I'd like a little bit of help with a skill-stacking system, if anybody wants to throw me some advice. The system is for a game called Crab Stack, where you use a team of crabs to fight monsters and other crabs. There are a boatload of different types of crabs, each with one distinct "skill," like punching, or throwing fire, that they use against the stuff you fight. The variety comes in when you start stacking your crabs on top of each other. If you were to stack up your punch crab and your fire crab, they would both attack at the same time with a single firepunch attack. Some combos are awesome, some combos are not so great. The challenging part is testing out crab combos in battle to see what works and what doesn't. But designing the skill stacking is what I'm having trouble with. It seems like wasted effort to list out every single crab combination, what the resulting attack is, and how effective it is against every other combo, but I have no idea what the alternatives are. Much thanks in advance!

No alternatives: it is the central gimmick of your game, design it well. If you feel inventing crabs and attacks is wasted effort, the writing is on the wall.

You should simply start small, with few crab types, and iteratively test the game to understand what new attacks, defenses and crab concepts could be appropriate.

To take care of many combinations cheaply, you can rule some crabs "incompatible" (they could jump out and have a fight when they are stacked together) or simply not relevant (they remain separate or combine with their other neighbour on the stack if possible).

I'm using a sort of similar system. The way I do it is that it follows simple rules, like paper-rock-scissors.

If the player uses a paper attack, they beat rock enemies, lose against scissor enemies, and are ineffectual against paper enemies.

When they combine two to make, for example, a paper-rock attack, I set it up so that the paper-rock attack is good against rock, bad against paper, and ineffectual against scissors.

If you start adding more elements, you'll quickly hit a situation in which there are too many combos for you to really design well, and too many for your player to really use them all.

If you want to look at the specifics of my system, here's the page:

http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/gameplay/abilities/

If you just got n crabs and want to stack 'em up to, lets say, 3 it would be n^3 combinations. 10 different crabs would result in 1000 combinations.

Well, the first and easiest approach would be to just let them combine in a generic way, but as you already stated, there wouldn't be any hope to get this really balanced.

An other idea would be to divide the crabs into different classes, lets say a soldier crab, a elemental crab and a specialist crab class. Each class has some distinct abilites like all soldier crabs got a special attack (hard melee, range attack, area of effect), the elemental crabs represents different elements like fire,ice,earth,air and the specialist crab has special abilities like first aid, magic shield etc.

Then you're only able to stack up to three crabs and only one crab of each class is allowed in a stack. This reduces the amount of combinations dramatically, giving you some hope to handle the balancing :)

What if in many cases the crab abilities didn't interact or change but were simply both being used?

Examples:
A shield crab and a punch crab.
A shield crab on its own has a weak attack but a good block. Punch crab is the opposite.
Combined they use the better Attack and better Block of the two.

A rock throwing crab and a punch crab.
Rock throw has a good ranged attack and punch doesn't so at range rocks are thrown, when the enemy closes in it starts punching.

Clamps and Punch. Clamps likes to grab things with his claw and crush it so he grabs and hold enemies while punch is hitting them.

Blaster crab and Rock Throw crab. Blaster hits enemies with a blast of water that blasts them backward doing little damage but keeping them at range. Rock throw then tosses rocks on it.

Blaster and Punch, totally in effective.

None of these so far have any interaction between the abilities and need no special rules.
Now lets add in a simple universal rule. Fire is put out by water. All attacks now are flagged for fire-ness or water-ness if they have them and this rule is added into the mix.

Firebomb crab and Blaster. Firebomb is like rock throw but with less immediate damage and more flaming enemies taking damage over time. Seems like he might work the same way as rock throw here but his fires keep getting put out from Blaster.

This final combo does need the one special rule, but once added universally still requires no combo specific attention. You still have to make sure that no combo is superior by testing them, but this makes a lot less work and you can still add in combo specific things. You just don't have to start with them.

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Original post by CaptainLogic There are a boatload of different types of crabs,

rofl

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Original post by CaptainLogic throwing fire,

Yessss.

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Original post by CaptainLogic I have no idea what the alternatives are.

Draw a 2-dimensional shape. Label each corner of your shape as an attack-category.

Now, connect all of the corners.
Where do you want the powerful attacks to be?
Now make the strength of combinations consistent with your diagram.

Shouldn't it also depend on whom you are attacking? Or maybe, the more "new" permutations of crabs you use, the better you do (try not to repeat the same combo)?

Do you want order to play a role? You could give each crab a "function" and a "trait" and mix them in combinations.
Fire thrower: function = shoot, trait = fire
Puncher: function = melee, trait = physical
so using those two you could get a melee/fire or a shoot/physical(cannon ball?).
The main problem with this setup is that it would limit the types of abilities you could implement(unless you get really creative with the functions and traits).

Were I designing it, I would approach it by balancing the individual crabs with one another, and then combined effects should be relatively in balance and need only a little tweaking. For example:

Start simple with 2 crab types mentioned here. Each crab has the same "HP"(10). Each crab has an attribute list, Attack value (damage), Range, and Defense rating of different "elemental" types(reduces damage taken from that type), and maybe a speed rating. For simplicity I'll use a 1-10 scale.

Punch crab has the stats: 7 AV(phys), 2 range, 7 physical defense, 2 fire defense, 5 water defense, and 6 speed.

Fire crab(throws blazing coconuts)has 4 AV(fire), 8 range, 2 physical def, 7 fire def, 1 water def, and 3 speed(slower, carrying those coconuts).

With those 2 fighting, obviously the fire crab has an advantage at range, but would die relatively quickly at close range, and has a hard time maintaining his distance.

Combined, these 2 would have the fire punch ability. The "Fire Punching Crab" would have 20HP, 11AV(either fire or physical, whichever def of opponent is lower), 3 range, 9 physical def, 9 fire def, 6 water def, and 4 speed.

By mashing the two(or 3, 4, 5, towers of crabs) stats together, you can make sure that they should be well balanced. Although someone using a full fire tower might not beat a full water tower, but that's where strategy comes in. By making it quite literally a combination (for the most part) you ensure that this crab would be relatively inline with any 2 other crab types, depending on each of the two type's resistances and damage types(part of the fun of combining).

You'll still have to decide what every combination can do. Start small, 3 crab types and stacks of 2, then expand. Since this is the main gimmick of your game, spend a lot of time testing and tweaking to ensure they are fun. Generic combination can have simply beefed up attacks and be a straight combination of effects, with no special meaning("multi water crab"), but you can add in more than enough really special types to keep it interesting. Also, you can add a little better attack or def, depending on the special crab purpose, to ensure combinations of crabs are "better" than individuals fighting alone.

Without seeing your concept It would be hard to really nail down what you're looking for, but this seems like a logical way to get things done.

Thank you so much, guys.
These replies are awesome.
Totally changing the way I'm looking at designing this system.