Enemy parties that restore themselves if you don't defeat everybody

[Infinitron]

If we "kill" an enemy character who's part of a party, but not the rest of his party, and then we run away from the fight, does he get back up with restored stamina? That's the same rule that the player's party follows, after all.

[Malekith]

Good question.

[Hormalakh]

i c what you did there.

 

I agree. What's good for the geese should be good for the gander. Don't disappoint me Obsidian.

[Messier-31]

*snicker*

 

I agree. What's good for the geese should be good for the gander. Don't disappoint me Obsidian.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5WmX-rnn4A

 

I have this idea for a special random encounter of enemy adventurers.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Messier-31

[Helz]

I guess this would be one way to stop the player from being able to pull units one at a time, although I'd much prefer if enemies within "earshot" of combat would assist their comrades.  And no leashing; they either die or run away, but don't just reset like nothing happened.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Helz

[Hormalakh]

If you are able to run away and rest up to become a "fresh party" your enemies should have the same advantage.

[Archmage Silver]

Another question:

 

AI characters usually have at least some artificial advantage over the player, so if this would only make things even for the AI, what would you suggest as the AI's advantage to prevent players from steamrolling enemies with superior tactics and removing the challenge from the game?

 

Enemies that level with you? I hope not.

[Infinitron]

Isn't that obvious? The AI's advantage is that there are a lot more of them than there are of you.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Infinitron

[Gfted1]

If you are able to run away and rest up to become a "fresh party" your enemies should have the same advantage.

 

100% of enemies in the game start with this advantage. They will always have full Health/Stamina and all abilities and spells at their disposal. Only the player party has to deal with being "ground down" over the course of adventuring. For realism.

[Archmage Silver]

Isn't that obvious? The AI's advantage is that there are a lot more of them than there are of you.

Yet we were promised very few trash mobs.

[Hormalakh]

Party can always find nearest campsite to rest up. It's a weird assumption to make that party will always be "ground down."

[Infinitron]

 

Isn't that obvious? The AI's advantage is that there are a lot more of them than there are of you.

Yet we were promised very few trash mobs.

 

 

Still much more even without trash mobs. What, you think you're going to fight through dungeons with six people in them?

[Archmage Silver]

No trash mobs, but still a lot more AI enemies per battle? How does work out balance wise, if they're all supposed to be at least challenging?

 

If they're spread out in smaller battles it's a wash anyway.

[Endrosz]

100% of enemies in the game start with this advantage. They will always have full Health/Stamina and all abilities and spells at their disposal. Only the player party has to deal with being "ground down" over the course of adventuring. For realism.

 

No one said it is for "realism" (I prefer verisimilitude), that's just a nice side effect. If you always start battles fully prepared, then all fights must be designed with that in mind, like in Aarklash: Legacy, which is my favorite tactics game from the last few years. It's a valid game design choice, but Eternity's designers chose another path.

 

Having attrition mechanics in Eternity means that moderately challenging fights still matter if you lose Health or use per-rest abilities in the process. Many classic RPGs which normally allowed resting had extra challenging zones where you couldn't rest, and had to win all battles in a single go. It's a great way to require strategic power conservation from players, which you don't have in games like Aarklash: Legacy.

 

Also, attrition increases the tension of every challenge that bleeds out the party, no matter how small the loss is. Okay, we won this battle, survived this trap... but do we have enough strength left to prevail until the very end of the adventure? Attrition paves the way for memorable stories: "And all I had was a single Melf's Acid Arrow, and two of us were knocked out, but that last spell finally dropped Big Foozle and we won!"

Edited April 11, 2014 by Endrosz

[Endrosz]

...wrong button...

Edited April 11, 2014 by Endrosz

[Gfted1]

Party can always find nearest campsite to rest up. It's a weird assumption to make that party will always be "ground down."

 

What? The entire "rest spot" mechanic was specifically designed as a disincentive to use. Your party will almost always be in a a state of less than full capabilities.

