[Ammutseba]

Hey trisphee,

Maybe you can help me out, here. I have a project I'm fiddling around with, but I'm concerned I may not be able to do it right.

I'm tinkering with the battle memory system in Rockman Xover, trying to make it simpler for a different game. In this game, you control a squad of 12 OVER-1 model reploids, and can deploy them into maverick-controlled areas to combat enemies. With luck and proper development, it should combine the qualities of a strategy game with those of an action platformer. However, the system from Xover is just too complex. I need to scale it back if I'm going to do this at all, and that's where I was hoping to get some input.

In Xover, you assigned your OVER with a type of armor fitting to how you wanted to play, decided on an element to use, and then acquired "battle memories" to increase your statistics. The elements were Neutral, Fire, Ice, Wind and Electric. Every element except Neutral was a trap.

Every type of armor had its own basic stats (life, attack and defense) and a grid of slots you put the battle memories in. Each slot had any of several special qualities about it. Generally, you could equip 4, 5 or 6 battle memories at a time, although two armors allowed for 8 at the cost of having either no bonuses for them, or significantly fewer bonuses.

Battle memories had names, each named battle memory had its own unique stat array, might have an element, might have a skill, which could be any of these:
- Atk Up: Attack will increase.
- Def Up: Defense will increase.
- C. Atk Up: Charge Shots will deal more damage.
- C. Boost: Charge Gauge will increase more (always active).
- Heal: Health will recover at the beginning of your turn (always active).
- Atk Down: Enemy’s Attack will be lowered.
- Def Down: Enemy’s Defense will be lowered.
- Heat: Enemy will lose health at the beginning of their turn.
- Wet: Enemy Skills won’t activate.
- Slow: Enemy has a chance of missing when they attack.
- Shock: Enemy will be paralyzed for one turn.

If the memory did have a skill, it might be any of these 5 types:
- α: Standard activation.
- β: Affects all players.
- Σ: More effective at full health.
- Ω: More effective at half health.
- μ: More effective at low health.

You also had to pay attention to a battle memory's rarity and cost. To make one useful, you needed to feed it money and other memories to increase its level. A memory's rarity controlled its maximum level; more rare memories could have higher levels. Cost controlled a memory's potential for growth. Finally, fusing two identical, maximum level memories would create a single memory with a +10% level cap increase and a +2 skill level cap increase, and could be done up to 5 times to a given memory.

In other words, super complicated and time consuming.



I'm thinking of gutting out random drops, rarity and elements first. And the thing with fusing memories (ugh). Turn-based effects will go, as will several of those skills. And the defense stat, since in a normal megaman game, life and defense are basically the same thing. A speed stat might go in the defense stat's place.

I am definitely not sure what to do with the armors and their grid slots et cetera. Any ideas?