Crystalgate
Member
Statting seems to be one of the hardest moment in RPG making for many and I have also noticed that people are often not fully aware of what every stat actually does.
Feedback is welcome. In particular, I would like to know if there’s specific areas of statting people find more troublesome than others and if there’s something I didn’t cover.
Attack Power: Attack Power influences the damage of standard attacks and skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Attack Power as well.
The average damage for standard attacks is: Damage = (Attacker’s Attack Power - [Target’s Physical Defense/2]) * (20+Strength) / 20
Damage may be up to 15% higher or lower than average.
The average damage for skills is: Damage = (Skill Power + [Attacker’s Attack Power*Skill ATK-F/100] - [Target‘s Physical Defense*Skill PDEF-F/200] - [Target‘s Magic Defense*Skill MDEF-F/200]) * (20 + [Attacker’s Strength*Skill STR-F/100] + [Attacker’s Dexterity*Skill DEX-F/100] + [Attacker’s Agility*Skill AGI-F/100] + [Attacker’s Intelligence*Skill INT-F/100]) / 20
Damage may be up to Skill Variance in percent higher or lower than average.
Physical Defense: Physical Defense influences how much damage is subtracted from standard attacks that hits you. With no Physical Defense, you will of course take full damage. If your Physical Defense is equal to the Attack Power of the attacker, you will take half damage. With a Physical Defense twice of the attacker’s attack, you take no damage. For Physical Defense between those examples, you will naturally take damage between those examples as well.
Skills can also be set to be reduced by Physical Defense. As long as you set PDEF-F to 100, you can just replace Attack Power with Attack Power*Skill ATK-F/100+Skill Power and then apply the same rule.
Magic Defense: Magic Defense typically (it‘s up to you) does for spells what Physical Defense does for physical attacks. Assuming you design spells as Enterbrain suggests, the amount of damage reduced is the same as with Physical Defense, only you replace Attack Power with the Skill Power of the skill and Physical Defense with Magic Defense.
Evasion: Evasion influences your chance of evading standard attacks and skills which are set to allow evasion. For standard attacks, the chance to evade is ( 8*Target’s Agility/Attacker’s Dexterity+Target’s Evasion)%. For skills, take that chance and multiply it with the EVA-F of the skill and then divide with 100.
While other stats than Evasion are involved in determining chance to evade, it’s usually the Evasion stat which really counts. For standard attacks, Evasion is also absolute. If you have 30 in Evasion you will have at least a 30% chance to evade the attack, no matter how many billion points of Dexterity the attacker has.
Another thing to note is that Evasion doesn’t suffer from stat inflation. Just like $10 will get you less today than it did for twenty years ago, getting 10 extra points of Strength added to your character will have less of an impact at level 70 than at level 10. This is the case with all stats except Evasion, 10 points of Evasion means just as much at level 70 as it did at level 10.
Strength: Strength influences the damage standard attacks does and skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Strength as well.
The amount of damage you do with standard attacks is proportional to Strength+20. This also holds true for skills with a STR-F of 100. For that, reason, think of actors as having 20 points of Strength more than their actual score when you want to compare them to each other. This will be very significant if you’re going for low stats and the fighter’s Strength of 4 vs. the wizards Strength of 2 becomes 24 vs. 22 instead.
Also note that Strength can not break Physical Defense, if you do no damage with a Strength score of 1, you will also do no damage with a Strength score of 999. This holds true for both standard attacks and skills.
Dexterity: Dexterity affects your accuracy with standard attacks and skills which are set to be evadable, your critical hit rate of standard attacks and finally, skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Dexterity as well.
Check Evasion for the how exactly Dexterity affects your accuracy. Your chance of scoring a critical hit with a standard attack is (4*Attacker‘s Dexterity/Target‘s Agility)%.
