Forums: Developer Talk

UPDATE – see the September Announcement for details on the changes to defeat in battle.

I’m considering making it so that when you die (as in your whole party dies, no one flees), you go back to the last city you were in. From the players’ perspective, the main benefit to this change would be: since your whole party is dead, you would have to rest up anyway, or visit a hospital, so you wouldn’t have to try to get your wounded characters back to town. For many players, this is the expected behavior – you die, and you go back to some kind of “home point” or “safe point”. The downside is that if everyone dies, you can’t keep pushing forward with your backup characters. Likewise, you can’t rest up and then continue on. If you’re in the middle of a fairly long trek, you’ll be starting over. The challenge this concept introduces is that if you get into trouble and you don’t want to be whipped back to a city upon death, you need to get at least one character to Flee the battle.

Since, as I said, many people expect things to work this way in a typical RPG, I will probably make this change soon. Any strenuous objections?

Good idea, very good idea. A great reason to flee if you are forced into that situation.

That is a good change, now you just need missions with long roads ;)

By having everyone die you go back but don’t lose any gold and by having at least one survivor you lose the gold but don’t go back. Now, let’s say you’re in a fight you cannot win anymore, you’re quite near a city, and you’re saving up on gold to buy some equipment…

It’s better to have your remaining party members killed than to try and have at least one flee the battle, this way you keep the money (and being killed is good training on passives ;) ).

If you wanted death to be harsher than fleeing you could:

• add the gold penalty to death, in addition to the respawn back.
  or
• reward the successful flee with the choice of respawning or losing the gold (something on the lines of “surrender: X gold” / “Flee back to city”)

Anyway, thanks for your continued effort in coding this game! :) (and for your blog that made its way in my news reader :) )

I didn’t meant for the first choice to come out striked, sorry O_o

Edit: I fixed it for you – R.S.

I did consider giving some kind of option at the end of battle, like your second suggestion. The reason I’m not docking gold on death is because I figure if you die and you get sent back to town, your four characters that were active are going to be at 0 health. You’re going to have to get those characters to the hospital or else you’re going to have to rest them for a while. Many people have vendors in the market, therefore they might not be able to keep playing with a full party until they heal up some of those dead characters. You see, the other advantage to fleeing is you’re characters still have health after they flee – they live to fight on :)

I see your point about purposely dying to get back to a safe point, and I’ll be watching to see if that really becomes common practice. Of course, if you travel from Hopitan to Martis and then die outside of Martis hoping to skip the trip back to Hopitan, you’re going to find yourself back in Martis, as that would be the last safe point you were in – so it does have some limitations.