[RPG Maker 2k3] Balancing Attack/Defense

Alright, so this is my main concern right now, is balancing out attack vs defense. I wanted to cap the attack and defense values naturally for the main party members at around 255 (like in most normal RPGs). However, I see that it's impossible to set it this way, since it seems that the attack/defense modifiers are.....wonky, let's say. I'm guessing it's due to how 2k3's formula's work differently since it allows for stats to go up to 999 (which I myself think is a tad too much personally but oh well) as opposed to how it would work in say, any of the Final Fantasy games. Now, is there any sure fire way to make sure that attack/defense is balanced throughout the game sans having to constantly test it during battles or whatnot? Or am I stuck to have to use the 1000 mark for attack/defense? D:

Ok, so now I'm clueless as to how to make this work! I tested this out a little and well....here's what I got


Set enemy's defense to 1
Had an attack of 255
Damage output = 200 damage



Set defense to 1
Had an attack of 999
Damage output=450-500


Set defense to 1
Had an attack of 1599
Damage output = 1000



Really? That's it? I guess I can't really do much about it. I was hoping to make attacking more worth it, but I guess I can't put the enemy's defense that high at all if I even WANT attacking physically to matter x_x

Why does your game have to be like most RPGs? Why do you have to do a shit ton of damage a hit, even still at level 1. I know that personally I prefer games with a more realistic amount of something. I'm not saying that everything should be realistic, but sometimes when something is harder to obtain, it's valued higher or at least you can feel accomplished. Though it's not like it's a big deal, but the thought always crosses my mind while I play a game as either "Wow, I'm level 3 and just did 531 damage" or if it's about gold it'll depend on whether or not it was easy to obtain. I think it's dumb that items are sold in shops for like 3000G for 1 potion whereas fighting an enemy yields like 2400 a kill or something. To me having really big numbers for something not that important seems way too over the top.

No, I'm just trying to balance it out a bit by having attack lower so that I don't have to have it at 1599 or whatnot. Granted, I don't want to do like 500 damage at Level 1 (at Level 4, I'm happy with the damage being 40-50 actually), but I am trying to go for realistic numbers here. I mean, if you're Level 99 (which I had a character set to btw to test this) with 1599 attack, and you're fighting an enemy with 1 defense, wouldn't you expect to do like.....a LOT of damage to them? That seems rather realistic I think, but that's me I guess.


And on the topic of prices, I've been trying to balance out the costs of items and equipment (which is another thing that's kinda rough to do ^^;), so yeah, I'm trying to be reasonable and realistic with things even if it is Touhou ^^;;

So then if you're into realistic numbers for things like that, what was the problem with the numbers you have in your second post?

I can't make an accurate guess as to what the calculations are for the damage output as your ATK grows, but if the first of the 3 examples you posted was something I based it off of, then the other two damage outputs are 1.25-1.6 times lower than it should be. Either way, I don't really see the problem :X

Also, finding the right prices is a lot harder than you'd think, blehhhrgg...

Aye, I know with the prices....I've been constantly adjusting them....and it's annoying x_x

Well, the problem with the numbers is that it just doesn't seem logical, nor realistic, for someone with THAT high of an attack to deal such low amount of damage. Granted, I wouldn't have that many enemies with 1 Defense, but I don't want to have all of my enemies and bosses to have somewhat low defenses just to make attacking physically worth using, if you know what I mean? Like....I don't want people to JUST rely on the special attacks (even though the special attacks are what I originally WAS going to make the game heavily based off of), and I'd like them to have a decent option if they don't have any MP or MP restoring items on hand at the time. ^^;

hmm. it depends I think. Can the players see the defense of the enemies? Because if not, then you could TOTALLY have your enemies with like 1-10 Defense throughout the entire game lol. I mean, the player can obviously look at their own ATK power and if they hit a monster with 999 ATK and it only does like 400 damage, well, hell, I would think that the enemy's DEF is retardedly high. So you could just fool the players into thinking it's not 1 DEF. You'd be the only one to know that for real I suppose

