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- Torn Apart...
- Group: Member
- Joined: Dec 15, 2002
- Posts: 31
Hi all,
I've recently been toying with the idea of a new battle system. It draws inspiration from The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone's (LOPS) battle engine, which I created, and Fire Emblem's tactical battle system. The reason for wanting a new battle system is that I've never been content with any standard turn-based ones, which too often boil down to a hack-and-slash / heal when necessary strategy. Making enemies stronger (like in LOPS) makes the battles slightly more interesting, but the basic strategy remains the same. The end result are boring battles that are neither fun nor strategic, and simply serve as breaks in the gameplay. Action battle systems solve almost all these problems, but may be a lot of work to make the animations and AI, or maybe you just don’t want an ABS. I was really inspired though, by Fire Emblem, which is one of the few non-action battle systems that I really had to think hard with (the only other tactics game I played is Bahamut Lagoon, which was very simple in terms of the battles). What I really liked was that you could see exactly what stats and moves the enemies had, and it was up to you to plan your moves accordingly, and the correct strategy meant the difference between life and death. So I decided to take this idea and adapt it to the more standard RPGs, where you don't have 40 units in the battle field and battles don't take an hour to finish. I also liked LOPS's command resolvement (CR) idea, so I decided to implement that also, but modified it somewhat to increase the strategy. This is a rough idea of what I came up with:
Battles take place on a, say, 10x5 grid, with allies on the right-half field and enemies on the left-half field. So it'll look something like:
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
Allies and enemies face each other and can only change position within their own respective field. Different moves will have different ranges/areas of effect. For example, some different ideas for attacks are:
Fireball: goes straight forward and hits the first target in its path, so any targets behind the first would be okay.
Spread Fireball: like Fireball, but upon impact with target, spreads to all adjacent squares.
Rock Split: breaks upon imact and moves laterally in both directions.
Meteor Rain: squares are impacted with a given probability that decreases with distance from target square.
Turn Around: turns around “move forward” attacks (like Fireball), no effect for other attacks.
etc... (you get the idea)
There would also be a move to create a "dummy" target on the field. This would allow you to hit the dummy target with an move if it i.e. causes damage indirectly. So by attacking a dummy target with Rock Split, any target in the same column would get hit by the smaller rocks. The idea is to make a unit's position important in the turnout of the battle. There are likely other systems, such as field effects ala Chrono Cross or tile effects such as lava tiles ala Fire Emblem, that could make battles more interesting, though I don't want to risk bloating the battle system with too many such systems.
Many moves will be formation dependent, meaning you can only perform them when your allies are in certain positions with respect to each other. This creates incentives to take certain positions that may be dangerous due to the moves the enemies have. It also disincentivices players from taking “random” looking positions which are more likely to be “safe”.
As mentioned, I like the CR idea from LOPS, but I think a slight modification that would drastically improve the strategy aspect of battles is that commands be executed after a given amount of time from which they were chosen, so in a sense it becomes command preparation (CP) instead of command resolvement (CR). This would make players have to think ahead to when allies' and enemies' moves will get executed and not simply the present moment. And like the CR system, different moves in the CP system would take different amounts of time to prepare, with stronger moves generally taking longer. This opens up the possibility for more strategic battles, especially in a position-based system. For example, if you suspect an enemy is preparing the Spread Fireball attack, you could create a "dummy" target directly in front of him, so when the fireball hits the target, the "spread" fire will damage the enemy.
Allies and enemies can also see each other's stats and moves (or if not, there'll be a pretty standard Scan ability that will reveal this info). That way, you know exactly what the enemy is capable of. Note that you would not be able to see the CP of the enemies (and vice-versa) since this would give away what moves they are preparing. It is part to the strategy to try to guess what they’ll do next.
Anyway, that’s essentially a rough idea of what I was thinking about. I’ve been messing with Sphere again recently (mainly over Christmas break), and tried to recreate the intro scenes of LOPS. This is more a way to test an RPG framework I’m making on Sphere than actually to recreate LOPS, but the idea of recreating LOPS is what got me thinking of a more strategic battle system, which is what you see here. There is almost no chance that I’ll be able to create this system, though, since I’m in grad school and don’t have the time. But I think it’s a pretty cool idea (I wish I had it 7 years ago!) and wanted to share it with you guys. Anyway, let me know what you think!
