What is the point of the damage formula?

Ive been working to simplify my project and ive come to the damage formula for attacks.. the default for a regular attack is

user attack * 4 - target defense * 2 the mouseover for the formula actually says you don't need to put any defense stats yet when removed damage is not modified by defense. from this point i changed the formula to be more direct.. simply user attack - target defense. but now im trying to figure out what the reasoning behind fudging the damage would be in the first place. If i leave the formula as is.. in game id attack expecting 4x my attack power - actual damage delt divided by 2 to be the monsters defense.. or i could just not.. and know that the enemys defense is my power minus damage delt. I realize other stats can be added to the formula and i realize that you may want some attacks to deal more damage but what doesnt make sense to me is why you'd want to fudge the base of all damage dealing or why the damage would involve multiplying the enemy defense.



why not just use damage minus defense? I feel as if im missing something big and its nagging at me.

The damage formula is what you want it to be. So you have to come up with one that works for how your game is designed. You want it to be damage - defense, set it up that way and make your game around that. If you want it to be 100 * attack - 97 * defense + 56 * agility - 25 * luck, you can do that too and balance your game around that.

Basically the point of it is to make the formula what you want it to be. Nothing more and nothing less.

ah, so maybe the default setting had more to do with showing what the damage formula could do.. rather than being the most practical approach.
for some reason i assumed there had to be some underlying mechanic i didnt understand but i didnt concider the program has to teach itself to the user to some degree.

It's about scaling mostly. Consider this example:
Attacker A has an ATK of 30. Defender D has a DEF of 15.
With a simple "ATK minus DEF", the resulting damage (assuming no resistances etc) is 15.
With "ATK*2 minus DEF", it's 60-15 = 45.
With the default "ATK*4 minus DEF*2", it's 60-30 = 30.
The idea is that with operators (which you can freely set), you can scale attacks to benefit more or less, and thus adjust the balance as you wish. Now I don't know why the default is as it is, perhaps it's just for showing off. But it does teach the user that attacks can be scaled according to tables for desired effects.

the default formula is made in the way how a lot of japanese RPGs handle that - which is basically to encourage grinding by always doing damage unless the actors are really beyond where they should be.

but as said, the developer is the one who decides what the damage should be - and never forget that the damage formula is eval'ed, which means you can use any script code available there (as long as the code fits into the limited space for the formula).

send the calculations over to the item processing method and use the damage formula to set only the applied damage.
that's what I did.

if the damage is always calculated as, say, attack - defense, with attack varying a few notches up or down depending on the skill used, pass that value over to the item process, and let *it* grab the attackers' base attack and the defenders' total defense, and do all the calculation.

ah, thanks for all the replies I think Ive got a clearer picture now