Hey guys, so while doing the database on my game I am always wondering how am I going to do the enemies for the game.

I was thinking on using some sort of enemy level with party script or something similar because it's kinda unrealistic that at level 90 if you fight a level 50 dragon you can beat it in 1 hit.

Having the possibility of enemies growing with you would make you going back to the first maps not a walk in the park but still having some decent fights.

I know some people hate this type of system and prefer enemies with fixed states and for now that was the route I was thinking on going, but eh doubts and thoughts are there too.

So how do you plan your enemies in your games? Would you put an enemy growing with you into a game or it's too much trouble?

Awaiting your responses as currently doing armour icons and states and next are enemies.

I use fixed enemies because I'm lazy and it's just sound design. You see, if you choose to have enemies level with you then the player arrives at several impasses:

1. I will never be god (which most RPG games thrive because you essentially become a god)

2. Enemies will just get more health and armor rather than new AI and so the fights just get longer; not more entertaining.

Now my questions to you from your examples:

1. Why does the player need to reach level 90 in the first place? You could make the max level 4 if you wanted to.

2. Why not make harder dragons when the player is level 90? You just need to map out your levels. As in, when the player reaches X part of the game they will probably be level 60-65. So you make enemies designed for those levels. If the player finds them too difficult then they go back to where enemies are designed for 50-60.

Yes, that method requires more play testing but when more play testing equals a better designed game (i.e, less tedium for the player), well, why wouldn't you play test!?

Basically the only pro to your chosen system is that you don't need to scale enemies yourself anymore. There's no real benefit to the player as if you scale incorrectly then the player is screwed because now all of the enemies are too difficult. At least, that's more likely to occur in that system.

With the hand-crafted area-level system the chances of players finding X too difficult is minimal and the solution for the player is to just fight weaker enemies (or perhaps earn experience doing other activities).

It's better, in my opinion, to hand craft the game rather than allow the player to grind through old enemies that have more health and armor.

While hand crafted enemies would be designed for their level and have new AI.

My two cents presented by my yours truly.

Your question defeats itself, why make max level 4 when it can be 90?
Besides I think it was just intended as an example, an exaggeration, to fully elucidate the flaws of this 'godmode' you like (not everyone wants to onehit KO everything), especially if he wants to reuse early areas later on.


I think its a nice idea, its refreshing to play a game with scaled enemies simply because not that many games do it.
The problem with the system is that the you can't risk varying the stats so much with the enemies since they'll be levelling up themselves. Enemies then become a little samey, only their picture and their skillset really changes throughout the entire game

Suppose. The problem with his idea is still that enemy AI isn't what's changing, just HP and armor. I consider that pretty mcuh artificial difficulty. And then what the hell is the point of leveling? If at level 1 it takes me 3 hits to kill the first enemy in the game, why at level 10 does it now take 5?

Take a look at The Elder Scrolls Oblivion to see just how terrible his system can be. It provides no benefits for the player to actually level up. Meanwhile, designing enemies to match the players assumed level makes a difficulty curve.

Under his idea, the difficulty is practically flatline.

Yes it was an example to point out the one hit KO flaws.

My game is open and sandboxish and so the maps could be reused for different locations like dungeons and events.

I'm still deciding what to do but like you pointed out kaust it has to be configurable in a way that doesn't make all monsters having same stats as I intend to make some monsters needing different strategies to beat.

[Edit]

@Cleril while oblviion's balance is flawed, skyrim has a more balanced one and even something similar to fallout could work.

What I don't like about being god mode is the simple fact that even if your level 90 a stab with a knife should hurt you regardless if your level 1 or 50.

I suggest you to use some serious enemy level script (i.e. not falwed as oblivions) and set some skill to be cast by enemies only when your party is at a certain level...
The best thing should be a linear system which set a maximum to enemies' defense (e.g. 220) in order to prevent you from doing zero damages and a maximum to their attack (e.g. 220) in order to prevent them from doing too much damage to your characters

I always hated that feature (enemies which can die in one hit while doing nothing to your heroes) too, BTW set a level maximum tied to map id is rather inelegant in my opinion...