Unless the target has an Agility which is either many times higher or lower than that of the attacker, the impact of Dexterity is not very noticeable. Give the nimble thief a Dexterity score of 60, the brutish fighter 30 and have them attack an enemy with an Agility score of 40. The nimble thief has a 6% chance of scoring a critical hit and a perceptual chance to miss equal to 5 plus the Evasion of the enemy. For the brutish fighter the numbers are 3% and 10 plus Evasion respectively. The player will most likely not even notice the difference it makes. Unless you make Dexterity based skills, the Dexterity stat will almost certainly be by far the weakest stat.
If you make a Dexterity based skill, Dexterity will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Dexterity and STR-F with DEX-F.
Agility: Agility affects turn order, your chance of evading standard attacks and skills which are set to allow evasion, how likely you are to get hit by critical hits, the success rate of the escape command and skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Agility as well. It affects quite a lot really.
Chance of evading attacks and scoring critical hats have already been covered. I will however say that just as with Dexterity, don’t expect the player to actually notice that Agility has an impact on chance to evade and eating critical hits.
Turn order is decided by taking the character’s Agility and to that number adding a random value from 0 to (10+Agility/4)-1 and when that’s done for all characters and enemies, everyone goes at order of highest number to lowest.
If you want to know whether it’s even possible for a character to go before another character with more Agility, just take that slower character’s Agility and add one fourth of that and then add another ten. If that new number exceeds the Agility of the faster character, then the slower may get his turn earlier if he’s lucky. An alternative way is to first increase both characters’ Agility with 40 and then check if five fourths of the slower character’s Agility exceeds the Agility of the faster one. This alternate method is especially useful if you don’t want to actually run the number, but merely want to eyeball how fast they are. Just think of every character as having 40 more Agility than their actual value and you could get a fairly good impression of how fast they are. As you may have guessed, this becomes especially significant if you’re going for low stats.
To calculate escape rate, first take the average Agility of all characters and then the average Agility of all enemies. You chance of escaping is (50*average character Agility/average enemy Agility)%.
If you make an Agility based skill, Agility will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Agility and STR-F with AGI-F.
Intelligence: Skills can be set to have it’s damage influenced by Intelligence. That’s it. In theory this stat has the least effects. In practice, everyone and their grandmother sets spells to be influenced by this stat. When you do so, Intelligence will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Intelligence and STR-F with INT-F.
HP and SP: Self explanatory.
The average damage for standard attacks is: Damage = (Attacker’s Attack Power - [Target’s Physical Defense/2]) * (20+Strength) / 20
Damage may be up to 15% higher or lower than average.
The average damage for skills is: Damage = (Skill Power + [Attacker’s Attack Power*Skill ATK-F/100] - [Target‘s Physical Defense*Skill PDEF-F/200] - [Target‘s Magic Defense*Skill MDEF-F/200]) * (20 + [Attacker’s Strength*Skill STR-F/100] + [Attacker’s Dexterity*Skill DEX-F/100] + [Attacker’s Agility*Skill AGI-F/100] + [Attacker’s Intelligence*Skill INT-F/100]) / 20
Damage may be up to Skill Variance in percent higher or lower than average.
Physical Defense: Physical Defense influences how much damage is subtracted from standard attacks that hits you. With no Physical Defense, you will of course take full damage. If your Physical Defense is equal to the Attack Power of the attacker, you will take half damage. With a Physical Defense twice of the attacker’s attack, you take no damage. For Physical Defense between those examples, you will naturally take damage between those examples as well.
Skills can also be set to be reduced by Physical Defense. As long as you set PDEF-F to 100, you can just replace Attack Power with Attack Power*Skill ATK-F/100+Skill Power and then apply the same rule.
Magic Defense: Magic Defense typically (it‘s up to you) does for spells what Physical Defense does for physical attacks. Assuming you design spells as Enterbrain suggests, the amount of damage reduced is the same as with Physical Defense, only you replace Attack Power with the Skill Power of the skill and Physical Defense with Magic Defense.
Evasion: Evasion influences your chance of evading standard attacks and skills which are set to allow evasion. For standard attacks, the chance to evade is ( 8*Target’s Agility/Attacker’s Dexterity+Target’s Evasion)%. For skills, take that chance and multiply it with the EVA-F of the skill and then divide with 100.
