll probably think of something else for overworld passives for those characters...if I come up with anything that is.
Nitori:
Because she's meant to have a super low MP pool. That's how I WANT her to be. I think it's not so much the regular abilities that are the problems but EX versions (regular abilities are like...5 MP, 10 for Lapis, 20 for Faith/Large P. Most EX abilities are like 50 MP. When she has probably about 60 MP or so). I haven't reworked the EX abilities yet, but probably won't until I redo her skillset anyways. The 3rd option sounds neat though I don't think I'd be able to do that very easily hm...unless I made it be one specific thing in general.
When her skillset gets revamped is what I think will do it for her. She's probably going to get all of the buffs (Protect, Bravery, Faith, Regen, MP Regen, Haste, etc.), which Chemist would double them from 25 turns to 50 turns, and Mirror Items will just make them inflict the status on the enemy. I might drop the EX gimmick though outright, or just use Gear Shift to do that (though not sure if there should be a Gear Shift version of Haste lol. That sounds TOO good...).
Stat Formulas:
For most of my stats, they're set to 100% at B, 200% at A, 50% at C, 0% at D, and -100% at E (Poison/Gravity is 300% at A, 200% at B, 100% at C, etc.). Physicals are 500% at A, 250% at B, 100% at C, etc. Of course, this would mean I'd need to rebalance skills again probably but...
Marisa:
Well, she's not exactly a copy. Despite what level Marisa's skills are at, PC-98 Marisa's version of the stolen skill is always static. I'm thinking of dropping the HP from 25,000 to something more manageable for a 1v1 fight, though Marisa in this fight can hit upwards to 1500 damage with her 98 MP cost spell so there's that (about 600-800 with another skill that's about 26 MP).
When the fight starts, PC-98 Marisa will have access to Galaxy, Mystic Illusion Laser, Little Devil, Rise Laser, MP Charge, and Steal. The first 4 abilities are what Marisa can steal from her to use (though they honestly suck in Marisa's hands). Throughout the fight (I have it set to Turns 20x + 1 I think. Or was it 1x + 20? Basically supposed to be once every 20 turns), PC-98 Marisa will attempt to steal from Marisa (50% chance of happening, much like with Marisa doing it to PC-98 Marisa. I may change the chance to something lower though, not sure yet), being Magic Missile, Illusion Laser, Narrow Spark, Meteonic Debris, Master Spark, Grand Stardust, Devildom Torch, Orreries Sun, and Green Spread. No matter what level these are at, whether level 1 or level 10 (max), it will be the static for PC-98. I have most everything set up for the fight EXCEPT for getting the stealing to work right. I'll probably post up a screenshot of that if you need to see what I'm trying to do.
Funny that you posted this, as I was just about to ask something but now completely forgot what I was going to ask. Hurrr...>_<
EDIT - I think what I was going to ask was about the current boss that I'm working on while waiting on what to do with PC-98 Marisa (if you still need those screenshots for what I have in the database, do let me know please). Here's what I got:
Spirit Magic Stone:
Encircle: Inflicts Eject.
Zombieja: Inflicts Zombie to the party.
Regenja: Doubles Regen level.
Full Life: Fully revives one ally. Instant death to a character that has Zombie.
Ignis Fatuss: Major Ghost damage to one target.
Spirit Magic Stone will always have "Auto-Regen: 1% Max HP", which is what Regenja will double each time it's used. When dispelled, it will just go back to this. I'm thinking 25,000 HP will be good enough for this fight. Now, here's the gimmick of the fight. Zombieja inflicts Zombie to the party, which will reverse the healing effects on the party (some things that use battle/common events will bypass this though. I don't know if reversing revive abilities will work or not honestly). This is done via the ResistControl plugin which I will use to set the Cure attribute from 100% to -100% on those under the status. With this in mind, the Spirit Magic Stone will then attempt to hit a Zombie character with Full-Life/Arise to instantly KO them (I MAY need to run a battle event in order to even do something about it inflicting Instant Death if I can't via other means which is...going to be annoying. I COULD use Full-Cure instead I guess but hm...). With that in mind, Zombie will also make the target weak to Ghost/Undead attacks, which Ignis Fatuss is, which already does a lot of damage but spells certain death to Zombies. Encircle removes a target from battle completely.
Now with that in mind, the thing about this is I have to balance it for THIS fight and for a fight with it and the other Magic Stones later on (though with that one, I may adjust the stats and abilities to make it fairer there). You are forced to use any four of the following characters for this boss fight: Aya, Momiji, Nitori, Remilia, Patchouli, Meiling, Sakuya, and Hope. Things to note is that Remilia and Hope are the only two who will be immune to Zombie status from this party (Komachi, Suwako, and Mokou are also immune but you don't have access to them here, and Youmu is 50% resistant but also unavailable). In addition, Hope is immune to Eject AND has an ability to bring back all Ejected allies, and also has Fairy Circle which restores 30% Max HP and bypasses Zombie.
So there's that. Does that sound balanced enough of a boss fight? Any adjustments you think it could use? I know you don't exactly know the characters and their statistics themselves (though you've already heard enough about Nitori heh), but yeah!
The other question I was going to ask involves Hope actually, but I'll wait until the other topics have all died down and are done before going into that. Like Nitori, she needs a bit of a skillset update but in a different way. ^^;
hedge1
862
Auto-Stuff:
Since you have the variables already setup, Auto-Potion shouldn't be too bad to implement. You will need to do check for Poison, though.
Nitori:
If you want to keep a small MP pool, you could give her automatic MP recovery. In my design for Crystals (which will probably never be finished) I give everyone MP recovery after battles. One character, however, has a very small MP pool and very large after-battle MP recovery. Basically it means they're really good during a dungeon, but not so good against bosses. Perhaps you could try to design Nitori around that theme?
Stats:
Sounds like you're already ahead of me with the attribute percentages, though the way you're doing it will make the Intelligence/MAG stat basically worthless. Those larger percentages for physical damage makes ATK and DEF definitely worthwhile, however.
I might as well add at this point that your basic Fight command is nothing more than a spell with zero power, 10 Attack Influence and 0 Intelligence Influence.
Marisa:
I guess what I was trying to say is that you have some options for trying to make PC-98 scale with Marisa's level and stats. The basic idea is that you can easily alter PC-98's HP value to something that's reasonable based upon Marisa's level, and you can control PC-98's damage output by limiting the use of better abilities if Marisa's level is too low.
Spirit Magic Stone:
To make healing harm rather than help, just give it an attribute called healing, and in that attribute set the value to D=100%, E=-100%. Nothing else should matter. Now set everyone's affinity to healing to D. Conditions can raise or lower affinity by 1 (if I remember correctly, it doesn't stack no matter how many conditions you have). That means you can make Zombie lower it by 1 to go from D to E, or basically from healing 100% to harming 100%. No need for any extra plugins. Up to you if you want to use this route or not.
Related, it's generally a good idea to have all of your items actually be Skill Scrolls. This way you can have the items reference actual Spells from the database, which means you can give items attributes and spell animations (basically, items become a lot more flexible). Note that Scrolls never cost MP, even if the ability they link to does.
There is no way I know of to reverse the effects of removing a status, like Death. So I think you're stuck with Full Cure or a custom script.
As for overall balance, status ailments that prevent action are the most powerful in any RPG. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly it's because it's an easy way to get ahead of your party's ability to heal. If, for example, the boss can Stun multiple party members in a single turn, then even if it only hits two, the other two must spend time removing the stun, essentially negating the entire round. If three are stunned, you fall behind a round and allow the boss to get in some free hits (which you won't have time to heal, mind you). If the boss does damage in addition to inflicting Stun, then you have two things you need to do (Stun status and recovering HP). It's not uncommon for those to be accomplished by the same character, which means again your team may fall behind even if the boss is all single target.
I say this because this boss could easily cause an endless loop of status effects that the player can't escape. So you really need to tread carefully.
Concerning the Eject spell, the only concern here is ensuring that the player can always have Hope in their party. For example, say you have a save point right before the boss, the player fights the boss without Hope, loses, and then simply adds Hope to the party at the save point and fights the boss again. That scenario is fine. If you have to walk all the way out of the dungeon, that's not fine.
If you don't have Hope, the boss can simply Eject everyone, right? That seems like a problem.
Zombie is perhaps more concerning because it is an AOE. Thus if you can only cure Zombie one at at time, you can quickly become overwhelmed and rely upon luck or Zombie immunity to win. Being forced to rely upon immunity to win is fairly lame, so let's pretend you don't have immunity (with Hope being the exception, since she's needed for Eject).
The plus side to this is that Zombie isn't Stun, which means you can still damage the boss while you're dealing with statuses. The other thing is that the boss's ability to deal damage is all single target. Thus one way the battle could play out is as follows:
Everyone is Zombied.
