Balancing speed as a main attribute

[Vanguard]

In my game the player will have 6 attributes, and one of them will be speed, something that is rarely done in roguelikes.

Now as we all know, being fast in an RL is really a very large advantage.  You're much better off getting two moves instead of having one move where you do twice as much damage (the way you would wind up if you improved strength instead of speed).

To answer this problem, I've thought of two possible solutions.

The first is to have speed increases not be as "direct" as improvements to other attributes.  As an example, say you start with 10 in all stats.  Putting 10 points in strength, making it 20, will double your damage output, but what if I made speed follow the formula of something like characterSpeed = (100 + (speedAttribute*4), so that a character with 100 speed would move a little under 5 times as fast as a character with 10 points in speed, instead of 10 times as fast.  What are you thoughts on that?

As a simpler solution, I could also just make it so improving speed costs more attribute points than the others, so maybe you get 6 attribute points when you level up, which means you can either add 6 to your strength, or 3 to your speed.

Are there any other ideas on how I would go about balancing this?

[Krice]

In my game the player will have 6 attributes, and one of them will be speed, something that is rarely done in roguelikes.

Nethack has speed attribute and some classes seem to gain speed faster than others. I don't know about other games, because I don't play them, but I think it's not that rare. Balancing speed is like balancing anything else. You have to try it and see what happens.

[Z]

Hard to predict that. You just have to try out in practice.

There is no reason to have a character of Strength 20 and Speed 20 to attack two times stronger and two fimes faster than one with Strength 10 and Speed 10. You can use any linear of non-linear relation you want.

As far as you use a linear relation, there is no difference whether your MPT (moves per tick) is calculated with MPT = 14 * SPD with 14 attribute points per increase of SPD, or with MPT = 100 + 4 * SPD with 4 points per increase of SPD (where 10 is typical for SPD of a new character in both cases). They are equivalent, up to some minor differences (well, if you allow only integer values of speed, the first one seems too sparse). It's like the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees. Maybe one of them is easier for players to understand, but I don't know which one, so I think they are equivalent in this respect too. You can try using a non-linear relation like MPT = sqrt(SPD) and then it will matter (just an example, no idea whether it is reasonable).

[corremn]

I use combat simulation to see the effect of attributes. I get two identical creatures, and adjust some variables, run the combat over N time and see what the outcomes are.  This way I can see if 10 speed and 5 strength is equivalent to 5 speed and 10 strength.   I could use calculations to do the same thing, but I perfer to use my game engine to test things.

[Vanguard]

I use combat simulation to see the effect of attributes. I get two identical creatures, and adjust some variables, run the combat over N time and see what the outcomes are.  This way I can see if 10 speed and 5 strength is equivalent to 5 speed and 10 strength.   I could use calculations to do the same thing, but I perfer to use my game engine to test things.

The problem with this approach is that while getting two attacks at regular damage or one attack at double damage is equal from a purely mathematical perspective, in the hands of an intelligent player the former is far more powerful.

[corremn]

I guess that is why I dont use speed as a major stat .  I use weapon speed in this way though.

[justinhoffman]

I'm using speed as a basic stat, sort of.  Speed can be increased by gear, but only by relatively small increments.   Speed can also be increased by a particular skill, however only up to a 20% increase (A turn might take a character 2 arbitraty units of time prior and 1.6 units after), but that can only be done by taking a particular class path that forgoes combat prowess for escape tools.

I'm not a believer of double/tripple movement characters.  I think that would be too hard to balance unless you assume every character has access to rings of speed or whatever throughout the game.  But I like small increments leading up to a 1.5 speed character.  Maybe even a 1.8 if they really push it.  But since every player has access to speed increases, the skill that increases speed as a secondary effect is rather limited in comparative effect.

If I had to put a number on it, maybe 20% faster is worth doing 60% more damage?  I'm not sure it's a 1 to 3 ratio, I think speed gets better and better the higher it gets over doing more damage.  Moving twice as fast as a monster is worth doing 10x the damage, though that would make the game play tedious.

Best to limit speeds effect to something small like 20-60% over base speed for standard play.  If you want more out of a speed attribute, you could aways add additional damage combat modifiers to the stat.