It sounds an awful lot like Dominions' combat system, and most of us on here only know about that game because Frogboy made a post about it once. In that, you give your units a script, and they attempt to act according to it in battle. We''ll see.

I prefer slow, pausable real-time for battles, but I guess no-one is interested in making Fantasy: Total War. It seems they'd rather make some Tom Clancy boringness.

I think it would be weird if there wasn't an option to have auto-pause after each 'turn' or 'round' whatever it is being called.

It sounds like it may be too late to ask for this, but I really prefer strictly turn based tactical battles.  As someone mentioned above, I don't want to be spending my time thinking about whether or not I need to hit the pause button.  The system that MOM had worked very well for me. I would really appreciate it if it was an option, at least, to make the battles strictly turn based.

True, we probably don't have enough info to guess how it works, but this kind of thing is usually best discussed early. So, I decided to post it. Like I said, I don't think that a discussion about which is better is really productive. What I want to discuss is wether or not it would be a good idea to have real turn based mechanics as an option, or possibly as something moddable (the second alternative would probably be too expensive, though).

Also, just to clear up things, there are quite a few ways to go about the combat system. In real time with pause system, things are exactly what they sound like. The units move continuously at the same time, but there is an interface element that allows the player to pause the action and give orders. Phase based is a lot like this, but there is still the notion of rounds. This means that the game may only be paused between rounds, and that actions must take one or more rounds to conclude. In other words, the time is not continuous, but discrete. Finally, in real turn based gaming, each unit must act separately from the others. When one unit is acting, no other unit should be acting (though some games have broken this a bit by allowing units to react outside their turns).

Anyway, my whole point is that I think this game, because its extreme moddability, would be able to support more than one tactical combat ruleset, and I think that a turn based one (according to the nomenclature I used) would be a nice addition to the game. By the way, Dominions 3 is awesome, and if the combat system was moddable enough that we could recreate it, this game would be even more awesome than what I thought possible!

Alex,

Personally, I would prefer straight-up turn based battles like MoM.  But I can deal with continuous turns.  What I don't want, or rather what I'm certain isn't feasible without hurting the project, is to have two distinct full-blown tactical combat engines. 

Such a change doesn't fall within the modability scope because it involves a very significant difference in the coding of the game; you would need one set of functions to process turn-based combat and another set of functions to process continous-turn combat.

Also, while there's nothing physically preventing the devs from coding an alternate combat engine and having an option switch between them, it would be a tremendous duplication of effort to test, balance, tune, test, balance, tune both engines.  Invariably some units and strategies would be more effective in one engine than the other (not the end of the world, but that would annoy a lot of people).  Invariably the AI would fare differently from one engine to the other, etc.  And every new spell, unit ability, etc would have to be tested twice as much for combat.

As it is, they have the normal tactical combat engine (continuous-turn) and a no-human-interaction "auto-battle" where the results are determined automatically.  Further, the auto-battle can show a graphical display of what happened or not.  Maybe they'll give us a Dom3-ish version of the auto-battle, which would be great particularly for PBEM.  Even that would be pushing it, but we'll see.

Anyway, thank you for posting this, it is worth discussing.  The problem is that this is one thing that would be a total bear to make an option.

Keith

Hm, before I can comment, I'd like to see a screenshot or two of the battle system in motion. Perhaps what Stardock has developed thus far lends itself much better to real-time battles (when two armies on the TB world map meet) a la Shogun TW?

I must admit that I'm with keithLamothe on this one. I think, that we have to take for granted that it's out of the question to have a turn-based engine 'as-an-option'. Every optional feature costs lots of effort, and will take away from the time that can be put into making a core game feature really rock-solid. (As Asharak very rightly pointed out in this thread, asking for features as options, is really a copout on the part of us players.)

I'd much rather see one really good battle-engine, than two or three optional ones.

It looks pretty turn based to me.  I suspect that real-time might apply to something else, like how it relates to the world around it.  I know in games such as HoMM, battles are a pain because they are seperate from regular turns and slow down large player games.  Maybe its more "real time" in that it relates to real time rather than turns.  I'm not sure really at what I'm grasping here, but I imagine a real-time turn based structure where turns go by in real-time to ensure that battles have a certain length

I think it'd probably be a lot easier to play and enjoy your units' abilities in full turn based. I've gotta be honest, though, I want a bigger scale more than any turn system differences, it looks awesome, but I want MOAR! That aside, I think it should actually be an easy option of a checkbox that lets you pause between turns (like in KOTOR, interestingly enough, but this game would appreciate it). It shouldn't be that hard to implement, but I won't say it's easy because I haven't tried implementing it and don't want Brad to chew me out for stupid assumptions.

The important difference between continuous turn based battles and real time battles is the turn part.

Or in other words, the lowest time unit in a real time battle is usually a tick (some fraction of a second depending on the game engine, 1/30s in the newer C&C games for example). The lowest time unit in a continuous turn based game is up to some seconds (a fraction of a second or up to 5 seconds depending on the speed settings in Paradox' games).

This means that you can greatly speed up unimportant battles or boring parts of battles (I would wager that the devs would add a speed control to the battles) by just having the turns go very fast, while if you need time you can slow it down quite a lot and with the use of pause play it like an almost turn only based battle.

A continuous turn based battle is also by definition a simultanious turn battle and thus removes some of the exploits and problems (and possibilities if you want) of seperated move turn battles or initiative based turn battles.

That kind of system works well for me and is in fact the system I guessed SD implemented already based on the scale they are talking about.

I think the units get to move based on initiative considering that queue on the bottom, it looks like it shows when each unit's going to get its turn, a system I like considering my experiences with that type of system.