Monster Troops

The next thing we need to look at is the Monster Party/Troops tab in the database.

Yes

Whenever our player encounters an enemy (random or otherwise), they face a troop, not a single enemy. Of course, you can also set up troops containing just one enemy, but it has to be configured in the troops tab.

These are super easy to set up, all you need to do is create a name for your enemy troop, add the monsters from the list on the right, pick the terrains in which you want the monsters to appear, and set any specific battle events you want to occur when the player encounters this troop. Remember, any specified battle events will run for all encounters. If any of the above sounded confusing, check this post out for a refresher.

Let's take a closer look at the battle events panel.

Yes

We can see that it looks very similar to a normal event – you have options to create new pages, you have a single event condition slot (which can actually take multiple conditions) and you have the event commands panel.

A key difference between normal and battle events, is that your event commands in a battle event will never run without a condition. So there's no default page as such.

Yes

The usual options, very similar to normal event conditions and self-explanatory so I'm skipping the details. Since we can select multiple conditions, this lets us create some really specific battle actions for enemies and boss fights. Imagination is the limit here, and I have none, so I'm skipping the creative examples for now. Let's put up a really simple example instead.

If my slime has kind of low HP (between 0% and 50%), it can try healing itself a little bit. So my condition would look like so -

Yes

And the battle event command would be like this -

N-Yes

With these settings, my slime are gonna be annoying buggers to defeat, so I will be removing this battle event now.

Recall that we had a very similar example last post. Such individual enemy actions can easily be set up under the Monsters/Enemies tab instead of here. Use battle events for all things you want to associate with a battle, rather than for the things you associate with an enemy. So, examples would be cutscenes being triggered mid-battle, cheesy dialogues between the player and the boss, funky ground-shaking animation and a change in the backdrop once a difficult boss' HP has gone below a certain level etc.. Again, imagination is the limit.

And that's it for now! Go ahead and set up your troops (or use the defaults, like I will). We'll be looking at the battle events section in more detail again, with an example, once we reach the boss fight, but until then, this is a good place to stop.

Kablam!

- Does anyone remember that show?