Massive Battle Party Versus Small Battle Party?

[LuLingqi1]

Hey guys! So today I finally found two plugins I needed to get SOME of what I want my game to get! Yanfly's godly Party System and Battle Row!


So, my overall final True End Route party is made up of 12 Characters. I first thought, okay a six man party is great. Then when I got the battle row plug in, I was like, wait, I can go even higher to about 8. And then it dawned on me, I could use all 12 characters in the battle party if I wished and did some moving properly. This would open up to some cool balancing mechanics, and make my class system feel more streamlined as everyone would be usable and in the fight and all the different build paths with classes and equipment could be best optimized. I also found this way there'd be no "UGH THIS CHARACTER IS USELESS CAUSE SO AND SO IS BETTER"


So, I would like to ask you guys, what are your thoughts on Smaller Versus Bigger battle parties? -- This is of course speaking in terms of when your overall party is more than say 6 people? --

 

[InBlast]

I prefer smaller parties, because I like to know more about the heros. With 12 characters, it's hard to be really interested on the stories. 

 

[ShadowHawkDragon]

One thing you've got to remember is enemy troop size and strength. The larger the battle party the more actions per turn you get and the easier it is to wipe the enemy before they get a chance to act (also party wide attacks/heals become more potent).
The biggest problem would be bosses, in Blue Dragon against the last boss you have five characters, that was 5 attacks to his every 1 (not including speed boosts for more actions), not surprisingly the fight was easy as pie (mmm, pie....) and you want to have 12 attacks base O.O



Basically every fight will have to be designed with large troop numbers in mind and what will happen if the player 'focus attacks'


Imagine a fight against 8 enemies, lets say 4 attacks on average kills 1, with 12 attacks you can focus down 3 in the first turn putting the returning enemy attacks down to 5 (not factoring speed) then 2...


I for one prefer to work with smaller numbers, for example I plan to have 6-8 characters max with a battle party of 3, however I also intend to allow mid-battle party switching so everyone could have the chance to fight if wanted/needed despite the small party limit.

 

[RogdagoR]

I like small parties too, even if my character pool is big, 4-5 i think is fine, otherwise will be hell balance everything with 12 man party.


I like to think how to set up my party at the best before each important fight, so with a decent pool of character with unique ability to choose is gonna be my favourite way.

 

[Neo Soul Gamer]

Small parties for me. Why not compromise and grant the ability to switch party members out with only 3-4 active at a time?

 

[kaukusaki]

it all depends on the game i'm writing. I'm used to doing 2-4 characters from my d&d days, otherwise i'm rolling between 4-6. 12 isn't unheard of. just make sure your enemies have a chance to whack your pc's!

 

[LuLingqi1]

I feel that I feel that. I was thinking for boss fights, they would just get turns in between during the cycle, as well as mobs of enemies going well past like, 12 lol. I'unno. xD

 

[Blackyu]

My recent games are all humoristic games, so I'd say the bigger the party, the better it is. My last game had 8 characters straight, and I still managed to make the Secret Final Boss insanely hard due to his multi-target attacks, multiple turns, huge amount of HP (He has two forms, a normal form with 700000 HP, and an even stronger form with 250000 HP), and his high chances of One-Hit KO-ing someone.


Of course, a party with a lot of characters is hard to manage properly, so you should avoid complicated gameplay and stick to "simple" movesets. For example, you have to let the player know that Actor X is a fire mage (giving X a fire and mage moveset), Y is a berserker warrior (so Y has mostly strong physical attacks), and so on. However, as long as you keep the battle party clean and fairly understandable, there shouldn't be any problem with a total of 12 characters if you're able to make ennemies an actual threat (good luck with that, 12 is still a quite large amount of different movesets and abilities to wipe the map from any randomly encountered baddies.)

 

[LuLingqi1]

Well, so far, I've had to tune and change direction a lot, just with each character's initial class. I was originally thinking of giving each characters 50 skills per class, since like, a class can't go past level 99 (for now). Then I found myself realizing, even with initial scaling due to damages and stuff, character skills weren't getting stronger, they were just sort of, sitting there stagnant. Then came the introduction of Fire, Fire 2, etc etc. WHICH I HATE. I always hated how in games like FF you had like Fire, Firaja, Firaga, etc etc. And they were just stronger versions of one another, and sort of, were like, okay I'm gonna use this version till im low on mana and have to use the weaker version. So then I decided to do forced upgrades to skills. The fire mage, for instance, starts with Fire, but at around level 15 it becomes Flame, and then like level 45 it becomes Scorch, so on and so forth.

