FARKASURDUNG'S PROFILE

I find this topic rather interesting, for I, too, have been complementing difficulty myself. Five years ago I wanted to make enemies "smart", as in they don't just randomly choose moves against the player, but team up using beneficial abilities. For example: a group of 3 identical monster who can cause sleep put the whole party but one member to sleep and pick apart the player's team one by one.

Nowadays I am contemplating adding several difficulties. The regular game would feature enemies with different set strategies that are chosen either to suit the current situation or randomly and they would use the same strategy for the rest of the battle. An idea came to my mind that what if I made them randomly switch to another one of their set strategies each turn, giving the player the upper hand over a confused AI.

While reading this topic I also thought of designing different dungeons or adding in complications that force the player to take a different path previously optional for different difficulty settings.

In your opinion, how could the experience be balanced? I do not wish to make battles feel like trial and error, nor do I want the player trying out a higher difficulty setting feel annoyed due to the extra tasks.

My self made pixel drawn tileset for 2000/2003 influenced by some known SNES game titles. Mainly the looping of the grass tiles are tested on this screenshot and some plants.

Tell me what you think.

author=LightningLord2
Make the weapon modifier a fractional number like 1,5 or so. Generally, don't make it increase too fast.

Yes, though I wanted to avoid fractional numbers, that was the only best thing I could find myself.

I thought up a stats/battle system and I was wondering if I could get a few tips to bend it in the right direction if I posted it here.

The sats:

• Levels: Only 10.
• HP: A max 3 digits number, won't reach 400 and will be 2 digits long for the first half of the levels.
• Max SP: Participants gain 2 SP a turn by default and the max SP just limits the amount they can store. I plan to create strategy around this.
• Strength (2 digits): Determines the power of a hit.
• Constitution (2 digits): Defense power, amount is added to max HP.
• Wisdom, Soul (2 digits): These two determine the damage of a spell in a Wisdom divided by Soul manner.
• Initiative (2 digits): Determines the turn order. (A random small number is generated for each participant, then the initiative is added.)
• Weapon modifier (1 digit): A multiplier. Default: 1 (no weapon).
• Armor modifier (1 digit): A multiplier. Default: 1 (no armor).

Standard attack's damage formula:
Attacker's Strength multiplied my his weapon modifier minus defender's Constitution multiplied by his armor modifier.

My concerns are about the damage formula. Whenever there's multiplication very high or very low numbers can occur and I know I'll have to pay special attention to this one in order to keep everything balanced. (I wanted a simple system with small numbers, mind you.) I was thinking of including weapons which gives strength, not just modifier, maybe that could balance things out better.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you for your answer.