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Light and Heavy Armour System

This is for RPG Maker XP with standard combat system, BTW.

I'm trying to do a basic but deep system for my RPG. To do this, I want to integrate a Light and Heavy armour system.

Basically: The idea is, Light armour would give you no/little penalty to Agility (not a bonus unless it's necessary for balance), while Heavy armour would give you a [large?] penalty to agility but make up for it with Defence (and possibly Magic Defence).

I need to work out how to balance this properly... but I'm not an expert with RPG statistics.

Can someone please help me with this?
 
PeteD2S":2ta7pskx said:
Just change the armor properties, you can give the armors negative stats (penalties).
I know this--but I don't know how much of X properties or Y properties to give them... AKA: I don't know whether Heavy Armour 1 should give a -20 penalty to AGI or a -100 penalty to AGI (as an example). I also don't know whether to give light armour a tiny penalty to AGI, no penalty to AGI, or a bonus to AGI...

All I need is some help with the amounts to give (and whether I should give them in some cases).
 
This is really a question that most people here can't answer. This all depends on your game. If you are using a system with agility and defense points up in the hundreds, the you would the penalty higher than if you had the agility and such down in the 20's and 30's. This is all based on what your system is. It also depends on the algorithm that your battle system is using (the mathematical system used to calculate damage and such). it'll vary depending on the different algorithms for different systems. You really just need to play with it until it feels right. We can give you basic Ideas of ranges like I stated before, but that's about it. So, here is my opinion on what you should do.

Percentages work great here for giving estimates!  :thumb:

Heavy Armor: 20-25% down in AGI, 30-35% up in DEF, 15-20% up in MDEF
Light Armor: (this can really vary depending on what type of armor...)
                0-5% down in AGI, 15-20% up in DEF, 2-8% up in MDEF

So, yeah. That's my opinion.

Hope this helps!
~xgamexfreakx
 
Let me first note that lowering agility with a constant value can lead to some rather unintuitive results. Let's say we have a light and swift warrior with 100 agility and a strong, but slow, warrior with 60 agility. Both of them equip an armor that lowers agility with 50. The light warrior is reduced to half agility, but the strong warrior is reduced to a mere 1/6 of his agility. If anything, you expect a heavy armor to affect the swift more severely than those who already are slow. Consider requesting a script that changes the armor modifiers to a percentile system i.e -30 agility on the armor means -30% agility.

Anyway, let's start with light armors. There's no real point in giving them a bonus to agility since the defensive value they offer is enough to make them a superior choice than not wearing an armor at all. As for giving them a penalty, it depends on if you want the player to sometimes choose not to wear them at all. If yes, then you should give light armors some penalty and if no, then you should not.

Now for heavy armors. What agility affects is turn order, chance to escape, chance to evade attacks that allows evasion and chance of receiving a critical hit (the more agility you have, the less critical hits you eat.) I don't think you really want to fiddle to much with chance of escaping. Questions such as "what is a reasonable chance of escaping from a battle if the player gives three out of four characters a heavy armor?" doesn't seem like something you want to spend a lot of time considering. The chance of evading due to your agility (as opposed to due to your actual evasion stat) and the chance of eating a critical hit is rather small unless you do something to extreme. As long as armors don't slow characters down to less than 50% original value, maybe 40% for really heavy armors, you're pretty safe from disruptive results.

Turn order probably is the main issue here. It's fairly simple in theory, just think of how severely you want heavy armor to affect when a character wants to move. Let's say you give the fastest character a heavy armor. How many of the enemies do you now want to be faster than him/her? If you for example want the otherwise fastest character to be slowed down so that half the enemies now are faster, then the heavy armor simple has to alter agility so that it's lower than half of the enemies in the current dungeon.

One other thing though, do not use low stats for this. An agility penalty becomes less noticeable the less agility the character has to begin with. A character with 30 agility will never act before a character with 60 agility, but a character with 3 agility will very often act before a character with 6 agility. Even at just 1 agility, you still have a chance of acting before someone with 6 agility. For safety's sake, the slowest character should have at least an agility score of 30 at level 1.
 
xgamexfreakx":73apk0yu said:
This is really a question that most people here can't answer. This all depends on your game. If you are using a system with agility and defense points up in the hundreds, the you would the penalty higher than if you had the agility and such down in the 20's and 30's. This is all based on what your system is. It also depends on the algorithm that your battle system is using (the mathematical system used to calculate damage and such). it'll vary depending on the different algorithms for different systems. You really just need to play with it until it feels right. We can give you basic Ideas of ranges like I stated before, but that's about it. So, here is my opinion on what you should do.

