Goodmorning all

I'm not sure i understand.  

In your planning phace you say 'attack that town'.

in the execution phase your troops are beat to the town by a opposing stack, the town is too strong to defeat now.

Battle begins, you retreat unharmed,  turn ends. 

New turn beings.


I don't see the problem?  Now you could have the enemy choose,have orders to force attack you, in which case your troops would have to be pre-programed to run away and the opposing stack would give chase.

Given that the movement/turn is likely to be on the order of half a screen to a screen and a half tops on the few occations your original plans have to be addapted at run time you still won't loose very much (and that just get's worked into the ballancing of costs for having to change your plans).

I think with the very minimum of execution phase yes or no questions, and ofcourse battles,  the two phased system is MUCH preferable to waiting 45 - 60 minutes for my next turn(5 players(4 who are not you) nominally 15 minutes a turn). Talk about long and dull.  If it's going to be like that, hopefully the game will be VERY Alt-Tab friendly because i'll be online. (or playing a different game)

This is true,  Unless they have well scripted behvours,  Like  go there, explore along this ridge, pick up anything you find.

Chase down an opposing army, Run from an opposing army.

 with just 2  or 3 settings most of the dynamic behavours you could want will be avalible. 
I'll be it indirectly.

the other option is purely simutanious turns, where all players tell units to move as they diside on the orders.   But then you get situations where one person is one step away from a cave, and another is 10 steps away, but the person 10 steps away is told to run for the cave first thing in the turn and so gets there before the player 1 square away does.  or Both players saying go at the same time, and latency, lag, giving one person the benifit of a faster realtime connection. Not to mention the AI that can send out actions faster then humans can click. . . 


Both systems have drawbacks, But i prefer the drawbacks of the seperated orders and actions phases, doubly so because they can be balanced out, and programmed around, and impose less demand on the servers [so stardock can host more games, for more people, with less equipment, and therefore less risk of breakdowns/outages, and no lag.]

It's my prefeance, I see what your worried about, and yes it is anoying to 'loose'  movement points to not being able to addapt on the fly what to do with the spare movement points. . . but that has many possible solutions, including carring over unused movement, Ballancing the game with less movment /turn,  intelligent dynamic behavours.  There are many ways it work.

 

 

I prefer regular turn-based for singleplayer - Player 1 goes, then Player 2 goes, then Player 3 goes, etc.

I prefer a two-phase simultaneous turn system for multiplayer.

I will play singleplayer much more than multiplayer, so if we get only one I'd pick the regular turn-based. Although I wouldn't really mind the two-phase simultaneous turns for singleplayer, either...

Goodmorning all,

Looking at the provided immages in Media, one notes that all the units have a moves/day less then 10.  assuming a move is ~ a body size, the standard for TBS, then two phace is more then doable with minimal losses do to not being able to react in ~real time. Units just don't move far enough for it to be a problem.

1. I'm not entirely sure Brad does the MM AI in these games.
2. No AI is as smart as a human. It's decisions will always be slightly dumber. With production automation and other stuff, this is not too big of a deal, but with something like unit moves, that little bit of stupidity can cause big problems.
3. The screenshots show >10 movement points AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. In GC2, Civ 4, and every other TBS I have played, units have gotten much faster as the game went on.

I agree with the concern of player not submitting their moves simultaneously. In a multiplayer game with 10 human players, if in late game a player takes 3 minutes tot ake a turn that is 2 turns an hour. And I have played with people that in late game with lots of stacks 3 minutes would likely be very wishful thinking, and 6 minutes might be more likely. Now if people are waitng almost an hour for their turn, there are people that will be taking bio breaks, making sandwiches etc., meaning there will be likely even more delays as people realize it is actually their turn.

Now there are valild concerns with simultaneous moves, such as you might give orders to attack a city, and reinforcements arrive, concerns about moving into FoW etc. I think the best solution is still have an orders phase but then have some interaction during the moves phase. In other words, if you are attacking a city (or another stack) then during the movement phase a confirmation window comes up that shows your forces vs their forces and confirms if you want to attack. The player you are attacking would also get a notification window with the option to either stand ground and fight or ATTEMPT to flee - in other words you could issue or alter movement orders during the move phase. When moving into Fog of War, some things that might trigger an opportunity to change orders would be discovering a dungeon, enemy or neutral troops beoming visible, resource or town becoming visible, or many others.