Jens

Skyrim uses a mix of Oblivion and even then it. Skyrim has fixed levels enemies will get up to (Bandits will only ever get up to say, level 5, as an example). In that the player does feel rewarded for leveling up as eventually they do get much stronger.

Skyrim also has certain dungeons that have set levels the player should be to complete then.

In essence, Skyrim has both points for your system but it still uses my preferred system. A match is a tad better middle ground but it still leaves much to be desired.

Basically, I play through my game as I create it. I believe this is result in the adverage outcome for all players. So I got along and create enemies, put them in game, and adjust stats if necessary.

When it comes to bosses, I tent to give them unique attacks and high health.
Erm... Idk... I test a lot and that's how it works out.

Just don't make the level up stats over dramatic with your characters and I'm sure enemies will always been challenging, rather make equipment what makes battles easier. Its what I did with The Magnus Light and it seems to work perfectly.

The scaling is an instant turn off for me, for most of the reasons Ceril indicated. It kind of nips any form of progression in the butt, as soon as you feel you're getting somewhere...wait...you never feel like you’re getting somewhere. Scaling basically means that you level up and get new abilities that don't feel all that new because enemies still take just as long to kill. No one said you can't have super high level dungeons in starting places that players have to come back to or scripted fights for extra tough quests, but constantly fighting enemies that get stronger as you do means that no matter how far you travel or level you never really feel like you’re getting anywhere.

Also, I think you're looking for a bit too much realism in jrpgs. You're right, no matter the level of the hero a knife should affect them and it should probably kill or send them to hospital in ONE hit. Getting hit a single time should mean that character can no longer fight for between 4-6 weeks and should be nursing the wound. Designing your gameplay around realism is somewhat pointless unless you go all the way, which is why most games worry about fun first and realism later.

What I was thinking by enemy scaling was that it would scale with your party every x levels till a certain point depending on the zone/monster, the monsters will become stronger with you but till a certain cap so they will be still beatable if you are very high level and go into the first maps.

The knife thing was just an example, I understand your opinion it's just I find it silly in every game that let's you be immortal when you surpass x enemy by 10-20 levels. Now I could make versions of the same enemies to make it somehow harder but I would prefer on hearing people's opinions before wasting hours on creating them then find out people hate that type of method.

At least in my game it will be somehow harder as levelling up you get points to spend how you want EVEN hp and mp. People could pump all in strength (Which gives a little atk) or some other stats but still having low health will make them gimped.

I'm not usually a big fan of scaling enemies myself, but I have seen some games where they not only work but are pretty much necessary. The more open world you make your game, the more sense it makes. If you have very linear game play that's not going to take you back to the first maps very much, why worry about scaling your enemies like that? Conversely though, if you have a game where the player can go to several different places, you almost need that scaling so that you don't get out of whack with the monsters.

For example, the first Dragon Age game had scaling enemies. The way that it was set up so that you could go nearly any order with the zones made it necessary, otherwise you would have easily out leveled the monsters or wouldn't have been able to beat them. It needed that flexibility.

Most RPGs I've played are pretty much linear. You start in Zone A that is level 1-4 (or whatever) by the time you hit Zone B the monsters are about level 5 or so on, so that as you progress they move with you. In these types of games, you go Zone A, Zone B, Zone C, etc... There's really not much making you go back to Zone A, so like mentioned before scaling the monsters here makes for more work for you.

Looking at it from another angle though, is there a reason story-wise for the monsters in to get stronger? Why would they level up at the same rate as your characters, does it have something to do with the world or the bad guy?

In the end it's all up to you and how you'd like to build your game.

Well I've always seen progress through the enemy types; in most games you start out fighting rats and oversized insects that take say 3 hits and then at level 50 you're fighting dragons... Kinda makes sense that these guys are gonna take a while.
Besides if you want enemies to go down in less hits as you progress then the game is getting easier, and frankly I'd find it a little ridiculous that my biggest struggle on a game was beating a slime.

Yeah this system takes away most grinding benefits, but you'll always have the advantages of the learnt skills or perhaps level restricted armour.

