Alright so I am playing a game and the enemy encounters are rather lacking, which is unfortunate because it's a beautifully created game.

You have very few spells, which require about 2-3 turns of battle before you can use them. The enemies only attack, nothing more. It's a grind, and rather tedious.

I think basic encounter battles are often overlooked by some RM game designers. That got me to thinking, what is an effective way of incorporating basic encounters into games?

I want your thoughts. Tell me what you think works best for basic encounter battles?

To me, this is the most efficient solution:
Allow battles to either be far and few between or controllable enough that they can be mostly avoided. Then allow all the battles to require some form of strategy, and take 6-10 rounds to complete. Boss battles will typically take the strategies you learned fighting these enemies and compile them into a much larger strategy.

I think where a lot of RM designers miss the mark is they give very little option for strategy right at the beginning of the game. You get these games where you have 2 skills at the start of the game, so you spend most of it just auto-attacking. I think strategy should be incorporated right from the beginning with a number of skills or skill options, and auto-attacking should be rare.

From what I've seen Dungeons: Critical Hit! does a pretty good job of giving you strategy right from the beginning with about 10 skills per class and then building upon it by letting you sort of design your own skill book.

The Way benefits from two different battle styles, The Plunge and the basic TBS style. The Shadow Baldes force a lot of strategy too, as some enemies are downright impossible without a good strategy. (The Way is more of a puzzle game but masks it nicely.)

Ara Fell has some pretty good strategy, requiring a ranged weapon when you run into a flying enemy. As you gain more party members, the strategy also increases as they synchronize with each other allowing for greater survivability and even a greater need for it.

What do you think?

conceptually, I always like to give enemies two different schticks, or at least give sets of enemies that complement each other. In doing so, they have multiple paths that can really mess up a players day.

the thing is though, random encounters are also meant to just expend player resources, not necessarily become life threatening at every turn. This is why I wouldn't always want to make every encounter deadly. But to give them one or two special little things that they CAN do or one or two properties that the player must take into account? totally.

I pretty much design my enemies the same why I do my bosses. I give them different behaviors sets that control a handful of skills they have. The only major difference is the number of behaviors they have and their stats, which are much lower than a bosses.
Much like each party member, each creature has a role whether it's healing, causing trouble through states or inflicting damage.

While I agree with you here, keep in mind that most people making an RM game don't have the professional talent or the time as you might expect from a more professional design. I do agree that oftentimes, games are made with boring and completely useless skills from the offset, and don't get much better throughout, but that's traditionally a problem with the game play balance in general and nothing to do with the skills. They key is to test the game thoroughly, something I think that is often missed.

However, there is a sense of pride in trying to figure out the best way to kill an enemy as fast and as efficiently possible without using up all your MP. By this, I mean useful skills should be given in an area where enemies are weak to that skill, but balanced appropriate enough so that players can decide whether to waste the magic using it or to fight with normal weapons. I don't really think they need to be provided right away, but assuming the forest near your home village is going to require level 3 or above, and the plains nearby are level 1 enemies, I would expect the player to have the sense to fight to at least level 3 before tackling the forest and the game designer to ensure I have the proper skill to tackle said forest by the time I got to level 3.

As far as rounds per battle, I read somewhere once where anything more than 2 rounds becomes tedious. While I may not agree completely with that, anything more than 3 or 4 rounds for a simple everyday fight seems redundant. If it does, then it should be because the player is not using the proper strategy, not because the game designer failed to give him the proper tools.

I do believe this right here is the key. Specialization is the essence of interesting combat. I've definitely designed entire tabletop dungeons surrounding the exploitation of a particular mechanic and base all the enemy behavior patterns around that.

If you can do this enough, it's pretty much guaranteed that you will have a fairly interesting mix of encounters throughout the entire game.

You could easily just take one or two elements from this thread, combine them together and make an encounter fairly unique.