game mechanics, Turns and ending them.

The problem with that is the fact that you have no ability to change your orders when things change: when you are attacking an enemy city, you can't attempt to withdraw when wierd things show up. Your reaction times are severely curtailed and can blunde rinto dangerous things.

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)

What I am saying is, in a single-turn system, you get to redirect your unit every time you move. If you see something you weren't expoecting, you can turn around and go back. With an execution phase, that option is taken away: your units ocntunue along their preset course regardless of who or what is in the way, and you have no ability to turn them back until the next turn.

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.

 

 

• Less movement on the map sizes we are talking about here could tick a lot of people off.
• Scripting could tick the noobs off.
• It could also tick the devs off.
• You still have the problem of wasted moves due to bad AI.
• I'm not entirely sure if it will be any faster: people will still take the time to order each individual unit around, and defferring the movement to another phase probably won't fix that.

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...

If my memory serves me AOW had both options, both in single player and multiplayer you could choose.  for single player you're right, player 1, player 2, player 3.  is a MUCH more mentally manageable setup. But for me it's far to painful to play multiplayer that way.

Hopefully both will be on offer.

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.

I'm strongly in favor of two-phase turns, even for single-player. You give orders, the orders are executed, you get status updates and give more orders.

A turn is a limited time-frame in the game (day, month, year, whatever a given game's scale might be), and the idea that you, ostensibly a non-omniscient supreme commander sitting in some central location, have effectively unlimited time to coordinate the movements of any number of troops and can receive and process real-time status information on all of them... well, it's always struck me as a conceit of the genre, ultimately a poor mechanic left over from early designs, which as the game advances caters more and more to micromanagement wonks (make no mistake, that often includes me) while annoying the piss out of those who'd like to see the game actually progress.

I micromanage compulsively when it gives me an advantage. And I frequently burn out on games which encourage this, because in the long run the mechanics are getting in the way of the fun.

Scoutdog, if your primary concern is poor AI causing troops to make dumb decisions when you're not in direct control, you might not be familiar with Brad Wardell.

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.

It is a seriously bad idea, when variables like fow (and the complication of you order your units to attack someone, but they run out of your reach, there still needs to be a way to decide priority) are taken into account. You idea is better suited to turn based tabletop strategy games.

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!

Movement speed would have to be deciding factor. If the stack(s) movement speeds were identical then the stack fleeing should be able to avoid combat, barring  terrain interference.

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.

This sounds to me like a very good addendum to the two-phase simultaneous turn model. It sort of adds a third-phase after the execuation phase - a confirmation phase. If something interactable comes into range or is discovered, actions would be interrupted and the player would be asked for further instructions...

There are some issues with it, though. Let's say I have a northern and southern army. Right now, my southern army is heading east to deal with an annoying demon that's bothering one of my settlements, while my northern army is about to assault an enemy settlement. Then, an enemy army comes from the south out of the FoW, and reinforcements arrive at the enemy city that my northern army was headed to, but not enough to convince me to retreat. Now what I'd really want to do during this 'confirmation phase' is halt my Southern army's eastward journey and bring it back to defend my southern border and tell my Northern Army to carry on. However, I'd only have the opportunity to change my Northern Army's orders, even though I don't want to. I just see this as being a little bit frustrating... It's not a huge problem but is something to consider.

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.

I think some variant on this would be best. tell a troop to do something, confirm before taking any serious action (yes no questions only) has a small set of optional 'if this then confirm a change to do.'  Like if something runs out of the FOW the nearest army(s) get a run to, run from, continue with orders.   so you scout can run away when he first sees a opposing unit, and the next nearest army can be chosen to alter course.  if you see fit.

As i see it there are only a few situations that you could want to change the action plan, all of which are within detectabilty.

 
. 

in any TBS you can spend a lot of time chasing down a unit of the same speed as you. that doesn't change anything.  fi they are faster they eventually get away, if they are slower you catch them, but normally over the span of more then one game turn, so not relivant to this conversation.




well it's not so much a matter of twice as long,  if the system is badly setup multiplayer turns can have deadtimes between turns of 30-45 minutes (see heroes of Might and magic 3. ouch)


Best wishes all take care.

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.

Ohhh, no. Yes no questions are terrible - they assume that the computer is as creative as the player. If a dialogue pops up with the options to either proceed or retreat, but I want to hold my ground - what then? I have no choice but to choose an inferior option. Yes no questions take a lot of strategy out of the hands of the player and cause lots of frustration because the computer doesn't know what you're thinking, what your intentions are, etc.

Yes/no questions should only ever be asked regarding problems with binary solutions - of which there are not that many.

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

Whenever a situation changes in more than one way at a time, for one. Another is, for example, if somebody enters the fog of war - approach, retreat and ignore don't really cover it. What if I want to avoid them, continue moving forward but going around them? What if I want to retreat in a specific direction that is not directly backwards? What if I want to send my army to join forces with another force of mine that is also within range? There are so many permutations that yes/no questions are incapable of handling.

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.

Sorry Denryu, but your odds of getting knocked off are zero.  My current list is so long that I'd have to kill several people a day to get through it before I got tired of flying under the radar.  There are way too many crooked politicians and judicial members that need killed first, it would take years.

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.

This question has  been mostly answered by the Devs who have said the game will be simultanious turns, .,, at least had said so on one of the game review sites, quite a while back.

weather this means simutanious plan and act, or simutanious all plan, then all excecute hasn't been specified. 

 
but waiting 20 * n minutes between turns has been kiboshed ( n = number of players, 20 is some arbitrary average)

Take care.

Robbie Price