Char 1 removes Zombie from Char 1.
Chars 2-4 attack.
Boss kills Char 2.
Char 1 removes Zombie from Char 3.
Char 3 revives Char 2 (who I'm assuming no longer has Zombie).
Char 4 attacks.
Boss kills Char 4.
Char 1 revives Char 4.
Chars 2-4 attack.
Repeat.
So it looks like it's going to work for you. The caveat is that you'll want a lot of ways to revive fallen party members, which probably means a lot of Phoenix Down equivalents. My suggestion is to place them in chests throughout the dungeon so that you know the party is going to face the boss with a dozen or so of them, just to be safe (maybe less depending upon what other options you have for dealing with dead characters).
Bottom line: if the player will always ensure having Hope in their party, and you have a lot of options for reviving dead characters (and dead characters lose Zombie status), you're fine. The boss should be balanced and beatable.
As for the refight, probably not. Since forcing Hope in the party for the refight isn't very reasonable, you probably need to think of ways to dealing with Eject. As for the Zombie status, so long as you have an easily available method of Remove Zombie from All Allies you should be fine. If you don't, though, I could see the battle quickly getting out of hand. The other issue is if the other three Magic Stones cause status effects. If they do, you could again get overwhelmed with simply more statuses than you can deal with. But not knowing the other Stones that's impossible to say.
Since you have the variables already setup, Auto-Potion shouldn't be too bad to implement. You will need to do check for Poison, though.
Nitori:
If you want to keep a small MP pool, you could give her automatic MP recovery. In my design for Crystals (which will probably never be finished) I give everyone MP recovery after battles. One character, however, has a very small MP pool and very large after-battle MP recovery. Basically it means they're really good during a dungeon, but not so good against bosses. Perhaps you could try to design Nitori around that theme?
Stats:
Sounds like you're already ahead of me with the attribute percentages, though the way you're doing it will make the Intelligence/MAG stat basically worthless. Those larger percentages for physical damage makes ATK and DEF definitely worthwhile, however.
I might as well add at this point that your basic Fight command is nothing more than a spell with zero power, 10 Attack Influence and 0 Intelligence Influence.
Marisa:
I guess what I was trying to say is that you have some options for trying to make PC-98 scale with Marisa's level and stats. The basic idea is that you can easily alter PC-98's HP value to something that's reasonable based upon Marisa's level, and you can control PC-98's damage output by limiting the use of better abilities if Marisa's level is too low.
Spirit Magic Stone:
To make healing harm rather than help, just give it an attribute called healing, and in that attribute set the value to D=100%, E=-100%. Nothing else should matter. Now set everyone's affinity to healing to D. Conditions can raise or lower affinity by 1 (if I remember correctly, it doesn't stack no matter how many conditions you have). That means you can make Zombie lower it by 1 to go from D to E, or basically from healing 100% to harming 100%. No need for any extra plugins. Up to you if you want to use this route or not.
Related, it's generally a good idea to have all of your items actually be Skill Scrolls. This way you can have the items reference actual Spells from the database, which means you can give items attributes and spell animations (basically, items become a lot more flexible). Note that Scrolls never cost MP, even if the ability they link to does.
There is no way I know of to reverse the effects of removing a status, like Death. So I think you're stuck with Full Cure or a custom script.
As for overall balance, status ailments that prevent action are the most powerful in any RPG. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly it's because it's an easy way to get ahead of your party's ability to heal. If, for example, the boss can Stun multiple party members in a single turn, then even if it only hits two, the other two must spend time removing the stun, essentially negating the entire round. If three are stunned, you fall behind a round and allow the boss to get in some free hits (which you won't have time to heal, mind you). If the boss does damage in addition to inflicting Stun, then you have two things you need to do (Stun status and recovering HP). It's not uncommon for those to be accomplished by the same character, which means again your team may fall behind even if the boss is all single target.
I say this because this boss could easily cause an endless loop of status effects that the player can't escape. So you really need to tread carefully.
Concerning the Eject spell, the only concern here is ensuring that the player can always have Hope in their party. For example, say you have a save point right before the boss, the player fights the boss without Hope, loses, and then simply adds Hope to the party at the save point and fights the boss again. That scenario is fine. If you have to walk all the way out of the dungeon, that's not fine.
If you don't have Hope, the boss can simply Eject everyone, right? That seems like a problem.
Zombie is perhaps more concerning because it is an AOE. Thus if you can only cure Zombie one at at time, you can quickly become overwhelmed and rely upon luck or Zombie immunity to win. Being forced to rely upon immunity to win is fairly lame, so let's pretend you don't have immunity (with Hope being the exception, since she's needed for Eject).
The plus side to this is that Zombie isn't Stun, which means you can still damage the boss while you're dealing with statuses. The other thing is that the boss's ability to deal damage is all single target. Thus one way the battle could play out is as follows:
Everyone is Zombied.
Char 1 removes Zombie from Char 1.
Chars 2-4 attack.
Boss kills Char 2.
Char 1 removes Zombie from Char 3.
Char 3 revives Char 2 (who I'm assuming no longer has Zombie).
Char 4 attacks.
Boss kills Char 4.
Char 1 revives Char 4.
Chars 2-4 attack.
Repeat.
So it looks like it's going to work for you. The caveat is that you'll want a lot of ways to revive fallen party members, which probably means a lot of Phoenix Down equivalents. My suggestion is to place them in chests throughout the dungeon so that you know the party is going to face the boss with a dozen or so of them, just to be safe (maybe less depending upon what other options you have for dealing with dead characters).
Bottom line: if the player will always ensure having Hope in their party, and you have a lot of options for reviving dead characters (and dead characters lose Zombie status), you're fine. The boss should be balanced and beatable.
As for the refight, probably not. Since forcing Hope in the party for the refight isn't very reasonable, you probably need to think of ways to dealing with Eject. As for the Zombie status, so long as you have an easily available method of Remove Zombie from All Allies you should be fine. If you don't, though, I could see the battle quickly getting out of hand. The other issue is if the other three Magic Stones cause status effects. If they do, you could again get overwhelmed with simply more statuses than you can deal with. But not knowing the other Stones that's impossible to say.
Xenomic
1752
Auto-Stuff:
Anything that lowers HP in this case, so all 10 levels of Poison, Sap, and Venom, as well as HP Drain. I'll probably give it a shot and see how it goes. Will need to think of who will get it since I don't want to use 28 battle events for each character heh.
Nitori:
Well again, all of her unique armor has Half MP Cost on them too so there's that going for her. I COULD probably give her a MP recovery passive or something though maybe. The player does get a bunch of MP stat boosters and MP+% accessories so they could use those to make her better (that and I just need to adjust the costs of all of the abilities to be more reasonable. That's going to be fun once the updated skillset is implemented heh).
Stats:
Yeah, I realized how terrible regular attacks are without weapons (as they should be honestly). Even with weapons though, I barely break 500 damage on attacks unless a critical or hitting a weakness. Kinda sad how they ruined the stats so much in 2k3. I actually have 2 sets of attributes, one for physicals, which is as you saw, and one for magic, which is doubled that of physicals (so instead of 200% > 100% > 50% > 0% > -100%, it goes 400% > 200% > 50% > 0% > -100/200%. I just never used those yet because I don't know how ridiculous that would be and would probably require readjusting everything ever).
Marisa:
Ah, I see. The issue with the controlling abilities is that everything PC-98 Marisa has REQUIRES a switch to be on for each of the abilities due to them all being stealable, so I can't use the Level thing with her. Though as I seen so far, the most PC-98 Marisa can do is about 400 damage (she's being really, really weird and not using abilities that she can steal from Marisa despite that the switch for those are turned on. The whole battle is weird).
Just to show what I've done, here's all of her stuff:
(If Marisa's speed is 100 or more than PC-98 Marisa's speed, PC-98 Marisa will get Auto-Haste. I'm actually going to have to abuse Auto-Haste sadly because of enemy speed being capped at 255 while player speed can go well beyond that...stupid 2k3)
PC-98 Marisa's steal coding. It's not 100% randomized because of how I had to do it.
Marisa's steal coding. Same dealio, set to 50% and it goes in a set order right now.
The coding for PC-98's steal. This common event checks to see what skills Marisa has at the time and sets the variable to that. This is also what makes it hard to truly randomize PC-98's Steal heh.
Spirit Magic Stone:
The reason for the plugin is that it allows me to make it so that if Zombie status wears off, it'll revert the attributes back to whatever I want them. With the default 2k3 increase/decrease attribute, it will never revert back to normal even if the status wears off until the character dies (which is pretty annoying. Really wish there was an actual way to control how much it increases/decreases resistances, like say increases resistance by 33%. 2K3 can't do that normally, and this plugin can't either. >_< ).
