CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

author=slashphoenix
5) Addendum: Strategies must be effective enough (read: extremely effective) so that players are convinced to spend time executing them.

More precisely, the player must be convinced that by learning the strategy, she/he will actually gain time. The strategy has to save more time than you lose by trying things out to learn it, else you actually made a loss by going trough the trouble of learning it. The player won't know in advance whether or not it will be worth it, so the developer needs to gain the player's trust.

Alternatively, learning the strategy is necessary to beat the battle at all.

WoW uses a combination to get people to squeeze out much DPS they can. If your group doesn't have enough DPS, you can't defeat the boss period. It will either rage or healers will run out of mana or some other limit will kick in. On top of that, the more DPS you have, the lesser the chance that something will go wrong. In the end, this saves time since you have to retry less.

Other benefits of learning a strategy is ultimately based on the earlier mentioned two benefits. For example, conserving health is only a benefit if either doing so is faster than just taking the damage and then heal it off or there's a danger of you getting a game over otherwise. By itself, conserving health isn't a priority. The same goes for conserving mana.

I think the problem is the sheer mindlessness. A lot of games don't require much though, but they still require your presence of mind.

Let's take a well-known game such as Super Mario World as an example. It's easy and certainly don't require much thinking. However, it still asks for your attention. Imagine you're jumping to a platform and then off it to another. Usually, you will ready yourself for the second jump even before doing the first jump. A reason for that is that often you want to jump of it at a lower speed than maximum or from a certain position and need to prepare for that in advance. Alternatively, there's a danger in the way you need to account for. Even though it's usually easy to do so, you still need to pay attention to what's going on and make a decision.

However, in some really bad cases in RPG battles, you can literally copy the strategy from one battle to another. You know that if you follow a certain strategy (use the best offensive move,) you will come out on top and barely even have to watch what's happening. Worst case scenario, I can look away and just hit the X button repeatedly.

author=Max McGee
What are some representative stats for a handful of different weapons and enemies? I want to see how these numbers play out. I'm also curious how you've done the scripting. (I'd just DL the game and mess with it if I could, but my computer has problems with VX right now.)

For simplicity's sake, I go with the earliest available weapons.

Rapier: One-handed, Attack 30, Accuracy 50 and Fast Attack.
Rod: One-handed, Attack 30, Accuracy 25 and Max MP +35.
Longsword: One-handed, Attack 40 and Accuracy 45.
Axe: One-handed, Attack 50 and Accuracy 25.
Spear: Two-handed, Attack 40, Accuracy 60 and Fast Attack.
Staff: Two-handed, Attack 40, Accuracy 30 and Max MP +50.
Greatsword: Two-handed, Attack 55 and Accuracy 50.
Warhammer: Two-handed, Attack 65 and Accuracy 25.

In case anyone wonder, you're not asked to choose one of all those at the start of the game. You do plenty of fighting before you need to upgrade your weapons. Someone replaying the game can however sell their start weapon (and shield) and buy a new one if she/he wishes to.

Fast attack is changed to double the initiative of standard attacks and physical skills. Skills that have a high accuracy usually also have accuracy based damage. However, enemies who have low evasion usually have such a low evasion you can't miss them even with a low accuracy weapon while using a low accuracy skill and against enemies who are neither evasive nor have high defense (being put to sleep robs you of your evasion,) attack based skills will deal higher damage, so attack is still a bit more valuable than accuracy.

I'm not found of the Greatsword right now. It's not intuitive that is has a greater accuracy than a longsword, but I kind of need it to deal higher damage with an accuracy based skill.

Anyway, assume that fighters have a natural attack and accuracy of 50 while it's 30 for mages. High defense enemies have around 90 defense and 30 evasion while for evasive enemies you can swap the stats.

As for skills, there are three direct offensive ones at the beginning.
Double Strike: 100% hit rate, two attacks, each dealing in damage.
Precise Strike: 150% hit rate, Damage = Accuracy * 1,2 - Defense * 0,75.
Bear Smash: 75% hit rate, damage = Attack * 1,35 - Defense * 0,5.

For comparison, standard attack: 100% hit rate, Damage = Attack - Defense * 0,5.

So far the system seems to work if I'm playing as intended. I haven't gone around to trying to break it yet though.

Edit: Corrected formulas and added standard attack.

author=Max McGee
What are you making your game in, Crystalgate?

It's VX with a modified to hit and damage formulas.

Your chance to hit, in percent, is: 160 - 80 * Evasion / Hit Rate.

For physical skills, replace Hit Rate with Hit Rate * Skill Hit Ratio / 100.

You're guaranteed to hit if your Hit Rate (renamed to accuracy) is 125% or of the enemy's Evasion and guaranteed to miss if your Hit Rate is half or less of the enemy's Evasion.

Anyway, more into what Craze was actually asking for. For the purpose of my game, let's redefine striker, brute and nuker a bit.

Striker has a high accuracy, but low attack.
Brute has a high attack, but low accuracy.
Nuker uses magic attacks.

Most enemies will have one of these three roles, but often also have other roles. A succubus for example, would be a striker and debuffer. A paladin like enemy, would probably be brute and either healer of buffer. Striker/nuker and brute/nuker combinations will also exist.

I also use a similar system to what craze described where stronger enemies can count as two and weaker as a half.

As mentioned earlier, most enemies also have either a high defense or a high evasion. High defense enemies are best dealt with by using high attack weapons combined with massive attacks that punches trough the defense. Evasive enemies are best dealt with by using high accuracy weapons combined with skills that have a high Hit Ratio. Magic will ignore both defense and evasion, but is subject to magic defense and elemental resistance. Even if the enemy in question doesn't have a high resistance or resists the element (each character has access to one element only) magic attacks uses up the same resource as healing spells does, while physical skills does not.

Roughly speaking, the idea is to bypass the enemies' defenses while making them attack whoever can best defend against them, i,e, tank brutes with an evasive character and strikers with a high defense character. You can also shut enemies down with status effects. However, enemies will soon start throwing wrenches into your plan. Let's take the succubus enemy I mentioned earlier as an example. She's best tanked against with a high defense character, but if she charms your tank, that strategy breaks. You need to somehow prevent her from charming the tank if you want to go the tanking route. Another problem comes when buffer raises the accuracy of a brute and it now becomes harder to evade its attacks. You need to take into account what the enemies can do and adapt you strategies thereafter.

At least that's the plan.

Let's start with the second question. The way I'm making it, there are evasive enemies, but you will only miss if you do something wrong. You will still hit them 100% if you use an accurate weapon and a skill with a high hitrate. Spells also cannot be evaded. The idea with evasive enemies isn't that x% of your attacks will inevitable miss, rather the idea is to force you to adapt your strategies. It's by the way the same deal with high defense enemies, you will not deal low damage to them unless you use the wrong strategies.

I don't know if it will cause frustration, but I don't think so. Final Fantasy X had evasive enemies, but I've not heard of anyone complaining since they just used the methods the game provided to get past the evasion.

As for the average weapon accuracy, it's useless to provide a number since it doesn't translate to a percentage. For example, 50 accuracy can mean all from a 100% hit rate to a 0% hit rate depending on the evasion of the enemy.