I've recently been toying with the idea of a new battle system. It draws inspiration from The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone's (LOPS) battle engine, which I created, and Fire Emblem's tactical battle system. The reason for wanting a new battle system is that I've never been content with any standard turn-based ones, which too often boil down to a hack-and-slash / heal when necessary strategy. Making enemies stronger (like in LOPS) makes the battles slightly more interesting, but the basic strategy remains the same. The end result are boring battles that are neither fun nor strategic, and simply serve as breaks in the gameplay. Action battle systems solve almost all these problems, but may be a lot of work to make the animations and AI, or maybe you just don’t want an ABS. I was really inspired though, by Fire Emblem, which is one of the few non-action battle systems that I really had to think hard with (the only other tactics game I played is Bahamut Lagoon, which was very simple in terms of the battles). What I really liked was that you could see exactly what stats and moves the enemies had, and it was up to you to plan your moves accordingly, and the correct strategy meant the difference between life and death. So I decided to take this idea and adapt it to the more standard RPGs, where you don't have 40 units in the battle field and battles don't take an hour to finish. I also liked LOPS's command resolvement (CR) idea, so I decided to implement that also, but modified it somewhat to increase the strategy. This is a rough idea of what I came up with:
Battles take place on a, say, 10x5 grid, with allies on the right-half field and enemies on the left-half field. So it'll look something like:
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
x x x x x o o o o o
Allies and enemies face each other and can only change position within their own respective field. Different moves will have different ranges/areas of effect. For example, some different ideas for attacks are:
Fireball: goes straight forward and hits the first target in its path, so any targets behind the first would be okay.
Spread Fireball: like Fireball, but upon impact with target, spreads to all adjacent squares.
Rock Split: breaks upon imact and moves laterally in both directions.
Meteor Rain: squares are impacted with a given probability that decreases with distance from target square.
Turn Around: turns around “move forward” attacks (like Fireball), no effect for other attacks.
etc... (you get the idea)
There would also be a move to create a "dummy" target on the field. This would allow you to hit the dummy target with an move if it i.e. causes damage indirectly. So by attacking a dummy target with Rock Split, any target in the same column would get hit by the smaller rocks. The idea is to make a unit's position important in the turnout of the battle. There are likely other systems, such as field effects ala Chrono Cross or tile effects such as lava tiles ala Fire Emblem, that could make battles more interesting, though I don't want to risk bloating the battle system with too many such systems.
Many moves will be formation dependent, meaning you can only perform them when your allies are in certain positions with respect to each other. This creates incentives to take certain positions that may be dangerous due to the moves the enemies have. It also disincentivices players from taking “random” looking positions which are more likely to be “safe”.
As mentioned, I like the CR idea from LOPS, but I think a slight modification that would drastically improve the strategy aspect of battles is that commands be executed after a given amount of time from which they were chosen, so in a sense it becomes command preparation (CP) instead of command resolvement (CR). This would make players have to think ahead to when allies' and enemies' moves will get executed and not simply the present moment. And like the CR system, different moves in the CP system would take different amounts of time to prepare, with stronger moves generally taking longer. This opens up the possibility for more strategic battles, especially in a position-based system. For example, if you suspect an enemy is preparing the Spread Fireball attack, you could create a "dummy" target directly in front of him, so when the fireball hits the target, the "spread" fire will damage the enemy.
Allies and enemies can also see each other's stats and moves (or if not, there'll be a pretty standard Scan ability that will reveal this info). That way, you know exactly what the enemy is capable of. Note that you would not be able to see the CP of the enemies (and vice-versa) since this would give away what moves they are preparing. It is part to the strategy to try to guess what they’ll do next.
Anyway, that’s essentially a rough idea of what I was thinking about. I’ve been messing with Sphere again recently (mainly over Christmas break), and tried to recreate the intro scenes of LOPS. This is more a way to test an RPG framework I’m making on Sphere than actually to recreate LOPS, but the idea of recreating LOPS is what got me thinking of a more strategic battle system, which is what you see here. There is almost no chance that I’ll be able to create this system, though, since I’m in grad school and don’t have the time. But I think it’s a pretty cool idea (I wish I had it 7 years ago!) and wanted to share it with you guys. Anyway, let me know what you think!
