Promoting Strategy

[Astfgl66]

I find that the issue of not knowing boss pattern is a design issue.
Nothing prevents you from foreshadowing things. Your bosses aren't supposed to come out of nowhere, that's just lazy writing.
Your party could find notes about the boss laying around, it could even be the point of sidequests, or random chat with townspeople.
Let's say your enemy is a famous general from an empire, don't you think that his strategy or skills would be known a bit in the world?
Your boss monster lives in a forest ? There's a village nearby, people have lived near it their entire lives and have heard things about it. Some of it may be right, some of it may be wrong, but the player can certainly prepare. Maybe they'll learn that this boss monsters enrages when they smell blood, they should then prioritize healing wounds so that the boss doesn't enrage. Maybe your boss is an assassin and is known for going for the easy kills. Your players can then choose between defending weak party members, prioritizing healing, or even rezzing over and over the same character so that other characters are untouched.

Likewise your dungeon surrounding the boss should contain any add ons the boss battle may have around, so they can get used to their gimmicks before you turn things around.

It creates a situation where players can prepare and bring a specialized party for the fight, or just rush in with a generalist party and have a hard time. It gives your player a choice, and that's the most important thing about video games.

I'll join the few posters who have mentionned alternate objectives. Nothing prevents you from saying that this battle is just survive for X turn, that X enemy must be dealt with first before you can escape or it will overwhelm you with summons,...

If your enemy and encounter design is just putting enemies dealing increasing amounts of damage through inflated stats, don't be surprised your players will do the same thing.

 

[kirbwarrior]

While Final Fantasy 7 boiled down to using the strongest attack at the end, there were many neat steps before getting there, and the part i think many people enjoyed was placing their materia (spells and enhancements) into correct pairs to get new effects.

I think that's a part some people miss is the strategy that takes place out of battle that's used for beating battles. Both Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler are some games that I've seen where random encounters aren't beaten by some huge strategy in battle but by setting everything up prebattle to efficiently deal with them (it helps that both reward you for both not taking damage and winning on first turn).

2. Cost Vs. Usefulness. Players are insanely stingy. If an ability is barely better than the base attack... man, I'm just gonna use the base attack. I mean, it's free!

That's more a thing of efficiency and attrition. In fact, for a long time I basically didn't use skills/spells in combat because that MP was either "necessary" for beating the boss and/or better used in casting heals between combat...

1. My skills in general have reasonable MP costs and there's a lot of MP recovery abilities, so the player shouldn't feel like they have to hoard MP until they reach the boss or some other hard fight.

..and I required a friend to break my of this mentality. In fact, I've been going back and playing older games with the thought of trying to actually use skills. I'm actually surprised how often MP recovery becomes a simple affair :L Part of it might be that buying MP heal items early on is prohibitively expensive and so I never think to buy them later.

But the problem is still in not knowing what is coming ahead. Even in some pretty incredible and complex rpgs (including Maker) that I've played, I don't know what I'll need ahead of time so the goal is to make sure that I'm both ready for anything and capable of fighting the boss at full capability.

that X enemy must be dealt with first before you can escape or it will overwhelm you with summons

That's a neat idea. Now I'm thinking of a boss fight where defeating one enemy is the major boss and wins you the battle, but a secondary enemy is constantly summoning threats and it's not easy to defeat the summoner. Priority shifting, especially midbattle, can absolutely change things up.

(I still feel pretty dumb to this day, some games are so much easier when you actually spend MP XD)