Yeah, the vast majority of my items are already set to that mostly so that they had battle animations to go with them. Not all of them are like that at the moment, but 90% of them are.
The thing to keep in mind about this boss is it can ONLY target one character at a time with anything that would hurt them (Ignis Fatuss, Encircle), and Full-Cure is going to be a major gamble on its part (if it hits someone that's NOT a Zombie, free full heal for them!). So in THIS particular fight, I think that's fine. For the refight with all Five Magic Stones and Phantom Mima? Not so much.
Yeah, you get to save directly before the boss (right after PC-98 Marisa and before the Spirit Magic Stone. Can also stock up on items before then. Concerning Zombie status, this is what is listed in my To-Do list:
*For Zombie status, make the following immune: Remilia, Mokou, Komachi, Hope, Suwako. Youmu would have 50% resistance. Make Holy Water cure Zombie. Have Soul Armor/Soul Cape/Soul Barrier prevent Zombie. Make Zombie prevent Regen/MP Regen.
So if the player has those things, which they should have some Soul Armor and I THINK Hope came with a Soul Barrier, that'll help prevent Zombie status. In addition, Remilia and Hope both are available for this fight, which helps prevent Zombie too (for the later refight, you'll have the others available too so there's that). So Zombie isn't NEARLY as bad as a status as it may seem. There are actual work arounds to prevent it and whatnot. In addition, Hope has Vortex which removes all statuses, good or bad, from both all enemies and allies, so she can actual cure Zombie that way. In addition, she DOES have Esunaga so there's that too. ^^
As for revives, don't have to worry about that at all, trust me lol. Hope has the Revive command, which revives all KO'd party members with 1 HP (Level 2 Revive revives them with 10% Max HP at the cost of 10% of Hope's HP per character, and level 3 is the same but 25% Max HP). There's also the 1-Up, 1-Up Piece, Cherry Points, Divine Spirit, Spirit Essence, and something else. In addition, Nitori (if the player invested into her at all), can have 1-Up and 1-Up EX. There's pleeeeenty of ways to revive, so that's not going to be an issue. And there's the shop right before the boss too! ^^
The refight may not have Eject in it because that'd be lame fighting 6 enemies with less than 4 party members. For the others, this is what I have for their gimmicks (these may also carry over to the refight but changed a bit too):
*For Mystic Magic Stone, uses powerful Mystic-elemental attacks, but has low MP and has to either recharge its MP or drain MP from the party.
*For Nature Magic Stone, give it Growth which increases all stats by 20 and that is AoE. If it takes any form of damage, all of its allies including itself will regain X% of the damage it takes. Every time the stone uses Growth, the amount of HP regained increases by 5%, starting at 20% of the damage taken, up to a maximum of 80% of the damage taken. Fought at Valley of Corpses - Dimensional Rift.
*For Fire Magic Stone, have it use abilities which sacrifices its own HP to deal fixed damage or % damage to the entire party.
*For Water Magic Stone, give it Vortex. Make it vulnerable to statuses that don't prevent it from acting and Silence.
*For Phantom Mima, cannot be damage, but if all Magic Stones are defeated, is also defeated.
Phantom Mima is only fought with all five of the stones at Reimaden. The other stones are all fought in the dimensional rifts (Water and Nature are fought alongside Kotohime who uses them to power herself up). Some of these still need ideas for their movesets and probably updated gimmicks that fit their themes like what I tried with Spirit Magic Stone. ^^;
EDIT - So, here's the thing. I got everything working for Spirit Magic Stone. Zombie works 100% as intended, Eject works as well, and Regenja does what it's supposed to do (bar other issues listed in the other topic for it). However, this isn't about Spirit Magic Stone so much as Encircle/Eject. You see, I coded it so that it randomizes between 1-4. After that, it checks to see which character is in that Hero Slot (this is set up through choosing party members in the party switch area. Temporary characters are almost always given the value of 4). I also did a common event that checks to see if the character is in the party, which would set a variable for them to 1. After that, it checks to see if the character is dead, and if they are the value goes back to 0.
Now, with that said and done, that makes it so that it lets the ability (which HAS to be done via custom scripting) target ONLY characters that are alive AND in the party. This is fine and dandy. However, NOW I feel there's another problem I have to figure out with adjusting the coding. You see, this accounts for 4 characters being in the party at any given time. HOWEVER, I need to make sure that it accounts for less than 4 party members in the party. What would be the best way to fix the coding up in order to do this? If you need the coding that I'm using for Encircle, I can post that.
This also applies to other custom scripted abilities (Meteorain, for instance, hits 4 random targets for non-elemental damage. Meira's Strikeback passive randomly targets 1 party member and deals damage equal to the last amount of damage Meira took. Meira's Mirror of Equity deals damage equal to the difference in her Max HP and current HP to one random target. Meira's Tiger halves the HP of one random target and inflicts Sap. And Saigyou Ayakashi has a battle passive that inflicts instant death regardless of immunities to one random target every 20 or so turns).
Anything that lowers HP in this case, so all 10 levels of Poison, Sap, and Venom, as well as HP Drain. I'll probably give it a shot and see how it goes. Will need to think of who will get it since I don't want to use 28 battle events for each character heh.
Nitori:
Well again, all of her unique armor has Half MP Cost on them too so there's that going for her. I COULD probably give her a MP recovery passive or something though maybe. The player does get a bunch of MP stat boosters and MP+% accessories so they could use those to make her better (that and I just need to adjust the costs of all of the abilities to be more reasonable. That's going to be fun once the updated skillset is implemented heh).
Stats:
Yeah, I realized how terrible regular attacks are without weapons (as they should be honestly). Even with weapons though, I barely break 500 damage on attacks unless a critical or hitting a weakness. Kinda sad how they ruined the stats so much in 2k3. I actually have 2 sets of attributes, one for physicals, which is as you saw, and one for magic, which is doubled that of physicals (so instead of 200% > 100% > 50% > 0% > -100%, it goes 400% > 200% > 50% > 0% > -100/200%. I just never used those yet because I don't know how ridiculous that would be and would probably require readjusting everything ever).
Marisa:
Ah, I see. The issue with the controlling abilities is that everything PC-98 Marisa has REQUIRES a switch to be on for each of the abilities due to them all being stealable, so I can't use the Level thing with her. Though as I seen so far, the most PC-98 Marisa can do is about 400 damage (she's being really, really weird and not using abilities that she can steal from Marisa despite that the switch for those are turned on. The whole battle is weird).
Just to show what I've done, here's all of her stuff:
(If Marisa's speed is 100 or more than PC-98 Marisa's speed, PC-98 Marisa will get Auto-Haste. I'm actually going to have to abuse Auto-Haste sadly because of enemy speed being capped at 255 while player speed can go well beyond that...stupid 2k3)
PC-98 Marisa's steal coding. It's not 100% randomized because of how I had to do it.
Marisa's steal coding. Same dealio, set to 50% and it goes in a set order right now.
The coding for PC-98's steal. This common event checks to see what skills Marisa has at the time and sets the variable to that. This is also what makes it hard to truly randomize PC-98's Steal heh.
Spirit Magic Stone:
The reason for the plugin is that it allows me to make it so that if Zombie status wears off, it'll revert the attributes back to whatever I want them. With the default 2k3 increase/decrease attribute, it will never revert back to normal even if the status wears off until the character dies (which is pretty annoying. Really wish there was an actual way to control how much it increases/decreases resistances, like say increases resistance by 33%. 2K3 can't do that normally, and this plugin can't either. >_< ).
Yeah, the vast majority of my items are already set to that mostly so that they had battle animations to go with them. Not all of them are like that at the moment, but 90% of them are.
The thing to keep in mind about this boss is it can ONLY target one character at a time with anything that would hurt them (Ignis Fatuss, Encircle), and Full-Cure is going to be a major gamble on its part (if it hits someone that's NOT a Zombie, free full heal for them!). So in THIS particular fight, I think that's fine. For the refight with all Five Magic Stones and Phantom Mima? Not so much.
Yeah, you get to save directly before the boss (right after PC-98 Marisa and before the Spirit Magic Stone. Can also stock up on items before then. Concerning Zombie status, this is what is listed in my To-Do list:
*For Zombie status, make the following immune: Remilia, Mokou, Komachi, Hope, Suwako. Youmu would have 50% resistance. Make Holy Water cure Zombie. Have Soul Armor/Soul Cape/Soul Barrier prevent Zombie. Make Zombie prevent Regen/MP Regen.
