Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

RTWP and TB inherent problems (and NPC companions)

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,003
Location
USSR
For RTWP:

Let's take the example of Baldur's Gate.

Option 1: Make AI overpowered, but stupid - it attacks only the closest target.

Result: it gets boring after a while, same solutions work every time, filler combat becomes tedious.

---------------------

Option 2: Make AI "Smart". It always goes for your mages and the weakest targets.

Result: It's a pain in the ass to deal with, your mages die all the time, warriors become useless because mages are tanking, it looks weird. You gotta buff mages with a ton of shit or make them stay way way back. It's super NOT FUN.

Any other ideas?


For TB:
- Can't have Companions in game, because then every fight becomes the battle of Waterloo.
- Could make Companions act as AI to alleviate the problem, but then some fights turn extremely stupid where you're dedicating all your efforts to protecting a stupid companion that can't protect itself, because it's AI. That's not a solution.


On companions:
Furthermore, if you have companions, then your party can basically do everything and pass all dialogue checks, which become irrelevant. It's a problem. Make them into silent mutes? Kinda weird. Remove them then.
But if you remove them, this only works for post-apoc settings and doesn't work with high fantasy. You gotta have NPCs there, BG2, Pathfinder, etc style.


Therefore, problem:
For generic high fantasy, you gotta have companions, therefore you gotta have RTWP, therefore your combat will suck, therefore your game will suck.
 

smaug

Secular Koranism with Israeli Characteristics
Patron
Dumbfuck
Joined
Feb 20, 2019
Messages
6,438
Location
Texas
Insert Title Here
Make it turn-based, or turn-based phased base.
 

laclongquan

Arcane
Joined
Jan 10, 2007
Messages
1,870,144
Location
Searching for my kidnapped sister
The problem of Turnbased is two fold
- Limit the number of participants. It must have limit of each turn would take too long.
- Limit the space of battlefield. either you have a random encounter map to have a proper size (in which case you can not control map terrain to initiate battle) Or you are going to mess with it. think of Fallout2 New Reno Main street if you initiate a battle.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
For TB:
- Can't have Companions in game, because then every fight becomes the battle of Waterloo.
- Could make Companions act as AI to alleviate the problem, but then some fights turn extremely stupid where you're dedicating all your efforts to protecting a stupid companion that can't protect itself, because it's AI. That's not a solution.


On companions:
Furthermore, if you have companions, then your party can basically do everything and pass all dialogue checks, which become irrelevant. It's a problem. Make them into silent mutes? Kinda weird. Remove them then.
But if you remove them, this only works for post-apoc settings and doesn't work with high fantasy. You gotta have NPCs there, BG2, Pathfinder, etc style.


Therefore, problem:
For generic high fantasy, you gotta have companions, therefore you gotta have RTWP, therefore your combat will suck, therefore your game will suck.

What?

How does turn-based make companions bad?

Turn-based is more fun with companions than with a single character, because you can perform more intricate tactics. How does a party of 4-6 characters equate to every fight being "the battle of Waterloo"? That battle had over 100k participants. You can take 5 random RPGs and add up every single enemy you fight in them and still not reach that amount of soldiers.

I play strategy games as well as RPGs, turn based and real time. Total War, Field of Glory, etc. Those battles, where you control dozens or even hundreds of units, feel and play a lot different than RPGs with their small party sizes.

Having the AI control your companions makes it even worse. This is what made me give up on the excellent NWN1 module Swordflight, because my AI companion spellcasters always kept wasting their spells, then ran into enemies and died. AI controlled companions is terrible because they will only do things you don't want them to do, and the battles become an exercise in frustration instead of fun. And yes, NWN isn't even turn based, it's RTWP.

A good example of AI-controlled companions sucking in a TB game is Fallout's Ian shooting you in the back. Classic.

