Troops

So you've got your Enemies but how do you actually make them appear in a battle? You need to create troops. Troops let you decide how many enemies there will be in an attack and which enemies are in the attack. So if you want two ghosts, or an imp and a lizardman attacking, or maybe just one individual enemy, you can set these properties with the troop tab. You can also arrange how you want the enemies to look in the battle screen, and what sort of backdrop the fight should have. This is also how you make battles more dynamic, because each troop page has it's own Events section. So you can make good and bad things happen depending on what your characters do, or what switches are on and off.

This tutorial will show you how to make new troops and how to edit the ones that already exist.

Making New Troops

As always, start off by increasing the maximum number of troops to make new, empty troops. Before we name anything, let's decide what we want to be in this troop. I want zombies, and I'm going to use them on my castle map. You should see a list on the right side with all of your enemies on it. To add an enemy you can either double click on that enemy's name, or highlight the name and click the left arrow button next to the list. The right arrow button will take the enemy out. The C button clears all the enemies away, and the A button lines up your enemies nicely if you'v been moving them around.

I think I'll stick with just one zombie. Now you can either choose to name the troop whatever you like, or let the program Autoname the troop for you. Autoname just lists the names of the enemies in your troop, separated by commas, and adds the number of each enemy after an asterix (except when there's just one of an enemy). Autoname can be useful, but for enemies that are important to the story, like boss fights and challenges, you may be best off to name them yourself. I'll name this one Zombie - Castle so I'll be able to pick it out later.

Next to Autoname there is a button labeled [ED] Battleback... Clicking this will bring up a list of all the preset backgrounds for battle. You can make new battlebacks in pretty much the same fashion you make every other image for RPG Maker, just make sure it's 640 x 320 pixels. Changing the Battleback on the Troops page just serves to show you what your troop will look like on that battleback, but doesn't have an effect on the game whatsoever.

Now try clicking and holding on your zombie and moving him around. If you move him too far up, he might look weird in proportion to the castle, or it might look like he's floating. And he doesn't have to be perfectly centered, but he should probably be all the way on the screen. If you have multiple enemies you can make some look like they're standing in front of or behind others. If you want them to line up in a row, don't forget about the A button.

One last thing you can do on the top half of the page is to make your enemy translucent and/or immortal. Right click on your enemy and choose Appear Halfway to make it look see-through. Click Immortal to make your enemy impossible to kill. This might be good for one of those super hard, learn a lesson boss fights, if you really really want to make sure your hero can't win (just make sure the game isn't over if they die!)

I think I'll leave my zombie as-is. Now comes the interesting part. To make your battles a lot more fun, try adding events. These events can be based on player HP, whether or not you've learned a skill, number of turns, almost anything. You can change the background music, have text appear, just about anything from the Event Commands page is fair game, although some actions are more appropriate than others.

Sort of like with conditional branches, the condition is what has to happen for this event to take place. The default condition is Don't Run, which, as far as I can tell, means these events are turned off until you choose a condition. Click on the condition box arrow to change conditions.

You can set the condition to be the turn in battle, the state of the enemy, the state of the actor, or a switch. The turn setting can also be set for every x number of turns. The first box deterimes what turn the event will start on, and the second box determines how many turns pass before it happens again. I want the zombie to say brrraaaiiiinnnss.... if my character's health goes below 50%.

Also pay attention to the Span box. Suppose I only want him to say "brrraaiiiiinsss.." when my character first reaches under 50% health, and not every single moment he's under 50% hp. Selecting Battle makes your event only happen once in a Battle, no matter what. Turn makes it happen once a turn, and Moment makes the event repeat while conditions are met.

Now I just enter the event like I would a normal event! Of course you might want this enemy to do lots of things under different situations, so you can always choose the New Event Page button. If you start making lots of enemies and want them to have the same or similar actions, there are buttons for Copying and Pasting event pages as well to save you some work.

One last thing you can do with this page is test your battle. This is extremely useful because it means you don't have to try and go play through your game just to make sure your battle events work. Near the top, click Battle Test and choose your settings. If you're just testing a specific event, it can be useful to switch off the other characters by changing the Actor to (None) and just leaving one active player. You may want to play though certain battles to make sure they're realistic. Change your character's level in the test to reflect what level and items you think they will have in the point of the game where this battle will take place. Make sure you can actually win your battles, but make sure they're not too easy!

Once you click OK, you will engage in mock battle! Awesome! Before I started, I went back to the enemies page and made zombies super strong so I wouldn't have to fight long to see if my event worked.

Awesome, it worked! And now I'm about to die, cool! Now that you know how to edit your troops, go off and make some cool bosses! But wait, how do you actually make these troops work in the real game? Now that you've made your new troop, it should be available to you in the Battle Processing event. Go back to the Battles page for a refresher.