So if the player has those things, which they should have some Soul Armor and I THINK Hope came with a Soul Barrier, that'll help prevent Zombie status. In addition, Remilia and Hope both are available for this fight, which helps prevent Zombie too (for the later refight, you'll have the others available too so there's that). So Zombie isn't NEARLY as bad as a status as it may seem. There are actual work arounds to prevent it and whatnot. In addition, Hope has Vortex which removes all statuses, good or bad, from both all enemies and allies, so she can actual cure Zombie that way. In addition, she DOES have Esunaga so there's that too. ^^
As for revives, don't have to worry about that at all, trust me lol. Hope has the Revive command, which revives all KO'd party members with 1 HP (Level 2 Revive revives them with 10% Max HP at the cost of 10% of Hope's HP per character, and level 3 is the same but 25% Max HP). There's also the 1-Up, 1-Up Piece, Cherry Points, Divine Spirit, Spirit Essence, and something else. In addition, Nitori (if the player invested into her at all), can have 1-Up and 1-Up EX. There's pleeeeenty of ways to revive, so that's not going to be an issue. And there's the shop right before the boss too! ^^
The refight may not have Eject in it because that'd be lame fighting 6 enemies with less than 4 party members. For the others, this is what I have for their gimmicks (these may also carry over to the refight but changed a bit too):
*For Mystic Magic Stone, uses powerful Mystic-elemental attacks, but has low MP and has to either recharge its MP or drain MP from the party.
*For Nature Magic Stone, give it Growth which increases all stats by 20 and that is AoE. If it takes any form of damage, all of its allies including itself will regain X% of the damage it takes. Every time the stone uses Growth, the amount of HP regained increases by 5%, starting at 20% of the damage taken, up to a maximum of 80% of the damage taken. Fought at Valley of Corpses - Dimensional Rift.
*For Fire Magic Stone, have it use abilities which sacrifices its own HP to deal fixed damage or % damage to the entire party.
*For Water Magic Stone, give it Vortex. Make it vulnerable to statuses that don't prevent it from acting and Silence.
*For Phantom Mima, cannot be damage, but if all Magic Stones are defeated, is also defeated.
Phantom Mima is only fought with all five of the stones at Reimaden. The other stones are all fought in the dimensional rifts (Water and Nature are fought alongside Kotohime who uses them to power herself up). Some of these still need ideas for their movesets and probably updated gimmicks that fit their themes like what I tried with Spirit Magic Stone. ^^;
EDIT - So, here's the thing. I got everything working for Spirit Magic Stone. Zombie works 100% as intended, Eject works as well, and Regenja does what it's supposed to do (bar other issues listed in the other topic for it). However, this isn't about Spirit Magic Stone so much as Encircle/Eject. You see, I coded it so that it randomizes between 1-4. After that, it checks to see which character is in that Hero Slot (this is set up through choosing party members in the party switch area. Temporary characters are almost always given the value of 4). I also did a common event that checks to see if the character is in the party, which would set a variable for them to 1. After that, it checks to see if the character is dead, and if they are the value goes back to 0.
Now, with that said and done, that makes it so that it lets the ability (which HAS to be done via custom scripting) target ONLY characters that are alive AND in the party. This is fine and dandy. However, NOW I feel there's another problem I have to figure out with adjusting the coding. You see, this accounts for 4 characters being in the party at any given time. HOWEVER, I need to make sure that it accounts for less than 4 party members in the party. What would be the best way to fix the coding up in order to do this? If you need the coding that I'm using for Encircle, I can post that.
This also applies to other custom scripted abilities (Meteorain, for instance, hits 4 random targets for non-elemental damage. Meira's Strikeback passive randomly targets 1 party member and deals damage equal to the last amount of damage Meira took. Meira's Mirror of Equity deals damage equal to the difference in her Max HP and current HP to one random target. Meira's Tiger halves the HP of one random target and inflicts Sap. And Saigyou Ayakashi has a battle passive that inflicts instant death regardless of immunities to one random target every 20 or so turns).
Xenomic
1752
Alright, so since I have to scrap the Regenja idea (sucks since it was all but done. Just that one thing prevented it from being used), trying to think of what else to do with the boss that'll still fit with its theme. Zombieja, Encircle, and Full-Cure are still staying, but I COULD make Full-Cure into Full-Life, and run the Full-Life event through a battle event to do the workaround with the zombie gimmick? It'll probably work better too and make the fight more difficult since Full-Cure would...just fully heal someone if they weren't a zombie which kinda defeats the point of the gimmick, right?
Now, with that in mind, is there any set AI pattern it should follow to keep it interesting yet not super difficult and random? Right now, Ignis Fatuss is set to priority 10, Zombieja at priority 100 but happens once ever 21 turns (Regenja was 20 turns at 100 priority), Encircle is priority 7, and Full-Cure is priority 7. Anything else to make it interesting? I did want to make Dispel a big part of the fight (hence the Regenja gimmick), but not sure what would be best to handle that. LockeZ suggest having it periodically give itself buffs, with the player having to determine when it'd be best to use Dispel, but not sure if that'd work well or not nor how to handle that one smoothly. I thought of adding in an attack called Spirit Wave where it would kill all zombied characters (as well as Mega Death which would kill all non-zombie characters. However, that idea got nixed quickly since it's really cheap like in FFX and zombie immune characters get gimped really hard by it). I also considered making it be immune to all types of damage until it started charging up for Spirit Wave, at which point it would be super vulnerable to everything (as in 200% damage from everything) until it used Spirit Wave at which point it would put the barrier back up. I am still thinking of it having its own Auto-Regen too (Regen is set to 2% + 1 HP, but I could make it have its own version at like...5% + 1 HP every turn. It does have 32,500 HP right now so there's that to consider too). I could also do something such as give it Return Damage (X% of damage it takes is returned back to party. Doubt I'd want to use that as its passive but it could be granted via a buff), Absorb Damage (X% of damage taken is recovered), MP Shield (X% of damage taken is recovered and is inflicted as MP damage instead), amongst other things. Of course, these all run into the same issue as Regenja did, so anything custom like that may be...troublesome to deal with unless it's dealt with correctly. >_<
Just...any good ideas that'd work for it whilst keeping the "Spirit" theme intact? Whether or not the ideas will also work for the refight with it with the other Magic Stones and Phantom Mima need to be considered too (or certain moves/gimmicks may not show up at all in that fight if need be).
Now, with that in mind, is there any set AI pattern it should follow to keep it interesting yet not super difficult and random? Right now, Ignis Fatuss is set to priority 10, Zombieja at priority 100 but happens once ever 21 turns (Regenja was 20 turns at 100 priority), Encircle is priority 7, and Full-Cure is priority 7. Anything else to make it interesting? I did want to make Dispel a big part of the fight (hence the Regenja gimmick), but not sure what would be best to handle that. LockeZ suggest having it periodically give itself buffs, with the player having to determine when it'd be best to use Dispel, but not sure if that'd work well or not nor how to handle that one smoothly. I thought of adding in an attack called Spirit Wave where it would kill all zombied characters (as well as Mega Death which would kill all non-zombie characters. However, that idea got nixed quickly since it's really cheap like in FFX and zombie immune characters get gimped really hard by it). I also considered making it be immune to all types of damage until it started charging up for Spirit Wave, at which point it would be super vulnerable to everything (as in 200% damage from everything) until it used Spirit Wave at which point it would put the barrier back up. I am still thinking of it having its own Auto-Regen too (Regen is set to 2% + 1 HP, but I could make it have its own version at like...5% + 1 HP every turn. It does have 32,500 HP right now so there's that to consider too). I could also do something such as give it Return Damage (X% of damage it takes is returned back to party. Doubt I'd want to use that as its passive but it could be granted via a buff), Absorb Damage (X% of damage taken is recovered), MP Shield (X% of damage taken is recovered and is inflicted as MP damage instead), amongst other things. Of course, these all run into the same issue as Regenja did, so anything custom like that may be...troublesome to deal with unless it's dealt with correctly. >_<
Just...any good ideas that'd work for it whilst keeping the "Spirit" theme intact? Whether or not the ideas will also work for the refight with it with the other Magic Stones and Phantom Mima need to be considered too (or certain moves/gimmicks may not show up at all in that fight if need be).
Xenomic
1752
Alrighty, I decided to make it so that the boss will have Doom as an ability. I'm thinking of making it inflict the Doom status at 100% chance, and while the status is on the target, it'll run a common event alongside that to check the timer. If it hits 0, then the target will instantly die. However, I'm not sure if this will work nicely or not with statuses. For instance, if the status runs out before the timer event runs out. Say I put the status to 20 turns and the countdown to 20 turns as well, and I have the status run its course. Will the countdown timer run as soon as the status run out or not? In addition, making sure that removing the status via methods such as Vortex, Dispel, Esuna, or whatever won't trigger the instant death part of the coding too.
hedge1
862
Auto-Stuff:
Eww!! Ya, I think you'll need to scratch Auto-Potion. While you won't need 28 battle events (again, for ALL auto stuff you need only a single battle event and a single, though very lengthy, common event), you will need to have conditional branches for each character to check for each and every condition.
