Suppression, Overwatch, And Rockets: How Do I Firearms?

[ChamomileHasGames]

My current project is a sort of Final Fantasy VIII-ish kind of thing (not really, but that's the closest analogue and I don't want to open with four paragraphs describing the setting's tech level) where guns and swords are both valid military grade weapons because all engagements begin at like fifty feet away for some reason, nobody takes any cover, but also it takes like twelve shotgun blasts to bring someone down. As flippant as I am about how weird this is, I do want the setting to have put some thought into effective combined arms tactics, and for that I need some status effects. I know how they should work, but not how to actually program them into MV.

So the first pair of effects I want is overwatch and suppression. Overwatch means that any time a player or monster makes an attack, everyone on the other team with a longer range gets to counterattack. Melee characters deal tons of damage, but they're range 0, so if they charge in against unsuppressed enemies, every time they attack they will get hit by every single enemy with any kind of ranged attack. Machineguns and assault rifles are max range, so they can attack with impunity, because even the longest range enemies only ever match their range, never exceed it (and sniper rifles are a whole other thing I will worry about later). Submachine guns and shotguns are in between. A key thing here is that it doesn't matter who exactly you're targeting: If you charge across the battlefield to engage in melee, the guys with machine guns can still open up on you regardless of whether you're charging them or a melee enemy.

You get around this with suppression, which is the specialty of machine guns in particular. A lot of firearms should inflict one round of suppression automatically when they hit, but the Gunner class (and monsters with similar abilities) can spread it around entire enemy teams. Suppression has two major effects: First, it reduces the range of the suppressed creature to 0, so if the entire enemy team is suppressed, your own melee guys can run up and attack with impunity.

Can Yanfly's Counter Control handle this? I see stuff about proccing ally counters in the description on the Yanfly webpage, but does that mean counters can be triggered when an ally is hit, or only when an ally uses a specified skill?

Second, suppression interacts with the shotgun and grenades. The shotgun is very inaccurate at longer range but deadly up close, which I'm modeling by giving it a middling range, but about a 50% miss rate against unsuppressed enemies. Assault troopers with shotguns can trade mid-range gunfire without eating a bunch of enemy bullets like melee units, but you will definitely notice how much less accurate they are when they can't get up close. Similarly, grenades are very inaccurate against unsuppressed enemies, who can run away freely, but much more accurate against suppressed enemies, who either run out into the gunfire and die or stay behind cover with the grenade and die (for simplicity's sake, enemies always choose to stay with the grenade, because that way I can just model the grenade as being way more accurate against suppressed enemies - provided I can figure out how to do that).

I'm hoping there's some overlooked feature or plug-in that people know about that can handle this kind of thing?

The second effect I need to model is armor-piercing. This one's not as complex: If I use the Weapon Skill plug-in to make certain weapons with heavier ammo/blades hit with a formula like a.atk * 4 - b.def - 20, will that effectively reduce the target's DEF by 20 as an absolute value? Or will it subtract 20 from the damage dealt? What's the order of operations here? Will RPGMaker automatically stop DEF dropping to 0 or do I have to do something special for that? It's important that anti-personnel armor piercing like battle rifles and buster swords be capable of ignoring enemy DEF up to about 20 when they attack, as compared to the rocket launcher, which ignores much higher amounts of DEF so it can be used as a dedicated tank killer without one-shotting every other kind of boss enemy.

As an alternative, is there a way to give certain enemies a tag indicating they are big bois and make the rocket launcher have normal accuracy against them but terrible accuracy against everyone else? Then the rocket launcher can ignore all armor, period, and tanks can have astronomical DEF that makes any multiplier besides 0 inadequate, and other weapons can ignore half armor instead, but rocket launchers still won't be the go-to against boss enemies.

 

[ATT_Turan]

My personal advice - you will get more and better responses if your post is easier to read. For what your questions appear to actually be, your post is freaking huge. (and I did not carefully read all of it)

We don't need any thematic explanation at all to help with your mechanical questions. All you need to say is you are using the regular battle system but you want to implement firearms with different ranges.

And within each of your questions, we don't need a large paragraph of example usage - ask the question, then if someone needs further clarification, they'll ask you once they've engaged with the post.

What does range actually do? Is it just a comparative number? Are you using Yanfly's Rows to determine who can target whom? Where and how are you defining it?

Overwatch means that any time a player or monster makes an attack, everyone on the other team with a longer range gets to counterattack.

This is, to me, potentially the trickiest one. I don't see any way to integrate this with actual counter attacks, as all of the team members were not targeted by the attack. I think you would either:
- Run a process at the end of every action that may result in using Force Action to overwatch. I don't like this, because Force Action screws with the actual actions you have queued.

- Have a counterattack skill attached via Yanfly's Counter Control and use Yanfly's Action Sequences and some clever coding inside of that counter skill to determine which actors you see visually shooting.

