Beginner's help with balancing battle mechanics

I am learning VX Ace, making my first game. Haven't played since the PSX RPG maker way back in the day, and I must say this is a huge improvement.

I am having a hard time getting started with balancing the battles. Setting the player and enemies stats to make for good battles, adjusting exp points earned, stat boosts upon leveling, etc. I remember struggling with this back in 2002 as well. Can anybody please provide some pointers?

There is no really simple way to solve this, because there are so many variables.  But, here are some pointers:

* First, decide how difficult the random encounters are vs the boss encounters

* I like random encounters to chop off roughly 1/5 of the party's health, so they're not instantly fatal but can quickly add up.  And I like them to take no more than maybe 3 rounds.

* I like boss battles to be challenging, so they might do 5x the party's health (i.e. you'd better heal during battle!)

On the "Troops" tab, use "Battle Test" a lot.  With this, you can choose your party members, their levels and equipment, then choose a Troop and have a battle against it.    See if the battle is the right difficulty.  If the battle is too hard, either lower the enemy ATK (or MAT) or boost the defense abilities the party would have.  If it's too easy, raise them until you feel the challenge is where you want.

As for the other adjustments, let your story be your guide.  Do you want player equipment to be the key, or player level advancement, or both?

* Some games have very slow stat boosts from leveling up.  These tend to favor equipment specific bonuses.

* Some games dramatically boost stats on level up and favor the party's levels.  These favor player levels BUT a good counter here is to have different Elemental attack types, and have the equipment boost Elemental resistance (or add weaknesses).

Also, make a test save file.  As you play through your game, save at certain key points.  Or if you use Yanfly's excellent Debug extension script, you can, at any point, spawn any battle from within the game by pressing F9 (I think).  This is important to test battles as your party grows in strength/changes equipment/etc.

Also: Only adjust one thing at a time.  When I create a game, I start with one or two enemies, and make sure they are balanced for starting party members, using Battle Test repeatedly. 

When that's done, I can always go back and adjust XP gain  --- faster XP gain makes leveling up more quick.  GP gain I adjust later on, once the main plot is in place.  Those depend on how long you want the player to have to grind for levels/gold to get the right abilities and equipment.

For example, if you have an Ice Demon which needs the party's Mage to have Fireball, and the Mage learns that at Level 10, that effectively prevents the party from progressing past the Demon until the Mage is ground to Level 10.

It's really a process, more than a one time thing, and I do it continuously throughout the game development cycle.

Hope this helps.

You might find this very useful to help you calculate your stats http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/24429-damage-calculator-spreadsheet/

Using the guidelines that whitesphere has given, plus that, will give you a good head start.

Observe how much % damage a player character does against an enemy. If you're unhappy about the results, change player or enemy stats accordingly and try again until it works the way you want it to.


Pro-tip: Use smaller numbers for convenience.

One thing I did was I created a separate side project and imported in all my actors, classes, items, states, enemies and troops, then had the generator make 5 random dungeon levels. Populate that with your monsters and bosses, and see how you like it. This allowed me to see if I had useless skills as they were too weak, monsters that were too weak, and so on. Though, it seems to work best for early game balance, late game will be tougher, but maybe this can help you get started.