Percentages work great here for giving estimates!  :thumb:

Heavy Armor: 20-25% down in AGI, 30-35% up in DEF, 15-20% up in MDEF
Light Armor: (this can really vary depending on what type of armor...)
                 0-5% down in AGI, 15-20% up in DEF, 2-8% up in MDEF

So, yeah. That's my opinion.

Hope this helps!
~xgamexfreakx
Hmmm... I decided to check the characters. Here is their Agility Curve: Elan: LV1/58 LV99/582 (meant to be above average with agility). Jub-Jub: LV1/68 LV99/663 (he is meant to have high agility, but not top-notch stuff). Eleanor (a spellcaster): LV1/52 LV99/543 (meant to start off not too great but end up decent). Sirus: LV1/52 LV99/533 (not a particularly agile guy, but not terribly slow either).
Those are the main characters for now. All of them (except the spellcaster) can use both Heavy and Light armour, allowing for a fully customizable party (this is part of the reason I want to get it done right).

Hmmm.... This sound pretty complicated O_o. I really need a way to have it do the percentages for me, so that I don't need to test the game forty times to work out what to stat the armour as.

Yes, this was helpful :D.

Crystalgate":73apk0yu said:
Let me first note that lowering agility with a constant value can lead to some rather unintuitive results. Let's say we have a light and swift warrior with 100 agility and a strong, but slow, warrior with 60 agility. Both of them equip an armor that lowers agility with 50. The light warrior is reduced to half agility, but the strong warrior is reduced to a mere 1/6 of his agility. If anything, you expect a heavy armor to affect the swift more severely than those who already are slow. Consider requesting a script that changes the armor modifiers to a percentile system i.e -30 agility on the armor means -30% agility.

Anyway, let's start with light armors. There's no real point in giving them a bonus to agility since the defensive value they offer is enough to make them a superior choice than not wearing an armor at all. As for giving them a penalty, it depends on if you want the player to sometimes choose not to wear them at all. If yes, then you should give light armors some penalty and if no, then you should not.

Now for heavy armors. What agility affects is turn order, chance to escape, chance to evade attacks that allows evasion and chance of receiving a critical hit (the more agility you have, the less critical hits you eat.) I don't think you really want to fiddle to much with chance of escaping. Questions such as "what is a reasonable chance of escaping from a battle if the player gives three out of four characters a heavy armor?" doesn't seem like something you want to spend a lot of time considering. The chance of evading due to your agility (as opposed to due to your actual evasion stat) and the chance of eating a critical hit is rather small unless you do something to extreme. As long as armors don't slow characters down to less than 50% original value, maybe 40% for really heavy armors, you're pretty safe from disruptive results.

Turn order probably is the main issue here. It's fairly simple in theory, just think of how severely you want heavy armor to affect when a character wants to move. Let's say you give the fastest character a heavy armor. How many of the enemies do you now want to be faster than him/her? If you for example want the otherwise fastest character to be slowed down so that half the enemies now are faster, then the heavy armor simple has to alter agility so that it's lower than half of the enemies in the current dungeon.

One other thing though, do not use low stats for this. An agility penalty becomes less noticeable the less agility the character has to begin with. A character with 30 agility will never act before a character with 60 agility, but a character with 3 agility will very often act before a character with 6 agility. Even at just 1 agility, you still have a chance of acting before someone with 6 agility. For safety's sake, the slowest character should have at least an agility score of 30 at level 1.
That does sound like a good script to request, yes indeed.

Good point.

I didn't realize Agility effected those--starting this thread has been more informative than I could've hoped.
OK, so I need to get a script that makes the property value of Agi with armour change the character equipping said armour's stat by percentage rather than simple value? I think I'll post that request now :D.

Well, I'd really like to give the player the option of making their own play strategy based on which characters have which armour etc.. Generally, the agile characters should get to act early (if not at the start) if they wear light armour, but would act more mid-way-ish if they used heavier stuff.

I listed the characters' agility curve above. I'd think it'd be high enough.
 
I realized you may not need a script after all. Armors gives you the option to have a stat inflicted on the character upon equipping it. You could use that to lower the agility scores. If the rating of the state is 0, you won't see it displayed.
 
Crystalgate":1tnt8tyf said:
I realized you may not need a script after all. Armors gives you the option to have a stat inflicted on the character upon equipping it. You could use that to lower the agility scores. If the rating of the state is 0, you won't see it displayed.
OK, I'll just do that then. Thanks guys :D!
 

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