While other stats than Evasion are involved in determining chance to evade, it’s usually the Evasion stat which really counts. For standard attacks, Evasion is also absolute. If you have 30 in Evasion you will have at least a 30% chance to evade the attack, no matter how many billion points of Dexterity the attacker has.
Another thing to note is that Evasion doesn’t suffer from stat inflation. Just like $10 will get you less today than it did for twenty years ago, getting 10 extra points of Strength added to your character will have less of an impact at level 70 than at level 10. This is the case with all stats except Evasion, 10 points of Evasion means just as much at level 70 as it did at level 10.
Strength: Strength influences the damage standard attacks does and skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Strength as well.
The amount of damage you do with standard attacks is proportional to Strength+20. This also holds true for skills with a STR-F of 100. For that, reason, think of actors as having 20 points of Strength more than their actual score when you want to compare them to each other. This will be very significant if you’re going for low stats and the fighter’s Strength of 4 vs. the wizards Strength of 2 becomes 24 vs. 22 instead.
Also note that Strength can not break Physical Defense, if you do no damage with a Strength score of 1, you will also do no damage with a Strength score of 999. This holds true for both standard attacks and skills.
Dexterity: Dexterity affects your accuracy with standard attacks and skills which are set to be evadable, your critical hit rate of standard attacks and finally, skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Dexterity as well.
Check Evasion for the how exactly Dexterity affects your accuracy. Your chance of scoring a critical hit with a standard attack is (4*Attacker‘s Dexterity/Target‘s Agility)%.
Unless the target has an Agility which is either many times higher or lower than that of the attacker, the impact of Dexterity is not very noticeable. Give the nimble thief a Dexterity score of 60, the brutish fighter 30 and have them attack an enemy with an Agility score of 40. The nimble thief has a 6% chance of scoring a critical hit and a perceptual chance to miss equal to 5 plus the Evasion of the enemy. For the brutish fighter the numbers are 3% and 10 plus Evasion respectively. The player will most likely not even notice the difference it makes. Unless you make Dexterity based skills, the Dexterity stat will almost certainly be by far the weakest stat.
If you make a Dexterity based skill, Dexterity will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Dexterity and STR-F with DEX-F.
Agility: Agility affects turn order, your chance of evading standard attacks and skills which are set to allow evasion, how likely you are to get hit by critical hits, the success rate of the escape command and skills can be set to have their damage influenced by Agility as well. It affects quite a lot really.
Chance of evading attacks and scoring critical hats have already been covered. I will however say that just as with Dexterity, don’t expect the player to actually notice that Agility has an impact on chance to evade and eating critical hits.
Turn order is decided by taking the character’s Agility and to that number adding a random value from 0 to (10+Agility/4)-1 and when that’s done for all characters and enemies, everyone goes at order of highest number to lowest.
If you want to know whether it’s even possible for a character to go before another character with more Agility, just take that slower character’s Agility and add one fourth of that and then add another ten. If that new number exceeds the Agility of the faster character, then the slower may get his turn earlier if he’s lucky. An alternative way is to first increase both characters’ Agility with 40 and then check if five fourths of the slower character’s Agility exceeds the Agility of the faster one. This alternate method is especially useful if you don’t want to actually run the number, but merely want to eyeball how fast they are. Just think of every character as having 40 more Agility than their actual value and you could get a fairly good impression of how fast they are. As you may have guessed, this becomes especially significant if you’re going for low stats.
To calculate escape rate, first take the average Agility of all characters and then the average Agility of all enemies. You chance of escaping is (50*average character Agility/average enemy Agility)%.
If you make an Agility based skill, Agility will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Agility and STR-F with AGI-F.
Intelligence: Skills can be set to have it’s damage influenced by Intelligence. That’s it. In theory this stat has the least effects. In practice, everyone and their grandmother sets spells to be influenced by this stat. When you do so, Intelligence will influence the damage the same way as Strength does only you replace Strength with Intelligence and STR-F with INT-F.
HP and SP: Self explanatory.
There’s a practically unlimited number of ways you can stat characters and get a good result. There is no single right way, so all I can provide here is some suggestions.
