Resource management

[renke_]

okay, my half-cocked concept.

I prefer mana pools over cool down periods (mostly a habit ^^) and like the idea of using the magic/special skills pool restricted to a single encounter, i.e. it measures the exhaustion (or whatever) and is refilled after the battle is done.

yayswords mentioned somewhere the problem with the baby-sized SP amount at the begin of the game and the huge 200+ pools at the end of act 2 and proposed a more static value for mana - I concur and think this could be done when mana is handled similar to speed: the base value is 100, every point of Will adds only +1. As another parallel to Agility&Speed every +5 points in Will will increase SP Regen by one, for two reasons: Make leveling Will still worthwhile and it should possible to meet (and survive) harder encounters in later stages of the game.

With this we have
1. a plannable amount of mana for every fight (no more self-restricting)
2. a lower range of possible SP pool sizes (the encounters can be designed around the semi-static amount of mana in every fight)
3. less micro-management for yet another resource

When we combine this with temporary HP healing (only a good night's sleep can heal wounds for real) this could also suppress the regen dances ;)

Thoughts?

[Anima_]

All of these involve kills. Is that thematic? I don't wanna have to micro so hard that the Bloodlust characters get the finishing blows to restore their mana (and some Pride characters), and then deliberately try to get one of them killed so that Club Phoenix/Rage can get their mana back. The latter is more bizarre than my regen dance even.

Coincidence.

Thoughts?

It's pretty much the system for Loren.

Though today the pack leader howled another goal into the night. The game is now supposed to encourage using different party members. Which definitely shapes the resource systems. My current approach is to add in battle party member changes. So the most logical way would be to go with a resource pool and then have back up members regenerate.

[renke_]

a total different pool size spread and you claim it's old&boring. Pshaw! :P

but anyway.

rotating party members is interesting, but it shouldn't be too easy/convenient. maybe only possible from the back row and the party has one less available actor for some time. nice side effect: huge horde battles, the guard waves at the end of act 1 could be designed as one single encounter with incoming enemies instead of the 4 separate fights.

[Anima_]

a total different pool size spread and you claim it's old&boring. Pshaw!

From a design point of view simply changing the range of a variable simply isn't that exciting. My prey are more the crazy and unorthodox ideas.

rotating party members is interesting, but it shouldn't be too easy/convenient. maybe only possible from the back row and the party has one less available actor for some time. nice side effect: huge horde battles, the guard waves at the end of act 1 could be designed as one single encounter with incoming enemies instead of the 4 separate fights.

Actually it should be quite easy and cheap to do, since our goal is people using it. The game would have to be designed around that. Sure it will take an action and you take your effects with you, but that should be about it.

[jack1974]

rotating party members is interesting, but it shouldn't be too easy/convenient.

Yes, of course that would be my job. Anima design the system and then the responsibility of the battle balancing/difficulty is on me as always.
But indeed one of the possible innovations would be really "horde" battles, which not necessarily means long, but could even be more epic

[renke_]

with an too fast (and therfor effective) way to switch active party members I fear mostly one thing: The fights will be *much* longer. What's the head count of Loren's playable chars? 2 dozens*? If all of them can take part in one encounter the forum will be full of "too easy" entries, and Jack has to add mobs with 4*10^6 HP so the players can get satisfying hard battles...

it would probably better to move team rotating to another thread, party members are resources but not the one yaysword meant with his topic ^^

*) only slightly exaggerated ;)

[yayswords]

This thread is about whatever it needs to be in order to establish that "feeling" that we apparently want to create but keep not talking about though I certainly have opinions on member swapping. The FFX fan had to code that in, yah?

Storytime, Anima. Level 12 Krimm, no points in will. The mana gains from attacking with Rage are not sufficient to keep her going forever, but if I can make the enemy team attack her much (primarily indirectly through Protect) then she gets hit a lot and gets enough mana to keep going. This is a satisfying mana system to me. The mana is not inherently infinite, but if I play the game smartly I'll still have a lot of it.

I'm not hellbent on having to use mana as our resource but it's the closest to home so I started there.

[renke_]

okay, let's talk about feeling: I want to use my shiny cool toys every second turn or so.

I just fired up an old save (Arena fight against the dark elvese, my party was between lvl 12 and lvl 13) and counted: My party members had between 3 and 4 turns, all in all 16 actions, 12 of them were costly skills. They needed between 50 SP (<ranger>) and 90 SP (Krimm) - I use this a base value for a satisfying fight.

So if we look at my old&boring idea above I think this could be a way to go. Say the base SP for 0 Will is 75 the twins will have at lvl 1 between 80 and 85 (~, depending on class) SP and SPRegen between 1 and 2. If this system would be implemented I would probably try to reach 15 Will for all chars quite early (90 SP, 3 SPR), and the backrow crowd would most likely have 25 Will around lvl 12-13 (100 SP, 5 SPR).

This has to be balanced and integrated in the new timer system (regen every 10 time ticks or so?), but I believe this is not way off of my idea of a satisfying mana pool construct.

This combined with permanent HP damage (battle-field fixes like spells and potions are only temporary) and complete regeneration of mana after the encounter could work ^^

[renke_]

okay, another save - the Yeldin fight (all on lvl 13 except Riley with 12): 31 actions, 9 of them without mana cost. Used SP was between 60 (Jariel) and 110 (Riley)

[Anima_]

This thread is about whatever it needs to be in order to establish that "feeling" that we apparently want to create but keep not talking about though I certainly have opinions on member swapping. The FFX fan had to code that in, yah?

Sorry to disappoint but the inspiration is Mana Khemia 1. The mechanics are designed to force and reward continuous member swapping and at least I had a lot of fun with them. I'll have to talk a bit with the writer before I can say more about the design goals. Unfortunately the current story outline hasn't been very current for some time now. So far it looks like a true sequel that will retain general mood and themes from Loren, while changing perspective and emphasis.

@ renke_
It would be probably better to plan it more abstract as amount of actions per 1000 ticks for example. Than we can assign regeneration, pool sizes and costs. Of course there is already a restriction on actions per tick trough the delay mechanic. A different metric would be sp/damage and scale from there.
Though if we use character swapping with a pool, the pool size will be scaled to the amount of switches we want per combat (on average). And regeneration would only occur for back up characters.