The only thing I can suggest at this time is to convert all of your poison, etc. stuff into common events (at least for the heroes) rather than rely upon conditions. But you'll need to decide if its worth the work.
Actually, I just thought of something reading your Marisa code. You can use the "if targeted" trigger and use that to trigger auto-potion. That will force you to do a lot more in battle events rather than common events, but that would get around the whole condition healing issue (at least for the most part). Not 100% sure if "if targeted" triggers if you're hit with an AOE.
Nitori:
All I'm saying is that it sounds like the reason she's worthless is her low MP pool and thus inability to use her abilities. I could totally be wrong here, but just from our conversation that's the impression I'm getting. So if you're looking at making her less worthless, that seems to be the way to go. And since halving her MP cost isn't enough, it seems like a good opportunity to add some interesting mechanics to her kit to both make her more unique and more useful.
Stats:
The reason I never finish anything:
I haven't given up, though. And every year RPG Maker gets better, so one of these days it'll be able to do what I want it to.
Marisa:
I guess I was thinking that you'd control PC-98's steal command to know what abilities it can and cannot steal, thus controlling PC-98's damage out. Her innate abilities could also be initially restricted just by setting the switches to OFF when the battle begins.
As for her being weird with her abilities, I never figured out how in the world rm2k3 figures out what attacks to use. It's really wonky, though generally speaking I've found that if you set the priority to all the same value (as you have) they should all have about equal chance of occurring, so in your case I'm not really sure what's happening. Hopefully it's just bad RNG (random number generation) and not actually an issue.
As I look at your Marisa Steal code, it looks like you'd steal all abilities all at once, or none at all. Unless I'm missing something here. Maybe that's why it's not behaving as intended?
Your PC-98 steal code looks fine, however. If I am understanding it, it will always steal the last ability in the list first, and the first ability in the list (in this case, Magic Missile) last. You could make it random, but I don't think it's worth it. Just call it artificial intelligence with PC-98 making decisions on what to steal.
255 Agility Cap
rm2k3 doesn't actually cap at 255 monster agility. That's a restriction inserted by the Goliath patch that you're using (or David patch -- it's the same thing more or less). In regular rm2k3, you can go all the way up to 999 with both allies and enemies. The reason for the restriction, according to the Goliath creator, is that sometimes when monster agility exceeds 255 it makes the ATB slow to a crawl. I haven't independently tested to see if restricted monster agility solves the ATB crawl, but I can say that I've had the ATB crawl issue a lot so anything that may help is a positive in my book.
To get around the 255 limitation you have two options. First, just keep the ally agility low. The other option is to alter ally agility upon entering battle to mimic the same cap. In other words, do the following:
Ally Battle Agility = Ally Normal Agility * 255 / 1000
(b = n * 255 / 1000)
That formula just converts your ally agility into the same scale as the monster agility. You can then think of monster agility needing to be 25% of ally agility to be about equivalent. So if an ally has 300 agility, similarly quick monsters should have about 70-80 agility (300 / 4 = 75).
Spirit Magic Stone:
You caught me here. I wasn't aware of that issue with increasing and decreasing resistance values. Given that I understand the need for the patch.
The fact that only the inflict Zombie ability is AOE is what makes the Spirit Magic Stone battle not broken. As I listed in my example in my post, with what you've setup, it's impossible to get "condition locked." I just wanted to showcase some of the risk involved with what you've constructed, particularly when it came to the refight, as there would be four rather than one enemy there.
As for Full-Cure being a risk, given that most of the abilities are instant-death (due to the Zombie status), I don't think free heals are going to be a top priority. That belief, though, is of course somewhat dependent upon how often the Stone uses each of its attacks.
Glad to hear you can save AND stock up on items before the Stone fight. That makes your gimmick viable and prevents getting the player stuck (which always has the potential of being rather annoying).
Stone Refight:
Since the rest of the Stones don't inflict conditions, if you remove the Spirit Stone's ability to Eject (as you suggested) I think you should be fine. Technically since it is 6v4 you may need other adjustments, but just due to how tough the fight is rather than the overall design.
Random Targeting:
I'd make a common event that will return a random number corresponding to ID of the randomly selected character in your party. Then just have all scripts that require a random selection call this event.
As for the event itself, there's no easy to do it since "Hero X is in the party" is a non-variable conditional branch. The same goes for "Hero X is not dead/has more than 0 HP." Here's probably how I'd do it though:
Grab four empty variables that will hold which four characters are alive and in your party. If you have fewer than four, fewer than four of the variables will be used. Call these variables [char1] to [char4].
Have another variable that will simply hold the number of alive party members. Let's just call this [party size].
And finally have a variable that will be used to return what party member was randomly picked. Call this [selected].
Set [party size] = 0.
For each character,
Check if the character is in the party.
Check if the character is alive.
If both are true,
Add 1 to [party size].
Use the party size to determine which [char1] to [char4] variable will be populated with the character ID. (I'd use a variable reference like I've done in my other examples for you.)
After going through all of your characters, one to four of the Char variables should be populated, and your party size variable will be 1 to 4.
So now just do four conditional branches (one for each party size option) and then randomly select a character in each branch (the first branch, where this is only one character, obviously won't need to be random). Store whatever character is selected in the [Selected] variable.
And you're done. You can now use that script for anything else you want.
That one regen script and possible Doom thing:
Since I think I have a solution for your regen script (posted in the other topic), I skipped what you wrote here. Let me know if my solution doesn't work for you.
EDIT:
For implementing Doom, if your script inflicts both a condition and sets a count down timer, then it shouldn't be too bad. For one, there's no reason to ever let the condition expire. It should be permanent, since Death removes all conditions. Then you can just let the count down timer run its course and if the character is still inflicted with the condition at the end of the 20 turn timer, they will die. If not they won't. So you shouldn't even need your Dispel, Esuna, etc spells to check for Doom and what-not. Just removing the condition is sufficient. Does that make sense?
Eww!! Ya, I think you'll need to scratch Auto-Potion. While you won't need 28 battle events (again, for ALL auto stuff you need only a single battle event and a single, though very lengthy, common event), you will need to have conditional branches for each character to check for each and every condition.
The only thing I can suggest at this time is to convert all of your poison, etc. stuff into common events (at least for the heroes) rather than rely upon conditions. But you'll need to decide if its worth the work.
Actually, I just thought of something reading your Marisa code. You can use the "if targeted" trigger and use that to trigger auto-potion. That will force you to do a lot more in battle events rather than common events, but that would get around the whole condition healing issue (at least for the most part). Not 100% sure if "if targeted" triggers if you're hit with an AOE.
Nitori:
All I'm saying is that it sounds like the reason she's worthless is her low MP pool and thus inability to use her abilities. I could totally be wrong here, but just from our conversation that's the impression I'm getting. So if you're looking at making her less worthless, that seems to be the way to go. And since halving her MP cost isn't enough, it seems like a good opportunity to add some interesting mechanics to her kit to both make her more unique and more useful.
Stats:
The reason I never finish anything:
would probably require readjusting everything everI eventually got to the point where I was like "OK, I'm going to plan out everything in advance so that I don't have to redo anything." Four years later and I'm still planning....
I haven't given up, though. And every year RPG Maker gets better, so one of these days it'll be able to do what I want it to.
Marisa:
I guess I was thinking that you'd control PC-98's steal command to know what abilities it can and cannot steal, thus controlling PC-98's damage out. Her innate abilities could also be initially restricted just by setting the switches to OFF when the battle begins.
As for her being weird with her abilities, I never figured out how in the world rm2k3 figures out what attacks to use. It's really wonky, though generally speaking I've found that if you set the priority to all the same value (as you have) they should all have about equal chance of occurring, so in your case I'm not really sure what's happening. Hopefully it's just bad RNG (random number generation) and not actually an issue.
As I look at your Marisa Steal code, it looks like you'd steal all abilities all at once, or none at all. Unless I'm missing something here. Maybe that's why it's not behaving as intended?
Your PC-98 steal code looks fine, however. If I am understanding it, it will always steal the last ability in the list first, and the first ability in the list (in this case, Magic Missile) last. You could make it random, but I don't think it's worth it. Just call it artificial intelligence with PC-98 making decisions on what to steal.
255 Agility Cap
rm2k3 doesn't actually cap at 255 monster agility. That's a restriction inserted by the Goliath patch that you're using (or David patch -- it's the same thing more or less). In regular rm2k3, you can go all the way up to 999 with both allies and enemies. The reason for the restriction, according to the Goliath creator, is that sometimes when monster agility exceeds 255 it makes the ATB slow to a crawl. I haven't independently tested to see if restricted monster agility solves the ATB crawl, but I can say that I've had the ATB crawl issue a lot so anything that may help is a positive in my book.