Meanwhile, turn-based combat with a party of 4-6 characters is the most fun RPG combat can be. Knights of the Chalice. The Gold Box games. ToEE. Those are often cited as the RPGs with the best combat, and for good reason. As for more recently released RPGs, pretty much everyone seems to agree that Divinity: Original Sin had better combat than the PoE games.
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,003
Location
USSR
Meanwhile, turn-based combat with a party of 4-6 characters is the most fun RPG combat can be. Knights of the Chalice. The Gold Box games. ToEE. Those are often cited as the RPGs with the best combat, and for good reason. As for more recently released RPGs, pretty much everyone seems to agree that Divinity: Original Sin had better combat than the PoE games.
I wish I had your outlook on things, then everything would be so easy. But every battle in Divos takes half an hour. What a snooze fest. It's to the point where you dread the next battle.

However bad POE's fights were, at least I always felt in control. In Divos you just watch things unfold and can't do anything for a long while. And when they CC your characters on top of it, oh boy. What would've been over in a matter of minutes with RTWP, takes half an hour in TB.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Meanwhile, turn-based combat with a party of 4-6 characters is the most fun RPG combat can be. Knights of the Chalice. The Gold Box games. ToEE. Those are often cited as the RPGs with the best combat, and for good reason. As for more recently released RPGs, pretty much everyone seems to agree that Divinity: Original Sin had better combat than the PoE games.
I wish I had your outlook on things, then everything would be so easy. But every battle in Divos takes half an hour. What a snooze fest. It's to the point where you dread the next battle.

However bad POE's fights were, at least I always felt in control. In Divos you just watch things unfold and can't do anything for a long while. And when they CC your characters on top of it, oh boy.

The solution is ToEE's system of showing enemy animations at the same time so there's less waiting involved.
 

Bohrain

Liturgist
Patron
Joined
Aug 10, 2016
Messages
1,442
Location
norf
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
On companions:
Furthermore, if you have companions, then your party can basically do everything and pass all dialogue checks, which become irrelevant. It's a problem. Make them into silent mutes? Kinda weird. Remove them then.
But if you remove them, this only works for post-apoc settings and doesn't work with high fantasy. You gotta have NPCs there, BG2, Pathfinder, etc style.

Companions shouldn't be able to execute every action where they pass the skill check, otherwise you make the build for player character redundant.
I think that they should be able to excel in their given specialization, but full cooperation with the player would be limited. Either the party size should be smaller than amount of type of skill checks, or you'd have only a limited amount of companions within your party who will fully cooperate with you. In case of the latter, you'd have situations like having 6 party members where only 3 would pick locks and such just as the player wants and the rest would only use noncombat skills when working against their hated faction, or do stuff like omitting vital information when translating a text.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
1,307
Let's take the example of Baldur's Gate.
Why not take the example of an actually good RTwP implementation? Why do people insist that BG's RTwP was anything but simple and boring? I get it, it's backed by a robust implementation of DnD but the actual execution of the combat is so rudimentary and bland. I find it hard to believe that anybody could play Pillars of Eternity and not immediately realize its brilliance when it comes to combat. Specially in the sequel, you have such granual control over companion behavior, and it has such great checks and balances that all your complaints are addressed. You can play on very high difficulties with the AI indeed targeting targets very strategically, but if you are diligent and build your party right, they will not be fodder for the AI's slaughter.

For generic high fantasy, you gotta have companions, therefore you gotta have RTWP, therefore your combat will suck, therefore your game will suck.
This is just retarded autism. You are equating RTwP with bad for NO REASON. You have either not played any good RTwP games and therefore not fit to make any post such as this or just too closed off to the idea that RTwP can be good that you don't even let it impress you.

I don't get you TB fags. What's with the fanaticism for TB?
 
