Is MP going to be simultaneous turns?

I really hope there will be simultaneous turns. Otherwise the multiplayer games will take a loooooong time to finish, and not in a good way...

Yea I know that's what I was thinking.

If you want a quick game, play on a small map - don't ask them to penalize those of us who want to bunker down for an 18 hour marathon game.....

 

My point really being, please include both options if simultaneous is offered. Otherwise (if its a choice between the two) I vote for turn-by-turn. Games take longer, but it's more fair, and more fun.

Please include both. If you can't include both, I vote include simultaneous and look into PBE for those who want a long game.

Here is the dev journal thread on this topic:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/377297

Great! Allow me to change my response to "Please default to Traditional...."

Non-real-time simultaneous turns is not something I'd be a fan of. It's simply too difficult to execute your turns because you have to plan all of your moves for the turn in advance (you aren't able to react to anything until the next turn).

I like both real time and non real-time simultaneous turns.

While real-time simultaneous turns is something I am used to, and would probably take up less time, It would be really cool/nifty to try out non-real-time simultaneous turns for a game or two (at least once).

Could someone explain to me the difference between sim and non-sim turns pref. with examples? I dinnae ken.

With nonsimultaneous turns, you each take turns like it was a board game, one after another. People don't like this because it means it takes a very long time for your turn to come back around. An extreme example being in a thirty two player game with each person's turn taking two minutes, you get to take a turn every hour. Not a problem in two player games, usually.

With Simultaneous turns, everyone acts at the same time, moving all their units and setting up their cities. In a thirty two player game with each person's turn taking two minutes, you get a turn every two minutes. People don't like this because they don't want someone "beating" them to a resource by getting their settler/whatever there first*.

 

*Of course I feel this utter hogwash, in nonsimultaneous turns, the "First" player always gets there first, because he always takes the next turn first. You have no chance to beat him to the goodie hut if your scout is the same distance away. Unless you randomize turn order, which gives wierd artifacts like getting two turns in a row, or having everyone else get a turn twice before you take your next turn.

Ultimately it doesn't matter, so long as both options are available, we'll all be happy.

Hehe ... well, as long as there are few "overland" spells (meaning all damaging spells, even volcano, need to take place within a tactical battle) then it will mean little whether turns are simul or non (however I of course prefer simul).

Well, tac battles alleviate ALOT of the stress of simul turns in any case. With FFH2, someone could destroy your army even before you had a chance to move! In this situation, a double-moving fiend might still invariably "catch up" to your army, however you at least have a fighting chance. In a tactical battle, you generally have the time to place your buffs, and to summon the required summons ... at least a respectable timeframe to cast a few select supportive spells ... if not enough time to cast all available supporting/buff spells.

In this, combat (especially in simul turn) would be vastly different than in FFH2. In FFH2 multiplayer, mobility was a winning factor. Cavalry with raiders could "essentially" defeat an empire of longbowmen (even though in practice it would be very hard).

What I am essentially saying, is that there were many spells that only lasted one turn (or several turns) and immediately attacking with unexpected ferocity is the kind of thing that catches people with their pants down ... and no magic. This isn't the result of a strategic failure of not having enough mana to deal with your problems, its a more human logistical restriction of not having the luxury to use spells before the attack. And then it has already started, and you are losing units before even one spell can be cast. Its why a giant stack of infantry can crush a smaller stack supported by archmages the turn AFTER they cast the fire elementals ... because it is much quicker to move the infantry atop them than it is to select the archmage to cast the elementals.

Certainly all spells should be castable from within battle (since the mana reserve is the same, yes?) ... and hopefully a select few spells, and only those without military application, can be cast out-side of battle. This is merely an argument to make simul-turns as fair as possible, not an argument against the game-play component of the "Stack of Doom destruction spell".

Seems like a legitimate complaint to me.  If you do non-simultaneous turns and move your pioneer onto a resource, you can be completely sure it will move to said resource, while with simultaneous turns that pioneer might have a wasted turn being shunted off the tile in question.  Turn order quickly becomes more of a cycle than a race.  The first person doesn't get much of an advantage, since the last person is just as capable as pulling the rug out from under him than the first person to the second person.

Of course, I'm not supporting turn-by-turn as a default, and I'm sure there are happy compromises to lessen that factor...

As the original topic has been answered, I don't see why we shouldn't talk about simultaneous turns versus nonsimultaneous turns in general, and not necessarily in relation to Elemental. I guess I should say that I don't really care that much about the issue, especially since we've got the choice between them, so please read this just as a comparison between the systems and not as an attack.

Losing an action due to the unit moving first is a valid complaint about simultaneous turns.

I don't see how you can argue that the first person can easily have the rug pulled out from under him. Assuming equal distances to a resource, the first player will always beat the other to a goodie hut. They will spend most of the game being a turn ahead of everyone else, so they will already know whether there is a goodie hut there or not, since they have the vision of turn #86 while everyone else is at turn #85. Eventually these advantages may diminish over time but they never go away, and the fact that they had them at the start of the game is never changed.

It's like this in board games as well. The first player has the advantage of the most choices, and most boardgames put in something to balance it for the other players that play after. In fact in really tiny computer game maps, you can see the first player dominating in the game because he's had the chance to build an attacker before anyone has had a chance to build a defender. He will be twice as far ahead in production as the next player on his second turn, 33% ahead on the third, 25% on the fourth, and so on. In a completely balanced map, he will always complete the wonder first, be the first to get the bonus from a tech. This is mitigated by having a ton of equally good choices so players do not regularly overlap in their decisions, and by inequal starting locations.

 

If we really want to get into it, there's different kinds of simultaneous turns. There's ones where the orders are accepted simultaneously and then processed  after everyone has hit the end turn button. There's also one where orders received in the same timeframe are then handled randomly, independant of who hit the button first. Civilization currently does this, eliminating the "he's the host so his computer beat me there!!" complaint and leaving the "this unit lost an action because we moved at the same time" one, albeit with the caveat that he didn't lose an action due to a bug, he lost an action because the player took the 50% chance he might get the goodie hut.

I don't really care for the first because I like to see things happening as soon as I give the order. The second one works wonderful actually, but every time this debate comes up and I bring it up, it gets ignored in the hustle.