Combat Discussion

[Ilium]

combat

[Ilium]

First Combat Test

Squire vs. Squire

Second Combat Test

Squire vs. Goblin

[Mordred]

If you're going to keep the paradigm in which each player character is locked down into a specific role based on an immutable Primary/Secondary/Tert class choice, you need to take into account that this means some classes may be incapable of facing off against monsters without party support. Since the P/S/T paradigm, however, forces players to make decisions about their characters as individuals (in a vacuum, since other players' decisions can't be predicted or relied on), this will naturally cause people to be driven away from classes like Chemist, White Mage, and other squishies in droves.

Remember, FFT vanilla monsters are balanced to be a challenge for a party of 5 characters, all under the executive and permanent control of one player. Five FFS characters, each having been grown separately to maximize survivability outside that specific group loadout (since the group will be changing constantly), each controlled by a separate player, will be destroyed by such a challenge.

There are a number of potential solutions to this:

1) Balance monsters so even a lone Priest can take them on. This makes combat monsters like Monks and Samurai ludicrously OP and makes partying up pointless.

2) Give all classes effective fighting power, for instance giving Priests the "Dia" line of spells from early FF games for offensive power. This dilutes each class' unique characteristics and makes class choice less inherently important, which is a decent solution if somewhat unattractive.

3) Change the paradigm. You could:
A) Make the game about players controlling teams of characters with fixed classes. If each player had 3 or even 2 characters, it would be much more amenable to experimentation - you'd have your protector and your squishy. More characters per player means more room for diversity.

B) Allow players to change classes easily, so that each time a party of players prepares for a battle, they can discuss amongst themselves what strategy they think will be most appropriate. So, if there are 3 players, each with a character, one picks Knight (from the options Squire, Knight, Lancer, Wizard), the second Archer (from his own pool of options), the third Priest (ditto).

C) Allow players to control multiple characters, each with the ability to change class. Hmm, where have I heard of that concept before..?

[kablizzy]

Mord! I've missed you, bro. <3

[Mordred]

Hi Blizz. :3

[kablizzy]

So, what Mosaic has suggested was something along the lines of #2. Giving each class a reason to be picked as a primary class, with moderate leanings towards what the class is meant to be. In terms of Priest and the like, this would likely mean more primary abilities focused upon attack - Holy, Pearl, Dia, et cetera.

But I'm rather torn. Doing that means, of course, that the concept of the character gets muddled in with 'Gameplay Mechanics', and I don't know what to put more focus on - being true to FFT, being true to flavor, or making the game more balanced. I usually tend to being true to FFT, or rather, true to Final Fantasy, in concept. This means that in most things, I'm going to try and capture the essence of what the original developers had in-mind.

Of course, more often than not, this is the party dynamic. Now, the problem I see with giving each player their own party is like, tenfold. First, it opens the french doors to some pretty serious metagaming - trading loot to a single character, tons of OOC information, and the like. If you're like me, you wouldn't even want each character in the same place as one another, so you'd have numerous different PTs to process for each player, and worsens the Kingdom dynamic by the number of PCs each player is allowed to have. Plots become more difficult and complex to run, and giving each player 3-5 PCs, all of whom can be whatever class they wish at any given time also means that the players will more often than not just cherry-pick your best abilities from each class (Didn't take Time Mage for Teleport? Don't have Equip Gun? Didn't take Gained JP-Up as your very first skill? Already behind the curve). This is what I did in FFT, anyway. After my first play-through, I never purchased Equip Axe or Weapon Guard. Why would I? Counter was available. Hamedo was there. I don't think I ever used a Calculator, ever, beyond my first play-through. Propositions would take longer, or at the very worst, they would be single-player endeavors. Not to mention having to run and keep track of multiple sets of PC information for each player by hand - You know firsthand how hard it was to run HoI when we were well-staffed with one PC per dude.

Beyond all this, I don't think shifting the paradigm to the party dynamic actually does anything to fix the thing that you're suggesting is the problem - in fact, I don't think it solves it at all. I think that by allowing everyone to create multiple PCs, you necessarily don't address the inherent issue with 'Calculator can't handle himself' - Why make a slow, crappy, conditional character when you can have one that has Accumulate, Hamedo, Jump + 4, Heavy Armor, and so on. I'm not being eloquent in this, since it's early, but you can see what I'm getting at, I think.

Yes, you may be able to include that Priest in your party, but he's not going to be anything but a supporting character for your main crew. He'd be a rather faceless, tasteless healer - much in this vein, I don't see people creating multiple fully-fleshed out RP dudes, I see them making their main character and a bunch of groupies that follow said main character around for the express purpose of making that character more invincible. Either that, or building upon the discrepancy between 'Better' characters and those who would want to play by the invisible rules and make 'interesting' characters. At some point, when a single dude's team gets to level 20-25 and are all hitting into Prestige classes, the only thing stopping them from steamrolling others in combat is... Well, other min/max-y bastards who do the same thing. Kinda hearkens back to the concept of 'Didn't take Move+3? Good luck in battle!"