Joined
Jul 18, 2016
Messages
78
I think one of the bad things about TB combat is that it scales really bad when you increase the number of participants. It works well when you do 1vs5 or 2vs3 but anything more than those numbers and it slows down really quickly. And the tactical depth basically vanishes as well because your only options are to either run away and shoot, sit behind your cover and play trenchware or run towards the enemy to focus them down. Get blobbed or be the blobber. This means that the game dev needs to make sure the number of participants never exceed the critical mass in any battle to avoid things slowing down to grind. (Unless you really want to create a big special battle on some special and rare situation in which case it is ok imho). But even then the goal always and absolutely needs to be to avoid using waves of low hitpoint enemies and generally keep the numbers manageable.

But even then something like 5vs5 is always going to be tedious. One way to get past this could be dynamic grouping. So if you have 5 companions you get divided into 3 groups of 2 each and each is controlled as one unit. That also scales up nicely if you always make sure the critical numbers are not exceeded. 30vs30 for example is 3x groups of 10 people each. I don't know how to deal with the various aspect of combat in that kind of system but I'd imagine something like that is the only real way to scale up the fights in turn based. I'd guess there are other ways. Does any rpg use a system where you have planning and movement cycles? So at first cycle you and your enemy plan your movements and attacks and then in second cycle the ai performs these planned moves and attacks for both sides? I've never played that kind of rpg but I do remember that combat mission had something like it when I played it eons ago.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
WTF is wrong with people

How is 5v5 tedious

That aren't even large numbers

Go play something like Field of Glory 2 or Steel Panthers WW2 to see what large amounts of units on screen are.

And FoG2 turns don't even take that long because animations are fast.

RPG combats are never so big that they become unmanageable hellholes. Underrail Expedition has some massive engagements against the natives, with over a dozen of the guys attacking you on one map, but it never feels like a slog because you can set animations to be super fast and then these massive battles actually become exciting and make you use all your available resources - spells, grenades, traps, etc.

The tediousness of turn based combat is not tied to the number of present enemies, but to the amount of time it takes a single enemy to calculate its turn, animate its movement, and animate its attack.

Fast animations or tricks like ToEE's displaying the walking animation of enemy groups at the same time remove all the tedium from TB combat.
 
Joined
Jul 18, 2016
Messages
78
5vs5 is fucking tedious against masses of slow or low hp enemies especially if you get more than one fight after another like that. Couple of high skill enemies are always better than bigger number of anything. Even in underrail I'd prefer to fight 3 mutants instead of 1 mutants and 5 green dogs even if underrail is not really tedious.
 

Kliwer

Savant
Joined
Oct 19, 2018
Messages
215
I find it hard to believe that anybody could play Pillars of Eternity and not immediately realize its brilliance when it comes to combat.

I'm used to fire PoE from time to time. Every time I do this and start fighting I'm thinking: "why to lose time on this when I could play BG?". Do not take me wrong - I like PoE 1 to some degree, but BG has everything better (especially with SCS). Classical fantasy instead of samthing which pretend to be clever and strange but is just boring. Wonderful companions who are like someone played by your friends during PnP adventure. Epick fights with interesting magic system and cool classes and kits... In PoE you have, in fact, 3 classes: dps, tank, supporter. The end. BG system is much richer and more interesing, even if not balanced. Backstabbing assassin is ten times more funt to play than any rogue build in PoE. Special abbilities of monsters are more deadly and more unpredictable. Magic items are non-standardized and unique.

There are some better things in PoE, but they are minor (ex. text adventures).
 

passerby

Arcane
Joined
Nov 16, 2016
Messages
2,788
Any other ideas?

For RTWP:
Use basic AI only for trash mobs, for serious encounters actually play the game yoursef, isn't that the point ? Problem solved.

For TB:
It's inferior by definition and a waste of time on top of that, don't use for party based games, it's fine for a single character if enemy moves are displayed simultaneously to not waste your time.
Easier to implement, so good acceptable tradeoff, to save development resources for games where combat is not the main focus and you don't spend majority of time in it.

On companions:

Provide tons of different non combat skills and not enough exp to cover all skills and make most characters proficient in combat at the same time, so there is a tradeoff.
Alternatively for some stupid class system like D&D, make some very useful skills exclusive to some classes that are inferior in combat.
 