 

If you always start battles fully prepared, then all fights must be designed with that in mind...

Its my understanding that that is already the case. Assuming most people play the "core" path, enemies will already scale to +/- 1 or 2 levels and will always have full capabilities. How much more designed can they possibly be?

[teknoman2]

 

If you are able to run away and rest up to become a "fresh party" your enemies should have the same advantage.

 

100% of enemies in the game start with this advantage. They will always have full Health/Stamina and all abilities and spells at their disposal. Only the player party has to deal with being "ground down" over the course of adventuring. For realism.

 

well, your party has to kill the 3 orcs guarding the gate, then kill the 2 pet hellhounds, then kill another 5 orc guards, then the troll cook, then 2 golems and you finally get to meet the lich who is the boss of the dungeon. if nobody has gone past the 3 guards outside, what reason would those inside have to be out of hp, stamina, skills and spells? they fought nobody, while by the time you get to the boss, you have had to kill 13 enemies of varying difficulty

[Elerond]

I have understood that enemies don't have health bar, only stamina, so when they go down they are down permanently, where player's party have abilities to bring back members of party that have lost their stamina, but still have at least some health left. Player's party members also recover their per battle abilities and stamina fully after each fight. So in most battles only thing where player's party members aren't on equal or better footing with enemies are per rest spells and abilities, but more often than not player's party members have much more of these to use than enemy npcs that may not even have any of them available to use. So at end health and per rest abilities work as way to pace the game so that player needs to go rest and needs to think his or her tactics and strategies so that his or her party members don't constantly lose all their stamina in fights and don't spam their most powerful abilities and spells to first enemies they see.

[Gfted1]

 

 

If you are able to run away and rest up to become a "fresh party" your enemies should have the same advantage.

 

100% of enemies in the game start with this advantage. They will always have full Health/Stamina and all abilities and spells at their disposal. Only the player party has to deal with being "ground down" over the course of adventuring. For realism.

 

well, your party has to kill the 3 orcs guarding the gate, then kill the 2 pet hellhounds, then kill another 5 orc guards, then the troll cook, then 2 golems and you finally get to meet the lich who is the boss of the dungeon. if nobody has gone past the 3 guards outside, what reason would those inside have to be out of hp, stamina, skills and spells? they fought nobody, while by the time you get to the boss, you have had to kill 13 enemies of varying difficulty

 

 

Exactly!

 

So in most battles only thing where player's party members aren't on equal or better footing with enemies are per rest spells and abilities, but more often than not player's party members have much more of these to use than enemy npcs that may not even have any of them available to use.

Link?

[Hormalakh]

Yet in each battle, you start at full stamina. Because stamina is a per-encounter resource and is rapid regenerated at the end of each battle. Therefore you are always "fully refreshed" at the beginning of every battle.

 

Health, however, is a different resource and one that is dependent on resting. It is a long-term resource that measures your success over a series of battles.

 

However, unless it is the case that groups of monsters in a select area who are vanquished will return (respawning) you can technically clear sections of areas one at a time and return to camp to replenish your long-term resource (health) whenever you get low.

 

You cannot measure party health (a long-term resource) against enemy party stamina (a short-term resource)- they are two different categories of resources. It would be more appropriate to measure party stamina against enemy stamina.

 

Thus, if you whittle down your enemies' stamina and knock them unconscious without knocking all of them unconscious, you should not be able to step out of the fight, wait for your stamina to refill, and continue the battle again with less enemies. That defeats the whole purpose. Just as your party is not "dead" unless all of your party members are knocked unconscious (0 stamina), it makes sense that the party of enemies should not be defeated unless all the members of that party are knocked unconscious.

 

If you defeat only a portion of the enemy party by knocking them unconscious, the other enemies should be able to "revive" their fellow members just as you are allowed to "revive" your fellow members. Thus, each party always starts at full stamina.

