Undertale Wiki's and Deltarune Wiki's battle pages have a section called "Appears with", which lists all possible enemies that can appear alongside the given enemy.
This setup, however, is incredibly limited. In practice, each area employs a selection of pre-determined battle formations that involve specific enemies. This is something that "Appears with" completely fails to communicate to the reader.
Therefore, I have drafted two separate lists of all possible battle formations that can be encountered throughout Undertale and Deltarune. You can view them at the following pages:
Please reply to this post with any feedback you may have. I plan to publish these pages to the article namespace once we figure out how to format them for the best viewing experience.
Wouldn't Smorgasbord act as a related mechanic? Or is the vision to merge that in with Battle Formations since it is just a description of a type of battle formation.
As I said in the Discord server while you were working on these, I'm a huge fan, and I think the wiki will be better for having these.
I have two pieces of feedback:
- On the Undertale page, why is the unique "spooky" Woshua/Aaron encounter not acknowledged? I feel like that's a notable exception.
- On the Deltarune page, I do not like the use of merged row cells (such as the 1 Ribbick/3 Ribbicks encounter). I believe separating those would be clearer and more consistent.
Smorgasbord isn't really a mechanic as it is a running gag that only appears twice in the entire game. The smorgasbords that appear after Chapter 2 are not named as such in the game. I think it would be best to supersede that page with the battle formation page.
I've addressed these two points. Let me know how the article looks now.
Excellent. As far as I'm concerned, this page can be published to mainspace.
Do we have any plans for mirroring this info onto enemy articles?
Yeah, that's the next step of this project. We're considering automating battle formation sections based on these pages, which would require extensive scripting that I am not familiar with.
You can see what this could look like if it were done manually on my modified Shadowguy draft (this table uses the outdated format, but just imagine the enemies laid out horizontally like the main page).
What if, after this is mainspaced, we add "Encounters" as a part of area articles?
Here's it done for Chapter 1's Forest:
https://deltarune.wiki/w/User:PapyrusPikmin1997/Sandbox
While, yes, the formations can be seen on the area's map, having them easily accessible on the area page as a simple table is useful, as with the map you have to scroll and click each one. Thoughts on this idea? Could it work?
I think this is a good idea, having the encounters of each area found only on the map seems like it may be hard for people to find if not told it was there. So this would help a lot for those people.
Can we mainspace the pages?
They're fully done outside of unused for CH3 of DR which isn't too important.
I want to publish the Deltarune and Undertale pages at the same time. As soon as we figure out what to do for Undertale, then we can publish them both.