This would also allow for tactical battles to be fought out simulatneously during the movement phase. The server would determine what all combats were going to occur during the movement phase, and after giving all players concerned an opportunity to fight or retreat. it could match various players up for their tactical battles. In other words, in a ten player game, player 1 might have battles against both player 4 and player 6 in a given turn. Player 2 has battles aginst player 5 and player 6, and player 3 has a battle against player 9. So player 1 would fight his battle against player 6 while 2 fought 5 and 3 fought 9. Once those fights were complete, then 1 would fight 4 and 2 would fight 6. This would allow the most turns per hour as everyone would be giving orders at the same time, and still give the flexibility to make changes to orders as conditions evolved. There was an old war game calle The Perfect General that had I believe 5 phases to a turn that was very nice, kept things moving and gave you full ability to react to changes. It also kept each phase very short. I don't remember if it had multiplayer or not, but it would have worked well as 90% of what you were doing, other players could have been taking there turn at the same time.

  I will be playing mostly SP anyway, so it may be a moot point for me. But I would like to see the MP be as awesome as possible and who knows? I may get sucked in!

But they will never actually be able to get away, either. You would be running around the entire map, which just does not sound feasable.

I'd rather have regular turns, take twice as long at multiplayer, and screw the annoying simultaneous turns.  It blows chunks for single player, and I've not used one yet that I preferred to waiting in multiplayer.

 

As long as it's optional, whatever you impatient people come up with is fine by me.  If it's not optional, I add you to my hitlist when it gets implemented.

Good points pigeonx2, I will leave it to the great minds at SD to figure out as I am not on the payroll to solve these niggling little problems.

And psychoak, if I am going onto your hit list, I guess it is a good thing that you don't know that I live in American Fork, Utah.

I'm not sure how much i agree. two options will often be enough, and beyond 3 i can't think of many situations where you'll have more then 3 things you'd want to choose to do with the span of 1 turns walking for ONE unit, that changes during that turn.

you run up to a town, Attack, seige, retreat. 3 options.  Somebody enters the fog of war [aproach, retreat, ignore].  You've been challanged to a fight, 'fight, run'. 

Probably three option states outnumber 2 options states, but the total number of times you'd need more then 3 options would be tiny, or negligable. As far as i can tell.

can you think of any likely 4 option choices? other then maybe which tresure chest to get first?


take care

Robbie Price

I am all for Simultaneous Turn (ST), even in SP, got to use up all my multi-core power!  I hate wasting time waiting all other players; ST is the only way to go.

Of course, there are concerns with ST.   Denryu’s solution maybe a feasible improvement.  However, when a turn is broken to different subturns, time is wasted when waiting for the next subturn when you are done with the current subturn.  This issue deteriorates when there are more players.

Just an idea for discussion.  In ST, when you attack player B, he will got notified in his log.  Whenever B is ready, he pushes the “let’s fight now” button in the log.  Player B will then have enough time to reinforce, or attempt to retreat by moving away his stack.   If B does not push that button when he ends his turn, the battle still commences.

Also, for ST to work well, there must be Zone of Control system at the strategic map.  It sucks to let rival units runs through your defenses.

It sounds as if you're all saying that classic turn-based is the best, except for the fact that during multiplayer matches it slows everything down to a crawl.  On the other hand, simultaneous turns can certainly lead to problems, even though they alleviate the waiting problem.

How about simply allowing players to manage their Empire/Civilizations during other players turns?  In most turn-based games, when another player is acting, you can't do anything.  If you could, on the other hand, prepare for your next turn while other players are handling their end of things a lot of the wait time would go away.

What exactly you allow the player to do during other players turns can certainly be debated, but the important thing is allowing players to do something during another player's turn.  Sitting around doing nothing while other people handle things that could of been better handled during the 30 minutes they were waiting for their turn is just plain silly.

In this vein, have a button/mode that allows players to review all enemy movement between their last turn and their current turn.  With more buttons that jump to the previous unit that moved, and to the next unit that moved.  Instead of forcing the camera to follow all the other players movement during their turn, the player could tweak their Empire, and review the moves later.

There are lots of ways to handle this, and while I prefer classic turn-based over simultaneous turns, the soultion is most certainly somewhere in the middle.