Suppression has two major effects: First, it reduces the range of the suppressed creature to 0

Again, depends on how you're implementing range.

The shotgun is very inaccurate...about a 50% miss rate against unsuppressed enemies.

You can use Victor Engine's Hit Formula to give weapons their own hit formula which takes into account the presence of a specific state.

If I use the Weapon Skill plug-in to make certain weapons with heavier ammo/blades hit with a formula like a.atk * 4 - b.def - 20, will that effectively reduce the target's DEF by 20 as an absolute value? Or will it subtract 20 from the damage dealt? What's the order of operations here?

The order of operations is what you learned in grade school math So if you want the defense to be lowered before subtracted in the formula, you need to use parentheses: (b.def-20)

Will RPGMaker automatically stop DEF dropping to 0 or do I have to do something special for that?

The damage formula doesn't automatically do anything except prevent the result from being less than 0. The math you type in is the math it does.

You may want to take a look at this for some common mathematical/logical functions you might want to use in damage formulae:

Damage Formulas 101

Please note: A discussion has already been started about different things you can do with these formulas so please direct those comments and question to the appropriate thread. https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/rmmv-damage-formula-ideas-and-help.47099/ A link to the list of...

forums.rpgmakerweb.com

So the above would be Math.max(b.def-20, 0)

As an alternative, is there a way to give certain enemies a tag indicating they are big bois and make the rocket launcher have normal accuracy against them but terrible accuracy against everyone else?

You can either give them a passive state or a notetag, then check for that thing in the hit formula as referenced above.

 

[ChamomileHasGames]

My personal advice - you will get more and better responses if your post is easier to read. For what your questions appear to actually be, your post is freaking huge. (and I did not carefully read all of it)

More, yes, better, no. A consistent result of leaving out what the end result is supposed to actually look like is that I get answers that do answer the fragment of the real question I posted but which are useless as solutions for the full problem. Sure, I can lure people in with the promise that the question is simple and straightforward and then slowly pull back the curtain to reveal that actually it's much more complex (I mean, not that complex, but still several paragraphs), but then it would take me a week to get usable answers and people would waste more time composing responses that turn out to be useless because of missing context than they would reading all the context up front in the first place. Assuming average reading speed for adults, my first post takes all of three minutes to read. It would be very easy to consume more of someone's time, not less, by posting too little and having to add clarifications later.

What does range actually do? Is it just a comparative number? Are you using Yanfly's Rows to determine who can target whom? Where and how are you defining it?

Range is exactly what I said it was in the OP and that's it: Different weapons have different ranges, and you get an automatic overwatch attack whenever someone with a lower range attacks. I might use Yanfly's Rows for other reasons, but not for suppression or overwatch.

 

[SpyroFan67]

To be honest I've wanted to have shooting enemies in RPG Maker MV before for a while, but I don't know how to do it either. Guess we're both out of luck-for now.

 

[TheAM-Dol]

better, no

To be honest I've wanted to have shooting enemies in RPG Maker MV before for a while, but I don't know how to do it either. Guess we're both out of luck-for now.

I see you are getting those quality answers you were talking about.

 

[ChamomileHasGames]

I see you are getting those quality answers you were talking about.

...yes? ATT_Turan gave me the information I needed in less than six hours.

 

[TheAM-Dol]

Well, your response sure didn't seem like you got your answer. It seemed more defensive and unappreciative. You talked about how writing long answers gets you better response. Clearly my joke went over your head.

If someone writes out an equally long answer for you, let mainly that person, but also the other forum members know that you are appreciative of their answer. If you implement it, let us know if it worked so we can call a wraps on this thread. If it didn't work, give us some concise information about where things went wrong.

Imo;
Turan's response rate has no baring on the "length of information" provided. Turan is one of the most active forum members and one of the most helpful so even if you provided 3 bullet points of what you want to do, you probably would have seen Turan here regardless.

Edit:
Also funny how writing out a bunch of defensive stuff derails the conversation and slows down getting the answer. Just stay focused on what you need help with and say thanks when someone provides their time to assist you with your game make.

 

[ChamomileHasGames]

I already have the answer. You really want me disagreeing with an active forum regular to have some dire consequence, but no, the longer post demonstrably worked. You can imagine that maybe three bullet points would've worked too, but that hasn't been my experience.

Also, defensive? I explained why I disagreed with a thing someone said. You're the one who interpreted that as a personal attack. And then also shat on another poster basically at random. Quit trying to turn this into a flame war.

 

[SpyroFan67]

Whoa whoa hey guys, stop it with this drama. You're both turning this discussion thread into a soap opera!

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Hiya, so if the thread is solved, it should be reported to be closed. Since I’m here, this thread is closed due to being solved. If you find yourself needing the thread later, report it to let us know why. Thank you!