Will your game have the confusion/charm ailment? If so, then you should stat the Attack Power and Physical Defense of the equipment as if the characters are hitting each other. Create a few enemies who has Attack Power and Physical Defense close to that of you characters and test it a bit.
The easiest way to handle Attack Power is to give all characters weapons with similar Attack Power and let Strength be responsible for the difference in damage between characters. Chance is you don’t want to do this though. If you don’t, keep in mind that there’s the Strength stat as well and that when both Attack Power and Strength increases, damage increases exponentially.
When it comes to Magic Defense, the simplest ways I know of handling it is to either make the average Magic Defense about as high as the average Physical Defense or make it so that Magic Defense is usually zero.
For Evasion, remember how it doesn’t suffer from inflation? Five points of Physical Defense is useful if the enemies have a low Attack Power, but five points of Evasion is always near useless. I suggest against starting characters with low Evasion and then gradually increase it. Instead, just decide how often you think a character should evade and give their equipment an Evasion thereafter. Take into account that the actual chance of evading will be somewhat higher than the Evasion score due to the Agility vs. Dexterity influence.
Strength and Intelligence are easier to handle if they have about the same range, i.e. mages have about as much Intelligence as fighters have Strength and vice versa. If you have Dexterity and Agility based skills, those two stats should also be at about the same range as Strength and Intelligence.
For Agility, worry first about turn order and then damage if applicable. After that you can worry about chance to evade and chance to escape.
For Dexterity, Dexterity based skills will be the biggest concern if you have any. Otherwise, you will be fine by just making sure the characters have an average Dexterity about as high as their average Agility. You can however, if you want to, make Dexterity considerable higher or lower than Agility. A higher Dexterity means less misses and more critical hits while a lower Dexterity means the opposite.
When it comes to HP, there’s a good chance you just choose a value you like and then afterwards make sure enemies does an appropriate amount of damage. However, if confusion/charm is a concern, choose HP values that are appropriate even if the characters are hitting each other.
What makes a good SP value depends on how much skills cost. I will however give two advices. 1) Don’t have the characters start with an SP in the hundreds and make skills cost 70 or so SP, cut a zero. 2) Don’t be to stingy with SP, I’ve never seen it end well when the characters run out of SP after 2-5 skill uses.
One big problem with statting characters is not only to get the starting stats right, but to also get the growth right. This is mainly a concern if you have the confusion/charm status in your game. By default, the RMXP algorithm gravitates towards characters doing much more damage than enemies and enemies having much more HP. This can result in characters one-shotting each other while monsters laugh at the damage from ally attacks.
At this point however I think you should actually plan you stat growth and calculate how much damage will be dealt rather than testing it over and over. You don’t have to calculate every character, just pick the strongest and the weakest of the relevant characters. If we take the sample characters as an example, calculate Sirus’ and Dorothy’s physical damage, the rest will fall somewhere between or are casters. Get Hilda’s spell damage and Gloria’s healing as well. If you don’t want to go trough the trouble of calculating, then my suggestion is that you don’t have both Attack Power and Strength (as well as Intelligence) grow quickly.
One trick you can use is to take advantage of the Slow-Middle-Fast slider when generating the stats. As Attack Power and Strength increases, damage will increase exponentially. You can get a similar exponential HP growth by choosing a slower growth combined with a higher level 99 stat. Alternatively, you can diminish the Strength growth by giving it a faster growth, but lowering the level 99 stat.
If you want to use low stats, know that this wasn’t intended and that the algorithms doesn’t work so well with low stats. As has been mentioned, how much damage you deal with a standard attack is proportional to Strength+20 while how fast your characters acts is sort of dependant on Agility+40. Even the damage algorithm for skills have a +20 in it. As a result, if you give the characters too low Strength, Dexterity, Agility and Intelligence scores, the +20 and +40 can overshadow their actual stats.
This only goes for those four stats, Attack Power, Physical Defense, Magic Defense and HP can be cut down much easier. For example, if you take the default Attack Power, Physical Defense, Magic Defense and the skill Power of all skills and simple divide them with ten, everything will now deal 1/10th the damage it used to and you can cut down everyone’s HP scores by a factor of ten as well.