Spoiler

Something else I wanted to make note of, specifically for my case is that, I have one character, whom all 3 of his classes do NO damage. His first class revolves around learning about the monsters (he's a walking-talking libra skill). With this class, he's a strong support class who is more of a disable-based "fighter". He can disrupt charge abilities, remove buffs from monsters, and apply special debuffs that only certain characters can interact with. His next class is about "record" keeping. The name might be changed as, story wise, he's not the one writing down about the party's journey. However, with this class, he is able to support his allies in a myriad of ways. One skill I'm working on for him allows him to add a string of skills to allies for the battle. His final class is still a support, but he is able to buff allies and debuff enemies although to less extents than his other two classes, and has skills that can push make an enemy useless for a turn or two. While he is the only class as of right now that has ZERO damaging abilities, I figured that would be worth noting since I've never seen that before, and I feel like it can help be what keeps the party balanced from having easy clear times lol

TLDR; Some of my classes do significantly less damage to literally no damage, but have usefulness in other ways.


Right now, 9 of the 12 characters have 3 classes. Two have 2 classes, and one has only 1 class. There's also tons of subclasses that give way less skills, but nice augments to stats and some party abilities.


There isn't much of an issue so far from what I've battle tested using six man and eight man parties. The issue comes in the form of row formation, and I just need to brush up on some scripting for it. A lot of skills flow, and a lot of characters have synergy. This is of course only talking about their first class, as that is what I'm currently working on. Monsters have significantly better stats than the player characters, and a good amount of skills as well and virtually no costs/cooldowns. Most of the actors have one or two ultimate abilities, that have high cooldowns, or high costs.


The biggest problem I'm having is the build paths for each character. In the main game, it's not going to be utilized fully as of right now, since I have classes unlocked via leveling up. However, in the second game mode -- actually i guess it would be called third, since the New Game+ is going to be a bit more different than the original story --, it works a lot easier as each character is pre-unlocked with all their classes set, and you can like mix and match your party before entering a battle.


Parties are confusing man.

 

[Blackyu]

Oh, you seem to have a very distinct idea of how you will manage everything, so I'm not gonna reply a lot about this. Still, don't put too much supporting classes, I've tried programming only one and it was already hard to make a big enough moveset.


In any case, your game already looks quite cool, looking forward to it !

 

[LuLingqi1]

I think a lot of people misunderstand what support really means, and that's why a lot of the time, they can't think of good movesets.


Buffing/Debuffing is probably the most basic type of skill set for a support, but disruption, lock down, etc etc also work wonders for supports.

 

[Blackyu]

I think a lot of people misunderstand what support really means, and that's why a lot of the time, they can't think of good movesets.

...Are you implying something ? è.é


Cuz, I most definitely and totally know what a support class is ! I...uh...have a friend who...plays a lot of RPGs ? (Am I convincing enough ?)


By the way, could you explain to me (maybe in PM) what disruption, lock down, etc might be ? I probably only know them in French, so the more I can learn in English, the better it'll be.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

I think to balance out having twelve characters in your party, you are going to need at least that many to keep every run of the mill battle from turning into a beat down. You'll also need to find a way to adjust the turn rate, so that when your party is fighting a boss, your party doesn't get to hit them twelve times in a row, followed by one attack from the boss, rinse & repeat. 


The only turn based RPG games I can think of where such a large party worked was the Shining Force games; if you've never played them they have a very different battle system than most RPG Maker games. In the shining force games the standard enemy battles had a party of equivalent size to your own, & you had to close distance over terrain which effected individual mobility of each character, based upon their archetype. For example flying characters didn't suffer terrain penalties, centaurs had much higher mobility, spellcasters tended not to have very high mobility, etcetera. & in the boss battles the boss would often get to attack after every third or fourth character moved, & most of their attacks would strike multiple party members each time. So often you would have your party in formations with support characters hopefully beyond the range of enemies, your tank line trying to limit enemies movements, & your DPS characters working the flanks to bring them down. Honestly it played more like an early version of an MMO I suppose.


So I am not saying it can't be done, you are just going to have to find a way to balance out just how much force your twelve person party is bringing to bear in comparison to the enemies, & do so without completely overrunning the battle field visually as well.