ATTACK-SPAMMING

post=101250
What are some of the methods you've tried to break away from the attack-spamming rut?

Removing the attack command.

This is the quickest way to force the player to use skills. The only reason why 'Attack' is there is so that the player has something to do if he runs out of MP. Not a really good reason to have it since you can easily add in some MP regen mechanic that prevents you from using high mp cost skills too much. Hell you could make the basic skills costless but have a rockpaperscissors system in place.

I think you're off on the causes of attack spamming. It comes about because attacking is typically reasonably effective (and free!) and by far the fastest option to select.


Taking the above as a stereotypical menu, what's the cost of selecting a choice?
Attack takes a quick double-tap on one button (a little more if you decide to select a non-default target, but then it's not spamming quite so much).
Whereas magic requires you to go down to magic, hit confirm, navigate through a menu to the spell you want, and then target that spell. Quite often this takes at least an order of magnitude longer than the confirm double-tap.

So: sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit to get a battle done faster by attack spamming, and sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit and overall time penalty to be able to devote their attention largely elsewhere. Either of those will happen regardless of enemy HP. (In fact, though I generally approve of trying to figure out how battles can proceed more quickly, the danger in this paradigm of having an enemy that can be taken out in two or three attacks is that skills, to be still noticeably more powerful, have to be able to take out an enemy in one shot or have some other effect of considerable worth.) More important factors are potential payouts, difficulty, and whether attack is really a viable option.

post=101259
There are plenty of other reasons to use attack.

You might be conserving MP for the boss. You might be finishing off an already weakned enemy. You might just be fighting weak enemies that would die anyway. The idea here isn't that "attack" is bad, just that sometimes you need to throw something at the player to make them think and use something else.

I'm not talking about reasons for the player attacking, I'm talking about why the option of attacking is needed. Think about it, if you have basic costless skills that are based on some rock paper scissor poop system, they function the same as attacks, only you have to alternate between them.

post=101254

post=101250
What are some of the methods you've tried to break away from the attack-spamming rut?

Removing the attack command.

This is the quickest way to force the player to use skills. The only reason why 'Attack' is there is so that the player has something to do if he runs out of MP. Not a really good reason to have it since you can easily add in some MP regen mechanic that prevents you from using high mp cost skills too much. Hell you could make the basic skills costless but have a rockpaperscissors system in place.

MP is kind of a silly resource system for abilities anyway. "You can use all this shit until you can't anymore (and have to use some item before you can just spam it again)!!" If the designer wants to limit the use of powerful abilities somehow, there are better ways. Having to conserve MP is also dumb because that means the game's full strategic depth/breadth of abilities is only available to the player some of the time, which is ~unacceptable~.

I used a simple method for turn-based system in my first ever first project; all skills cost a certain stamina and you regen stamina each round, the attacks also have a cooldown. Your only ability is to select from which Skill you want to use each turn. (You also passively healed each turn and there were NO items and nearly no healing skills, none of which you could use repeatedly.)

Not having attack lets you add in the potential for a lot more strategy too, the player feels more like varying their attacks to test things on enemies, etc.

The system I'm planning to try out next is like a turn-based meets action-rpg:
* You can actively switch your characters into any of the three modes at any time: Offense, Defense
* Character in Defense protect themselves and allies automatically based on how they're set up (healing or buffing or like Cover in FF games kind of)
* Characters in Offense keep attacking enemies constantly as a Passive Attack (but it doesn't deplete their HP, but instead a defense stat that reduces the damage they take from Active attacks or blocks it, etc)
* You highlight a character in a mode and then press a button (one of two possible) to start a skill chain that you've configured in a menu outside of battle, this is an Active Attack
* During that Active Attack you can you keep pressing one of the two keys to continue through a chain of Active attacks on that character (defined as chains by you beforehand)
* Active Attack chains increase a Momentum kind of stat that defined if you can overcome the defenses of your target

I'm on the fence about allowing other character participate in those Active Chains (working on the mechanics in my head) but the goal is to make battle very simple and easy by only using 2 buttons and never using menus, but making it strategic in the sense that how you set up different chains and use

As far as attack goes, I am using what WoW and FFXII do. The attack command merely serves to choose which target you wish a character to attack, then attacks are done automatically until another command is inputted.

