Winter Wolves - Queen Of Thieves - alpha/prototype build 0.5.1

jack1974 May 16, 2015

I had the enlightenment! :lol:

I was using SOTW system, but wasn't really happy about it, until I had the idea: use the Critical Hit value not just for the Critical Strike (double damage) but also to determine the final damage, compared to the target's defense

This way putting points in Accuracy makes much more sense too.

In summary the damage is now determined with:

compare attacker's Critical Hit vs defender's Defense, then multiply this by the Attack value (obviously, also considering the skill parameters, so if says "deals 250% base damage" will take this into consideration too).

The result so far are super encouraging, because this way even if you put all points in Attack, you aren't anymore a killing machine like before, and same applies for Critical Hit. You need to balance the two things.

I'll probably upload a new version tomorrow, but I am quite happy about this solution.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFI-GmZVEAIZnOi.jpg:large" style="max-width:100%">

See? now AOE spells do valid damage! (in particular on the sides, 50% of the center damage as expected).

Jaeger May 16, 2015

the system I had in mind would work for example in a card game, where you can lose cards and replace them by other, and with always fixed values, but with level up progression and a RPG gameplay it doesn't work well as I thought!

With the way damage calculation worked and defense breaking, it vaguely reminded me of The Banner Saga. They had a level up system, but it had a lot of restrictions. Attributes points given on level up are on the small side. Each attribute had a maximum value and they varied by character. The level cap was also very small, with 5 being the highest.

I had the enlightenment!

I was using SOTW system, but wasn't really happy about it, until I had the idea: use the Critical Hit value not just for the Critical Strike (double damage) but also to determine the final damage, compared to the target's defense This way putting points in Accuracy makes much more sense too.

In summary the damage is now determined with:

compare attacker's Critical Hit vs defender's Defense, then multiply this by the Attack value (obviously, also considering the skill parameters, so if says "deals 250% base damage" will take this into consideration too).

The result so far are super encouraging, because this way even if you put all points in Attack, you aren't anymore a killing machine like before, and same applies for Critical Hit. You need to balance the two things.

So accuracy also increases damage (not just critical chance)? I'm a little confused here?

jack1974 May 16, 2015

With the way damage calculation worked and defense breaking, it vaguely reminded me of The Banner Saga. They had a level up system, but it had a lot of restrictions. Attributes points given on level up are on the small side. Each attribute had a maximum value and they varied by character. The level cap would was also very small, with 5 being the highest.

Yes indeed. I could probably have kept this if I didn't offer any attribute point, or leveled up the characters based on class automatically, so I could design specific encounters for each level.

So accuracy also increases damage (not just critical chance? I'm a little confused here?

Yes in practice it does. If target defense and attacker accuracy are the same, the damage is the 100% of the attack value. With different values the damage changes in %. For example:

Attacker: Attack 10 Accuracy 4 => Defender: Defense 4 = 10 dmg

Attacker: Attack 10 Accuracy 2 => Defender: Defense 4 = 5 dmg (since accuracy is 50% of defense)

Attacker: Attack 10 Accuracy 4 => Defender: Defense 2 = 15 dmg (since accuracy is 200% of defense)

for a moment considered doing a miss/hit, which is quite common too in games like Blackguards, but I stopped playing that game exactly because of that... nothing more frustrating than missing 4-5 times in a row because of bad luck

Troyen May 16, 2015

Wait, your last example doesn't make any sense. Why would being 150% of defense result in lower damage than 100% of defense?

Also, if you don't have hit/miss (and I hope you don't add them back!), "Accuracy" seems like the wrong word. From the sound of it, it's function is more like "Penetration" but I don't quite know if this is that kind of game. Maybe something like "Piercing"? (Can your writers help with synonyms?)

yayswords May 16, 2015

I think it was supposed to say 15 damage. But accuracy is 200% of defense, not 150% Jack. :lol:

Anyway, I'm not sure about this. It's not that I don't think it could work, but I think it has needlessly many moving parts. I suggested for SotW long ago that the benefits of overpowering the attack:defense ratio should have diminishing returns; if you have twice the attack you do double damage, but if you have three times the attack you do 2.5x damage, not 3x, etc. That way, huge attack scores don't result in proportionately huge damage numbers, yet there isn't a lame multiplier cap saying stop getting more attack retard it won't do anything at all. Someone better versed in math and programming could come up with a formula easily, I imagine.

