Balanceing act and missing persons case

[Bones]

i've been working on my new game Into The Void,
and have come across some issues.
#1-Is there some formula for balancing enemies?
#2-i made two chars. in a city, one "useless" character, and a gatekeeper, BUT the gatekeeper plays a large part in the story! it shows the characters
in the layout, but not in play or testplay!
could any1 help me?

[MagusMartovich]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

The way to balence enemies is largely debatable. I like to make regular enemies take 2-5 hits to kill. So, whatever my heroes are doing as far as damage per hit, I multiply that by 2-5, depending on the enemy. A couple of people have formulas, so someone might post those too.

As far as the MIA, I would try to delete it from the map, then save then put it back. I've had problems with items vanishing from my inventory after purchase and weapons that no one could equip be solved this way. It is tedious, depending on the ammout of text in the event, but its worth a try, right?

[Wavelength]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

With much respect to Magus and JPS, I think any talk about formulas to balance enemies is going to be largely irrelevant. It depends so heavily on your personal system, and on how much the player is going to level up his characters. You can roughly figure out how many hits it will take to kill an enemy if your characters are at a certain level, but that level is a guess.

Then you have to consider whether they'll be using magic or not (which depends on how much cash they have to buy mana potions, as well as their personal style). Then you have to consider any unique elements of your system (my system, for instance, doesn't let you use most spells immediately after entering battle, but spells can wipe enemies in 1-2 hits, whereas physical attacks might require 5-10 hits on most enemies).

In the end, I think it's better to just testplay it! Try to do things (like build your characters) as many different ways as possible as a player, and make sure none of them are too easy or ridiculously difficult. Get others to testplay, and listen to their feedback. There is no "wrong" way to play a game.

As far as the disappearing character, I've never noticed anything like this happen to me (although it could just be that I was oblivious). Magus' advice sounds good. Save, delete him, save, add him back, and save again.

[MagusMartovich]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

Unless your characters gain ludicrious ammounts of points per level up, that won't effect the outcome of ~3 hits. A different weapon might, and since magic points are essentally a limited feature, so what if a player decides to waste the first 12 monsters s/he meets with an overkill ammount of damage?

I understand where you're coming from: I have to defend my own system, too In my eyes, this is lilke arguing that poison is a useful status effect to use on bosses (ITS NOT!!!) because in 20 short rounds said boss will be gone without much effort from you team. I still maintain there's better things any character can be doing aside from poison.

Not to get too far away from the original tiopic though: Wavelength is right. PLAYTEST THE CRAP OUT OF YOUR GAME!!! A crapless game is much more fun to play than someone's half fleshed out vauge half joke with one of their friends. Oooo! and HAVE FUN. No matter how it ends up, have fun all along the wya and it won't feel like you wasted 6 months of your life.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

In my eyes, this is lilke arguing that poison is a useful status effect to use on bosses (ITS NOT!!!) because in 20 short rounds said boss will be gone without much effort from you team. I still maintain there's better things any character can be doing aside from poison.

Not to continue encouraging the deviation from the OP, but in poison's defense, when I used it against bosses in The Spiteful Dead, it caused enough damage that it was like having a 5th party member in the team.

[Pagerron]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

Regarding the missing character graphic, this has happened to me before as well.

Here's what I was told and the problem was fixed immediately!

In the character editor, Press R1 until you come to the "NPC & Event Codes" screen. Go down to the tab titled "To the mode editor." Press X and choose Edit. In the "NPC Settings" screen go to the upper left box and change the character display from OFF to ON.

That's it. Hope it works for you too!

[Bones]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

Regarding the missing character graphic, this has happened to me before as well.

Here's what I was told and the problem was fixed immediately!

In the character editor, Press R1 until you come to the "NPC & Event Codes" screen. Go down to the tab titled "To the mode editor." Press X and choose Edit. In the "NPC Settings" screen go to the upper left box and change the character display from OFF to ON.

That's it. Hope it works for you too!

I've tryed this and also did a "refresh display" but it didn't work,
but, i remade the characters and it fixed the problem, still not sure what happened, but ty!

and about the formula- I just use the samples, change the name, add a few attacks, tweak the hp and mp to my will, and take the last number place off of the hp and use it as the gold earned. It actually works fairly well.

[MagusMartovich]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

I've tryed this and also did a "refresh display" but it didn't work,
but, i remade the characters and it fixed the problem, still not sure what happened, but ty!

and about the formula- I just use the samples, change the name, add a few attacks, tweak the hp and mp to my will, and take the last number place off of the hp and use it as the gold earned. It actually works fairly well.

Theonly advice I can give is: Playtest, playtest, playtest! I tried to use the samples so that I could be lazy a couple of times and unless you stick to a solid "base" character (one who's stat growth is more or less reflected in all other characters) you will find that within as little as 3 levels some characters will be juggernauts and others will be dead or never get a chance to move. Again, just adviee because I had a bad experience doing somewhat of a similar thing as you are now.

[JPS]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

With much respect to Magus and JPS, I think any talk about formulas to balance enemies is going to be largely irrelevant. It depends so heavily on your personal system, and on how much the player is going to level up his characters. You can roughly figure out how many hits it will take to kill an enemy if your characters are at a certain level, but that level is a guess.

Then you have to consider whether they'll be using magic or not (which depends on how much cash they have to buy mana potions, as well as their personal style). Then you have to consider any unique elements of your system (my system, for instance, doesn't let you use most spells immediately after entering battle, but spells can wipe enemies in 1-2 hits, whereas physical attacks might require 5-10 hits on most enemies).

In the end, I think it's better to just testplay it! Try to do things (like build your characters) as many different ways as possible as a player, and make sure none of them are too easy or ridiculously difficult. Get others to testplay, and listen to their feedback. There is no "wrong" way to play a game.

As far as the disappearing character, I've never noticed anything like this happen to me (although it could just be that I was oblivious). Magus' advice sounds good. Save, delete him, save, add him back, and save again.

I strongly agree with you here, my guide serves as a basis for balancing, though I would not recommend basing an entire game off of it, because like you stated, from beginning to end a player can gain any amount of levels, just depends on how much they want to grind...some people likes to run through a game, but if you make it so they have to grind then the game will get boring REALLY fast, Ive grinded in a few games (most notably FF7) and was able to literally obliterate anything I ran across for the rest of the game...but thats the reward for spending 15-20 hours on nonstop grinding lol

[MagusMartovich]

Re: Balanceing act and missing persons case

FF7 also has the versitality that allows players the convience to customize and redesign character abilities to the extent that it is very easy to make a team that not only regain HP/MP based on taking any/all actions, but alos one that 99.999% of all the monsters in the game have no possible way of defeating in the first place.

FF7 is a bad, quite possibly the worst example to cite here as RM3 is fairly rigid and without the prior planning of the game creator, situations like the aforementioned are just not possible.