To get around the 255 limitation you have two options. First, just keep the ally agility low. The other option is to alter ally agility upon entering battle to mimic the same cap. In other words, do the following:
Ally Battle Agility = Ally Normal Agility * 255 / 1000
(b = n * 255 / 1000)
That formula just converts your ally agility into the same scale as the monster agility. You can then think of monster agility needing to be 25% of ally agility to be about equivalent. So if an ally has 300 agility, similarly quick monsters should have about 70-80 agility (300 / 4 = 75).
Spirit Magic Stone:
You caught me here. I wasn't aware of that issue with increasing and decreasing resistance values. Given that I understand the need for the patch.
The fact that only the inflict Zombie ability is AOE is what makes the Spirit Magic Stone battle not broken. As I listed in my example in my post, with what you've setup, it's impossible to get "condition locked." I just wanted to showcase some of the risk involved with what you've constructed, particularly when it came to the refight, as there would be four rather than one enemy there.
As for Full-Cure being a risk, given that most of the abilities are instant-death (due to the Zombie status), I don't think free heals are going to be a top priority. That belief, though, is of course somewhat dependent upon how often the Stone uses each of its attacks.
Glad to hear you can save AND stock up on items before the Stone fight. That makes your gimmick viable and prevents getting the player stuck (which always has the potential of being rather annoying).
Stone Refight:
Since the rest of the Stones don't inflict conditions, if you remove the Spirit Stone's ability to Eject (as you suggested) I think you should be fine. Technically since it is 6v4 you may need other adjustments, but just due to how tough the fight is rather than the overall design.
Random Targeting:
I'd make a common event that will return a random number corresponding to ID of the randomly selected character in your party. Then just have all scripts that require a random selection call this event.
As for the event itself, there's no easy to do it since "Hero X is in the party" is a non-variable conditional branch. The same goes for "Hero X is not dead/has more than 0 HP." Here's probably how I'd do it though:
Grab four empty variables that will hold which four characters are alive and in your party. If you have fewer than four, fewer than four of the variables will be used. Call these variables [char1] to [char4].
Have another variable that will simply hold the number of alive party members. Let's just call this [party size].
And finally have a variable that will be used to return what party member was randomly picked. Call this [selected].
Set [party size] = 0.
For each character,
Check if the character is in the party.
Check if the character is alive.
If both are true,
Add 1 to [party size].
Use the party size to determine which [char1] to [char4] variable will be populated with the character ID. (I'd use a variable reference like I've done in my other examples for you.)
After going through all of your characters, one to four of the Char variables should be populated, and your party size variable will be 1 to 4.
So now just do four conditional branches (one for each party size option) and then randomly select a character in each branch (the first branch, where this is only one character, obviously won't need to be random). Store whatever character is selected in the [Selected] variable.
And you're done. You can now use that script for anything else you want.
That one regen script and possible Doom thing:
Since I think I have a solution for your regen script (posted in the other topic), I skipped what you wrote here. Let me know if my solution doesn't work for you.
EDIT:
For implementing Doom, if your script inflicts both a condition and sets a count down timer, then it shouldn't be too bad. For one, there's no reason to ever let the condition expire. It should be permanent, since Death removes all conditions. Then you can just let the count down timer run its course and if the character is still inflicted with the condition at the end of the 20 turn timer, they will die. If not they won't. So you shouldn't even need your Dispel, Esuna, etc spells to check for Doom and what-not. Just removing the condition is sufficient. Does that make sense?
Xenomic
1752
Auto-Stuff:
Yeah, it's a pain. I may just say fudge it for the Auto-abilities in general (except those that like...require to be under 25% or less HP. Those aren't that bad to deal with. Things like SOS Haste and the like). We'll see if I need to come back to it later or not.
Nitori:
In the end, I think I just need to act like I'm starting her over from scratch and go from there with her skillsets in general. That would require a lot more thoughtful thinking to make sure that she's not completely worthless but not completely overpowered. I may need to talk to you in PM about that, or here works too heh.
Marisa:
Yeah, it's a mess to figure out what exactly to do with her. It's just set in a specific pattern right now because I haven't figured out WHAT to do with it. And she continues to be stingy with never using the abilities she steals from Marisa herself. >_<
It shouldn't since after it steals something, there's an End Event Processing right after the steal code so that it doesn't go any further.
255 Speed:
Yeah, I'm aware it's of the patch I'm using, but I'd be darned if I didn't use that patch lol. Some of the other restrictions (99,999 HP amongst other things) didn't jive well with me. ^^;
That's an interesting formula actually. I was going to go with a hidden Auto-Haste stat that later enemies would get (if enemies start hitting 255 speed, then I'd go to about 128 speed and then those monsters would get a hidden Auto-Haste that couldn't be removed. The only issue THERE is making sure that when they revive, if they can be revived, they get the Auto-Haste back without screwing with battles).
Spirit Stone:
The only thing that makes the fight terrifying is Doom and Doomja (AoE Doom). Since Hope's the only character that you have access to during the first fight that's innately immune to Doom, the others can easily die UNLESS they equip something that prevents Instant Death (since if it prevents Instant Death, it also prevents Doom). Suwako's Instant Death ability will NOT do this (mostly because I can't be arsed to go through all of the Armor Blessed armor to change that right now. I'll be using the ResistControl plugin to deal with that at a later date...). The funny thing is when I fought the boss in my testing, it never used Full-Cure once which...was really weird that it didn't. Dunno WHY it didn't, just it didn't. I'll probably swap it to Full-Life to do the custom coding instead. I actually have a method of doing targeting that I used for others as you already know. That, and Hope's Vortex also removes Doom from everyone (and is the only method of doing so. Though it costs a hefty 50 MP to do everytime so it's pretty costly). Outside of the Full-Cure on Zombies, the stone has no method of dealing damage (since I removed Ignis Fatuss, but I might give that back), which means healing is hardly worth doing right now.
Stone Refight:
Yeah, I haven't decided fully on what I'm going to do with the refight. I'm half tempted to make it so that Phantom Mima uses the stones herself to attack, though that'll mean only one attack instead of 6. Makes it more manageable, but the stones may still use their unique abilities (Spirit Stone's Zombieja, Nature Stone's Growth, etc.). Don't know quite yet.
Oh, and just to show the random targeting I'm using for Encircle:
The battle event:
The common event:
Essentially, the common event first checks to see if they're in the party. If they are, that variable is now 1. Now, if they're ALSO DEAD, that variable goes to 0 which skips them being targeted. In the battle event, if the random variable hits a specific hero slot (hero slots being determined when adding characters to the party from the HRCS area) and if that specific character's Hero Slot ID is that number, AND if they're in the party AND NOT DEAD, it will attempt to target them. I haven't really had any problems with this coding at all (and I can tell when Encircle doesn't work thanks to Hope being in the party as Eject's coding ignores Hope completely). I think this works the way you're talking about as well, right?
Yeah, it's a pain. I may just say fudge it for the Auto-abilities in general (except those that like...require to be under 25% or less HP. Those aren't that bad to deal with. Things like SOS Haste and the like). We'll see if I need to come back to it later or not.
Nitori:
In the end, I think I just need to act like I'm starting her over from scratch and go from there with her skillsets in general. That would require a lot more thoughtful thinking to make sure that she's not completely worthless but not completely overpowered. I may need to talk to you in PM about that, or here works too heh.
Marisa:
Yeah, it's a mess to figure out what exactly to do with her. It's just set in a specific pattern right now because I haven't figured out WHAT to do with it. And she continues to be stingy with never using the abilities she steals from Marisa herself. >_<
It shouldn't since after it steals something, there's an End Event Processing right after the steal code so that it doesn't go any further.
255 Speed:
Yeah, I'm aware it's of the patch I'm using, but I'd be darned if I didn't use that patch lol. Some of the other restrictions (99,999 HP amongst other things) didn't jive well with me. ^^;
That's an interesting formula actually. I was going to go with a hidden Auto-Haste stat that later enemies would get (if enemies start hitting 255 speed, then I'd go to about 128 speed and then those monsters would get a hidden Auto-Haste that couldn't be removed. The only issue THERE is making sure that when they revive, if they can be revived, they get the Auto-Haste back without screwing with battles).
Spirit Stone:
The only thing that makes the fight terrifying is Doom and Doomja (AoE Doom). Since Hope's the only character that you have access to during the first fight that's innately immune to Doom, the others can easily die UNLESS they equip something that prevents Instant Death (since if it prevents Instant Death, it also prevents Doom). Suwako's Instant Death ability will NOT do this (mostly because I can't be arsed to go through all of the Armor Blessed armor to change that right now. I'll be using the ResistControl plugin to deal with that at a later date...). The funny thing is when I fought the boss in my testing, it never used Full-Cure once which...was really weird that it didn't. Dunno WHY it didn't, just it didn't. I'll probably swap it to Full-Life to do the custom coding instead. I actually have a method of doing targeting that I used for others as you already know. That, and Hope's Vortex also removes Doom from everyone (and is the only method of doing so. Though it costs a hefty 50 MP to do everytime so it's pretty costly). Outside of the Full-Cure on Zombies, the stone has no method of dealing damage (since I removed Ignis Fatuss, but I might give that back), which means healing is hardly worth doing right now.