I use fixed enemy stats, but I make the fights harder each dungeon. Ex, your damage increases by 5%, but the enemy's hp increases by 8%. I'm obsessed with Strategy RPGs though, so rather than reward the player by making them a "God", I reward them with different options as time goes on. At first, you only have fire spells and regular attacks, and enemies go down quickly. Later enemies are really tough, but you can weaken them with status ailments, temporarily freeze them with Ice magic, damage yourself to use Dark magic, buff a friend that can use multiple attacks, etc. I feel like putting the difficulty and the learning curve together works really well. That way you don't have to learn about status ailments right away, but when you finally get them you're ready to learn all you can about them because you need the advantage.

The problem with using a "strategy based" method of increasing difficulty with the enemy strengthening method you're proposing is that you'll be familiar with all the enemies. Rather than looking at a dragon for the first time and going "How am I going to kill THAT", the player will already know the correct strategy to fighting a slime because they've fought dozens already. If I was you, and I wanted the enemies in different areas to "grow" with me, I'd use conditional branches that occasionally "upgrade" enemy encounters depending on where you are in the game. That way you're still upping the difficulty, but at level 10 you're now fighting "slime lizards" or whatever, rather than just stronger slimes. It's still fresh to the player.

I don't know if you're using the random encounter generator though, and frankly I don't know how you could script that in. I use event based battles myself, but I'm sure someone could help you modify the way random encounters work with switches.

You could do it with a party experience event. I've written one for 2k3 which is (of course) scriptless. But the thing is, the villain would normally have about 10x the stats of the party, making the only real advantage weapons that can multi-hit. It's simpler just to add higher damage amounts to a random damage battle event, based on whether you're below level 10, or above level 90.

I'm trying to aim my game as sandbox and open not linear as possible and that is pretty much the reason I am considering this system.

There isn't a reason for the monsters to grow stronger with you storywise it's just something I was thinking that would make travelling more dangerous instead of a walk in the park. I'm not sure if people saw my game thread but the first map I've done is 240 x 200 which is not something you really see usually because it can make people with old computers have frames problems while playing them.

In my game you will have a main story but it's not forced on you I want to try and take an approach similar to the elder scrolls games in which you start the game got some cutscene and you need to go in x castle to proceed the main story, tough no one is forcing you to go now and that is the reason why I think some sort of scaling could work.

I'm not making the characters in my game heroes but normal people (Which I'm seeing rarely in most games sadly).

@KD648 I'm not using random encounters because rmxp one is very bland and limited and seeing the enemies on the map that can follow you is better anyway.

After looking at most scaling scripts I could find I'll probably go with the conditional way, say if party's level is higher than x fight big rat, if less fight rat.

Another solution is to event all your enemies, and get rid of random encounters. With some exceptions, random encounters have become a thing of the past, and most people would prefer to see the enemy on map to decide whether to battle them or not.

With evented enemies, you can add switches that alter the enemy through different stages of the game, assuming you'll have to come back and fight through the same dungeon multiple times.

So at the start of the game, one dungeon may feature the cliched slime, but halfway through the game you have to return to that dungeon, so set a switch that turns the slime into a harder enemy like a dragon with stats close to what the player will be at, that offers more EXP/Gold. This way, you avoid having to properly scale an enemy without making them redundant, the player doesn't feel their hard work has gone to crap when at level 5, slimes are still just as powerful as at level 1, and you have diversity in the monster groups since the player won't always know what monsters will be there at any given time.

I like the thread starters Idea.

Also, rather than just adding more HP and Attack. You can also give the monsters a new attack every x levels..

I have played some games where scaling monsters causes hell, especially if their are random encounters. It might be a good idea to make it so that only a portion of the monsters in a certain area scale to heroes strength while the rest are normal.

Don't worry I don't intend on using random encounter because rmxp one is very bland, frustrating and annoying for the players.

Also yes if I'm going to make versions of same enemy but with higher states it might have new skills.

This is pretty much what I use for my enemies in my game, along with the "Enemy Detection System" by Gubid. I added my own events which every time you touch a enemy on the map, it pulls up a random group of enemies. It's so the player won't be fighting the same three slime, sometime they would be fighting two slimes, or five bandits. I use the control variable to make this happen of course.

I try to make the outside encounters look fun, such as some enemies can fly, fade through walls, teleport, hide, or even call for help. (Which I'm working on the call for help one)