Hit Chance as an actively changing stat

[Adventurer_inc.]

I'm asking the community's opinion on a mechanic.


Inspired by an MMO that I will not mention, a "hit" chance that actively changes as the user and target becomes further and further from each other. In a previously project, archers became overly-powered because of range advantages and the ability to use the same skills as melee users but from range. Bow users practically destroy everything even with a, weaker than melee, bow. If I continue to weaken bows and strengthen melee weapons, eventually either melee weapons becomes too strong or bows does practically nothing.


My mechanic is for every space away a target is from the user, "hit" chance is decreased by 7%, not counting the space next to you. This will apply to all physical range attacks and not just bows. The game also features evasion chance, which only applies when attacks are from the front and sides and block chance, which only applies when attacks are from the front. 


More Info:


- All character and enemy's average move rate is 4 spaces. An average bow's max range is 6 spaces. Max possible range is 8 with one possible buffs adding +1 range.


- Average bows are about 25% weaker than an average melee weapons but allows you to be 25% faster.


- Base stat for all class regardless of build: Hit is 100%, Evasion is 5%, and Block is 0%.


- The highest Hit chance will probability reach if built heavily is 150%. One possible buffs can add another +30% hit chance. There are no hit chance decreasing debuff.


- The calculation chance follows the default system: hit chance is applied first, follow by evasion, and last is block. 


The idea was to get solo bow users to invest in hit chance and not just stat pure damage with no defense due to the the bow users' damage avoidance ability. The idea was if attacking from max range (range 8) without buff or investment the hit rate will be 51%, which is about half of base hit rate. Opinion? Too complex and I should just abandon the idea? Too punishing for anything that is a physical range attacks? Not enough of a punishment? To much math?

 

[Pine Towers]

Well, bows did controlled the battlefield for a reason.


My 2 cents would be:


1. Different kind of armor are best against different kind of damage type, so a plate may reduce by half piercing (ans thus, arrow) damage, but be easier to hit with a blunt weapon. He would be an archer-killer that is easily dispatched by a hammer-wielding warrior.


2. Distance affects damage as well as to hit, since bow is a user-powered projectile the farther away the less momentum it maintains and as such, is easier to avoid and deals less damage.


3. Cover can screw the best archer around, lowering his hit chance without affecting the melee ones. This would force the archer to move, maybe exposing himself.


4. Rate of fire and damage reduction. If bows shoot faster but deals less damage with each arrow, it would be a powerful weapon against mooks. But against the archer-killer mentioned above, maybe a crossbow would be better, since it pack quite a punch, but the range is shorter/requires one full action to reload.

 

[hadecynn]

Use a spreadsheet and figure out if your math is working like you intend the mechanics to. If bows have a 51% hit chance at max range, the expected value over time for damage would by ( damage * .51 ), meaning for each % gain in accuracy, you are essentially gaining 1% of the original damage. However, let's say your damage was 100, this would mean that at range 8, at default accuracy, you would expect to be dealing 51 damage per turn over an infinite amount of turns. By increasing this to 52 through 1% accuracy, the player is gaining 1/51 * 100% of damage increase (roughly 2%) with this upgrade. As the accuracy gets higher, however, the incremental gains becomes less and less. Compare this incremental gain with the damage gains the player would get by focusing on pure damage builds. If, even at the original 51% accuracy, a single point of STR is going to give a 3% increase to the output damage, then your system would not support the idea of making accuracy builds. (Of course, only a selected kind of players would go this far, and the question of whether your game difficult requires this sort of find tuning remains) 

 

[Wavelength]

Hey, good question.  You haven't explained quite enough about your game's battle system and the different classes/playstyles that characters can have in battle, so I'm going to assume a Disgaea-like tactics system based on the fact that you talk about distance in "spaces".


My instinct is that this is not a problem you can solve with math alone - you need to use (or introduce) the design levers that are necessary to allow imperfect balance.  My question for you would be - why are bow-users overpowered in your game?  Is it because the melee characters die before they reach the characters shooting at them?  Is it because they could never manage to reach a smart bow-user no matter how tough they were defensively?  Is it because of a flaw in the AI?  There are some problems that lowered hit-rates will correct, and others where this will only make things worse.


Once we figure that out, it will become much easier to fix.  If the ranged characters are getting too many hits in before they're caught, the solution might be to lower their range.  If the ranged characters seem to be able to kite forever, the solution could be something like lowering their mobility (without lowering their range) or forcing them to focus for a turn after moving in order to raise their Hit Rate from a low number to 100+ percent.  Another way to handle any of the above problems would be to have a couple of "assassin"-type classes that have the ability to flash up to their target and engage at melee range.  This would make them weak to most melee classes, but very strong against mages and bow-users that normally use distance to their advantage.  When you have this "rock-paper-scissors" cycle of classes that are strong against each other, some level of imbalance is okay because there's always a counter to the theoretically-strongest move.


I'm also rather fond of Cristovao's ideas, particularly the idea of having line-of-sight and cover affect bow-users' ability to shoot at their targets.

 

[Adventurer_inc.]