Stone Refight:
Yeah, I haven't decided fully on what I'm going to do with the refight. I'm half tempted to make it so that Phantom Mima uses the stones herself to attack, though that'll mean only one attack instead of 6. Makes it more manageable, but the stones may still use their unique abilities (Spirit Stone's Zombieja, Nature Stone's Growth, etc.). Don't know quite yet.
Oh, and just to show the random targeting I'm using for Encircle:
The battle event:
The common event:
Essentially, the common event first checks to see if they're in the party. If they are, that variable is now 1. Now, if they're ALSO DEAD, that variable goes to 0 which skips them being targeted. In the battle event, if the random variable hits a specific hero slot (hero slots being determined when adding characters to the party from the HRCS area) and if that specific character's Hero Slot ID is that number, AND if they're in the party AND NOT DEAD, it will attempt to target them. I haven't really had any problems with this coding at all (and I can tell when Encircle doesn't work thanks to Hope being in the party as Eject's coding ignores Hope completely). I think this works the way you're talking about as well, right?
hedge1
862
Marisa:
As stated previously, I don't think there's an issue with having an order or preset method to how PC-98 steals stuff. Call it "strategy" and just go with it.
As for things not working, again, it looks like your code for Marisa stealing stuff from PC-98 steals everything all at once, which would explain why PC-98 doesn't want to use the stolen skills -- it doesn't have them anymore.
When looking at the code, all I see is a branch if "Meteonic Debris Enemy" is ON. Otherwise, there's nothing else dictating which skill is stolen. Thus I'm hypothesizing (without having seen the rest of the code) that it would steal any skill where the "Skill Name Enemy" switch is ON.
255 Speed:
Out of curiosity, does your Goliath patch use a fixed width font for the message boxes in the editor? It should, as that was part of the original Goliath patch, but it doesn't for me, and it's annoying. It makes me not like the Goliath patch, despite it's numerous other advantages.
As for agility, I'd totally skip all the mucky auto-haste stuff and just stick with either restricting the speed of your heroes to 255 or less, or use the formula I gave you to take whatever value they currently have and turn it into a value between 1 and 255. As you said, getting the auto-haste to return after the monster dies can be a pain, and as I said before, conditions can be a bit sketchy anyway, so it's best to avoid using them when possible.
Finally, there's another patch of sorts out there that allows you to have character stats up to 9999, which is pretty nice. You can even raise character HP to over 30,000 (though it overlaps with the slashes in the menu if you do so). Something else to keep in mind.
Spirit Stone:
Out of curiosity, did you code the "Full Cure" spell as an attack spell for the Spirit Stone, or is it just the same old Full Cure spell that anyone gets? I'm reasonably confident that an enemy will never use a healing ability on an enemy, no matter what you ask it to do.
Stone Refight:
Up to you on the refight. Either what you originally suggested or your revised suggestion would work, so long as you keep in mind that you need to prevent the boss from getting the party turn-locked, where all the party does is endless remove status effects, heal, or bring people back into battle. That, or you could make the whole point of the fight having the player figure out how to avoid those things, in which case you'd need to tell the player in advance what to expect so that they can plan to avoid it. Though given that in this case it's mostly just one stone that does all the statuses, I'd probably argue that making the battle all about conditions isn't stylistically consistent.
Maybe the best advice I can give you is for you to make the battle one way and test it out, both with a "prepared" party and an "ignorant" party and see how it goes. If the "prepared" party can win consistently and the "ignorant" party can usually win (as it's you who's controlling them, you'll perform better than the average player), you're probably alright with whatever you go with. The key here, though, is consistently. Just winning once doesn't cut it because you may have been lucky. I remember a Final Fantasy fan game I played years ago where the first boss could wipe your party and there would be nothing you could do about it, but the creator just played the boss once, won easily, and was like "awesome, good easy first boss."
Random Targeting:
You can do it the way you're doing it, but I think you're using far more code than necessary since you're checking for each character for each battle slot, as opposed to just checking if they're alive and in the party (which you're already doing in your common event). If you want to change it and don't understand what I wrote, I can try to make it clearer. Otherwise you can just keep what you already have since it's already done.
As stated previously, I don't think there's an issue with having an order or preset method to how PC-98 steals stuff. Call it "strategy" and just go with it.
As for things not working, again, it looks like your code for Marisa stealing stuff from PC-98 steals everything all at once, which would explain why PC-98 doesn't want to use the stolen skills -- it doesn't have them anymore.
When looking at the code, all I see is a branch if "Meteonic Debris Enemy" is ON. Otherwise, there's nothing else dictating which skill is stolen. Thus I'm hypothesizing (without having seen the rest of the code) that it would steal any skill where the "Skill Name Enemy" switch is ON.
255 Speed:
Out of curiosity, does your Goliath patch use a fixed width font for the message boxes in the editor? It should, as that was part of the original Goliath patch, but it doesn't for me, and it's annoying. It makes me not like the Goliath patch, despite it's numerous other advantages.
As for agility, I'd totally skip all the mucky auto-haste stuff and just stick with either restricting the speed of your heroes to 255 or less, or use the formula I gave you to take whatever value they currently have and turn it into a value between 1 and 255. As you said, getting the auto-haste to return after the monster dies can be a pain, and as I said before, conditions can be a bit sketchy anyway, so it's best to avoid using them when possible.
Finally, there's another patch of sorts out there that allows you to have character stats up to 9999, which is pretty nice. You can even raise character HP to over 30,000 (though it overlaps with the slashes in the menu if you do so). Something else to keep in mind.
Spirit Stone:
Out of curiosity, did you code the "Full Cure" spell as an attack spell for the Spirit Stone, or is it just the same old Full Cure spell that anyone gets? I'm reasonably confident that an enemy will never use a healing ability on an enemy, no matter what you ask it to do.
Stone Refight:
Up to you on the refight. Either what you originally suggested or your revised suggestion would work, so long as you keep in mind that you need to prevent the boss from getting the party turn-locked, where all the party does is endless remove status effects, heal, or bring people back into battle. That, or you could make the whole point of the fight having the player figure out how to avoid those things, in which case you'd need to tell the player in advance what to expect so that they can plan to avoid it. Though given that in this case it's mostly just one stone that does all the statuses, I'd probably argue that making the battle all about conditions isn't stylistically consistent.
Maybe the best advice I can give you is for you to make the battle one way and test it out, both with a "prepared" party and an "ignorant" party and see how it goes. If the "prepared" party can win consistently and the "ignorant" party can usually win (as it's you who's controlling them, you'll perform better than the average player), you're probably alright with whatever you go with. The key here, though, is consistently. Just winning once doesn't cut it because you may have been lucky. I remember a Final Fantasy fan game I played years ago where the first boss could wipe your party and there would be nothing you could do about it, but the creator just played the boss once, won easily, and was like "awesome, good easy first boss."
Random Targeting:
You can do it the way you're doing it, but I think you're using far more code than necessary since you're checking for each character for each battle slot, as opposed to just checking if they're alive and in the party (which you're already doing in your common event). If you want to change it and don't understand what I wrote, I can try to make it clearer. Otherwise you can just keep what you already have since it's already done.
Xenomic
1752
Marisa:
I'll have to look it over again. It's supposed to check if that skill is there, then do the coding, else it'll skip to see if the next switch is on and rinse and repeat. But I probably did something silly and screwed it up...
255 Speed:
What do you mean fixed width??
As for the speed, I guess I could, though the issue THERE with characters is...well...the players will have to restart their save files because current files will not register changes at all. And adjusting character speeds is NOT something I've ever been great at heh. I honestly have no idea how I really want to deal with speed at all, it's such a hard stat to balance correctly. ><
And huh. I don't know if I should use that at all lol. It sounds crazy though!
Spirit Stone:
I looked and it's because I had the Full-Cure spell set to a switch that never activates I think. I haven't retested the fight though to see if it'll use it or not. I mean, I have an enemy that throws Sirloin at the player that fully heals them and puts them to sleep for 50 turns so I know healing stuff can work. And an enemy uses Hot Springs on the player that does nothing but heal them so...
Stone Refight:
What I'm thinking is that for the Stone Refight, since you already fought most of the stones, their power should be pretty much gone. So Phantom Mima will use her turns to "recharge" the stones, giving them one action each turn outright. Otherwise, the stones will do nothing. And to make it a bit more interesting, Phantom Mima will have a really high speed so she can activate more than one stone at a time. I feel that'll balance the fight out instead of having it like a mandatory Culex fight (granted, Culex was already fought but he didn't have any crystals, just him and he was a jobber).
