Spamming the Attack Button

[GoodSelf]

I'm early in my testing, and I'm working on balancing out skills and stats using a bunch of Yanfly's plugins (which can be found here).
I think my math is correct so far, but I've come to another issue:
I win battles by spamming the attack button.


Now obviously, this is poor design on my part, and I want very much to remedy this.
Do i just make a basic attack deal little to no damage? Or perhaps put a negative effect on using it?
How have you managed this problem in your game, or how have you seen it managed in other games you've played?


Thanks for time 

 

[Alexander Amnell]

   Personally I got rid of it completely, as a general rule the free attack is nothing more than a cop out for poor balancing in games but by nerfing it you don't really improve upon it so much as make it useless. Instead I use an easily recovering (as well as partially regenerated each turn) stamina resource for physical skills, with weaker attacks draining around  what you'd recover in a turn to the most powerful attacks draining 75% of the bar in one go, and also making each % point in the stamina bar increase that character's defense so that 100% stamina will have a character's or enemy's physical defense double it's standard and adding more depth to what moves the player selects other than just saving up and using the most powerful attacks in a pointless cycle as using the powerful finishing moves can easily end a battle turns quicker but if you jump the gun and blow your stamina to soon you can find yourself open to a deadly retaliation. 

 

[sabao]

If you're breezing through by just spamming attack, there might be a few problems with your enemy units:


HP too low?

• The cheapest way to pad out a fight is have the enemy unit have a lot of health. This urges on the player to roll out high damage output skills to take out larger chunks of the enemy's health over the smaller bits normal attacks deal out. Make those skills worth burning MP for!
  

Too vanilla?

• Perhaps your enemy units aren't a large enough threat to the party. Slap on a few surprise skills or other mechanics that will force players to go on the defensive or shift strategies on certain turns! Maybe the guy has a big attack that takes out a huge chunk of your party's health, forcing the team to regroup and heal for a turn. Maybe the guy has a defensive skill that nulls physical damage for a turn (or has a natural resistance to physical attacks), forcing players to try out different approaches for attacks.
  
  Mix it up! Your maths behind the stats might be sound, but battles are all about adding different variables to the mix.
  

Some other stuff to consider:

• Are these for boss fights or random/normal encounters? In some cases, normal encounters where you do nothing but spam attack is permissible, but with boss encounters, these usually shouldn't fly unless the player ground his/her characters above the recommended level of an area.
  
• How's your encounter rate? If you're shooting for the less frequent, more meaningful fights, spamming attacks won't fly. If you're shooting for more encounters, a few fights the players can breeze by shouldn't be a problem.
  

 

[RHachicho]

Personally I think the basic attack should be nerfed to the point where the only purpose it serves is to give a skillblocked character something to do and to build some tp to use a skill. If you are just spamming attack and winning battles and taking little to no damage in return then that is very boring combat.


Personally one of the things I like to do is give some enemies very high hp but then I create skills that work together to stack buffs and debuffs on players/targets to the extent that a skill that normally does middling damage can wreck it's face. That way an enemy has to be prepared for a takedown. And seeing that big damage go on when you have finished prep and murderize it is a satisfying experience for the player I feel. For example I have a "charge" skill on one of my classes that uses a special item that gives a special "state" that lasts for 1 turn and doubles the damage of their next spell. Not only does that put more supply management in the game outside of combat. But if you combine that with a mdf down debuff you're going to do serious dmg.


I also make use of taunt and taunt ignoring effects. Yanfly has a script for this. And it means that you can focus healing and defensive stuff and build a wall. Which also means that you can make enemy attack damage so high that they have to do this to live. This work's very well with stuff like absorption shields. And I fully intend to use his new "cyclone" script to create crowd control effects. Neutralizing especially dangerous enemies until they can be tackled solo. I am using CTB for my combat system. So I also have skills that make an allies turn come faster. Or delay an enemies turn. Need a bit of extra time to get the tank up? .. Why not cc/delay the more dangerous enemies. If you don't tank dies .. and then everyone else does in short order. Obviously include some aoe and random damage that bypasses taunt so the game doesn't purely become an exercise in creating an invincible tank. But sometimes without "tanking" I feel like you are just trying to blanket the team in buffs and heals. And that somehow seems less controlled and interesting. And also means you can't give enemies enough power to 1 shot the weakest defense characters. At least not in general play. But you can if there was supposed to be tank taking that hit


This is how I plan to create my combat system. It's mostly modeled after my time in wow and other mmo's As well as a little grandia turn order influencing thrown in.

