Keeping first enemies fair but challenging?

[Panda]

I've run into a little problem, mechanics-side, while making enemies for my first dungeon. What I'm ultimately trying to do is make the enemies in the first dungeon moderately challenging so that they aren't just pushovers you can beat by spamming attack several times.

So right now, I've got two Plant enemies: One small, and the other a larger variant. The larger one deals more damage and has more HP, at the cost of less speed, while the smaller one deals less damage but is much quicker than the large. Both enemies have a skill which allows them to heal over time, as well as a skill which can potentially cause bleeding (-5% total HP per turn for two turns).

However, I've noticed a problem during playtesting - even with a fair amount of health, HP regen spells and potions, the enemies still end up dealing a large amount of damage over the course of a battle (200-300 damage out of 625 total HP), which in turn forces the player to needlessly and continuously waste potions after every battle.

I thought to try lowering their stats, but if I lower a stat by 1 or 2, there hardly seems to be a difference, while if I lower a stat by over 3, the battles seem to become far too easy and quick.

Could anyone suggest what I could do to fix this and get the difficulty just right?

 

[Alexander Amnell]

   I had this problem for a while because I wanted to make random encounters 'meaningful'. The problem with this is that if your game has minor encounters that are rampant throughout and you make them at all a threat (for a fully healed party) you risk breaking the game unless you also allow your a plethera of healing opportunities so that the player can keep healing up after every battle.

   One idea I've stumbled upon recently is having the party heal automatically after every battle so that you can make battles as threatening as you want rather than a scenario where you 'might' die after 30+ battles if you don't manage resources well, which allows you to require battles to be more strategic as well. Not many games do this but I've played a good many that do in the past few weeks and have found that I really like them. In my game I'm kind of adapting this idea in that after battle you recover 50% hp and 15-25% of skill currencies (depending on the character), so that in battle you will always go in with at least 50% life. Because of this potions have taken a more unique effect of being before battle items that grant you powerful buffs instead of being something you can carry 100's of around and chug down to keep yourself alive all the time. At the same time I haven't eliminated resource management entirely and added a type of injuries system where if a character does fall in battle upon revival (either through being revived in battle or recovering at 50% health afterwards) he/she suffers a random injury type that lowers his/her effectiveness until properly treated. 

   Probably a little bit of an extreme idea as far as solutions go, but I like it better this way as it focuses on player skills rather than just resource management in order to survive. (not that resource management is a bad thing, but in games where that is big oftentimes I find that minor foes are all usually weak and boring except in certain optional areas.) of course a drawback to this is making bosses stand out from the regular foes but I'm not 100% sure that's even a bad thing exactly.

 

[mlogan]

Okay, I stink at battle balancing so take this for what it's worth. These were just the ideas that popped into my head first:

Have you tried adjusting the enemy stats down a little and the player stats up a little to see what that does?  Also, how quickly does the player level up? In other words, if it only takes 3-5 battles to get to the next level, it might be okay having to use potions right after for a few battles before leveling up and battles getting easier.

 

[Milennin]

The first thing you need to do is giving the player the option to deal with them outside of spamming auto-attack. Give each character their own unique skills. Make these skills have effects that are useful for dealing with the enemies in your first dungeon. Like if there's an enemy that continues healing the other enemies on the field, give a character a skill that inflicts Rot condition on all enemies, which turns all healing effects into damage.


Secondly you need to punish players for using auto-attack. Have some enemies heavily resist basic attacks, or maybe inflict status conditions on those who melee them.


Once you've given the player the tools to deal with your monsters effectively (assuming they pay attention), you can lower the stats on your monsters. Make them weak enough so they aren't a big threat to any player who uses their skills correctly, but strong enough to be dangerous if the player does nothing but auto-attack them.


You just need to make sure the player can somehow make use of their skills every battle without having to go to town and stock up on a stack of potions.

I thought to try lowering their stats, but if I lower a stat by 1 or 2, there hardly seems to be a difference, while if I lower a stat by over 3, the battles seem to become far too easy and quick.

Have you tried changing damage calculations for monster attacks instead?

 

[Sixxon]

My tip would be to lower the stats from the HUNDREDS at level one.

