Stats and battle, like you're talking to a 6 year old...

I know where to find the info on how stats/damage/etc work, but I don't understand why and I'm having trouble figuring out how to set hero and enemy stats to balance a battle.

Assume a single Level 1 hero enters a room and there is one enemy inside that must be fought. The character has had the opportunity to pick up one weapon and one armor. I have not given him any potions yet, but might add one if it enhances the game. Neither the hero nor enemy has magic. The enemy should be insanely difficult without the weapon and armor equipped (but perhaps still barely possible), and should still be a kind of long hard battle for the hero even with the items equipped. How should I set the stats of these characters to get me in the ballpark?

There is something I'm not grasping about how the math works, I think.

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Cody Gaisser

If you want the battle to last longer without making it impossible, boosting the HP and Def of the enemy while keeping his attack relatively low will make him harder to kill but less likely to kill you.

You could also do something like the first boss fight in FF4, who is a dragon that turns into fog at certain points during battle. You can't attack it while it's in fog form, but perhaps you could give the player a minimal free heal to give them something to do.

If you give the hero low health and a small heal, it'll prolong the fight because the player will have to spend turns healing, but the hero's stats should still be pretty low. Just base the enemy's stats on the hero's stats, since you don't have to worry about varying levels.

Just tweak things and see what works better.

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

This battle seems to boil down to a simple puzzle. Equip the weapon and armor and you win, fail to equip the weapon and armor and you lose.

So that means we want to look at two different battle setups. First unequipped, then fully equipped. The difference between the two tells us what stat bonuses the equipment should give you.

Before we begin, let us look at each of the stats, and see which ones will actually matter at all in this battle



So for the purposes of this first battle, there are only 4 stats that we really care about.

HP Atk, Def, and Spd

Let's start with Spd, or "Speed". I say just throw a 20 in here for both the hero and the enemy. That means they will both attack at the same speed. There are plenty of nuances here, especially regarding your choices about whether your game uses turn-based battle, active-time battle, or active-time with pausing menus.... but for now just set Spd = 20 and think about it later.


Lets say the hero and the monster both have about the same HP. They can both have 100.

Okay. Now for Atk. Lets assume that both the hero and the monster are also evenly matched in terms of Attack power. They both have 25 Atk. That means that if we ignore Def (defence) it should take each of them 4 or 5 turns to kill the other. (if you turn on the bitset to disable damage randomization then it will always be exactly 4 turns)

At this point the battle is a coin toss. Whoever attacks first going to be the winner.

Finally we are going to add Def into the mix. The hero has 0 Def. The monster has 10 Def.

The default damage formula ("Normal") just subtracts: Attacker's Atk - Target's Def = Damage

There are other defence formulas, but we aren't going to worry about that right now. 10 Def on the monster, means that the Hero will be doing an average of 15 damage each round, while the Monster is doing an average of 25 damage each round.

Max HP divided by damage per round tells us how many rounds each will take to die.

The Hero will die in 4 or 5 rounds

The Monster will die in 7 rounds.

Hmmm.... That means the hero has absolutely no chance of surviving the battle. You said you wanted a small chance of the hero surviving the battle unequipped.

So lets reduce the Monster's Def a little. Instead of 10 Def, lets try 5 Def.

25 Attack - 5 Def = 20 Damage.

An average of 20 Damage per round means that the monster will die in 5-6 rounds.

The hero will die in 4 or 5 rounds, so the Hero has a small chance of surviving this time

This really just boils down to another coin-toss of which one got the first turn, combined with the good or bad luck of damage randomization, so it isn't very fun.

Anyway, now we have our first battle described.

Now lets talk about equipment.

Suppose your Hero picks up a Sword that gives you +10 attack, and a Shield that gives you +5 Def

Now the hero has 35 Atk. The enemy still has 5 Def, so the hero is doing about 30 damage per round. Now instead of 4-5 rounds, you will kill the Monster in exactly 4 rounds (damage randomization isn't big enough to make it 3 or 5 rounds)

The Monster still has 25 Atk, but the hero now has 5 def. That means that the Monster will deal an average of 20 damage per round, and kill the hero in 5 or 6 rounds (depending on damage randomization)

This results in a battle that the Hero can't lose. Do you want to narrow the chances a little? Doesn't actually sound like a fun thing to do, but if you were to done-town the Sword or Shield, it could change the odds.

tldr

Start by thinking about battles in terms of average damage per round, and how many rounds each hero and enemy can survive. This is useful for learning how to balance stats, and useful for understanding why very simplified battles usually aren't much fun.

James's example is a pretty darn good start, and I have just a few things to add to it!

It might be helpful to design not only your battles, but also every encounter in your dungeon around how many turns your player will need to go before they need to heal or else they'll get a gameover. Using James's example, you'll need to heal up to full health after every battle, or at least every 4th round! That's a pretty steep challenge for a starting dungeon, and I'd ensure there were ample healing items scattered around, or perhaps even start the hero off with a small supply at the beginning of the game!

As a general rule, I almost never give enemies any defense statistic, unless its to discourage the player from using physical attacks (use magic to defeat them, etc)!

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To friends long gone, and those I've yet to meet - thank you.

You should put that on the wiki as an example of balancing.
Or just link to it.

Thanks, that was a great answer. I had started with a totally balanced battle, realizing that it was a coin toss, and had started messing with the stats to make it more interesting but just made it less predictable. Thinking about it this way, I should be able to figure out how to balance my battles better. I'll let you know when I get some progress!

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Cody Gaisser

I originally read this thread as making a battle that can't be won run long (giving the player some hope that it can be won). On a second read, I see that it's more about making a single battle extra challenging.

But, seeing the long response in context to my first impression made me wonder why we still don't have an enemy bit for "Lose Battle Even if Enemy Dies" or something that bypasses a player's lucky killshot should they prove extra formidable against a planned undefeatable enemy. Essentially, the idea here is that enemies don't actually die at 0 HP (or they never actually take damage from the player). Or, if the enemy is supposed to survive all attacks but one (like the "knife throw" against the hyena in Tightfloss Maiden), a bit for "Resist All Attacks But [Special]" might be nice, where "special" refers to an element or a specific tag that's attached to the weapon or item used in battle.

Just something I thought about while reading this topic.

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If I was going to make an enemy that could only be killed by one specific elemental, here is how I would do it.

The enemy would have an on-death-bequest attack that cures itself. That would make it unkillable.

Then I would give it a counterattack to the one special element which self-targets and transmogrifies the enemy into a different version of itself. The other version would lack the on-death-bequest attack

Thanks everyone. Great info and advice, some of which I've already put to use. I'm actually not trying to make a "fun" game yet, just trying to make the absolute bare minimum of content for a "complete RPG" (albeit highly condensed). I'm doing this to get a better grasp on the basics so I'll be more prepared when it comes time to take a more serious crack at a real game that people might enjoy.

This game has only one battle (again, bare minimum) and I'm not even trying to make that battle fun yet, just functional enough to have a predictable outcome so I can make a "game" that is playable from start to finish. Once this "game" is more or less "finished" I'll probably go back and experiment with making the battle more exciting, and I can already tell the info in this thread is going to come in handy - if not then - at least when I start trying to make a more engaging game.

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Cody Gaisser