I guess I wasn't clear. I understand the relationships that you've set up. I'm questioning why the relationships were set up as they were. They just seem arbitrary at times. For example - it's obvious why water is strong against fire, but why is earth strong against wind? It's obvious why fire is strong against lifeforce, but why is electromagnetism strong against water?

It's probably the fact that you're using real things (except for dark energy of course) that makes it confusing because in the real world what you're doing isn't necessary true. It would be hard to implement this system in a game and not have gamers question the system in some spots. For example - why doesn't mud have a weakness against fire or water? Fire would dry it up and water could wash it away. Why doesn't it resist electromagnetism? How does metal resist electromagnetism? That should be a weakness.

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Water can extinguish fire; Fire can boil water. There isn't a definite order, yet we have to create one.

If the hybrid types are to make sense, we'd have to decide between concepts like this, and then choose names for the hybrid types based on the specific actions we want it's component elements to have.


So for the Fire+Earth hybrid, we could say:

Volcanos defeat Water, (analogous to Fire can boil water)

... or we could say ...

Ocean defeats Lava (analogous to Water can extinguish Fire)

But when we mix up the terms and consider "volcano vs ocean" or "water vs lava", then it becomes unintuitive as to which will defeat which.

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It almost sounds like there needs to be a "power" attribute for an element/force/type and associations between them, not a "x is strong against y" thing. River, Lake, Ocean would all be Water types with different strengths for example. There's obvious holes in this, but might be a better start.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

In many of the cases there isn't a definite order, but I think with fire and water it's pretty clear cut. When equal amounts of fire and water clash, the fire loses out. Even boiling water will still douse a fire. The whole concept of fire-fighting generally revolves around dousing fire with water.

Back on topic: the system itself seems cool, it's just that the names already have their own meanings that don't gel with the strengths and weaknesses. Maybe you could make up names for everything instead? Like the runes from Diablo. Call things Ral, Ort, Tal, Etc. and it solves the semantic conflicts (Creating a new problem: difficulty in remembering wtf everything is )

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As I've mentioned before; the names of the hybrid types are merely suggestions to get you started. What the names would eventually be would be up to you and how you choose to implement them. In my game Animus, I don't use the names at all, I simply use the icons. Trying to come up with definitive names for each hybrid type could be an exercise in futility because as you can see, different people will interpret it in different ways. I'd rather leave it open for the designer to mold it to their own needs. This system isn't really meant to be memorized like rock, paper, scissors. It's meant to be a bit more cerebral than that, similar to the Pokemon types. It's very difficult to memorize all the types and hybrids, but you figure it out as you play.