This sounds really awesome!  Great job!

Is the battle system turn based, or does it depend on speed?

It's conditionally turn-based. Participants usually act in the order of who has the highest AGI, but the ability you use affects your initiative. (curative spells, for instance, take higher priority than other abilities)

The system is commonly known as CTB. (conditional turn-based) It's turn-based in the strictest since, but turn order is affected by both AGI and which particular command you use. (each command has its own priority) Think Final Fantasy X. There is a command queue that sorts the order of each action according to these rules, and then performs them in that order.

To be more elaborate: Each character registers a command before any combat begins. Those commands are sorted in the command queue according to character AGI, and the priority modifier of the command. (i.e., some commands occur as if the character had 30% more AGI) Then, the actual combat ensues, and each command is executed in the order that was earlier determined.

Don't feel too bad. I was always late to the scene when it came to newer consoles. I didn't play Final Fantasy X until some 3 or 4 years after it was released.

Regrettably, I never got around to the later games in the series. I've yet to get my hands on Final Fantasy XII, even though it looks like a really impressive game.

In some FF games, using curative items is indeed faster than curative spells. Same goes for Star Ocean. In FF9, Quina takes like >9000 turns to cast his Blue Magic, by the time the boss fight is done he still hasn't casted anything. Ok I'm exagerating here but goddamn that character was slow at casting shit...

I thought I should elaborate more upon the modifiers used in the game. These detail elemental forces, status effects, and so forth.

First, there are two basic elements: Fire and Ice. These encompass some of your offensive spells, and well as a few abilities used exclusively by enemies. (such as dragon breath attacks) Characters and enemies alike may hold a resistance to either element, or even a weakness. When an element is resisted, the efficiency of such attacks will be reduced by 80%. This means you will still sustain some damage from the attack. The game will also factor your own defenses into that formula; so if you already have high defense, that remaining 20% damage might be entirely nullified. If you are weak against a specific element, then the efficiency of such attacks is increased by 60%. There is otherwise a "neutral" / default state, where elemental attacks don't modify the normal damage output in any manner what-so-ever.

Status-wise, there are four modifiers that can be resisted, or added to your own attack: Poisoning, Blindness, Enchantment and Death / Petrification. (referred to as "Cursed" or "Felled" status) Poisoning reduces the target's HP by mHP/8 at the end of each round, until neutralized. If the effect is not neutralized by the end of battle, then each step taken reduces HP by 1. Poison cannot kill a target. Blindness reduces hit % by half, and evasion by 1/3. This condition can also persist after battle, until it is manually healed. Enchantment will cause the target to become dazed, which impedes their ability to act during combat. Although the character can still input commands, there is only a 20% chance they will take any action that round. This effect naturally expires after a few rounds, or at the end of combat. Death / Petrification merely results in HP = 0. There is no distinction between a character who is petrified by an enemy spell, and one who is felled by receiving damage. Both have to be restored by the same means. Death / Petrification persists after battle.



There is also "undeath" status, which only occurs by equipping a specific suit of armor the effect is tied to. This grants the character resistance to an effect that normally occurs every time they are attacked by an undead creature. (stamina drain) On the other hand, it also prevents curative magic from having any effect on the character.

Lastly, there is a set of modifiers directly tied to enemy racial types. The game recognizes the following types of enemies:

Treants
Ogres
Dragons
Winged creatures
Marine creatures
Undead creatures
Humanoids

The only puprose of this is to allow specific kinds of weapons and spells to be more effective against various racial types. For instance:

Axes - additional damage versus treants, because they have many tentacles that are vulnerable to the axe's blunt edge
Bows, and the "Heaven's Wrath" spell (lightning) - additional damage versus winged creatures, because being airborn makes them more vulnerable to missiles and lightning attacks
Dainsleif sword - a cursed sword that is effective against humanoids, but otherwise weak against any other creature (think Blood Sword from Final Fantasy)
Wyrmscorne sword - a sword that is effective against any draconic enemy
Ogrish Axe - an axe that is effective against any ogrish enemy

Some enemies are registered under multiple types, so they might have many weaknesses at once. Some enemy racial types also afford them protection against certain effects; undead, for instance, are immune to enegy-drain. (spells or weapons that drain HP from an enemy and transfer it to the player)

wow very complex considering it's for calcs ^^, I like it. Question, though, when the entire party is undead, is it game over?

They can't be. There is only one unique item that afflicts undeath on the character. The status itself doesn't "kill" the character, in that sense -- it just changes how spell behavior affects them, as well as the status-draining effect of undead enemies.

"Undeath" is slightly misleading. It doesn't really convert the character to an undead creature, as in draining all their HP and making them some immortal corpse. The character is still functional. I wanted to make sure there was some downside to it, so I threw-in the "no curative magic" penalty.

Also I think the -'s should be swapped with x's, because at first, looking at the screenshots, to me, the -'s seemed to represent weaknesses and the like while X's represented neutral state. I thought it might be an idea since the opposite of -, which is +, is used for property addition

I thought it might be more confusing if I used X to represent a neutral state, because that's how most states would normally appear. If you had a large row of X's, it would be hard to discern the appearance of +'s, since they look similar.

Also note that X doesn't appear on the top row, since weakness would only appear in the character's defense modifiers. For the top row, you would only see a neutral state, or a + (added to attack) state.

I plan to make sure this is all elaborate upon in some of the tutorial text. Around the beginning area of the game, you can talk to NPCs or search the bookshelves to learn about things like modifiers, equipment proficiencies, or just basic info about how to play the game. I even have an icon reference on one of the bookshelves, so the player will always have a way to look them up.

You control humanoids, right?

Yes; but your characters are independent of racial types. There aren't any enemies who are more effective against humanoid characters. There's no discernment.

I forgot all about the undead status in Final Fantasy V. It's been so long since I played the game...

It would be kind of funny to have zombie-characters, though. I can just imagine them limping into battle with an unsatiable hunger for monster brains.