MV How to make a faster-paced battle system?

[Aome]

Dear forum members,

So I've looked at some threads on this board about this and I have some ideas, but the threads are quite old and I'm wondering what your current opinions on this are.

I've been busy designing a sci-fi RPG prototype and I'm very happy with the way the battle system is turning out. But the better it's getting the slower it also gets. The balance is ok now after a lot of testing and I'm enjoying the way MP and TP are functioning. But the pace of the battles is slow because you constantly have to choose between using an MP or a TP skill, and it's not always quickly clear when you have enough MP or TP to use a skill from either category.

What do you change to make it faster paced. Do you change TP entirely to just automatically trigger a sort of overdrive mode doing lots of damage? Or do you just mix TP and MP skills together in the same sub-menu? Or do you lower the HP of the enemies and buff the skills?

 

[bgillisp]

What I did was I got rid of TP and used only MP. Then you only have to worry about one resource. Seems to have worked so far.

 

[Milennin]

I also only use MP. Less is more, and all that kind of stuff. Get rid of things that aren't really necessary, or merge them with existing things.

 

[MushroomCake28]

I kept the complexity, but made it that a player that is intended level in a dungeon can kill an enemy in that dungeon in 2 normal attacks max, or 1 skill. Now, with only 2-3 enemies per battle and 4 party members, the battle ends pretty quickly.

 

[OmnislashXX]

I put more enemies in the game, varied them so that the group's that appear aren't always the same, there may be more or less enemies, and I make the enemies HP low enougn so that they don't take an infinite amount of time to kill.

 

[bgillisp]

@MushroomCake28 : I actually did something similar too, where I used a spreadsheet to determine what the average player's stats would be (and level) for that dungeon, and used that to tell me what an average monster's stats would need to be to match, using also how many hits with a physical attack did I want them to fall to. Early dungeons used 3 - 4 hits as they are meant to be quick, but it does go up as the game progresses.

Still it results in a really fast battle system if you keep up with the intended levels. Now if a player underlevels...that's another story.

 

[MushroomCake28]

@bgillisp Yup! I think that is good approach since that way you don't need t compromise on animation and pace. And if people are really concerned about battle time, we can just reduce a bit the encounter rate.

 

[Aome]

What I did was I got rid of TP and used only MP. Then you only have to worry about one resource. Seems to have worked so far.

I also only use MP. Less is more, and all that kind of stuff. Get rid of things that aren't really necessary, or merge them with existing things.

I think that's a great system! Do you then use mana regeneration or rely on resting an potions to regain mana?
Right now I'm using a mana regen system, and tp gain by both getting hit and hitting. This way the battle starts slow but escalates. If you're low on health or doing a lot of damage, you get access to crazier skills that require tp. But I'm still looking for ways to have more "action" or even more escalation, maybe with a combo point system where if you use the tp skills multiple time the damage escalates.

I kept the complexity, but made it that a player that is intended level in a dungeon can kill an enemy in that dungeon in 2 normal attacks max, or 1 skill. Now, with only 2-3 enemies per battle and 4 party members, the battle ends pretty quickly.

I put more enemies in the game, varied them so that the group's that appear aren't always the same, there may be more or less enemies, and I make the enemies HP low enougn so that they don't take an infinite amount of time to kill.

I agree I think low HP enemies are a must if you want the battles to have a quick pace! The more HP I give the enemies the slower everything becomes. I think a high HP enemy needs some very interesting moves to make the battle interesting.

 

[Milennin]

I think that's a great system! Do you then use mana regeneration or rely on resting an potions to regain mana?

I always go for an MP management system that has various skills refund MP as they're used. Also makes for useful support characters beyond healers or stat buffers.

 

[MushroomCake28]

I think high HP enemies should be kept for minibosses, bosses, or event battles.

 

[bgillisp]

Personally I just went with here's your MP pool and the cost of the skills, now try to make it last. Most dungeons I let you find an item that will refill some MP to the entire party at the halfway point just in case, and there is also a healing crystal the party can use to restore all MP, though those are usually either at the start or end of the dungeon (depending on if the player can leave the dungeon or not). Outside of that, it's bring potions.

Though to aid in that I did have one party member give you a collection of potions when they joined, so that you have a good starting base. You even get one potion I call the get out of jail free potion which restores all your HP and MP, but you are given a warning that you will probably *never* find another one all game, so use it when you really need it (and they are right to a degree. I hid one more in a secret room in Chapter 9, and the 2nd to last boss drops one when defeated. That's it for that potion all game).