The thing is with having the stats so high for everything is that it's really easy to get caught up in the small details of the whole thing. Arranging numbers when you have so many to work with.

Save that for the mid-endgame, and for the beginning area, try to not make any of the stats go past the hundreds.

This results in easier control of your balance, so you can change stats by a very small degree and see the difference very quickly.

 

[Zoltor]

It's easier to do, if you get rid of the FF formatted HP/MP values, the entire concept of such numbers early on, is absolutely nothing but eyecandy, and it makes it a pain to balance enemies "throughout"(the bigger the game is, the harder it becomes keeping FFs donkey math in check) the game, when char are gaining 50-hundreds of HP/MP at lv up.

Basically you want to stick to lower numbers for "raw" stats, equipment should be used for bigger stat increased.

You're better off having raw HP/MP , end up like 500 or so at lv 99, it make it much easier to balance out the game.

 

[Traveling Bard]

I think Melinin has the right idea. What I try to do is string in little combos among my characters to use on enemies via their skills.

Ex. You're facing an Ogre that can stun the party with yell, throw a boulder(moderately large damage), and standard attack. Stun works for two turns(which translate to the turn it was inflicted and the next turn). I give my party members this: Zeke has Heavy Strike that has a chance to stun while Raven has Piercing Thrust that does 30%-50% more damage to stunned enemies. Instead of messing around with stats, you give them damage mitigation options. Zeke is my tank type who has high defense while Raven is more of a rogue type as a fencer. I'll give Zeke "Cover" which takes affect at the beginning of the turn so he can block for a damaged Raven if she took too much damage, and I'll give Raven "Instinct" which negates physical damage and counters(this includes the boulder earlier) but is negated itself by the Ogre's stunning yell. It then becomes a pretty decent fight/dance  

In your case, they are plants....maybe have a way to set the large one on fire which deals damage to them like poison, negates their healing factor, and have a chance each turn to make the enemy do nothing/screech in pain since it's on fire. They'll eventually put it out if you don't take them out fast enough. Just a thought. Maybe have the smaller one be able to put out the fire if they are still on the field. This would make the player want to choose who they take out first, etc etc. 

In short, make connections between the enemies, make connections between the player characters, and add either bigger heals for your healing items or add damage mitigation via status effects built into attacks or both. Just my two cents. 

 

[omen613]

Sounds like your main problem is that players are using healing resources after the fight...not the fight itself. Why not make a reward system where if the player defeats the enemies in a "smart" way. either kill all enemies by X turn....or kill the last foe on the xth turn..Or only use magic to kill foes this battle...or only basic attacks this battle....their HP and MP get restored after the battle. 

like a challenge for only non boss battles

 

[kerbonklin]

This is why Battle Systems are important (no, not that side-view or ATB script)  They can give even the most simplest early battles a bit of difficulty if you don't pay attention and don't play smart. (And it will take time for players to adjust/learn the system)

 

[hian]

My main project has pretty hard battles at times, but firstly almost all battles can be avoided, as I'm using touch encounters. Secondly, my game has a continue system, where you can retry any battle you lose in exchange for a type of collectible item(bosses have infinite retries).

This means that I can afford to have a high difficulty, because any loss that isn't due to simply being underlevelled can be "appealed" on the spot, so to speak.

Also, you can spend SP you have charged by fighting, to opt out of future encounters.

As for balancing in general, using states and elements to their full potential, and a lot of things will run smoothly.

As long as you give enemies elemental weaknesses, and provide the cast with a diverse set of skills to deal with the various types of enemies, you can work around stat-related issues like the ones you describe.

 

[Kes]

@hian

As for balancing in general, using states and elements to their full potential, and a lot of things will run smoothly.
As long as you give enemies elemental weaknesses, and provide the cast with a diverse set of skills to deal with the various types of enemies, you can work around stat-related issues like the ones you describe. 

But as these are first enemies, it is at least possible that the party doesn't yet have a diverse set of skills to hand, or even half the party present yet.

 

[Necromus]

Seeing how some people here seem to suggest lowering stats, thats not always useful, nor even helpful for balancing, but it all depends on what kind of damage formulas you're using for your game.