Due to this level of automation, based on the speed of which the attacks come, the two-hit rule would obviously need to be modified to promote the use of other abilities.

I don't see a problem with MP. It's really just a very common means to an end; a consumable resource that establishes a strategic limit for the use of special abilities. Most (close to all?) RPG's have something that performs this function, and a game like WoW actually has several (Mana, Energy, Rage, Runic Power, and Focus).

I feel that good implementation of such resources really depends on the battle model. Using items to replenish MP, for example, can be fine, but there has to be a clearly established disadvantage to that. Item cost is one thing, but towards end-game money might not be enough of an issue preventing people from buying a wagon-load of items. The pace of battle and amount of MP restored should also factor into the disadvantages. Using games like Lost Odyssey and the NES FF games as an example, using any character's turn for the purpose of restoring MP to a magic user is a pretty disadvantageous (unless the character is otherwise useless to you, then you have another problem). In later FF games, like FF6, the disadvantage is drastically reduced because of the ATB system; you can react on the fly when the next character's turn comes up.

Like Craze and Karsu, I like to draw a lot of battle pacing theory from WoW. I believe that normal attacks (called white damage to WoW players) should be a significant portion of the damage (weapon-based) characters should deal to enemies (I haven't thought about it enough to give it a %, per se, but I'd say around 40% is a fair number). This can change based on a character's abilities as well, for example, Rogues in WoW have a talent tree that is largely dedicated to increasing "white damage" as opposed to special abilities. Mages shouldn't be left in the dust, though; having a weapon or no-cost ability as an alternative to a regular attack modified by their intelligence (or what-have-you attribute) should be strongly considered.

I want to stress battle pacing a little bit more. I wouldn't say it's necessarily correct to balance a game using the philosphy "if you just use regular attacks or button mash, you will die." Button mashing is punishing enough, I don't think it's right to punish a player for not delving into all of the strategic intricacies you developed. I believe the most important resource is time, and everything else contributes to how well time is managed. Even HP is a resource which manages time; enemies having more will make battles take longer. In response to that, other resources are used to compensate and reduce the time spent in battle. Thus, whatever system you use to supplement standard attacks should act as an opportunity to reward the strategic player by reducing the time it takes to win. It also helps to make them 'splosions shiny.

Heh, the attack command...

I've struggled with this beast for a long time now. I can never really handle the thing too well.

My first and only real deviation attempt was to replace the single attack command with a set of skills used to attack instead, like Slash, Thrust, Uppercut, Downward Slash. That didn't go over too well. People just mashed the closest attack skill and then complained when it didn't do any damage. You see I tried to make enemies weak to certain attack types, but people didn't catch on. I guess that's bad implementation on my part. Oh well.

My current attempt is to embrace the attack command and make it central to the battle system. Right now the attack command is sort of like a variable skill that can be as short or as long as you want it to be with each phase of the attack costing MP. In the end though, Attacking is not your main source of damage, but rather, a tool used to weaken an enemy value called 'Barrier' so that special skills do more damage than they would have otherwise.

Now what I do, I like to run an energy system. Mp (or En(ergy) as I'm using it) is really important. If you let it get to 0, you get tired which halves all your stats. So you gotta choose your moves wisely and use food and energy drinks (as they restore En), properly. Attacking takes away En depending on what weapon you use. Small weapons take away 1, big ones take 3 and guns don't take away any En 'cause it isn't really all that tiring to shoot a gun. En restores passively outside of battle, but certain actions might make you lose some En.

