Welcome Star Legacy Development Group!

[Captain Kwok]

To be fair to my comment, I only said that it was the most fair, which means only that the other systems are less fair, not necessarily unfair. I'm not sure how you can be more fair than to allow everyone's ships to move and fire at the same time.

Most complaints against real-time are not about the fact that everyone moves simultaneously, but rather that control is difficult and you can lose the aspect of micromanaging a combat, which is appealing for a lot of players.

So, make it the best of both worlds. At one end, combat can run straight time. On the other, you can approximate a turn-based system with automatic timed stops. The key for either is to have a good set of controls to make both satisfying and easy to work with.

[Ed Kolis]

To expand on the timed-stops theme:

Remember a REALLY OLD game called "BEGIN"?

In Begin, you piloted a starship of the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, or Orions, and your AI allies and opponents would pilot starships too.

The game was essentially turn-based, but in a way real-time as well - there were ten (later expanded to 100 with the advent of faster CPU's) "phases" per turn. The game would execute all of those "phases" before returning control to the player for his next order (fire torpedoes, set a course, whatever).

Really, the only differences between real-time games and turn-based games are the granularity (RTS is finer, while TBS is coarser), and the ability to think as long as you want (RTS you can't, TBS you can). We're trying to merge the two - include the fine granularity of RTS, but leave in the ability to plot your strategy at your own pace like in TBS.

Thus, if we DO have real-time tactical combat, it will be structured such that the game host (or the player, in single-player games) has complete control over the rules for when players can pause the combat. If you don't like RTS, don't join a multiplayer game with the "autopause every X seconds" option disabled or set to a really high value, or with the "auto-unpause after Y seconds of strategizing" option set really low! There will surely be other players who like the leisurely pace - and why NOT cater to everyone if it's that simple?

Since the main issue people (myself included!) have with RTS games is the inability to plot strategies, and there's no harm (besides extra bandwidth usage) in turning up the level of detail, I really don't see a downside to this plan

[Captain Kwok]

I don't see how you can practically run tactical combats in multiplayer games though - particularly those that are remote games.

[klausD]

Originally Posted by Captain Kwok

I don't see how you can practically run tactical combats in multiplayer games though - particularly those that are remote games.

It depends how much understanding the game makers have about the basic mechanics of a good turnbased game. For example Edi said it already. If you ever played age of wonders, there where 2 different modes one traditional and one with simulataenous turnbased execution. So if the Age of Wonders designers (which where doubtless quite talented because the game was great) could program such a interesting turnbased mode, why not the Star Legacy makers?

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.

Or do you think that every turnbased game has always to be the same old Igo-Yougo?

Possibly thats the reason of your wrong perception of the socalled "unfairness" of turnbased games?

[Xrati]

Well, first of all. We need to know how movement will be handled. Then weapons fire. Seeking weapons movement! How will the AI process it's controlled ships?

How will PBEM combat be resolved if using RT processing? Too many unknowns to weigh-in on this.

[Captain Kwok]

I think some confusion has crept in here...

I'm talking specifically about the combat module of the game, not the actual empire building component.

Star Legacy itself is intended to be a simultaneous turn-based game. That is, each player takes their turn giving orders to their various objects. Once finished, all player turns are processed together and movement/orders executed at the same time. This is the same format as simultaneous mode in SE4 or SE5, as well as other turn-based games. Except in Star Legacy, combat at this point would not be restricted to strategic resolution only, but you'd have the option of playing combats you're involved in.

I don't think it's really all that great for epic scale empire building games to be real-time. It becomes very difficult to manage in a time sensitive environment and adding co-managing systems doesn't really work out all that well because many players don't like to lose that control.

Originally Posted by KlausD

Possibly thats the reason of your wrong perception of the socalled "unfairness" of turnbased games?

Again I never declared turn-based resolution as unfair, so I'm not sure why you've added the quotes there. I simply said it was less fair than simultaneous/real-time resolution.

Why do you think turn-based methods have evolved such complex mechanics? To closely approximate a truly continuous system right? For early turn-based games or their board game predecessors, it was difficult (or impossible) to do this, but nowadays it isn't.

[Fyron]

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.

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..