The other problem that I see coming around the bend is that it turns HoI almost necessarily into a single-player game. Which I expressly and vehemently would rather avoid. I can't see propositions RPing out fully with 15-30 different people talking to each other at once. Especially for the hard-core roleplayers, they'll of course want each of their characters to have a different personality, and unless we do single-player props (Which ups our staff/player requirement to 1:1, if not more), I can see problems there.

So, that all said, I'm not entirely against a change in paradigm, I'm just not sure that this particular one helps us in general. Biggest problem is that we have to run everything by hand, whereas FFT could store all of that data inherently, and for a single-player to manage, that's not too difficult. Especially without a GUI for us to operate within, I just have a hard time seeing how - especially with less-staff who are currently busier with real-life than we were ten years ago and more players - we'd even be able to operate with a larger work-load.

In addition, the critters that we had balanced for last version were kinda nuts, but I don't think I saw a lone Priest trying to go at it with any other single monster class. Plus, I want to encourage player interaction and have them try to come up with more creative ways of problem-solving than "I have Knight, Squire, Time Mage, Dark Knight, so I'll pick Dark Knight." Especially when it comes to 'Squishy' classes, if Monk and Samurai are monsters in combat on a singular level, the answer as I see it isn't "Give everyone access to Samurai", but rather "Give other classes the capability to compete."

Just a few thoughts on the subject. If I've misinterpreted anything, lemme know!

[Schwerpunkt]

Kablizzy double posted. Ready the ropes, lads; we've got an admin to keelhaul!

But seriously, I agree with a lot of what was said. The problems inherent in giving people multiple characters (not necessarily PCs; more was probably thinking more along the lines of WotD's FPCs, which are basically mini-characters that each PC can accumulate to help him do stuff -- they're the equivalent of the guys you buy in the soldier shop) are numerous and pretty well enumerated above. Further complicating them is the fact that I want every faction to have a very distinct vibe and feel. If you've got sub-factions in each faction composed of each PC with his own clique of Red Shirts, you're dramatically changing the dynamic of the joinable factions. After all, why would Baert decide to send a promising PC and two new recruits off on some dangerous trek to kill a pirate when he could just send the promising PC and said PC's cronies? In fact, that problem becomes more pronounced when we start talking about unique props (only one dude can kill Bob the Pirate; everyone else has to get their own prop).

That, of course, brings us back to the 1:1 staff:player ratio. Which we simply cannot do. I'd be happy with 1:10 with the full game (where we've got four or five staffers running the major factions and their associated quest lines and the rest doing MHs, PTs, and props). Giving players their own cliques means more props and MHs to run, which we simply don't have the staff for. Even if Ilium manages to somehow make this super-awesome program that lets us somehow act out a MH in a flash window of some sort, that still takes tons of time. No matter how automated the process is, it'll never be as simple as Phailak's "input tactics and stat lines, run program, post results" battle system with Warlords. Warlords, for those that don't know, is basically the exact opposite of our battle system: no maps (or terrain, really), just "layers," tactics, and lots of raw processing.

I do think it's important for most classes to be very well balanced and capable of filling at least two roles. I don't think we're going to see Priests with tons of damage, but we're not going to see Priests that have to slowly beat goblins to death with staves while healing themselves sporadically.

[kablizzy]

Apr 25, 2013 4:29:43 GMT -6 Schwerpunkt said:

Kablizzy double posted. Ready the ropes, lads; we've got an admin to keelhaul!

I do think it's important for most classes to be very well balanced and capable of filling at least two roles. I don't think we're going to see Priests with tons of damage, but we're not going to see Priests that have to slowly beat goblins to death with staves while healing themselves sporadically.

I did no such thing! YOU SAW NOTHING!

I also would like to see Priests with Flails. Those dudes were cool as shit. And I think this embodies pretty much everything I want with the game. Honestly, we had so many hands in the cookie jar with v1 and v2 development, that development, design, and balancing, that it just didn't get done. And that's something I'm wanting to avoid this time around.

[Schwerpunkt]

I honestly do not want flails to be in the game because, really, they don't do anything.

... but if we give Priests this sort of auxiliary role where they can wield flails and crush faces, I'm now on board. Warrior-priests are awesome. Especially since that sort of lets us justify a Paladin prestige class.

[kablizzy]

*Exactly*.

Also, didn't original-recipe White Mage use, like, a mace or a hammer or something?

