Support skills for reserve actors?

My project ends up having a fairly large party as the game progresses (possibly around 10 at the maximum, details uncertain though), which means most of your characters don't get a chance to do anything. Sure, they can swap out, or apply healing and the like on the map, but it doesn't feel great to have potentially more than half the party just tagging along for the ride while barely contributing.

So I was wondering what would need to be done to create a system where reserve actors (as in, non-battle members of your party) can hop into the battle, use a skill, and hop out again, generally in response to some specific trigger in the fight. For example, if you score a critical hit and nearly kill an enemy, one of the reserve actors might hop in and finish it off. Or if you gain a preemptive attack on the enemy troop, a reserve actor might hop in with a party buff. Maybe if one actor protects another and is left with very low health, an actor will hop in to heal them. The general idea is that they interrupt the normal flow of actions to insert a new action, then retreat.

For the curious, the idea for this came from the 3DS game Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronicle. I'm not aiming to replicate its battle system in full, though - I just want something that will let the reserve actors play a bit more of a role in battle.

Note: This is not a plugin request, but rather a query of what I might need to do to implement such a plugin (well, unless one already exists). I don't use any Yanfly plugins related to battle. I do use SRD_SummonCore, which is similar in the sense of adding additional actors to the battlefield, though I don't currently see any way it could help with this idea.

Can I bump this?

You could try messing around with some of the row formation plugins. Yanfly row formation has you create a state that is put on the actors depending on which row they are in. So technically, anything you can think up that works with the Yanfly buff and state core could be made possible.

For a while I was using that plugin to recreate the BoF4 reserve row. Actors in that row could not attack or anything, but they regained HP and MP. They would then move up to take the place of an actor in the front row if they went down.

So using that row formation plugin, you could create a pseudo reserve row, seal actions to keep them from attacking, and create a state that does pretty much whatever you want.

Hmm, so what you're suggesting is that the reserve members would be treated as part of the battle party, but positioned offscreen, moving in under certain conditions, probably with the state setting their target rate to zero? It's an interesting idea... but it sounds like rather a major restructuring. I'll wait and see if anyone else has ideas on this.

Bumping this again.

It seems that getting the actor on the screen might not be so difficult? I've already noticed that if battleMembers() returns more than 4 characters that they'll automatically be added to the battlefield, so maybe I can have some sort of switch/variable that randomly adds an actor to that list?

Then I need to figure out how to interrupt the flow of battle to insert a new action from a new actor...

Guess I'll bump this again.

The current Jump into Javascript actually covers Game_Action, which might be informative for this.

Basically you can do this by temporarily adding one of the non-combat members to the party, adding a new Game_Action to their actions list and set its _forcing property to true so that it's considered a forced action. You can then set it to contain whatever skill you want, and it should be performed as part of the turn. You can then remove the member from the party afterwards.

So, I can do this during the evaluation of another action, right?

You could, but it would require either using a plugin (like Yanfly's) or writing your own to allow that to happen mid-action. It's not something you can easily do out of the box.

Though depending on how complex you want it to be, you could probably achieve this using a battle event. It just means you'd have to replicate the event to all your troops.

Well, writing my own plugin was the intention here (unless one already exists that does exactly what I want and has no dependencies).

Using a battle event might work if they can trigger after an action and I also use a "common troop events" plugin, but it needs to be very dynamic to adjust itself to your actual party composition and formation, so I thought a plugin would be better.

Yeah, a plugin would definitely be the way to go if you're comfortable writing them, which you seem to be.

Well, I got the mechanical side of things working (with hard-coded actors and skills for now), but now I need to figure out how to make the actor actually enter the battlefield while they perform the action...

Bumping this - still need to make the reserve actor jump onto the screen to perform their skill, rather than doing it from offscreen. I can probably work it out given time, but if anyone happens to know what's needed...

Since someone expressed interest in this, I've decided to post my work in progress. Please note that this is not finished and for sampling only. Do not use this in your finished game in its current state.

When it's finished I will likely add it to my main plugin thread; at that point, using it in a game will be fine.