However let's not add hit/miss back, especially not tied to single stats. This was another problem of SotW, for example my Ranger/Riley combo with such godly defense that spells missed on a regular basis, and any attack that went through still did pitiful damage. When defense both reduces damage taken and chance to get hit in the first place, it has exponential scaling. Going from 50% dodge and 50% damage reduction to 75% dodge and 75% damage reduction quadruples your survivability.

So anyway, back to your system. Mathematically, it might be sound, but it leaves me wondering when to get accuracy and when to get strength. How does weapon damage factor into the calculations, anyway? And is the skill multiplier (say 200% damage attack) applied at the end of all this?

Is it (attack+weapon damage)*(accuracy/defense)*(skill damage modifier)?

jack1974 May 17, 2015

I think it was supposed to say 15 damage. But accuracy is 200% of defense, not 150% Jack.

Yes exactly, that's what happens when you post formulas after 8h of work :mrgreen:

So anyway, back to your system. Mathematically, it might be sound, but it leaves me wondering when to get accuracy and when to get strength. How does weapon damage factor into the calculations, anyway? And is the skill multiplier (say 200% damage attack) applied at the end of all this?

Is it (attack+weapon damage)*(accuracy/defense)*(skill damage modifier)?

Well, I don't have weapon damage. Weapons add to stats (they can add bonuses to existing stats). They are still different since some weapons add 5 attack and others add 5 speed and so on.

I wanted to make a game where I could write a formula (except the mistake I made above because was tired) and everyone could understand it. With SOTW I still can't explain to someone what is the damage formula because there are so many different things (weapon damage, the capped multiplier, etc etc).

In practice you can say that attack is the weapon damage, but in this case you can also raise it with stats (but not much).

Anyway all this theory means nothing, I played the prototype now and works very well, you clearly see what happens every time. So unless someone can show me a clear way to break this system, I'm going to keep it and only tweak the skills

jack1974 May 17, 2015

I've updated the first post with 0.5.1 with the new system, is still with many bugs but just to show the new damage calculation. Unless someone can point me an obvious reason why it sucks (with an example maybe) I'm going to keep it

yayswords May 17, 2015

So for a basic attack it's just attack*accuracy/defense then? That's easy enough to understand. Assuming they are always equally expensive to raise, it will always pay off more to boost the lower one... actually slightly favoring accuracy since that boosts crit too. I think (if it uses that formula) you might as well have made attack twice as expensive to raise and just used attack^2/defense but let's try this :D

yayswords May 17, 2015

OMG YOU BROKE OLD SAVES ALL MY PROGRESS IS GONE :cry:

Also, tell me this. Poisoned in like all your games reduces crit by 50%. Reducing a percentage by a percentage always gets confusing (although I think there is proper unambiguous wording), so just make it clear. If a character has 50% crit chance and gets poisoned, will it have 25% crit or 0% crit?

jack1974 May 17, 2015

I wanted to have another use for accuracy beside the critical. So the only other options I could think of was to use a "hit/miss" system, but you know I don't like those

Anyway yes, is like what you said, though I don't know how to fix this, and still keep a simple formula. Maybe is just impossible

Or I should do like in Grimrock or many other RPGs, without any attribute increase on level up or minimal, so I could just keep the previous damage=attack-defense and tailor the encounters.

To be honest, the ONLY problem with the system before was when the enemies had more defense than your attack and you hit for 1dmg. But perhaps just allowing fixed attribute increase based on Class or 1 attribute on each level was enough.

Also, tell me this. Poisoned in like all your games reduces crit by 50%. Reducing a percentage by a percentage always gets confusing (although I think there is proper unambiguous wording), so just make it clear. If a character has 50% crit chance and gets poisoned, will it have 25% crit or 0% crit?

It should have 25%, if is not like that is a bug

yayswords May 17, 2015

The formula is easily applied at least. I can figure out what damage I will do without looking at the predictions.

Debuffs like Poisoned/Burning/Weakened will throw the numbers around a bit, but generally you could tell a novice player to just raise acc/atk equally and that should be like 80-90% optimal.

jack1974 May 17, 2015

Cool at least we agree on one thing, now is super easy to understand, is what I wanted

Hmm maybe I could have attack influence by how much the defense is lowered on each hit? In practice I'm thinking a way to make attack more attractive, so people don't just put all points in accuracy :lol:

Or maybe I could have it influence the duration of the negative conditions (need to check if it's possible).