[Schwerpunkt]

I wouldn't be surprised. Maces have been pretty common for Priest-esque classes in gaming. The first edition Cleric in D&D, for instance, could use maces.

[Mordred]

FF1 White Mages did wield hammers, yes. That's a feature that wouldn't be remiss in an updated rendition for FFS. How about instead of a Paladin prestige class, you equip Equip Armor on your White Mage as a Support ability? Or give a Knight White Magic as a secondary ability set?

As for the problems with multiple characters under a single player's control, El Blizz is a little behind the times - he hasn't seen Families on WotD, which is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Essentially: one PC, a bunch of fully-statted redshirts. But, as I said in the other thread, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to stick with the one-player-one-character paradigm and I'm happy to drop the player-as-party issue since it's not a direction anyone else is interested in going.

So ok, we're going the direction of "EVERYBODY FIGHT NAO!!!" Which is equally cool!

That being the case, we have some work to do in terms of defining combat niches for each class. I've been mostly staying out of the specific class threads because I think it's way too early to be talking about what skills an Archer should have if we haven't even decided how an Archer fits into the strategy-metagame question of "what class spread should I field for this battle?"

I'm told the conversation about "finding niches" has already been started elsewhere, so I'll go look for it.

[Mordred]

FF1 White Mages did wield hammers, yes. That's a feature that wouldn't be remiss in an updated rendition for FFS. How about instead of a Paladin prestige class, you equip Equip Armor on your White Mage as a Support ability? Or give a Knight White Magic as a secondary ability set?

As for the problems with multiple characters under a single player's control, El Blizz is a little behind the times - he hasn't seen Families on WotD, which is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Essentially: one PC, a bunch of fully-statted redshirts. But, as I said in the other thread, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to stick with the one-player-one-character paradigm and I'm happy to drop the player-as-party issue since it's not a direction anyone else is interested in going.

So ok, we're going the direction of "EVERYBODY FIGHT NAO!!!" Which is equally cool!

That being the case, we have some work to do in terms of defining combat niches for each class. I've been mostly staying out of the specific class threads because I think it's way too early to be talking about what skills an Archer should have if we haven't even decided how an Archer fits into the strategy-metagame question of "what class spread should I field for this battle?"

I'm told the conversation about "finding niches" has already been started elsewhere, so I'll go look for it.

[Mordred]

Ok, this is sort of a game mechanic, sort of combat, but there's another convo going on in the Game Mechanics thread...

Hits, Crits, Evasion, Glances, and Elements.

HoI couldn't balance Evade because it's inherently wtfbroken. What if you gave a Knight some armor that could negate all damage from an incoming attack 60 or 70 percent of the time? That's shit. Why should Ninjas get the equivalent without even having to equip an item to do it?

So, instead, we have four categories of attack result instead of the current three (which are Miss, Hit, Crit). Instead, let's do Miss, Glance, Hit, Crit.

++ Miss is very rare on attacks, and essentially is a critfail. A miss deals no damage. Misses are most common on binary yes/no effects like status spells/skills.
++ Glances are the usual result of when a target evades or blocks an attack. Glances do 50% normal damage. Magic attacks never glance.
++ Hits are the usual result of a target nonevasion and nonblock. 100% normal damage. Magic attacks always "hit" when they don't miss (a statement which sounds considerably more retarded than it is; what I'm getting at here is that magic damage should most often be modified by elemental properties).
++ Crits do bonus damage based on the properties of the weapon with which the attack is made. Magic can't crit.

So, why bother making this distinction? This way, we can balance HP and Evade% much more successfully than HoI or the original FFT.

In FFT, there's nothing stopping a Knight from having Weapon Guard, Defender, Kaiser Shield, Maximilian, Feather Mantle, and Grand Helmet all at once. So, if you get through the 100+% P-EV, the character doesn't even give a fuck because he has 500 HP.

But, with the glance-versus-hit paradigm, we can do something different with armor than just make them giant HP reservoirs: instead, they gain an "evade" score, which increases the chance of glancing against the equipped target. So, better armor doesn't increase your HP as much, but it gets you more mileage out of the HP you have. Likewise, stacking evade doesn't make you untouchable, rather it just also gives you more mileage from your HP.

Well look at that: balance between speedy types and tanky types!

So, with this set-up, you can have Shields, Helms, and Armor for Knights, with Clothes, Hats, and Mantles for Ninjas. This way, their base HP scores don't have to be widely divergent, which means both of them are appropriately vulnerable to physical and magical attacks.

Whether you want to flavor Evade as "taking a hit and not caring" or "dodging mostly out of the way," doesn't matter. The point is, the damage resistance qualities of evade versus armor need to be on the same level.

[kablizzy]

Very intriguing. I'm not sure how I feel about this, I'll have to ponder on it a bit.