RPG maker for strategy games?

[Wartasticus]

I know that RPG Maker MV comes with two combat systems already installed (front and side-by-side). Is the engine flexible enought that you could make your own combat types- like turn-based tactical combat in XCom titles or wargames (e.g. Panzer Commander, Unity of Command)? If this is possible at all - how difficult is it?

I'm interested in hobby game development but am not an RPG player really, so this is kind of a buy-no-buy question for me. Thanks in advance for any input.

[Slim Jimmy]

there's no special libary out there for that sort of thing, for now

but if you're willing to clock in some serious hours getting your hands dirty learning to script and get all the features exactly you want then go for it

[Wartasticus]

I've done a fair bit of scripting. I guess I was hoping to avoid that as much as possible through a GUI. For this kind of non-core purpose, would RPG Maker save any time over programs like GameMaker Pro?

[Marquise*]

You can do almost anything 2D in RPGMaker...exceptmaybe if you already got scriptingyoucan research also for those peoples who were working on iso graphics in the comunity. :) You can do strategy turn based game but no real 3 D hovering and stuff yet althought I saw someoneworking on tiling RPGMaker in 3 D environement. Dunnowhow that works as graphic. Usually all should be pre-rendered.

Gah... just realised. Dunno if the other maker you mentionned had a demo version but you can try the lite version of this one; it is free but it just limit you in number of everything you use. So you can easylly findout if it isyour cup of tea and compare needs vs what the softwares can offer.

In fact, I would recommend lite to everyone over ambitious to just see if they cam bust the lite limits and see if they can do very long epic sagas before get humbled by the fact that they can't make 500+ hours long games! :P

[◢ k r i s ◤]

Honestly, you would have to reverse engineer a lot of RMMV to get an xcom styled strategy game, I think. I've seen this question before and while I don't think it's impossible, you might prefer to build your system from the ground up in GM instead of RMMV.

The plus side of building from the ground up is you know how everything works and it works like you want - obviously at the expense of having to basic system in place for anything at the start. Opposed to reverse-engineering RMMV, which includes understanding almost the entirety of how RMMV works and hoping your implementations does not fail or break the rest of your MV game.

To make an xcom styled RMMV game you would need to modify how the battle system worked (one-sided single turns with some logic for automatic counter-attacks and defense skills), you would need to switch out entities in the player's party very often, and you would probably need to build an enemy movement AI that is more comprehensive than RMMV was designed for (taking health into account for offensive or defensive tactics - etc). Nothing impossible, but improbable for someone new to RMMV and especially unlikely without the ability to handle a lot of scripting. That's just scratching the surface of the least invasive solution I can think of at the top of my head. By this point, you could possibly have a very rudimentary example of your game engine figured out and partially working in GM - if you were willing to learn delphi or whatever language it is that GM uses now.

I personally wouldn't recommend picking up RMMV for this task unless you were dedicated to thoroughly understanding RMMV's mechanics or happened to find a plugin someone else made that does most of the work for you (which I don't believe has happened yet, if it ever will). I'm not sure GM will be any easier or better than RMMV by the end-product, but I think programming the entire thing from scratch in GM will be more practical in the long run. I'm also wondering now if someone might've built such an engine already for GM or Unity or some other GDK that you can recycle if openly available. Might be worth researching that next if you aren't tied to a particular GDK yet and before opening such an ugly can of worms.

[wesley.thomas]

Check on RPGmaker's dedicated forum. They've got plugins that'll make the engine sit up and beg.