I'm a fairly avid strategy and RPG game fan, so, as you might expect, my favorite games are strategy RPGs- namely, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force II, etc. However, I have noticed a common problem in all SRPGs I've yet played; a lack of balance between character building and combat tactics. Allow me to explain. In Disgaea, monster levels are not scaled with character levels, though they can be raised by the player over and over in order to increase difficulty. Assuming your characters are evenly matched with the monsters, combat tactics become quite important; you can't simply throw a bunch of fighters at a large group of monsters and expect them not to die, and you can't ignore healing, status magic, and character positioning. Luckily, for the majority of the game, your characters ARE matched with the monsters you face in the storyline. The problem is when you start doing sidequests, and your characters begin to rise to unbelievable levels (the maximum is 9999) while obtaining incredibly powerful items that make them virtually unstoppable. At that point in the game, combat tactics no longer have a real meaning, as any enemy can be defeated in one blow with enough time poured into advancing characters and items. The strategy, at this point, is in the character building: which items offer the greatest bonuses, and how should they be combined? What classes maximize offensive potential, and which techniques can do the most damage? This type of strategy is nice, but without combat tactics, it quickly becomes dull (but not that quickly in the case of Disgaea, as I have about 105 hours logged :D). Conversely, in the case of Shining Force II, gameplay is extremely linear. You have very few options for customizing characters, and you cannot search for random encounters or training missions, so there is really no such thing as character building. As you might imagine, this places a higher emphasis on combat strategy, as you simply do not have the ability to design an uber, high level team- you are given an assortment of characters, and it's up to you to choose how to use them. This makes the game both challenging and enjoyable, but it lacks any replay value. Once you beat it, it's done, unlike Disgaea, where the player has the option to defeat secret bosses and build up characters. Finally, Final Fantasy Tactics take the approach of scaling monster levels to player levels, making sure you are evenly matched the whole time. This provides for very challenging gameplay, forcing you to develop your characters wisely and take into account all aspects of combat. On the other hand, it fails to address the problem that your characters can become very powerful without having to gain experience levels. By giving them certain ability combinations, classes, and equipment, they become unstoppable, making the game laughably easy in the long run. A level 25 Goblin may have better stats than a level 5 Goblin, but it doesn't have better abilities or equipment, while a level 25 player character will have far better equipment (and thus, stats) than a level 5 PC. This isn't a problem until late in the game, but it is still a major downfall to what is otherwise an incredible game. This brings me to the purpose of the topic, which is to pose a question to various developers and games here. How do you think the ideal strategy RPG should balance tactics during combat and tactics for building and equipping characters?

My opinion on this...

Say you're providing side-quests and uber-weapons, and yet you
don't want the player to become invincible/unstoppable? Then
why bother?

In the end, no matter what system you come up with, some
hard-core players will try to find a way to "defeat"
your system and achieve "unbeatble" status, precisely because
they want to be unbeatable!

But so what? That is the player's prerogative. Why waste time
even thinking about it? It doesn't make sense.

I fully expect to become a "god" in the game, if I'm going to
invest 20 hours into side-quests and obtaining some uber-weapons
in the game. I wouldn't have it any other way, as a player.

If you don't provide side-quests or uber-weapons, then as you
mentioned, the game becomes very much linear and loses replayability.

Scaling the baddies to your level was bad in FF8 - it lead players to attempt to never, ever level up (instead, they used a little loophole attack that didn't allow you to gain experience points, but did let you get cash).

Options:
a) don't make stats go up so fast. If you didn't insist on increasing the damage dealt by the player's "hit" action by an order of magnitude every half-hour, then maybe their enemies wouldn't be so far behind. Think baby-steps - by the end of the game you should be only 5x as strong as you were at the beginning, not 1000x.

b) don't scale enemy strength based on player strength, just scale experience points given based on relative strength. So an imp is worth 50 xp to a low-level player, but 10 to a high-level player. So with side-quests, the players will get ahead a bit, but the monsters will catch up when they get back to the main story.

Quote:

Original post by TangentZ My opinion on this... Say you're providing side-quests and uber-weapons, and yet you don't want the player to become invincible/unstoppable? Then why bother? In the end, no matter what system you come up with, some hard-core players will try to find a way to "defeat" your system and achieve "unbeatble" status, precisely because they want to be unbeatable! But so what? That is the player's prerogative. Why waste time even thinking about it? It doesn't make sense. I fully expect to become a "god" in the game, if I'm going to invest 20 hours into side-quests and obtaining some uber-weapons in the game. I wouldn't have it any other way, as a player. If you don't provide side-quests or uber-weapons, then as you mentioned, the game becomes very much linear and loses replayability.

