Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-32182236-20190910173950

"Here's a thought: The more of the box is filled with attacks, the harder it is to generate new ones."

Hmm.. This makes sense, if we assume something else about magical attacks.

It doesn't just take energy to create bullets... It also takes energy to sustain them.

So the more attacks you summon, the more energy you're using at a time.

Another possibility is that magical attacks form their own magical fields, but this time, it takes energy to prevent them from interfering with each other, thus causing them all to destabilize (which happens at the end of a turn, usually.)

"This both explains why unavoidable attacks are so rare (Sans' dunk is probably using as little per-bone energy as possible while still dealing damage, which it's guaranteed to do exactly 1 of anyway)"

That is indeed likely what happened.

"and, if balanced correctly, explains why adding more monsters doesn't let them extend the duration of their attack. Since Jerry pours all of his magic into the box, it's a consistent +2 because Jerry's per-turn magic output sustains the box for two seconds."

Yes, it makes sense. ..Given enough time, I should probably be able to make a working formula.

We need the amount of energy required to make new attacks to scale in such a way so that for any number of non-Jerry monsters that exist, the amount of energy not used for attacks remains constant.

In order words, the total energy required to make all of the attacks needs to be proportional to ME-C, where M is the number of monsters except for Jerry, E is the total amount of energy a single monster has, and C is a constant (the energy of which is used up to sustain the box. Basically, all the energy the monster has left after using it up.)

When Jerry is added into the picture, we have an extra packet of energy, which adds 2 seconds to the energy. (I would make a formula for it, but I got lost in the math again.)

"Here's another thought (which definitely doesn't work, but if putting energy into the Bullet Board doesn't work out, then we might build on it): Using your previous hypothesis regarding the human ending the turn via TP, we state that magic is drawn from the box and not from the attacks. But this breaks down when we consider bosses with attacks that last different lengths (Flowey and Sans denying you of turns far longer than standard)."

What if we mix the two a bit?

What if TP is drawn from attacks, but serves not to allow the human to teleport out, but is instead used to fight against the field that prevents them from leaving? As in, what if TP is the thing that makes it require more energy the more attacks there are? Your third answer makes perfect sense. I have no comments on that matter.