Also, I make my strategies more priority based. So for example, there are 3 enemies. One of them is a heavy hitter, does about say, 10-19 damage depending on what attack it uses and takes about 2 or 3 hits depending on what attack you use. The other 2 are little fuckers that are so fast, they'll attack twice before you can attack once and die in one hit. The little fuckers do about 4 damage. So that's 16 damage before you can attack from those little guys and 10-16 from the big dude. You have about 45 hp.

Now who are you gonna kill first? The little fast douches? or the big guy? Sure, you could kill the little guys, i mean it only takes one hit right? Kill one on the first turn so you take 8 damage + whatever the big guy does instead of 16. But you gotta remember the big guy's a wild card. There's a 50/50 chance he'll rock your shit with the powerful move that does almost 20 damage.

Take your chances with the big guy and kill the little guys first? Or hit the big guy with your more powerful but En consuming move and take the hits from the birds?

But, you know, that's just me.

Input-based, reaction/timing-intensive skills are awesome. For example, I made an ability where arrows appear on the screen randomly pointing up, down, left, or right, and you have to match it on the keypad within like 0.4 seconds or whatever, each time you correctly match it you deal physical damage, and your turn ends when you fail to match. Another example would be Sabin's blitzes in FF6, where you had to enter a blitz combination. Another example would be (sorry if I describe this poorly) if you had a meter, with a bar that rapidly oscillates between 0% on the left and 100% on the right, and the better you time pressing enter, the closer you deal to 100% of max damage. Please feel free to free to make-up your own example and post it.

You could also have some sort of paper-rock-scissors attack style (i.e. punch, kick, throw or w/e) that affect how vulnerable you are to the next attack the enemy makes. The enemy could have subtle tells or attack patterns that might hint what there next attack will be, so that you have to pay attention to select the correct attack. This is almost like elemental weaknesses, except that instead of spamming fire on an ice enemy, which is mindless, the attack selection is a more mindful process that requires more focus. Another version of this is if you made the attack and defend commands more balanced and more strategic by making the enemy have a subtle tell or pattern as to who they are going to attack next (a system that makes much more sense than punch-kick-throw).

Also, if you play WoW, there are various classes where you don't spam at all (honestly, I haven't played WoW in 4 years, but I assume it's the same), such as the Rogue and the Warrior. With Warriors, you often prefer to use the Battle Shout buff right at the start of battle (so make 40-60% of the battles long enough that using a buff for your first command is strategically correct). Often when you're lower level, you want to use the hamstring ability (slows their movement) to keep them from running away, so you could make a game with plenty of thieves (I hate thief enemies, who steal a ton of your money and then escape), so that a hamstring-cutting move is worthwhile to use. There's the execute command, which uses the amount of rage you've accumulated to deal a proportionate amount of damage, which you use as the final hit of the battle, so you could have a command similar to execute, a command called "revenge" that deals damage proportionate to the amount of damage the enemies' have done this battle (logically most effective towards the late stages of the battle), or a command that just auto-kills the enemy if its HP is low enough (say between 1 and 3 attacks worth of HP) and otherwise does nothing. I don't know exactly how to play rogues, but they also don't just spam attack or spam magic.

Also, you could make regular encounters challenging enough to require mid-battle healing, as a way to encourage occassional use of yet another non-attack skill. If so, you'd need to compensate by reducing the total number of regular encounters and increasing the EXP awarded, which again reduces the monotony of grinding / attack-spamming.

Btw, magic-spamming is just as bad as attack-spamming, imo, if it's super-easy to strategically choose the best magic spell. So if you're going to make your battles more of a magic-spamming affair, then you ought to spice-up the spells so that you don't cast the same one over and over. For example, you can give the spells cooldowns, such as "this is the best offensive spell, but after you use it, you gotta wait 3 turns before you can use it again" etc.. You could also make magic spells agility-intensive, I guess, similar to first-person shooters, the bullets are like magic spells that you have to aim, and they aren't magical :-D