Hm. I suppose that is true, though the 1599 is with the highest physical attacker (not including other equipment that I just recently fixed up that has attack bonuses, so odds are it'd do more damage than that to them). It's just that the issue right now is, at the start of my game right now, I have enemies with around 20-40 Defense (2 with around 60-70), and my party members usually have an attack of 70-100, so they do around 40-50 damage (if they don't hit with any weaknesses, and around 30-40 to the high defense monsters), so that seems perfectly fine for the start of the game. And most of the "ultimate" weapons give an attack boost of only around 200 (most bonus weapons give around 255-400), so yeah....I think the issue I'm having is trying to keep the enemies' defenses up to par so that they don't get murdered by physical attacks too.....I don't know x_x


And no, they can't see the defense of the enemies, so I could probably do that actually, though it'd feel pretty weird doing it that way. lol

1 DEF
255 ATK
=200 Damage

totallllly does not even make sense when you say

30 DEF
85 ATK
=45 Damage

I mean...wow. The defense is 30 times higher, the attack is only 3 times lower .___. and yet you only do about 1/4 damage instead of something more logical like 1/20 the damage (I totally didn't use math for that fraction, I just made up 1/20 because it just sounds like it'd make way more sense than 1/4)

Yeah, it makes absolutely NO sense to me, hence why I brought this topic up to begin with. If it's like that at that with 85-100 atk vs 30-40 def and then 255 atk vs 1 def, then I don't know how the heck it's going to be balanced at all. I do have weapons that attack twice, and then attack twice again to simulate a 4x Cut effect, but those are far and few (and are usually very rare weapons in the game that you can't buy anyways....or if you get them, they reduce the heck out of the other stats that aren't attack power to balance them out some). It's just....very awkward x_x

Use Algxel to calculate potential damage caused by a stat since it uses default rm2k/3 algorithms or make your own X_X

The formula is something like 1/2 Attack - 1/4 enemy defense with some variation. What I did for Paradise Blue was play around with the attribute values. Instead of 100%, it's 200% or more. I have a few weapon types, each with their own attributes. So it goes from 150% for the weakest weapon to 400% for the strongest weapon. I wanted that so small attack values would still show a difference (The strongest weapon had 56 attack power and the weakest was 5. In RM2k3 default values that'd be a difference of 27 damage, not much at all).

Unfortunately you can't have multiple attribute types on a weapon if you do that otherwise they'll stack and have a super powered weapon. So you may need to scale magic attributes the same way, or don't do any attribute scaling and just keep it normally at 200% or so. You could go plugging in numbers here but at least you should be dealing much higher damage than before if that's something you'd want to do.

Player defense still becomes an issue though. No attribute for that, so you'd just have to make sure the amount is noticeable enough.

Oy. Seems.....complicated in a way. I remember messing with the attributes for elements to make them do 200% at the maximum and absorb 100% at the weakest, but I don't know WHY I didn't think of messing with the attributes of physical attacks. That would allow me to actually make the highest weapon NOT 400 attack then ^^;. I'll have to mess around with that then, but I do have to say, that is a very odd formula indeed o_o;


I also noticed that if I were to do something like, say give Fire the Fire and Magic attribute, and the enemy absorbs Fire, it won't work due to it having Magic on it for whatever reason (like I have Magic at C and Fire at E). Yet if I were to make it JUST Fire, or Fire and say....Ice I think?.....then it'll absorb it. Any ideas on that part?



EDIT: Alrighty, so I did some more testing, and this is what I got.


Using my strongest powerhouse character, level 30, 600 attack vs 1 defense, and setting the Attack weapon attribute to 150% (default), she does about 170 per hit. After setting it to 1000%, she only did 250 per hit.



Using another character, 121 attack vs 1 defense, 150% attack attribute, she did about 60 damage. Setting it to 800%, same stats, did about 80 damage normally.....so yeah.....and I tried with setting other attributes too to see what would happen, but it didn't seem to affect the damage values at all.



EDIT #2: Sometimes I am a blithering idiot lol. I forgot to set the monster's attribute for attack to A instead of C. So now, my 121 attack vs 1 def with 500% attack does like 2500 damage. Granted, I don't know if I'll use that as the base or not, since that's kinda high, where 1172 atk vs 1 def and 500% attack attribute does 3300 damage. I think I'm getting it fixed up, though I think this will work fine enough. I should test it on other enemies first.


And after testing it once more, some more test values


121 attack vs 100 defense, 500% attack attribute = 180 damage.


121 attack vs 34 defense, 500% attack attr. = 350 damage.



So I need an opinion here from you guys! Do you think that is balanced enough or not? The 500% is at A, 250% at B, and 100% at C, just to make that clear.