Or if I bring back the old progressive attributes system that would work too (since after 10 you need 2 attribute points, after 20 you need 3 and so on).

yayswords May 17, 2015

I don't think people will put everything in accuracy, not even in the accuracy vs. strength decision. There's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_of_two_squares which tells us (not primarily perhaps, but it does) that if you split a number into two terms, and then multiply them, you'll get the largest product if they are equally split.

Okay that sounded nerdy, but look at this. Let's say you have 20 attribute points to divide between str and acc, and both are at 0.

If you put 15 in acc and 5 in str, you'll have 15*5=75 "attack power" or whatever we wanna call it.

If you put 18 in acc and 2 in str, you'll have 36...

If you put 10 in each, you'll have 100.

If you're looking to use the mathematical rule here, just call a 10 and b whatever you want to steal from one and give to the other. Then you get (10+b)(10-b)=100-b^2, which is greatest (100) when b=0.

So obviously accuracy also gives us crit, but even if we compare the smallest uneven split to the equal split, meaning 11 acc/9 str to 10 of each, we have

99 attack power, 11% crit

vs

100 attack power, 10% crit

We can average 1% crit out to +1% damage, so they become

99*1.11=109.89

100*1.1=110

And the even split is still better. If we have 100 stat points to allocate and we go 51/49 vs 50/50:

55*49*1.51=3773.49

50*50*1.5=3750

Accuracy has become very slightly favored somewhere between the 20 and 100 stat point total, but we're talking 23.5 "raw damage" when we're already dealing with 3700; it's not even 1% better to start going for uneven distribution.

So yeah you don't really need to worry. Of course it would be nice if strength had another bonus, but the added crit from accuracy doesn't really hold strength back much. I'd still raise them equally and what would change it is the occurrence of attack/crit reducing debuffs. And that gets really nerdy to calculate because Poisoned is much more heavy on your crit than Burning/Weakened is on your attack, but it's just your crit, not your accuracy it lowers, so I'm not gonna try to figure that out right now

jack1974 May 17, 2015

Ah true, you're right

OK for now will keep it like that and focus on finishing the skills, in particular the mage ones

The only thing I'm unsure is if to keep the 1 attribute each level up as it is now, or bring back the 3+ attributes (depending on difficulty level) and the progressive reduction...

yayswords May 17, 2015

I was wrong when I said Burning/Weakened/Poisoned will throw the numbers around a bit. Okay, it's true Poisoned will, but as I already posted, the added crit barely changes the balance at all so if it can go down in this or that fight that doesn't really matter either.

Anyway, since it's all just one... not even long

multiplication, and multiplication is commutative (=order doesn't matter), it doesn't make any difference if Burning/Weakened reduce attack or accuracy, the end result is -20% damage anyway, no matter what balance of the stats you currently have. Also holds true for Rampage, but not for Frenzy, since that's a flat addition.

I guess it's added clarity when you can think of +x% attack as +x% damage.

Troyen May 17, 2015

Something that's been an issue with mage spells in all the other RPGs is each element applies a specific debuff, and some are very much better than the others, namely Slowed and Shattered, because they benefit your entire team's offense (more attacks between enemy turns and more damage). If you're going with the same debuffs on the same elements, it would be neat if you can figure out some way to encourage casting multiple elements, so there is some variety in skill choices.

The resistance/immunity system and the environmental "bonus" attempted this, but didn't quite work out. Immunities just denied you a debuff and the "bonus" forced you into picking whatever school was good for the act.

What if instead you could work out some gameplay where there was a bonus to using multiple schools of magic? Though I'm not quite sure on how to do this while still avoiding a set rotation that you would just use every fight. In terms of flavor, seems like fire might be good for clustered enemies, and then you have some single target options - maybe ice for thieves, earth for warriors, and air for mages. Or make them theme-based, fire spells built around dots, ice spells built around comboing off each other, etc.

