[cowgod]

I'm working on the design for a casual RPG, and I have a design decision to make. I want to use Phased combat, but I would like to get some other people's opinions on this.

Note that real-time combat isn't an option. I don't want to deal with it.

Turn-based Combat:

In turn-based combat, you decide what your character does when it's your character's turn. This is the "normal" way to do things, and it allows you to make decisions based upon everything that's already happened.

Phased Combat:

In phased combat, you decide what all your characters do at the beginning of the turn. This is more realistic in that the characters won't be aware of what has happened in the past few split seconds, so you have to make your decisions without this knowledge.

It also has the advantage of allowing you to reuse your decisions from the last turn, only modifying the ones that need to be modified. The engine will be smart enough to change the targets so that you never attack someone who is dead.

The only recent game I've seen this in is Wizardry 8. It used to be fairly standard. It seems to me that it would at least be something different to include in the game even though it's not entirely unique.

[RedSlash]

Yes, I believe that the "phased" based style was the "normal" way of doing things in the earlier generations of console RPGs.

I prefer turn based. Being able to script macros for "phased" based games made fighting really boring (execute macro, watch same fight scene over and over again). I think turn based allows it to feel slightly more interactive. i.e. someone's about to die and it's your turn, you can heal them in time or a character who is super agile gets his round of the turn faster and more frequent than someone who is slow, etc...

If you go "phased" based, it would be cool to see that attacking a already dead target would fail (just like in FF1). Prevents you from just clicking fight constantly.

I vote turn-based, but I don't mind phsaed!

[cowgod]

Well, I wouldn't have any kind of macros for phased combat - you would just select actions for each one of your characters.

Faster characters will still act sooner, but each character will generally take one action per phase. There will be special abilities that allow multiple attacks in a phase, but they'll require the expenditure of stamina points.

Actually, one of my main reasons for doing this to minimize the amount of clicking repeatedly just to make your characters attack turn after turn. You tell them to do an action, and they'll keep doing it until you change the action. Maybe they'll even preserve it from one battle to the next.

On the other site where I posted a poll, people seem to like Phased Combat. Of course, there were only 5 posts (1 of which was mine). We'll see what the results are when a statistically significant number of people post.

Nothing is set in stone yet. I still haven't finished the project I'm already working on.

[LeoDraco]

I prefer turn-based over phase-based. While my reasoning will probably be taken to be a non-sequitor, mostly because a properly designed phase-based system could account for this, it stands thusly: I like turn-based because I can, as RedSlash mentioned, react to what the enemy is doing far more quickly and efficiently. Phase-based systems can degenerate to the following situation: party member A is dead; party member B raises him during the phase; party member C casts a cure spell on A; enemies attack. Now, in the best case, the agility of B and C are great enough (or, conversely, least enough) so that C always executes immediately after B (which is what I want; presumably, B's raise spell/item does not full cure, or, as in FF3, only yields 1 HP); in the far more common case, an enemy unit attacks between B and C, probably on the party member with the least HP (e.g. A). In this scenario, A dies before he can be fully cured. If, as you suggest, these types of actions carry over between phases, A may never be able to participate in this battle.

This argument, reversed, also is applicable: a few of the enemy units are fast enough to always cure themselves or their party members before your characters can effectively eliminate a single enemy unit.

Regardless, I hardly see how a party of characters waiting around for orders until the beginning of a phase is any more realistic compared to a character who executes his order immediately upon receiving it.

Finally: FFX reintroduced turn-based combat to the series; its battles were extremely quick, and, assuming you like doing the same thing over and over, mostly painless. You could just retain the player's menu-selections (assuming you are using some sort of battle menu) for each character, defaulting their action to the previous one; this way, when ever their turn came about, all that the player would need to do is hit the proverbial "OK" button.
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"...LeoDraco is a pompus git..." -- Mandrake

[Rainer Deyke]

The system you describe as "phased", where all orders are given at the beginning of the turn and then resolved in initiative order, is just annoying. Aside from the control issues that LeoDraco mentions, I hate waiting for the combat actions to resolve when there's nothing I can do to affect them until the end of the turn.

However, delayed action resolution isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the combat system for one of my current game projects has delayed action resolution. This is to give each side an opportunity to interrupt the other side's slow but super-powerful spells as they are being cast.

[Captain Vimes]

Look at Golden Sun for an example of phased combat. But I'm for turn-based.
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"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."
- Terry Pratchett

[cowgod]

[cowgod]

I don't plan to use a delayed action system unless it's phased combat. It makes sense for spells to have a casting time, but I'm not sure I'd like to wait for something to happen. I remember FF7's long animations for the summons.

I looked up Golden Sun but didn't find much mention of how combat actually works. I assume it's similar to the old Dragon Warrior games (e.g. 2-4).

What about Action Points? In games like Fallout, each step uses 1 action point, and each attack uses a particular number of action points. An character might have 6-8 action points in a turn (depending upon statistics - it could be more or less, but most characters seem to fall in that range). I think melee attacks would usually use 3 action points and ranged attacks would usually use 5.

My system won't have any kind of movement. Would an action point system still make sense in such a system? It seems to me like it would, but it might not be a good idea for a "casual" RPG.

[RedSlash]

I actually like the action point system. But it can make sense in turned based as well. For example, say you have 5 action points. If you're a thief, your attacks can use 2 action points, enabling two attacks in one turn. Or you can use 1 attack using 2 action points, and let the 3 carry over to next round where you'll have 8 action points to execute superslash (which requires 8). You can start creating combo attacks using action points, etc..

[cowgod]

A turn-based action point system sounds like a good plan to me right now.

Oddly, this forum likes turn-based systems, and the Java Games Forum unanimously likes phased systems.

I have thought up a solution to the Heal-then-Revive problem. If a character is casting Heal on a dead character, the character will wait until that character is revived. Every time the next character is about to move, it checks a list of characters who couldn't act because of a non-sensical command (such as casting Heal on a dead character). If it gets to a point where every character who hasn't acted is blocked, they just do some default action. When possible, they might just retarget the action (i.e. healing a live character).

Certain actions might be handled differently. When attacking, it would retarget on-the-fly instead of blocking the action because it doesn't matter too much who you attack.

This would take away a certain amount of freedom though. If there's an enemy that explodes when attacked with a melee weapon, it could cause a problem.

A much simpler solution (from the Java Games Forum) is to just make Revive restore some HP as well. That reduces the problem but doesn't get rid of it unless I make Revive heal a whole lot of HP (which seems like a bad idea).

[RedSlash]

How about if a person does something non-sensible (healing a dead character, or attacking an already dead enemy), then that person's turn gets passed to the end of the queue.

So for example for characters A, B, C, D (in which A is the fastest and D is the slowest character):

Suppose C is dead.

And suppose the following commands are entered for each char:
A (heal C), B (revive C), D (attack enemy)

Since A goes first and cannot heal C, so A's turn gets pushed to the end after D. B revives C, D attacks the enemy and A gets to go and heal C.

If by the time C is revived and an enemy gets a turn after D and kills C, then A is out of luck and has to pass the turn.

With attacking an already dead enemy, your turn gets pushed to the end where it will autoselect a target when you get your turn again at the end.

[cowgod]

[RedSlash]

[Adam]

[cowgod]