Evasion and SP shouldn’t be affected by whether you’re going high stat or low stat.
Will your game have the confusion/charm ailment? If so, then you should stat the Attack Power and Physical Defense of the equipment as if the characters are hitting each other. Create a few enemies who has Attack Power and Physical Defense close to that of you characters and test it a bit.
The easiest way to handle Attack Power is to give all characters weapons with similar Attack Power and let Strength be responsible for the difference in damage between characters. Chance is you don’t want to do this though. If you don’t, keep in mind that there’s the Strength stat as well and that when both Attack Power and Strength increases, damage increases exponentially.
When it comes to Magic Defense, the simplest ways I know of handling it is to either make the average Magic Defense about as high as the average Physical Defense or make it so that Magic Defense is usually zero.
For Evasion, remember how it doesn’t suffer from inflation? Five points of Physical Defense is useful if the enemies have a low Attack Power, but five points of Evasion is always near useless. I suggest against starting characters with low Evasion and then gradually increase it. Instead, just decide how often you think a character should evade and give their equipment an Evasion thereafter. Take into account that the actual chance of evading will be somewhat higher than the Evasion score due to the Agility vs. Dexterity influence.
Strength and Intelligence are easier to handle if they have about the same range, i.e. mages have about as much Intelligence as fighters have Strength and vice versa. If you have Dexterity and Agility based skills, those two stats should also be at about the same range as Strength and Intelligence.
For Agility, worry first about turn order and then damage if applicable. After that you can worry about chance to evade and chance to escape.
For Dexterity, Dexterity based skills will be the biggest concern if you have any. Otherwise, you will be fine by just making sure the characters have an average Dexterity about as high as their average Agility. You can however, if you want to, make Dexterity considerable higher or lower than Agility. A higher Dexterity means less misses and more critical hits while a lower Dexterity means the opposite.
When it comes to HP, there’s a good chance you just choose a value you like and then afterwards make sure enemies does an appropriate amount of damage. However, if confusion/charm is a concern, choose HP values that are appropriate even if the characters are hitting each other.
What makes a good SP value depends on how much skills cost. I will however give two advices. 1) Don’t have the characters start with an SP in the hundreds and make skills cost 70 or so SP, cut a zero. 2) Don’t be to stingy with SP, I’ve never seen it end well when the characters run out of SP after 2-5 skill uses.
One big problem with statting characters is not only to get the starting stats right, but to also get the growth right. This is mainly a concern if you have the confusion/charm status in your game. By default, the RMXP algorithm gravitates towards characters doing much more damage than enemies and enemies having much more HP. This can result in characters one-shotting each other while monsters laugh at the damage from ally attacks.
At this point however I think you should actually plan you stat growth and calculate how much damage will be dealt rather than testing it over and over. You don’t have to calculate every character, just pick the strongest and the weakest of the relevant characters. If we take the sample characters as an example, calculate Sirus’ and Dorothy’s physical damage, the rest will fall somewhere between or are casters. Get Hilda’s spell damage and Gloria’s healing as well. If you don’t want to go trough the trouble of calculating, then my suggestion is that you don’t have both Attack Power and Strength (as well as Intelligence) grow quickly.
One trick you can use is to take advantage of the Slow-Middle-Fast slider when generating the stats. As Attack Power and Strength increases, damage will increase exponentially. You can get a similar exponential HP growth by choosing a slower growth combined with a higher level 99 stat. Alternatively, you can diminish the Strength growth by giving it a faster growth, but lowering the level 99 stat.
If you want to use low stats, know that this wasn’t intended and that the algorithms doesn’t work so well with low stats. As has been mentioned, how much damage you deal with a standard attack is proportional to Strength+20 while how fast your characters acts is sort of dependant on Agility+40. Even the damage algorithm for skills have a +20 in it. As a result, if you give the characters too low Strength, Dexterity, Agility and Intelligence scores, the +20 and +40 can overshadow their actual stats.