 

[sabao]

Personally I think the basic attack should be nerfed to the point where the only purpose it serves is to give a skillblocked character something to do and to build some tp to use a skill. If you are just spamming attack and winning battles and taking little to no damage in return then that is very boring combat.

Why provide players a mechanic/playing choice that functionally does nothing of benefit? I mean I'm for creating more meaningful experiences for players in battle, but making Attack a choice players would outright feels like it would be better off to just remove the command entirely.

 

[RHachicho]

Why provide players a mechanic/playing choice that functionally does nothing of benefit? I mean I'm for creating more meaningful experiences for players in battle, but making Attack a choice players would outright feels like it would be better off to just remove the command entirely.

Giving a skillblocked character something to do is still meaningful. Having a way to get TP when you have zero is still meaningful. It just won't do much damage. Attack is meaningful .. it just isn't for killing people with. I get where you're coming from. But I feel if you remove the basic "Attack" you're just going to have to put that kind of functionality in elsewhere. Might as well be there really.


It also allows you to pace the opening couple of turns of a fight. I always start my combats with zero tp. So I know I can plan the enemies abilities around them not having enough for them in the first turn or two. Which gives the players time to prepare. This also allows me to limit player possibilities and force the players into making preparation moves. Such as attacking to build up tp for a 10tp charger or defense skill as an opening move. This way combat isn't just WHAM spam best skills and win. It builds up over 2/3 turns and then the big damage starts flying. And the way the player has prepared for this will greatly affect the outcome of the battle. Basic attack is part of that preparatory arsenal for classes that don't really use mp much.


At least for me .. I mean I could see you making a system that doesn't need it. I just don't really see the need to. It serves it's purpose

 

[Wavelength]

The answer to this depends on a lot of other factors, such as where you want the challenge in your game to lie (if it's long-term depletion of resources throughout a dungeon, then winning a single random encounter using nothing but Attack is okay, for example) and - like @sabao mentioned, whether the Attack Only strategy is viable in boss battles (really bad) or ordinary encounters (not as bad, though still not good design).


But the main piece of advice I usually give for this issue is to encourage the player to use skills (and other non-attack actions) in combat.  The most direct way to do this is to give your characters resources (used to pay for skills) that either "reset" at the end of combat or easily refill over time.  This way, the player doesn't feel torn about using skills versus needing to save up the resource.  As @RHachicho mentioned, 'Attack' will still be a useful tool to have if you're temporarily too low on this resource and need something to do for a turn or two.  Along with that, you have to make the enemies threatening enough to warrant, in the player's mind, the extra few seconds she will spend considering which skill to use and selecting it (instead of just mashing 'Attack') - unlike sabao, I believe that increasing the enemies' offensive power is usually a far better way to do this than increasing their HP.  Only increase their HP if playtesters report that enemies fell too quickly.


There are lots of other ways to encourage skill usage (everything from giving bonus rewards for defeating enemies with skills to placing cooldowns on every type of action), but most are specific to the mechanics you want to build into your system.  The above combination of renewable resources and threatening enemies is a direct way to improve your combat design from "poor" to "pretty good" in almost any RPG you can come up with, though.

 

[GoodSelf]

Thanks for everyone's feedback - this is currently for random encounters, not boss battles.


i feel like raising the ATK of my monsters can help with this, and maybe make the Attack skill deal slightly less damage.


Another thing I should mention is that Skills have a Cooldown - you'll have to wait 4 turns before you can use a certain ability again.

 

[Arithmetician]

@GoodSelf  4 turns may be excessive for cool downs, unless the skills are very powerful, especially because that works in a contrary manner to discouraging Attack spams.  Try varying the cool downs a bit.

 

[GoodSelf]

@GoodSelf  4 turns may be excessive for cool downs, unless the skills are very powerful, especially because that works in a contrary manner to discouraging Attack spams.  Try varying the cool downs a bit.

Exactly my thoughts too. Perhaps I'll take out cool downs all together to promote more use of skills, or at least make the maximum Cooldown 2 for the best skills.

 

[Arithmetician]

@GoodSelf  1-2 turns would probably work for cool downs for most skills that have them, while 3-4 turns could be saved for more powerful skills.  That said, you should probably at least have some basic skills that don't use cool downs so that the player can reliably use them when needed (though obviously at the cost of some resource, like MP)

 

[GoodSelf]

I've been thinking of ideas  to encourage players to use skills over spamming attack, and would love some feedback.