1. Different kind of armor are best against different kind of damage type, so a plate may reduce by half piercing (ans thus, arrow) damage, but be easier to hit with a blunt weapon. He would be an archer-killer that is easily dispatched by a hammer-wielding warrior.


2. Distance affects damage as well as to hit, since bow is a user-powered projectile the farther away the less momentum it maintains and as such, is easier to avoid and deals less damage.


3. Cover can screw the best archer around, lowering his hit chance without affecting the melee ones. This would force the archer to move, maybe exposing himself.


4. Rate of fire and damage reduction. If bows shoot faster but deals less damage with each arrow, it would be a powerful weapon against mooks. But against the archer-killer mentioned above, maybe a crossbow would be better, since it pack quite a punch, but the range is shorter/requires one full action to reload.

1. Ironically, I did that that exact type of armor system you just mention. Great minds think alike as they say. However, heavy armor lowers base movement by 1 and have a pretty decent agility penalty with a projectile and slashing damage taken reduction of 20%. With the speed and movement decrease, they are basically sitting fodders, even when coupled with a pull ability to catch far targets.


2. I did thought of the damage reduction but gave up on it because the distance, somewhat realistically, would be too short to make much of a difference. The arrow is like a speed bullets basically.


3. I did try the cover, but it worked to the shooter's advantage. The shooter would just sit at max range and snipe as the melee expose himself.


4. This sounds like different types skills, which this game has. Charged single high damage attacks, weak multiple hit attacks, and wide spreading ones. Melee and Rangers have shared skills with the difference being weaker ranged and stronger melees.

Use a spreadsheet and figure out if your math is working like you intend the mechanics to. 

I did used something of this sort before posting this. The best accuracy was around 70-80% in comparison to damage loss. The bigger issue was the effects that the skills also carried, like immobilizers and weapon disarming. Immobilized targets can't move or evade attacks and weapon disarmed targets can't attack or use any skills.

My instinct is that this is not a problem you can solve with math alone - you need to use (or introduce) the design levers that are necessary to allow imperfect balance.  My question for you would be - why are bow-users overpowered in your game?  Is it because the melee characters die before they reach the characters shooting at them?  Is it because they could never manage to reach a smart bow-user no matter how tough they were defensively?  Is it because of a flaw in the AI?  There are some problems that lowered hit-rates will correct, and others where this will only make things worse.

Good question. The game is a tactic type battle like in the tags, you could assume it's  Disgaea-like. I was shooting for more of the Final Fantasy Tactic-like


Ironically, the problem aroused when a computer AI was "too good" for their own good.


1. Basic enemy archers would stand still like statue (Not moving makes your next turn come sooner, a mechanic borrowed from FFT), skill while all melee enemies charge in. The moment one of my members reach ~50% health, all the enemy archers would move in chains and mow the member down with their range. 


2. One of the boss in the game known for being a master of bows has both superior range (distance) and movement, which can only be natural, as it is a boss. The AI type of the boss was Hit-and-Run. This boss was some monster, always sitting at max range and just stall when I refuse to get within shooting range. 


I like the assassin-type class idea with high movements and speed but it sounds like killing rats with snakes. There is now a snake problem, like melee now defeating "mages". I did not include the "mages" in this because they come with their own set of penalty like cast-time and lower health, basically archer-food with archer's superior range and speed. The reason why bow-users are a bit overpowered in my game is probability their ability to stall. Either the archer comes out victorious against the melee or the battle goes on forever.


With the "hit" chance penalty not only do I strike at the damaging attacks but also the debuffing attacks, allowing the melee to approach enough before real damage can be done. However, it seems a bit over the top as you can easily miss at 70-80% chance. I might have to run a few more test with the AI to see how they react to the changes.

 

[Wavelength]

Sounds like you're making a pretty good game!


While reducing Hit Rates could be a step in the right direction, it sounds like even doing so would just force them to take a longer time to "stall out" the battle.  If the biggest problem with an Archer (gonna use this as a general term for bow-users) is their ability to stall, it sounds like reducing their mobility (making it impossible to kite forever) could be the way to fix them.

• You could reduce the Archers' movement range in general so that melee characters can move further over time than the Archers can run away
  
• You could reduce the Archers' range so that they need to move closer to danger in order to attack
  
• You could impose large penalties on the Archers' shots if they haven't been standing still for a turn (making them into specialists that need to find a good place to shoot from, stay immobile, and unload their damage)
  
• You could go with Assassin-types that are weak to whatever mages are good at (perhaps give the assassins very low magic defense, but reasonable physical defense) so that they are good at eliminating Archers but not good at everything
  

Basically, you want to create an identifiable and exploitable weakness in any character/class that seems to overpowered.

 

[TheRiotInside]

Is it possible to add some other forms of map manipulation in conjunction with your pull skill you mentioned? Maybe certain classes could get some kind of jump skill where they can land a few spaces away and do AoE damage around them, helping to close the gap. Or more mystical classes could get a teleport skill. Both of these could be balanced with cooldowns or high costs depending on what systems you are implementing.