This only goes for those four stats, Attack Power, Physical Defense, Magic Defense and HP can be cut down much easier. For example, if you take the default Attack Power, Physical Defense, Magic Defense and the skill Power of all skills and simple divide them with ten, everything will now deal 1/10th the damage it used to and you can cut down everyone’s HP scores by a factor of ten as well.
Evasion and SP shouldn’t be affected by whether you’re going high stat or low stat.
Statting an enemy should be much easier than characters since you already have the characters as a reference point and you don’t need to plan their growth. However, you will have a lot more enemies to stat than characters. Being aware of what the stats does and taking them in the right order should make things much quicker though.
Attack Power and Strength: Both stats increases the damage of standard attacks. To make the process of getting both of them right, first decide how much damage you want the character with the lowest Physical Defense to take from this enemy compared to the one with the highest Physical Defense. If you decide upon a multiplier, like x1.5 or x2, adjust Attack Power until that is fulfilled. If you decide upon a constant, like +20 or +50, adjust Strength instead first. Once you done either, adjust the other stat.
Intelligence: This together with the Spell Power of whatever spell they may cast decides how much damage the spell in question does. Look at the Spell Power as the magic version of Attack Power and Intelligence as magic Strength and you can run the same reasoning as when statting Attack Power and Strength. Consider giving enemies their own version of spells. Unless you decide it’s so, there is no rule saying the Fireball spell that enemies use has to have the same Spell Power as the one characters use.
Agility: Your main concern should be turn order, so pick Agility thereafter. Their Agility shouldn’t be so low every other standard attack critcals though. If you give the enemy an Agility based skill, you will need to take damage into account as well. I don’t advice giving enemies Agility based skills though unless you know what you’re doing, doing so can make things messy if you didn’t plan the stats out carefully.
Dexterity: As long as you give the enemy a Dexterity score close to the average Agility score of characters, you should do fine. You can just wing it a bit, the nimble thief has a bit more Dexterity than that and the brutish fighter a bit less. Heck, even if you accidentally swapped the Dexterity scores of the thief and the fighter, chance is most players won’t notice. Dexterity is just awesome like that.
Alternatively you can give enemies significantly lower Dexterity scores if you want them to score less criticals and miss more often. You can also give them higher Dexterity scores as well for less missed and more criticals.
As with Agility, don’t recommend giving enemies Dexterity based skills either unless you know what you’re doing.
Physical Defense: Read the first paragraph I wrote about what Physical Defense does. It’s usually not more complicated than knowing how much damage you want the enemy to mitigate. If there’s a large difference in Attack Power between the physically oriented characters there can be a large variation in how much damage is mitigated. For example, if Dorothy has an Attack Power of 20, Sirus of 30 and they are both hitting an enemy with a Physical defense of 30, Dorothy will have her damage mitigated by 75% while for Sirus it’s “only” 50%. Check both the strongest and the weakest representative of the physically oriented characters in this case.
Magic Defense: The same idea as with Physical Defense applies. However, if you have spells increase in power rapidly, say the final tier offensive spells has 6 times the Skill Power the first tier offensive spells has, I recommend you to give the majority of enemies 0 or an insignificant amount of Magic Defense. The reason for that is that if you give enemies Magic Defense that’s significant and then rapidly increases it, you’re likely to obsolete spells way before the replacement is ready. If you read the damage algorithm and truly understands it, you should see why. If not, the problem is basically while the casters Intelligence increases the damage of spells and the target’s Magic Defense decreases it, they don’t actually offset each other. Magic Defense will eventually win the struggle and the spell damage will then decrease faster and faster until it hits zero. If Magic Defense starts high enough to significantly reduce magic damage and raises rapidly, “eventually” becomes “very soon”.
Evasion: Well, how often do you want the enemy to evade? As long as the enemy has an Agility Score close to the Dexterity score to the attacking character, expect them to evade about 5-10% more than their actual Evasion score. One tip though, you can give the enemy a negative Evasion score in case you don’t want it to evade at all.