 

When it comes to health, again we measure them based on the same category. It would be redundant to give enemy parties "health" in any case, because they are not "adventuring parties" and thus will only have one battle, but if they were to have "health", again with each reset of the PC party resource (resting), enemy parties would also have resets of their health (as you rest, the enemy also rests).

 

Thus equal categories are being measured. Stamina for stamina - a rapidly recharging short-term resource. Health for health(if it's even needed) - a slowly recharging long-term resource.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Hormalakh

[Gfted1]

Yet in each battle, you start at full stamina. Because stamina is a per-encounter resource and is rapid regenerated at the end of each battle. Therefore you are always "fully refreshed" at the beginning of every battle.

 

Health, however, is a different resource and one that is dependent on resting. It is a long-term resource that measures your success over a series of battles.

I disagree. 95% of attacks will damage your Health. Its a simple matter of death by a thousand cuts and in no way is a measure of success.

[Sarex]

I can't wait for the situations were you are almost at the end of the dungeon with low health searching for a rest spot and then bam the boss appears. Now that is a sucker punch.

[Elerond]

 

So in most battles only thing where player's party members aren't on equal or better footing with enemies are per rest spells and abilities, but more often than not player's party members have much more of these to use than enemy npcs that may not even have any of them available to use.

Link?

 

I don't have currently in hand and I didn't find any mention about subject with quick search, so it is possibility that I remember it wrong, but I can't shake of mental image that Josh have said that fight is over when all enemies have their stamina in zero.

[Lephys]

What? The entire "rest spot" mechanic was specifically designed as a disincentive to use. Your party will almost always be in a a state of less than full capabilities.

And yet, as Endrosz said, the encounters are designed with this in mind, rather than each encounter being designed with the assumption that you'll have full Health, Stamina, and spell/ability "ammo" each time.

 

It's hardly different from, say, a first-person shooter game having you at not-full ammo for most of the game. Sure, every now and then you find a bunch of ammo, and pick it up until you can't carry any more. But, the rest of the time, you have to make do with what you have. This is balanced out by the fact that you're easily able to slay 50+ foes without necessarily using all 200+ rounds of ammo you can carry.

 

I disagree. 95% of attacks will damage your Health. Its a simple matter of death by a thousand cuts and in no way is a measure of success.

But nothing dictates how low you will get before reaching another rest spot. It's only death by a thousand cuts if you hit 0. If you rest every single time you get down to 5% Health, even, then it's just non-death by 999 cuts, in which case, where's the problem?

 

Also, why are you okay with having to manage your resources through a single fight, until combat victory, but not okay with that same principle simply being spread out across multiple fights?

 

If you always got "fully refreshed" after every single encounter, but the encounters were all designed with that in mind, then the tougher ones would sometimes require that you flee before finishing the encounter (if you didn't fight efficiently enough and ran out of spells and health and such), healing up, then returning to finish it up. How is killing 5 enemies, then having to heal before slaying the 6th, any different from winning 5 encounters, then having to heal before taking on the 6th, functionally?

[Lephys]

I can't wait for the situations were you are almost at the end of the dungeon with low health searching for a rest spot and then bam the boss appears. Now that is a sucker punch.

See, that would just be horrible design. The purpose of Health and limited resources between rest spots isn't to ultra-mega-test your minimalist usage of all your resources. It's not "See if you can take out like 50 dragons before having to heal again!" It's just to make sure there's no absence of strategy through short stretches of area.

 

Yes, sometimes you're probably going to get your arse whooped and have to go back to the previous rest spot. But, I don't know why the assumption is that the design is going to always give you a rest spot to get you to 100% health and full spells, then throw X number of fights at you that require roughly 110% of your Health and ALL of your spells before you will possibly ever see another rest spot.

 

"I hope things aren't designed that poorly" is a perfectly understandable sentiment. One that I share. But, I don't see how assuming bad design will happen is accomplishing anything.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Lephys