I don't know, but I think the mage skills need the most work - they've been around in generally the same form for a while now.

yayswords May 17, 2015

Strike Through doesn't agree with the new damage calculation. 7 str, 8 acc, ST novice deals 3 damage? It "should" deal 28, but that would be OP as hell making even Strike Through (Novice) the same as attacking an enemy with 2 defense. Anyway 3 damage sounds like just dealing 50% of strength as damage which isn't going to be exciting unless the opponent has tons and tons of armor.

@Troyen - a few ideas on that, for example if more power is moved into the DoT then you would at least not chain cast the same nuke on the same target. I also had the idea that Burning does more damage, but it also damages anyone who tries to interact with the victim.

jack1974 May 17, 2015

I was wrong when I said Burning/Weakened/Poisoned will throw the numbers around a bit. Okay, it's true Poisoned will, but as I already posted, the added crit barely changes the balance at all so if it can go down in this or that fight that doesn't really matter either.

I haven't checked those yet, but I could probably just use fixed numbers. Even if I raised HP pools a bit as you noticed, a 2hp/turn damage is still noticeable

Something that's been an issue with mage spells in all the other RPGs is each element applies a specific debuff, and some are very much better than the others, namely Slowed and Shattered, because they benefit your entire team's offense (more attacks between enemy turns and more damage). If you're going with the same debuffs on the same elements, it would be neat if you can figure out some way to encourage casting multiple elements, so there is some variety in skill choices.

Yes, but I am not sure I want to include elemental attacks for Warrior/Thief, would look a bit strange. I am even considering removing the elemental aspect itself. So it's only about damage + effect.

I think it could be balanced this way, like:

- Fire = maybe higher hit damage, but then lower DoT

- Freeze = lower initial damage, but slow

- Poison = normal initial damage, but longer DoT

I had put Freeze for now in the combo skill exactly because of that, because the slow effect is very powerful, so I wanted it not to be available easily.

Strike Through doesn't agree with the new damage calculation.

Yes that's broken. I tried to make it ignore armor but would result in insane damage :lol:

so I think will change the texts saying it ignores 50% of armor value, that way shouldn't be too powerful.

I also had the idea that Burning does more damage, but it also damages anyone who tries to interact with the victim.

Hehe that would be fun to do.

I think anyway the balancing could be obtained like I said, tweaking the DoT length or effect itself. Another idea, using yaysword as base, is that every spell would have a counter-effect:

- Burning, burn anyone who uses melee

- Freeze, slow down but increase their armor (since they would be hard as ice :lol:

)

stuff like that, of course only for mage stuff. Poison would just do poison and nothing else.

yayswords May 17, 2015

I haven't checked those yet, but I could probably just use fixed numbers.

No I was talking about their effect on your damage output. At first I thought you should get a little extra attack because Burning/Weakened will sometimes reduce it, but in actuality these debuffs (or the Rampage buff) don't change the optimal balance.

so I think will change the texts saying it ignores 50% of armor value, that way shouldn't be too powerful.

With the way defense works now, ignoring 50% of defense is the same as a 200% attack. And the only way it won't be that is if the target is all the way down to 0 defense, but I've already seen numbers get ridiculous enough before you get that low. At 0 defense you die from a fart, unless the division by 0 crashes the game. If this is supposed to be the answer to high defense we need a different mechanic.

Brute Force: Deals 200% your strength as damage. Ignores defense.

jack1974 May 17, 2015

No I was talking about their effect on your damage output. At first I thought you should get a little extra attack because Burning/Weakened will sometimes reduce it, but in actuality these debuffs (or the Rampage buff) don't change the optimal balance.

Ah OK, good then.

With the way defense works now, ignoring 50% of defense is the same as a 200% attack. And the only way it won't be that is if the target is all the way down to 0 defense, but I've already seen numbers get ridiculous enough before you get that low. At 0 defense you die from a fart, unless the division by 0 crashes the game. If this is supposed to be the answer to high defense we need a different mechanic.

Brute Force: Deals 200% your strength as damage. Ignores defense.

Lol I just tried, and with Kira 8 AT and 6 AC against 1 DF = 48 dmg :lol:

(with a simple melee attack)

Perhaps I should just do this instead, normal hits don't decrease defense/armor anymore, but only selected skills (like Strikethrough or Thalia's Backstab). Probably is a wiser idea. The previous mechanic worked fine with low numbers, but now reducing target's defense even just by 1 each hit has much devastating impact!