Adding a random element to enemies

I don't want to write out the entire plot of the game I'm developping, so I'll keep it brief.

What I would like, is that for random encounters in the game, there's a rare chance of one of the enemies being an 'empowered' version of themselves.

How they're empowered is random, they'll have an affinity for an element, so they can use abilities from that element and take less damage from it.

I can see the simple way of doing it: generate lots of different soldier troops and create lots of different versions of each enemy, and make the powered up version rare, but possible to occur.

But I can't help but think there's a better way to do this. Does anyone have advice?

have two enemies added to the troop, one normal and one powered version of the same. then right-click them and set them to "appear halfway".


Then make a troop event for turn zero, checking a random variable to decide wether the normal or the powered version should be made appear on turn 0 (which is before battle starts)


You'll still need several troops if there are different forms of empowered enemies, or if you have troops that need the full maximum of eight enemies you can't use this trick - but it should reduce the numbers of troops neccessary.


Edit: you asked in the Ace forum and the answer above is for Ace - but your profile says you're using XP. I don't know if this works for XP...

I have both, so don't worry about that.

I don't think I want to make troops eight men strong, so that's one problem dealt with. But it still looks like I'll have to create and balance a ton of different enemies.

I don't need visual or name differences, just a minor tweak to their elemental resistances and what skills they use. I was considering maybe doing something with states, but if this is the only way to do it, I'll have to knuckle down and do it.

States are another way you can do this, especially if the turn-0-troop-event randomly adds states.


The features of the state can add changes to values and ratings, and you can set the attack patterns of the enemies so that some skills are only usable if the corresponding state is applied. Takes a bit of work until everything is balanced, but can be done.