Haven't had a lot of time for games lately, but I've been slowly working on the Revenant Wings stat topic as I've been playing it, so I want to talk about that for a little while.
The game has a fairly simple skill formula. Every skill in the game has a base potency value, and then there's just a series of multipliers that are applied before spitting out actual damage.
This includes each allied and enemy unit's basic physicals, which change depending on what kind of weapon they equip. Since Revenant Wings is a RTS with FF skills, all units are primarily spamming their basic 'physicals' as much as possible, so any special attributes on the physical is extremely helpful in-game as special abilities (while awesome) don't last very long and take too long to recharge. Most units have a basic physical of 10, though there's a few weapons that do special things like 3 hits of 8. Magic units sling basic spells like Blizzard (also 10 base damage), depending on the element of their weapon. In the case of Blizzard, sometimes there's a status attached like Silence, which hits 100% of the time, but only lasts for a seconds, though it can be reapplied if the unit continues spamming his basic 'physical'. Healers spam low-level cure spells at their allies (and themselves). No Healers in the game have any ability to deal physical damage, and there are only 2 Holy-typed spells they can use for damage. Really awesome support units, though their basic spammable cure spell doesn't heal that much, so you tend to need a lot of them to be really effective.
Besides base power, there is a base stat multiplier. For every 200 points of Strength or Magick, this multiplier increases by 1. It starts at 1, and max base stats in this game hover around 500, so you're never seeing more than a 3x multiplier, and most likely you'll never see more than a 2x multiplier by endgame (stats around 300). I'm guessing this is how they tried to make tiers of difficulty. It basically only serves to make the final sidequests really really difficult without grinding your stats to 400-450.
The next multiplier is your basic divisional defense formula. Base power is multiplied by (Attacker's Attack stat / Defender's Defense stat) for either Physical or Magical abilities.
Multiplier #3 is the typing advantage, Fire Emblem-style. There's a rock-paper-scissors set of Melee > Ranged > Flying > Melee. All units fall into one of these categories (Healers are ranged) and these multipliers are set. The Ranged/Flying relationship is a bit less balanced than the rest.
Melee: 1.3x damage to Ranged; 0.45x damage to Flying
Ranged: 1.8x damage to Flying; 0.45x damage to Melee
Flying: 1.3x damage to Melee; 1x damage to Ranged
Same-type matches: 1x damage
Multiplier #4: Elemental multiplier - Defender's Elemental weakness and resist effect damage by constant multipliers. Depends on equipment for Leader units. Note that the game doesn't have any visible method of showing the difference in potency of the resists/weaknesses, so I had to look up all of them from the Ultimania.
Espers have set elemental weaknesses and resists, depending on Rank.
Rank 1 Espers take 1.1x damage from their weakness, and 0.9x from their resisted element.
Rank 2 weakness: 1.2x; resist: 0.75x.
Rank 3 weakness: 1.25x; resist: 0.5x.
Multiplier #5: Support abilities - Various multipliers from accessories, skills, buffs, debuffs, and status effects. Each of these had to be translated from the Ultimania on a skill-by-skill basis.
Now, in-game everything happens real-time, so the relatively small damage numbers compared to HP numbers aren't so bad due to the fairly quick pace. Viewing it from a turn-based perspective would make it seem like enemies take forever to kill and that healing is outright useless. It's not.
Each skill/basic physical in the game has a casting time, which is generally less than a second (all of these were found in the Ultimania), then a recovery time (the unit can act again, also short), and in the case of Special skils (Gambits), a recharge/cooldown period before the Gambit can be used again (significantly long enough to generally prevent being used again before the unit can pull off about 5x as many physicals).
This balances in-game quite well as you may very well get to use your Gambit, get in 5 attacks, and then use it again before enemies die (due to the relatively low amount of damage being dealt). In the DL view, all of this would be averaged against the other cast members and taken according to the 2.5x (3x in Tai's case) interpretation, making damage look really good. Healing gets kind of shafted though, due to not receiving that averaged boost to effectiveness, and not receiving any significant decrease in relative casting speed. Still, infinite resources, so Penelo makes a cool Light!
Stat topic progress:
I have a spreadsheet with every Leader Unit's basic and Gambit skills' base power, range, casting time, recovery time, recharge time, and special effects. Times are listed in seconds, so it's very easy to determine how fast each skill is. I also have status effect durations listed in seconds.
I have every PC's base stats and growths listed, and it was easy to derive endgame stats from that (checked against actual endgame stats).
I have all useful weapons/armors stats and abilities and elemental resists listed and default setups have already been figured into the endgame derived stats.
Accessories in this game each give a unique PC passive ability, and I have most of these translated and their multipliers listed.
Things left to do: Finish accessories, put it all together, calculate damage against average enemy stats.
Final Boss stuff is difficult to translate, so I'm just not bothering. I will try to get Mydia and Ba'Gamnan though. Espers' stats/skills would be another large translation undertaking that I don't really want to do, but I can (and may do at some point, if only for rankable Shiva hype).
Thoughts on the game itself: I'm not a fan of RTS, but this one has been surprisingly enjoyable so far, especially as a one or two maps-per-sitting project. Story is really... Grandia 1-esque. Incredibly light-hearted and cute. It's refreshing, and now that Fran and Balthier are around, being badass for no good reason other than to be badass, the plot is entertaining again. Best part of the character interaction is still the logbook arguments and confessionals.
Still, it's VERY jRPG PLOT. Not good by a long shot, just... cute, really.
