Quote:
Originally Posted by klausD
Ever heard of changing mini-initiative? Or bidding turns? These are concepts for certain turnbased games to learn who comes next and how many units he can move till his enemy comes. Today the alternative concepts of turnbased game design is more evolved than 10y or 20y ago.
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All of those are literally attempts to make the combat engine approximate reality (which is intrinsically real time). "IGO-UGO" is about the least fair and balanced combat mechanic that can be implemented (beyond stupid dice rolling to approximate an entire battle). This is because one side gets to act in entirety before the other side. The solution is to approximate simultaneous action, by breaking up each side's forces into smaller groups that act in phases during a turn. Thus, you get various forms of initiative, bidding turns, and what have you. To make a better and better combat system, in terms of balance and fairness, one must break up these phases into smaller units. Thus, the ideal combat mechanic is one in which the gradations are as fine as possible. This allows as much simultaneity as possible. But as you add more and more complexity to the rules to continue improving the approximation of reality, you bog everything down and make the game harder and harder to play (just like the insane economic rules in GalCiv2). Going all the way to real time, continuous action serves to provide the most balanced and fair mechanic, due to the tiny size of the increments, all without bogging gameplay down with a huge morass of unnecessary rules.
The trick is creating control mechanisms that are easy to use. The only 4x games with real time combat that have really even come close are the far more RTS ones like Sins of a Solar Empire. Very few 4x game development teams are particularly competent in this area of game design, due to a glaring lack of experience. More effort needs to be put into studying the highly evolved control schemes of the big RTS games..