Battle System

Battles are turn based with 1-4 battlers per side. Each battler has persisted and transient stats, as described below.

Persisted stats can be levelled up and do not reset automatically.

- Health
- Mana
- Damage
- Speed
- Stealth

Transient stats are stored per-battle and reset. They may or may not be visible.

- Focus (0-1000, default 0)
- Focus Lock (hidden, boolean per-enemy)
- Awareness (hidden, bitfield)

The team as a whole also has certain “stats”.

- Leader
- Distraction

Battlers use various moves, which may deal damage, cause status effects, or trigger side effects. Battlers also have a single “passive” which may be triggered when certain conditions are met.

To initiate a battle, the player can walk into the enemy sprite in the overworld. They can also ambush the enemy or be ambushed themselves, which starts the ambushing team with a +250 Focus bonus.

Actions

Attack
Uses a damage-dealing, status, or side-effect move on an enemy or ally.

Bag
Allows you to use an item, and also reduces your focus, but does not break Focus Locks.

Observe
Skips your turn and reduces your focus, but raises your Awareness. Breaks Focus Lock.

Call out
Reduces everyone’s Focus by 50 and ends all of your team’s Focus Locks except that of the battler who used it, but increases team Awareness.

Hide
Reduces your focus to zero and decreases enemy Awareness of you (see Awareness).

Flee
Ends the battle, but will fail if any enemy is Focus-Locked onto one of the battlers.

Stats

Focus

Focus controls the turn order and each battler’s awareness of other battlers. The formula for turn order is Focus / 100 * Speed. In the case of a tie, turns will be chosen randomly.

When a battler lands a successful attach against an enemy, their Focus goes up, by an amount depending on the damage dealt.

If they attack the same enemy twice in a row and hit both times, they enter “Focus Lock”. In this state, the amount of focus they gain from successful hits on the same enemy increases by 20% each turn, but attacking a different enemy or missing will decrease break the Focus Lock If the enemy is defeated, Focus Lock will end and the battler will keep the focus they earned.

“Breaking” and “ending” a Focus Lock are different things. Ending a Focus Lock allows you to keep the Focus you earned during it, while Breaking it removes 100 Focus + all Focus earned during the lock.

Using status or side-effect moves lowers Focus, but does not break Focus Lock as long as they were used on the same enemy the battler is Focus-Locked to.

Missing an attack does not affect Focus, except in Focus Lock where it breaks the effect and refunds the Focus earned. Using an item from the bag reduces Focus by 100 points, but does not break Focus Lock unless the item was damage-dealing and used on another enemy than the Focus-Locked one.

Once Focus reaches the maximum value of 1000, the battler will get to act an additional time that turn. If they use a damage-dealing attack on their additional turn, it will always land a critical hit. Their focus will automatically decrease to 950 after the end of the additional turn, no matter what action they took.

Awareness

Each battler has an awareness level for every opposing battler. I don’t know the formula yet but in general, Awareness is the inverse of Focus. As a battler’s Focus goes up, their Awareness goes down. A high Stealth stat reduces enemy awareness of a battle by a flat amount. Focus Lock negates the effect of awareness - if a battler is Focus Locked onto an enemy, they are always aware of them.

A battler can reduce enemy awareness of them by choosing the “Hide” action for their turn. This skips their turn and zeroes their own Focus, but makes enemies less aware of them. Certain environments may provide a modifier to this effect - Hide is more effective in a Jungle map than a Desert, for example

When one battler (Battler A)’s awareness of another (Battler B) reaches zero, either by B choosing to hide, A’s Focus getting too high, or a combination of the two, B can choose to land a Stealth Attack, which is an instant critical hit and awards B with 300 Focus and an instant Focus Lock. They can also choose to Perfect Flee, which causes the entire party to leave the battle instantly even if enemies are Focus-Locked onto them.

However, hiding isn’t the silver bullet that it may seem like. Without an exceptionally high Stealth stat, it takes several turns of choosing Hide to reduce enemy awareness of a battler to zero, and that’s several forfeited turns. On top of that, if the same enemy attacks you twice in a row while you’re spamming Hide, they will Focus Lock onto you, preventing you from Hiding from them.

In general Hiding should be combined with Distraction.

Distraction

Certain actions cause Distractions, which is a per-team effect that lasts one turn. A team can be distracted by various items or abilities, actions in the overworld, by their “Leader” being defeated, or by being hit by moves that damage the entire team at once.

Distraction is an integer with only three values - 0, 1, and 2. All of the above events cause Distraction to increase to 1 for that turn. To increase it to two, two or more of those events must occur on the same turn.

When the enemy team’s Distraction is above zero, Hide only takes one turn to reduce non-Focus-Locked enemy awareness of you to zero, and your team’s chance to miss is decreased.

When the enemy team’s Distraction is 2, all of their Focus Locks on you are broken. Your team gains a boosted chance of critical hits.