Adding Strategy to Battles

[servantb7]

So we've all played/made a game with  battles where your party does nothing but attack, attack, heal, repeat. Not all of these games are bad, but personally I like a game that involves a bit more challenge and strategy.

 

I'll give an example.  One way I add strategy is by having certain enemies that can only be damaged by certain types of weapons/spells. This makes this player make sure that he constructs his party in a way that is appropriate for the current enemies.

 

An example from a professional game is how some enemies must be 'staggered' in FF 13. You can attack them all day but won't do real damage until you stagger them.

 

What ways have you have seen (or better yet, made in RPGM) to add extra levels of strategy to battles?

 

[Zevia]

There was some advice for DMs during D&D campaigns I read somewhere once that said you should tailor your campaigns to fit what the players wanted to do. If someone rolls a thief with a lot of points in picking locks, give them some locks to pick.

Along that kind of thinking, I try not to add any abilities unless they have some kind of pointed use - for both enemies and actors.

For example, does that enemy have a poison attack? Then there better be a way to cure it, so one of the actors needs a poison removing ability.

Does an actor have an ability that increases fire damage taken? Then either that actor or, better yet, another actor better have a fire-based ability.

Does an actor have an ability that lowers enemy defenses? Then there better be an enemy who has really high defenses to remove.

Is there an enemy or an actor that has a high agility/evade rating? Then there should be an ability that slows them down or makes them easier to hit.

Do you have an ability that applies a status effect, like silence? Then there should be an enemy who would be significantly weakened by being silenced.

I also try to change up how each of these goals is accomplished so you often have more than one way to deal with a given problem. For example, early in my game, you encounter a couple enemies with an almost 100% evade chance. However, you also have party members that can use an ability called impale that's a guaranteed hit and will lower their evade to 0% for a couple turns.

Later on, you don't have those party members, but you encounter high evade enemies again - but this time, you have some AoE abilities that ignore evade chance.

Target priority is also a simple but effective way to add some strategy to battles. The most common one would be to give the enemy party a healer, but you can also create enemies with high damage but low HP, or an enemy that reduces damage done to all other enemies by 90% until he's dead or something.

 

[Tai_MT]

Well, I'm tackling this in three ways:

1.  Character Skills/Classes

2.  Character/Enemy Stats

3.  Weapon/Armor Types

Basically, I allow players to tailor their characters skills to their play styles and make sure that each character gives multiple "Coverages".  The Wizard can do more than simply cast magic spells.  They can inflict status ailments or other tricky things.  Thieves can inflict status ailments that aren't elemental based (like poisons, stuns, paralysis, etcetera), but can also inflict "Speed" based stats which really hurt enemies that aren't that fast.  Etcetera.

Stats affect how your characters play and how enemies act.  Attack/Defense work against each other, Magic Attack/Magic Defense work against each other, Speed/Luck work against each other.  Lots of characters have overlaps into these areas as well as weaknesses to some of these forms of attack.  Enemies are the same way, heavily armored enemies might have very low Luck and could thus be murdered with Speed.

Weapons inflict different kinds of status ailments or do specific types of damage.  Bashing/Slashing/Piercing.  Enemy attacks can have these traits too, so you have to wear armor that would suit you.  Chainmail might make you immune to Piercing blows, but it makes you really susceptible to any kind of magic casted on you.  That same Chainmail also doesn't fare too well against Bashing attacks.  Plate Mail may defend you better against Bashing attacks, but Piercing go right through it.  Etcetera.  Some enemies are only weak to specific types of damage as well (It's hard to stab or slash a zombie, for instance...  But, bashing them into mush is an option).

The final thing I added is that certain weapons can have abilities or elements to them, while others cannot.  Everything you can equip or use has a drawback...  But, it can also be quite useful depending on how you're playing and what you want your coverage to be.

That, my friend, is how I'm attempting to make battle "Complex" instead of "mash attack to win".

 

[kerbonklin]

An actual battle systeeeeeeem. (I can't stop myself from stressing this constantly)  Many, many, MANY projects i've seen are just standard turn-based or standard ATBs that don't have anything unique to how they function. Or people who implement a turn-order bar but don't have any ways to ALTER it using various skills other than actor AGI stat stuff. 

 

[Milennin]

You need to force the player into using skills that don't just heal or just do damage. Make enemies resistant/immune to physical attacks. Make enemies inflict status effects that hinder physical attacks (blind/weaken). Make enemies counter physical attacks.

Then at the same time giving the player all the tools to deal with these enemies effectively with the skills on their characters that they should be able to use every battle. Also, skills should always be more powerful/useful than regular attacks.