Last edited:

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
masses of slow or low hp enemies

Here's the problem which I already partially addressed in my post.

The "slow" part can be easily fixed by not making enemies slow. Best case scenario: allow simultaneous movement display a la ToEE and add a combat animation speed slider like in Underrail.

Masses of low HP enemies are also called trash mobs, and trash mobs are bad design in RTwP too, it's just less apparent there because combat is more automatic. But trash mobs are always a waste of time, unless they're encountered in a longer dungeon where you can't easily return to town to re-stock on resources, and their purpose is to drain the player's resource before the well-designed challenging boss fight.

It's not a TB problem, it's a trash mob problem.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Option 2: Make AI "Smart". It always goes for your mages and the weakest targets.

Result: It's a pain in the ass to deal with, your mages die all the time, warriors become useless because mages are tanking, it looks weird. You gotta buff mages with a ton of shit or make them stay way way back. It's super NOT FUN.
Disagree. Mages should be standing away from the combat. They're wearing a fucking dress.
 

Sergiu64

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Jun 8, 2010
Messages
2,636
Location
Sic semper tyrannis.
Let's take the example of Baldur's Gate.
I find it hard to believe that anybody could play Pillars of Eternity and not immediately realize its brilliance when it comes to combat. Specially in the sequel, you have such granual control over companion behavior, and it has such great checks and balances that all your complaints are addressed. You can play on very high difficulties with the AI indeed targeting targets very strategically, but if you are diligent and build your party right, they will not be fodder for the AI's slaughter.

Do you enjoy granually controlling companions as they all blow themselves and each other up with AoEs? Or do you not use half of your abilities because its impossible to set up the AI to stop nuking their friends?
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Option 2: Make AI "Smart". It always goes for your mages and the weakest targets.

Result: It's a pain in the ass to deal with, your mages die all the time, warriors become useless because mages are tanking, it looks weird. You gotta buff mages with a ton of shit or make them stay way way back. It's super NOT FUN.
Disagree. Mages should be standing away from the combat. They're wearing a fucking dress.

Easy solution for the AI going straight for the mages: add stuff like flanking attacks so if they run past your fighters and expose their backs to them, the fighters can get easy crits.
 
Joined
Jul 21, 2009
Messages
2,573
Location
Once and Future Wasteland
Serpent in the Staglands Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
ill repeat myself from another thread some time ago: rtwp got a problem due to number of companions. For it to work you MUST get nice companion AI customization options.

Companion AI is, and always will be, hot garbage. No matter the quality of the customization options, the AI will never be able to execute your strategy as well as you can because the customization options are far too static. The player is simply far better able to adjust to the circumstances of each individual battle when controlling every party member because the circumstances change. They change even when facing the exact same enemies because the party's HP, level, inventory, spells, etc, will be different, and managing these effectively is important for a game to have good combat. Moreover, the more dynamic you make your AI, the less predictable it is (because the player has to keep track of what the AI will do at each juncture), which makes it even more difficult to plan your encounters out. If you're consistently winning with party AI on, it means the game is too damn easy with party AI off.

The very first thing I do when starting an RTWP game is to completely shut off the party AI. I want full control, that's why I'm playing the game in the first place.
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,003
Location
USSR
Option 2: Make AI "Smart". It always goes for your mages and the weakest targets.

Result: It's a pain in the ass to deal with, your mages die all the time, warriors become useless because mages are tanking, it looks weird. You gotta buff mages with a ton of shit or make them stay way way back. It's super NOT FUN.
Disagree. Mages should be standing away from the combat. They're wearing a fucking dress.

Easy solution for the AI going straight for the mages: add stuff like flanking attacks so if they run past your fighters and expose their backs to them, the fighters can get easy crits.
Absolute nonsense that it solves anything. Unless all your mobs die after getting hit 1 time. And then there are archers.

The only solution is to NOT make such AI.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2015
Messages
12,621
deterministic system > RNG
 
Last edited:

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom