Battle Party QUestion

[123uconduit]

Hey RPG Maker fam! I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out this thing I want to add to my game. I want to make it where certain battles you are forced to used different members of the party by choice (or random sometimes) and always switch the amount of party members you can use per battle. It would change every battle. Is that possible?

For example:

1 particular troop of Goblins have you use 2 random party
then another troop of zombies would let you use 3 party members
and another random troop would require all 4

Any help would be very much appreciated. I want to force the player to use all the different characters but in different quantities. Thanks in advance

 

[Arithmetician]

@123uconduit Well, you can adjust whoever's in the party through eventing.

But I don't understand why you would want to randomize the number of party members available to fight different troops from a design perspective. That seems like it would be more frustrating to the player than anything, not to mention throwing off the balancing, and there are far better ways to encourage the use of all party members rather than outright forcing them.

 

[123uconduit]

@123uconduit Well, you can adjust whoever's in the party through eventing.

But I don't understand why you would want to randomize the number of party members available to fight different troops from a design perspective. That seems like it would be more frustrating to the player than anything, not to mention throwing off the balancing, and there are far better ways to encourage the use of all party members rather than outright forcing them.

Thanks for the response! That is a good point do you have suggestions for how to encourage the use of different members?
And I would want to randomize WHICH party members but the amount would be based on the troop (a 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 4) but with random or chosen player.

How would I do that through eventing? It's still pretty confusing to me. Would it be possible to base it on the troop?

 

[Trihan]

The best way to encourage the use of different party members is to make all of them fun to use.

 

[Andar]

To your original questions: you'll need a plugin to change the number of battlemembers in the party (fixed at 4) unless you make the party smaller (if there are less than 4 actors in the party, less than four will be in battle).

Another option would be to
1) make different actors strong against some and weak against other enemies
2) make the battles pure evented with story background

the second option will require you to be very carefull with the story who fights when and why, but it is possible

 

[Arithmetician]

@123uconduit Rather than randomizing WHICH the party members the layer can use, give each a well-defined niche and design enemy troops with these in mind. You can also use Yanfly's Formation plugin so that you can switch in party members at the start of each turn according to the situation. So for instance, say that you can only use 3 of your 4 party members at any one time, but that the last one is in reserve and can be exchanged for one of the active members at the start of the round. If you find that you have a highly physically resistant foe, you can just swap out your warrior for your mage.

In contrast, if you only randomly get your warrior and your thief at the start vs. two physically resistant foes, as in your proposed system, the battle is going to get drawn out unnecessarily, and players will rage at not being able to adjust their tactics (by choice of party member) to deal with the foe, while it would be a breeze if you lucked out and got the mage. And should you not get a healer for a boss fight, things would turn ugly quick. This sort of RNG would just be "fake difficulty" and seems more aggravating than anything. And if you do implement such a system anyways, there should be a pretty good reason for it.

 

[123uconduit]

@123uconduit Rather than randomizing WHICH the party members the layer can use, give each a well-defined niche and design enemy troops with these in mind. You can also use Yanfly's Formation plugin so that you can switch in party members at the start of each turn according to the situation. So for instance, say that you can only use 3 of your 4 party members at any one time, but that the last one is in reserve and can be exchanged for one of the active members at the start of the round. If you find that you have a highly physically resistant foe, you can just swap out your warrior for your mage.

In contrast, if you only randomly get your warrior and your thief at the start vs. two physically resistant foes, as in your proposed system, the battle is going to get drawn out unnecessarily, and players will rage at not being able to adjust their tactics (by choice of party member) to deal with the foe, while it would be a breeze if you lucked out and got the mage. And should you not get a healer for a boss fight, things would turn ugly quick. This sort of RNG would just be "fake difficulty" and seems more aggravating than anything. And if you do implement such a system anyways, there should be a pretty good reason for it.

That's great, thank you so much for the suggestion. I want to implement a system like you described.

How would I set it so you can only use 3 members and that you can select who to use at the beginning of the battle?

 

[Arithmetician]

@123uconduit I think you just need Yanfly's Party System Plugin, which includes the Formation option I mentioned earlier. This also lets you change the allowed numbers of battlers in the party. Well, technically you need Yanfly's Core Engine as a dependency too, but you can find everything at Yanfly's site: http://yanfly.moe/yep/

 

[123uconduit]

@Arithmetician I'm having problems allowing the player to switch their party members during battle. It says "type error... defined is not a function" when I select finish after switching the party in the battle. I've tried playing with the pluggins but I can't get that error to stop.

 

[Arithmetician]

@123uconduit Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to help you debug your code right now, and you'd need to post some screenshots of your settings if anyone is to be able to provide meaningful assistance.