Question Re: Encounter Weight

[Golden Fish Entertainment]

Trying to determine exactly what the encounter weight values translate to in terms of "percentage chance of occurring". In other words, if we have five encounters, each with a different weight numbered 1-5, what percentage of the time will an encounter result in encounter four occurring?

Basically trying to figure out if there is a way to accurately predict the chance of facing specific monsters, and if not, is there a script anywhere out there that will allow better control over encounter rates? Dealing with some dungeons which are "specialized", and with only a handful of possible encounters we don't want the "rarest" enemy type to still be showing up 20% of the time.

 

[Andar]

Unfortunately the blogs (where I made a post explaining weigth) are currently offline.

Short answer - don't try to recalculate them as percentages, learn to read them directly because that is easier on development.

Example:
You have three enemies A B C with weights 5 10 and 20

The total weight here is 35, so enemy A will be encountered 5/35, enemy B 10/35 and enemy C 20/35

Now assume you add another enemy, D with weigth 15
Now the total weight is 50 and the numbers become for
A: 5/50
B: 10/50
C: 20/50
D: 15/50

But no matter how many enemies you add or remove, the relative numbers will remain: Because enemy B has a weight that is two times enemy A, it will always be double as often as enemy A.
Since D is three times A, that enemy will always be encountered three times as often as A (which will remain the rarest enemy), even if you suddenly delete enemy C (dropping the 20 for a total of 30 and the numbers becoming A 5/30, B 10/30 and D 15/30)

 

[Golden Fish Entertainment]

Okay, this is kind of what we were hoping was the case. So what you are saying is, using our example above, the "total weight" of encounters would be 15, so encounter 4 would have a 4/15 (~26%) chance of occurring. We were concerned that having too many of a certain weight would create weirdness with the encounter tables, but this works out very well for us.

Thanks!

EDIT: So just to be clear, the "rarest" enemies should be receiving the lowest weight, correct?

 

[Andar]

yes