What if every time a skill is used, I increase a variable by 1. The player can then exchange these points for items or gold at certain shops.


In addition to lowering cool downs and slightly increasing the attack of monsters, I hope this makes skills more approachable.


Any thoughts on this?

 

[Arithmetician]

@GoodSelf  If you're using variables with skills, perhaps you could work in some sort of "chaining" system, were using different types of skills could provide increased damage or other benefits.


Earning some sort of points you can exchange is also fine.  Just be sure that there's a reason why the proprietors will accept these points.

 

[Wavelength]

As far as cooldowns - the people telling you to lower them might be right, but they might not be.  Try different cooldown lengths and see what feels the most satisfying.  In the game I'm currently working on, the most common Cooldown length is 2 full turns (meaning that using a skill on Turn 1 means the next time you can use it is Turn 4), but a few skills (usually ones that grant a powerful, long-lasting status effect) have cooldowns of up to 6 full turns, and a few skills are deliberately overtuned a bit in their power but have a cooldown of "can only be used once per battle".


As a rule of thumb - the cooldown length is too long if your player finds himself unhappy with all currently-available skills more than 10% of the time, and it may be too short if your player is ignoring more than 20% of your skills (that are supposed to be relevant based on level, etc.) because there's always something better available (either that or your skill balancing is off).

 

[Hoppy]

I pretty much made it quite hard and in some cases impossible to just spam the attack button to win against almost all bosses and some random enemies, my games revolves around elements (every skill and weapon has at least one element) and there's skills with 2-4 elements at once, lots of reflect, null, and absorbing elements going on from the beginning not to mention special rules for specific enemies that can make attack command spamming ineffective or useless in some cases.

 

[RydiaMist]

It really depends on your game's design. If you're making a classic style RPG with a lot of encounters, making them winnable by attack spam with healing as needed as long as you're leveled up enough is fine. A game where every single encounter requires strategy, thought and time starts to get very, very grating when you're going to be fighting 20+ battles per area. A lot of RM games these days seem to fall into this trap. Since nobody wants to be accused of having simple combat, they over-complicate every single encounter and the game becomes a huge slog.


If your game has very few encounters, then it is much more important to make every encounter engaging and interesting. And of course, you should never have attack spam be a good boss strategy unless you're ridiculously overleveled or have some sort of build via accessories/skill trees/whatever that focuses on making standard attacks powerful at the cost of something else (but you mentioned this is for random battles, anyway).


An easy way to discourage attack spam without completely devaluing the ability would be to simply make normal attacks have their own element, and make specific enemies resistant to that element. Or use a plugin that lets you add resistances to specific skill IDs. Alternately, you can just make base ATK low, and give skills crazy high damage multipliers... but doing this may cause some skills to be way overpowered.


What I'd suggest to discourage attack spam without just making it useless is to have skills that improve with use. If players just mash attack all the time, they'll find that their skills are underpowered when they get to the boss and they need them. Your idea of a skill use shop is interesting, but I can see how that may become difficult to manage in a larger game.

 

[LaFlibuste]

Ok, I haven,t read everything, but another idea would be to give enemy groups dynamic so that mindlessly spamming "attack" would fail. I'm thinking directly on Chrono Trigger, though I'm sure other games I can't think off the top of my head do that too. Here are some enemy group dynamics CT uses:


- Duos or trios of monster, if you attack the main thing first, the other two counter-attack violently (and/or the main thing is immune).


- Timed vulnerability window, were monsters can't be damaged/will counter-attack violently if attacked at the wrong time.


- Triggered vulnerability, like the dinosaurs or that side-quest giant skeleton under the desert: Dinosaurs had very high defence until you shocked them with lightning, which reduced it for a short while. Some had the ability of storing electricity and unleashing a powerful electric attack after a few times. The skeleton was basically the same but with water hardening the sand.


- Of course, something that you might not be able to reproduce as well as CT because it was one of its battle system's more memorable quirks, but ennemies moving around and skills with different zones and patterns to hit multiple ennemies.


And I think there were more but it doesn't come to mind right now, but that's the basic idea: force the player to use certain skills at certain times to trigger desired effects, force him to observe ennemies and the flow of battle to determine when and what command to apply, etc. Not make "attack" useless so much as find a way to limit its universality.