How to make encounter balance

[Ronyunderen]

Hello members,
Could you help me please to give design advice how to make encounter balance?
In my first draft game design, i just wanna make one actor vs one enemy.
But, i have an idea to make a party (up to 4 actor) vs group of enemies (2-6)
But, i also confused how to make the enemies is not too much/hard when the player still have one actor.

The game design i use is, the player have to complete a quest for every actor the player meet. So there is progress there.

Anyone can give me example basic template for how much enemy and weight rate? Thank you!

I use open world map like DQ.

 

[lianderson]

There's no right or wrong answers, but I can tell you how I personally approach most areas.


(game's party size is usually 3-4) (most enemy encounters are usually 1-3)


Random battles are usually broken down as...

1 Large enemy

2 Medium enemies

1 Medium and 2 small enemies


(note that large, medium, and small are more about the unit's power than anything else) (large units are usually about 50-66% stronger than medium units and small units are usually about 25% weaker than medium units) (balance your areas based on your medium units)

Hope this helps. Get that game make.

 

[myenemy]

Anyone can give me example basic template for how much enemy and weight rate? Thank you!

In rpg terms, enemy weight in the map is a slang for the spawnrate compared to other battle troops. This line differs from what you requested first. Plus, if you were asking for how many to spawn per character, that pretty much depends on the growth rates you set on your actors and how strong are these enemies for the level the player is meant to be there. It's something you need to test yourself manually or hire staff to do it instead. Dark souls balances like this, if testers say "this boss is too hard", they make it way harder.

As for spawning more monsters in mid battle, under the troops config, you can set battle events, set for example, turn 0, set a variable to Game Data > Other > Party Members, and if it's 2 people, spawn one, if it's 4 people, spawn two (for example).

If you want to make it even simpler, do the tracking of the party members on a parallel event on the map, and set switches on and off so you can just make a few event pages to spawn multiple mobs.

 

[Andar]

most people start with mathematics and spreadsheets to get a base that is roughly equivalent as values.

but after that it is playtest, playtest and playtest - make a dozen battles with the same opponents to see if the difficulty is what you want, and if not tweak the values a tiny bit and repeat.

 

[eomereolsson]

When working on my first game (which still is unfinished, despite me starting two new projects since then -.-), I was faced with a similar design problem. I wanted the player to have some agency in when they recruit which follower, but also the combat balance obviously fastly varies depending on the number of party members. The way I approached this, was to only have a few characters truly optional, but have some characters required to progress the main story.
That makes it so I know, that the player's party will either have 2 or 3 members in the first dungeon and 3 or 4 members in the second dungeon. This obviously makes it way more managable to balance these areas than only knowing that the player has somewhere between 1 and 4 characters in their party.
For the sidequests I used a different approach. They are balanced around the assumption that the player has 3-4 members in their party. If they don't, but still manage to beat the sidequest they get an increased reward for playing 'on hard mode'. If they don't manage to beat them, they can simply come back later when they progressed the main story and have recruited more followers.

 

[Kes]

Another aspect to consider is: how many hits do you want the enemy to take before it dies?
As a massively oversimplified example
Enemy HP 100
Actor does 20 damage
Enemy dies in 5 hits.

Maybe you think 5 is too long. You must then chose to either increase the actor's attack, reduce the enemy's defense or reduce the enemy's HP.

Then consider how many hits you want the actor to receive before dying, and do the same sort of calculation. This can also affect how many enemies are in the troop. You could have 4 enemies, each of which deals only small damage, or one enemy which deals a lot.

Then as a further refinement, ask yourself if the actor will be using turns to heal HP or remove status afflictions? How (if at all) will that affect balance? If the enemy inflicts only trivial status afflictions that the actor can ignore, what will you do about it? This will help you decide aspects of status afflictions.

 

[Ronyunderen]

@lianderson @myenemy @Andar @eomereolsson @Kes Thank you for the explanation.