Yeah, I've done countless testing on bosses and stuff for this game, so I at least know how to balance for the most part. "Most part" being the keyword, some of the older versions of bosses were dumb and me and a beta tester of mine both wondered how we even got past them. >_>;;
Random Targeting:
Probably. Though it's at least consistent and makes sure that things get done. It's only used for when I REALLY need it (though I haven't done it for Meteorain or the others that deals damage yet. Still only used on Encircle).
I'll have to look it over again. It's supposed to check if that skill is there, then do the coding, else it'll skip to see if the next switch is on and rinse and repeat. But I probably did something silly and screwed it up...
255 Speed:
What do you mean fixed width??
As for the speed, I guess I could, though the issue THERE with characters is...well...the players will have to restart their save files because current files will not register changes at all. And adjusting character speeds is NOT something I've ever been great at heh. I honestly have no idea how I really want to deal with speed at all, it's such a hard stat to balance correctly. ><
And huh. I don't know if I should use that at all lol. It sounds crazy though!
Spirit Stone:
I looked and it's because I had the Full-Cure spell set to a switch that never activates I think. I haven't retested the fight though to see if it'll use it or not. I mean, I have an enemy that throws Sirloin at the player that fully heals them and puts them to sleep for 50 turns so I know healing stuff can work. And an enemy uses Hot Springs on the player that does nothing but heal them so...
Stone Refight:
What I'm thinking is that for the Stone Refight, since you already fought most of the stones, their power should be pretty much gone. So Phantom Mima will use her turns to "recharge" the stones, giving them one action each turn outright. Otherwise, the stones will do nothing. And to make it a bit more interesting, Phantom Mima will have a really high speed so she can activate more than one stone at a time. I feel that'll balance the fight out instead of having it like a mandatory Culex fight (granted, Culex was already fought but he didn't have any crystals, just him and he was a jobber).
Yeah, I've done countless testing on bosses and stuff for this game, so I at least know how to balance for the most part. "Most part" being the keyword, some of the older versions of bosses were dumb and me and a beta tester of mine both wondered how we even got past them. >_>;;
Random Targeting:
Probably. Though it's at least consistent and makes sure that things get done. It's only used for when I REALLY need it (though I haven't done it for Meteorain or the others that deals damage yet. Still only used on Encircle).
hedge1
862
255 Speed:
Here's the difference between fixed and variable:
As for balancing speed, it is one of the more difficult things to do and honestly for my current project I've thrown in the towel and am having everyone with fixed speed values that don't change as they level up (though they do change with equipment or abilities). While I wouldn't go so far as to recommend that such a decision is optimal (everyone loves seeing their stats increase, so having one static is perhaps less desirable), I do think it is a completely valid option that makes the game as a whole better balanced (and easier to make balanced). So that's something to think about.
As for correcting save files, you could have a parallel process common event that alters the speed values for all of the characters when called. To prevent it from calling itself continually, just have it check the speed value of one character first to see if it's run yet or not. Then once all of the necessary save files are corrected, delete the common event. It's a bit of work, but it does allow you to make changes on the fly, which is nice.
Spirit Stone:
You know, I really appreciate all of the weird stuff you're putting in your game, like healing someone fully but then putting them to sleep. I wish there was more variety like that in more games.
Stone Refight:
I quite like your thoughts on the stones getting charged. It provides good lore to the game.
Here's the difference between fixed and variable:
As for balancing speed, it is one of the more difficult things to do and honestly for my current project I've thrown in the towel and am having everyone with fixed speed values that don't change as they level up (though they do change with equipment or abilities). While I wouldn't go so far as to recommend that such a decision is optimal (everyone loves seeing their stats increase, so having one static is perhaps less desirable), I do think it is a completely valid option that makes the game as a whole better balanced (and easier to make balanced). So that's something to think about.
As for correcting save files, you could have a parallel process common event that alters the speed values for all of the characters when called. To prevent it from calling itself continually, just have it check the speed value of one character first to see if it's run yet or not. Then once all of the necessary save files are corrected, delete the common event. It's a bit of work, but it does allow you to make changes on the fly, which is nice.
Spirit Stone:
You know, I really appreciate all of the weird stuff you're putting in your game, like healing someone fully but then putting them to sleep. I wish there was more variety like that in more games.
Stone Refight:
I quite like your thoughts on the stones getting charged. It provides good lore to the game.
Xenomic
1752
255 Speed:
Ah, yeah. It's definitely fixed then. That is definitely a pain, I agree. I USED to have a patch that had like a line set to where you could tell where portraits would be and whatnot, but I lost that and I'm always having cut-off text and whatnot. So troublesome...
The problem is that it doesn't fix itself even on level ups IIRC. I think it still uses the old value in the old save files.
Spirit Stone:
You'd be surprised at how many other weird things show up, and how many gimmicks there are for bosses. FFIV's CPU boss? Check. Magus? Check (now anyways thanks to the ResistControl plugin). Bowyer? Check. There's a looot of things here and there heh.
Stone Refight:
Aye. Mima's the one that created them in the first place IIRC, and even though Phantom Mima isn't the REAL one, it's still a part of her in the end, so she'd have the power to recharge them. That, and who wants to fight 6 bosses at once? Oh, and to make the fight a bit more complicated, which I forgot to mention, you cannot kill Phantom Mima. She fully heals every round. The gimmick is to defeat all Five Magic Stones, and THEN she'll die. It's basically reverse Culex in that regards. Granted...there's another boss immediately after her so...yeah...^^;
Ah, yeah. It's definitely fixed then. That is definitely a pain, I agree. I USED to have a patch that had like a line set to where you could tell where portraits would be and whatnot, but I lost that and I'm always having cut-off text and whatnot. So troublesome...
The problem is that it doesn't fix itself even on level ups IIRC. I think it still uses the old value in the old save files.
Spirit Stone:
You'd be surprised at how many other weird things show up, and how many gimmicks there are for bosses. FFIV's CPU boss? Check. Magus? Check (now anyways thanks to the ResistControl plugin). Bowyer? Check. There's a looot of things here and there heh.
Stone Refight:
Aye. Mima's the one that created them in the first place IIRC, and even though Phantom Mima isn't the REAL one, it's still a part of her in the end, so she'd have the power to recharge them. That, and who wants to fight 6 bosses at once? Oh, and to make the fight a bit more complicated, which I forgot to mention, you cannot kill Phantom Mima. She fully heals every round. The gimmick is to defeat all Five Magic Stones, and THEN she'll die. It's basically reverse Culex in that regards. Granted...there's another boss immediately after her so...yeah...^^;
hedge1
862
255 Speed:
I actually hacked the hex code in my game to get the lines in there (which you can see in the fixed width version above). Unfortunately, the instructions on how to do that I think were on the old Gaming World forums or something, because I searched for a couple of hours one day and couldn't find it anywhere (not even a regular patch). I'm pretty sure the same set of instructions told me how to get the fixed width in there as well, which I was hoping I could adapt to fix my Goliath Hack. Not having fixed width is a total pain.
As for my recommendation, I know that getting a level up doesn't reset values (level ups simply give you the difference the current level and the next level stat values). What I was saying was that the parallel process common event would actually change the base stats for each character (and their respective variables). It would be a bit of work to setup, but doable and preserve the old state saves.
Spirit Stone:
Out of curiosity, is the project you're currently working on the Touhou Fantasy in your profile? Is it related to the Touhou project in any way other than name?
EDIT: If you're in need of high quality sprite rips, have you checked out the Spriters' Resource?
http://www.spriters-resource.com/search/?q=touhou
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/swr/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/touhou123/sheet/26551/
Another source is the Sprite Database:
http://spritedatabase.net/
I actually hacked the hex code in my game to get the lines in there (which you can see in the fixed width version above). Unfortunately, the instructions on how to do that I think were on the old Gaming World forums or something, because I searched for a couple of hours one day and couldn't find it anywhere (not even a regular patch). I'm pretty sure the same set of instructions told me how to get the fixed width in there as well, which I was hoping I could adapt to fix my Goliath Hack. Not having fixed width is a total pain.
As for my recommendation, I know that getting a level up doesn't reset values (level ups simply give you the difference the current level and the next level stat values). What I was saying was that the parallel process common event would actually change the base stats for each character (and their respective variables). It would be a bit of work to setup, but doable and preserve the old state saves.
Spirit Stone:
Out of curiosity, is the project you're currently working on the Touhou Fantasy in your profile? Is it related to the Touhou project in any way other than name?
EDIT: If you're in need of high quality sprite rips, have you checked out the Spriters' Resource?
http://www.spriters-resource.com/search/?q=touhou
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/swr/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/touhou123/sheet/26551/
Another source is the Sprite Database:
http://spritedatabase.net/