An older MMO, Dofus, had this problem occasionally in PvP. It was a similar isometric grid-based tactical system similar to FFT. You had MP to move and AP to use attacks and spells (both replenished each turn). There was no accuracy and missing, but all weapons and spells had both a Critical Hit chance and a Critical Failure chance, essentially a chance for the action to fail upon casting.


Anyway, occasionally you'd get a PvP match with the archer class against a physical class with no map manipulation spells. Most classes had some form of ranged attack, but it was either outranged by the archer's weapons and spells, or limited in some other fashion (some ranged spells could only be cast linearly in a plus sign instead of the full diamond around the player being selectable). So you would see a match on a map with the archer class simply running away from the opponent, pelting them with weapons and spells (it probably didn't help that the archer class also had a long range Explosive Arrow spell that dealt high AoE damage, enabling them to hit a target behind minimal cover and around corners, haha). This was never really an issue in groups, which is what most of your battles are probably going to be. So maybe it's just a matter of more map manipulation options and possible tweaks to the waiting mechanics you have implemented.


Good luck to you! A nice, polished tactical battle system is a real treat to play

 

[Adventurer_inc.]

Thanks for the words of encouragement.


The problem with lowering the archer’s movement and range is their advantage over mages. The game follows a basic rock-paper-scissors concept. Archer > Mages > Melee > Archer. The mage’s spells barely reaches Archers which freely move around the map with no real position constrain, however, melee, who have to position themselves, have a hard time moving around with all of the pre-casted spells placed by mages.


The game has no physical defense/magic defense system similar to FFT. Everything is either physical evadable, magic evadable or certain hit.


I did thought of leap skills once, but it comes with its own set of problems. One of the biggest one is that enemy AI’s will not use them, as I can’t seem to make them plan ahead. For example, trying to make the AI see that a certain useless position now will be useful for future plays without making the AI do ridicules moves elsewhere. The best I can do is movement increasing skills because leap skills also cost a turn. This way the AI would use movement increasing skill, which also increases damage, on themselves on turn one and be able to reach the target and attack on turn two. Because AI tracks movable squares and attack ranges, both you and enemy AI will see it coming.


This is a good discussion. I've just recently realize, while writing this, that the dynamic hit chance change will make archer unconscionably think about their positions and range where they are attacking from. In a way, it is a "range constrain" as the further attacks the higher chance the attack will miss.

 

[Wavelength]

The game follows a basic rock-paper-scissors concept. Archer > Mages > Melee > Archer.

Does it, though?  It sounds like the problem you're having, unless I've misunderstood a lot of what you're saying in this topic, is that in practice the power chain is actually Archer > Mage > Melee... with Archer being better than both.


Now having "melee" in this mix seems like a really limiting way to design (I think to League of Legends where high-defense melee tanks, high-speed melee assassins, high-attack melee fighters, and slow-but-powerful melee juggernauts all fill different design spaces), but going with the Archer/Mage/Melee division, it sounds like you need to take away a "melee-fighting tool" from the Archer that won't effect his ability to beat Mages, or give the Melee an "Archer-fighting tool" that won't allow her to also beat Mages.


In a simple system, I could see the following system working in any tactics game:

• Class A: High speed, zero range, medium attack (will close in on and beat Class B )
  
• Class B: Low speed, high range, low attack (will snipe and beat Class C)
  
• Class C: Low speed, low range, high attack (will outdamage and beat Class A)
  

Looking at it like this, the fact that you've given Archer both High speed and High range makes me think that it really is going to have the potential to beat anything else on the map.  You seem to be somewhat dead-set on using the sliding scale of Hit Chance as the solution to your problem, and hey it's your game to do what you want with, but I see two major problems with it:

• You're introducing an extremely random mechanic to a tactical game - players are not going to be happy when their 79% chance to hit fails twice in a row.
  
• More importantly, I don't think you're fixing the core problem.  If an Archer can stay out of range of other characters while attacking, even with a 10% hit chance they would eventually be able to whittle down their opponent without being scratched.
  

If you want something to be able to beat an Archer, you need that something to be able to catch the Archer!  As you've mentioned, it's always going to be more complex than the simple situation I laid out above, and there are certainly problems with "unleashing the snakes" or with making the AI properly utilize what you've created.  But I still think these problems are more minor than an uber-class that can kite around all day and destroy anything at range.  Once you've done this, you can work out the more minor problems - if the new high-speed Melees are the "snakes" that now beat everything, simply tune up Mages' raw attack power so that the Mage can beat them (the Archer can still outrange and beat the Mage).


One other idea I just thought of would be to create relatively small battlefields - if the Archer's range is 8, make the battlefields 12x12 or even smaller.  This would allow melee characters, even slow ones, to eventually "close in" on Archers as long as enough of them are still alive.  A single slow Melee character could never catch a single Archer, but have four or five Melees approach (in a loose formation) a band of four or five Archers, and at least one of those Archers is eventually going to be caught.

 

[Pine Towers]

The game follows a basic rock-paper-scissors concept. Archer > Mages > Melee > Archer.

You could do as I told before: Make armor reduce arrow damage, but not magical damage. This way the melee can win over the archer but lose to the mage, while mages (who doesn't wear armor) are threatened by archers because of long range and kiting.


That's the simplest way to do.