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Party formations? Baiting? Luck-based combat ?

PostPosted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 2:31 pm
by poetic chalice
First of all, I like what this game attempts: true turn based combat a la TOEE. Like Blue Salamander, I find real-time combat or even real-time with pause to be too chaotic and lacking in tactics. However, these are some things I don't like about Chalice:

Party Formations: There are no party formations. Is this a deliberate design choice or was it due to engine limitations ? The reason I bring this up is that in Chalice, your party position becomes extremely important. However, since you have so little (or zero) control over this, when combat starts, my party members end up in really unpredictable, awkward, and disadvantageous positions.


Baiting: You cannot control a single character. This effectively makes luring monsters into ambushes impossible. Again, was this a deliberate design choice, or was it due to engine limitations? The bad thing about this is that my party can be ambushed and surrounded by many enemies, but I can never do the same.

Luck-based combat: Because of the lack of control over where your party members are positioned when combat starts, there is an unpredictable element to each combat. Your party could be walking along the forest minding their own business, when suddenly a bandit group surrounds your party and they end up in really awkward positions with the mage in front and the fighter at the rear. :? To me, this unpredictable element gives combat an overall-luck based nature. Sometimes a fight which was hard on one occasion, became easy on the next, only because the combat triggered in a different place and your party members were in better tactical positions.

This lack of control over your position is a big deal because it gives the game a luck-based nature, when fights should be determined by your tactical ability, not your luck. I hope this is something they are working on in Chalice 2 or I hope they at least re-consider their design choice, if it was a deliberate design choice and not an engine limitation.

Re: Party formations? Baiting? Luck-based combat ?

PostPosted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 9:38 pm
by BlueSalamander
Hi poetic chalice,

Regarding party formations: this was a design choice, made to simplify things. I liked the way it looked in Dungeons & Dragons Warriors of the Eternal Sun (on Sega Genesis) so I reproduced it. However, you can change the party order by clicking 'Leader' in the character sheet for the first character. I agree that something more accurate, like the formation window in TOEE, would be desirable.

Baiting: Again, it was a design choice, to not allow individual character movement when you're not actually involved in combat. I'm not planning to change that in KotC2 since it has a potential to break scripted encounters and to leave some of your characters in a position that can't be reached by the monsters (or from where you can't reach the monsters).

Luck-based combat: I can see why it would happen in KotC - sometimes two characters may be standing on the same square outside combat, and then when combat starts the game needs to find a separate square for each character. I agree that it's desirable to have characters occupy the same square that they were in at the start of combat (unless there's a script which is moving the whole party to another position).

Re: Party formations? Baiting? Luck-based combat ?

PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 5:39 am
by DonaldDuck
I for one like that the party is stuck together, simply because baiting is such a cheesy boring exploit in other rpg's, as it's so much easier to bait enemies one by one then figuring out a way to deal with a whole group of them. I do agree about party formation, I think these should be fully customizable by player and shouldn't change at start of scripted battles.

Re: Party formations? Baiting? Luck-based combat ?

PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 11:51 am
by Grunker
A ToEE-like party-formation screen would indeed be awesome. ToEE's way of handling that is by far the best of any game ever. I don't mind not being able to control single characters, since I agree that baiting is a cheap and often much to tempting tactic, but party formations would be awesome.

Re: Party formations? Baiting? Luck-based combat ?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 2:22 pm
by anoldman
lol, so i'm only 8 months late on this thread...

Sure party formation would be nice but i don't really mind the random starts. I enjoy the additional challenge. I just rationalize it as the randomness of where they happened to be at the time.

Re: Ambushes, a little off topic since you all mean players to monsters and my next comment refers to monsters ambushing players, but the scripts where party gets jumped are enjoyable as well. Yes, my first reaction is "cheap shot!" but i inevitably enjoy overcoming them. Just wanted to throw that out. I also don't like baiting monsters or single player control for nerfing.

btw, I really enjoy the game and will absolutely buy KotC2 when it comes out (unless like the upcoming X-com remake, it goes from SSI goldbox style to a first-person shooter... I mean honestly!?... sorry, off topic again.. ;) )

Great game Blue Saly! Thank you!!!!!!!!!
--AOM