 

[Kyutaru]

For example on how to make a strategic RPG with all these suggestions, download and play Manifest.

 

[Zevia]

Or people who implement a turn-order bar but don't have any ways to ALTER it using various skills other than actor AGI stat stuff. 

Isn't the whole point of ATB or CTB to establish that some people get to act more frequently than others, as well as allowing actions to have immediate consequences, instead of having to play out in order via a "turn?" Other than using abilities to alter how quickly those peoples' turns come up, what else would you really do to affect it?

If you have an ability that boosts your agility, thus allowing you to act more often on the order bar, or an enemy has an ability to lower your agility, thus forcing you to act less often on the order bar, or you have an ability that doesn't cost any CTB time, thus allowing you to act twice in one turn, effectively, why is that uninteresting? That would seem to be the whole point of the order gauge to me.

 

[SpacemanFive]

What I intend to do with some of my games is engineer it so that players are rewarded for thinking about how they tackle each enemy or group in a battle. Or punished for not thinking things through and just charging in, guns blazing, so to speak. (Although that can sometimes be a valid strategy in some situations.)

Do you use melee weapons? Ranged? Will one element be more effective, versus another? Will the enemy perform a devastating counter-attack to certain types of attacks? Does the enemy have support that can heal? Is there something in the environment that you can use to aid you in combat, such as a switch you can hit? (Which could even be located in the environment before the battle starts.) Will blocking prevent the nasty effects of a big attack that comes with some warning, or should you attack while the enemy is vulnerable and risk heavy damage? Sometimes it could even be the best choice to just charge in and go berserk on something, which could be vulnerable while preparing an attack that could devastate the party if allowed to complete.

Some of this would require specialized scripts, so I've been working on getting what I need to make it work, while other stuff is more than possible within the limits of the default engine.

One tricky thing with this stuff is to set it up so that it's not formulaic, but instead promotes active strategizing. So for example, having to think about how to deal with an enemy, versus having to memorize attack patterns.

 

[servantb7]

For example on how to make a strategic RPG with all these suggestions, download and play Manifest.

I keep hearing good things about Manifest. I need to check it out I guess.

@Millenin: I agree that it's important to make enemies that force the player to use skills besides damage/heal, or else they never will. In most RPGs I rarely use support skills because they just aren't powerful enough to be worth it on regular enemies, and most bosses are immune to them.

I'm trying to design enemies in my game to be diverse and require different ways of dealing with them. I'm also making support moves (status changing, buffing, etc.) powerful and with a high chance of success to reward players for experimenting with them.  

 

[Tai_MT]

It helps when you think of regular battles as "Lessons" and the Boss Fights as "Tests".  In that way, you can easily establish "themes" to follow for battles (like maybe silence is important, but so is fire immunity and piercing weapons).  Your standard battles should teach you what you need to do to defeat foes who use whatever tactics they're using.  The boss fight later should then be a test to see how well you learned those tactics and maybe even teach you a more "advanced" way of using them.

If done in this way, you can avoid the whole "bosses are immune to all status ailments" crap as well as the "bosses are easily destroyed by status ailments".  The boss fights truly become challenges because they are a test of the skills you should have learned up to that point.  Like, you could make a boss immune to all status ailments... except the ones they need to use to "pass the test".  Even then, you can throw curve balls at them to teach them that a status effect needs something else to make it effective (like making the enemy weak to it first so that it degrades more of his health than he can heal every turn with regen that kicked on the moment he had the status of poison inflicted upon him).

Get creative!

 

[AClockworkMelon]

It helps when you think of regular battles as "Lessons" and the Boss Fights as "Tests".

This is the essence of good encounter design.

 

[CWells]

Well, two of my fav creations so far come from my biggest project in the works, Conjurers college:

I have taken the myth of Sisyphus and applied it to one battle. Brief summary of Sisyphus legend:

As a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again.[7] The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for King Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Zeus accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from King Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration

So to adapt this to my game I have a boss called Sisyphus in which, if you do not wipe out his last 9% of health in one large strike, the following turn, Sisyphus will stun the party with a cold attack and instantly heal all his health forcing you to start over. This battle requires timing and careful preparation as you approach the end. I've tested this and messed with this fight for days. It's way more fun than one might think. And there are some secret ways to deal with him if you cannot bring him down.

Another is my use of a special breed of creatures that are heavily resistant to both physical and magical attacks. But they come forward with ferocious strength. Your job is to burn, freeze and poison them into submission while keeping your guard up for the fight. It's an ailment game.

These are just some of the ways in which I'm working on making fights interesting/challenging.

There may be some negotiation methods for some pre-fights. Make the right choices and everything can be resolved peacefully, if not, battle.