Good encounter design with regards to skills?

Questions
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I’ve been working on an FE-inspired game with some friends and I’m wondering if there are some nice docs out there or something that talk about good encounter design. We’ve seen plenty of great videos, though one sticking point for us is that we’re leaning heavily on the unit skills system. Which is unfortunately more related to the more recent FE games, and we feel some of those games have, eh, questionable map design at times (though I haven’t played too much of Engage yet).

If anyone wants to personally mention good examples of unit skills harmonizing with encounter design that we can look more closely at, that would also be great :smiley:

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I don’t think I can help much with it. But the Snes Jugdral games, Fe4 and Fe5, as well as the Tellius games, Fe9 and Fe10, also have skill systems. So maybe looking how they use it might help? A lot of rom hacks also use skills so they might help too.

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Check Conquest. That game does enemy skills to almost perfection

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I don’t know about if other people consider this good design but IMO its best to minimize chance based skills as much as possible. Everything should be measurable, like for example Vantage HP thresholds, repositioning skills going specific numbers of squares (i.e. Smite pushes 2 squares, Canto is remaining movement), flat number values for aura skills like Night Tide/White Pool or AoE moves like Savage Blow, etc.

If you must involve a chance based skill it should be highly visible and have a predictable condition, like +30 crit when attacking at 1 range or something like that, in order to spook the player into trying to make more informed decisions about how to approach a shaky encounter.

Also there are differences depending on what you’re even using, like an FE8 ROMhack won’t have enemies who know how to use everything, not sure about SRPG Studio AI but chances are its not too intelligent, and if its just being more or less made from scratch then you have to account for if your team knows how to code interactions with the skills you give non-player units accordingly.

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I agree with the random chance part. I know luck is part of the experience for games like that, but making challenges that can only be won by the toss of a coin going in your favor can be frustating.

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I just remembered about this video talking about skills in rom hacking, maybe it can help you and your team: Skills - Using Them To Enhance Gameplay in your Fire Emblem ROMhack - YouTube

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I personally really liked how Berwick Saga did it. Generics had skills there but there were also just a lot of named generics or mini bosses. And hints towards it in dialogue at some points. Berwick Saga’s skills did also generally feel a bit different than other FE games though. nearly no procc skills but much more activatable skills. You could for example find archers situated on a hill (plains with cliff tiles surrounding them) which can have Deadeye for example, and have a poison arrow. Deadeye is an activatable 3 range attack which needs you to not move, and costs you accuracy (which is actually kinda hard to come by in Berwick).

Thus if you missed the fact that guy has a skill, you will take damage for it. But it is not an automatic death, mostly just some side damage, with you needing to spend time to heal the poison (if the arrow even hits). Missing to see a skill on 1 generic was almost never an instant death sentence.

For comparison, i recall playing Fe10 randomizer with random enemy skills and that being an absolute chore. Too many skills on too many enemies. Maps which were too reliant to having certain units alive (especially early on), and skills which were practically just % chance for you to die, which feels cheap.

What is also very important in my opinion is slowly adding in skills as time goes on. If everyone starts with 5 skills, and generics have skills, and bosses have 5 skills, then that just makes everything take so long to check, that you’d rather not check any skills and get punished for it, or check them all and get bored. So you wanna let the skills trickle in over time. Another thing that could REALLY help is a proper UI. I don’t know what engine you are using (FEbuilder, LT or some other one), but if possible i would take a look at properly conveying the fact enemies have skills to the player.

You could for example have an exclamation point appear next to an enemy with a dangerous skill. Or maybe give him a slight Aura of sorts. If you’re working with a modular Character Sprite/Model system you could also opt for each skill giving you an easily recognizable design trait. Maybe every enemy with a red Headband has Wrath, and thus you can immediately see their skills based on that. You essentially just want the player to know as quickly as possible whether an enemy is worth worrying about, and how to deal with him, without going through 5 button clicks. Reduce the amount of effort to see the skills to an absolute minimum.

Also please to dear god no FEHeroes type skills with a war peace treaty between 20 nations worth of text on how to activate the skill or how it works to an absolute detail and every single situation. If you really wanna be thorough on how skills will act on (most often relatively rare) occasions, then give the skill an easy to understand description you can understand easily, and add a codex type of thing, or maybe an additional button press to extend the description to be more descriptive.

So to conclude: Explain how skills work shortly and easily. Make enemy skills be visible at a glance. And maybe even opt for activatable skills in favor of “% chance to do effect”.

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Berwick Saga’s skills did also generally feel a bit different than other FE games though. nearly no procc skills but much more activatable skills. You could for example find archers situated on a hill (plains with cliff tiles surrounding them) which can have Deadeye for example, and have a poison arrow. Deadeye is an activatable 3 range attack which needs you to not move, and costs you accuracy (which is actually kinda hard to come by in Berwick).

I think those types of skills are philosophically better categorized as combat arts (in FE terminology) and among skill bloat I actually think those are relatively tolerable.

Usually in games that use a lot of “combat arts” they also have an MP system and categorize all nonitem heals and other kinds of magic under the same banner, with FE being the exception in how few different types of moves it gives units. I’m not entirely sure why but in such non-FE games I’m usually a lot better at remembering those movelists than whatever passive conditionals exist in Fire Emblem, possibly because they do a better job at introducing them over time and visually indicating it on enemy types like you mentioned.

On the subject of enemy types and visuals, I think it also largely depends on how symmetrical players and enemies are. Imagine if FE2 or FE8 had zero human classes as enemies, this gives you the design space to just make monster classes do something else entirely without overloading information the player has to account for among the enemy, as there is a clearer distinction between who gets what.

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Oh yeah that was a part of the inspiration

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Yes, totally agree! I don’t even think we have any random chance skills in mind, but if we ever do, that’s good advice, thanks

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I haven’t actually played the non-FE Kaga games, so guess this is a good excuse as any to get started.
And yeah, we’re aware of FEH… I’d post a relevant meme we shared with each other recently but I don’t think I’m at that “trust level” with the forum yet lol

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