I understand what you're saying, but again, the problem is balance. How difficult should it be to make all the boss battles trivial? In FFT, the game becomes easy when you get a certain NPC on your team a little over midway through the game- that character alone is more powerful than several normal characters of the same level. In Disgaea, the game becomes easy once you reach a certain sidequest stage that seems to be designed just so you can gain easy experience and money.

I certainly agree with you that a developer *must* provide side quests and ways to make characters unbelievably powerful. However, one of the most aggravating things I've experienced in various RPGs is that once I *have* become powerful, there is nothing for me to do. What good is it to have ultra-powerful gear when absolutely nothing poses a challenge? Only a few games have managed to circumvent this by introducing super-bosses that can annihilate even a complete maxed out team (see: Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy 7, Shinryu and the two Weapons, respectively).

er, I was logged out somehow, that last post was me. sorry about that.

Quote:

Original post by Anonymous Poster Only a few games have managed to circumvent this by introducing super-bosses that can annihilate even a complete maxed out team (see: Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy 7, Shinryu and the two Weapons, respectively).

There are some other options.

The first time through, there will be no (or just a
few) secrets accessible to the player. In a New Game+,
the player has more explorable options and the ability to
obtain uber-weapons.

In fact, the player can retain all the items and weapons from
the previously finished game to ease the tedium of playing
through the scenarios again (i.e. they can breeze through the
early stuff).

Yes, this sounds like the system used in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter,
and a few other games that let you play New Game+.

The first play-through is where you would care a lot
about balance and you can easily control the difficulty (because
the player won't be too powerful, yet).

I hope you can agree that in a second (or third or more) play-through,
it really doesn't matter if the player can become a "god" anymore...

That's an interesting point. I am familiar with games that have New Game+ options (Chrono Trigger, for instance), but I have never seen it used that way in an SRPG. Perhaps I should rent Breath of Fire V and see how they execute it. I could definitely imagine that system working, provided the game is not so long that players would not want to start a new game. I think 30-50 hours is the ideal playthrough time of an SRPG, counting the time you need to build up characters to beat bosses, but not counting the time it takes to do sidequests.

Well I think that one way to balance the characters is to add debilities in their jobs. For example, you could get a very powerful Dragon, but the enemies have a Knight, and Knights have bonus against Dragons.

With this, although you get a very powerful Dragon and the enemies were very weak, this fighting bonus could make the difference. And you could make a very large list of jobs and abilities and make every job weak against any other.

Well, anyway, being extremely strong in the game will make this obsolete, but the idea could help anyway.

I'm really interested in this but unfortunately haven't played alot of these types of games, so please excuse my ignorance, but I wonder if part of the problem is the linear nature of the leveling cycle itself: Rather than being massively good at any one thing, what if getting better at something made you more vulnerable at something else.

You could have a system, for example, whereby getting better at fighting made you more susceptible to magic, or being better at ranged combat made you more susceptible to melee. IOW, you could always expand and level your character, but expansion itself would embed tactics by default, since what makes tactics possible period are vulnerabilities.

What you could then do is give bosses and monsters mixed powers and combined power tactics which occured in phases. For example, if getting more power with ice weakened you by default to heat, it might be interesting to run up against a group of monsters that alternatived between both heat and ice attacks and vulnerabilities in phases.

Even at godly levels, you would still be at the mercy of their heat blasts, and you would have to keep your party positioned smartly and alive long enough so that you could be ready for the phase when the monsters were more vulnerable.

I think it would help if there were more tactics possible then there were NPCs in the player's party. This way, they could never cover every vulnerability, and even godly fighters would need the backup of healers when walking into terrain with variable attack/defense monsters.

zircon_st, take a look at Avernum. ( www.avernum.com )

It is an RPG with an awesome story, world and all that stuff, but what you might be interested is this:

The world is huge (probably the biggest in an RPG so far), and you are allowed to walk anywhere right from the beginning (except places where the story or too big monsters are in the way ;)).

At the same time, it manages to be extremely well balanced, combat wise. Of course, when you're level 20 (which is quite high), you'll have no problems killing goblins - as it should be (monster scaling is a horrible idea) - but you'll still have problems with fighting demons, dragons, golems and other nasty monsters you might encounter. There are always someplace you can go, and some places you can't depending on your level, because there are always balanced fights to be had everywhere. Amazing. :)

The combat system is extremely fun too, in my opinion.