Interesting Fights and Combat Situations

Sneak Attacks

Sneak Attacks (Or Pre-emptive strikes, as they are called in the Final Fantasy series) lets one side in a battle act first. For example, in your combat formation you have a formation with two goblins that encounters the party. But what if you want the Goblins to do a surprise attack? Or if you want the party to catch them from behind?

If the enemies are going to act first, then you have to an enemy that looks exactly as the enemy whos going to sneak attack. Give him the same stat with two exceptions. Give him a godlike speed and give him one HP. This will ensure that he will almost always will act first (you can turn the Untargetable bitset on if you still dont want the heroes to very rarely attack before a pre-emptive strike). Set spawning, so the the enemy will spawn a normal enemy of that type upon death. If the party DO attack first, they can prevent a sneak attack (since the enemy will die before he uses his sneak attack). Now, figure out which attacks the enemy will have. If you are going to let him have the same attack(s) as the normal one, you have to copy each attack. You need to make so these attacks cost one HP to use. Alternatively, you can create an attack that that enemy always uses in a sneak attack. After this do a battle formation that has the new sneak attack enemies. Throw in the battle formation in the formation set you want it to appear in. Unless you want sneak attacks to happen 50% of the time, throw in some extra normal formations (for example: Throw in three formations with two normal goblins and one formation with the sneak attack one). Optional: Create an enemy with an attack that says "Sneak attack","Back attack","Pre-emptive strike" etc. (Check out my other article, Combat Dialogues)

Now, lets turn it around, say you want the Party to catch the Goblins off guard. Again, create a new enemy that looks exactly as the enemy you want to be surprised (For extra spiffiness, do another enemy interface with the enemy turned the other way!). Edit so this guy has the same stats as the normal, but only one HP. Set so they spawn a normal enemy upon death, and give them no attacks. Now what bonuses does this give if you spawn a full HP enemy after you attacked it? Well, first of all, it lets you pick off your enemies one by one, since the other enemies wont react until you attack them. Second: If you dont want to fight them anyway, you can run away more easily, because they wont attack you. If you still want them to lose some HP, make a third enemy thats exactly like the normal, but give him less max HP.

Using these two examples will definetily increase your number of enemies and attacks. This WILL make things a bit messy. Dont use these two options if you dont want to keep track of that many monsters/attacks.

Epic Battle

Heres a spiffy idea for a large epic battle. Lets say that the nearly endless undead hordes of the evil necromancer Bob has come to invade Happytown. Coming to rescue is Ned the brave paladin and his squire Jim! Together they must defend against many enemies.

Create an invisible enemy (an enemy with a blank picture) with the Untargetable versus Heros, Boss and Unescapable bitset on. Give it an amount of HP equal to the amount of enemies total you want to be in the fight, minus the amount of enemies that will be there from the beginning of the battle plus 1. Give it a relatively slow speed. Now make an attack (with a blank picture) that targets self and deals 1 damage. To do this you must:

• Set the Damage Math to Pure Damage
• Set the Base ATK stat to 100
• Set Extra Damage to -99%
• Set Aim Math to Never Miss
• Set Target Class to Self
• Give it the bitset Do not randomize

Give the enemy the said attack, and then set the enemy so it spawns one enemy (of your choice) upon hit. Give the spawned enemies the Die without Boss bitset. Throw in the invisible enemy and a couple of enemies (about 2 will be good). Work with the plot so that the heroes battle the formation and tadaah! At even intervals enemies will spawn (if too much are spawning, than lower the Boss creatures speed), but when a certain amount of time has passed, all the enemies will die (because the boss creature will deal one damage to itself and kill itself, thus killing the other enemies). Alternatively, you could set the Boss creature to spawn a big "commander" creature upon death (also with the Boss and Unescapable bitset).