Seeing how you describe that lowering stats by 1 or 2 doesn't do much, but 3 makes it aready easy, it seems that you got a case, where low stats are actually a bad thing.

Depending on how your damage is calculated, when having low stats, you have almost no room for changes.

I'm not saying change the HP values, I'm saying change the values for attack and defense (or whatever you're using), to something higher, so you have more room to change things around.

 

[Tai_MT]

Let's be honest, there are a ton of good suggestions in here for how to deal with your problem.  From reading these replies and my own experience, I've learned that you do kind of need to find your own solution to the issue so that the solution won't clash with anything already in the game.

That being said, I'll throw my own two-cents in.  Maybe the stories everyone else is giving you will give you an idea that's unique to you and your game.

Here's how my battle system works:

I have "Physical" attacks, which are usually anything that doesn't simply fall under a weapon class (like a punch or a thrown chair).  I have "Magic" attacks, which are usually any kind of magic use that doesn't fall under a specific Element (like fire, water, wind, etcetera).  I also have "Speed" attacks, which are any attack (weapon or magic related, doesn't matter) that relies heavily on the speed of a character to execute.  Following those three main headings (which are simply generalized and aren't actually used that much in my game... they're kind of a "fall back" attack type when the others don't fit), we have "Blunt, Piercing, and Slashing" type of attacks.  These are all physical type attacks, but they're usually tied to a weapon of sorts (or a part of the body like teeth, claws, and tails).  Then, I have the breakup of Magic into specific elements.  Speed isn't broken up into anything because the only defense against Speed is having high enough "Luck" stats to counter it.

I broke my battle up in this way for two reasons.  The first reason was that I wanted what was equipped to be very important.  I didn't want players simply looking at the numbers and going "this is most optimal".  I wanted players thinking about what weapons they would be using and what armor they'd be equipping.  The second reason was that I wanted Skills to be unique affairs to nearly every monster and every character.  I have a few "Fast" characters that would rely on "Speed" stats to deal out their damage.  Sure, you could mash "Attack" with them, but that might not be the most effective method.  I have a few characters that have access to unique elemental abilities so that you might want to bring them along in certain areas.

Oh, there is a third reason I did this as well:  Variety in Equipment and Skills means you can have "overlap" in character coverage so that players don't accidently handicap themselves if they leave a certain character type at home.

Now, with your particular monsters, I likely would have made the larger one that was slower have a "tougher" hide and make sure you had to bring along a Mace or something to dispatch it.  The smaller one, I probably would have made weak to swords or axes or something.  On top of that, I would have gotten rid of the "Health Regen" thing as so early in the game, it's hard to balance (and it really doesn't leave you many places to go once you get further in development and need more gimmicks for monsters).  To be honest, I'd stick with one or two gimmicks per monster.  Loading them out with a lot of gimmicks can make fighting them somewhat tiresome and make programming them for balance a major nightmare.  If they are already hard to kill (with lots of HP or high defense), then you don't need an HP Regen.  Especially if one of the monsters is faster than the other and the other is noticeably slower.  You've already got two gimmicks on both of those monsters already.  Adding a third is just kind of overkill.

Here's why I think your "HP Regen" might be a major problem.  You see, Regen of any kind on a monster you fight usually indicates that it is an obstacle to overcome.  If it's early in the game that you run into this particular trait and you have no means to counter it, then it doesn't so much make the battle "stronger", as it makes the battle "grindtastic".  I would honestly only introduce things like "Regen" when the players have access to whatever means you want in order to "counter" that Regen.  Look at it from the other side of the table.  Would you give monsters a "Poison" attack if you didn't plan on introducing any type of "Antidote" method at the same time?  In short, your Regen state so early in the game is prolonging battles too much with no way for the player to counter it except "overwhelming force" which is just "mash attack until dead".

 

[hian]

@hian

But as these are first enemies, it is at least possible that the party doesn't yet have a diverse set of skills to hand, or even half the party present yet.

That shouldn't be a problem, it simply means you need to tailor the enemies to the skills and members you do have.This is essentially why any good RPG usually provides at least two skills or so at the beginning of the game in addition to the usual attack function .

Edit : FF10 did this really well.