leveling skills (idea)

[Lonestar51]

Retraining is more like: OK, you have a char, say a mage, and you gave him water attacks and additionally some dexterity for avoiding attacks (Or whatever). Later, you notice, that the combo does not really work, and you retrain the char: away with the water attack, fire is much nicer. And instead of dexterity you decide to put everything into making the magic attacks more powerful.

However, as an old-school RPG player I do not need such new-fangled knicknack.

[jack1974]

Level cap will be 30, right now I have no clue exactly how easy/hard will be to hit it, but even the grinding will be different from Loren. While present, I'll put some limits based on key plot-points, so that I don't see anymore situations like people fighting Fost (last boss of Loren) at level 27-28 (a normal playthrough should get you there when you're level 17-18!)

[renke_]

Retraining is more like: OK, you have a char, say a mage, and you gave him water attacks and additionally some dexterity for avoiding attacks (Or whatever). Later, you notice, that the combo does not really work, and you retrain the char: away with the water attack, fire is much nicer. And instead of dexterity you decide to put everything into making the magic attacks more powerful.

exactly! Thanks for the explanation

However, as an old-school RPG player I do not need such new-fangled knicknack.

Life's short - as an old gamer I'm not interested in completely retrying a game in different combos. I'm not a teenager anymore, every day counts ;)

[yayswords]

Many will have 100%, but since this one gives an instant-kill, I thought would be better to give the poor target some chances. Though I could probably tweak the HP left though.

Sounds way better to use 100% and rather tinker with the threshold.

[Becca2828]

Thanks for the explanation, so do the enemies, mobs, not friendly things... I don't really know what to call them, level up with you or is it like different area's give different leveled mobs to fight?
Someone's probably already asked but I don't really want to sit and read through all the pages, I'll end up doing it at some point though

[jack1974]

In summary:
- I have a system that auto-balances the enemies to you party statistics (not level or skills). Using as base the average stats of your party
- then I can tweak the values to assign "traits". For example: Bruiser means has 20% more HP, 20% more attack than the average party member
- finally, in the encounters I can assign a level RELATIVE to the party average. So if I put -2, means that this monster will be 2 levels below the party average, so weak. If I put +5, will be 5 levels higher so very powerful

Using this relative system is much easier because I don't need to play the game in all possible ways to see which levels the player reach (though I'll also put level-based limits). Also, a tough encounter will be tough no matter which level you play it. Of course, if you find battles hard in general or a specific battle too hard, you can always change the difficulty during the game

[yayswords]

Did it take you a whole game to think of that! About time bro. Don't you dare have second thoughts about it

[jack1974]

Well, Anima is skeptical about my approach for example. But I think I will convert him once he can play the beta next month

[yayswords]

I am a sucker for big numbers so I like that solution over just having a level cap that increases as the story progresses. Or did he have another solution in mind? Either way this is better than leaving things as they were in Loren.

Fittingly enough, there's been a recent comic about this very subject http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20140307 only 5 days old.

[jack1974]

Ah no I was referring to the auto-leveling enemies. But to be honest was a while ago, when he thought that by auto-leveling I meant simply that enemies were always the same as your party, instead using this new "traits system" I can still define enemies in detail (the big enemy with lots of HP, the quick enemy with high attack but low defense, etc). He likes the level cap as story increases idea, I think actually was him that suggested it to me for PS2, and I'm adopting it in SOTW too