Of course, your overall numbers do matter too. In my game you will probably hit level 56 - 60 in the last dungeon (based on my playing) and by then you got a couple party members who have 999 MP (the cap in my game on max MP) and the ultimate skills cost 150 MP, everything else is 70 MP or less.

MP regeneration is rare, though I did make one character who uses G for skills who can use a skill to restore MP at the cost of some of the party's gold.

 

[Aome]

MP regeneration is rare, though I did make one character who uses G for skills who can use a skill to restore MP at the cost of some of the party's gold.

Good times !!

Sounds like your game ended up very balanced, that's great.

 

[bgillisp]

Thanks. It took a *long* time though, first, second and third drafts of it were very broken. But I made just enough to work and test the game, and bosses were just random easy numbers so I could continue the game for now, and once the plot was done the balance was finalized.

I'm sure there are still ways to break it, but then again, no game is perfectly balanced. And if you are making a single player game, I don't believe it needs to be perfectly balanced anyways. In fact, some players enjoy finding ways to break a game, or seeing how broken of a build they can win with (either a good build or a very poor build).

Funny thing is, I actually was able to figure out how to beat my game, but I ran from every random fight. Only did the mandatory fights for the entire game. Was about 20 levels underleveled at the end, and I had to know my boss patterns by heart to have a chance as I had to know when to attack and when to guard as I had no chance of surviving skill x this low level, but it IS doable.

 

[TheoAllen]

I'm going in the opposite direction. I removed MP and only use TP entirely. The way I designed my game, it's going to be broken if I use MP system because most of the skills are quite overpowered on its own.

Also, it depends on what do you mean by fast-paced. You seem to like to consider a fast-paced battle as the battle that ends quickly, or not confusing about what skill to use. Meanwhile, I interpreted it as the battle that will make both parties suffer a lot of damage in a few turns. If you mean a battle that ends quickly is just as simple as reducing their overall hp.

 

[mobiusclimber]

I'm going the overdrive route. Different attacks and skills fill your TP gauge at different rates. When it hits 100%, a (usually) screen-clearing skill automatically goes off. That way there's still some strategy involved, but I and the player have less to worry about than if it was a typical TP system.

 

[TWings]

As MushroomCake28 and bgillisp pointed out, making sure the player can beat the average enemy fast enough is a way to do it. I too tend to balance enemies HP (and all the stats for that matter) according to the average player's level.
Then there's no really fast tracking the player's thinking/selection process, so unless you make a really basic combat system, the more the skills/possibilities, the longer it will take to choose.
As for my use of MP / TP, I use MP for magic and TP for skills, so most of the time a character can only use one of those. Having x MP skills and y TP skills on the same character can indeed get potentially messy.

 

[Kes]

[move]Game Mechanics Design[/move]

 

[Aesica]

I turned TP into a limit break gauge, and since it resets after battle, it's really only something the player has to think about using in longer boss fights. Even though I'm not trying to make my fights short (I want the battle system to be fun, not something the player feels they have to spam through) I still want to note the importance of having at least a good amount of weak-hp mooks that can be killed in around 1-2 hits. Boss fights should of course be higher hp, but I also really like the idea of strong mooks that feel like minibosses.

Disclaimer: I use visible encounters and the enemy events either stand still and are defeated permanently or wander randomly and respawn on map change (no chasing BS though) so the player has near-complete control over whether or not to engage. This is so that the player can be in the mindset of "I'm ready to engage this fight" rather than "god another !%#@%#ing random encounter asfkajs mash through it!"

 

[Wavelength]

Although you've already seen it @Aome, I'll go ahead and copy-paste what I said in a similar thread a while back since it will be useful for any new members browsing this topic:

• Eliminate unnecessary menu navigation. For example, get rid of the Fight/Escape party command phase and add "Escape" as an Actor Command. Add Hotkeys for common actions such as "Attack" so you can choose them with a single button press, and/or allow Hotkey setup so the player can assign keys to their 3 or 4 favorite skills. Provide ways to organize long lists (like the player's Inventory of items).
• Use clear pictures/icons instead of text whenever possible. This is mostly only a "feel" thing, but it will make your battle feel faster, and if you do a good job, your player will actually recognize the actions he wants to take quicker, thus speeding up the total battle time.
• Err toward higher damage and lower HP. Battle balance is very contextual based on your game, but in general you can achieve quicker (and much more exciting) battles by leaning toward relatively high damage and low HP for both characters and enemies.
• Keep battle animations short. No one wants to sit through the same 6-second animation on the hundredth time that they use a summon. So keep them short, and if possible, give the player an easy way to speed them up or skip them.
• Don't create resource crunches. There are certain games (dungeon-crawlers in particular) that need the Resource Crunch to be effective, but if we're just looking to create fast-paced battles, characters that use non-renewable resources (like traditional MP/Mana) to unleash their mid-damage actions (like a mage's standard spells) should have access to copious amounts of that resource, so the player isn't discouraged from freely using those spells. More often, it's good design to give casters a resource that renews during battle (or at least after each battle) that they can use to load big damage onto enemies.
• Add a "Rush" mode. "Rush" modes usually just automatically give the "Attack" command to each character, but there are ways to make a more tactical Rush mode as well. This mode is good if your game has the potential to swamp the enemy with easy battles (such as a traditional RPG that has backtracking and random battles).

I'll also go ahead and add one more tip to increasing the pace of your battle system, which is Speed Up Decided Battles. Have a mechanic in place to make the end of battles that have already (for all intents and purposes) been decided as quick as possible. When your team has dusted 3 out of the 5 monsters in a random enemy troop and are no worse for wear, the last 2 monsters are unlikely to provide any kind of challenge or engaging dynamics. It's just kind of a slog to the end of the battle - and that slog can even be the entire battle if, for example, your party is twenty levels above the enemy troop because you're backtracking to an earlier dungeon that has random encounters.

You might solve this "slow ending" issue with a systemic approach (for example increasing the damage that all battlers deal and take every time an enemy dies), or with very careful kit design (for example a very powerful area of effect skill that renders the user helpless for a few turns after using it). The goal is to extend the challenge of battles that might have otherwise been Decided, and also to increase the speed of battles that actually are Decided.

Or do you just mix TP and MP skills together in the same sub-menu?

Speaking specifically to this point, mixing the skills together is not something I usually do, but there may be games where it's appropriate. My advice would be:

• If MP skills and TP skills are qualitatively different in some other way besides the resource they use - such as all MP skills being Instant Casts, or TP skills all being self-buffs, or all TP skills are Limit Breaks - then separate them into two different commands/lists.
• If there's no qualitative difference, the Number of skills that you have could be a good way to determine whether to split or combine them. I usually find that 6 to 10 skills off of a single command is a good number. So if you have 3 TP skills and 4 MP skills for a character, it's likely a good idea to combine them, whereas if you have 8 TP skills and 8 MP skills, I'd definitely split them.

 

[Aesica]

For example, get rid of the Fight/Escape party command phase and add "Escape" as an Actor Command.

While I agree with your post overall, I have mixed feelings on this one particular part. I'm a big fan of making the primary command list short--around 4 lines and no scrolling required. Adding escape to every actor's command list only adds extra bloat for players to navigate through, despite being 1 less window. In my game, actors only have 4 things in their command list right now:

• Attack (or whatever variant the equipped weapon provides)
• [Actor-specific skill command]
• Magic
• Item

I want guard to be on the list as well, but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do that without adding to the aforementioned bloat. Maybe press right on the command list to access it, final fantasy style?

Anyway, I'm currently using Yanfly's ATB plugin and I think it handles the Fight/Formation/Escape menu close to perfectly. In particular, the Fight/Formation/Escape command window is suppressed normally, skipping straight to an actor's command list when their ATB gauge hits 100%. Yet, if you still want to escape or change party members, you can press cancel on any actor's command list to bring it up.

- - -

Edit: This next part is meant to be in general, but one thing I found that really helps speed up combat animations is using Yanfly's action sequence system. While making spells that I want to be usable on either on or all enemies/allies, I got fed up with how it played out, with the animation playing on every single target, slowly, one at a time, so I made my own relatively simple action sequence intended to omit the "wait for animation" parts:

<Target Action>
perform action
action animation: target
action effect: target
death break
perform finish
</Target Action>

It looks like this in battle:

Note that this is for a single target effect meant to also be usable as an aoe. aoe-only effects aren't as annoyingly slow.