HP: HP is possible the most straightforward stat and how long the enemies should survive varies depending on how the battles are set up and how frequent encounters are, so there’s not really any tips I can give here.
SP: Just ask yourself how many times you want the enemy to be able to cast it’s spells. Note however that the AI will happily keep trying to cast spells even with insufficient SP, so the easiest way to handle SP is to just jack it up to maximum.
Attack Power and Strength: Both stats increases the damage of standard attacks. To make the process of getting both of them right, first decide how much damage you want the character with the lowest Physical Defense to take from this enemy compared to the one with the highest Physical Defense. If you decide upon a multiplier, like x1.5 or x2, adjust Attack Power until that is fulfilled. If you decide upon a constant, like +20 or +50, adjust Strength instead first. Once you done either, adjust the other stat.
Intelligence: This together with the Spell Power of whatever spell they may cast decides how much damage the spell in question does. Look at the Spell Power as the magic version of Attack Power and Intelligence as magic Strength and you can run the same reasoning as when statting Attack Power and Strength. Consider giving enemies their own version of spells. Unless you decide it’s so, there is no rule saying the Fireball spell that enemies use has to have the same Spell Power as the one characters use.
Agility: Your main concern should be turn order, so pick Agility thereafter. Their Agility shouldn’t be so low every other standard attack critcals though. If you give the enemy an Agility based skill, you will need to take damage into account as well. I don’t advice giving enemies Agility based skills though unless you know what you’re doing, doing so can make things messy if you didn’t plan the stats out carefully.
Dexterity: As long as you give the enemy a Dexterity score close to the average Agility score of characters, you should do fine. You can just wing it a bit, the nimble thief has a bit more Dexterity than that and the brutish fighter a bit less. Heck, even if you accidentally swapped the Dexterity scores of the thief and the fighter, chance is most players won’t notice. Dexterity is just awesome like that.
Alternatively you can give enemies significantly lower Dexterity scores if you want them to score less criticals and miss more often. You can also give them higher Dexterity scores as well for less missed and more criticals.
As with Agility, don’t recommend giving enemies Dexterity based skills either unless you know what you’re doing.
Physical Defense: Read the first paragraph I wrote about what Physical Defense does. It’s usually not more complicated than knowing how much damage you want the enemy to mitigate. If there’s a large difference in Attack Power between the physically oriented characters there can be a large variation in how much damage is mitigated. For example, if Dorothy has an Attack Power of 20, Sirus of 30 and they are both hitting an enemy with a Physical defense of 30, Dorothy will have her damage mitigated by 75% while for Sirus it’s “only” 50%. Check both the strongest and the weakest representative of the physically oriented characters in this case.
Magic Defense: The same idea as with Physical Defense applies. However, if you have spells increase in power rapidly, say the final tier offensive spells has 6 times the Skill Power the first tier offensive spells has, I recommend you to give the majority of enemies 0 or an insignificant amount of Magic Defense. The reason for that is that if you give enemies Magic Defense that’s significant and then rapidly increases it, you’re likely to obsolete spells way before the replacement is ready. If you read the damage algorithm and truly understands it, you should see why. If not, the problem is basically while the casters Intelligence increases the damage of spells and the target’s Magic Defense decreases it, they don’t actually offset each other. Magic Defense will eventually win the struggle and the spell damage will then decrease faster and faster until it hits zero. If Magic Defense starts high enough to significantly reduce magic damage and raises rapidly, “eventually” becomes “very soon”.
Evasion: Well, how often do you want the enemy to evade? As long as the enemy has an Agility Score close to the Dexterity score to the attacking character, expect them to evade about 5-10% more than their actual Evasion score. One tip though, you can give the enemy a negative Evasion score in case you don’t want it to evade at all.
HP: HP is possible the most straightforward stat and how long the enemies should survive varies depending on how the battles are set up and how frequent encounters are, so there’s not really any tips I can give here.
SP: Just ask yourself how many times you want the enemy to be able to cast it’s spells. Note however that the AI will happily keep trying to cast spells even with insufficient SP, so the easiest way to handle SP is to just jack it up to maximum.
